Congamyk,
I agree with what you say, with these exceptions:
• Black spirituals, Delta blues, and Missouri ragtime music are Afro-Euro hybrids. Rhythmically, there are some elements in jazz that clearly originated in Africa, rather than Europe.
After the Civil War, African Americans were able to obtain surplus bass and snare marching drums, and fifes. This was probably the first expression of the African American-style drumming tradition. A common underlying rhythmic motif in African American drum and fife music is the figure the Cubans call
tresillo:
X . . X . . X .
The tradition had survived in Mississippi until rather recently.
“It is probably safe to say that by and large the simpler African rhythmic patterns survived in jazz, even in transformed cross-accents, because they could be adapted more readily to European rhythmic conceptions . . . It may also account for the fact that a pattern such as [tresillo], so common as a ground pattern in African music, has remained one of the most useful and common syncopated patterns in jazz”—Gunther Schuller.
Early Jazz v. 1, Its Roots and Musical Development (1968: 19).
- Gunther Schuller. Early Jazz v. 1, Its Roots and Musical Development
"In New Orleans, our clave goes: X . . X . . X . X . . X . . X . [tresillo]"—Wynton Marsalis (60 Minutes 1/2/11).
http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7206311n• The use of call-and-response in African American music shares traits with the call-and-response heard in sub-Saharan and Diaspora musics.
• Academics have long lumped jazz harmony into Western music theory, and while that certainly is valid, the tendency has been to ignore the African harmonic element of this Afro-Euro hybrid. The most obvious example is the blues, which while an African American original, owes a lot to the music of the Sudanic belt shown in the map below.
This map shows those areas in sub-Saharan African where blues traits are found in traditional music. From
Africa and the Blues by Gerhard Kubik (1999).
Jazz pianists of the mid-20th century were certainly familiar with the repertoire of European art music. It stands to reason then, that the sophisticated harmonies in jazz are often attributed to the harmonic revolution of the European Impressionistic era at the turn of the 20th century. It has been pointed out many times that jazz uses some of the same harmonies found in Impressionistic compositions by the likes of Claude Debussy. However, music theorists and educators may have sold the African influence short, by neatly fitting jazz harmony into the greater European harmonic matrix of Western music theory. Kubik posits that the fit is in reality, not that neat, and we must look to the blues if we are to fully comprehend jazz harmony:
“To understand what happened in the development of bebop, it is useful, therefore, to delineate some areas of maximal divergence from Western diatonicism:
1. The blues tonal system clashes with the Western diatonic system most prominently in the latter's dominant-based fuctionalism. While the subdominant mode is acceptable, it is by now well known that many blues musicians in the Deep South have avoided the dominant seventh chord that was imposed upon their predecessors through Western folk and popular music in the nineteenth century (Kubik 1999a, 127). Bebop musicians had the courage to reject it even more radically. The progression dominant to tonic, its leading tone long avoided melodically in jazz, now became the target of substitution. The chord D, (7) was often used as a substitution chord and resolved into Cmaj (7), for example. Or the dominant chord was extended upward, for example, G (13).
2. Comparable to melodic and harmonic progressions in African music (and in the blues), movement of chord sequences in bebop emphasizes resolutions in a downward direction, eliminating all memory of the European leading-note tonality.
3. Shifting chords downward in parallelism and semitone steps was, of course, already current practice in swing jazz, such as Em (7) to E[flat] m (7) to Dm (7), the last chord replacing the dominant seventh chord in the third line, measure 9 of a twelve-bar blues; but in bebop, this system of moving in narrow steps downward was much more expanded. In Africa, this is familar practice; such progressions are common in equiheptatonic tunings, often ending on a "raised tonic," as for example in the Cuambo and Khokola mambila xylophone music that I recorded in Mozambique and Malawi. (25)
4. The upward extension of triads in bebop follows two very different principles, both inherited from African practices. One could be called "the central African model" of piling thirds on top of each other; the other principle is the selective use of upper harmonics, an auditory experience in African-American traditions transmitted through the blues. Because higher partials cannot be played exactly on a piano, the pianist chooses optimal approximations. Upper partials are what Charlie Parker must have heard internally when he tried to work out something new over "Cherokee." Thus even within the tuning of the European tonal system, C (9) in bebop and earlier blues-based jazz can be taken as a column of harmonics incorporating partials 4, 5, 6, 7, and 9; and its cognate, [C.sup.+11], the augmented eleventh chord, is but a representation of the harmonic series up to partial 11. Because that partial stands at 551 cents, its pitch value cannot be played accurately on a keyboard instrument; soft is used to represent it. That note fulfills its task much better than f, because f would simply corroborate the diatonic scale.
5. The central tonality of the blues provided another important foundation for bebop. The more bebop musicians had dismantled the dominant-tonic cliche, the more jazz returned to an auditory awareness of a strong tonal center. A decade later, in Ornette Coleman's free jazz, functional harmony would even be abandoned while the twelve-bar blues form would be maintained as a mold. This signifies the de facto return to a non-Western, possibly west-central Sudanic concept of tonality and perhaps to a type of blues structure sung to rift-like accompanying patterns devoid of any functional European folk harmony. (At a later stage, Ornette Coleman also abandoned the counting of the twelve bars)”—"Bebop: a case in point: The African Matrix in Jazz Harmonic Practices,"
Black Music Research Journal (Gerhard Kubik 3/22/05).
“One of the signs of the increasing ambivalence the young musicians of the 1940s felt toward diatonicism in jazz was their recourse to the blues tonal system. This was a foundation on which one could build. The blues tonal system, based on the retention and cultural transmission of auditory materials of non-Western origin, has found expression in jazz history in the most diverse ways and on various instruments. Shortly before the rise of bebop, Jimmy Yancey, Meade Lux Lewis, and others had brought a hitherto-unknown blues-related African legacy to the surface: boogie-woogie. Some left-hand bass lines could have been a reminder about blues tonality's background in west-central Sudanic traditions, and so would boogie-woogie's specific swing and "walking" bass figures that alternate the fifth and sixth scale degrees”—Kubik (3/22/05).
Below: Banda-Dakpa Horn Orchestra, Central Africa (top), and Rahsaan Roland Kirk playing three saxophones simultaneously (bottom).
The bottom line is that jazz is an original Afro-Euro hybrid and to deny either the African or European contributions is a mistake.
-David