Race In Jazz: Early, Gillespie and Sudhalter

A great recent essay on race by a black American jazz critic is Gerald Early’s “White Noise and White Knights: Some Thoughts on Race, Jazz, and the White Jazz Musician”. I found it through Ken Burn’s “Jazz: A History of American Music”, a companion book to the more well-known documentary.

In this essay, Early attempts to show how the white jazz musician both perceives himself and is perceived by both the critical community and general listening public. He asks some very difficult questions about race in jazz and indeed the very definition of jazz itself in an open and honest way that I find refreshing. Specifically, he is willing to engage a book dedicated to informing the public of all the white jazz musicians that have been neglected over the years. The book in question is Richard Sudhalter’s “Lost Chords: White Musicians and Their Contribution to Jazz, 1915-1945”. Unlike other black critics who might take the opportunity to start “driving the thresher” (to quote Stanley Crouch), Early simply acknowledges the “unavoidable anger” that inevitably surfaces about such a book, and moves on to the bigger questions.

Sudhalter and Early each bring up questions about the nature of jazz. Can any one race be said to have invented it? Are blues and swing essential elements of the music? Who contributed them? Can we make generalizations about race in this music? I am relatively new to Gerald Early as a critic, so I was a bit surprised at some of his opinions. Early detects a shift after World War II toward increased critical reception to jazz music that saw itself as “an expression of major black aesthetics.”

I am a little more lost when he claims that most jazz fans and critics are most suspicious of music played by whites. “Cool” or “West Coast” jazz always struck me as quite popular, and is it really held today in lower esteem than the black avant-garde music of the 60s? Early seems very aware of the fact that jazz has largely lost its black audience, a very crucial point. Without an enthusiast black listening public, can we really be certain we are getting the whole story?

This is a major reason why I love Dizzy Gillespie’s autobiography To Be or Not to Bop. Stan Kenton is discussed a great deal in the book, though seldom is the content of his music engaged. This is Al McKibbon:

“I think had Dizzy been white—Here it is a guy comes along with a new style of playing, a new style band, a new style of dressing, a new way of talking. Now, man, suppose Stan Kenton had all those things? Dizzy would have been a rich man.” (pg. 334)

And later (this is Dizzy himself now):

“Progressive jazz came after our music, bebop. You see you can’t leave out the fundamentals like Stan Kenton did. The major fundamental of our music is rhythm, a great and definite rhythm. If you leave out these fundamentals it’s just as if you took a tree with a trunk and something crept out on a limb and kept going until it fell off.”

It’s clear to me that Dizzy felt passionately about this, since it is within the last ten pages of his autobiography. Dizzy also claims a number of other offenses for Stan Kenton throughout the book. These include the assertions that white bands like Kenton’s were more commercially successful in America, and that Kenton put a conga drummer in his band after hearing Chano Pozo with Gillespie.

There’s even a story about Kenton drunkenly telling Gillespie he can his music better than him!

So I guess I shouldn’t have been that surprised to learn that Kenton angrily wrote in to protest the exclusion of white jazz musicians in a 1956 Downbeat Critics Poll, and there is plenty of discussion of Kenton’s right-wing political and racial views throughout the article. Hilariously, we are also told that the Stan Kenton Fan Club wrote “KKK”, “Keep Kenton Kicking” on all their letters!

This may be an extreme case, but no doubt these conflicts are still being played out to this day. It makes me sad that these two great musicians let skin colour get in the way of enjoying each other’s music.