Jazz Appreciation Month

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Jazz Appreciation Month

It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that sting dept.

Dartanyan L. Brown

Mar 30, 2025

Transcript

In about 48 hours it’s going to be April.

In 2001, April was designated as Jazz Appreciation Month. This was accomplished through the work of many of us in the community but steered most effectively by John Edward Hasse who was then a curator of The Smithsonian Institute’s National Museum of American History.

Jazz Appreciation Month was created to be an annual event that would pay tribute to Jazz as both a living and an historic music. Schools, organizations and governments celebrate Jazz Appreciation Month with concerts and educational programs.

I spent the years 1979-1986 as a Jazz-Artist-in-Residence telling the stories, and playing the music of jazz for school children from North Carolina to Montana.

Pictured: Professor, Author and Composer the late David Baker (L) with Jazz Appreciation Month’s legislative father John Haase. Baker is recognized as a seminal figure in the world of Jazz performance and education.

There is no question that Jazz music, rooted in the ordeal of enslaved Africans in America, has been held up as the preeminent artwork to emerge from America during the 20th Century. We’ve all heard of Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Bennie Goodman but there is much, much more to the music then the work of it’s most famous practitioners.

Jazz was always a clarion call, a survival strategy, a outlet for frustration, an expression of love, an academic pursuit, a commercial success, a commercial failure, a sonic refusal to be subjugated, a clever code with which to outwit the oppressor. First and foremost though it was, in it’s essence, a direct line from the soul to the world. Telling stories in melody and rhythm that could rarely be voiced directly from those of subjugated social status.

The amazing thing about this rhythmically seductive, harmonically intriguing new mode of musical expression was that once it was heard by the wider community, it escaped its founding matrix and proceeded to conquer the world. It’s influence seemed to transcend the worlds of art…and politics.

As ‘jazz ambassadors’ supported by significant support from the National Endowment for the Arts, composer and instrumentalist Marcia Miget and I taught and collaborated with students ranging from elementary school to collegiate.

Jazz is about freedom—within a framework of context. Learning which notes to play (and which to leave out) was the challenge we all faced as beginners. Students learned that they themselves could listen and learn to conceive musical ideas that may not be as influential as say, Louis Armstrong, but those ideas were yours and that, dear reader, is the essence of what makes this music such a potent and dangerous force to the dictators of the world.

When speaking to students of any age, they would often ask me “What is Jazz and why did they play it?”

That question was the opening I needed to impart the basic foundational reason for this music in America.

The restless nature of Jazz music goes back to it’s origins as the music of enslaved and disenfranchised people. As I told students from elementary school to college: “Imagine yourself coming from a culture rich in musical development while being made to work as a slave in a new world. In the relatively few hours each week in which to rest, relax and recreate your mind, body and soul, you and your community will seek to return the centuries old practices where music served a healing mission much beyond the realm of entertainment. (see: Congo Square then ………and now)

New Orleans musicians often had to play prescribed music forms for formal occasions. When on their own however, the musicians might play some of those same staid compositions, but played in the manner that allowed them to break out of convention and play the way they preferred—including changing the melody and creating harmonies more in line with their preferences.

During the upcoming month, I hope that you will come to know more about this music called Jazz. As we all know, musical styles change over the years. The business of music, ever vigilant for money-making trends also seeks to influence which sounds and styles can be marketed—sometimes favoring the banal over the truly artistic or, dare I say, organic effects of place and technological on the creative process.

The bottom line on all of this: The spiritual resilience of enslaved people produced a mode of musical expression vital and attractive enough to exert its influence over the entire world as early as 1917.

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I am thinking deeply about these matters this morning as our retrograde American regime is making new attempts to pre-empt art and history literally erasing the achievements of African Americans across the social spectrum. The current administration, like those of another sad era in world politics is in the early stages of establishing what they might call patriotic art and music.

It doesn’t take much insight to look deeper and see these efforts for what they really are.

I’ll end this first-in-a-series post on Jazz Appreciation month by saying we’ve seen this movie before. It never ends well for those who try to suppress, deny, or subjugate the human spirit…especially here in the USA. History tells us that those who sought to deny reality and freedom throughout the world have usually ended up in smoking ruins themselves (see Dresden). It seems liberty and human compassion are not so easy to stamp out just because you might view them as ‘divisive concepts.’

Jazz lives because it jumped out of the cauldron of racism, exploitation and undisguised hate. Our forefathers and mothers performing an act of spiritual alchemy miraculously transformed those awful dues of subjugation into sonic statements of love, art, resilience and dedication to the human spirit worldwide. ‘Twas love, inborn and intrinsic which delivered us.

To those who still persist in thinking that they can ban or erase the achievements of our elders, I say..proceed at your peril. This music is as strong as the will to survive that carried our ancestors out of Africa into America where they, acknowledged or not, were pivotal to the cultural construction of the most productive social experiment of its age.

I found this book, originally published in 1978, in a Salt Lake City bookstore. It continues to be an invaluable source when examining the period 1917 through 1933 in Germany.

Author and researcher John Willett produced a beautifully resourced publication which cross-references events of the period including the significant musical, theatrical, political, visual art, architectural and technological developments during the volatile period between World War I and II known as the Weimar Republic. Many social observers are beginning to look back on that period as a precursor to the times we find ourselves in today. One thing for sure: We are certainly witnessing a seeming replay of the time when the government is attempting to place its heavy hand on the levers of culture to dictate what expression is in the ‘national interest.’

Please Come back for the next episode and share this one as we judge for ourselves if we’re living in an echo or still battling ghosts of oppressors past.

Just in case you’d like to find a copy of Willett’s compilation, it was given a new cover and some additional information in 1996.

*The composition above, written and produced by Jaimeo Brown and Chris Sholar is entitled Mean World. It features community voices of Gee’s Bend, Ala. community alive and thriving since the bad old days of slavery.

Two great albums from Jaimeo Brown Transcendence. 4-star reviews in Downbeat and available where kick-ass Jazz is still available. See the author for details

Up next, a personal chapter in this most recent disturbing episode of our history. To the uninitiated: You think that it can’t happen here? Let me disabuse you of this innocent notion.

Jazz Appreciation Month

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