Whose Music is it, Anyway?: The Oxford University Press Jazz History/Criticism Series, 1980-Present

Abstract

Jazz as a Negro music, existed, up until the time of the big bands, on the same socio-cultural level as the subculture from which it was issued. The music and its sources were secret, as far as the rest of America was concerned, in much the same sense that the actual life of the black man in America was secret to the white American. The first white critics were men who sought, whether consciously or not, to understand this secret, just as the first serious white Jazz musicians sought not only to understand the phenomenon of Negro music but to appropriate it as a means of expression which they themselves might utilize ... Negro music is essentially the expression of an attitude, or a collection of attitudes, about the world, and only secondarily an attitude about they way music is made ... Usually the critic's commitment was first to his appreciation of the music rather than to his understanding of the attitude that produced it. This difference meant that the potential critic of Jazz had only to appreciate the music, or what he thought was the music, and that he did not need to understand or even be concerned with the attitudes which produced it... The major flaw in this approach to Negro music is that it strips the music too ingenuously of its social and cultural intent. It seeks to define Jazz as an art (or a folk art) that has come out of no intelligent body of socio-cultural philosophy. . .