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At the time and since, performances in these spaces were celebrated for wide-ranging, exploratory music that frequently fell outside the stylistic parameters that club owners and record executives thought marketable.¹⁰

      In that context, Blythe’s work is notable for its eclectic but respectful embrace of the past. In an interview published shortly after the album’s release, he explained why he chose the approach he did: “What prompted me to do that album now was not an attempt to be part of any trend, because several players are going back to the tradition, but just a sense that now the feeling would be right for an album like this…. The music on In the Tradition is basic and fundamental to so-called jazz. If you don’t acknowledge anything of that nature then what are you doing?” (Blumenthal 1980, 64). Indeed, he amplifies his comment later in assessing his own work as well as that of like-minded performers: “People don’t have to be innovative to be creative. For a while everybody was trying to be innovative, but everybody isn’t. I’ve always felt that the innovative thing comes about when one does his homework being creative…. You don’t have to reject everything that has been dealt with already and go look for the new horizons, because you could be out in the dark where you don’t see shit” (Blumenthal 1980, 64).¹¹ On the recording he leads his quartet through compositions by Duke Ellington, John Coltrane, and Fats Waller. His repertoire choices repeat, in a different medium, the canonizing gestures of earlier writers, but with a signal difference. Through the inclusion of two original compositions, one might say that Blythe sees himself as someone capable not only of playing in the tradition, but also of adding to it. One result of his recording, as Francis Davis suggested in a piece originally published in 1983, was the addition of a new phrase to the discourse on jazz: “When Arthur Blythe formed a quartet … and began mixing tunes by Ellington, Waller, Monk, and Coltrane in with his originals, he gave a movement—or more precisely, a moment—its name and unintentionally became its figurehead. Any performance that swings or follows a chord sequence or makes an overt reference to the past is now said to be in the tradition. And any performance which doesn’t do any of those things isn’t” (Davis 1986, 194–95).

      Thus, although many commentators have associated a “neoconservative” return to traditional playing with the rise of Wynton Marsalis in the early 1980s (Pareles 1984; Sancton 1990), Blythe’s comments make clear that other musicians were motivated to explore previous styles without the prompting of the young trumpeter. Indeed, many of the issues that would be part of the debate regarding tradition and conservatism in the 1980s and ’90s are prefigured in Blythe’s statement and his work.¹²

      Through the 1980s, greater investment by major recording labels, more extensive media coverage, and the institutionalization of jazz in schools and performing arts institutions strengthened the related visions of tradition presented by Williams, Blythe, and, eventually, Marsalis. Many of the musicians who would become prominent figures in the mid-1990s had their interest in acoustic jazz sparked by the evidence of a venerable jazz tradition around them. Critic Tom Piazza describes the era in this way: “At the beginning of the 1980s, it would have been hard to imagine young musicians who were playing demanding acoustic jazz being signed to major labels…. But by 1990 they were appearing constantly, and at an amazing rate” (Piazza 1997, 96). While the interest young musicians and fans were displaying might have been regarded as a sign of the music’s vitality, there were critics who were less sanguine about the newcomers. “Predictably,” Piazza continues,

      the phenomenon … stirred up a backlash among reviewers … with odd racial overtones, as many of the music’s young players were, for the first time in quite a while, African-American. The gist of the attacks was that the young musicians, instead of making a Coltrane-like, self-immolatory journey of self-discovery, were focusing too much energy studying previous work in the idiom. Along with this, the attacks ran, they paid entirely too much attention to their appearance—dressing in suits and ties with a sophistication that hadn’t been seen in jazz musicians since the Miles Davis of the mid-1960s[,] and this effort was taken to be symptomatic of the superficiality of the Yuppie ’80s. There was a sneering, hostile quality to many of the attacks; the young musicians were being characterized as “neo-conservative,” “reactionary,” and “Reaganite.” … Some enlightened soul even came up with the snide phrase “young black men in suits” to characterize the movement. (97)¹³

      As the decade ended and Lincoln Center chose Wynton Marsalis to be the artistic director of its summer “Classical Jazz” series, the attacks grew more vicious. Critics regarded young black men in suits as something more pernicious than conservative: they were antiwhite.

      In a widely cited Down Beat interview (Crouch 1987), Marsalis had stressed the need for budding jazz musicians to study the work of the masters. And, since all of the masters he named were African American (as had been the case with Williams), many commentators saw his vision of tradition as racially exclusive. Even more, Marsalis’s seeming refusal to feature tributes to white musicians in Lincoln Center’s programs and the absence of white musicians in various young black bandleaders’ bands were prima facie evidence that Marsalis and his acolytes were militantly rejecting white musicians.¹⁴ Likewise, the record labels that seemed to be favoring young black musicians such as trumpeter Roy Hargrove and guitarist Mark Whitfield for presumably lucrative recording contracts were also—and quite paradoxically—regarded as antiwhite. It mattered little that the same label that promoted Hargrove also put significant promotional energy behind a white saxophonist named Christopher Hollyday or that Harry Connick Jr., Joey DeFrancesco, Benny Green, and Ryan Kisor were also signed to major labels at that time (for a more complete list, see DiMartino 1991). Furthermore, comments by African American musicians to the effect that jazz was a form of African American music would lead writers like James Lincoln Collier, Gene Lees, and Terry Teachout by the mid-1990s to level charges of “reverse racism” at them. In other words, those young players were not only denying the contributions of white musicians to jazz, they were also denying white musicians the opportunity to support themselves playing a music they too loved and, as Americans, should receive equal credit for having created.¹⁵

      The crux of the argument, then, was that jazz was historically an American music rather than an African American one. In differing ways, these writers each conceded that jazz had (partial) roots in African American musics or resulted from a mixture of European and African elements (Collier 1993, 183–224; Lees 1994, 187–246; Teachout 1995).¹⁶ That is, where African Americanness might once have been an important factor in the development of jazz, its impact registered only in the past: in post–Civil Rights–era America, it no longer mattered. In fact, labeling jazz as African American ran counter to the music’s democratic, integrationist spirit and was a politically correct attempt to elevate black musicians while erasing the contributions of white ones. The introduction of Richard M. Sudhalter’s Lost Chords: White Musicians and Their Contribution to Jazz (1999b) places it squarely in this ideological camp. He writes, for example,

      The rage for “multiculturalism” in the arts—as in society at large—has led to the reassessment of, and often elevation of, artistic traditions of non-European and non-white cultures. With it has come recognition of many black artists and writers whose achievements long stood hidden from public sight…. Applied to jazz history, such thinking has spawned a view of early white efforts as musically insignificant and—particularly in the 1920s and ’30s—vastly overpublicized. Jazz, says the now-accepted canon, is black: there have been no white innovators, few white soloists of real distinction; the best white musicians (with an exception or two) were only dilute copies of black originals, and in any case exerted a lasting influence only on other white musicians. (xvi)

      Such a state of affairs leads him to lament the resulting distortion, for in truth “in at least one important field, black and white once worked side by side, often defying the racial and social norms of their time to create a music whose graces reflected the combined effort.” Jazz represents, then, true, nonpoliticized multiculturalism, “living proof that the races and ethnic groups can cooperate to the common good” (xvii).

      Drawing inspiration from the work of Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Sudhalter asserts that his work is grounded in historical facts and therefore both ideologically neutral and capable of correcting the sins of those

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