Disclaimer: The following blog post is not a reflection of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s opinion on the below topics.
By Diya Abbas
“Jazz is a signifier”—Kwami Coleman
In music, syncopation can be understood as a site of invention, an off-beat from the given beat of an arrangement. For example, if a piece of music were in a 2/4 time signature, a syncopated beat would be an experimental site of play that precedes, follows, or interrupts the given two beats of the measure. In a conversation with the scholar and musician Dr. Kwami Coleman, the idea of syncopation was expanded to “something new.” Prof. Coleman described syncopation as “something clever,” something that sparks an interest, an artist who “puts their foot in it.” A mark of successful syncopation is in affect: whether there is an emotional or mental resonance. Syncopation and polyrhythm are distinct features of the genre of jazz. The genre I argue relies on collective/community sound, a mythos, invention, and infinite arrangements of being. Syncopation is where anti-harmony, anti-form, and anti-craft take place in the composition of sound and music. I argue de-colonial systems exist in jazz and are why they pose such a threat to empire. I use ‘empire’ as a substitution for imperialism and colonization. To the degree that in the 1920’s, during the Jazz Age, jazz was described as a disease. Critics used words like ‘pathological,’ ‘infection,’ ‘virus,’ ‘epidemic,’ and ‘cancer’ to describe jazz.[1] Why does jazz, specifically its syncopation, pose such a threat to America, and more importantly, how can postcolonial bodies use syncopation to enlarge the imperial limits of our bodies and minds through sonic fictions? Syncopation serves as a strategy for a decolonial approach to linear time and history.
First, we must apply our understanding of jazz and syncopation to the real world. Russell L. Johnson puts it well: “Music is music and jazz is jazz”.[2] We can understand jazz as a relational form, fluxed, malleable, and subject to constant transformation. If we use jazz as a methodology instead of a genre, then perhaps syncopation can be a strategy of survival for post-colonial figurations of historicity. Syncopation parallels the idea of history as constantly happening, the past and future reinforcing the present the way that syncopation manipulates the space preceding and following the momentum of a given beat. On the idea of history, we can apply the dynamic attending theory, a theory of attention that focuses on the interaction between an individual’s internal rhythms and the external rhythms of events.[3] Scientists argued that jazz posed a threat to human order because the body follows a distinct rhythm. “Disease is unrhythmical,” said Eva Agusta Vescelius, founder and president of the National Therapeutic Society.[4] However, we are constantly experiencing the dissonance between our internal and external sensorium. Would that mean that life itself is a disease? If so, it would make sense then why jazz resonates as deeply human. The cosmos themselves are made of both chaos and order. Singularity and rhythm are means of control. Order is the effect of empire. Perhaps the West fears what exists outside of control: the infinite possibilities of arrangement which yield unique possibilities of form. We cannot forget the racial associations of jazz with Black people in the United States. Racial purity yielded uniformity, suppression, and ultimately cultural stagnation, delegitimizing jazz. Jazz itself was a hybrid, like the saxophone which itself is a “hybrid of reed and brass”.[5] From a first-generation perspective, are we not also as immigrants existing in a sense of hybridity? For Black Americans, jazz as a form was able to hold the conflicting realities of what it means to be American in a country that seeks to define Black Americans as less than human. Lastly, jazz was argued to induce “civilization shock” which mirrored those of soldiers with shellshock.[6] Aren’t those subjected to the horrors and violence of colonization and imperialism also affected by physical and mental generational trauma? Jazz then, its chaos and glory, mimics the form of oppressed peoples. Perhaps this is why jazz might be, as Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka), a prolific playwright, poet, critic, educator, and activist of the late 1960s and 70s, argues is the only soul of the United States.[7]
The inherent resonance of syncopation as a site for rapid identification, experimentation, hybridity, and relation might be exactly why it serves as such a threat to empire. Syncopation poses an assault to the traditional order of time. It resists linearity by looking towards both the future and past, the possibilities of play which exist before and after a given measure. This metaphor can be applied to our identification with history. Empire wants history to be something that has merely happened, not actively happening. However, syncopation proves that we can indeed name and exist in the space between a history and future which is actively happening. Jazz is often defined as noise; this noise however seems to me the sound of relenting emotion. An act of total exodus. From the originations of jazz in ragtime and blues, music was a vehicle of freedom through sound. For enslaved Black Americans music became the only way to enact a sense of unleashing, unraveling, out of the physical and mental constraints of their lives. The blues was a way to experience a future through the embodiment of sound. Perhaps there lies the threat. If we as historically oppressed peoples are able to harness the infinite assemblages of sound, then we would be able to mark and notate alternative articulations of our lives, bodies, and futures.
Syncopation, additionally not only involves the individual human sound but is reliant on the rest of the band. Jazz serves as interlocutors of the collective. An fMRI study found that music, specifically musical improvisation, is a language which serves as a means of communication between individuals.[8] Perhaps then jazz is a communication between communities which outsmarts the surveillance and identification of empire. What if we could tap into those higher entropy states as a kind of arsenal, of manifestation, towards global solidarity? Fourteen months into the genocide in Gaza, I wonder how can the syncopation be a strategy for the manipulation of discourse towards what we define as a human life? As Professor Coleman posited, what if we didn’t call jazz a genre? What if we called it a way of inhabiting, of being, of becoming?
[1] Johnson, Russell L. “Disease Is Unrhythmical”: Jazz, Health, and Disability in 1920s America | Semantic Scholar, www.semanticscholar.org/paper/’Disease-Is-Unrhythmical’:-Jazz,-Health,-and-in-Johnson/fc9bc9e434e915750a9abeb812712669bb1094c5. Accessed 8 Dec. 2024.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Witek, Maria A., et al. “Effects of polyphonic context, instrumentation, and metrical location on syncopation in music.” Music Perception, vol. 32, no. 2, 1 Dec. 2014, pp. 201–217, https://doi.org/10.1525/mp.2014.32.2.201.
[4] Johnson, Russell L. “Disease Is Unrhythmical”: Jazz, Health, and Disability in 1920s America | Semantic Scholar, www.semanticscholar.org/paper/’Disease-Is-Unrhythmical’:-Jazz,-Health,-and-in-Johnson/fc9bc9e434e915750a9abeb812712669bb1094c5. Accessed 8 Dec. 2024.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Jones, LeRoi. “Swing: From verb to noun.” The Improvisation Studies Reader, 7 Aug. 2014, pp. 354–366, https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203083741-53.
[8] Donnay, Gabriel F., et al. “Neural substrates of interactive musical improvisation: An fmri study of ‘trading fours’ in jazz.” PLoS ONE, vol. 9, no. 2, 19 Feb. 2014, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0088665.