Jazz, Identity & the Meaning of Life

What does jazz reveal about humanity? Is it the ultimate enlightened vision of ourselves?

Photo by Filip Mishevski on Unsplash

Today’s post is part of a monthly exploration of Jazz.

Sometimes I think one cannot write about the meaning of life because it is beyond words. Other times, I think the answer must be a simple one word answer: love or happiness.

But what are these one word things? What do they look like? Feel like? I mean, how do we know they exist in the form they are supposed to exist? How do we accept the legitimacy of their presence in our lives?

The great critic and professor Terry Eagleton writes about jazz as the meaning of life in The Meaning of Life. After several chapters investigating the question from literary and theoretical, as well as some psychological and biological, perspectives, he arrives at the idea that “love and happiness” are central to the (still undefined) answer. He also speaks of a shared humanity central to any individual forms of enlightenment. Jazz seems to be that abstract other that reflects this life force within us.

However possible this idea may be without a clear definition of its representation, he moves onto the metaphor of a jazz group (pp. 99-101), where each member functions freely and independently:

The complex harmony they fashion comes not from playing from a collective score, but from the free musical expression of each member acting as the basis for the free expression of the others….There is self-realization, but only through a loss of self in the music as a whole….[T]here is also happiness in the sense of flourishing. Because this flourishing is reciprocal, we can even speak, remotely and analogically, of a kind of love. One could do worse, surely, than propose such a situation as the meaning of life – both in the sense that it is that when we act in this way, we realize our natures at their finest.

Eagleton suggests that although the jazz group is functioning at an extremely high level of musical understanding, it is also representative of their core “natures.” He goes on to suggest that jazz is a kind of “utopian aspiration” where everyone functions independently in harmony. However unrealistic he realizes this is, the idea is that we enjoy our lives, assert our authenticity, and appreciate each other’s manifestations of joy:

…What we need is a form of life which is completely pointless, just as the jazz performance is pointless. Rather than serve some utilitarian purpose or earnest metaphysical end, it is a delight in itself.

Can we use jazz for such universal ideas when its roots are in a particular group’s identity and formed from a rich moment in history that followed a tragic one (perhaps also as a continuous subculture if we consider Harlem and African American identity as the center)? Is Eagleton not paying homage to great jazz musicians in doing such or is he falling into the trap of intellectualizing jazz that Ellison detested (which I wrote about last week)?

It seems different to me. Eagleton appreciates traditional jazz, elevating it to a metaphor for all of us to aspire to. One can read more of these tensions in a look at Michel Foucault and John Coltrane, for example, in “Dominant Positions: John Coltrane, Michel Foucault, and the Politics of Representation” and associated discourse.

I think back to Brooks’ line: ‘jazz June’ from “We Real Cool.” It’s a kind of freedom, isn’t it, to verbify jazz in this way? Can we also ‘jazz life’? That is, can we appreciate society’s structures and art forms and engage with them each in our own personal way? If we are able to do so, does this mean we have a free society or a free mind?

Sounds like existentialism, doesn’t it? It should be no surprise, then, that many existentialists (and poststructuralists) not only loved jazz music but the ideas that jazz convey. Ted Gioia tells us that Jean-Paul Sartre “saw jazz as the musical manifestation of the existential freedom he described in his philosophical texts.”

The American Beats — especially Jack Kerouac — “used jazz as a musical model for his writing.” Or, as Douglas Malcom puts it, Kerouac’s “literary experimentation was also modeled on his understanding of jazz improvisation” (p. 85). In Malcom’s discussion of On the Road and representations of both African American culture and jazz music by the white American author, he notes that although Kerouac was interested in representing Black culture and the history of jazz, he was often uninformed or at least not clear enough in his writing it into the novel: “Indeed, his primitivist view of black culture, one that shapes his use of jazz in On the Road, often misrepresents, exaggerates, and suppresses important elements of the music and the culture in which it originated” (p. 94).

In the same essay, Malcom discusses (Black American novelist) Ralph Ellison’s views on jazz as “much more than just musical technique and is, in fact, integral to African American culture wherein each musician’s improvisation ‘represents…a definition of his identity: as individual, as member of the collectivity and as a link in the chain of tradition” (p. 86).

Perhaps jazz can be both? It can be both representative of African American culture and history as well as a more universal concept for Americans…then stretched again for all humanity?

I’ll leave you with another quote from Jon Batiste whom I’ve quotes that last two weeks in connection to his work on the film Soul and with the National Jazz Museum. He talks about jazz and ‘Black identity’ as well as a more universal ontological view. Here, he considers its function in American identity. This quote comes from an interview with Forbes: Jon Batiste: So Much More Than Stephen Colbert's Music Director:

Music is a real form of connection to a higher power at its greatest; music was a form of community that brought people together and gave them a common purpose. Jazz is really a term that doesn't encompass what it's pointing at, [...] the intellectual breadth of black geniuses who were basically denied the credential of being a genius in society because of their skin tone. [...] We always talk about improvisation, and it really is one of the only forms of music that exemplifies the American experiment putting all these different cultures into one country and coexisting and trying to create beautiful music together.

Sometimes as an American ‘expat’ or ‘emigrant’ or whatever you want to call me, people ask me why I live elsewhere and I’ve got plenty of answers. Some practical, others more philosophical. But I’m still American and I think Batiste articulates what I love and often miss about America. Sure, the places I’ve lived have been international and I’ve lived among other cultures elsewhere. Although racism and hatred against immigrants as well as a continued history of denying the native populations’ cultures is real and a massive problem in the US, there are also amazing spaces that manifest the “American experiment” Batiste speaks of here.

The spaces may be someone’s apartment, an art gallery, a school classroom…or a jazz club. And sometimes that space may not need words…merely experiencing the notes and energy together asserts ones identity on stage and another’s — listening at a table. It must be some kind of enlightenment? Some kind of elevation of humanity, at once its core purpose as well as its highly unique articulations?

20. Jazz