By Katerina Valouxi,
Jazz and rap are two music genres that are so different yet so similar that they can merge seamlessly if utilized creatively enough by the right people. Rap is tied to the people of the streets, whose thoughts, rage, and suffering could only be expressed through the art form that was closer to them, and that is why rap as a genre, like its people, is oftentimes marginalized. On the other hand, jazz was created not only to showcase black people’s suffering but also their celebration of love, joy, and creativity. Ultimately, what unites these two music genres is inarguably their history of black artists striving to speak out through their art against the system’s discriminatory practices.
While it is a common belief that rap music as we know it today originates from the South Bronx, it is possible that its roots can be traced back to Egypt and South Africa. There were the South African Imbongi praised poets, traditionally male, oral poets, who recited poems and songs with a narrative-like quality, and whose presence is still important in South African communities. Moreover, the Black Africans of ancient Egypt always expressed their deep devotion to the written and the spoken word. For them, speech, the ability to create words and improvise when speaking, was a divine gift. According to the Kenyan writer and academic Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, an early prototype of hip hop and rap battles can be acknowledged in East Africa’s Giyuku festival, at an event in which “the best poets of the various regions would meet in the arena, like in a [hip hop] battle, and compete with words and instant compositions. These poets had even developed a form of hierographics [graffiti-writing]”.
Every language owns musical elements like pitch, stress, and intonation, but these characteristics are particularly prominent in most West African languages because a word said at a certain pitch, for example, might have a different meaning if uttered at a different pitch. Thus, languages of African descent seem to be “musical” and rely on the rhythmic flow of the words, just like rap music does. In America, black music did not just serve as a form of entertainment but also as a social function meant to celebrate freedom and emancipation from slavery. Through their music, African Americans also wished to preserve their African roots and the tradition of reverence for the spoken word (Nommo) of the African rhetorician. Rap borrows characteristics from other genres of African American music like blues, gospel, R & B, and jazz, employing punning and freestyling, elements also found in Black literature. The birth of rap as we know it today, with its old-school hip hop or drill beats, was an attempt to rebel against the invasive forces and the gentrification that was threatening areas of New York like the Bronx. Hence, black rappers were speaking out against the suppressive urban renewal of their already established communities.
Jazz as a music genre was also marginalized and not given enough credit, at least not until its rise during the 1920s. Jazz is viewed in general as a blend of European music and African musical styles that were brought to America by African slaves. However, because there are no recordings of early jazz due to musicians playing almost everything by ear, there have been misconceptions and biases surrounding jazz and its origins. Early jazz scholars and the media focused on white jazz musicians and gave little to no attention to black musicians of the time, something that continued happening even after 1920, when jazz started being established as a respectable music genre. For example, it is undeniable that New Orleans was an important place for early jazz as well as “Latin” music to bloom and develop because of its geographical proximity to the Caribbean islands. However, it was not the birthplace of it. Black musicians were playing jazz in places all over America even before the turn of the 20th century, but in New Orleans, white musicians were the successful jazz artists to whom credit was given for the music that originated from black people.
While European music surely interacted with jazz and influenced it in one way or another, it is unfair to undermine it and tone it down to a genre that existed only because of interaction with white America and European-style marching bands, as it is commonly thought. However, like rap, jazz derived from the need to express different facets of life and community. Early jazz can be found in African ceremonial music played in funerals, which, however, later became music that accompanied dancing, collecting elements from the blues as well as ragtime (a music style characterized by syncopated rhythm, usually written for piano solo or banjo). In addition, the writer J.A. Rogers claimed that jazz had folk roots: “The earliest jazz makers were the itinerant piano players who wandered up and down the Mississippi towns from saloon to saloon”, which shows that jazz was played before in rural areas that did not interact with urban centers like New Orleans. After strict and racist legislation was imposed in the South in the late 19th century, a huge wave of black people who migrated to the North took their music with them and established a black music scene in New York, where jazz was most prominent.
Noise is important to both rap and jazz. Rap is often said to be noisy and disrupting, while jazz is said to be disorderly, tumultuous, and too exotic. Rap is considered to be disturbing because it is often characterized by loud sounds, either natural or, later on, computer generated, in order to emphasize the bold intonation and flow of the words, and thus it has been stereotyped as “ghetto music”. Jazz was also pinned with the label of “race music” because it firstly sounded weird and disturbing to the untrained ear, due to both genres not conforming to the norms of white music at the time. In the 1940s, African American musicians created “bebop” jazz, a genre that attempted to be “noisy” and loud to rebel against the oppression of the system. What both rap and bebop have in common is creating a rhetoric of resistance and rebellion using loud drum sounds and freestyling. The creative forces that crafted hip hop, rap, and jazz made these genres become more than just music; they became revolutionary tools with which people still fight injustice and corruption while also celebrating joy, talent, and creativity all over the world.
References
- Tsitsos, William. “Race, class, and place in the origins of techno and rap music.” Popular Music and Society 41.3 (2018): 270-282.
- Baruti, Kopano. “Rap music as an extension of the black rhetorical tradition: Keepin’It Real.” Western Journal of Black Studies, Winter 26.4 (2002): 204-214.
- Bashonga, Ragi. Selling Narratives: An Ethnography of the Spoken Word Movement in Pretoria and Johannesburg. MS thesis. University of Pretoria (South Africa), 2015.
- McKay, Cory. “The Origins of Jazz.” Journal Vol 9.1 (1989): 2.
