High Art and Low

Consider this music called jazz. With its social and cultural origins among the illiterate and more or less despised and dispossessed African diasporas of the southern American states: brothel pianists, nomadic cotton pickers, watchers of passing trains and steamboats, street-corner guitar players, out-casts and strumpets, it has expanded and evolved to include a cultural community that today cuts across boundaries of age, sex, economic status, vocation, ethnicity and the state. The most vital in the abundance of contemporary music, jazz has become established world-wide as the mother vernacular of urban popular music.

Globally, jazz complements each individual cultural musical tradition by offering a universality that has not become lost in vulgarity and self-reference. More importantly, the value that jazz musicians attach to innovation leads most to hold a view of composition and music history that is truly global in scope. Just as jazz was born in America in an amalgam of African and European Diasporas, it has continued the practice of absorbing different musical influences and has remained capable of absorbing new traits without sacrificing either its dignity or identity.

In a global cultural landscape in which popular music has become increasingly strident, aggressive and barren, jazz continues to exalt the simple charm of existence without much demand for reflection on the part of the listener. With the music of contemporary high culture becoming progressively rarefied, abstract and minimal, leaving room for only highly sublimated emotions, jazz, by its raw exuberance, brings an element of balance. It is at once both high art and low; the true classical music of the global, post-modern age and also its genuine folk expression; through its various fusions the living, growing, musical incarnation of the global cultural personality, its once oral traditions of generational transmission now accomplished electronically.

If jazz has any purpose, it is a way to discover, to create, and to define a missing part within human beings related to what it means to be human. In this sense, jazz could be called an existentialist art. Jazz musicians create their essence by playing jazz, as both the global classical music of post-modernity and as its folk music.