Jazz: Culture and Social Justice - Soundtrack of America’s Art Form is out now.
While Jazz is widely regarded as America’s indigenous musical art form, Dr. Pascal Bokar Thiam provides a detailed survey of Jazz’s roots in West Africa in his new book, Jazz: Culture and Social Justice - Soundtrack of America’s Art Form, which is available now through major retailers.
A leading scholar on Jazz history and its African lineage, Dr. Thiam draws on decades as an award-winning jazz guitarist and a university educator. His lived experience across three continents has given him unique insight into how music and musical instruments have evolved over centuries.
Born in Paris and raised in Mali and Senegal, Dr. Thiam observed socio-musical patterns in the United States that diverged from the European ethnic heritage of most Americans. Instead, he found them aligned with West African music, culture, and instrumentation—reflecting the profound African ancestral roots of the music of the Mississippi Delta and its evolution into Jazz. Jazz: Culture and Social Justice is the culmination of years of research, multiple academic papers, and thousands of hours spent tracing the cultural pathways that shaped America’s art form.
“As early as the beginning of the 20th century, Jazz as an art form began lifting this nation to the status of a cultural superpower. Jazz is the soundtrack of the socio-cultural history of Africans in North America—a soundtrack of freedom and victory, a victory of our collective humanity, and a victory for human dignity over tyranny,” said Dr. Thiam, who serves on the faculty at the University of San Francisco in the Performing Arts & Social Justice Department.
Discouraged by the lack of research and gaps in existing scholarship, Dr. Thiam set out to connect the dots across continents and centuries by writing Jazz: Culture and Social Justice.
“Most books about Jazz history begin around 1865 in New Orleans,” he said. “The persistent omission of African cultural values, heritage, and traditions—which shaped the Blues of the Mississippi Delta and helped form American popular music and its art form, Jazz—has done a great disservice to the story of this amazing music.”
According to Dr. Thiam, even the roots of iconic American instruments such as the banjo, along with the musical traditions that shaped Jazz, Blues, and Gospel, are deeply rooted in West Africa.
To Africans in North America, the West African ngoni—the ancestor of the banjo—was the umbilical cord to Africa. Its continued existence preserved the colors of the blue notes through the Blues, the rhythmic syncopation through Ragtime, the belief in a higher power through the Negro Spirituals, and the concept of improvisation through Jazz,” said Dr. Thiam.
Although the journey across the Middle Passage typically took sixty days, Dr. Thiam argues that no one forgot their culture in that time. Instead, African culture profoundly influenced American music, instruments, and traditions.
“When we think about culture and music, the great Malian guitarist Ali Farka Touré said it best: ‘In anthropology, Black American does not exist, but there are Blacks in America, which means that they came with their culture.’ I would add that, however horrific it was, the Middle Passage lasted sixty days—and no one forgets their culture in sixty days. Africans arrived on the shores of the Southern colonies daily from 1515 until 1860, long before the acknowledged roots of American Jazz,” said Dr. Thiam.
He notes that jazz’s seminal luminaries—Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, Duke Ellington, Ma Rainey, Count Basie, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Billie Holiday, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Mahalia Jackson, Dexter Gordon, Art Blakey, and many others—are all descendants of West Africans enslaved in the United States.
Jazz: Culture and Social Justice—Soundtrack of America’s Art Form is available now through major retailers. The book can be purchased from Amazon.
ABOUT DR. PASCAL BOKAR THIAM
Born in Paris and raised in Senegal and Mali, Dr. Pascal Bokar Thiam holds a doctorate in education and a master’s degree in education and music. He has more than 25 years of experience teaching African American culture, music, and history as well as African culture, society, social policy, and political science. He studied at the National School of Arts in Dakar, Senegal; the National Conservatory of Nice in France; and in the United States at Berklee College of Music, Cambridge College, and the University of San Francisco’s Graduate School of Education.
Dr. Thiam created the first Jazz, Culture and Social Justice course at the University of San Francisco, where he also directs the university’s jazz band.
He is the author of From Timbuktu to the Mississippi Delta (2013), Africa: Its Music & Its People (2022), and The Banjo Is From West Africa (2023).
A bebop jazz guitarist who performs globally as Pascal Bokar, Dr. Thiam has worked with legendary trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie (who honored him with an Outstanding Jazz Soloist Award), trumpet master Donald Byrd, and drummer Donald “Duck” Bailey. He has released seven albums; his 2015 album “Guitar Balafonics” was named one of the best albums of the year by DownBeat magazine.
Dr. Thiam is currently working on his first Contemporary Jazz album, slated for release next year. The project was recently previewed with the single “Sunrise,” produced by Billboard hitmaker Greg Manning.
For more information, please visit https://pascalbokar.com.
Jazz from Amazon.com
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