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writers who have unduly stressed the African Americanness of jazz and players who hire musicians presumably based only on their color are betraying the music’s mandate to be a model of interracial cooperation. (Exactly who gave the music this mandate is never clearly specified; unlike other elements singled out for historical investigation, this assertion has gone largely unexamined.)¹⁷ Sudhalter and the others contrast their views with those put forward by Albert Murray, Stanley Crouch, and Wynton Marsalis, prominent figures on the board of Jazz at Lincoln Center.¹⁸ These latter three they accuse of overlooking the importance of figures like Bix Beiderbecke, Benny Goodman, Gil Evans, and Bill Evans through programming that focuses almost exclusively on the work of African American performers and composers. Furthermore, they assert that the aesthetic judgments of Murray and the others, which foreground blues playing and swing, implicitly exclude white musicians from meaningful and publicly sanctioned participation in jazz.

      Although many of these arguments have been stated in almost identical terms for decades (see, for example, Hentoff 1961a), they had a particular resonance near the close of the twentieth century. The use of words and phrases such as meritocracy, reverse racism, and politically correct connected the project of Collier, Sudhalter, Teachout, and Lees to the affirmative action debates of the 1990s and perhaps constitutes an attempt to resist any reframing of historical narrative.¹⁹ Even worse, in a move reminiscent of the era’s conservative politicians and radio talk show hosts, Collier, Lees, Teachout, and Sudhalter placed selected black musicians and scholars in roles similar to those voluntarily assumed by black conservatives such as Clarence Thomas, Shelby Steele, and Ward Connerly, making Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Gerald Early, for example, unwitting yes-men for arguments they might never have independently endorsed. Toward the end of “The Color of Jazz,” for example, Teachout quotes Duke Ellington as having told an interviewer in 1945, “Twenty years ago when jazz was finding an audiences [sic], it may have had more of a Negro character. The Negro element is still important. But jazz has become a part of America. There are as many white musicians playing it as Negro…. We are all working along more or less the same lines. We learn from each other. Jazz is American now. American is the big word” (Teachout 1995, 53; see also Tucker 1993, 254).

      Teachout then comments, “Five decades later, this spirit is being undermined by cultural politicians for whom the word ‘American’ has validity only when it lies on the far side of a hyphen. That jazz, the ultimat cultural melting pot and arguably America’s most important contribution to the fine arts, would have fallen victim to such divisive thinking is an especially telling index of the unhappy state of our culture at the end of the 20th century” (Teachout 1995, 53). One wonders, however, what Ellington, who often insisted on calling his work “Negro music” rather than jazz (Ellington 1939), might have thought of his words being so characterized, particularly without the context of his comments being considered. He was, after all, speaking near the end of the Second World War; was talking to an unidentified, but presumably white, interviewer; and knew that his words would appear in PM, a “liberal newsmagazine” whose “readership [was] more accustomed to [reading about] opera, symphonies, and art museums” than jazz (Kelley 2009, 132). When one remembers how important dissembling has been for African American survival in the United States (Hine 1989; Roberts 1989) and how few negative opinions Ellington ever expressed publicly, his intentions become germane. His repeated references to jazz’s modern, American qualities (he likens the music to the automobile and the airplane) make it seem that he might have been self-consciously striving to present a patriotic view, whether or not it expressed all that he thought (see Cohen 2010, 227–28, 232, 239, 242). Teachout’s interpretation, however, doesn’t leave room for that possibility.

      In the collective work of Collier, Lees, Teachout, and Sudhalter, then, to mention race is to be divisive and to delay the arrival of a truly colorblind society. Like the conservative cultural critics with whom I’ve aligned them, they have effectively turned the rhetoric of the 1950s and 1960s American civil rights movement against it. A clear example of this rhetorical strategy is Teachout’s plea for a world in which “artists are judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their choruses” (Teachout 1995, 53).²⁰ In short, even though Collier, Lees, Teachout, and Sudhalter defend their project as neutral historical recuperation, their ideology is just as apparent as the one they seek to expose.

      In fact, the writers and musicians they single out for criticism share some of their assumptions regarding the primacy of skill and the relative importance of race. Murray (1976), Crouch, and Marsalis, to be sure, feel that the essence of jazz lies in the “fire” of its fundamentals: blues feeling, timbral nuance, and rhythmic swing. These immutable fundamentals (see DeVeaux 1997, 17; Rudinow 1994)²¹ are most profoundly audible in the work of a group of musical masters like Morton, Armstrong, Ellington, Monk, and Coltrane. One might infer, as Teachout does, that the fundamentals were chosen to exclude white musicians. I see no other way to understand his inference beyond seeing in it a conflation of race and culture. He assumes, based on their programming choices and their list of masters, that Marsalis, Crouch, and Murray believe that blues and swing are the exclusive province of black men and that they attribute the excellence of African American jazz musicians to their skin color (cf. Lock 1988, 115–16). Teachout used as evidence esteemed New Yorker critic Whitney Balliett’s assertion (1977) that Murray’s view of jazz history in Stomping the Blues (1976) was racist, for Murray allegedly discussed only one white musician (Gene Krupa) in main text of the book.

      It is difficult to substantiate these charges when one carefully examines the writing in question. Indeed, it seems as though Teachout and Balliett have grossly misread Murray, seeing in his work only that which seems to support their opposition to him. Murray, in fact, is primarily concerned with asserting that jazz performance is about skill and nuance rather than racial essences or inborn gifts, particularly when, using blues as a synonym for jazz, he writes:

      No matter how deeply moved a musician may be, whether by personal, social, or even aesthetic circumstances, he must always play notes that fulfill the requirements of the context, a feat which presupposes far more skill and taste than raw emotion…. [Such skill and taste] represent … not natural impulse but the refinement of habit, custom, and tradition become second nature…. Indeed on close inspection what was assumed to have been unpremeditated art is likely to be largely a matter of conditioned reflex, which is nothing other than the end product of discipline, or in a word, training. (Murray 1976, 98)

      More than anything, Murray is trying to disentangle those cultural and practical concerns that he feels are actually operative in performance from racist assumptions. His focus is on an approach to music making. When he later writes of those “conditioned by the blues idiom in the first place” as having certain advantages over those who were not, writers like Teachout read that argument as racial, focusing attention on dark persons rather than on what Murray foregrounds: skill, conditioning, and discipline. Murray is ultimately concerned with musical competence, as Benjamin Brinner (1995, 1) would later describe it: “an integrated complex of skills and knowledge upon which a musician relies within a particular cultural context” (see also Stanyek 2004).

      Though his position is harder to defend, Stanley Crouch likewise maintains what I consider a focus on practice and action rather than race or phenotypical notions of it. Indeed, he has no shortage of negative criticisms of hip-hop or rhythm and blues or of African American musicians who fail to work within the tradition as he understands it (see Crouch 1990a). Writing about Miles Davis’s The Birth of the Cool recordings, for example, he excoriates Davis, implicitly condemns arranger Gil Evans, and questions the discernment of other jazz critics in one magisterial sweep:

      Davis’s nonet of 1948–50 played little in public and recorded only enough to fill an album, but it largely inspired what became known as “cool” or “West Coast” jazz, a light-sounding music, low-keyed and smooth, that disavowed the Afro-American approach to sound and rhythm. This style had little to do with blues and almost nothing to do with swing…. Heard now, the nonet recordings seem little more than primers for television writing…. The overstated attribution of value to these recordings led the critical establishment to miss Ellington’s “The Tattooed Bride,” which was the high point of jazz composition in the late 1940s. Then, as now, jazz critics seemed unable

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