If your usual methods of essay procrastination are failing you this week, try spending an hour and a half watching the inaugural BAM conference that took place at Birdland in New York earlier this month. The trumpeter Nicholas Payton’s suggestion that we should ditch the word ‘jazz’ in favour of ‘BAM’, an acronym for ‘Black American Music’, has been creating controversy ever since its first appearance on his incendiary but thought-provoking blog. The level of public interest in his argument is testament to the fact that the movement he is trying to create clearly has implications outside of jazz, both musically and culturally.
Nicholas Payton: a controversial figure
Payton argues that ‘there’s a negative historical attachment to [jazz]‘, and that ‘we never named our music that as black people’, citing the Original Dixieland Jass Band, an all-white outfit and the first to record jazz for profit, as a frivolous white caricature of a serious black art. According to Payton, jazz, as a word, ‘was racist at its inception’ and representative of a ‘colonialist mentality’, which resulted in a means of expression belonging to an oppressed minority being gradually bastardised by an exploitative dominant group for commercial gain. A flurry of different reactions suggests that there are people who are willing to take issue with this viewpoint, but Payton is undeniably right in saying that, racist or not, the mention of the word jazz can mean that ‘it’s OK if there’s only two people in the club, it’s OK if you only sell 50 records, it’s OK if you only pay the cats $50′.
Despite his justified reference to lowered expectations and underpaid musicians, Payton’s argument is not primarily commercially motivated: BAM, apart from anything else, seems to be an attempt to reinvigorate an art form and reintroduce it to the public, and to acknowledge the heritage of the music. In theory, it’s hard to find fault with the idea of rechristening jazz as BAM: jazz is Black American Music. But then, what would be the fate of soul, funk, R&B, or hip-hop? Surely these would have to be called BAM, too.
To distinguish jazz from these other forms of BAM, if it needs to be distinguished from them, Henry Threadgill’s suggestion of ‘creative improvised music’ would appear to be a viable alternative. Jazz, however, is far from being the only music involving improvisation: examples are wide-ranging, from improvised organ accompaniments in the Baroque era to fully improvised musicals today. Attempts at finite categorisation of music with certain common characteristics inevitably results in genre, a dangerously reductive term in itself, becoming more fluid, and less reliable. In a perfect world, we would all agree with saxophonist Gary Bartz when he comments that ‘from time immemorial, musicians don’t name their music, because it’s music’. This, however, is unrealistic, as evidenced by the irony in the fact that he is expressing this opinion whilst sitting on a panel that advocates a change from ‘jazz’ to ‘BAM’.
Showstopper! The Improvised Musical: not BAM
For some, the argument has implications that reach far wider than complexities of genre. Gary Bartz says of jazz that ‘it’s insulting, it’s like calling you the n-word’ because ‘people see an image. Drugs. No money.’ It is deeply worrying that a term that is openly and unthinkingly used by so many can be seen as so derogatory. Surely, there are people who frequently refer to and make use of the term (writers of jazz blogs, for example) who are not racists. There are countless institutions (such as Jazzwise, the London Jazz Festival, and Jazz at Lincoln Center) that necessarily use the term on a daily basis. These are not racist organisations – Jim Davidson doesn’t have time to run them all. There are respected, successful musicians (including Christian McBride and Jeremy Pelt) who have no problem with the word. There will always be people using the term who may not have as nuanced an understanding of its meaning and connotations as Bartz himself. This means that a word as divisive as ‘jazz’ needs to be contextualised by the way it is meant as well as in which it is received.
Christian McBride: 'jazz has always been Black American Music'
A change to ‘BAM’ is likely to agitate other racial sensibilities. Would white musicians feel as if they were trespassing on an art form that others have made clear isn’t their own? Would white audiences feel unwelcome in a club? Payton offers the reassurance that ‘it’s not about excluding white people or any other race because many people have been great at this form of communication’; rather, BAM is simply an attempt to ‘understand and acknowledge once and for all that this is a black creation that came out of a struggle’. In other words, it is a black American creation, but anyone can play it. At Birdland, the awkward laughter that greeted every hesitant substitution of ‘jazz’ for ‘the j-word’ suggests that a wholesale abandonment of the term – let alone its replacement by ‘BAM’ – would take a significant amount of time. This is to be expected: long-standing attitudes and assumptions would need to be destabilised and subverted.
Some will be unsure that emphasising a specific racial element of jazz is helpful, given the amount of conflict and tension that already exists (notably between musicians and critics) about who is entitled to play and critique the music. When a white musician plays jazz (or, for that matter, anyone who isn’t a black American), they are arguably not trying to claim ownership of a black American music, but instead are trying to participate in and contribute to a 100-year-long dialogue that has become a worldwide collaboration. Certainly, its heritage should be preserved and its origins not forgotten (the Wynton Marsalis school, for example, has an important role to play), but in the case of BAM, those who would defend the music risk stifling its progress by unintentionally decreasing the number of people ‘eligible’ to play it, if the ultimately inclusive nature of their message is not communicated successfully.
BAM is undoubtedly neither racist nor exclusionary, but there is a significant risk that some will see it that way. Leaving aside personal responses to this particular controversy, to deny that racism still exists in jazz would be complacent and unhelpful. BAM is not the panacea it is considered to be by some of its advocates in America, but the debate it generates is vital and there is unquestionably much more to be said on the subject.
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