Not Just White
I wrote a letter to the editor of DownBeat last year (May 2022 issue). I was responding to errors and omissions in an article on the history of UNT’s jazz program. The story of the country’s first jazz degree program at North Texas State Teachers College (now UNT) in 1946 has solidified over time and the DownBeat author was mostly repeating what is written in promotional materials. The author defined UNT in Denton, TX as the “epicenter” of jazz in the region, that what happened there “spurred a movement of jazz education around the world.” The founders had to call the program “dance band” so as not to be “run out of town.” Finally, the author gave some insider knowledge: the famed One O’Clock Lab Band was named “not in honor of Benny Goodman’s ‘One O’Clock Jump,’ as many surmise, but named for the time the band met each week, at 1 p.m.”
It is a story of heroic white men who started jazz programs in the face of prejudice and eventually spurred a movement. What goes unstated is that UNT was segregated at that time. The people who were actually “run out of town” were Black families whose houses were being bombed in middle class neighborhoods in nearby Dallas. Further, Kansas City was the “epicenter” of jazz in the region when the founders of the UNT program were learning their craft. As such, the story of this shifting epicenter is a story of Black to white. The prejudice underlying Jim Crow segregation and house bombings transmogrifies into the bias of classical music snobs against white men attempting to create a jazz program. Count Basie’s ‘One O’Clock Jump’ becomes Benny Goodman’s. The Count Basie Orchestra’s saxophonist who helped make “One O’Clock Jump” famous, Denton native, Herschel Evans, was forbidden to attend his hometown college. In this heroic re-telling of jazz’s epicenter, Count Basie, Herschel Evans, and segregation simply disappear.
The men who started UNT went on to found or lead renowned jazz programs at Indiana University, USC, University of Miami, and other colleges. Stan Kenton and Woody Herman used these programs to stock their bands and sell their big band charts. Graduates of these programs became teachers in secondary schools and local jazz camps. This bare-bones introduction to the beginnings of a movement can give some insight into why there are so few Black students in college jazz programs today. Nonetheless, a longtime (white) instructor from UNT wrote to DownBeat claiming I was doing “a great disservice to a program that was and continues to be progressive and tolerant and welcoming.” This instructor grew up in Houston in the 1940s and 50s, entered UNT as a student in 1963 (when the “Black part of town” was still unpaved), and taught there from 1987 to 2017. He wrote, “I really think it a stretch to blame a ‘segregated lineage’ for the ‘dearth’ of Black students in today’s academic jazz programs. I saw the writing on the wall many years ago in New Orleans when I witnessed young Black men turn their backs on a passing jazz funeral march for a deceased member of the traditional jazz community.” The view of this longtime UNT professor is that Black students aren’t in jazz programs because they don’t respect jazz. So again, if you graduated from a college jazz program, think about what you might have learned along with your Mixo #11 chords.
It’s likely your band is Just White. No sticker.
Next blog entry: Calling in, Calling out
