The Great Exchange
African American gospel music is thought to have come forth in the late years of the 19th century, notably developing as the Gospel Hymns. Characteristically, black gospel music is a great deviation from the contemporary spiritual melodies sung by African Americans working in plantations and the hymns such by their white masters on which this African American gospel is thought to have found its footing on.[1] Similarly, Jazz is thought to have originated in New Orleans around 1895. Jazz, as a form of music, was a combination of the elements of Blues, marching band music, and Ragtime.[2] Jazz is differentiated from these earlier forms of music by its far-flung utilization of improvisation, with the often inclusion of performances by several players at a time. This paper then presents the importance of the intersection between jazz and black African American gospel music.
African American Gospel
The 19th century African American Gospel music notably included numerous sophisticated, spiritual-like texts, which incorporated smiles and other colorful imageries, and was specially set to music resembling the white hymns traditions as best exemplified by the music of Lowell Mason and other composers who followed him.[3] However, this music formed part of the African-Americanized, more so in the use of syncopation The hymnody of gospel among the African congregations rose to considerable heights under the influences of the powerful religious movements in the late years of the 19th century and the early 20th century, giving birth to numerous fundamentalist Pentecostal, holiness, and other sanctified churches.[4] The Methodist Minister Charles Albert Tindley of Philadelphia is one composer who is accredited for identifying these movements.[5] His gospel hymns are thought to have addressed the needs oppressed African Americans, the poor and often the uneducated Christians.
The stylistic performances of this gospel music are believed to have begun in 1907, originating in Memphis when its founders – the founding fathers of the sanctified Pentecostal Church of God in Christ – were exhilarated after attending a revival mission in LA.[6] They ordained their religious services with characteristic shouting, tongue speaking (glossolalia), visions and trance all suitable form emotional music, often then sung in an improvised and highly charged style.[7] Skilled song leaders performed exquisite performances that evoked bodily movements from the congregation (including head-shaking and swaying), rhythmic responses (foot stamping and hand clapping), and the occasional shouting of interpolations in line with the traditions of ring shouting and dancing in circles.[8] The song leaders were preachers, ministers or singers with a commanding and authoritative voice as motivated by the need to lance through the congregations’ vociferous responses.[9]
Then, some of the gospel singers who gained renowned fame from the sale of their gospel records include Blind Willie Johnson, a majestic Blues Guitarist and with a powerful church like singing, Arizona Dranes and Gary Davis.[10] Dranes, through her intense thin soprano singing, inspired several other singers, and that her stylistic piano play was one of the models for gospel used for recording by artists such as Thomas Dorsey.[11]
Through the 1930s, gospel singers, often performing at concerts independent of church affiliations but nonetheless referred to as revivals, preferred playing pianos more than they did guitars as one of their important accompanying instruments.[12] Additionally, they emphasized their performances with actuated melismas that alternated with short and staccato exclamations.[13] Best exemplifying this are the Gospel creations by Thomas Dorsey Gospel Songs Music Publishing Company which symbolized the growth of gospel over this era.[14]
The ensembles of African-American vocals have performed a critical function in the sharing of traditions in gospel music – shaping of the male quarters in 1910’s in addition to giving rise to other ensembles that grew, having as part women.[15] Inviolable religious and social bonds have been in existence among the vocal groups of African American gospel and the musicians of Jazz, but concerning the discernible musical interrelationships, these relatively large portions of the history of the gospel come into revelation by the importance and emergence of Jazz.[16] Some researchers, however, post that the stylistic Piano plays of Dranes, more so as typified by her two solo musicals, the Sweet Heaven is my Home and Crucifixion, are some of the major representations of the archetypal representation of the initial stages in the continuum of fast western or piano that have ever been recorded.[17]
In this era of intensified creativity in music, composers, preachers, gospel hymns, and the artists performing them exhibited, in diversified manners, robust and particular inspirations for not only the advancements that took place in Jazz but also in how particularly Soul and Rhythm-and-Blue music energetically emerged.[18] These developments were however thwarted and frustrated.[19] The 1970s were marked by a continued departure from the sanctified characteristic church like styles of congregation calls and responses, choral refrains, and spiritual possessions, adopting a more often than not elaborated harmony or vocalism and distinctive properties of complex musical sound as intuited by the popular African American music of the time.[20] Such a novelty was then christened contemporary music, appealing to a larger multitude, though concurrently forfeited some of its relationships with the roots of contemporary Gospel in the African-American houses of prayer.[21] The further developmental changes that took place in the 1980s had their origins from the recording of artists such as Edwin Hawkins’ 1969 Oh Happy Day.[22]
Innumerous recordings, musical groupings and performance venues rapidly grew that gospel could not anymore be classified as contemporary or traditional.[23] The older styles of worshipping were replaced with three new styles: first, Sanctuary Contemporary Gospel which combined the elements of Rhythm-and-Blues with African American gospel.[24] This stylistic worshipping style was concertized in concerts and church services. Secondly, Urban Contemporary also rose, combining jazz, hip-hop, rhythm-and-blues, and contemporary African American gospel; seen on Gospel televisions and Soul radio stations.[25] Thirdly rose the Devotional Gospel; a less emotionally charged and meditative form of gospel.[26]
Jazz
Jazz was a representation of detachment from the established traditions in the music of the Western world, where music was written by composers on paper, and that the artists had to endeavor in playing the exact musical score.[27] However, Jazz is characterized by profound creativity and improvisation around the musical score. Whereas the artist might have never composed the written musical score, or in essence the song was popular and easily recognizable, by the time the musicians had finished playing the musical, it rarely or never at all resembled the original piece.[28] Frequently, these virtuoso artists performing jazz could either not read musical scores or had poor eye sights, but nevertheless managed to thrill the audience; capturing either a sense of joy or adventure that was both a graphene deviation from the musical traditions of the time and exciting from the views of the audience.[29]
Jazz was first played in New Orleans by the Creole and African American musicians. The renowned Cornet Player Buddy Bolden is regarded as the pioneering musician who played proper jazz.[30] The second wave of Jazz was later termed Hot Jazz because of it was played at a breakneck speed and had an incredible improvising of polyphony produced by the bands playing it. As a young virtuoso Cornet Player, Louis Armstrong was discovered by King Oliver in New Orleans; he went on to have a great impact on both African-American gospel music and the popular Classical Music. The 20th century continued to be dominated by a strong force of African-American musical styles of Horace Silver, Bill Evans and Nina Simone.
The Intersection between Jazz and African American Gospel Music
Notably, the effect of Gospel Music on Jazz is of tremendous magnitude, whether as formative experiences of music upon the lives of numerous Jazz musicians – exemplifying the electric vocabularies of Gospel brought into Jazz; or the connections existent between the profoundly delight congregational experiences of reverence services more so accrued from the emotionally charged reactions of song and jazz performances.[31] Performance as those of Duke Ellington, Horace Silver, Bill Evans and Mahalia Jackson are elating. The contemporary formats of call-and-response from preachers and congregations, which in Jazz exists as a between the improvised soloists and the musical ensemble, or among the soloist who creatively improvises and his or her audiences.[32] Jazz soloists have put into service this exceptionally expatiated melismatic attributes of gospel music singing.[33]The singing of Mahalia Jackson, for example, is noted by Martin Luther King Jr. to not only occur once in a century but once in a millennium.
As early as the 1950s, a large number of African American saxophonists took up a style of formulaic, improvised use of instrumental melodies based on the preaching of the gospel in the construction of their music.[34] Then it is through their improvisation and adoption that this characteristic integration of African American Gospel music into Jazz music was transmitted to Art Porter, David Sanborn, Horace Silver, Bill Evans among other players took up the traditions from the 1970s forth.[35]
The course 1950s was marked by the secular adoption of the Hammond organ and application in the Black-American churches.[36] The late 1950s and early 1960s were marked by the emergence of the Hard-Bop substyles of Soul Jazz, aspects that were featured as programmatic and self-aware evocations of the Black gospel churches, occasioned with the episodic utilization of the chord progressions that were particularly adapted from the repertoire of African American gospel music.[37] Similarly, following the earlier emergence of the vamp in the gospel music, it came into play – performing a significant in the advent of the ostensible Modal Jazz, a musical style in which modal components were in essence of lesser significance as the basis for the improvising as compared to the adaptation of the passages of static harmony that are lengthy. James Williams, in 1994 (after years of changes) made a formalization of these connections between African American gospel and Jazz by the founding of his Jazz group termed the ICU.[38]
Conclusion
Indeed, then it is true that Jazz owes African American Gospel Music a spiritual debt, and vice versa; this debt, of course, cannot be quantified, but forms a fertile ground for an intellectual discussion.[39] The, from this position, at times, elements of African American gospel and Jazz efficaciously coalesce, not only in the performance environments which tend to lend themselves to a communal interaction but also in the possibly somber atmospheres when recording a song in a studio. Potentially, one can recall the succinct delineation of Marion Brown: that their studio achieved an ecstatic state when recording the 1965 John Coltrane’s Ascension; that the people in the room loudly screamed.
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Hayes, Eileen M, and Williams, L. F. Black Women, and Music: more than the blues. Urbana: The University of Illinois Printing Press, 2007.
Huang, Hao “Jazzlines: Drawing Relationships between American poetry, jazz and gospel music.” TOPOS, Bilingual Journal of space and Humanities (Pannon Eygetem, Veszprem) XX, no. 1 (2013): 34-43.
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[1] Kirk Byron Jones, Jazz of Preaching: how to preach with great freedom (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2010), 29-32.
[2] Paul Oliver, Max Harrison, and William Bolcom. The new groove Gospel, Blues, and Jazz: With Spirituals and Ragtime (WW Norton & Company, 1997), 87-93.
[3] Robert, Darden, People get ready: a new history of black gospel music (New York, NY [u.a.]: Continuum, 2005), 15-25.
[4] Oliver, Harrison, and Bolcom. The new groove Gospel, Blues, and Jazz, 220-225.
[5] Lenard Bowie, African American Musical Heritage, 1600-present: an appreciation, historical summary and guide to music fundamentals ([United States]: Xlibris, 2011),10-14.
[6] Eileen Hayes and Williams, L, Black Women and Music: more than the blues (Urbana: The University of Illinois Printing Press, 2007), 17-29.
[7] Jones, Jazz of Preaching, 29-32.
[8] David Aretha. Awesome-American rock and soul musicians (Berkeley Heights, NJ: Enslow Publishers, Inc., 2011) 310-331.
[9] Jones, Jazz of Preaching, 29-32.
[10] Hayes and Williams, Black Women and Music: more than the Blues, 41-54.
[11] Jones, Jazz of Preaching, 29-32.
[12] Hao Huang. Jazzlines: Drawing Relationships between American poetry, jazz and gospel music, (TOPOS, Bilingual Journal of space and Humanities (Pannon Eygetem, Veszprem) XX, no. 1, 2013), 35-41.
[13] Aretha. Awesome-American rock and soul musicians, 210-238.
[14] Bowie, African American Musical Heritage, 1600-present, 70-75.
[15] Darden, People get read, 31.
[16] Oliver, Harrison, and Bolcom. The new groove Gospel, Blues, and Jazz, 301-315.
[17] Ted Gioia, The History of Jazz (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 21-30.
[18]Jody Kerchner L and Carlos R. Abril, Musical experience in our lives: things we learn and meanings we make (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Education, 2009), 225-230.
[19] Oliver, Harrison, and Bolcom. The new groove Gospel, Blues, and Jazz: 322.
[20] Michael Campbell, Popular music in America: the beat goes on, (Boston: Schirmer Cengage Learning, 2012), 51-54.
[21] Darden, People get read, 22-31.
[22] Jones, Jazz of Preaching, 115-135.
[23] Darden, People get read, 38-45.
[24] Campbell, Popular music in America, 51-54.
[25] Hayes and Williams, Black Women and Music: more than the Blues, 15-29.
[26] Hayes and Williams, Black Women and Music: more than the Blues, 29.
[27] Oliver, Harrison, and Bolcom. The new groove Gospel, Blues, and Jazz, 216-220.
[28] Hayes and Williams, Black Women and Music: more than the Blues, 75-90.
[29] Bowie, African American Musical Heritage, 1600-present, 322.
[30] Oliver, Harrison, and Bolcom. The new groove Gospel, Blues, and Jazz, 210-215.
[31] Bowie, African American Musical Heritage, 1600-present, 200-271.
[32] Bowie, African American Musical Heritage, 1600-present, 370.
[33] Gioia, The History of Jazz, 21-30.
[34] Oliver, Harrison, and Bolcom. The new groove Gospel, Blues, and Jazz, 110-115.
[35] Bowie, African American Musical Heritage, 1600-present, 101-125.
[36] Darden, People get read, 35-50.
[37] Hayes and Williams, Black Women and Music: more than the Blues, 216-218.
[38] Gioia, The History of Jazz, 21-30; Aretha. Awesome-American rock and soul musicians, 210-238.
[39] Oliver, Harrison, and Bolcom. The new groove Gospel, Blues, and Jazz, 90-101.
