Racial integration in jazz

Everyone knows that jazz music, a genre created by black Americans, was born out of and developed in a hostile environment, the result of racial prejudices which have historically manifested in segregation, discrimination and disenfranchisement for African Americans, a situation that has improved over the years, but which occasionally resurfaces in cruel and painful situations.

In the first three decades of the history of jazz, that is, between 1900 and 1930, the orchestras were segregated, meaning they were formed entirely either by black musicians or by white musicians, without any integration. At most, musicians of both ethnicities had come together to play in recording sessions. In the song Knocking a Jug, recorded in 1929 under Louis Armstrong, the ensemble is a sextet made up of three black and three white musicians. This was impossible to see in public.

In the mid-1930s, when Benny Goodman first became famous as the front man of his great orchestra, he formed a trio that alternated with the big band, which included, in addition to Goodman, his drummer, Gene Krupa and black pianist Teddy Wilson. This trio became a quartet when the fabulous vibraphonist Lionel Hampton was added, making the group two white and two black musicians. But Benny Goodman never dared to integrate his great orchestra. The first to do so was the white clarinetist Mezz Mezzrow who formed a large mixed orchestra, but the attempt was thwarted when the Broadway venue where he performed was stormed by a pro-Nazi group and days later was closed by court order under the pretext of non-payment by the company.

During the 40s, the small groups led by Benny Goodman (sextets, septets, etc.) gradually incorporated black soloists. In the case of the great white orchestras, they only afforded themselves the occasional addition of a black soloist into their ranks. Such is the case of the great trumpeters Charlie Shavers and Hot Lips Page who performed respectively in the orchestras of Tommy Dorsey and Artie Shaw. In the black orchestras the reverse did not occur. A significant and astonishing example of this can be found in the film Check and Double Check (1930) in which Duke Ellington’s orchestra appears in a scene, and we can see one of his trombonists, the Puerto Rican Juan Tizol, white-skinned, but painted in blackface.

Already in the 1950s and 1960s, as the struggle for civil rights came to fruition, the appearance of several white musicians in black orchestras and vice versa became more widespread, although the orchestras continued to be segregated as white orchestras (Harry James, Woody Herman, Buddy Rich) or black orchestras (Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Lionel Hampton). Since the 70s, however, orchestras have become fully mixed. Today, the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra conducted by Wynton Marsalis, surely the most important in existence, is a fully integrated ensemble in which we can see musicians of all ethnicities and colors.