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Blowin' the Blues Away. Travis A. Jackson
Читать онлайн.Название Blowin' the Blues Away
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780520951921
Автор произведения Travis A. Jackson
Жанр Музыка, балет
Серия Music of the African Diaspora
Издательство Ingram
Where race and culture are collapsed into one another, history and memory are frequently kept apart despite their similarities. “Both processes,” Geneviève Fabre and Robert G. O’Meally have written, “involve the retrieval of felt experience from the mix and jumble of the past…. [But at] least until quite recently, many observers would agree that while history at its finest is a discipline,… memory is something else again, something less. Memory, these same observers would say, is by definition a personal activity, subject to the biases, quirks, and rhythms of the individual’s mind” (Fabre and O’Meally 1994, 5). That is, where people’s memories are variable and fallible at best, historians’ focus on facts and responsible interpretation raises their work to a presumably more objective level. The process through which certain events and social actors come to be regarded as historically significant, however, is not in the end drastically different from the reconstruction and sense-making processes of memory. After all, the “balanced and sober modes of analysis” (Fabre and O’Meally 1994, 6) that characterize the writing of history are equally selective and interpretive. In Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s characterization (1995), historians base their conclusions on data gathered from archives of various kinds, specially maintained repositories of papers and artifacts, to be sure, but more generally from whatever records remain from the past: newspapers, magazines, books, photographs, and audio and video recordings, for example. Archivists of whatever kind cannot fully document and preserve every bit of potential historical data. They must continually decide which items to keep and which to discard. Furthermore, they must develop aids for researchers who might use the materials they have kept: Which materials do they group together? Which criteria do they employ in determining what those groupings will be? The evidence of the archive and its documents, then, are necessarily filtered through the biases, quirks, and rhythms of the minds of archivists and historians before they reach readers or auditors.4
Debates over the relative importance of race and culture in jazz’s development and performance are intimately tied to those over the relative importance of history and memory as evidence for whatever claims one makes about the music. Those writers who favor particular visions of jazz—as African American music or America’s classical music, for example—frequently appeal to history to support their assertions. In the process, they attempt to raise their understandings to a level higher than the supposedly ideological, selective memories of others. One clear example of how the dyads race/culture and history/memory are relationally connected is the ongoing debate about the nature and constitution of the jazz tradition, a debate that was both fresh and resonant during my fieldwork. Both sets of categories provide the means through which understandings of tradition and claims over legitimacy are configured in written and musical discourse, as Gillespie’s previously quoted comment suggests.5
The jazz tradition, one might say, is the invention of Martin Williams, who in 1970 first published a collection of essays that put the definite article in front of the words jazz and tradition.6 Williams further solidified his conception of a coherent tradition with the release of the multi-LP Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz in 1973. Whether he intended this outcome or not, his choices for that compilation became for a time the de facto standard repertoire in the teaching of jazz history, the “classic” recordings made by the most important performers. Partially because of the Smithsonian’s imprimatur, numerous municipal and school libraries purchased the original set as well as its later revisions. Moreover, given the collection’s wide availability up to the late 1990s, the authors of a number of jazz textbooks, including Tirro (1977), Porter (1993), and Gridley (1997), chose the majority of their listening examples from the Smithsonian set.7
The tradition as Williams understands it emerges from the work of a series of exemplary figures. Great improvisers like Louis Armstrong and Charlie Parker “reassessed the music’s past, gave it a new vocabulary, or at least repronounced its old one,” while great composers like Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk “gave the music a synthesis and larger form” (1983, 5). Williams’s tradition also has clear racial and gendered dimensions. He writes, “Jazz is a music evolved by black men in the United States. It has been in general best played by [them], and its development has been dependent upon their artistic leadership. But at the same time, it is a music which men of other races, and men in other countries, can play and sometimes play excellently” (249; see also Wilmer 1970, 3). Because of his language, one can’t help but wonder whether he is conflating race and culture (were these musicians capable of providing artistic leadership simply because they had dark skin?). In addition, his (tacked-on) acknowledgment that blacks aren’t the only skilled performers might leave some nonblack musicians and listeners wondering about the legitimacy of their involvement with jazz. Williams’s masculinist version of tradition rests on the belief that the deeds of African American men are central to any understanding of jazz. Indeed, the narrative he presents has its support in what he sees as the determining roles of race and culture and in the play of history and memory: he chose outstanding African American male performers and composers from the much wider universe of musicians whose work he knew (remembered) and, through writing and argumentation, fashioned them into a now foundational account.
Williams’s invented tradition is, of course, not the only one: writers like André Hodeir (1956) and Gunther Schuller (1968) had already assembled similar pantheons of greats to support their own visions of a jazz tradition. Interestingly, all three brought to their work ideas and prescriptions originating outside the music they discussed. Williams, a former English student enamored of the New Criticism he read in college, was interested in the degree to which close reading of recordings could illuminate jazz’s artistic qualities (Gennari 1991, 2006). Hodeir and Schuller both brought concert music backgrounds to their encounters with and writings on jazz. Whatever their backgrounds, these three writers molded what they saw as primarily African American musical practices in the image of Western literary and musical traditions.8 Along with a number of others (e.g., Baraka 1963; Tirro 1977; Collier 1978; Sales 1984; Porter et al. 1993; Gridley 1997), moreover, they have created what we might call the master narrative of jazz history—one concerned with rapid advances in harmonic and rhythmic vocabulary and successive stylistic permutations spearheaded by a number of “great men,” Ferdinand “Jelly Roll” Morton, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, and Ornette Coleman, among them. Taken together, those musicians and their body of recordings form the central core of jazz: without due consideration of their work, the argument might go, no understanding of the music is possible.
Other writers have convincingly pointed out all there is to critique in the resulting narrative (DeVeaux 1991;Tomlinson 1991; Gabbard 1995; Tucker 2000). In effect, such writing can do little more than present a view of jazz history as selective as the memories it attempts to organize. The point is not that being selective is inherently bad. No single historical work can be truly comprehensive: some stories, some figures, some styles have to be omitted or discussed less extensively. Selective or not, though, the wide acceptance of Williams, Hodeir, and Schuller’s interpretations has allowed them to become a baseline for discussions of the roles of race, culture, history, and memory in jazz. At one and the same time, they provide evidence for both those who endorse their visions and those who might take a different view.
Although it is impossible to say how widely Williams’s work informed subsequent debates, by the late 1970s the nature of the jazz tradition was also being discussed publicly by musicians and critics, who prominently featured the catchphrase “in the tradition.” Indeed, the phrase might have entered wide circulation as the title of a 1979 LP by saxophonist Arthur Blythe.9