Why “Make Jazz Not War” rather than “Make Music Not War”? My great-nephew Henry’s father asked me that. My flip pat answer is to reel off Wagner, Sousa, Dixie, Uber Alles, fight songs, and any other reference to fascistic music that pops. Music is too broad a term for a contrast with war if only because it includes these.
Jazz provides a metaphorical structure for living in community that many genres cannot. In classical music one person decides what notes will be played, one person directs, and everyone else does what they’re told. Other genres are also too limited. They rely on the same old changes and resist changes. They start to sound the same and eventually you’re not listening to what their heart. Making jazz is about communicating. Sometimes you hear people say jazz is a conversation. It’s more than a conversation. It’s a trust, a relationship. It’s an adventure, a creative experiment. Jazz is listening, probing, searching for the new land.
Jazz is a concept that includes every art form. It’s a dance, a poem, a sculpture. It’s a squeak and a scream, a purr and a red and every kind of rasp. It can contain any genre. Ray Charles used country music. Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra used songs from the Spanish Civil War. The best of popular music becomes jazz standards. Blues, salsa, gospel, rock, opera, folk, Celtic, gamelan, soul, Filipino, Gwa Ko, you name it – somebody’s used it or collaborated with it sometime in the history of jazz.
The most important reason it’s “Make Jazz”, not “Make Music “, is the jazz ethos – what I call jazzlife. Jazzlife is three intertwined principles that rest upon each other: collaboration, improvisation, and communication. There might be more, but those are my basic three. Especially improvisation. We all improvise all the time. We have to, because we live in a world that changes all the time. The better we get at improvising, the better we cope with change. Collaboration and communication come into it because we don’t improvise in a vacuum. Everyone around us is improvising too and we all interact. It works better if we do it together.
