Since jazz emerged from its geographical origins it has travelled back and forth across the disputed terrain between high and low culture, variously located as folk, popular, art music and permutations. Its shifting position makes it a particularly instructive vehicle through which to study the matrix of cultural politics, the balances of power that determine which cultural forms carry authority. The migrations of jazz within musical politics and aesthetics depend upon negotiations between text (the particular jazz performance) and context (the physical and cultural space within which it is situated). The Eurocentric arbitration of musical value by the end of the nineteenth century was predicated on the stability of the musical text and of its relationship with context. Jazz appeared to demolish this model. As aurally based improvisation, in performance the ‘text’ evaded fixity, and the sites and conditions of performance blurred the distinction between art and social practice, music and noise. Even preserved on a sound recording, its formal components were scarcely intelligible in established musical terms such as background–foreground, melody–harmony and structural coherence. Jazz was a site of unruliness.

Jazz categorisations

The rapid international diaspora of jazz (see Chapter 2) meant that it could not be ignored; jazz was arguably the most pervasively influential development in twentieth-century music. Apart from the particular musical forms and practices in which it has been seminal, it was the most widespread musical vehicle of the progressive thrust into the experience of modernity in the early twentieth century, in such matters as gender, mass mediations and technological innovation.

An eminent Shakespearean scholar famously remarked that there is no such thing as Shakespearean Tragedy: there are only Shakespearean tragedies. Attempts (he added) to find a formula which fits every one of Shakespeare's tragedies and distinguishes them collectively from those of other dramatists invariably meet with little success. Yet when challenging one such attempt he noted its failure to observe what he termed 'an essential part of the [Shakespearean] tragic pattern'; which would seem to imply that these plays do have some shared characteristics peculiar to them.

Nevertheless, objections to comprehensive definitions of ‘Shakespearean Tragedy’ are well founded. Such definitions tend to ignore the uniqueness of each play and the way it has been structured and styled to fit the particular source-narrative. More generally, they can obscure the fact that what distinguishes Shakespeare’s tragedies from everyone else’s and prompts us to consider them together are not so much common denominators but rather the power of Shakespeare’s language, his insight into character, and his dramaturgical inventiveness.

‘Free Jazz’ refers to a historical movement that, despite earlier precedents, first significantly flowered in the late 1950s in the US. Its central focus was a liberation from musical conventions – but from a jazz player's perspective, since no liberation is ever complete. Initially known simply as the New Thing, it became Free Jazz after borrowing the title of a seminal 1960 album by saxophonist/composer Ornette Coleman. It subsequently has had international repercussions that seem set to continue well into the twenty-first century.

Its impact and relations to other developments remain controversial, and a variety of accounts of it are possible: as a culmination of the drive for individual creativity, a radicalisation of the scope of musical materials of jazz, a collection of statements by salient individuals and groups, or as a movement shaped by extramusical forces of political, cultural, racial and spiritual liberation – to mention only the most obvious. Here these are all taken as valid viewpoints, in need of reconciliation.

The seminal role of creative improvisation

The nucleus of all jazz is creative improvisational expression (Louis Armstrong's ‘the sound of surprise’), a process that brings into the music the joy of discovery, the magic of communication, and the uniqueness of both the moment and the individual. Yet it also introduces several profound tensions which early on planted the seeds for the ultimate blossoming of free jazz.

While it remains a fascination that one of the first recordings of African-American music was made in Sweden in 1899 – ‘Cake Walk’ (a version of ‘At A Georgia Camp Meeting’ by Kerry Mills), by the Kronoberg Society Regimental Band conducted by Erik Högberg – the first jazz recording is usually cited as ‘Darktown Strutters Ball’ by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band from January 1917. Prior to that we can only guess what the music might have sounded like as a deliquescent folk music in the rural southern states of America. But we do know that early jazz drew together several strands of vernacular music, including Negro spirituals, work and folk songs, ragtime, minstrel music, brass-band music and blues, that were freely mixed with elements from hymns, popular songs and popular classics of the day.

From the start, jazz was a pluralistic music. One of its great early practitioners, Jelly Roll Morton, argued that the music should always include a ‘Spanish tinge’ while the unambiguous habañera section in St Louis Blues, published by W. C. Handy in 1914, is revealing of jazz's practice of appropriation; an important, if often neglected, feature of a music that already comprised a diversity of elements drawn from a variety of sources both from within and without the African-American diaspora.

Once the Dixieland revival found an audience in the 1940s, the monolithic façade of swing began to splinter into the interest groups that have populated the subsequent history of jazz: bop, cool, third stream, free jazz, fusion, neo-traditionalist. Jazz as music is inseparable from the African-American experience, and Duke Ellington rightly insisted that ‘the Negro is the creative voice of America, is creative America’ (Tucker 1993, 147). The question of the jazz audience, on the other hand, encompasses amore indeterminate populace. One could approach the topic of audience by offering a demographic profile of various constituencies of fans, but this would lend tacit assent to consumerism as validating criterion. There was an audience for jazz before there were consumers, in part because ‘the Jazz Age was born … almost before there was jazz’ (Schiff 1997, 87). ‘Jazz’ was initially so mercurial a term that it was applied to music intermittently: the audience responded to a social spectrum in which music was only a part. None the less, historians have gravitated to the narrative magnetism of giants shaping the music to their personal visions, and 1923 is often cited as an inaugural moment because it marks the first recordings of Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, Sidney Bechet and Bessie Smith. Gunther Schuller even refers to a ‘pre-1923 era’ (1968, 71). But if we de-prioritise recordings, a significant fact appears: jazz had already had a worldwide impact before 1923.

Shakespeare's tragedies are usually remembered for the central characters for whom they are named. However, the fact that all of their heroes are what in the period were termed 'princes', occupying the power centres of their realms, means that these narratives of usurpation and death are also anatomies of political crises. In setting out contexts for his tales of woe or wonder Shakespeare reveals himself to have been as curious about the make-up of courts and kingdoms as he was about the psychology of individuals. The sufferings of great men and women in Shakespearean tragedy derive from conflicts, the analysis of which inevitably entails a consideration of 'the properties of government' – its characteristics and its proprieties. In 1589, at about the time Shakespeare was beginning to write, George Puttenham observed that ‘poets . . . were the first lawmakers to the people, and the first politicians, devising all expedient means for th’establishment of commonwealth’. Although in his tragedies Shakespeare may concentrate far more on rulers than on the ruled, ‘commonwealth’ interests are inevitably invoked by the fact that any act on the part of a king is de facto what, in Hamlet, Claudius terms ‘sovereign process’ (4.3.65).

Currently one of the least fashionable ways of looking at jazz is from the perspective of ‘classical’ music – a label still used in record shops, and still understood instinctively by almost everybody, in spite of its avoidance by commentators who have yet to find an acceptable substitute. (Of the alternative terms, ‘art music’ is just as politically incorrect as ‘classical’, while ‘concert music’ can be applied to almost everything; in America, classical music is deemed to be ‘European’ in a simplistic antithesis to African-American traditions.) The once common notion that jazz might be thought of as ‘America's classical music’ has long been discredited. Yet no amount of quibbling about labels will make the parallels between the classical and jazz worlds go away; and those who insist on the uniqueness of jazz and its incompatability with essential characteristics of classical music cut themselves off from the richness of allusion and crossover at the heart of all the best western music of the twentieth century. It was perhaps because of this limited outlook that Duke Ellington, on his own admission, stopped using the word ‘jazz’ in 1943 (ibid., 452).

There are many tantalising tales of early jazz and its origins that conjure up both romantic and tragic images of an evolving musical tradition. These tales become a bit hazy as they are passed down, and the truth often obscured. Because jazz has frequently been accorded great reverence by its loyal fans, the tales of its heroes and their exploits have grown in great proportion, often leading to misunderstandings. It is only recently through accurate and patient research that we have come to some less colourful but more informative conclusions about the origins of this music. Likewise, viewing a faded old photograph may cause us to wax nostalgic about the persons staring at us across a century or more. If we could find a pristine negative of the photo and could make a new print of it, we would have a truer representation of that moment in time. There would be greater detail and clarity. However, with the sharper, truer image, we would miss some of that faded quality from which mystique and legend emerge.

One of the great legends of the pre-history of jazz was an African-American cornettist from New Orleans named Buddy Bolden (1877–1931). To many he is considered to be the first of all jazz musicians. Stories of his powerful cornet are among the earliest and most prominent in jazz. Legend tells us that Bolden played loud and low down, drank heavily, ran with fast women. His music was exciting and intoxicating.

Shortly after Elizabeth Tudor became England's queen in November 1558, the Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity were passed, effectively outlawing the practice of Roman Catholicism in England and making Elizabeth I head of the Church of England. By establishing Protestantism as the official state religion, Elizabeth hoped to put an end to the religious conflicts that had divided the English people and disrupted the realm ever since her father, Henry VIII, defied the Pope by divorcing Catherine of Aragon in 1534. In what is known as the Elizabethan settlement, she reversed the policies of her Catholic half-sister Mary I, who reigned from 1553 to 1558. Mary's marriage to Philip of Spain had forged an alliance between England and the most powerful Roman Catholic country on the continent. As queen she had attempted to return England to the Roman Catholic faith after a period of intense reform activity that occurred during the six-year reign of Mary and Elizabeth's younger half-brother, Edward VI (1547-53). With the Elizabethan settlement England became a predominantly Protestant country after many turbulent years of religious strife.

Five and a half years after Elizabeth’s ascension to the throne, William Shakespeare was born in Stratford. England’s most illustrious playwright thus belonged to the first generation of English people who lived their entire lives in an officially Protestant country, required by law to practise the established state religion.

Definitions of jazz as musical practice are contingent upon a host of factors, not least of which are the intellectual histories and life experiences that condition writers' approaches to definition. Some are likely to see as most distinctive jazz musicians' usage of rhythm, harmony, melody and/or timbre in jazz performance and composition, others the relative balance of oral/aural and textual materials, and still others the music's connections to African-American expressive culture. Early writers on jazz, for example, tended to have European concert music as their primary frame of reference. The ‘work-’ and ‘score-centric’ concepts and terminology of concert music almost dictated that these writers would focus on parameters of music making amenable to staff notation and textual analysis – e.g., melody, harmony, form (and, to a lesser degree, rhythm) – and describe jazz chiefly through the ways in which it differed from concert music. Whether or not one agrees with that approach, it is a manifestation of the desire to identify and describe jazz's distinctive character. In a world of diverse musical expressions displaced geographically and temporally, the practical necessity of making distinctions (Lakoff 1987, 5–6) has required those writing about jazz to find ways to distinguish it not only from concert music but also from Tin Pan Alley popular song, from other forms of African-American music and from other musics that prominently feature improvisation. This chapter will examine the ways in which other writers have defined jazz, taking account of the characteristics they have invoked and the usefulness of those items for definition.

When the United States Congress declared that jazz deserved to be ‘preserved, understood, and promulgated’, 1987 became a watershed year in the history of valuing jazz: a music that had first entered the written historical record as ‘discordant jass’ now possessed the status of ‘a rare and valuable national American treasure’. Yet it could be said that such a statement attempts to erase the history that made it necessary. Even the Congressional discussion that preceded the resolution shows that the conflicted history of jazz is not so easily swept away.

Although John Conyers, the resolution's chief sponsor, at one point mentioned the ‘Afro-American roots’ of jazz, he, like the other speakers, emphasised the music's global success. He spoke of having encountered jazz in Japan, Moscow, Africa and the Caribbean, and he hailed the spread of jazz, along with its generative force to produce musical fusions, as bases for international respect and understanding. However, he raised important issues of ownership and identity when he commented: ‘I have been in countries throughout Europe in which many people thought that the art form [jazz] was their art form.’

'Tragedy of love' is to some extent a contradiction in terms. For love is the great force that unites and binds. It is what prompts a man to leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife. Celebrated traditionally in romantic comedy, love is the divine bond which leads to marriage and the creation of a new family. In forming the basic building block of the social group, love is not only a beneficial but a fundamentally creative force and as such it is opposed to all the forces of destruction. Love not only creates society, moreover, but seeks to preserve what it has made. It is therefore the great civilizing force, the energy that counters anarchy and chaos with order and degree (in primitive societies, marriage is always the first law). Love makes for civil conversation, courtesy, and good manners. It oils the wheels of social functioning and mitigates aggression and selfishness. When, in literature, love does encounter the forces of destruction it is generally in order to meet them head on and reverse them in a glorious moment of redemption. When Hero appears to die in Much Ado About Nothing, for example, or Hermione in The Winter’s Tale, their later appearance alive, well, and still loving is made all the more poignant for our fear that they have been lost. Tragedy is averted as love’s redemptive force wins out. Strictly speaking, the sleeping potion that Juliet takes in order to feign death should fall into this category too.