Sp14. Can jazz's origins only occur with an oppressed people?
Discussion[edit]
Defining terms[edit]
The terms that need defining to address the topic question are "jazz," "origins," "oppressed," and "people."
The definition of jazz is considered at Ontdef3. What is the definition of jazz?
Dictionary.com provides these helpful definitions for the noun "origin."
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“something from which anything arises or is derived; source; fountainhead”
- “rise or derivation from a particular source”
- “the first stage of existence; beginning”
- “ancestry; parentage; extraction”
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Dictionary.com provides these helpful definitions for the verb "oppress."
- “to burden with cruel or unjust impositions or restraints; subject to a burdensome or harsh exercise of authority or power”
- “To oppress a people is usually to subject them to burdens and to undue exercise of authority, and the like. Its chief application, therefore, is to a social or political situation, as in a tyrant oppresses his subjects.”
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Dictionary.com provides these helpful definitions for the noun "people."
- “persons indefinitely or collectively; persons in general”
- “persons, whether men, women, or children, considered as numerable individuals forming a group”
- “human beings, as distinguished from animals or other beings”
- “the entire body of persons who constitute a community, tribe, nation, or other group by virtue of a common culture, history, religion, or the like”
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NOTES: (1) People do not need to be human beings. Angels, trolls, giants, fairies, and Martians, to name a few are usually portrayed as people, but none of them are in the same species of animal or agency as homo sapiens.
(2) Blues is a music of the oppressed crying out for justice in the dark. The blues most likely requires an oppressed people to develop this musical form, although it is not strictly logically impossible (since not self-contradictory) for a non-oppressed group to develop the blues.
Jazz incorporates the blues because in addition to the use of a European diatonic musical scale, jazz also incorporates a pentatonic musical scale since jazz synthesizes or hybridizes the two scales. It therefore can be argued that jazz needs the blues and the blues's typical origins will be formed from an oppressed people therefore jazz's origins are from an oppressed group at least indirectly.
Could jazz develop from the blues of an oppressed people by non-oppressed people? It is true that this is logically possible. Many unlikely to occur this way things are often logically possible because the claims are not self-contradictory. Someone can jump from the Earth to the moon is logically possible even though it is never going to happen and furthermore it is physically impossible because human muscles cannot generate enough force to reach escape velocity from the Earth, but thevscenario, by itself is logically possible.
So, just because something is logically possible does not imply that it could ever actually occur in this manner. The question then turns to probability.
➢ What is the probability that a non-oppressed class could have developed jazz at its beginnings?
The developers of jazz here on Earth were an oppressed people. Whether theses developers were Creoles, as were Jelly Roll Morton and Sydney Bechet, or African-American musicians, as were Buddy Bolden or Louis Armstrong. Joe "King" Oliver, not himself a Creole, performed in 1922 at the Royal Gardens cabaret (later renamed the Lincoln Gardens) in Chicago as King Oliver and his Creole Jazz Band.
NOTES[edit]