How About We Trash the Word “Integral”, and All That Jazz?

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Thought experiment: Imagine that it’s 2062. The Integral movement has helped to usher in a tipping point of heightened awareness so visible and clear that changes in leadership styles, laws, social policies, cultural programs, health care practices, and in the field of psychology, in line with the highest ideals presented by Ken Wilber and other perspicacious thought leaders, become the norm of the cutting edge.

Unforeseen setbacks and unintended consequences have served as setbacks from one point of view, and as springboards to progress from yet another.

As an amoral tool of human culture, technological developments impact communications among human beings based on where individuals and groups cluster on widely available psychographic charts.

Scholars in most academic fields have evolved past the myopia of their particular disciplines, and have embraced models that take into account, as a basic ground, the four quadrants, types, and empirically-based research findings on developmental lines as well as levels and states of consciousness.

But what if one of the then-most respected third generation Integral leaders decides to throw the word “Integral” into the dustbin of history, henceforth and forever more abjuring use of what he or she begins to call the “I” word?

Take a moment to consider how such a stance would make you feel.

Doesn’t sit too well, huh?

Well, if you’ve read some of my blog posts here at Integral Life you know that I strongly position jazz as music with aesthetic depth and sophistication, with grooves for the gut, heart and soul.  Although I’m fully aware that no word, whether “Integral” or “Jazz” captures the full meaning and associated experiential reality, words are what we humans have to describe and classify such realities. My Unique Self celebrates jazz.

So recently, when a well-respected musician playing the music known as jazz decided to dismiss the word jazz and start a movement in which “Black American Music” would be the descriptor, I felt compelled to respond. Two weeks ago, for my Race and Jazz column at the All About Jazz site, I did in fact respond to this nascent movement. The essay has attained approximately 10,000 views as of this writing, so the issue has traction among those who love and follow jazz.

I’m sharing this essay as a follow up to the “Jazz vs. Racism” post from March 2011 (the very first of the aforementioned column), and to get feedback from others in our IL community as to how Integral insights and perspectives can be brought to bear on this issue.  Most of the essay is below; to read up to the conclusion (which includes personal reflections on my early years falling in love with jazz, references to tantric sex, sacred and fractal geometry, and what I call The Tao of Jazz) you’ll have to click through to the All About Jazz site.

Esoteric Jazz: Pat Martino in Dialogue Hosted by Greg Thomas, Pat Martino shares some of the deepest depths of his inspiration, his vision, and his creative process, all of which has made him one of the most remarkable performers in the jazz scene.

B.A.M. or Jazz: Why It Matters

Since the last Race and Jazz column, the first of a multi-part discussion with John Gennari—the top scholar on the history of jazz criticism—a firestorm of controversy has arisen surrounding Nicholas Payton's declaration that, to him, the word jazz is dead. He also feels that the word jazz is tantamount to or worse than the "n" word—nigger—and that the best and most descriptive umbrella term is Black American Music: BAM.

We'll continue sharing our conversation with Professor Gennari soon, but first I'd like the All About Jazz audience to digest and respond to this piece. The scholarly dialogue with Gennari is crucial because it provides helpful historical context and background for such heated situations as the one this article addresses.

Nicholas Payton, highly skilled on a variety of musical instruments, is one of the best contemporary trumpeters, and was even perhaps the best of his generation playing what he now calls (at least for 90 days) the "j" word. And I believe, as fellow black writer Willard Jenkins put it, that Payton is "speaking the truth as he believes it." I also agree with Jenkins' point that no one stole jazz from black folks, and lament the miniscule number of audience members from the cultural group of its origin at jazz events.

So, before getting back to the conversation about the history of jazz criticism with John Gennari, I'm going to, as author of this Race and Jazz column, give some reflections on and responses to the hullabaloo.

As master saxophonist, composer and arranger Jimmy Heath mentioned at a recent event at the Visitor's Center of the National Jazz Museum in Harlem, he's been hearing that jazz is dead or dying for over 60 years. 1959—the last year Payton says "jazz" was cool—is most certainly a high point in the production of classic jazz: Miles Davis's Kind of Blue, Charles Mingus's Ah Um, Dave Brubeck's Time Out, and Ornette Coleman's The Shape of Jazz to Come were all released that year, and John Coltrane was working on Giant Steps. Yet to claim that the word representing the form in which a plethora of musicians played, a host of fans listened to, and buckets of ink were typed in periodicals devoted to the music, was virtually or symbolically or actually dead after 1959, is obviously inaccurate. But since it's a provocative statement that elicits discussion, I'll take it with a grain of salt.

And jazz, as I and many others conceive of it, is a music that certainly should be placed under the banner of Black American Music. Jazz is one of the musical branches that sprang from the cultural production of native-born black folks in the United States. However, I don't think it prudent to stop there and make BAM the be all and end all term. To jettison the word "jazz" completely, not to mention equating it with the "n" word, is, in my estimation, not wise.

Regarding the latter, nigger was a term used to maintain the lie of white supremacy and black inferiority. "Nigger" and the racial caste system that supported its wide usage against black Americans were used to subjugate minds and oppress bodies, to deny freedom and keep "them in their place," and to scapegoat black folks as lazy, shiftless, hypersexual, unintelligent, and as the cause of the nation's ills.

It's highly doubtful that terrorist white racists used the word "jazz" as a term of ultimate derision when lynching Negroes, but you can bet your bottom dollar that those bastards thought and scowled the "n" word while committing such murders. Furthermore, the meaning and connotation of jazz has changed several times over the course of the 100+ years of its existence. And though it may be true that the image of jazz musicians as drugged-out outlaws of society still has some currency today, I'd speculate that those who weren't conditioned into the view that jazz is lowbrow or the devil's music likely don't think of it in such terms. In fact, many consider jazz as akin to a classical music, and beyond their grasp. (Hence the expression "Black Classical Music" or Dr. Billy Taylor's often quoted declaration that jazz is "America's classical music.") Considering the course of European classical music, this is problematic as regards accessibility and popularity, but my point is that many people now think of jazz as "high" instead of "low."

When considering what to call or name an art form, the issue of genre comes to mind. I'm not aware of anyone arguing that gospel, or r&b, or even hip hop, as terms describing musical genres, should be just thrown in the trash. The music called jazz, to me, has a powerful, noble, and oftentimes triumphant legacy as regards black folks and in the overall history of the nation. The values, practices, and tools of jazz also inform the potential of a global present and future. So it's disappointing and somewhat confounding to me that some of those who play it well are so readily willing to give up the nomenclature, almost willy nilly....

That said, what is this thing called jazz? In my estimation, it's not simply a marketing term created by white folks with invidious intent. Jazz, to me in 2012, is the fine art branch of North American music, with a specific set of stylistic practices, born in the United States, created by black Americans, who ourselves are a distinct ethnic group or tribe combining influences from Africa, Europe, and the Caribbean, just like jazz.

Since we're riffing classifications—which are inherent to language and to the human condition—there's also folk and pop music, general terms which, along with fine art, identify relative levels of stylization of the creative process, and relative levels of sophistication of aesthetic statement. The blues, for instance, are fundamentally a folk form of music. The Negro Spirituals are another example of a folk music, on the sacred side. The blues, of course, is one of the very foundations of what became jazz. In fact, the writer Albert Murray, 95, calls the fine art of jazz the ultimate extension, elaboration and refinement of the blues idiom, Murray's expression for the sensibility and fundamental cultural basis of the stylistic expression of Negro Americans (his generation's preferred term), that infused American culture writ large.

Blues idiom music would be my preferred term, since the "black" in Black American Music can too easily be thought of in terms of race, which, as I've said in earlier columns, is too often confused with culture. "Blues idiom" as an idea grounded in the blues establishes a root music foundation for the secular music called jazz. Gospel music is on the sacred branch of the blues idiom continuum. (See the article hyperlinked in this and the previous paragraph, and here, "An Integral Take on the Blues Idiom," for more about this rich idea.)

Nicholas Payton and other artists have a right to call their music what they want, and to reject or accept the terms they want. Just as I, a multi-media journalist (print, radio, video) who has devoted himself to continuing and furthering the legacy of jazz in American media for a quarter century, have a right to respond to those choices as they appear in print. I believe that my right to respond becomes a responsibility when the very word with which I strongly identify—jazz—is challenged or dismissed without due consideration or weight being given to the positive values of the word/concept. The values jazz represent, the musical and social practices of the art form, and how it touches people, are what gives jazz powerful meaning and import, not just in the past but now too.

What jazz signifies and means is really the issue and why what we call this music matters.

To me, personally and professionally, I associate jazz with improvisation and syncopation, with resilience and flow, with tradition and innovation, with earthy elegance, with strength and nuance, with the integrity of individual expression within a collaborative group context, with true democracy in action, with spontaneity and empathy, with the eternal moment and the power of now. I think jazz is exemplary of the best produced by my ethnic and cultural group, and by the United States as well.

For the conclusion, go here.