Student Sample Papers, Honors 3900, Thinking Jazz
You can look at the student samples below as possible models as you begin working on your own essays. Note that these samples are not "perfect" (whatever that may mean), nor are they meant to be, but they advance an interesting thesis, support their argument with sufficient evidence and research, and are generally well written. — Thank you to your fellow students for allowing us to have a glimpse at their work!
Sample 1: Jazz and Klezmer: It's no coincidence that they're both spelled with "z"!
In the children's book Mrs. Katz and Tushby Patricia Polacco, an old Jewish widow becomes friends with a young black boy named Larnel. During one of his visits she tells him, "Larnel, your people and mine are alike, you know. Trouble, we've seen. Happiness, too. Great strength we've had. You and I are alike, so much alike!" And during Passover, she reiterates: "Like your people, my people were slaves, too…. They wanted freedom so much that they prayed to God to help them." Mrs. Katz's words help to explain why the foundations of jazz and klezmer music are so similar: their backgrounds are from suppressed, mournful, yet always hopeful people. Although the composer and pianist Jelly Roll Morton claimed that "I myself happened to be the creator [of jazz] in the year 1902," the reality is that no one person can be credited with the invention of jazz at any one time. The seeds of jazz were planted in the landscape of West Africa, where many slaves were taken from. Jazz gathers its sounds from Caribbean rhythms of the West Indies. It comes from ragtime, which employs syncopated versions of European tempos and themes. The instruments are primarily European, like the cornet, trombone, trumpet, sax, clarinet, guitar, and bass (Hasse 4). Jazz's ingredients had fused enough for it to become the most recognizable style of music in the nation by the late 1910's and 1920's; then, individual musicians started to greatly influence its further development. But before that, it was still jumbling (and continues to do so) with tribal pulses, gospel, blues, calypso, Cajun rhythms, ragtime, military beats, and more being added to the mix.
Klezmer music seems to have taken on a more definitive form earlier than jazz did. Since klezmer really just means "musical instrument" in Hebrew, it can be said that music coming from instruments has existed for thousands of years for the Hebrew people. But the word "klezmer" doesn't describe general music anymore; it's a style that people can ask for by name and is very distinguishable from accompaniments to traditional Hebrew prayers. There are written records of "klezmer" music at weddings and other celebrations from as long ago as the 15th century (Sapoznik 6). However, the Yiddish dialect was present in the ninth century, combining German, Hebrew, Russian, Polish, and Aramaic languages; this blend of language is evidence that cultures, and with those, musical styles also built upon each other. According to Klezx.com, Klezmer employs Russian, Ukrainian, Bessarabian, Romanian, German, Turkish and Israeli effects. Like jazz, it retains influences from a time when religion governed society, and---as with jazz---military marches are also heard in klezmer.
Although today the words "jazz" and "klezmer" both describe genres of music, they have obtained those meanings in somewhat different ways. Klezmer comes from the Hebrew words pronounced "kley zemer," or musical instrument, and also means musician, or in plural for a klezmer band, "klezmorim." In 70 A.D., according to traditional Jewish history, music was banned in synagogues after the destruction of the Second Temple. Similarly, in many towns in Europe during the Middle Ages, because of discrimination, Jews were not allowed to play music. Once in a while they could play at weddings; some towns would not allow drums or brass instruments because they were too loud. So, being a klezmer was not a steady job; usually Jewish musicians worked as tailors or barbers before picking up a fiddle to make some extra money. Because of this form of musical moonlighting, the word "klezmer" was almost a kind of insult; those relying on music for food lived a rough life. Today the word is used to describe a type of Jewish jazz, an eclectic blend of Yiddish and American styles that is currently seeing a revival.
The word "jazz" can't be translated so directly. Some say it means "speed up" in Afro-Caribbean (Hasse 2), which fits in with the phrase "jazz it up." In New Orleans jazz meant sex, and may have evolved from the word orgasm. It's also thought that the word may be a shortened version of jasmine, the type of perfume that many prostitutes dabbed on before prancing around in private rooms in Storyville, where ragtime and jazz music was played to their movements. It has been spelled as "jas," "jass," "jaz," "jasz," "jascz," and " jazz" (Osgood 11). It was used to describe a whole new era by F. Scott Fitzgerald, and all the innovations that came with it. In the ‘20s, the "jazzy" lifestyle was revered by youngsters and despised by their parents, much as the thought of rock and roll sickened parents in the ‘50s. It meant dancing, nightclubs, hot music, and living it up. Today the word has been stretched to describe dance classes, which really have nothing to do with the original jazz dancers. It is the name of Utah's NBA team, which started out in New Orleans. It brings images of The Great Gatsby and flappers to mind. It has even been used in the name of a girl at my school, Jazzlyn. But it largely describes the type of music that overtook the nation in the 1920s and is still thriving and changing today.
Jazz and klezmer both speak for people who have been persecuted and enslaved. Oftentimes music was the only release from the aching reality of everyday life. Music is a sense of community, a lesson, a prayer, a defiant burst of jubilation in the midst of captivity. It restored a sense of humanity to the slaves. Blues, which has its roots in Africa, was a way for the slaves in the fields to remember their home and to unleash their anguish. In New Orleans in the late 1800's, every Sunday black slaves and free Creoles would gather in Congo Square to dance and create music together. Since Jews in many European towns could only play music at special celebrations, when they did, it was that much more joyous. The ancient Levites even had an edict that there must be song and rejoicing at all weddings, which overruled the banishment of music in 70 A.D. After the Holocaust, a flood of klezmer songs composed in concentration camps was published with Yiddish titles like "Tsu Eyns, Tsvey Dray" and "Zog Nit Keynmol."
The similarity that military conscription had on jazz and klezmer is practically parallel. European Jews that survived their forced military recruitment in the late 1800's brought back marching band instruments, especially the clarinet. Meanwhile in America, after the Civil War, black marching band soldiers came back toting wind instruments such as the French horn, the bugle, and significantly the cornet. The cost and availability of cornets after the war started many young boys on their way to becoming trumpet masters. While marching bands were all the craze in the U.S. in the late 1800's, wind instruments were thought to be too loud in European Jewish communities. Fiddlers, who were the foundation of all Jewish music, felt threatened. There was even a riot among the local fiddlers' guild in Khotin, Bessarabia, in 1888 against wind instruments!
Creoles living in New Orleans in the late 1800's were proud of their European heritage and considered themselves to be more educated and refined than pure blacks. However, when Jim Crow laws were passed in New Orleans in 1890, Creoles were lumped with blacks and from then on shared their bathrooms, trains, and most importantly to jazz, their theaters. Although this was most likely mortifying to many Creoles, as some had even owned slaves before the war, it forced Creoles and blacks to interact on the same level as they produced musicals and minstrel shows together. The Creoles brought their classical piano training and the blacks brought their soulful gospel and blues to the musical table, and soon the music merged together to create the sound of a new society. Later, in the 1920's, white musicians were scrambling to reach success with jazz. (Early) white and black collaboration was usually not recorded, but undoubtedly took place backstage and in nightclubs.
As far back as the Middle Ages, there are records of Jews and non-Jews playing together in Eastern Europe. Considering the amount of hostility and division that was present, it's pretty remarkable that the non-Jews, deemed highly superior, would form bands with Jews. In some towns, Jews could only play at non-Jewish functions and not at their own festivities. "Ma Yofusniks" were musicians that were hired by non-Jews to be derided and mocked. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Polish nobility developed a taste for klezmer music and hired klezmorim to play for two or three day-long weddings. Although the Polish aristocracy was more than likely anti-Semitic, they curbed these attitudes for the sake of fine music.
This scenario is redolent of many clubs and speakeasies in the 1920's, most notably the Cotton Club. Even the name of the Cotton Club suggests the class separations between the performers and the audience; the black musicians and dancers were slaves to what the white audience expected of them. Interestingly, blacks were not allowed to enjoy live shows by some of the biggest names in black music there, except when once in a while Ethel Waters or Bojangles Robinson would finagle a few seats for friends (Hasse 43). One advertisement for the Cotton Club reads that the "Chocolateers," "50 Copper-Colored Gals," and "50 Sepian Stars" would be performing. Today this announcement seems blatantly racist, but back then most whites in attendance thought they were absolutely modern by sitting down to an evening of black entertainment. They didn't know that the real festivities exploded when blacks could gather with other blacks after hours and were not subjected to whites' stereotypical anticipations.
Since African music is mostly vocally and percussion-based, jazz imitates the sound of a voice. It's easy to hear this when a soloist improvises a theme, and then the rest of the band uses that same theme to play back to the soloist. The call-and-response style is like hearing someone make a statement and a group of listeners shout out their assertion, like a southern Baptist sermon: "Can I get an amen?" And the congregation yells back "Amen, brother!" The instruments themselves even sound like animals and human voices at times with the use of mutes. In some recordings Louis Armstrong and his trumpet trade off growling verses back and forth, and at times it can be hard to differentiate between the two!
Klezmer is also modeled after the human voice. Cantors, who lead Jewish congregations in prayer, sing based on a special notation called trope that signifies when the voice should rise up, then down, then down more, then up, and so forth. The outcome is a deep singsong wail that never stays in one place. Klezmorim based their compositions on cantorial singing because it was the heart of synagogue music. The typical instrumental ornament of klezmer is called "krekhts, " which translates as "sigh" or "moan" (Sapoznik 9).
And of course, the human voice is unpredictable. If singers just sang straight notes in the exact tempo they belonged without any vibrato or ornamentation, songs would seem soulless and flat. (Christina Aguilera would be out of work.) Jazz and klezmer are the same way, and one of their most distinguishable shared features is improvisation. Klezx.com states that klezmer's Oriental (Turkish) influences are "the rarity of long ‘pure' tones. Instead notes are usually surrounded with graces, trills, chirps, crying effects, glissandi, etc." Also, many early klezmorim could not read music, but fed off of one another when playing familiar wedding songs and dances.
The jazz scholar Berndt Ostendorf noted that "Jazz is the result of a confluence . . . of Western musical literacy and African musical memory." Jazz has a rich history of tradition but is different every single night. In the 1920's, most jazz musicians were able to read music, but their success lied in the art of improvisation and collaboration with the rest of the band; learning songs in a night and playing by ear required improvising. It could be said that America was improvising as it went along in the ‘20's, and jazz was the quintessential reflection of this modern, carefree way of life.
Klezmer has fundamentally been the same for hundreds of years, but still underwent change when Jews began emigrating from Europe to the U.S. in the late 1800's and early 1900's. The invention of the phonograph made it easy for newly American Jews to listen to prayers on record. Irving Berlin composed songs with titles such as, "Yiddle on Your Fiddle Play Some Rag Time," and "Yiddisha Eyes,"; James Brockman composed "Abie, Take an Example From Your Fader: Novelty Hebrew Song"; and Eddie Cantor wrote his own take on Al Jolson's "My Mammy" as "My Yiddisha Mammy." Jewish musicians even recorded with Okeh Record Company, the same "race record" producer that many black musicians recorded under. Klezmer, the underdog, reached out to whoever was listening.
Jazz music, however, didn't come together until all its different components had reached America. It accompanied an awakening of pride and artistic expression for blacks. Many white bands tried to ride the wave of jazz, and some, like the Dixieland Jazz Band, had very successful careers. But no one could compete with the clout of Buddy Bolden, the originality of Freddie Keppard, the sheer power of Louie Armstrong, and the genius of Duke Ellington. Jazz music was an announcement of the beauty in black heritage.
Judaism and jazz have overlapped several times, as with the composer Irving Berlin, and the clarinet players Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw. Although Irving Berlin made some Yiddish songs popular, he was better known for songs like "Easter Parade Fantasy" and of course "White Christmas." Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw enjoyed huge popularity but never brought their religious heritage into the spotlight. Klezmer in America was not a Jewish pride movement. After World War II and the death of almost ninety percent of Eastern European Jews, klezmer music was in danger of being lost to history. It reminded Holocaust survivors of the Yiddish-speaking ghettos, the old world, and of the guilt they carried by being alive. Jews escaped this past by focusing instead on the joy of the State of Israel, a new homeland, and its purely Hebrew culture.
Klezmer regained some popularity in the ‘90's. It is played at more traditional Jewish weddings and bar and bat mitzvahs, and several remarkable bands today are made up of klezmorim. One is the San Francisco Klezmer Experience, who describe their music as consisting of the "rich depths of klezmer, Yiddish folk and art song, and modern jazz to create a brilliantly original sound, still rooted in the bedrock of Yiddish culture." Another is Masada, fronted by John Zorn, who owns the Tzadik record label. Masada is "a klezmer band that is often described as Jewish jazz." Masada is "capable of tight arrangements . . . laid-back jams . . . rocking funky renditions." Klezmer has undergone much more change since the 1920's than it did moving from Europe to the U.S.
Jazz is still one of the most popular, respected musical styles and branched out through the decades into swing, bebop, funk, hip-hop, jazz-rock fusion, rap, and many others. Groups like Digable Planets, A Tribe Called Quest, and the Roots blend jazz with rap. Wynton Marsalis is a modern day jazz classicist trumpet player with tremendous talent. Nora Jones has hit the pop circuit with her bluesy jazz sound. The Jewish black-wannabes are still thriving: watch out for 50 Shekel, an Israeli/Persian rapper who is the next 50 Cent. His hit parody song is "In da Shul [synagogue]" who is described as "just a Hebrew homie who likes them Hebrew hotties."
Jazz and klezmer have led extraordinarily comparable lives, although their progressions have been dependent on unconnected diasporas, enslavements, religions, military drafts, and prejudices. Perhaps it is because Jews and blacks have surmounted many similar hardships; perhaps it is an ironic coincidence. Whichever it is, they reveal the way we as humans absorb a million different approaches to life, in specific patterns and speeds, to become complete individuals.
Sources
Hasse, John Edward. Jazz: The First Century. New York, NY: HarperCollins, 2000.
Fordham, John. Jazz: History. Instruments. Musicians. Recordings. London, England: Dorling Kindserly Limited, 1993.
Sapoznik, Henry. Klezmer! Jewish Music form Old World to Our World. New York, NY: Schirmer Trade Books, 1999.
Shipton, Alyn. Jazz Makers: Vanguards of Sound. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Strom, Yale. The Book of Klezmer: The History, The Music, The Folklore from the 14th Century to the 21st. Chicago, Illinois: A Capella Books, 2002.
Polacco, Patricia. Mrs. Katz and Tush. New York, NY: Bantam Doubleday Dell Books For Young Readers, 1992.
"Masada (band)." Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. 6 pp. 17 April 2004. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masada_(band)>
"John Zorn." Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. 4 pp. 17 April 2004. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Zorn>
Phillips, Stacey. "Here's a Bisl Shpiel on Klezmer Music:." The San Fransisco Klezmer Xperience. 8 pp. 4 April 2004. <http://www.klezx.com/klezmer_history.htm>
"Klezmer." The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia. 2003 ed. 1 pp. 4 April 2004 <http://www.infoplease.com/ce6/ent/A0827897.html>