The Modern Jazz Quartet rebelled against convention. To the extent that it was possible to do so, they came to live musically and socially in a world of their own making. That act of independence and creativity, at once defiant and healing, was the substance of their protest.

I.

One afternoon a few weeks ago, a student wandered into my office to discuss an assignment. When we had completed the business at hand, he lingered.

“What’s on your mind?” I asked him, as he stood up but made no move to leave.

He said he had heard a rumor that I was a musician. He explained that he had become deeply interested in the history of music and wondered whether I might guide his listening so that he could further his education.

“The world is filled with rumors,” I said, “but this one happens to be true.” I motioned for him to sit back down. “I’ll be delighted to help you if I can.”

As it turned out, he was not interested in “classical” music broadly defined as, for reasons that now seem inexplicable, I had assumed. There was to be no discussion of Bach or Beethoven, of Mozart or Mahler. Instead, he wanted to know about the blues and early rock ‘n’ roll. Did I know anything about those genres he asked, and could I help him figure out where to start exploring them?

Before I had nary the chance to rave on about Buddy Holly, the young man interrupted me to clarify that he had become attentive in particular to the politics of music. With all the solemnity of which only earnest youth is capable, he proceeded to explain as graciously as he could that although I likely did not know it (meaning that I was too old to be aware of such things) music can be political. My feigned look of astonishment must have been enough to deceive him, for he went on in excruciating detail to acquaint me with the history of rap and hip-hop with which, I confess, I have no more than a passing familiarity.

I let him have his moment. Had I possessed the wherewithal to interrupt his soliloquy, I might have made clear that rap and hip-hop originated in a contest of verbal agility that blacks called alternately the Dozens or the Dirty Dozens in which participants assailed each other with rhyming insults. Playing the Dozens was about more than a show of verbal prowess. It was a battle of wills for supremacy and respect. Opponents slandered one another and denigrated each other’s families. The game was the ultimate test of “cool.” The first to lose their cool, to get angry, and thus to hesitate in their reply, forfeited the challenge. As Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka) noted:

African songs of recrimination survive as a highly competitive game called “the dozens.” (As any young Harlemite can tell you, if someone says to you, “your father’s a woman,” you must say, as a minimal comeback, “your mother likes it,” or a similar put-down.)[1]

As had been the case in Africa, so it was among the slaves in the United States: music and song reinforced traditional values and community solidarity. At the same time, song could permit individuals to transcend the restrictions that society placed on them and to express feelings for which they had no other outlet. Persons could, for example, criticize, reproach, and even mock their superiors through song in ways that they could never do, and would never dare to try, in word or deed.

Like many West African peoples, the Ashanti and the Dahomeans formalized such rituals in annual ceremonies, such as the Ashanti Apo celebration, which lasted for eight days. During that interval, the Ashanti used music to inspire an emotional release without disturbing the cohesion of the group. Slaves often used song in the same way and for much the same purpose, although they could not recreate the rituals of their African counterparts. The slaves, for instance, sang to express their feelings about, to lampoon, criticize, and discipline, other slaves who had misbehaved or who had violated the ethical standards of the black community. Among the slaves, the practice was known as “puttin’ on the banjo.” They also used song to castigate and ridicule their masters and other whites, which, of course, they could not do openly since such freedom of expression was denied them or came at an unacceptable cost. When using song to disparage or satirize whites or to sing about subjects, such as sex, that most whites considered taboo, the slaves obscured the lyrics, making them seem simple, quaint, innocent, or ridiculous, so that, to any whites who happened to be within ear shot, the real meaning of the song was incomprehensible. In this way, blacks deceived whites, a practice that, by itself, must have occasioned a certain emotional satisfaction. Blues singers continued to conceal the true subject and meaning of their tunes, sometimes to be clever, funny, or entertaining and sometimes to avoid arrest or worse.

Later, as I reflected on the conversation with my student, or rather on his impromptu lecture, I began to wonder, and not for the first time, about the politics of the music I had listened to growing up during the 1960s and 1970s. Most of the songs that appealed to me then have lost much of their luster, if for no other reason than the moment of their political relevance has long since passed. I decided that if anyone ever asked, I could identify three songs from that period which still represented fundamental aspects of my political outlook: Buffalo Springfield, “For What it’s Worth” (1966), Ten Years After, “I’d Love to Change the World” (1971), and The Who, “Won’t Get Fooled Again” (1971). (J.B. Lenoir and Gil-Scott Heron deserve a special category of their own in the annuals of political music, as does the contemporary blues singer Shemekia Copeland. And, yes, I am ignoring Bob Dylan.)

Each of these songs acknowledges the perils that threaten individual freedom, humane order, and perhaps life itself. Yet all express doubt and confusion about how to respond. “There’s somethin’ happening here but what it is ain’t exactly clear,” sang Stephen Stills. (“For What It’s Worth”) “I’d love to change the world but I don’t know what to do.” (“I’d Love to Change the World”) Nor do the musicians find solace in partisanship, which can obscure reality as much as political indifference or oppression.

There’s battle lines being drawn.
Nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong….

A thousand people in the street,
singing songs and carrying signs,
mostly say “Hooray for our side.”

It’s time we stop, hey now,
what’s that sound?
Everybody look, what’s going down?
(“For What It’s Worth”)

Finally, none adopt a superficial optimism or seek facile solutions to complex problems. Some of the quandaries that beset modern life may, in fact, have no remedy.

Everywhere is freaks and hairies
Dykes and fairies, tell me where is sanity?
Tax the rich, feed the poor
‘Til there are no rich no more….

World pollution, there’s no solution
Institution, electrocution
Just black and white, rich or poor
Senators stop the war. (“I’d Love to Change the World”)

Although these lyrics would today provoke a torrent of disapproval and condemnation, Alvin Lee asked the right question: where is sanity?—a question more relevant now than during the quarrelsome and turbulent era in which he wrote. Lee has no answer and, in fact, despairs of finding one, so he will “leave it up to you.” There is a sense of resignation to the status quo and withdrawal from the struggle, even a hint of fatalism, in Lee’s words. More positively, Lee suggests that people ought to think for themselves. He can neither instruct nor lead them, and has no wish to impose his political views on others. They must render their own judgments, reach their own conclusions, and take the actions they deem to be appropriate.

“Won’t Get Fooled Again” goes further, questioning whether people any longer have the desire or the capacity to think for themselves and voicing mistrust about the efficacy of political reform. Faith in revolutionary change and hope for social progress may be the most devastating illusions of all. After the struggle has ended:

The world looks just the same
And history can’t be changed
‘Cause the banners, they were all flown in the last war….

There’s nothing in the street
Looks any different to me
And the slogans are effaced, by-the-by
And the parting on the left
Is now parting on the right
And the beards have all grown longer overnight.

I’ll tip my hat to the new Constitution
Take a bow for the new revolution
Smile and grin at the change all around
Pick up my guitar and play
Just like yesterday
Then I’ll get on my knees and pray
We don’t get fooled again.

Pete Townsend understood, or at least implied, that iconoclasts and revolutionaries are usually far less successful in obliterating the past and eradicating their former selves than they are wont to believe. Despite impassioned enthusiasm, generous sentiments, and noble aspirations, those who perpetuate the rapid transformation of government and society carry with them many of the customs, prejudices, and ideas against which they rebelled. The changes that they effect are mostly superficial. From the debris of the old order they construct the new. The best that citizens may anticipate is that they will not again be deceived by such extravagant but insubstantial promises. “Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss” constitutes the last will and testament of the nouveau régime.

II.

A few exceptions notwithstanding, neither blues nor jazz are the music of protest. The number of blues and jazz songs that explicitly object to social and political injustice is small. Yet, in important respects, the entire corpus of the blues and jazz was created in the spirit of protest. The music at once provides a defense against, and operates in defiance of, the racism and discrimination that have caused so much misery for so many black persons. Although portraying blacks as the victims of human frailties that afflict everyone regardless of the color of their skin, blues and jazz musicians did not ignore the problems that arose from racial prejudice, such as the “Jim Crow” laws that segregated blacks in American society, the violence against blacks that the Ku Klux Klan and other groups committed, the lynch mobs, the race riots, and countless other manifestations of hatred, brutality, and humiliation. Demanding greater respect for their music and their people, socially- and politically-conscious musicians such as Leadbelly (Huddie Ledbetter), Big Bill Broonzy, Josh White, J. B. Lenoir, Charles Mingus, and Gil Scott-Heron used their art as a deliberate form of protest against the conditions under which blacks were forced to live and the treatment that they were compelled to endure. Equally mindful of the plight of black Americans, the members of the Modern Jazz Quartet conducted a quieter, more subtle form of dissent, and it was they who, in the process, created my favorite protest music.

On December 22, 1952, John Lewis, Milt Jackson, Percy Heath, and Kenny Clarke gathered in a Manhattan recording studio to lay down four tracks.[2] At the very moment the Modern Jazz Quartet embarked on their first session, president-elect Dwight D. Eisenhower was meeting with an association of black clergymen a few blocks away at the Commodore Hotel. Eisenhower expressed astonishment when the ministers informed him that racism and discrimination against blacks continued to be prevalent in the United States. He promised to organize a commission to investigate the problem, but vowed to follow the law even if it cost him every black vote.

Between the late 1860s and the late 1920s blacks had voted overwhelmingly for the Republican Party, which was, after all, the party of Abraham Lincoln. During the Great Depression, they had shifted their political allegiance to the Democrats, believing that Herbert Hoover and Republicans had abandoned them. Eisenhower’s criticism of various federal welfare programs, of which blacks were the principal beneficiaries, had sounded the alarm during the campaign. Except for the forty percent of votes that Eisenhower received from blacks in Atlanta, statistics from the presidential election of 1952 reveal that the majority of blacks did not support him. Most blacks voted for Eisenhower’s Democratic opponent, Adlai Stevenson. Bobo Jenkins, a bluesman from Detroit, expressed the misgivings that blacks felt about Eisenhower and the Republican Party in “Democrat Blues.” Jenkins lamented the demise of the Democratic Party and the return of Republicans to power, a development that he suspected portended only hard times and evil tidings for blacks:

Well, do you remember, baby, 19 and 31?
That’s when the Depression, baby, just begun.
Yes darlin’, if you know what I’m talkin’ about.
The Democrats put you on your feet, baby,
Well, you had the nerve to throw them out.
Well, do you remember, baby,
When your stomach was full o’ slack?
Somebody help me get them Democrats back.

J.B. Lenoir of Chicago echoed these sentiments in “Eisenhower Blues:”

Hey everybody, I’m just talkin’ to you
I’m just tellin’ you the nach’al truth
I got the Eisenhower blues
Thinkin’ about me and you,
What on earth are we goin’ to do?
My money’s all gone. . . .
Way things look, how can I be here long?
I got the Eisenhower blues.

Shortly after its release, the record label withdrew Lenoir’s “Eisenhower Blues” from circulation, an act of censorship that attempted to suppress the political content of black music and to silence black voices of protest.

Although critics initially dismissed the Modern Jazz Quartet as “academic” and “effete,” and although members of the group did not engage in, or comment on, the political struggles of the 1950s and 1960s, the Modern Jazz Quartet nonetheless refused to be silenced. Perhaps more accurately, they learned to remain silent until they had something of importance to say. Then they let their demeanor and their music do the talking. From the outset, they seem to have envisioned transforming public attitudes toward music and, perhaps coincidentally, toward blacks. Together Lewis, Jackson, Heath, and Clarke exuded “cool.” In Yoruba culture, the ability to commune with the divine nature of the inner self (ashe) manifests itself as itutu, which translates into English as “coolness.” Leroi Jones wrote that:

The term cool… meant a specific reaction to the world, a specific relationship to one’s environment. It defined an attitude that actually existed. To be cool was, in its most accessible meaning, to be calm, even unimpressed, by what horror the world might daily propose. [3]

Persons who have soul are cool; like the unchanging sea and sky, they remain poised, tranquil, and dignified no matter the circumstances. They can transform rage and hatred into serenity and wisdom.

However inadvertently, the Modern Jazz Quartet challenged preconceptions about both jazz and black people. The members performed in formal attire. They played in concert halls throughout Europe and the United States rather than in nightclubs. If audiences refused to sit quietly and listen, the group played more softly. If the din persisted, the musicians walked off stage. They made it clear that they were not a dance band playing to entertain. Neither ignoring nor disdaining their audiences, the Modern Jazz Quartet communed with them, insisting that they listen and instructing them about how to do so.

It is perhaps no surprise that Europeans, who had a tradition of listening to complex orchestral arrangements, recognized the genius of the Modern Jazz Quartet earlier than did Americans. The Modern Jazz Quartet sought to make a gift of their music. Such magnanimity is also characteristic of “coolness;” it is the noblest quality that persons can exhibit. “Klyaala-mooko kufwa ko,” declares a Bakongo proverb: “He who holds out his hands does not die.”[4] For all intents and purposes, the MJQ was a chamber ensemble playing refined, elegant, and sophisticated music that encompassed a multiplicity of genres ranging from the classics to the blues. Without fanfare, the members insisted that four black men belonged on the concert stages of the world and that, leavened by their talent, they were worthy of their art.[5]

But Lewis, Jackson, Heath, Clarke, and later Connie Kay also insisted that they were unconcerned with and, in fact, were indifferent to, respectability if it required the compromise of their ideals. Refusing to be confined by established formulas or expectations, the Modern Jazz Quartet regarded no musical genre as off limits. Some critics lamented that the group juxtaposed gospel, the blues, jazz, and baroque, that the members of the Modern Jazz Quartet incorporated elements of both the African and Western musical traditions, such as antiphony and counterpoint, into their work. But within that exhaustive musical compass the group created a formal and rational structure in which adventurous improvisation could take place. Passionate and yet restrained, their music was the very definition of ordered liberty, the antithesis of the musical anarchy that emerged in both jazz and rock to inundate the coming decades.

Intrepid yet expressive, poignant yet graceful, disciplined yet spontaneous, fastidious yet intimate, the music of the Modern Jazz Quartet relied on a balanced relationship between, that is, on an integration of, four musicians and their instruments, each playing different parts in unison while leaving ample space for individuality. As the Modern Jazz Quartet, Lewis, Jackson, Heath, Clarke, and Kay rebelled against convention. To the extent that it was possible to do so, they came to live musically and socially in a world of their own making. That act of independence and creativity, at once defiant and healing, was the substance of their protest.

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Notes:

[1] Leroi Jones, Blues People: Negro Music in White America (New York, 1963), 27.

[2] At their first session, the group recorded two jazz standards, “All the Things You Are” and “Rose of the Rio Grande,” and two of Lewis’s original compositions, “La Ronde” and “Vendome,” for Prestige Records.

[3] Jones, Blues People, 213.

[4] Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit: African & Afro-American Art & Philosophy (New York, 1983), 119.

[5] Originating in the rhythm section of Dizzy Gillespie’s Orchestra in 1946 and going through several iterations during the late 1940s and early 1950s, the Modern Jazz Quartet performed and recorded together between 1952 and 1974. The group then played occasional concerts until reuniting for a tour of Japan in 1981. The Modern Jazz Quartet continued to perform and record until permanently disbanding in 1997. The personnel remained intact for nearly the entire existence of the group, except that Connie Kay replaced Kenny Clarke on drums in 1955. When Kay suffered a stroke in 1992, Mickey Roker, who had worked with Milt Jackson during the 1960s and 1970s, temporarily replaced him. When Kay died in December 1994, Albert Heath, Percy’s younger brother, permanently replaced Kay on drums until the Modern Jazz Quartet ended.

The featured image, uploaded by Anefo, and taken by Harry Pot, is a photograph of the Modern Jazz Quartet taken on 20 October 1961. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.