Enriching Experience Through Social Justice
As noted in the
mission statement of the VCU Jazz Studies Program: “Jazz has long been and will
long remain a basis for myriad musics derived from jazz roots; crossing all
cultures, genders, and nations; absorbing from and spilling over into
classical, rock, popular, and more. Our goal is to prepare our students for
that future.”
Part of that future
is recognizing that the history and expression of jazz intersects with America’s
history. In his comments delivered within the printed program for the 1964
Berlin Jazz Festival, Dr. Martin Luther King wrote the following regarding jazz: “Much of the power of our Freedom
Movement in the United States has come from this music. It has strengthened us
with its powerful rhythms when courage began to fail. It has calmed us with its
rich harmonies when spirits began to lag. This has been true from the early
days of the simple Negro Spiritual. And now, Jazz is exported to the world.”
The fight for equal
rights in our country found long ago a champion in jazz: many jazz artists have
spoken up—musically and verbally—often paying a societal or financial price, or
both. The very roots of jazz, stemming so much from the expression of enslaved
Africans and into the generations that followed, dictate that to understand the
music, you must understand the people who created it and the world they lived
in. This is in part how an artist avoids cultural appropriation: an artist must
recognize and respect the culture and traditions of the persons whose art they
are emulating and building upon.
Jazz’s future
demands that our students learn that performing and composing jazz is more than
finding good notes: you have to find something to say and the skill to say it.
Musically, this is simply a representation of what it means to study at a
university: to study more than one’s core subject in order to understand your
own core more clearly. What our students ultimately may say through their music
is up to them, but we cannot ignore that expressing the need for change towards
a better world is a constant that runs through much of the jazz community.