Cultural Officer Cam

First Published Friday 24th November 2023 on the Sugarfoot Stomp Facebook Community Group.

Part 6: Jazz and the Harlem Renaissance

Here we are for my sixth and final post summarising “The Power of Black Music” by Samuel Floyd. Last time I wrote about how black musicians and dancers incorporate European elements into their art with two concepts from black sociology - African American Modernism and Signifyin’. I used ragtime music and dance as an example. This time I’ll use Signifyin’ and another concept - Renaissancism - to describe jazz and the Harlem Renaissance.

Signifyin’ and Early Jazz

The book traces the origins of jazz back to collective singing of African (and African American) funerals and burial rings. It includes this quote from a black South Carolinan from the 1920’s. It depicts the Signifyin’ Monkey’s “first cousin,” the trickster figure Br’er Rabbit and his friend Br’er Mockingbird, playing a banjo, dancing on tombstones and whistling together after a funeral at night:

“Dat mockin’ bird an’ dat rabbit - Lord, dey had chunes floatin’ all ‘round on de night air. Dey could stand a chune on end, grab it up an’ throw it away an’ ketch it an’ bring it back an’ hold it; and make dem chunes sound like dey was strugglin’ to get away one minute, an’ de next dey sound like sumpin’ gittin’ up close an’ whisperin’.”

Notice that rabbit and mockingbird are Signifyin’ - playfully toying with different tunes and melodies from their cultural memory and each other. For a refresher, last time I loosely defined Signifyin’ as “Implicative, loud-talking wordplay that demands attention to the signifier, and mocks the signified to reverse power.” In this exchange, we see mutual Signifyin’, where they are riffing and cutting - building on and trying to outdo each other by trying to stand out in a way that enhances the whole. Again we see how the stories of African trickster figures carry cultural memory of Signifyin’ traditions.

The book references a few reports of rural southern African-American burials from the 1800’s . One described mourners gathered around a coffin singing songs and clapping their hands and singing lively songs on their return from the grave site. These reports show that playing up-tempo trickster spirituals at funerals started as a rural phenomenon, but it is of course epitomised by the New Orleans marching band.

As I described in my fourth post on blues, emancipation led rural black communities to embrace secularised spirituals in the form of solo performances - blues and rags - in jook joints. Urban conditions were different, however, so their secularised spirituals retained their collective character. Black New Orleans marching bands combined the oom-pah bass of Euro-American marching bands with the collective Signifyin’ of the ring shout, using ragtime tropes and rhythms to synthesise the two sounds. These bands played for funerals and secret societies in the mid-1800’s and expanded into picnics, parties and dances after emancipation.

This music required one more element to become jazz - the melodic and timbral distortions of blues. The first documented jazz musician was Buddy Bolden. His band built on the innovations of blues musicians from the Mississippi Delta who had figured out, through their solo performances of secularised spirituals, how to make vocal sounds from the ring (such as melisma, bends, and elisions) on their instruments through techniques like guitar slides, hand-distorted harmonica, and guitar picking techniques. He used blues to complete the ring-based genre that is jazz by figuring out how to make brass instruments ululate, moan and declaim with blowing techniques, fingering techniques and mutes. His style can be heard in this recording of Dippermouth Blues from King Oliver’s band - especially the trumpet solo from 1:25. The New Orleans Jazz style was refined into big band swing in 1920’s and 30’s Harlem.

The Harlem Renaissance

In response to the transatlantic slave trade, and inspired by the Hatian revolution of 1804, black intellectuals and leaders from all over Africa and the African diaspora started to unite in the ideology of Pan-Africanism. Their goals were to “glorify the African past, inculcate pride in African values, and promote unity among all people of African descent.” In America, this primarily took the form of black nationalism, which is about black people “taking pride in their African heritage and desiring to control their own destiny and communities.” They did this by building community self-reliance - by only shopping at black-owned businesses, for example - and by fighting against segregation.

Black nationalism was combined with African-American Modernism to form Renaissancism, which believed in uniting all classes of black society to build a self-reliant culture and economy, whilst pursuing integrationism and producing great works of art and literature to meet white America as equals in a “frontal assault on access to the fruits of American society.” As renaissance intellectual James Weldon Johnson wrote at the time: “A people may be great through many means, but there is only one measure by which its greatness is recognized and acknowledged. The final measure of the greatness of all peoples is the amount and standard of of the literature and art that they have produced.”

Intellectual leaders usually rejected jazz and blues as decadent and reminescent of the “old Negro,” in favour of concert music and choreographed renditions of black dance. Jazz and blues musicians and dancers were “both amused and offended by the superior attitudes and posturings of some of the black intellectuals,” so they Signified the black elite in dress, posture, and speech. This process arguably synthesised the hoity-toity aesthetic of ragtime and cakewalks with the spirit-possession aesthetic of blues music and dance to form the “cool” musical and dance aesthetics of the Harlem Renaissance. This aesthetic characterised jazz orchestras, jazz dance, the Lindy Hop, classic blues singers and ballroomin’ blues dance. Ironically, by the mid 20’s, the cool aesthetic came to define the Renaissance, winning jazz music and dance the acceptance of renaissance intellectuals, and later by parts of broader white American society.

Classic Blues

Southern black women such as Ma Rainey, Mamie Smith and Bessie Smith learned the blues in southern jooks, and performed in southern travelling minstrel and vaudeville shows around the 1910’s. Their bands crystallised blues as an idiom into a 12-bar structure, using jazz instrumentation and arrangement techniques such as riffs, breaks and fills to interpret and Signify the slow drag rhythms and blue melodies of the jooks. Let’s listen to Careless Love by Bessie Smith. Notice the clear ring elements - call & response, Signifyin’, improvisation and the dance beat - and the way they manifest themselves in modern blues aesthetic and idiom. Many of these women ended up basing themselves in Harlem as they travelled, establishing blues as the primary trope that connected Renaissance musicians to the ring, as their new blues idiom did all over the US.

Stride

The northern, urban descendant of southern jook joints was the rent party - with pianists instead of guitarists playing primarily boogie-woogie in Chicago and stride in Harlem. East coast ragtime, related to Piedmont blues, is characterised by uptempo dance polyrhythms and fast, jaunty melodies. Here’s the east coast rag Nothin’ - by Luckey Roberts, considered the “last word in rent party cutting contests from 1908.” Around 1918, Luckey Roberts was succeeded as “king” by James P. Johnson, who played gospel-inspired shouts in the east coast ragtime style - adding more rhythmic and harmonic cohesion to create stride piano. Here’s his stride song Carolina Shout. The “big three” stride pianists James P. Johnson, Willie “the Lion” Smith, and Fats Waller went on to revolutionise jazz piano, adding elements of New Orleans jazz- and blues-derived melodic improvisation. Here’s Willie “the Lion” Smith’s version of Tea for Two - full of “melodic beautifications” as he liked to call them. Art Tatum became the last king of stride in 1931.

Big Band Jazz

New York’s large dance halls required larger bands than the jook joint or rent-party setting. These larger bands could not abide by the heterophonic sound ideal that defines African-American music; the tendency to fill up rhythmic and timbral space could not be extended to this many instruments without making a very chaotic sound. Instead, early black big bands like James Reese Europe’s Hell Fighters and Will Marian Cook’s Southern Syncopated Orchestra added some black rhythms and harmonies to largely Euro-American orchestral dance music. The first serious, effective attempt to preserve as much African American aesthetic expression as possible in a big band context (whilst still rejecting the heterophonic sound ideal) was Fletcher Henderson’s big band. Here’s their song Wrappin’ It Up, which contains tempered ensemble playing of ring-derived tropes such as call-and-response, riffs and solos. By 1932, their work launched the Swing Era, and was notably the first ring-derived black band to win the acceptance of Harlem Renaissance leader W. E. B. Du Bois.

Later, particularly in Kansas City, big bands became more improvised within their ensemble structure, growing with stride piano. Having 12 or more Signifyin’ musicians striving to demand attention to their own voice in the horn section, striving towards the heterophonic sound ideal without being able to deviate from their part’s rhythm, emergently created jazz harmony, an extremely complex and improvisational harmonic language for what is essentially southern dance music. These harmonic developments were conducted from the piano by harmonic geniuses in their own right - the blues-, classical-, and stride derived harmonic genius of big band pianists such as Count Basie, Hazel Scott, and Duke Ellington respectively. Listen to Count Basie’s “All of Me”, Hazel Scott’s “Black and White are Beautiful” and Duke Ellington’s “Cabin in the Sky” to hear some great examples of harmonic complexity and density arising from the pianist’s simultaneous sonic guidance of many individual horn players’ Signifyin’ jive and swing playing (there’s also some good Lindy Hop in the “cabin in the sky” recording!). As you can see, big bands eventually found ways to incorporate the heterophonic sound ideal to a much greater extent than Fletcher Henderson without creating a messy sound.

The End of the Renaissance

The “Negro Renaissance” lost cohesion as its focal point moved from Harlem to Chicago around 1935. It ended for good in the early 1950’s in the wake of two developments. The House Un-American Activities Committees branded much of black art and culture as communist, and harassed and censured many Renaissance stars and leaders.

Secondly, the NAACP launched a full-scale attack on segregation, including five segregation cases in the Supreme Court that resulted in the first black attendants to the Universities of Texas, Louisiana and Virginia, as well as the first black United Nations delegates, American Medical Association delegate, Pulitzer Prize winner, National Tennis Championships competitor and Nobel Peace Prize winner, all or which happened in 1950 alone. “It was thought that the achievement of political and cultural equality would require that African Americans conform to more acceptable artistic standards and behaviours… black artists retreated into a conformative mode that would last until the 1960s.” It was only until the “promise of integration” was mostly broken as discrimination continued illegally into the 70’s that the black community re-embraced jazz- and blues-derived ring music and dance in new forms, such as funk, soul, and hip hop.

Key Takeaways

When we dance, I believe it is important to hear swing-era jazz primarily as southern dance music - as its fundamentals owe far more to East Coast ragtime, New Orleans spirituals, Mississippi jook joint blues and other ring-derived dance genres than any kind of European or Northern American orchestral music - despite the superficial aesthetic similarity. Inspired by this music, our jazz dance should contain an overlying hoity-toity vibe and an underlying Southern and African spirit-possession derived groundedness, control and elegance.

This is the much delayed last post in this series! It’s been a delight reading the book and writing summaries, hope you all could learn a little something from them. You can find all the rest of them here: https://www.sugarfootstomp.co.nz/blog .

Cam