By Simon Weil

I

"In the crowds that attended the revivals and camp meetings [after the Revolution] there were numbers of Negroes who found in the fiery message of salvation a hope and prospect of escape from earthly woes. Moreover, the emphasis which the preachers placed on feeling as a sign of conversion found a ready response in the slaves who were repressed in so many ways. There were other factors in the situation that caused the slaves to respond to the forms of religious expression provided by the Baptists and Methodists...the slaves, who had been torn from their homeland and kinsmen and friends and whose cultural heritage was lost, were isolated and broken men, so to speak. In the emotionalism of the camp meetings and revivals some social solidarity, even if temporary, was achieved, and they were drawn into a union with their fellow men. Later, common religious beliefs and practices and traditions tended to provide a new basis for social cohesion in an alien environment." The Negro Church in America, E. Franklin Frazier, p. 16

It is not tenable to say that the cultural heritage of the slaves was entirely lost - rather it became absorbed into the slave society built around the church. Moreover to say that the slaves were broken men does not fit with history. But Frazier has a vital point when he says that the common religious beliefs of the church provided a new basis for social cohesion and it is generally agreed that the church was the centre of black slave society - and so, effectively, the fount from which much of black society, and to some extent, jazz (from church music) would flow.

"Charles Colcock Jones' son-in-law, the Reverend Robert Mallard, wrote to his wife about a Negro service he witnessed in Chattanooga in 1859. His reactions were characteristic not only of Presbyterian minister, but of white southern society generally:

"I was much interested, and yet at the same time shocked by a spectacle which I witnessed two nights ago. Hearing singing in the neighborhood of the hotel, I went to the church from which it proceeded. It belongs to the white congregation of a Cumberland Presbyterian church. I stood at the door and looked in - and such a confusion of sights and sounds! The Negroes were holding a revival meeting. Some were standing, others sitting, others moving from one seat to another, several exhorting along the aisles. The whole congregation kept up one loud monotonous strain, interrupted by various sounds: groans and screams and clapping of hands. One woman specially under the influence of the excitement went across the church in a quick succesion of leaps: now down on her knees with a sharp crack that smote upon my ear the full length of the church, then up again; now with her arms around some brother or sister, and again tossing them wildly in the air and clapping her hands together and accompanying the whole by a series of short, sharp shrieks - I was astonished that such proceedings were countenanced in even a Cumberland church.. Considering the mere excitement manifested in such disorderly ways, I could but ask; What religion is there in this?...Some allowance, of course must be made for the excitability of the Negro temperament...." Sinful Tunes and Spirituals, Epstein, p. 205-6

"In providing a structured social life in which the negro could give expression to his deepest feeling and at the same time achieve status and a meaningful existence, the Negro church provided a refuge from a hostile white world. For the slaves who worked and suffered in an alien world, religion offered a means of catharsis of their pent-up emotions and frustrations. Moreover it turned their minds from the sufferings and privations of this world to a world after death where the weary could find rest and the victims of injustices would be compensated." The Negro Church in America, E. Franklin Frazier, p. 50

The shrieks, groans and screams which so upset Mallard are an example of this catharsis - where the agony of the slave experience is given expression within the safe and structured environment of the Church. For an observer to hear the anguish behind these wordless forms of expression, he would have had to face up to the reality of the oppression of blacks by whites. In the 60s, when the oppression of blacks by whites was brought to forefront of the public consciousness - and changed somewhat - the scream became a core element of avant-garde jazz. This article is however not about jazz itself, it is about the reactions - in particular the negative reactions - that jazz has induced. Mallard's reaction is a precursor of these.

II

The stereotypical association of blacks with "disorderly ways" or chaos and "the excitability [or "passionate nature"] of the Negro temperament" were ideas with wide currency - owing a great deal to conceptions such as "The Dark Continent" and Africans as savage - and appeared in many forms through the years. They are projections of white fears onto blacks:

"'There were no mobs in the slave South,' explained South Carolina planter James Henry Hammond in 1845, only the 'habitual vigilance' of a citizenry 'concerned in the maintenance of order.' 'The people' might 'assemble to chastise' a trespassing abolitionist, but this was no more a mob, than a rally of shepherds to chase a wolf out of their pastures would be one. If abolition were forced upon it, this society would immediately collapse: former slaves would wander the land, idle except to plunder...

[After Emancipation] While black voters frightened white men, African American militias terrified them. In the eyes of many white men, black men were inherently unfit for citizenship. Black men could not constitute a legitimate body of 'the people,' fitted for public meetings, political rallies, or military service. When black men did take on these roles, whites portrayed them as comical and ignorant, or more often impudent and riotous - as a mob. Reconstruction consisted of corrupt 'misrule' and 'taxation without representation' by the 'voting power' of 'an impressible people, whose passions and prejudices [are] easily excited.' To many whites, the elevation of such unsuitable citizens to this position of authority created chaos masquerading as order, a polity that those commited to a white male monopoly on citizenship must oppose as fundamentally illegitimate. Black women's participation in the early stages of Reconstruction electoral politics - including, most famously, guarding the weapons during a meeting - struck some white observers as further evidence of how chaotic politics had become. Men and women, laborers, renegades, and aliens, the Republicans represented all the forces of disorder." "One Man's Mob," Kantrovitz; in Jumpin Jim Crow, ed. Dailey et al., p. 69

For their part, Southern whites were convinced that it was blacks who were dangerous, who bred the violence that hung over the South. Virtually every issue of every Southern newspaper contained an account of black wrongdoing; if no episode could be found, episodes were imported from as far away as necessary; black crimes perpetrated in the North were especially attractive. Black men were thought to be inclined toward certain sorts of crimes, crimes of passion rather than crimes of cunning. "The longer I am here, the more I dread and fear the nigger," a white woman from Massachusetts wrote to a relative from her new home in Louisiana. "They have no regard for their own lives, and seem to have no feeling. Consequently if they have some fancied wrong to avenge, the first thing they think of is to kill. You rarely hear of them fighting fist fights. It is always a razor or knife or revolver." Southern Crossing, A History of the American South 1877-1906, Ayers, p. 105

The particular crime of passion most on whites' minds was rape:

"Northen's [William J. Northen, ex-governer of Georgia, ex-confederate] antilynching movement [1906-7] sought to augment the power and authority of an elite group of 'sun-crowned, God-given' white businessmen, planters, and ministers who would protect the sexual purity of white women from black rapists and the integrity of 'civilization' from white mob participants...

Like Northen, white male Georgians of all classes embraced their self-appointed roles as the 'protectors of women'". "William J. Northen...", Godshalk; in Jumpin' Jim Crow, ed. Dailey et al., pp. 141 and 6

Although most lynchings were inflicted in response to alleged murder, most of the rhetoric and justification focused on the so-called "one crime" or "usual crime": the sexual assault of white women by blacks. Southern Crossing, A History of the American South 1877-1906, Ayers, p. 109

III

The idea of blacks as agents of chaos and passion (especially sexual passion) fed into the early response to ragtime and jazz, in origin black forms, which became the locus for fears about sexuality and anarchy. It was suggested that Jazz was associated with a loss of civilized control.

"Jazz originally was the accompaniment of the vodoo dancers stimulating the half-crazed barbarians to the vilest deeds. The weird chant, accompanied the syncopated rhythm of the voodoo evokers has also been employed by barbaric people to stimulate brutality and sensuality. That it has a demoralising effect upon the human brain has been demonstrated by many scientists...

...jazz - that expression of protest against law and order, the bolshevik element of license striving for expression in music.

The human organism responds to musical vibrations. This fact is universally recognised. What instincts are aroused by jazz? Certainly not the deeds of valor or martial courage, for all marches and patriotic hymns are of regular rhythm and simple harmony; decidedly not contentment or serenity, for the songs of home and the love of native land are all of the simplest melody and harmony with noticeably regular rhythm. Jazz disorganizes all regular laws and order; it stimulates to extreme deeds, to a breaking away from all rules and conventions; it is harmful and dangerous, and its influence is wholly bad.

...In a recent letter to the author, Dr Henry van Dyke says of jazz: 'As I understand it, it is not music at all. It is merely an irritation of the nerves of hearing, a sensual teasing of the strings of physical passion. Its fault lies not in syncopation, for that is a legitimate device when sparingly used. But "jazz" is an unmitigated cacophony, a combination of disagreeable sounds in complicated discords, a wilful ugliness and a deliberate vulgarity.' "Does Jazz Put the Sin in Syncopation?" [1921]; in Keeping Time, ed. Walser, p. 34-6

An overview of the negative responses:

"By 1922, helped by the increasingly available phonograph and radio, jazz or what passed for it seemed to blare from every street corner and living room in the land. While some classical music lovers listened with interest, many more were appalled and feared that the chaotic new sound represented the swan song of America, even of western civilization. This potential downfall was graphically dramatized in J. Hartley Mariner's 1922 play The National Anthem, in which a group of white middle-class youngsters 'jazzed' their way to degeneracy, ignoring the dire warnings of the older generation. That same year an editor of the classically oriented Musical Courier polled his subscribers, mainly musicians, about jazz and reported the results under the heading "'Jazz' - The National Anthem?" Those polled "all agreed the 'ad libbing' or 'jazzing' of a piece is thoroughly objectionable and several of them advanced the opinion that this Bolshevistic smashing of the rules and tenets of decorous music, this excessive freedom of interpretation, tended to a similar letdown on the part of the dancers, a similar disregard for the self-contained attitude that has been prescribed by the makers of the rules of dignified intercourse." Jazz, Myth and Religion, Leonard, p. 3-4

For some Americans, there was moral panic:

"In Christian homes, where purity and morals are stressed, ragtime should find no resting place. Avaunt the ragtime rot! Let us purge America and the divine art of music from this polluting nuisance." Leonard, p. 10

Similar views for both Ragtime and Jazz:

..."A person inoculated with ragtime-fever is like one addicted to strong drink!" wrote one alarmist before the War. And after the Armistice, a respected New York physician declared that "jazz music causes drunkenness... producing thought and imaginations which overpower the will. Reason and reflection are lost and actions of persons are directed by the stronger animal passions." Leonard, p. 11

In an article, "Ragtime, the New Tarantism," the British critic Francis Toye asserted that the new sounds "show precisely the kind of 'vitality' associated with Revivalism peculiar to the negro! What need have we of further witnesses? For of all hysteria that particular semireligious hysteria is nearer to madness than any other." [1913] Such feelings flourished on both sides of the Atlantic and complimented fears of an overall black contagion working its way into the heart of our national life. One commentator asked: "Can it be said that America is falling prey to the collective soul of the negro through the influence of what is popularly known as 'rag time music?' ...If there is such a tendency toward such a national disaster, it should definitely be pointed out and extreme measures taken to inhibit the influence and avert the increasing danger - if it has not already gone too far...American 'rag time' or 'ragtime' evolved music is symbolic of the primitive morality and perceptible moral restrictions of the negro type. With the latter sexual restraint is almost unknown, and the wildest latitude of moral uncertainty is conceded."

The medical director of the Philadelphia High School for Girls claimed in the Twenties that "the consensus of opinion of leading medical and scientific authorities is that [jazz's] influence is as harmful and degrading as it has been all along among the savages from whom we borrowed it" and warned that if the disease continued to spread it "may tear to pieces the whole social fabric." Leonard, p. 11-2

IV

Fear of jazz was a contagion that spread to totalitarian societies in Europe:

"[T]here are rumblings, wails and howls like the smarting of a metal peg, the shriek of a donkey, or the amorous croaking of a monstrous frog. This insulting chaos of insanity pulses to a throbbing rhythm. Listening for a few minutes to these wails, one involuntarily imagines an orchestra of sexually driven madmen conducted by a man-stallion brandishing a huge genital member...The music of the degenerate ends finally with a deafening thud..." Maxim Gorky in Pravda [1928]; quoted in Ken Burns Jazz, p. 216

Indeed, the most extreme example of these reactions was to be in the Third Reich. The Nazis banned jazz, "nigger-jew" music, soon after coming to power in 1933, though, in reality it continued to exist in various forms...They made an image of a caricature black man sporting a star of David and blowing a saxophone - a jazzman - the personification of "Degenerate Music" - all that they opposed. It was "the art of the subhuman," according to Goebbels.

And in Denmark:

"Jazz was not born in nor has it ever been integrated into European culture. It was introduced from the violent need of a primitive race for rhythmic ecstasy and cannot grow organically here. It represents mankind's lowest bestial instincts. Jungle jazz rhythm is an expression of primitive Negro erotic ecstacy...The fact that the white race tolerates this sort of thing indicates our culture's decline. Denmark should follow Germany. When Hitler banned jazz, it was a great idealistic act." Olaf Sobys, 1935; quoted in Swing Under the Nazis, Zwerin, p. 177

V

If you look up the word "jazz" in the dictionary you find, among other things, the idea of Jazzing it up - That is make more exciting by adding things, chopping things around, elaborating on, whatever. But this is more or less what happened in early jazz - "rough" - is what the rhythm was, chopped up etc. - hence more exciting. In the atmosphere of that time this went with dancing and (inevitably) the suggestion of sexual freedom. One can see how the basis of the Jazz = sex connection might have occurred. Jazz sometimes being said to have originally meant Sex.

But equally adding things and chopping things around makes for a music that is liable to sound chaotic to the untrained/unaccustomed ear (to use the argument from Attali in Noise). So there are rational grounds for those two reactions. But the passion of the reponse - the moral panic and its widespread nature - indicates that something other than rational grounds were at play here. And that is why I suggest that it involves the play of age-old stereotypes. And society didn't collapse and people didn’t turn into sex-fiends.

These problems were problems in the society that were played out through jazz, the new popular music of that age (and implictly through the figure of "The Negro"). In the '60s and '70s some related problems (and other different ones) were played out through rock, the new popular music of that age. Whatever the intrinsic value these forms might have is obscured by the way The Time acted itself out through the music. Futher innovations in jazz saw a further jazzing up - moving away from standard tunes - with bebop and then with “free jazz”. Both, being novel, required acclimatization from the listener if they were not to sound chaotic. So one saw further criticisms of jazz as anarchic for both these forms. But because bebop and free jazz were not truly popular musics, this criticism did not, by and large, come from the popular press but rather from critics from within a now established form.

A comment of this sort came from D. Leon Wolff when he wrote, in Bop is Nowhere, "...the end result [of bop rhythm] is more chaotic and stupefying than it is rhythmically satisfying for the listener." While Dizzy Gillespie countered Satch's attacks on the form with "Louis Armstrong couldn't hear what we were doing. Pops wasn't schooled enough to hear the changes and harmonies we played."

In the '60s a new wave of critics took up the baton against the new avant-garde of Coleman, Coltrane and Taylor. These critics, and their offspring, continue their attacks today - making this one of the longer running aesthetic debates of the 20th (and now 21st) Century. One of them, Philip Larkin, seemed somewhat aware of the way he was repeating comments made in the past about music which he loved and considered unimpeachable - but not enough to make him doubt:

"Merely a raucous and inarticulate shouting of hoarse throated instruments, with each player trying to outdo his fellows in fantastic cacophony - yes, if it's the New Wave you are talking about you took the words right out of my mouth. Only, of course, it isn't, or wasn't. This, of the stately, and classic music of Armstrong, Morton and Ellington. It makes you despair of human perception." All What Jazz [1966], Larkin, p. 159

A more characteristic example:

"...swing. Coltrane and Dolphy seem intent on deliberately destroying this essence, this vital ingredient. They seem bent on pursuing an anarchistic course in music that can but be termed anti-jazz." John Tynan, 1961; quoted in Avant-Garde Jazz Musicians, Such, p. 10

The centre for this sort of criticism nowadays is Marsalis/Murray/Crouch triumvirate:

"Art has to do with security against chaos. What we want are durable forms, things that endure...

Ornette Coleman came along and said, 'This is free jazz.' But what is freer than jazz, you are talking about freedom of improvisation. The whole thing is about freedom, about American freedom. So why would anybody want to free it from its forms? The whole idea of art is to create a form that is a bulwark against entropy or chaos. Jazz is not meant to be formless and absolutely self-indulgent. That's like embracing the waves in the sea. You cannot embrace entropy. You cannot embrace chaos." Murray, quoted in Jazz, a History of America's Music, Ward and Burns, p. 343

"I've talked to Ornette about his conception of free jazz. I don't understand it. I think it's chaos. Maybe it's not, but that's what I think it is. Chaos is always out there; it's something you can get from any fifty kids in a band room. I'm in favor of using that conception when kids first start playing. It helps them explore their instruments without restraint..." American Heritage, Marsalis [1995]

Marsalis on avant-garde jazz as cacophonous: "[Monk's] themes are timeless and he teaches us how to be modern without stooping to the kind of cacophonous cliches that have been misinterpreted as bold or futuristic.

Monk uses wide intervals, jagged melodies, unexpected rhythms. But, instead of making us feel like we have stepped into the calamitous caterwauling at the end of the world [ie. the sort of avant-garde jazz that Marsalis decries] Monk brings us right down home for a meal of blues and swing..." Marsalis on Monk, sleevenotes

Murray locates the source of degeneration in whites:

"...decadent white esthetes...encouraged and subsidized more abandon between the Hudson and Harlem rivers in uptown Manhattan than ever existed in the Congo...Abandon...is one of the natural products of freedom that comes with what is called civilization. It is the super-civilized avant-garde bohemian...who is forever and ever in wild-eyed, hot collar, soap-box, street-marching or window breaking rebellion against all sorts of restrictions - some of them purely imaginary." The Omni-Americans, Murray, p. 155 [1970]

And makes it clear that this has had its effect on avant-garde jazz:

"The current black arts movement...is nothing if not avant-garde, ersatz tiger noises underneath the bamboo tree boom boom and all. But the avant-garde sort of thing is not exclusive to the cogniscenti these days...Some of it comes out on Columbia and RCA Victor records." Murray, p. 155-6

For Murray, the stereotype of the black rapist (and thus jazz) is not rejected but turned around:

"You mentioned that Greenwich Village poet in your other letter. Which reminds me that he got so shook up that I never did realize what I was really trying to tell him. I was trying to tell him that fay [white] boys were making a myth of the Negro 'stud' psychological fact. That all that old talk was turning the Negro man into such a sex object that fay chicks were already half fucked before they even got into bed. I also said something to him about chicks imagining that they were raped, and pointed out to him that they didn't have to be raped except perhaps on demand. [Women demanding to be raped? What is that?] And then I said something about not being able to reconcile my personal knowledge of a tradition of sophisticated sexual technique and barnyard pride in effective coxmanship with the newspaper image of Negroes as frantic snatchers & grabbers. I also pointed out that jazz represented CONTROL not abandon, as did all forms of American Negro dancing. Man, I was mainly trying to destroy the image of the rapist, and I created for him the supercoxman!" Trading Twelves, Murray, p. 211-2 [8/17/59]

Putting these quotes together Murray is saying that the avant-garde jazz of the 60s was the result of the corruption of blacks (and hence Jazz) by whites with their alleged taste for the out of control and decadent. That is he turns round the old allegations (of blacks corrupting whites) from the 20s and earlier. As he says, he was attempting to reverse the preceding stereotype.

VI

The above comments concentrate on the time-honoured fears of jazz as chaotic/anarchic. Overall, the Lincoln Center ideologues do not find reason to fear jazz (or elements of it) as sexual music. Or perhaps they don't make that fear explicit. Those fears of oversexualised music do exist though. Marsalis construes pop and rock in those terms:

"...to me pop music [is] really geared to a whole base type of sexual thing. I listen to the radio. I know tunes that they have out now: here's people squirming on the ground, fingering themselves. It's low-level realizations of sex." "Wynton vs. Herbie" [1985]; in Keeping Time, ed. Walser, p. 343-4

Here Marsalis explains how his experience as a teenage musician underlies his ideas:

"[Q] Why jazz? Why not, as with most of your contemporaries, why not rock and roll? Why jazz?

[WM] Well, I always equated rock with something social like meeting girls, and stuff. I never equated it with music. So I would be on the bandstand, and the music itself was all right, but I had also heard my daddy and them play. So I knew what was going on our bandstand - rock - wasn't going on his bandstand...

It's like, if you go in a club and hear Coltrane play, or if you go into one of those clubs down on 42nd Street and take in a burlesque show, well it's a club and you are going out but it's very different." Achievement Org Interview [1991]

Here he explains the difference between the effect of jazz and of rock:

"[WM] So there is so much in jazz music to be studied and to be learned...The music had the effect of liberating a lot of people from the Victorian image of sexuality. But for some reason people still think they need to be liberated from that. That is something jazz music was doing around the turn of the century. And now it's degenerated in the modern era to a type of vulgarity that is represented by rock and roll, which parades under the guise of giving you sexual freedom, which is really, truly, sexual repression.

Sexual freedom is found in the sensuality and the romance and the lyricism of the great songwriters like George Gershwin and Cole Porter and Duke Ellington, and of the great instrumentalists like Louis Armstrong. These people had a truly romantic conception that was based on the elevation of the relationship between a man and a woman, rather than the denigration of it into just some abusive sexual discoveries." Achievement Org Interview [1991]

VII

So, for Marsalis, pop and rock are abusive, degenerate forms - to do with base sexuality - and indeed, drawing people into that. This is more or less the charge that was laid at the feet of jazz previously. It implies that pop and rock can corrupt sexually in just the same way as jazz was asserted to. And they can corrupt anyone. In Marsalis’s now nearly 20 year long campaign against Miles Davis he consistently asserts that his predecessor was "corrupted" by rock. As we shall see, Marsalis recently made clear that part of this "corruption" was sexual:

"We gotta drop some bombs here. Indict some motherfuckers. Talk about the music. I don't want to cut Freddie [Hubbard] down. I'd rather cut Miles down than Freddie. He ain't doing nothing. I think Freddie has taken enough heat. He's a great trumpet player. He's a great musician. Miles was never my idol, I resent what he's doing because it gives the scene such a let-down...I think Bird would roll over in his grave if he knew what was going on...there's an interview with Miles where he said he didn't hear me and he's not interested in hearing me because we're all imitating Fats Navarro. He imitated the shit out of Fats Navarro the first five years, and Clark Terry and Louis Armstrong and Monk and Dizzy. Then he sits up and talks about how he listens to Journey and Frank Sinatra. He's just co-signing white boys, just tomming." Marsalis Interview [July 1983] in Carr, p. 435

"..the more famous [Wynton Marsalis] became, the more he started saying things - nasty, disrespectful things - about me, things I've never said about musicians who influenced me and who I had great respect for." Miles: The Autobiography, Miles Davis and Quincy Troupe, p. 349-50 [1989]

In a piece written after Miles death, Wynton perhaps felt it expedient to mute his hatred of Miles' fusion period:

"However controversial the last twenty years of Miles Davis's career have been, there is no doubt that the lyrical beauty, the poignancy of his sound and the ability he had to address the fundamentals of jazz will forever be of value to all musicians and all true listeners. He knew how to organize bands. Few in jazz or in any other music have been as good as he was at his best." Marsalis, tribute to Miles [11/91]; in Carr, p. 550

But next year:

"MB: About Miles (Davis), when you first came on the scene and all and he was just coming back into his career, there seemed like there was some kind of a rift between the two of you, at least in the press, I don't know if it was manufactured or what. What exactly caused that?

WM: Well, the rift was that I was trying to play Jazz and he was trying to play pop music and use his status as a great Jazz musician to relieve the pressure that the art form of Jazz put on the United States of America in terms of education. So you know the big debate in Jazz was always - is it just some lightweight pop entertainment which actually has also a race component in it ... or is it an art form that addresses the American mythology and which needs to be looked at seriously? Now at one time he was adamant that it was an art form that needed to be addressed seriously. That was when he was really playing and being serious. That's the Miles Davis that I was attracted to. Then in the late 1960's when Rock came over, when Rock was in the United States of America and it became real popular and they were making all of the money and getting all the publicity - then he switched over and wanted to be a Rock musician. So when I came on the scene, I came out to play Jazz. But I came out in the after- math of a scene that was decimated by Jazz musicians like him who tried to imitate Rock musicians, so that made it much, much more difficult for someone like me to learn how to play because the feel of Jazz had been, I mean, you know what happened. So always there had to be a rift between he and I because I was trying to represent the tradition of Jazz dealing with American mythology and he was trying to make some money and be commercial and sell his position as a great Jazz musician to cosign this, whatever it was that he was doing." Wynton Marsalis Interview, All About Jazz [1992]

In 1994, Marsalis alluded to Miles in scurrilous terms:

"Better yet, ask one who has surrendered. He can better describe the feeling of neglect, having succumbed to it. He is still a warrior, albeit a fallen one. Now more celebrated in defeat. Ask, if you want to know the pitiful truth of surrender after a too-long struggle with forces that have always been unbeatable - forces of prejudice, of ignorance, of apathy, greed, the inhumane. But you probably can't find the words. How do you talk to an old fallen warrior who has surrendered senselessly, soon after defeat was assured, surrendered before the good fighting begins, the fight for the life of a thing? Now he tours the world in a cage to represent the grandeur of those who have defeated him, an old Hannibal in the hands of the Romans. Trapped in his own fame, and on display Miles away from his capitulation. Now the tales of his victories are exaggerated because they no longer honor himself, but his captors, who will graciously define him and his generations. That is the way of war.

..the fallen proclaim, 'I had to change with the times,' or 'So what?'..." Sweet Swing Blues on the Road, Marsalis, p. 161-5 [1994]

The allusion is via the capitalisation of the M and “So What”:

In a 1999 interview for Ken Burns, Wynton made explicit that Miles’ “corruption” had been in part mediated by sex (which we know Marsalis associates with rock):

"I think that when Miles stood up and saw Sly and the Family Stone and all the women they had, and women of all races now, white women and black women, not that he hadn't enjoyed himself but now they're in the media, they get in the gossip papers and they got thousands of people hollering and screaming at the music. He's playing trumpet in a jazz band. They got the electric guitars going, the afros, the psychedelic pants, the groove the boom boom is hot and everybody's hot and they're screaming. There, people never did that for Charlie Parker. He could feel that he was old and out-of-date. And he did not want to grow old.

...As fusion progresses, we see that the musicians' desire is not to come up with a jazz sensibility and use things from rock and roll, but it is to become a glorified pop musician who can play instrumental music also. No, but it's to become the, the musicians desire is not to become, it's not to take rock and roll and bring it into the sensibility of jazz, but it's to become a rock and roll musician and participate in all the benefits of that should be the money and the groupies and all that and play a jazz solo every now and then. And this comes, we get to see it in full, in full bloom when Miles Davis returns in the early 80s with a straight instrumental pop album with no overtones of fusion at all." Ken Burns Interview [1999]

This is one of the latest shots fired by Marsalis in a campaign besmirching Davis’ name. As I say it has been going on for many years. In it a black man now asserts that a black jazz musician has been corrupted by the sexual content associated with a white form of music. And the basis is no stronger than in the twenties when black jazz was asserted to be sexually corrupting young whites. In turning round the age-old accusations of corruption, rather, Marsalis is following his mentor Murray. I demonstrate that, for Davis, the original attraction of Sly Stone was his ideology of integration in my article on Bitches Brew. That is Miles wasn't "corrupted" at all.