A Sad Day for American Music

 A few days ago I was reading the obituary of one of my favorite musicians and someone I consider an American hero, Dave Brubeck.  The obituary, which can be found here, contains a section about Brubeck's fight against racism.  While I was reading this it really struck me how as a whole, jazz musicians were so far ahead of their times regarding race issues.  People like Jelly Roll Morton in the 1920's and Benny Goodman in the the 30's led integrated bands that performed publicly, something unheard of in their days. Even today in Chicago, which is generally a very segregated city, if you go to the jazz showcase you will see both audiences and performing groups that are very evenly integrated.  All this really made wonder about why this might me true.

The most logical reason that I could think of comes from the origins of jazz.  Jazz was born out mixture of many musical styles.  Much of jazz comes from African American spiritual music.  This later developed into things like blues and ragtime, both hey ingredients in jazz.  However, jazz also takes a lot of influences from minstrel show tunes, music created by solely white artist which comes from European folk music.  So jazz is a unique combination of very culture centered White and African American music.  I think that because of this one can't really properly play or understand jazz music unless they can fully comprehend and respect how all of its cultural influences can be combined, leading successful jazz musicians to be very tolerant to race differences.