Unheard Sounds of Slavery:The Birth of Jazz and the Color Line in Psychoanalysis

My parents socialized in the rooms overlooking the park, amidst party glasses clanking, with Handel's Messiah playing overhead. I stayed in the back kitchen with Yvonne, a dark-skinned Barbadian woman who was my caregiver and still, at eight years old, my most trusted companion. She regaled me with spicy stories of her West Indian past while preparing curry goat over the stove top. If White music—Classical and Baroque styles- was the background to my family, Yvonne listened to Black Gospel and other sounds of a Christian voice. Influenced by both, I eventually found jazz.

There is classical psychoanalysis…and then there is “all that jazz.” Psychoanalysis and jazz grew up together, both birthed in the late 1800s, but they occupied separate worlds. If psychoanalysis was the province of White European intellectuals, jazz belonged to the Black American South. Like restauranteur Paula Deen, who is said to profit off of Southern cooking—collard greens and black-eyed peas—while reportedly treating her employees of color like second-class citizens, any interest in jazz by psychoanalysis risks exploiting a Black tradition if it does not address the White dominance in its canon and corridors (Duke, 2013). To couple psychoanalysis and jazz is to celebrate and elevate the vitality, improvisation, creativity, and intuition of both. But without understanding the historic association between jazz and psychoanalysis as being, foremost, about race—its construction and its influence—psychoanalysis cannot listen ethically to this art form—and its sounds of slavery (Orange, 2019).

The very name, jazz, is derogatory. In 1918, the phrase “all that jazz” was coined to mean “all that empty talk, rubbish, or rot” (). Contemporary jazz star Nicholas Payton (2014) prefers the genre to be called, simply “Black American Music,” because jazz derives from the slang term “jism” or “gism,” which the Historical Dictionary of American S