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COPYRIGHT 2005 Center For Black Music Research
In 1998, a flyer was circulated announcing the appearance of the Garland Encyclopedia of World Music. On that leaflet, the publishers subjected readers to a test with five questions under this heading: "How Well Do You Know World Music?" The first of these questions in statement form was "American jazz borrows its harmonic structure from European classical music." Readers were supposed to mark whether the statement was true or false. The answer given on the back of the flyer for those still in doubt was "True." Thereby was endorsed one of the most tenacious stereotypes about jazz, the all-embracing notion that harmony in jazz and other African-American music was "European" in origin, while the rhythm was "African."
Unfortunately, the facts are much more complex. Before the topic called "jazz theory" became part of the curriculum in jazz schools across the United States, harmonic practices in jazz were not always so Western or "European." Chord symbols such as [Gm.sup.9], [G.sup.09], [E.sup.o7], [E.sup.(7[flat]5)], and so on, with their implicit reference to Western music theory, had served jazz musicians as a useful notational set, just as the Roman alphabet is useful for writing English, French, Latin, and Kiswahili. These symbols are coins with a hidden face. Jazz chords and progressions have functioned like the system of the orixa in Brazil. To a Catholic, the orixa can be explained as a set of Catholic saints, but a Yoruba from Nigeria will recognize all of them as transcendental beings in the Yoruba religion, and Afro-Brazilians in the Candomble religious meetings will think both ways.
Melville J. Herskovits (1941), to whom we owe much insight into the processes of culture contact, called such phenomena syncretism. Herskovits's terminology, embracing selection, retention, survival, reinterpretation, syncretism, and cultural focus, is still very useful (see Evans 1990, 1999), although occasionally with some necessary conceptual modification. Syncretism, for example, should not be understood as a blend or merger of different cognitive systems; rather, it is, at least originally, an attempt at a parallel, "bilingual" presentation of ideas that one can read in either of the two codes (Kubik 1991, 174-176).
From a standpoint in Western music theory claiming universal applicability, it is often difficult to comprehend that jazz musicians have always converted the tonal-harmonic resources provided by the Western instruments that they played to suit their own concepts, strongly rooted in blues tonality. From my viewpoint, as someone who has spent a lifetime in African cultures and recorded some twenty-six thousand items of African music since 1959 in eighteen countries, jazz harmony at its structural and aesthetic level is based predominantly on African matrices, although it must be added that individual jazz performers, ensembles, and composers vary in the degree to which their harmonic practices and understandings are more African- or more European-derived. It may vary even from one work to another or one performer to another.
I am not the only one who has gathered such a glimpse of the hidden side of the coin. Actually, it was Percival R. Kirby who in his article "A Study of Negro Harmony" (1930) first detected a structural principle of African provenance in the harmonic patterns of Negro spirituals. Later, in 1951, A. M. Jones wrote on "blue notes and hot rhythm"; and there was the eminent Richard A Waterman (1952, 209), who pointed to common evolutionary roots of harmony in European and African music:
Harmony ... appears in aboriginal music nowhere but in the western one-third of the Old World, where it is common in European folk music and African tribal music.... [T]here exists a broad intrusive belt of Arabic and Arabic-influenced music which stretches across the middle of the western area, along both shores of the Mediterranean. Since the times of ancient history this alien musical outcropping has masked the fact of the previous existence of a continuous harmony-using bloc of cultures established earlier in the area.
Although Waterman ignored Polynesia, and his view of a former historical unity of European and African harmony is probably an overstatement since the "intrusive" nonharmonic sector existed across North Africa and Mediterranean Europe before the Arabs and Islam arrived (e.g., among Egyptians, Phoenicians, Romans, and Berbers), it is important that Waterman, like Kirby, recognized the precolonial existence of harmony in the music of sub-Saharan Africa.
More recently, Thomas Brothers (1994, 490) has drawn attention to melodic anticipation of harmonic schemes in Louis Armstrong's "Big Butter and Egg Man," recorded in 1926. He writes that "Armstrong's F chord comes a measure early, and as a result the phrase structure of the solo collides with the harmonic rhythm of the accompaniment." Brothers, who carried out fieldwork in Ghana, points to the fact that such behavior serves "an African conception of syntax that involves two levels, a fundamental and a supplemental, with the supplemental moving in and out of agreement with the fundamental." To some, this may sound esoteric in its formulation, but in fact, insights like Brothers' open jazz to cognitive investigation. At one level of inquiry, it may be sufficient to identify the social processes that promote or inhibit innovation, or to study the sounds and their sequences that musician-composers produce, but at another level, we would like to learn about the musical concepts and nonverbal thought patterns that fuel and steer those results.
It seems that in jazz history from the 1920s to the 1950s, different sets of African traits became prominent in succession. Heterophony and responsorial, functional polyphony were dominant in early New Orleans jazz, as in the testimony by Bunk Johnson and musicians such as clarinet player George Lewis, who had remained local (that is, not emigrating to the North during the early 1920s); homophonic multipart structures set the tone of big-band jazz during the swing era of the 1930s, while equitonal melodic principles, clustered chords often based on remote partials, and what has been called the pitch area concept in the blues (Evans 1982, 24) staged a breakthrough in bebop of the 1940s.
In a sense, jazz history was also like a series of volcanic eruptions. Whenever a new jazz style appeared, it brought to the surface something that had been dormant in America for some time, which was then recognized as something with which we have been familiar from somewhere in Africa. In my wife's village in Malawi, I remember that in 1967 there were rap artists; they pronounced their complaints while walking, for everyone to hear. Some were indeed the "public enemy" of the established political hierarchy. We did not call it rap, of course; we simply called it declamatory oral literature.
The fascinating thing about jazz history is that when something new appears, as bebop did most radically in Minton's Playhouse in Harlem in 1941, it often seems to re-create concepts, traits, and aesthetic principles central to some African cultures somewhere on the map. In America, however, they erupt in a new disguise, as if remolded or reconfigured with a different type of clay. Thus, a time journey through jazz and blues history is often like an excursion through different African cultures. In one style of jazz or blues, one gets more traits from the west-central Sudanic savanna and Sahel zone, in another from the Congo and the Guinea coast, and in a third from the Zambezi valley and northern Mozambique. From a viewpoint inside Africa, it is difficult to escape the feeling of deja vu that periodically arises.
The present article is a preliminary exploration of this dimension of jazz history, excluding rhythm and other details that are easy to analyze, while concentrating on the question of tonal-harmonic structures and patterns. The subject is further narrowed by the fact that I deal only with African, and no other, matrices in jazz, but that does not express any deliberate neglect of the other face on the orixa coin.
Recorded African Traditions of Multipart Singing
The age-old presence of specific multipart styles and compositional principles, both vocal and instrumental, in the music of sub-Saharan Africa is no longer much of a dispute. There are numerous works dealing with the subject. In Africa, there are large areas in which only singing in unison and octaves is practiced, such as among pastoralists: the Cushitic speakers of northeast Africa, the Fulbe cattle herders in West Africa, and the Hereto pastoralists in Namibia. However, unison and octave styles do not exclude the development of polyphony; the evidence is the instrumental polyphony on xylophones and harps that developed in the precolonial kingdom of Buganda in East Africa's interlacustrine region, a very complex serial music, with no simultaneous sounds other than octaves allowed (see Kubik 1994). Octave styles in Africa contrast with large pockets of harmonic traditions, for example, along the Guinea coast, from the ancient city of Benin, the Ijesha- and Ekiti-Yoruba--speaking peoples, to the Ivory Coast and southern Ghana, where harmonic composition techniques among the Fanti and Asante were first described by Thomas Edward Bowdich in 1819. Another large "harmonic patch" covers areas of Congo-Brazzaville, Congo-Kinshasa, southwestern Angola, eastern Angola into Zambia, expanding into the Zambezi valley and other parts of southern and eastern Africa (Kubik 1996).
Although we cannot time travel for verification, there is good reason to assume that Africa was one of the planet's cradles of polyphony. Bushmen hunter-gatherers must have discovered the harmonic properties of stretched strings as soon as they had discovered the use of the bow and arrow; and this knowledge has continued until today, with the !Kung', for example, using no fewer than four different kinds of harmonics-producing techniques on hunting bows (Kubik 1994, 217-224). Equally, the pygmies of central Africa developed polyphony probably thousands of years ago--although, in contrast to the savanna-inhabiting bushmen, not from instrumental techniques but from the formants of speech and vocal techniques such as yodel--long before their forests were invaded by Bantu-language speakers from eastern Nigeria and the Cameroons between circa 1000 and 400 B.C. Some of these invaders then adopted the pygmy-style polyphony, while others retained their own multipart experiences.
In 1946, Andre Didier and Gilbert Rouget of the Musee de l'Homme in Paris recorded fascinating multipart singing in the then French Congo: heptatonic harmony in lush triadic chord clusters. I reconfirmed the existence of these styles among the Bongili and Bakota in 1964 during my own travels (see transcription outline in Kubik 1998, 664). In the 1950s, Rouget documented an equiheptatonic singing style among the Baule of the Ivory Coast, with its characteristic neutral thirds. (1) And in 1965 in eastern Angola, I recorded homophonic three- and four-part singing in initiation ceremonies and masked performances among the -Mbwele, -Nkhangala, -Lucazi, and -Cokwe. This is an area displaying a non-modal style that involves chord progressions that fluctuate between major, minor, and neutral triads. An impressive example is a song in the women's secret tuwema (flames) society. (2)
I recorded in 1964 shifting of chord clusters by a semitone in the sya stories among the [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] settled in the southwestern forests of the Central African Republic. In that culture area, there is a strict parallelism of individual voices. The principle of chord formation in this style could be described as stacking of thirds on top of each other. In principle, this process is unlimited. Sometimes one gets only two voices in parallel major thirds. In another performance of the same tune, one gets three voices, forming major triads. In one version of the song "Atende," which I recorded at Bigene village in 1964, a fourth singer joined with yet another third on top of the triad. Thereby, the progression turned most naturally into parallel movement between two major sevenths, a semitone apart: [Cmaj.sup.7] to [D[flat]maj.sup.7] and back (see Ex. 1).
[ILLUSTRATION 1 OMITTED]
All of these harmonic traditions used to flourish in places that were relatively isolated. There were no influences from church songs or mass-media music. Probably they were centuries-old local developments, and some of them had restricted distribution areas.
In light of the precolonial presence of distinct harmonic practices in many parts of Africa from where people were deported to New World destinations, it would be strange if nothing of the underlying concepts had survived in African-American cultures....
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