Rodney Dale

Part A

The History of Jazz

Many books about Jazz begin by trying to define what Jazz is, and tell you that definition is very difficult. Many definitions are difficult. If you ask me what a pangolin* is, I can try to describe it, but this may entail my using terms which themselves need explanation. It would be better to show you a picture of one; better still, to show you a real one going about its business.

If you seek an understanding of Jazz, you should certainly listen to it on records and on the radio, watch it on film, on TV and live, and, if you have the means and opportunity, try playing it yourself. I'm here to help you to listen to, watch, and play the 'right' things, and to know why they are 'right'.

Music is sound, so listening is of supreme importance. All the pioneers of Jazz had to listen — that was the way in which the music was copied and developed and handed on in the absence of written or recorded material.

To define Jazz, I need to use terms which themselves need explaining, but I will give a definition now, and return to the subject later. Jazz is a type of music which differs in at least three ways from non-Jazz:

1. In Jazz, the player is of far more importance than in non-Jazz; Jazz depends more on interpretation by individuals than on adherence to a score. I know that orchestral soloists and conductors 'interpret', but they do so within constraints. Sir Peter Hall suggested that, if classical music is the search for anonymous perfection, Jazz is about individuality. André Previn is quoted as saying that 'The basic difference between classical music and Jazz is that in the former the music is always greater than the performance — whereas the way Jazz is performed is always more important than what is being played.'

Jazz is predominantly a matter of listening, but I want you to remember that there may be other clues which will (perhaps unexpectedly) give you information about what you are hearing. Sight plays a part in live music: watching the players and how they interact with one another and the audience. Touch is certainly important if you are a musician — and you should not overlook smell and even taste. As a pianist, I find the smells of pianos highly evocative of certain occasions, and this may help to shape my enjoyment (or otherwise) of an event. Taste, I admit, seems a little remote in this context, but the anticipation of a Madras prawn and mushroom after a gig (performance), or the memory of the one you had last time, may well affect your attitude towards the last set (tunes between the last interval and the end of the gig).

The sixth — sometimes called the kinaesthetic — sense (that which enables us to perceive the relative and changing positions of parts of our body) is the one which enables the musician to play 'without thinking'- or, at least, without having to think what to do to produce a desired note or pattern of notes. In the early stages of playing any instrument in any style, it is well known that the need to instruct the muscles to do the right things at the right times overrides any possibility of playing smoothly. Once you can either read, or hear in your mind's ear, a note or pattern of notes, and then play what you want without further ado, you have achieved a great leap forward.

2. Carrying the first point even further, Jazz invites — depends on — not only improvisation but collective improvisation by several players at once.

3. Finally, because Jazz 's a freer music, the rhythms may become very complicated — and note that there is a difference between 'rhythm' (what the music is doing), and 'beat' (the steady pulse upon which it does it).

As we shall see, Jazz emerged from definable roots as a music which began to sound different from anything that had been heard before. But we mustn't lose sight of the fact —as adverse (as opposed to constructive) critics were liable to until comparatively recently — that Jazz is a part of the world of music as a whole. Jazz spent a lot of its childhood being ignored, derided, or denounced as decadent. For example, the supposedly objective Funk and Wagnall Desk Standard Dictionary (1920) defines 'Jazzband' as: 'A company of musicians who play ragtime music in discordant tones on various instruments, as the banjo, saxophone, trombone, flageolet, drum and piano'.

At school, our music master refused to accept that Jazz had any artistic content; thinking back, I'm sure that he had no idea how it worked. We were allowed to form what was called a Jazz Club, which held record sessions from time to time, but we had to be on our very best behaviour lest we should do anything which might be interpreted as the decadence 'known' to be associated with the music. Thinking back some more, I realise that this attitude actually caused us to feel decadent when listening to the music, while having no idea why we should — after all, it was only jolly music.

This view of Jazz in what was then the 'older generation' was widespread, until a newer generation of music teachers (and enlightened heads), who recognised a whole range of musical styles as valid, took over. The widespread interaction between Jazz and the rest of the musical world on the concert platform has now penetrated the walls of the music room — and the examination room — at all levels of education.

What should we call 'non-Jazz'? The term 'Classical music' (despite Classic FM) has a particular meaning: 'the period of the concert symphony and the concerto between the Baroque (ending in about 1750) and the Early Romantic (beginning in about 1800)'. We cannot complain about people using the word 'Jazz' loosely if we ourselves contrast it with 'Classical' music. Some use the term 'Serious Music' to contrast with Jazz, but that implies first that Jazz isn't (in its way) serious, and second that non-Jazz knows not how to amuse. The Chinese, I understand, call non-Jazz , noble music', an unusual word which seems curiously helpful.

The pianist Ahmed Jamal calls Jazz 'American classical music'. And Willis Conover is quoted as saying: 'Jazz is a language. It is people living in sound. Jazz is people talking, laughing, crying, building, painting, mathematicising, abstracting, extracting, giving to, taking from, making of. In other words, living.' Read on, and see what you think.

(* Any mammal of the order Pholidota found in tropical Africa, South Asia and Indonesia, having a body covered with overlapping horny scales, and a long snout specialised for feeding on ants and termites; also called scaly anteater.)

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