Jazz Music as a Political Message

Abstract

Music incorporates multiple meanings shaped by the principles that regulate musical concepts, processes and products. Over the years, jazz music has carried numerous "messages" containing many attitudes and principles, playing a crucial role as an instrument of dissemination of political viewpoints. According to writer Amiri Baraka, it is a music that, in its most profound manifestations, has been completely divergent with North American white cultural standarts1. In fact, some of jazz's most prominent personalities in the fifties and sixties, like Charles Mingus, Max Roach, Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, or John Coltrane, were very active in terms of associating jazz music with personal standpoints of disagreement, first, with the way the music industry was operating (dominated by European-Americans in charge of criticising, writing, editing, promoting, analyzing, recording, and distributing the music), and second, with the white supremacy that privailed in the United States and the colonial world.