Multi-instrumentalist, composer and producer Chief Adjuah dropped a bombshell in Rotterdam in July: ‘Jazz is a derogatory term and the North Sea Jazz Festival would do well to choose a different name,’ said the musician who went through life as Christian Scott until 2012. Famous musicians of the past like Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Nina Simone also avoided the word. The first jazz record from 1917 caused controversy because it featured exclusively white musicians who had a condescending attitude towards their black colleagues. How tainted is the term jazz?
Born in New Orleans in 1981, Adjuah not only changed his name but also his instruments. He exchanged his trumpet for authentic-style wind instruments made for him by Dutch instrument builder Miel Adams. He also plays a self-designed electric harp, a contemporary version of the traditional West African kora. With his instruments, songs and stories, Adjuah shows and tells that the history of his music goes back much further than the period of slavery. His ultimate goal is ‘decolonising African-American music’. Instead of ‘jazz’, he opts for the elastic term ‘stretch music’.
Duke Ellington & John ColtraneIt remains to be seen whether North Sea Jazz is willing to change its name anytime soon. After 48 years, this brand name is stronger than ever. Yet Chief Adjuah is certainly not the first musician to have trouble with the term ‘jazz’. Duke Ellington (1899 – 1974) didn’t like the word either: ‘Jazz reminds me of the kind of man you hope your daughter doesn’t come home with.,’ said the successful composer and bandleader.
Neither did Miles Davis (1926 – 1991) like to be trapped in a jazz pigeonhole: ‘The name jazz doesn’t mean anything to me, I prefer to talk about social music,’ said the trumpeter and musical innovator who was beaten up by a white policeman in front of Birdland in New York in 1959 where he was to perform that night and where his name was written in large letters on the facade.
Singer, composer, pianist and activist Nina Simone (1933 – 2003) wrote in her autobiography I Put A Spell On You, ‘Jazz is a white term used to frame black people.’ Drummer Max Roach ( 1924 – 2007) considered jazz (other than derivative forms like bebop and swing) a swear word (the word ‘jas’ was used to refer to a sex worker in the French-speaking part of New Orleans).
In 2011, Nicolas Payton (1973) wrote an essay entitled ‘Why jazz isn’t cool anymore,’ in which the trumpeter explained that jazz is a racist label that black musicians received from white people who looked down on their culture. Payton advocated replacing the word ‘jazz’ with Black American Music possibly shortened to BAM.
It is fair to say that not all black musicians distance themselves from the term ‘jazz’ in such sharp terms. Promoters like trumpeter Wynton Marsalis and pianist Herbie Hancock find it especially important to point out the Afro-American roots of their music to their audience. And after all, that music was also played in the brothels of New Orleans in the early 20th century.
Official jazz history did get off to a false start, though: the first jazz record, a 1917 recording by the Original Dixieland Jass Band, was a tainted product. It was a weak imitation of black music by an all-white orchestra. Many black musicians considered it a disrespectful record. This did not get any better when bandleader Nick LaRocca started calling himself the inventor of jazz and made derogatory remarks about black musicians. However, according to the standard music history books, ‘Dixie Jass Band One-Step’ was the first jazz record, and in 2017, the centenary of jazz was celebrated all over the world.
The more you delve into the history of black music, the more poignant the contrast becomes between the musicians’ painful life stories and the unprecedented high level of their improvisations. Sonny Rollins (1930) unrivalled as tenor saxophonist, composer and creative bandleader for decades tells in the Dutch documentary Morgen speel ik beter (‘Tomorrow I will play better’, by Olaf van Paassen, 2012) that every time he enters an airport, people pull their suitcases a little closer to themselves.
Eric Dolphy (1928 – 1964) a teetotaler who practised scales for hours every day, was not admitted to a symphony orchestra because of the colour of his skin. The flute-player and saxophonist became an improvising musician against his will. In 1964, he died of diabetes in Berlin. Because he was black, almost everyone initially assumed he had succumbed to a drug overdose and he did not receive adequate medical care.
In the southern states of the United States, black musicians were allowed on stage until the 1960s, but not to sit in the auditorium, eat in the same restaurant, or stay in the same hotel as their white audience.
Over the years all kinds of musicians have called attention to better treatment of black Americans. Singer Billie Holiday (1915 – 1959) confronted her audience in 1939 with the chilling song ‘Strange Fruit’, in which she sang about black people hanging from poplar trees in an evocative way. Saxophonist Cannonball Adderley (1928 – 1975) toured the southern states in the 1960s with Reverend Jesse Jackson (1941) with pep talks and music entitled ‘Operation Breadbasket’. Charles Mingus (1922 – 1979), who hated the word jazz, composed ‘Fable of Faubus’ as an indictment of racist violence. John Coltrane who never used the term ‘jazz’ (1926 – 1967) wrote ‘Alabama’ after a bloody attack by the Ku Klux Klan in Birmingham.
The situation may now have improved for black musicians, but the ideal has not yet been reached. Adjuah, too, drags his own experiences. At every border check, he is pulled out of the queue and searched extensively. Each time, he has to buy new instrument cases because the old ones have been cut open by customs officials looking for banned substances. Adjuah is not fighting his battle alone, the younger generation of musicians such as saxophonist Kamasi Washington, bassist Esperanza Spalding and pianist Robert Glasper are emphatically making themselves heard. To the question ‘should the term jazz be banned?’, Adjuah replied wittily in Rotterdam last month: ‘If, with the knowledge of today, you still use that word, I almost start to believe you do it on purpose.’
