A Departure From Origins: How African American Jazz Participation is Decreasing
The North Saint Paul High School student directed us into a dark auditorium. Three large columns of seats spanned the room from the back to the stage. We moved past the first, past the second, down the aisle between second and third, and filed at last into two rows for our eight saxes, five trumpets, four trombones, two drummers, bassist and pianist.
“This is Summertime, by Charlie Parker,” announced the conductor on stage. Young and white, I hadn’t seen many directors like him. His band’s sound struck me first as a bit whiny, a bit forced. It certainly didn’t sound like the melodic, slightly melancholy song of Charlie Parker’s saxophone. I had heard a term, one I often used to evaluate my own saxophone playing: “White Jazz.” I was not sure of my authority in the subject, but this sounded like White Jazz. And sure enough, as I swept my eyes over the band on stage, save one Indian alto player, I saw white faces contorting around mouthpieces, white fingers gripping drumsticks and manipulating valves, all at the direction of white hands battling the air furiously like a cat in mid-tumble from a tree, writhing around in frantic search of upright position.
That was only the beginning of the whiteness. Every jazz band at this contest, including my own, was predominantly white. Every conductor was white, and all three judges were white.
I found this scene perplexing. After all, Jazz is an unequivocally African American art form. Originating out of New Orleans, one of America’s first cultural melting pots, jazz was a product of diversity. The cultures of Africa, Europe, and the Caribbean all gradually blended together to create jazz. But the seeds of this new musical genre were always in African music traditions (Stewart et al., 1993). Jazz can be traced back to two other, earlier-developing musical forms: Blues and Ragtime. The Blues, featuring a distinct 12-bar form, originated out of the songs, spirituals, and chants of the African-American community of the 19th-century deep South. Ragtime was popularized in the late 1800s by African Americans in Saint Louis (Stewart, 2016).
While Jazz was a product of cultural blending, its roots have always been in African American culture.
Even today, if you ask nearly any jazz participant–musician, listener, composer–who their all-time best 5 jazz musicians are, they will undoubtedly list the names of 5 African American artists. For many, the top 10, even 20, are all African Americans. White and black professional jazzers alike will tell you that when they first began learning they didn’t listen to Frank Sinatra or Art Pepper, but Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, Duke Ellington, and Art Blakey. Yet on Billboard’s top jazz albums for 2019, Michael Buble and Herb Alpert are joined by other non-African American jazz musicians finding success (Billboard, 2019). Whether I’m on stage playing jazz or in the audience listening, the people sitting on either side of me tend to be white. So I have to wonder: when did things change?
In 1992, the National Endowment for the Arts published its most comprehensive edition of the regularly taken Survey for Public Participation in the Arts (SPPA). It found that African Americans made up as much as 20% of live jazz audiences, despite being only 11% of the United States population (Deveaux, 1995). The 2008 SPPA showed a drop in audience participation to 12.5%, barely above African Americans’ representation as 11.4% of the population. Among adults, the trend in African American jazz participation is even more negative, with African Americans making up only 8.6% of adult jazz audiences in 2008 (Williams & Keen, 2009).
There is no substantial data on trends in the demographics of jazz musicians themselves, largely due to the very small sample sizes in any potential study. However, the diversity of successful contemporary jazz musicians reflects a shift from the genre’s original cast. I’ve attended performances in which white, black, Latinx, and Indian musicians all play on the same stage. This is a stark contrast from the early years of jazz’s popularity–the 1930s, for example– when all well-known jazz musicians were African American.
To understand my personal experiences with decreasing African American representation in jazz, I spoke with my saxophone teacher, Jeff King. Jeff, who is white, has been a professional saxophonist for several decades, and has been teaching at Cadenza Music on Snelling Avenue in Saint Paul for over 30 years. He has published music recently with his combo, King Iden Woods, in addition to several solo productions. When I asked if the demographics of his audiences had changed over the years, he took a few moments to think. “I don’t know if it’s so much that the people who come out are different. It probably has a lot more to do with where you are.” Describing the racial makeup of Minnesotan Jazz musicians, he continued “I think in this neck of the woods, there just simply aren’t that many black people, I mean proportionally. It seems like there always has been a handful of those players, and, you know, a majority of white guys.”
This is your music. This is your bloodline.
Jeff’s suggestion made me wonder: is this only happening in Minnesota? Perhaps the lack of African American representation had been a constant in Minnesota jazz, and wasn’t an issue elsewhere. To find out more, I spoke to Kevin Washington, an African American drummer who has taught at Walker West Music Academy for several years and has collaborated with a laundry list of jazz greats. “There ain’t that many black musicians in town but there used to be. Some of them gave up, got frustrated, some of them moved away,” he explained. “It was an uphill battle, and we are flyover town. It got to a point with your generation, and with people in there mid 20s and 30s, black people here, they saw white kids doing jazz so much they thought it was white music. And I’m like ‘what the fuck, come on man.’ It’s like, this is your music. This is your bloodline.”
Kevin’s jazz story is classic. When I asked how he first got involved in Jazz as a black kid growing up in Detroit, he laughed. “Born into it. Born into it. Being from Detroit, Detroit is like the northern New Orleans. You had a lot of legends that created the music living there or are from there. We were just exposed to it, man. And we got taught from the people who created it.” He rattled off name after name: Donald Byrd, Kenny Cox, Kenny Garrett. “Cats was always livin’ there, or they came there. We saw these things. And they was teachin’ us. Nothing but black kids, not a single white kid.”
This extreme level of exposure to jazz quickly proved invaluable, not only to Kevin but to the entire jazz world. “My father had a jazz band called Bird Train ‘Scoe– ‘bird’ meaning Charlie Parker, ‘train’ meaning John Coltrane, and ‘scoe’ meaning Roscoe Mitchell. These kids consisted of a middle school my dad was working at on the east side of Detroit…Rodney Whitaker came out of that band. James Carter came out of that group.”
Kevin’s story is inseparable from that of another jazz musician: legendary pianist McCoy Tyner, who passed away in March. Most famous for his work with John Coltrane, Tyner was an icon in the golden age of east coast jazz. Where did his journey begin? Playing the piano in the front window of his mother’s beauty shop, Tyner caught already-famous Bud Powell’s ear as he walked down the street. Powell listened to him, came in, and proceeded to groom one of the greatest jazz pianists of all time. Dizzy Gillespie, who lived around the corner, helped out too.
Kevin Washington and McCoy Tyner’s stories are not unique. As Kevin explained, these “jazz neighborhoods” existed in nearly every large American city. Harlem, Kansas City, and Chicago, in addition to Philadelphia and Detroit, were major northern jazz havens.
But somewhere along the way, things changed.
“Do you feel like that kind of neighborhood, or that kind of exposure exists in Detroit today?”
“Not like it used to, but see it all changed. I can tell you why black people not exposed to it, because they took music out of school…I was teaching when I started watching how Minneapolis Public Schools’ music program was going down. And I found out it wasn’t just happening here, it was happening everywhere. A lot of black kids were getting it from school. You can still get it from the black church, but that’s it, whereas before you could get it everywhere. It was at a church, it was at the park, it was at somebody’s house…it was at school.”
Kevin’s hypothesis that the school is the locus of jazz exposure is backed by statistics. The 1992 SPPA showed that jazz participation was unequivocally linked to education, finding that college educated individuals made up only 45% of the total population, yet comprised 78% of jazz audiences. At the time, only 24% of adult Americans were college graduates, but 49% of jazz participants were (Deveaux, 1995).
But the links between education and jazz participation begin much, much earlier. Educational funding is a crucial component in deciding which groups are represented in jazz audiences, and who is up on stage. Simply put, when a school isn’t receiving enough funding, arts programs are the first to go. That is, if the money was there to establish the arts program in the first place. As Jeff King explained, “the poor schools are just struggling to get by. Ya know, ‘we don’t have any money for that.’” Funding disparities in different school districts have led to disparities in access to jazz. According to a 2019 Edbuild study, there is a $23 Billion disparity nationwide in funding of predominantly white vs predominantly non-white school districts, despite serving the same number of students. In New York, one of the birthplaces of jazz, there are $2,222 more of funding per student in predominantly white than non-white school districts. With white students gaining more access to arts education, and thus jazz education, than students of color, it’s no wonder jazz audiences and stages are no longer dominated by African Americans. If Kevin were growing up today, Bird Train ‘Scoe, the middle school band led by his father, may have never been funded. Rodney Whitaker, James Carter, and Kevin Washington may never have discovered their path to jazz musicianship.
In addition to access disparities in schools, Kevin attributes the loss of access to jazz for black youth to a broader ideological issue.
“It’s everybody: it’s the record companies, it’s the school systems. It’s this westernized philosophy that exists throughout the world. Where everything is from a European mindset, and not an African American mindset. And everything European isn’t good for brown people. You know, what they say is supposed to happen musically in school. There was no black person at the table dictating what needs to be happening in the school.”
Finally, Kevin addressed the final piece in a large puzzle of decreasing African American participation: “Then, for some reason, black people couldn’t afford the instruments anymore.” McCoy Tyner also addressed the affect of socioeconomic status on jazz participation in a 1979 interview with Jet Magazine. Describing the increasingly white makeup of the youth in his audience, he reasoned “Perhaps it’s just because black people don’t have much of a chance to hear us, especially on the radio, where some of the jazz musicians particularly in New York are not playing enough pure forms of music. In Europe, where there is government-controlled radio and television, people get a tremendous variety of music at very low cost.” His theory bears out in the 1992 statistics which show that black Americans were most likely to listen to TV and Radio or recordings, whereas White Americans mostly see jazz live. As Tyner alluded to, the prohibitive cost of live music was likely the driving force behind decreasing black representation in audiences.
Even the 1992 SPPA showed that socioeconomic status, comprised of education and income levels, is “the strongest predictor of participation in the arts generally, and jazz is no exception. Participation in jazz through live attendance and the media rises steeply and steadily with socioeconomic attainment as measured through increases in education and income levels” (DeVeaux, 1995). Jeff King concurred, explaining that it “comes down to economics. Who can afford to learn, to get the lessons, to go to the best school?”
When Kevin and I were done discussing the details of the origins of jazz, the exposure of his upbringing, and the pitfalls of the music industry, I still sensed a question lingering in the back of my mind. It was one I, a white Jazz musician had always been too scared to ask.
“Is there a sense that white people are stealing jazz?”
“Yeah, I’m not gonna lie, some of the older cats couldn’t stand white jazz musicians. Cause they were getting to play in venues that [black musicians] weren’t allowed to play in. Ray Charles was banned from playin’ in Georgia because of… some dumb racism shit. Read Miles Davis’s book, he talked about it. How not just the white musicians, but the white club owners, treated black musicians. Even the record labels. It was found out that they were payin’ in drugs not money. All that little extra shit that white people don’t have to deal with.”
The weight of that “extra shit” has been crippling to black jazz artistry. Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, and Billie Holiday are just a few famous black jazz figures who died after long bouts with substance abuse. When I asked Kevin what was causing this epidemic, he immediately exclaimed “Racism! The weight of it. It does get tiring. Like I just want to play music and I gotta deal with this bullshit. I’ve seen how it’s taken out so many of our heroes.”
Kevin still believes white people can play the music, even if they haven’t suffered the hardship. But if they are going to play, they have to at least understand. “I don’t mind white musicians playin’ the music as long as they respect the culture. I can’t stand white musicians that come in here, do our shit, make money off our shit, and then don’t respect the culture.”
“What does that look like? Respecting the culture.” I asked.
“What you’re doin’ right now, trying to learn the origins, trying to understand the mindset, and the mentality behind it.”
Fewer and fewer African Americans are participating in Jazz due to an inequitable educational system and music industry, both leading to a steady decrease in exposure for black youth. Until our nation becomes more equitable as whole, and begins to work against its dominant “Western philosophy,” the number of African Americans being exposed to jazz will continue to shrink. Perhaps the only way to stop this reduction is for those at the decision table, the school administrators and the music executives, to “respect the culture.”
Works Cited
DeVeaux, Scott. Jazz in America: Who’s Listening? Seven Locks Press, 1995, Jazz in America: Who’s Listening?
Scott DeVeaux is Associate Professor of Music at the University of Virginia. In addition to this report, he is well-known for his work as a coeditor of The Music of James Scott (1992). His 1995 report presents and analyzes the data of the 1992 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts–commissioned by the National Endowment of the Arts’– and compares its findings to those in the 1982 edition of the Survey. Of the various demographic characteristics addressed by DeVeaux, race and educational background are especially useful to establish a baseline level of jazz participation for various groups, as well as understand backgrounds of jazz participants and their respective reasons for participating.
“Jazz Albums Chart.” Billboard, 2019.
Billboard magazine tabulates “top charts” ranking the best songs, albums, and artists in specified genres, countries, and the entire world. The Charts were first introduced in 1945. The Chart for Jazz albums ranks the top Jazz albums each week, month, and year based on popularity. Identifying the most popular songs, artists, and, in this case, albums is crucial to understanding which jazz people are listening to most today.
“New York Daily News.” New York Daily News, 1991.
“New York Daily News.” New York Daily News, 2013.
Stewart, Jack, et al. “Jazz Origins in New Orleans.” National Parks Service, U.S. Department of the Interior, 1993.
The National Park Service has a New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park in Louisiana. Based on the 100th U.S. Congress’s declaration that Jazz is a “national American treasure,” the new Orleans Jazz National Historical Park opened its doors on October 31st, 1994. The Park’s visitor center is located just blocks away from New Orleans’ French Quarter. This article, developed by a committee from the U.S. Department of the Interior, details the origins of jazz in New Orleans. Its focus on the cultural blending that bore jazz is especially useful.
Stewart, James. “Timeline: Blues, Ragtime and Jazz.” Vermont Public Radio, 2016.
James Stewart is a radio host and writer for Vermont Public Radio. He received a bachelor’s degree in Music from Toccoa Falls College in Georgia, and a Master’s of Music in Composition from the University of North Carolina School of the Arts. He received his Doctorate of Musical Arts from the Hartt School of Music at the University of Hartford. Stewart has written original music for five children’s shows. His article chronicling the progression from Blues to Ragtime to Jazz discusses the history of all three art forms and highlights the connections between them. Understanding these connections is crucial to understanding the origins of Jazz.
Tyner, McCoy. “Why More White Youth Than Black Like Jazz.” Jet , 29 Nov. 1979, p. 63.
McCoy Tyner (1938–2020) was a world-renowned African American jazz pianist. He was best known for his work with the John Coltrane Quintet, but also sustained a long and successful solo career, becoming a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master and five-time Grammy winner. In his brief brief interview with Jet magazine, Tyner discussed the possible reasons why his audiences were becoming increasingly white.
Walker, Max, and Jeff King. 13 Mar. 2020.
Jeff King is a first-call saxophonist in the Twin Cities. He plays the Alto, Tenor, Baritone, and Soprano saxophones in addition to the E-flat and B-flat (bass) clarinets. He has been teaching saxophone at Cadenza Music for over 30 years, and is a part-time faculty member at Minneapolis Community Technical College. His most recent professional work has been with two jazz groups: Kind Fletcher Woods and King Iden Woods, both of which produced albums in the last decade. King has also produced several solo albums. This interview provides an inside, experienced perspective to the demographics of jazz musicians, audiences, and students.
Walker, Max and Kevin Washington. 30 March, 2020.
Kevin Washington is a professional drummer born in Detroit, Michigan and currently living in Minnesota. Washington has played with several Jazz greats including Kenny Garrett and Roy Hargrove, and has taught drum lessons at Walker West Music Academy for several years. In addition to all genres of drumming, Washington plays bass and guitar. He has led the Kevin E. Washington Quintet, which has played at mutiple reputable venues, including the Dakota Jazz Club in Minneapolist, Minnesota. This interview provided insight from the African American perspective into the causes and cultural ramifications of decreasing jazz participation among African Americans, especially young African Americans.
Williams, Kevin, and David Keen. 2008 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts. National Endowment for the Arts, 2009.
The Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (SPPA) provides data for public participation in various art forms in the United States. The report on the 2008 edition of the Survey was prepared by Kevin Williams and David Keen. This edition of the Survey emphasizes a decline in arts participation, especially participation in jazz, across the population. It provides new figures on demographics of jazz participants. These, in addition to statistics and analysis regarding trends in participation in all art forms, can be compared to the findings of the 1992 SPPA to identify trends in arts participation.
Walker, Max, and Jeff King. 13 Mar. 2020.
Jeff King is a first-call saxophonist in the Twin Cities. He plays the Alto, Tenor, Baritone, and Soprano saxophones in addition to the E-flat and B-flat (bass) clarinets. He has been teaching saxophone at Cadenza Music for over 30 years, and is a part-time faculty member at Minneapolis Community Technical College. His most recent professional work has been with two jazz groups: Kind Fletcher Woods and King Iden Woods, both of which produced albums in the last decade. King has also produced several solo albums. This interview provides an inside, experienced perspective to the demographics of jazz musicians, audiences, and students.
$23 Billion. EdBuild, 2019, $23 Billion.
EdBuild is a research nonprofit aimed at examining and exposing funding disparities in public schools across the United States. Much of Edbuild’s research revolves around modern segregation based on race and class in schools, and the failure of recent reforms in their attempts to bridge educational gaps between students of different races and socioeconomic backgrounds. $23 Billion is a research report that examines the failure of state-level policies to guarantee equal education to all children, which has culminated in majority-white school districts receiving $23 Billion more funding than districts that serve mostly students of color. This research is crucial to understanding the connections between race, socioeconomic status, and education, three factors which ultimately influence jazz participation levels.
