We Need a Psychohistory of Jazz

Dear Editor,

As much as I have enjoyed reading Clio’s Psyche, I regret that I have not read anything about jazz — a field that brings so much pleasure, as well as insight into the human condition, to so many people. Miles Davis begins his autobiography, Miles (1989), with, “Listen. The greatest feeling I ever had in my life — with my clothes on — was when I first heard Diz (Dizzy Gillespie) and Bird (Charlie Parker) together in St. Louis.” Jazz in an expressive music that is associated with our deepest emotions.

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One way of exploring jazz is to read the many autobiographies and biographies of jazz musicians. (Currently, I am writing a biography of the jazz guitarist Bucky Pizzarelli.) Miles Davis reflects on the nightlife of jazz musicians: “We’d play downtown on 52nd Street until about twelve or one in the morning. Then … we’d go uptown to Minton’s, Small Paradise, or the Heatwave and play until they closed around four or five in the morning.” We are also informed by the autobiographies of white jazz musicians such as Benny Goodman, Bud Freeman, Mezz Mezzrow, and others about their excitement at hearing black musicians who drifted into Chicago in the 1920s. They use terms such as “freedom of expression” and “natural music” to depict the sounds and rhythms of jazz. Mezz Mezzrow states that jazz helped him to break the “straight jacket” of conformity and to thumb his nose at the “pillars of society.” In the 1950s, Norman Mailer, in his essay, “The White Negro,” was interested in why white hipsters “Absorbed the existential synapses of the Negro.” Mailer felt that there was a psychological association between the imposed alienation of black musicians and white hipsters.

The life of black and white musicians was that of a shared condition that included smoke-filled night clubs, sleazy dance halls, all-night hours, drugs and alcohol abuse, lack of proper sleep and food, and in most cases, lack of a living wage. The question arises, what was it about this lifestyle that attracted so many musicians? Burton W. Peretti, in The Creation of Jazz: Music, Race and Culture in Urban America (1992), concludes,

Taking these celebrated extra musical aspects of the jazz musicians’ lives into consideration, it is not possible to argue that they created a distinct influential subculture. These tendencies toward masculine fraternity, therapeutic uses of music, nocturnal life, slang, unusual dress, gambling and drugs and alcohol use and abuse most often derived from the tensions and creations found in the dominate white and African-American cultures.

Jazz is considered America’s classical music. (There are now many jazz studies programs and formal degrees in jazz education, one of which I helped to create at William Paterson College [now University] before retiring in 1995.) It is generally agreed that jazz began 100 years ago in and around New Orleans. Frantz Fanon, head of a psychiatric hospital in Algeria and author of Wretched of the Earth (1968), connects the emergence of the blues to oppression and racism. LeRoi Jones (Amira Baraka) in Blues Peoples (1963) states, “The blues could not exist if the African captives had not become American captives.” In his seminal study, Black Culture and Black Consciousness (1978), Lawrence W. Levine includes lyrics from black folk songs that clearly indicate the concerns of poor black folks. “Got no mind for white folks to see / nother for what I know is me / He don’t know / he don’t know my mind.” Slaves ridiculed stingy white masters in their songs. “We rais de wheat / Dey gib us de corn / We bake de bread, dey gib us de crust? We sif de mea / Dey give us de huss.” A combination of slave songs, blues, and gospel singing comprise the beginning of what is called jazz music.

In the 1960s and 1970s, some black jazz musicians used jazz to express their anger with white America and as a means to “liberate” themselves from the music and expression of the white society. Frank Kofsky explores what he calls the “substratum of black resentment” in Black Nationalism and the Revolution in Music (1970). These musical expressions combined with the civil rights movement and the black identity movement that included afros and dashikis to express African-American connections. Among the black musicians who engaged in this phase of jazz were Dizzy Gillespie, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Theolonious Monk and Archie Shepp.

Critics of jazz music and the attitudes of this black expression called the musicians “neurotic.” However, it is interesting to note that libraries are filled with studies of Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin and Wagner, all of who were dubbed with psychological terms such as mad, driven, crazy, and ego-maniac. Aaron H. Esman, writing in The American Imago, associates jazz with “vital libidinal impulses … precisely the id drives that the superego of the bourgeois culture sought to repress.”

Whether depicted in sociological or psychological terminologies, the study of jazz and its performers is a vital part of America’s cultural history. It would be good to read about it on your pages.

Sincerely yours,

Terence M. Ripmaster

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New Jersey Jazz Society

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