Jazz and politics

For the past fifty or sixty years, certain critics and historians have wanted to read and analyze the evolution of jazz in a political light. Of course, like all human cultural activity, jazz music is produced in a certain political context, whatever that may be. However, one must be very careful and rigorous with this kind of reading and analysis.

When analyzing the earliest era of jazz, a festive, entertaining music for dancing and enlivening shows, many of these critics and historians consider this style the expression of an African American community that, subjected to terrible oppression on the part of whites, found in jazz a way to escape or alleviate their suffering. In other words: jazz was an alienating form of not openly and belligerently confronting the yoke to which the community was subjected.

On the other hand, when looking at the complex styles that emerged after the 2nd World War (be-bop, hard-bop), and, especially, groundbreaking forms that emerged in the styles of the sixties (free jazz), these same critics consider them the expression of the revolt of radical groups (Black Power, Black Panthers) against a situation of submission. While, as with any artistic activity, a style may express a certain political attitude, a slightly less superficial reading may lead to different conclusions.

The jazz of the first decades and the styles that have continued to preserve its character constitute a music of a popular nature that gives musical form to the feelings and ways of doing things typical of the African American community. In an environment of cultural oppression and permanent brainwashing in which Black people have to hear, day in and day out, that they are an inferior race, staying true to their traditional popular forms of expression is a manifestation of cultural resistance that has an undeniable political value and meaning.

In the opposite sense, those styles that explicitly seek to denounce and combat a situation of oppression, but do so scorning the language they inherit from their predecessors, instead adopting foreign musical forms (contemporary European music, dodecaphonic, atonal, etc.), these styles in a way betray their cultural identity, despite the explicit themes they profess. They are surrendering to the cultural and intellectual pressure posed by the adversary, playing their game. And this also has political significance.