Miles Davis and American Culture by Gerald Early

8 For others, black musicians created idealized and woke communities of color, which inspired the development of progressive black social and spiritual movements. 7 For the interracial musical scene of the forties and fifties, jazz improvisation was often viewed as the ultimate integrated music, crossing the color line and social categories with aplomb. For Wynton Marsalis, the jazz ensemble is democracy in action: participatory, inclusive, challenging, competitive, and collective.

These collective musical relationships became generalized into idealized concepts of community that pervade our contemporary understanding of jazz. Indeed, two of the most influential heroes in jazz-Miles Davis and John Coltrane–are known by the brilliance of their quartets and quintets, which became the most revered models of group interplay. Jazz improvisation celebrates the heroic genius improviser, but, as musicians know, that brilliance often depends on the collective magic of the right band: individuals who compliment, anticipate, inspire, and upset each other into a communal whole greater than the sum of its parts. 2 Anthropologist Alan Merriam notes that there are also Hausa and Arabic words that may be related to the term: jaiza, the rumbling of distant drums, and jazb, allurement or attraction.

Others say that the word “arose from corruptions of the abbreviations of the first names of early musicians: ‘Charles’ (Chas.) or ‘James’ (Jas).” Some have thought it came from the slang word for semen or that it came from “jazzing,” a slang word for fornication. How did the music come to be called this and what does this word mean? Jazz bassist Bill Crow points out that some have thought the word comes the French verb jaser, or to chatter. Even the word “jazz” itself is wrapped in mystery. But if jazz is partly-through its challenging demands as a musical form, through the various changes through which it has sustained itself over the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, and through its aspirations to both embody and transform modernity-a music of clear and revealed intentions, it remains an art that many, even many of its devotees, do not fully understand. Perhaps, like Miles Davis, jazz itself is a mystique wrapped in an enigma, an essential or inescapable unknowingness that makes this music attractive for its audience.

Miles Davis and American Culture by Gerald Early