Politics and Jazz

[Dr. Rat]

For me, jazz *is* political, and always has been.  Art *is* political by its very nature.  Look at the Impressionists and the Modernists.  Look at the Cubists and the Abstract Expressionists.  Heck, look how sales of superhero comics go up during republican administrations!  Anyone who imagines that art and politics reside in separate camps is fooling him or herself.  Art is human expression.  Politics is a human activity.  Politics is inescapable.

Exactly. Thank you Alexander.

Right, that seems to be everyone's take. Which is why I was trying to shepherd the discussion toward somewhat more specific questions:

What do we think of art that (more or less) explicitly aims to encourage some social or political goal?

Is this a bad thing to try to do? Does it still work as art? Does it work as politics? Artsists, of course have their right to an opinion, and their right to express it, but is it a good idea to do so through their art? Or is it best to leave the political significance of art to be of the more or less accidental type?

If I may quote myself. This line assuming what we all seem to agree to:

Art *is* political by its very nature. 

But art is not always identically political. I think the more interesting issue would be How art is/should be political raher than Whether.

--eric

[Dr. Rat]

I don't necessarily agree with "Burns's" view, but certainly, probably starting with "Strange Fruit," jazz started to go in a different direction as to how politics was to be integrated into the entire presentation.

• "Strange Fruit" is probably the most widely known protest song in jazz, although "Black and Blue" is up there, too. However, neither song pioneered the genre. Listen to Bessie Smith's "Poor Man's Blues," for example, and there are many more blues whose lyrics have social significance.
  

You are right, and I did think of blues when I wrote what I did about Strange Fruit, but this song still seems to me to mark a transition.

There seems to me to be a change between the many socially-conscious blues and jazz/blues tunes starting from the early days of recording and the "protest song" sorta stuff that started to come out of the Cafe Society circle.

And again, I think there is a change in the 1960s away from this sort of thing toward another style of politics-in-jazz.

What do you think?

--eric

[ghost of miles]

Much more aggressive, much more overt, and therefore more offputting to those who felt threatened by it. Less of a "pity the victim" and more of a "we don't need you to give us our freedom, we're going to take it all by ourselves, thanks much." All art is indeed political; Eric's question seems to be, "In what fashion do people prefer it? In what ways does it operate more and less effectively?" One could argue that the protest jazz of the 1960s, taken to its extremes, was "crude" compared to other, less overtly angry pieces (like Oscar Brown Jr.'s "40 Acres and a Mule," one of my favorites from that era, where Brown laces the song with a wonderfully acidic humor), but I'd imagine at the time that it seemed wholly appropriate. And still seems so today, to me, in retrospect. I also think there was much more subtlety than is commonly ascribed to the 60's free-jazz movement--the iconic image of an Ayler/Coltrane/Shepp standing onstage and shriek/honking for 45 minutes seems to me far too prominent and reductive an image for that movement.