Jazz Music Age

Jazz Age

Music is the most eloquent metaphor through which individuals communicate the unknowable, and name the unnamable. Aristotle once said, "Metaphor accomplishes the supremely difficult task of providing a name for everything"; the famous conductor Leonard Bernstein extends upon Aristotle's words by saying, " Music is the ultimate metaphor for communicating our interior lives, what cannot be named otherwise; our psychic landscapes of actions." Not surprisingly, African Americans along with a vast majority of other musicians commenced to realize this precious value of musical expression. Jazz, revolutionary to music as it was, represented a commendable form of free speech through which African Americans were enabled to protest and largely influence the social matters of their era. The background of jazz and the lives of African Americans, its revolution in the path of music, and its symbolization as a social movement, shed light on how the society began to regard jazz as asocial icon.

Through encountering copious problems in every aspect of their social lives, African Americans began to consider jazz a reflection of their bitter hardships. Many blacks suffered through racial discrimination, their hands were tied, and there was no one who would hear what they had to say. The early years of the twentieth century were utterly disagreeable to the lives of the African American living the in the confederacy. The distasteful years of slavery had passed; yet, the segregated society had created a racist ambiance among its citizens. Education, employment, and even neighborhoods were platforms of such discrimination (Awmiller 27). Hence, banishing slavery had not added any beams of light or any essence of freedom to the lives of discriminated African Americans enticing their natural wills for liberty. Jazz was born in despair and was aimed to voice the word of the deprived even back in the very old days when slavery had just entered the American society. "The long prehistory of jazz begins with the rhythmic music slaves brought to America in the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries and developed on Southern plantations." Slaves and segregated African Americans brought jazz into life for the sake of their own relief, hoping to address their exasperating quotidian challenges through musical metaphor. In their attempt to to protest against the pressure to conform, African Americans actively defined their very civil and basic rights through jazz. A year before the Great Crash occurred, Bessie Smith recorded "Poor Man Blues" in 1928:

They'll make a honest man do things that you know is wrong

....

Poor man fought all the battles, poor man would fight again today

Poor man fought