What Is Jazz? Part 1
Leonard Bernstein
Now, anyone hearing this music, anyone on any civilized part of this earth, east or west, pole to pole, would immediately say: That is jazz. We are going to try to investigate jazz, not through the usual historical approach, which has become all too familiar, but through approaching the music itself. We are going to examine the musical "innards" of jazz to find out once and for all what it is that sets it apart from all other music. Jazz is a very big word. It covers a multitude of sounds, all the way from the earliest Blues to Dixieland bands, to Charleston bands, to Swing bands, to Boogie-Woogie, to crazy Bop, to cool Bop, to Mambo--and much more. It it all jazz, and I love it because it is an original kind of emotional expression in that it is never wholly sad or wholly happy. Even the Blues has a robustness and hard-boiled quality that never lets it become sticky-sentimental, no matter how self-pitying the words are: I woke up this morning with an awful ache in my head.
I woke up this morning with an awful ache in my head.
My new man had left me just a room and an empty bed.
And on the other hand, the gayest wildest jazz always seems to have some hint of pain in it. Listen to this trumpet, and see what I mean:
That is what intrigues me about jazz. It is unique, a form of expression all its own. I love it also for its humor. It really plays with notes.
We always speak of "playing music." We play Brahms or we play Bach--a term perhaps more properly applied to tennis.
But jazz is real play. It "fools around" with notes, so to speak, and has fun with them. It is, therefore, entertainment in the truest sense.
But I find I have to defend jazz to those who say it is low-class. As a matter of fact, all music has low-class origins, since it comes from folk music, which is necessarily earthy.
After all, Haydn minuets are only a refinement of simple, rustic German dances, and so are Beethoven scherzos. An aria from a Verdi opera can often be traced back to the simplest Neapolitan fisherman.
Besides, there has always been a certain shadow of indignity around music, particularly around the players of music. I suppose it is due to the fact that historically players of music seem to lack the dignity of composers of music.
But this is especially true of jazz, which is almost completely a player's art, depending as it does on improvisation rather than on composition. But this also means that the player of jazz is himself the real composer, which gives him a creative, and therefore more dignified, status.
Then there are those who argue that jazz is loud. But so are Sousa marches, and we don't hear complaints about them. Besides, it's not always loud. It is very often extremely delicate, in fact.
Perhaps this objection stems from the irremediable situation of what is after all a kind of brass band playing in a room too small for it. But that is not the fault of jazz itself.
However, the main argument against jazz has always been that it is not art. I think it is art, and a very special art. And before we can argue about whether it is or not, we must know what it is. And so I propose to share with you some of the things I know and love about jazz.
Let's take that Blues we heard before and find out what it's made of.
Now what are the elements that make that jazz?
First of all there is the element of melody. Western music in general is based, melodically speaking, on scales, like the major scale you all practiced as kids.
But there is a special one for jazz, which is a variation of the regular major scale. In jazz, this scale gets modified three different times. The third note gets lowered from this, to this. The fifth from this, to this. And the seventh from this, to this.
Those three changed notes are called blue notes. So instead of a phrase which would ordinarily go something like this, which is not particularly jazzy, we would get, using blue notes, this phrase, which begins to show a jazz quality.
But this so-called jazz scale is used only melodically. In the harmony underneath we still use our old unflatted notes, and that causes dissonances to happen between that tune and the chords.
But these very dissonances have a true jazz sound. For example, jazz pianists are always using these two dissonant notes together. And there is a reason for it. They are really searching for a note that isn't there at all but one which lies somewhere between the two notes, between this and this. And the note is called a quarter tone.
The quarter tone comes straight from Africa, which is the cradle of jazz and where quarter tones are everyday stuff. We can produce one on a wind instrument or a stringed instrument or with the voice, but on the piano we have to approximate it by playing together the two notes on each side of it. The real note is somewhere in there, in that crack between them.
Lets see if I can sing you that quarter tone, if you will forgive my horrid voice. Here is an African Swahili tune I once heard. The last note of it is a quarter tone.
Sounds as if I'm singing terribly out of tune. But actually I am singing a real note in another musical language. In jazz it is right at home.
Now just to show you how important these so-called blue notes are to jazz, let's hear that same Blues played without them, using only the plain white notes of the scale.
There is something missing, isn't' there? It just isn't jazz.
But even more important than melody in jazz is the element of rhythm. Rhythm is the first thing you associate with the word jazz, after all.
There are two aspects to this point. The first is the beat. This is what you hear when the drummer's foot is beating the drum. Or when the bass player is plucking his bass. Or even when the pianist is kicking the pedal with his foot.
All this is elementary. The beats go on from beginning to end of a number, two or four of them to a measure, never changing in tempo or in meter This the heartbeat, so to speak, of jazz.
But more involved and more interesting is the rhythm going on over the beat, rhythmic figures which depend on something called syncopation, a word you have certainly heard but maybe were never quite sure of.
A good way to understand syncopation might be to think of a heartbeat that goes along steadily and at a moment of shock misses a beat. It is that much of a physical reaction.
Technically, syncopation means either the removal of an accent where you expect one or the placing of an accent where you least expect one. In either case, there is the element of surprise and shock. The body responds to this shock, either by compensating for the missing accent or by reacting to the unexpected one.
Now where do we expect accents? Always on the first beat of a bar, or the downbeat.
If there are two beats in a bar, one is going to be strong, two is going to be weak, exactly as in marching: right, left, right, left!
Even if there are four beats in a bar, it is still like marching. Although we all have only two legs, the sergeant still counts out in four: "Hup, 2, 3, 4! Hup, 2, 3, 4!"
There is always that natural accent on "one." Take it away, and there is a simple syncopation: 2, 3, 4, 2, 3, 4, etc. You see that that missing accent on the first beat evokes a body response.
Now, the other way to make syncopation is exactly the reverse: put an accent on a weak beat, the second or the fourth, where it doesn't belong. Like this: 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4! This is what we all do, listening to jazz, when we clap our hands or snap our fingers on the offbeat.
Those are the basic facts of syncopation. And now we can understand its subtler aspects. Between one beat and another there lie shorter and even weaker beats. And when these get accents the shock is correspondingly greater, since the weaker the beat you accentuate, the greater the surprise.
Let's take eight of those fast beats in a bar: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. The normal accents would fall on 1 and 5: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. Now instead, let's put a big accent on a real weak one, the fourth: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. As you can see, we get a pure rhumba rhythm.
Of course, the strongest syncopation of all would obviously be obtained by doing both things at once: putting an accent on a weak beat and taking away the accent from the strong.
So now we will do this double operation: put a wallop on the weak fourth, and remove the strong fifth beat entirely; and we get: 1, 2, 3, 4! 6, 7, 8. It begins to sound like the Congo, doesn't it?
Now that you've heard what syncopation is like, let's see what that same Blues we heard before would sound like without it. I think you'll miss that essential lament, the very life of jazz. Sounds square, doesn't it?
Well, that takes care of two very important elements,: melody and rhythm. But jazz could not be jazz without its special tonal colors, the actual sound values you hear. These colors are many, but they mostly stem from the quality of the Negro singing voice.
For instance, when Louis Armstrong plays his trumpet, he is only doing another version of his own voice. Listen to an Armstrong record, like I Can't Give You Anything but Love, and compare the trumpet solo with the vocal solo.
You can't miss the fact that they're by the same fellow. But the Negro voice has engendered other imitations. The saxophone is in itself a kind of imitation of it, breathy, a little hoarse, with a vibrato, or tremor, in it.
Then there are all the different growls and rasps we get by putting mutes on the horns. Here, for example is a trumpet with a cup mute and a wah-wah mute. And a trombone with a plunger mute.
There are other tonal colors that derive from Afro-Cuban sources: bongo drums, maracas, the Cuban cowbell and all the others.
Then there are the colors that have an Oriental flavor: the vibraphone, the various cymbals and so on.
These special colorations make their contribution to the tonal quality of jazz. You have certainly all heard jazz tunes played straight by non-jazz orchestras and wondered what was missing. There certainly is something missing: the coloration.
There is one more jazz element which may surprise some of you who think jazz is not an art. I refer to form.
Did you know, for example, that the Blues is a classical form? Most people use the word Blues to mean any song that is "blue" or torchy or low-down or breast-beating, like Stormy Weather, for example.
But Stormy Weather is not a Blues, and neither is Moanin' Low nor The Man I love, or even The Birth of the Blues. They are all popular songs.
The Blues is basically a strict poetic form combined with music. It is based on a rhymed couplet, with the first line repeated. For example, Billie Holiday sings:
My man don't love me, treats me awful mean.
Oh, he's the lowest man I've ever seen.
But when she sings it, she repeats the first line, so it goes:
My man don't love me, treats me awful mean.
My man don't love me, treats me awful mean.
Oh, he's the lowest man I've ever seen.
That is one stanza of Blues. A full Blues is nothing more than a succession of such stanzas for as long as the singer wishes.
Did you notice that the Blues couplet is, of all things, in iambic pentameter?
My MAN/don't LOVE/me, TREATS/me AW/ful MEAN.
This is about as classic as one can get. It means that you can take any rhymed couplet in iambic pentameter (from Shakespeare for example) and make a perfect Macbeth Blues:
I will not be afraid of death and bane,
Till Birnam forest come to Dunsinane.
It makes a lovely Blues.
Now if you've noticed, each of these three lines got four bars apiece, making it all a twelve-bar stanza. But the voice itself sang only about half of each four-bar line and the rest is supposed to be filled up by the accompaniment.
This filling-up is called a "break." And here in the break we have the origin of the instrument imitating the voice: the very soil in which jazz grows.
Perhaps the essential sound of jazz is Louis Armstrong improvising the breaks in a Blues sung by Bessie Smith. From this kind of voice imitation all instrumental improvising has since developed.
Did you notice the instrument that has been accompanying our singers today? It is a harmonium, that wheezy little excuse for an organ which we all associate with hymn tunes.
But far from being out of place in the Blues, this instrument is especially appropriate, since the chords in the Blues must always be exactly the same three chords we all know from hymn tunes:
These chords must always remain in a strict classical pattern, pure and simple. Try to vary them and the Blues quality flies out the window.
Well, there you have it: melody, rhythm, tone color, form, harmony. In each department there are special features that make jazz, instead of just music.
Let's now put them all together, and hear a full-blown, all-out happy Blues. Oh, did you know that Blues could be happy? Just listen.
This is the end of the first part of Leonard Bernstein's lecture on jazz, originally presented at a Young People's Concert in New York City, and broadcast on October 16, 1955. Now that you've stopped listening and tapping your feet to Leonard Bernstein and his jazz samples, you can all start talking by responding to the following questions. But you mustn't tap your feet as you talk.
1. What does it mean to go "all out" for something? 2. Name a famous Neapolitan song. (You may have to netsearch.) 3. The word "Neapolitan" refers to which city in which nation? 4. Which nation has given the world the most beautiful melodies? 5. When do you feel you are treated with indignity? 6. What is your current marital status? 7. John Philip Sousa was a great march composer. On what occasion are marches usually played? The name of a country (his birthplace) is in Sousa's name. Which country is it? 8. In Bernstein's lecture, what do the "two poles" refer to? 9. Whose your favorite historical personality? Why? 10. Describe uncivilized behavior. 11. If someone tells you your girlfriend or boyfriend is fooling around, does that mean he or she is being foolish? What does it mean? 12. Do a netsearch and tell us which century produced the minuet. 13. What's a one-word synonym for delicate, as in delicate skin? What does it mean to handle something or someone delicately? 14. Is a blue Christmas happy or sad? 15. The word "aria" is related to which English word? What once common and deadly disease was named from "aria" and how did it get its name? 16. If you have to improvise an excuse to your boyfriend or girlfriend why you didn't show for the date, do you plan what to say or make it up quickly? 17. In a lawsuit, the person making a complaint is called by what name, using a form of the same word? 18. Describe rustic scenery. 19. Is a person in robust health healthy or sickly? 20. A multitude of books means many or few? 21. What's a parking meter? A gas meter? 22. Where is the Congo located? 23. In the 1950s and 60s, "square" was opposed to "cool." Which one was good and which bad? Explain. 24. The word "vibrato" is related to which English word? 25. What does it mean to modify your plans? 26. In what room do you use a plunger and why? 27. What does it mean to accentuate the positive? 28. What's a synonym for "stem" in the sentence, "The trouble stems from the past." 29. In an Austin Powers movie, Liz Hurley, as Vanessa, rejects Austin's romantic advances in these words: "If you were the last man on earth and I was the last woman and the future of the human race depended on it, I would still refuse you!" Austin replies, "So what's your point, Vanessa?" Was Vanessa giving a subtle hint? 30. What's another word for a "note" in music? If you write a note to someone, are you writing them a tune or a message? 31. What happens when you turn the mute on a CD player or a television set? 32. The word "Dixieland" refers to which part of the US? 33. The person with whom one corresponds is called by what word? 34. What does it mean to crack under pressure? 35. What's a crackpot? A crackpot idea? 36. How many notes make up a chord? 37. How can you soil your clothes? 38. Where are hymns heard? 39. Use your English or American Lit textbooks and recite a single rhymed couplet from memory. 40. Is a horrid movie good or bad? 41. Where are sergeants usually found? 42. Is something "irremediable" able to be fixed? What word is found in that word? 43. What is the opposite of dissonance? 44. How do you compensate for your weaknesses? 45. Four is a number. What's a "number" in a show or musical? 46. Show how to clap your hand over your mouth. 47. If an exam was a snap, does that mean it was easy or hard? 48. Bernstein refers to "Negro" music. That was in 1955. What word would we likely use today? 49. Does classical mean old or new? What's another word for classical music? 50. What do you lament from your childhood? 51. Is your girlfriend likely to wallop you when you bring her flowers or when you forget to bring her flowers? 52. What vehicle are you likely to pedal? 53. If we say, "She was the bane of his life," do we honor or dishonor the woman? 54. If we say, "Make it snappy!" what do we mean?
What is Jazz? Part 2 By this time I've probably given you the impression that jazz is nothing but Blues. Not at all. I've used the Blues to investigate jazz only because it embodies the various elements of jazz in so clear and pure a way. But the rest of jazz is concerned with applying these same elements to something called the popular song. The popular song, too, is a form and it has certain strict patterns. Popular songs are in either two-part or three-part form. By far the most numerous are in the three-part. You all know this form, of course, from hearing it so much. It is as simple as pie. Anyone can write one. Take Sweet Sue for instance. All you need is the first eight bars, really, which in the trade are called the front strain. Now the song is practically written, since the whole thing will be only 32 bars long, four groups of 3 bars apiece. The second 8 is the same exactly as the first. Sixteen bars, and we're already half finished. Now the next 8 bars which are called the release or bridge, or just simply the "middle part," must be different music. But it doesn't matter if it's very good or not, since most people don't remember it too well anyway. And then the same old front strain all over again and it's finished. Thirty-two bars, and a classic forever! Easy, isn't it? But Sweet Sue is still not jazz. A popular song doesn't become jazz until it is improvised on, and there you have the real core of all jazz: improvisation. Remember I said that jazz was a player's art rather than a composer's Well, this is the key to the whole problem. It is the player who by improvising makes jazz. He uses the popular song as a kind of dummy to hang his notes on. He dresses it up in his own way, and it comes out an original. So the pop tune, in acquiring a new dress, changes its personality completely, like many people who behave one way in blue jeans and a wholly different way in dinner clothes. Some of you may object to this dressing-up. You say, "Let me hear the melody, not all this embroidery." But until you accept this principal of improvisation, you will never accept or understand jazz itself. What does improvising mean? It means that you take a tune, keep it in mind with its harmony and all and then as they used to say, just "go to town," or make it up as you go along. You go to town by adding ornaments and figurations or by making real old-fashioned variations, just as Mozart and Beethoven did. Let me show you a little of how Mozart did it and then you may understand how Erroll Garner does it. Mozart took a well-known nursery rhyme, which he knew as Ah, Vous Dirai-je Maman and which we know as Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star, or as a way of singing the alphabet: Twinkle, twinkle, little star
How I wonder what you are.
Now Mozart takes a series of variations. One of them begins. Then another. Another. And another.
They are all different pieces, yet they are all in one way or another that same original tune. The jazz musician does exactly the same thing.
There are infinite possible versions of Sweet Sue for example. The clarinet might improvise one chorus of it this way.
Now he could have done that in any number of ways. And if I asked him to do it again tomorrow morning, it would come out a whole other piece. But it would still be Sweet Sue and it would still be jazz.
Now we come to the most exciting part of jazz, for me at any rate: simultaneous improvising. This happens when two or more musicians improvise on the same tune at the same time. Neither one knows exactly what the other is going to do. But they listen to each other and pick up phrases from each other and sort of talk together.
What ties them together is the chords, the harmony, of Sweet Sue. Over this harmony, they play two different melodic lines at the same time, which, in musical terms, makes a kind of accidental counterpoint. This is the germ of what is called the jam session.
Now the trumpet is going to join with the clarinet in a double improvisation on Sweet Sue. See if you can distinguish the two melodic lines:
You see how exciting this can be? This business of improvising together gave rise to the style called Dixieland, which is constantly having a big revival.
One of the most exhilarating sounds in all music is that of a Dixieland band blaring out its final chorus, all stops out, with everyone improvising together.
But jazz is not all improvisation, not by a long shot. Much of it gets written down, and then it is called an arrangement.
The great days of the arrangements were the 30s, when big, startling swing arrangements were showing off the virtuosity of the great bands, like Casa Loma, Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, the Dorsey brothers, and so on.
Now jazz is hard to write down. There is no way of notating exactly those quarter tones we talked about, nor the various smears and growls and subtle intonations.
Even the rhythms can only be approximated in notation, so that much of the jazz quality is left to the instincts of the player who is reading the music. Still it does work, because the instincts of the players are so deep and genuine.
Let's listen to a good solid swing arrangement of a chorus of Sweet Sue as we might have heard it back in 1938.
Now remember, this arrangement was for dancing. In 1938 we were all dancing.
And that brings up the most important point of all. Nobody seems to dance to jazz very much any more, except for mambo lovers, and they are limited to those who are athletic enough to do it.
What has happened to dancing? We used to have a new dance practically every month: the Lindy Hop, the Shag, the Peabody, the Big Apple, Boogie, Susie-Q. Now we have only dances you have to take lessons to do.
What does this mean? Simply that the emphasis is on listening these days, instead of on singing and dancing.
This change had to happen. For one thing, the tremendous development of the recording industry has taught us to listen in way we never did before.
But even more significant, with the advent of more complicated swing and jazz, like Boogie Woogie and Bop, our interest has shifted to the music itself and to the virtuosity of its performance. That is, we are interested in what notes are being played, how well, how fast, and with what originality
You can't listen to Bop intelligently and dance too, murmuring sweet nothings into your partner's ear. You have to listen as hard as you can to hear what's happening.
So in a way, jazz has begun to be a kind of chamber music, an advanced sophisticated art mainly for listening, full of influences of Bartok and Stravinsky and very, very, serious.
Let's listen for a moment to this kind of arrangement of our old friend Sweet Sue. Whether you call this kind of weird piece "cool" or "crazy" or "futuristic" or "modernistic" or whatever, the fact is that it is bordering on serious concert music.
The arrangement begins to be a composition. Take away the beat and you might not even know it's jazz at all. It would be just a concert piece.
And why is it jazz? Because it is played by jazz men, on jazz instruments, and because it has its roots in the soil of jazz and not of Bach.
I think the key word to all this is the word cool. It means what it implies.
Jazz used to advertise itself as hot. Now the heat is off.
The jazz player has become a highly serious person. He may even be an intellectual. He tends to wear Ivy League clothes, have a crew cut, or wear horn-rimmed glasses. He may have studied music at a conservatory or a university.
This was unthinkable in the old days. Our new jazz man plays more quietly, with greater concentration on musical values, on tone quality, technique. He knows Bartok and Stravinsky and his music shows it. He tends to avoid big, flashy endings. The music just stops when it is over.
As he has become cool, so have his listeners. They don't dance. They listen respectfully, as if to chamber music, and applaud politely at the end.
At jazz night clubs all over the world you find audiences who do not necessarily have a drink in their hands and who do not beat out the rhythm and carry on as we did when I was a boy. It is all rather cool and surprisingly controlled, considering that jazz is essentially an emotional experience.
Where does this lead us in our investigation? To some pretty startling conclusions.
There are those who conclude from all this that here, in the new jazz, is the real beginning of serious American music; that at last the American composer has his own expression.
Of course when they say this they are intimating that all American symphonic works up to now are nothing but personalized imitations of the European symphonic tradition from Mozart to Mahler.
Sometimes, I must say, I think they have a point. At any rate, we can be sure of one thing: that the line between serious music and jazz grows less and less clear. We have serious composers writing in the jazz idiom and we have jazz musicians becoming serious composers.
Perhaps we've stumbled on a theory. But theory or no theory, jazz goes on finding new paths, sometimes reviving old styles, but in either case, looking for freshness.
In any art that is really vital and searching, splits are bound to develop; arguments arise and factions form. Just as in painting the non-objectivists are at sword's point with the representationalists, and in poetry the imagist declaims against the surrealists, so in jazz music we have a major battle between the traditionalists and the progressives.
These latter are the ones who are trying hardest to get away from the patterns of half a century, experimenting with new sonorities, using note relationships that are not common to the old jazz, and, in general, trying to keep jazz alive and interesting by broadening its scope.
Jazz is a fresh, vital art in the present tense, with a solid past and an exciting future.
Discussion Questions for Part 2 1. What common fruit has a core? What's a synonym for "core" in "The core issue is whether she's telling the truth"? 2. What are some ornaments on a Christmas tree? 3. When 2 people talk simultaneously, what does that mean? 4. What's a simulcast? (Hint: This is a blend word, like brunch.) 5. From Bernstein's lecture, what do you think a jam session is? Is it a time when children open up a bottle of jam when their parents are sleeping? 6. What is the key to being a good student? 7. If music is blaring from a radio, does that mean the music is loud or soft? 8. What's the germ of an idea? 9. An idiom is a phrase that says more than the literal meaning, such as "How's it going?" What's an idiomatic style of speaking or singing? 10. What's the opposite of latter? Progressive? What's progressive education? 11. What is representational art? At what time of day is one likely to see surrealistic images? 12. Describe a crew cut. In what profession does one usually see crew cuts? 13. How can you tell the advent of winter? 14. What does it mean to revive a musical? To revive a person? 15. Name a famous Chinese virtuoso. What common word can be found in that word? 16. What's an exhilarating trip? 17. What is the middle of a song called? 18. Name some Ivy League colleges. 19. The word "chamber" comes from the Italian word for room. What English word is related to this word and how? What is chamber music? 20. What's a weird person or movie? 21. What's an Italian way to say "dining outdoors"? 22. Is a sonorous voice pleasant or unpleasant to listen to? 23. The word "tremendous" is related to what similar word? 24. What does it mean to conserve electricity? Is a conservative more likely to vote for change than a liberal? What is the difference? 25. When are you likely to whisper sweet nothings into someone's ear? 26. What world famous 20th century painter is an example of nonobjectivist art? 27. What subject is usually taught in a conservatory? What is usually grown in a conservatory? 28. Name a famous symphonic composer. 29. Listen to the music of a symphonic composer and discuss your experience. Or go to the library and listen to the second movement of Rachmaninov's Second Piano Concerto. Do you recognize a popular song in it? 30. Give an approximation of a baby crying, the sound of an hyena, or a lion roaring. 31. What values should a leader embody? 32. What technique do you use to get a person interested in you? What technique do you use to chase a person away?
