Music: Crow Jim

Negro Bass Player Charlie Mingus is a talented, successful and angry man—so angry, in fact, that he planned to leave for an island in the Mediterranean and never return to the U.S. Mingus changed his mind, but the anger remains. It is shared in some degree by many Negro jazz musicians, and its major cause is anti-Negro prejudice in a field that Negroes regard as their own. Its result is the regrettable kind of reverse segregation known as Crow Jim—a feeling that the white man has no civil rights when it comes to jazz.

To Mingus and others, jazz is far more than music. It is a shared heritage, a symbol of achievement, a language in which to tell what Negro Drummer Max Roach calls “the dramatic story of our people and what we’ve been through.” It is also a private language. Through jazz, Negro Pianist Billy Taylor points out, the Negro has always been able “to say many things musically that would never have been accepted by a white American had he verbalized them.”

“He Plays Like a Negro.” What embitters Negro musicians is that they share so little in the management of the music they created. Negroes control no major company making jazz records, no major booking agency, few of the top jazz rooms. Rarely is a’Negro jazzman given a choice engagement on television. Moreover, many Negro jazzmen honestly feel that white jazzmen cannot “feel” the “soul” music that the “soul brothers” and “soul sisters” are producing these days. The highest praise that a Negro jazzman can give his white counterpart is that “he plays like a Negro.”

There is also resentment of the easy acceptance of such white jazzmen as Brubeck, Kenton, Mulligan and Shearing. In fact, notes Dizzy Gillespic, “colored musicians are simply resentful of the fact that in every sphere of American life the white guy has it better.” The resentment is too often expressed in the refusal of Negro groups to hire white musicians. It has presented the jazz world with a critical problem in an already critical time—the number of jazz performers is increasing more rapidly than the number of jobs available.

Loudest Notes. As long ago as the ’30s, Negro musicians resented the “theft” of swing by white combos. According to Pianist Mary Lou Williams, the Bop era of the ’40s began when Thelonious Monk decided: “We’re going to create something they can’t steal, because they can’t play it.” But the real problems of Crow Jim emerged in the ‘505 with the big-money success of West Coast jazz under the leadership of Brubeck, Mulligan, Shorty Rogers and Shelly Manne—all of them white. The new jazz put more emphasis on sophisticated arrangement and composition, avoiding the traditional African-born aspects of hard swing.

Most Negroes, says Negro Saxophonist Julian (“Cannonball”) Adderley, “felt that swing had to be there for the jazz to be valid. They weren’t much interested in the new West Coast music. They were convinced that Brubeck’s music was not jazz.” Result: few Negroes were involved in West Coast jazz. As its popularity increased, so did the resentment of Negro jazz leaders, who were getting fewer and fewer dates. “The irony of the thing is,” says Stan Kenton. “that this group of musicians, who never had any problems before, all of a sudden were at odds and started boycotting on the basis of color rather than music.”

“Uncle Tom.” West Coast jazz is no longer an important consideration, but Crow Jim is, especially among the angry young men who are passionately involved in the rise of Negro nationalism. Jazz compositions these days bear titles like A Message from Kenya (Art Blakey), Uhuru Afrika (Randy Weston), Africa Speaks, America Answers (Guy Warren), Afro-American Sketches (Oliver Nelson). Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite—We Insist includes tunes like Tears for Johannesburg, a lament for the Africans shot down in the Sharpeville massacre. To younger jazzmen, a great musician like Louis Armstrong is suspect—instead of hopping on the freedom bus he has been content to remain an “Uncle Tom.”

Charlie Mingus denies that Crow Jim exists: “How can you talk about Crow-Jim and look at Mississippi?” And, adds Negro Pianist Horace Silver: “The whites started crying Crow Jim when the public got hip that Negroes play the best jazz.” Nonetheless, believes Silver, the differ ence between soul or “funk” music and other varieties of jazz is the difference between talking “colored” and ordinary English—and only a Negro musician can feel it. “It is murder today for white jazz players. Negro clubs just won’t play them.” says Impresario George Wein. White Pianist Paul Winter, 22, who has three Negroes in his sextet, agrees: “We’re right in the middle of a Crow Jim period. Out in Chicago they told us, ‘Don’t go to New York—you’re ofay.’ “* Echoes Drummer Cal Tjader: “I don’t think I’d very much like to be a white boy just starting out in New York now.”

Colored Cats Bitched. For all that, most Negro jazzmen are as concerned as the whites about the effects of prejudice in either direction. Querulous Trumpeter Miles Davis has always insisted on hiring his musicians on talent only, although he concedes that “some colored cats bitched” when he added white Saxophonist Lee Konitz to his group. (In jazz argot, the pressure applied by Negro bigots to Negroes who will not subscribe to Crow Jim is called Crow Crow; its opposite is Jim Jim.) Says Negro Saxophonist Sonny Stitt: “Man. if a guy can play, that’s all that counts. I don’t care if his skin is purple, orange or chartreuse.”

Negro Singer Abbey Lincoln, ignoring such Negro artists as Harry Belafonte and Leontyne Price, reasons that “it’s unfair for whites to get so worked up over discrimination against whites; in music, we’re kept out of everything but jazz. If a Negro jazz player chooses other Negroes to play with him, it’s because he’s looking for the same emphasis musically and emotionally.” Cooler heads know that the future of jazz could depend on resolving prejudice. Noting that modern jazz owes much to the European classical tradition. Pianist Taylor points out: “Crow Jim is a state of affairs which must be remedied; jazz can never again be music by Negroes strictly for Negroes any more than the Negroes themselves can return to the attitudes and emotional responses which prevailed when this was true.”

* Pig Latin for “foe,”‘ or Xegro jargon for a white person.