My Paper: Jazz as the American Language

One of the critical discussions in literary circles has been the definition of what divides quintessentially American literature from its European origins. That much of the North American continent has been grafted with European-based languages and geographical names should hardly be passed over as holding little relevance. Noah Webster’s attempt to rework English into an identifiably different American version resulted in only marginal and surface level development of something to be called uniquely American. Language defines and shapes the ways in which any given group of people relates to their environment, fellow citizens, and universe. The creation of what is truly American could not occur until a decidedly organic American language poured forth and reformed the underlying mythology of what America is. The American music phenomenon of jazz formed this critical new language. Its development and growth in the early twentieth century marked the moment in which America separated itself from its European roots. What this paper hopes to examine is the development of this new language in terms of literature, art and thought within the cultural juggernaut we call American.
It could be readily argued that Ralph Waldo Emerson and his transcendental writings marked the beginning of the killing off of Europe’s smothering grip on the American psyche. Emerson’s essays such as “The Poet”, and the “Oversoul” marked the beginning of a fundamental shift in the focus of both spirituality and structure of thought on the North American continent. Akin to the writings of William Blake, Emerson’s works focused upon the internal divinity of the self. He saw the poet/artist as the vehicle for the sharing the collective experience of humanity contained in the oversoul . Each individual provides the only divine link to creation. In this view the artist merges with the divine muse, becoming possessed by the divine spirit. Wallace Stevens, the great American poet, built upon this idea in works such as The Idea Of Order at Key West. The destruction of the hierarchically constructed old world of Europe is the successful end result of this reshaping of thought and creativity. The internalizing of the divine was the key element in bringing about Jazz music.
If we examine the structure of literature in terms of a Pyramid figure, music lies at its base. Directly beneath mythology it forms the wordless structure upon which the foundations of myth and language gather their very existence. The exact form of that music differs from culture to culture. In the terms of the American pyramid it is jazz that lies at the base. Structurally it supplanted its two major predecessors of both blues and bluegrass. Jazz formed a fundamental movement away from the language of its predecessors. Where as blues and bluegrass relied heavily upon the strength of words and poetic form, jazz turned to the music itself as its primary form of communication. A comparison between the works of Muddy Waters, Bill Monroe and John Coltrane, quickly highlights the different usage of words in their music. The primary voice heard in the works of artists such as Coltrane, Parker, and Davis come from their respective instruments. Saxophone, trumpet, bass, guitar and drums comprise the voice of the jazz musician. Louis Armstrong provided the bridge between the world of blues and the universe of jazz. To see jazz as a language it is critical to examine its structure in some detail.
At the most basic level Jazz is constructed in a four bar system. As a piece of music, it is performed by a group of musicians utilizing this four bar measure to time a conversation between their given instruments. Within this structure, one of the musicians rises from the background to carry and take the lead movement. It is this leader, for the given four bars that pulls the given piece in one direction. The remainder of the band follows the lead, and builds upon it, filling the gap between notes and changing direction based upon their given mindset in regards to the piece. Every piece of jazz can be considered a type of journey, an almost dream like movement between places. Every piece can be seen as set of themes or musical vignettes that are strung together by way of musical improvisations. At its heart, jazz is type of musical conversation between the players conducted through the melodies and sounds created by their instruments. In that the music also provides for a mental journey, so the wordless conversation evolves fluidly at the will of players. For jazz, it is the music created by those instruments rather the words sung by a human voice that matter. At its heart, jazz is a conversation utilizing sounds that stretch beyond the patterned syntactic structures of spoken language. In this language there are only pure emotions and structure. Without words, the old order of Europe finds it difficult to manipulate and overpower the divine truth at the heart of jazz.
The development of jazz in the early twentieth century enabled America to finally create for itself a language to speak for her varied peoples. Despite Noah Webster’s attempt to create a wholly American language, the end product of his dictionary managed only minor aesthetic changes to a wholly European language. Dropping the occasional “u”s and reversing “re” to “er” hardly provided for a fundamental different language. This new American English proved itself to be far too rooted in the traditions of the former colonizer to be embraced by a nation of distinct cultural diversities or to provide the basis of an entirely new nation. What the advent of jazz brought about was a common language that could readily be embraced by America’s huddled masses. That it was created by the former slaves of English speaking white men should never be overlooked. Unlike countless other failed attempts at creating American identity from the top down, jazz sprung forth from the masses huddled below. Fueled by mind liberating narcotics such as marijuana, and following cues laid out by writers such as Emerson and Blake, musicians turned inward and pulled from their innermost recesses the tonal patterns and musical structures we now see as the language of jazz. To them, turning inward was the only possible escape from a society still wholly rooted in its colonial past.
The explosion of art, literature, and culture that followed mainstream acceptance of jazz as a solidly American art form can hardly be considered coincidence. We can readily witness the fundamental changes the language of jazz brought to the arts of America after its explosion in popularity. It was all encompassing explosion, engulfing the entirety of the arts of America. The landmark movie Citizen Kane utilized the science of deep focus in its filming. For the first time the background images of film became as intrinsically important to the foreground. Film became a fluid conversation of images, with no single player on the screen providing a more important image than those around. This mimicked jazz, in that the conversation between the instruments provided a type of deep focus for music. The lead instrument finds the notes that it plays metaphorically wrapped around by the instruments playing behind it. The background becomes critical. In terms of music, this is most aptly seen at work in the performance of Motown music, which was of itself an organic sprouting of jazz into pop music.
Faulkner picked up on this structure as important facet of his writing. His lack of subordinating clauses highlights the equal weight of importance of each of his statements. Every statement for Faulkner bared the same importance because each “leading” idea found its strength in every statement that preceded it. Faulkner was clearly not the soul beneficiary of jazz’s legacy upon American literature. Writers such as Jack Kerouac, Alan Ginsburg, Ken Kesey and the beats utilized its basic structure as vehicle to create innovative works such as On the Road, Electric Kool Aid Test, and Holy Soul Jelly Roll. In Kerouac’s works we see not only the motif of the voyage at work, but also the inward soul gazing aspect inherent in both Buddhism and jazz. We are even left with the truth that comes from gazing inward for truth in Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood. Hazel Motes blinds himself with lime at the end of the book, as he realizes the only truth lies in the inner self. The idea of the road movie or the odyssey we see in at play in movies such as Wizard of Oz and Dead Man come the improvisational basis which jazz music lays out.
What is most vividly implied in the creation of jazz is the idea that the creator of the art is divine. We turn to Emerson again, and we see both the musician and the artist as a channelor of the divine. The improvisational nature of jazz music precludes the fact that the artists themselves become divine in the very act of creation. They become enthusiastic, possessed by the knowledge and spirit of the oversoul. With their instruments they sing beyond the genius of the sea, and open doors of perception to the underlying mythic level of American literature. Stevens plays with this idea of the artist as divine creator in his work. It is highlighted in the final lines of the twelith stanza of his poem “The Man With the Blue Guitar”:
“As I strum the thing, do I pick up,
That which momentousily declares
Itself not to be I and yet
Must be. It could be nothing else” (Stevens 140)

Here is the melding of the divine muse with the artist. Perhaps unknowingly, Stevens lifted at least a portion of the veil obscuring the true language of America. By casting the artists as a divine creator of order, he mimicked the processes at work in the jazz musician. Jazz, like poetry, was and is a destructive force. They tore down what was once a decidedly European dominated American order.
Our final example of jazz’s influence on American literature comes in regards to one of the most overt examples of the fusion of jazz and literature. Ralph Waldo Ellison shapes his timeless novel Invisible Man to the near perfect form of an intricate jazz improvisation. Invisible Man stands on its own as a great jazz epic. Read in silence, the melodies of the words and images swirl into a masterpiece of music rivaled only by Charles Mingus’ Tijuana Nights or John Coltrane’s Love Supreme. The novel is laid out in intricately written vignettes and tied together as tightly woven type of odyssey. The protagonist of the novel evolves and changes through the course of the improvisation. That the lead role is begun as a student moves through such other characters as a paint mixer and a communist should not escape the reader’s attention. This is the changing of the lead instrument in the Ellison’s great jazz improvisation. Every one of Elision’s lead musicians pulls the overall song into a new direction. Without a defined name, the mesh of characters and personalities fuses into one elaborate group. Each protagonist Elision launches at us, is distinct from the last and clearly highlights a change in instrument. Invisible Man can also readily be sectioned into vignettes. Each chapter can be taken as a distinct story. However, Elision weaves them together with his ever-changing protagonists like a jazz musician does with numerous individual themes. Later writers would pick up on Elision’s style and copy it to carry them to equal successes. If one examines Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, one sees an almost identical structure at play. Jazz provides the new vehicle for America to create and illustrate its only mosaic of people .
Jazz has had a profound, if not obfuscated impact upon the totality of American culture and art. As the base of the pyramid structure of both literature and culture it has provided the framework for the creation of literature that is above all else American. Words eventually followed jazz’s music structural. This occurred only after the successful refiguring of consciousness and structure that was implicit in the purely instrumental works of artists such as John Coltrane, Miles Davis, and Charles Mingus. Despite this change, jazz remains as the foundation upon which the quintessential literature and arts of America have been built. Jazz forms the basis of an ongoing and ever evolving societal conversation between America’s very unique peoples.

Works Cited

Stevens, Wallace. Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose. New York, NY: Literary Classics, 1997.