Jazz and Protest: A Reappraisal
Indeed, jazz artists, along with rockers, folkies, soul and R&B bands, did much to define the culture of civil rights and antiwar activism, bringing about what Gennari calls "a zenith in black communal expression." Even Joe Henderson, the generally nonpolitical tenor sax master, reflected the turn toward black nationalism with album titles like Power to the People (1969) and In Pursuit of Blackness (1970).
A lot has changed from post-Vietnam to post-9/11, and some fault the current generation - a markedly interracial, international, multistylistic crop - for failing to live up to the legacy of political engagement in jazz, whether out of apathy or fear. But this accusation doesn't square with the glut of politically themed albums and song titles, not to mention verbal statements of outrage at live gigs and even recommended reading lists in liner notes and websites, that became a commonplace in the jazz community during the Bush years. On the contrary, we can now look back on a decade - 9/11, war in Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, economic meltdown, the Obama ascendancy - that saw a considerable spike in jazz protest, perhaps the most quantitatively significant since the civil rights era.
With the advent of the blogosphere, musicians were freer than ever to share their political views with the public. Even when the statements weren't issue-specific, they could advance the idea of jazz as countercultural, part of a generalized "protest and resistance against the seemingly irresistible pressures to conform, be silent, go along and get along," as one concert presenter put it an email. In this respect, jazz has much in common with other underground music. Ian Mackaye of the innovative hardcore band Fugazi once said: "To exist independent of the mainstream is a political feat, in my opinion."
[J]azz artists, along with rockers, folkies, soul and R&B bands, did much to define the culture of civil rights and antiwar activism
Which brings us to a central paradox of jazz history. While some view the music as officially anti-establishment, in perpetual tension with American society and even Western norms as a whole, others believe it to embody, in Gennari's words, "African American culture as a vital stream of Western civilization." For figures such as Amiri Baraka (formerly LeRoi Jones), jazz is integral to the revolutionary leftist, Third Worldist program he's espoused for years. For other authors, such as Ralph Ellison, Albert Murray and Stanley Crouch (Baraka's nemesis), jazz actually "vindicat[es] the most hallowed American values - freedom, democracy, individualism - against the country's equally entrenched traditions of bigotry, philistinism, and commercialism." This is how jazz could become a diplomatic "soft power" weapon, a means of cultural outreach, for the U.S. State Department during the Cold War, even as some in the jazz world voiced sympathy with international communism. The music has always mirrored tensions between the official political culture, the liberal democratic left, the absolutist radical left and shades of grey in between.
"The Jews Knew"
As I write this, Jazz at Lincoln Center is preparing to host a New York panel on "Jews, Blacks and Jazz," featuring Stanley Crouch among others. Jews have indeed played a role in the music, certainly as players, perhaps most significantly as journalists and critics. And needless to say, the jazz world was never immune from growing splits in the civil rights coalition. Jewish critics tended to voice discomfort with rising black nationalist sentiment. Nat Hentoff, now 83, the esteemed jazz writer and outspoken civil libertarian who produced Roach's Freedom Now Suite, addressed his white colleagues in 1962 as follows: "[It is] unrealistic not to expect a period of catharsis for the American Negro - a period where all the rage and bitterness and anger and torment has to get out." But for a critic like the late Leonard Feather, the exclusivist tone of LeRoi Jones's influential 1963 book Blues People: Negro Music in White America was hard to swallow. According to Gennari:
