PROUDFLESH: A New Afrikan Journal of Culture, Politics & Consciousness
| PROUDFLESH: A New Afrikan Journal of Culture, Politics & Consciousness |
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| ISSN: 1543-0855 Jazz: The Unmasked Rhetoric |
Despite the contempt with which both black Christians and white critics treated jazz, it provided a successful rhetoric for black Americans. The only true American art form, jazz is derived from the wordless experiences of blacks shackled by that horrible institution of American slavery. Stripped of their culture, language, religion and dignity, blacks found in music a means of complaint, revolution, joyful expression and survival. Jazz provided an outlet for white Americans who ventured into the speakeasies and bars that harbored the music.
At the turn of the 20th century, white Americans were engrossed in less complex conversations than the theorizing of European high art. James Collier said, "Jazz was seen quite specifically as reflecting [the] new spirit. It would be one of the weapons in the battle against the old worn-out morality." [1] From 1890 onward, the general populace placed more emphasis on lighter living and jazz provided the background for a prolific life of fun and frolic.
In A Grammar of Motives, Kenneth Burke says rhetoric has "a 'you and me' quality. . . .addressed to some person."[2] Burke asks, "What is involved, when we say what people are doing and why they are doing it?"[3] He uses the pentad and the ratio of its five terms: act, scene, agent, means and purpose to one another to explore a text or work of art and "inquire into the purely internal relationships which the five terms bear to one another, [to] see how these various resources figure in actual statements about human motives."[4] Burke's pentad reveals the philosophical implications of jazz as the "unmasked rhetoric" of African Americans.
First, a discussion of the background of jazz is necessary. The forerunners of jazz - spirituals, blues and minstrelsy - resulted from the experiences of American slaves who were denied the use of both their language and worship of their gods. Traditionally, music was extremely important in African religion, which involved direct communication with earthly and personal gods.[5] The Western monotheistic God was too distant from the African's experience and could only be contemplated in relation to his afterlife.
Dove came down by the foot of my bed,
And he carried the news that I was dead. . . .
I'm going away one day before long,
And I won't be back before Judgment Day. . . .[6]
The slaves' life was unbearable and their obsession with death was reflected in their religious music, which promised the peace of heaven, comfort and wholeness. The Africans were constrained by the Western god idea, but their application of European sacred music produced the spirituals, which contributed to the richness of American folklore. The lyrics of spirituals quickly spilled over into the secular lives of slaves. As the words evolved into the blues, which communicated both fear and hope, slave songs produced an improvisational language, which is evident in today's Afro-American music, jazz.
West African drums often signal the beginning of a bout between warring tribes. In 1775, the State of Georgia outlawed drums as a result of attempts by slaves to revolt.[7] American prohibition of drums, though politically founded, "account[s] for the single most important development of Afro-American music transfer [of] the function of the drum to the feet, hands and body, by way of the Spirituals."[8] That drums were not outlawed in other countries where slaves were taken, like Jamaica and Haiti, meant that no substitution of the system of African rhythms was necessary in these countries.[9]
The slaves used Christian sacred hymns to create a unique body of music, the spirituals, which W.E.B. DuBois called "Sorrow Songs" because they "gave the slaves spiritual sustenance."[10] But spirituals had another use. The "Land of Canaan" meant the North (scene) and freedom for fleeing slaves (agents) who used spirituals as a means to communicate their intention to escape (act) by way of the Underground Railroad (purpose) instituted by Harriet Tubman.
I'll meet you in the morning,
Safe in the Promised Land
On the other side of Jordan.
I'm bound for the Promise Land.[11]
When slaveowners became suspicious of the songs that spoke of freedom and opposition to slavery in South Carolina, at the beginning of the Civil War, slaves were jailed for singing:
We'll soon be free.
The Lord will call us home.
We'll fight for liberty,
When the Lord will call us home.[12]
Walton Ortiz, says the lyrics were dual, "masked and unmasked,"[13] with one meaning being ascribed to the relationship with other slaves, who were ready to flee the grips of slavemasters, while the other meaning was attributed to the relationship with whites, whom they were bound not to cross. Prior to 1920, in the South (scene), most African American spokesmen, writers, minstrels and bluesmen and women (agents) were engaged in this 'masked' art (act) using rhetorical essays and music (agency) to convey or portray what they believed they should say (purpose) to win over black and white audiences. The shroud of racism made it impossible for black rhetoricians to be heard or published. Therefore, black scholars and writers like Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. DuBois and Marcus Garvey failed to influence the American masses though their rhetorical documents and essays were traditionally persuasive, having message content and structure, credibility of source and effective use of media. To the black audience, invariably illiterate, black rhetoricians were highbrow and misunderstood, while whites feared this rhetoric of assimilation, separation and revolution, and shunned these highly inventive scholars.[14]
Blues and minstrelsy produced the only overt communication for blacks. Carl Van Vechten finds in the blues "a peculiar language of its own, wreathed in melancholy ornament. . . .eloquent with rich idioms, metaphoric phrases and striking word combinations."[15] Although, in A Different Drummer, William Melvin Kelley saw minstrelsy as a ritual of nonsense created by whites to attest that blacks were only "mis-speakers bereft of humanity,"[16] minstrelsy really was a masked correlation between rituals of lynching and exorcism. In order to have a voice during the age of Booker T. Washington, African Americans had to master the form of minstrelsy. The sound of the mask translated into stories of ignorant, comic brutes speaking nonsense syllables, evident in this minstrel oration:
When in de course ob inhuman events it becomes necessary fo' a man to elimnate de constructive difference from de planetary problem, what objective dissolution am de ebberlastin' screech ob a lonesomen Thomas cat got ter do wiv de brickbat flung at him? Dat's so an' more so.[17]
This passage, fraught with grammatically incorrect English, retains philosophical overtones. The sound of the 'screech' of the cat (the masked black) rings louder than the 'brickbat flung at him' (abuse of whites). The minstrel's expression appears comical to a white audience but is a sad, ironic statement about himself. While minstrelsy afforded blacks release from anxiety and masked pain, it provided a joke for the white audience.
Burke classifies the strategies humans use to outwit and cajole each other in his concept of the "Human Barnyard"[18], where human nature uses and misuses symbols and the psychological implications of the strategies are purely symbolic. Burke's artistic inquiry into forms and methods is more concerned with symbolism because he finds rhetoric to be diplomatic, editorial and parliamentary, offering a means of social sparring, although he admits that grammar, rhetoric and symbolism overlap.[19] Relationally, the minstrel mask worked for whites because it symbolized African Americans as being happy and fun loving. Rhetorically, the minstrel mask worked for blacks because it allowed the minstrels to patronize an audience of oppressors and complain about their social predicament without fear of lynching. However, this process could not extricate them from the horror of their masked existence, and it functioned as a misused symbol.
For Houston Baker, form includes a changing array of images and presuppositions that a group of people holds to be a valued repository of spirit. The mask carried forward these notions with "motion seen rather than 'thing' observed."[20] Baker's contention corresponds with Burke's dramatistic view that language is more a "mode of action [than] a mode of knowledge."[21] Burke further categorizes music, dance, language, and all human exchange as "symbolic action" [22] because this exchange is public and social. If, as Baker contends, our experience of pleasure and pain is individual, and the realm of the word is miniscule compared to the space of wordlessness in which we exist, then the minstrel mask symbolized the ritualistic repression of the Africans' sexuality, play, id satisfaction, castration anxiety and humanity. "It's mastery constitute[d] a primary move in Afro-American discursive modernism."[23] Constance Rourke concludes that the mask signified "Negro literature predating the 'cult' of Afro-American expressivity. . . .in the 1940s." [24] Rourke identified the mask's 'sound' as part of its psychodrama.
After 1920, the masked African-American art forms metamorphasized into the act of jazz music. Black and white dance halls in the South, West and North became the scene. Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Jelly Roll Morton and other notable African American jazz musicians and their audiences became the agents. Dixieland jazz played on classical instruments provided a new, unmasked voice (still wordless but full of rhetorical energy) for African Americans previously silenced. Where the masked arts of blacks failed to offer symbolic dogma, grammatical art and rhetorical diplomacy, jazz was able to address these elements and jazz musicians became the heroic models of liberation to the African American community. They provided what Baker calls an "expressive counterenergy" for African Americans.[25] This counterenergy provided a "higher and more effective form of Afro-American expression," [26] according to critic Larry Neal.
Rhetorical language is an inducement to action (or to attitude, attitude being an incipient act) with transformation resulting from ambiguity, "whereby a bitter fountain may give forth sweet waters."[27] In Anti-Duhring, Engels theorized that modernism is the advantage of slavery and that change could not have occurred without slavery. The blues and jazz are art forms honed from African cultural tradition long forgotten by slaves and freedmen but distinctly inherent in the core of their being. The re-identified Negro had a 'new' culture that shaped a new music out of Euro-American religion, telling society that this displaced, worn, undignified and disqualified Negro had managed to retain his consciousness in a barren land.[28]
The jazz scene in New Orleans sounded the end of the blues era when black women like Gertrude "Ma" Rainey and Bessie Smith wailed and scoffed at their unfortunate condition in Southern American. The systematic progression from spirituals, blues and minstrelsy to jazz carried with it the ambiguities of helplessness and hope. Freedom, at the end of the 19th century, cast blacks into urban ghettos amidst blatant racist factions. Poet Langston Hughes said, "[t]here seems to be a monotonous melancholy, an animal sadness running through all Negro jazz that is almost terrible at times."[29] But jazz emerged as the agent of African Americans to express their true sound, a real unmasked rhetoric. Poet Amiri Baraka's [LeRoi Jones] simple and poetic account of the transition from slavery to jazz is almost religious:
JAZZ NOTES
After the dark night
of the Soul
our father, the Sun,
(Ra) gives us
Lady Day![30]
We could portend that the only purpose for African-American rhetoric is complaint. However, I assert that the real purpose is to manifest a highly spiritual creativity, arising from the grimiest of social outrages and soaring into the widest space of blue skies, white clouds and silver linings. In his essay, "The Evolution of Jazz", Gary Giddens recognized jazz as "a pleasure-giving, mind-expanding expression of America in the 20th century, the legacy of a formerly enslaved people that has conquered the world. . . .[giving] society what it needs."[31]
From early New Orleans blues and Dixieland music, pulsing with rich, percussive rhythms common to African music, trumpeter Louis Armstrong (considered by some modern jazz artists and enthusiasts to have been minstrel-like and too compromising) developed jazz ecumenically, taking it "out of the woods and. . . .around the world." [32] His mature brand of music addressed the deep emotions of Americans who needed to feel good about themselves. Linked with dancing, jazz was the bond of the American community. Big cities and small towns alike had clubs, dance and concert halls where jazzmen played to crowds of blacks and whites. Jazz became a language, a dialogue between players and audience.
The next stage of development - bebop - was accomplished in the mid-1940s by saxophonist Charlie "Bird" Parker whose emotional and technical range carried jazz forward into modernism at a time when sentimentality was rampant among Americans emerging from taxing depression and war. Musical heroes like Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, Charles Mingus, Erroll Garner, Barry Harris and Thelonious Monk continued "Bird's language" [33] well into the 1950s and beyond. Jazz became the intense, visionary, vital and universal rhetoric of restless Americans eager to show the world that they were free.
Baraka's simplicity is conclusive on the subject of the evolution of African American expression and music:
THE AESTHETIC
If you can understand the
complexity of an African
mask, the tense ambiguities
of Black Blues
then my work should be clear
to you, what I say
easily understood.[34]
Jazz sounds around the world as the gilded voice of those who have risen from the dust of bondage to take hold of the reins of the chariot moving toward universal emancipation. The popular musicians of the present generation will ever be indebted to the unheard voices of victims of slavery whose forgotten cries linger in the sphere of the spirit of man.[35]
References
[1] James Lincoln Collier, The Reception of Jazz in America (New York: Institute for Studies in American Music, 1988) 14.
[2] Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969) xix.
[5] Howard W. Odum, Ph.D., and Guy B. Johnson, A.M., "Dove Came Down To The Foot Of My Bed", Negro Workaday Songs, (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1926) 127.
[7] Joan Cartwright, "The Sign Of The Blues" (Jazz Research Papers, 13th Edition, International Association of Jazz Educators, Ed. Dr. Larry Fisher, 1993) 19.
[8] Ortiz, Walton. Music: Black, White & Blue (New York: William Morrow & Co., Inc. 1972) 20.
[14] James L. Golden and Richard D. Rieke, The Rhetoric of Black Americans, (Ohio: Charles E. Merrill Publishing Co., 1971) 1-9.
[16] Houston A. Baker, Jr., Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1987) 21.
[21] Kenneth Burke, "Questions and Answers About The Pentad" (College Composition and Communication, December 1978) 330.
[25] Houston A. Baker, Jr., Afro-American Poetics: Revisions of Harlem and The Black Aesthetic (Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1988) 7.
[29] Langston Hughes, I Wonder As I Wander (New York: Thunder Mouth's Press, 1986) 252.
[30] Amiri and Amina Baraka, The Music: Reflections on Jazz and Blues (New York: William Morrow & Co., Inc., 1987) 76.
[31] David N. Baker, ed., New Perspectives on Jazz (Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1986) 36-37.
[32] Baker, New Perspectives on Jazz, 34.
[33] Doug Ramsey, Jazz Matters: Reflections on the Music & Some of Its Makers (Fayetteville and London, The University of Arkansas press, 1989) 79.
Copyright © 2004 Africa Resource Center, Inc.
Citation Format
PROUDFLESH: A New Afrikan Journal of Culture, Politics & Consciousness: Issue 3, 2004