LITMIR.BIZ

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Lou Donaldson, Larry Goldings, Joshua Redman, and Diana Krall, among others.

      It might be obvious what broad racial/cultural identities one might ascribe to these musicians. Without my making those ascriptions (or the musicians’ own self-identifications) explicit, there are tangible regularities in the paths they have taken to jazz performance. All are men who have benefited from the support of their parents, siblings, and teachers. Two of them have had extensive training in European instrumental techniques and repertoire, while two more have had less serious engagement and the remaining musician almost none. Regardless of their knowledge of concert music and its performance practices, however, their approaches to learning and developing have primarily entailed engagement with the work of African American musicians and various kinds of African American musics: jazz, in particular, but also gospel, rhythm and blues, blues, and funk. As musics that draw from a common fund of musical practices, these styles have been pivotal in each musician’s development. Indeed, they have all learned to play jazz through close listening and through performance. Many of them have concentrated on keeping central in their performances and choice of repertoire the African Americanness of the music.

      Although these issues will be explored in more depth in chapter 5, their importance here lies in musicians’ foregrounding of an African American approach to music making, one that has been most aptly described in scholarly writing by composer Olly Wilson. In 1974, he proposed that “a black-music cultural sphere exists which includes the music of the African and African-descendant peoples of the following geographic areas: the Atlantic Ocean in the center, bounded by West Africa on the east with the northern part of South America and the Carribean [sic] Islands on the south-west and the United States on the north-west” (6). Within that sphere, various musics are connected to each other via common conceptual approaches to music making: use of (overlapping) call-and-response techniques, off-beat phrasing of melodic accents, percussive approaches to performance, timbral heterogeneity, use of polymetric frameworks, and the integration of environmental factors into performance.³¹ Wilson summarizes his argument as follows:

      The relationship between African and Afro-American music consists not only of shared characteristics, but importantly, of shared conceptual approaches to music making, and hence is not basically quantitative but qualitative. Therefore the particular forms of black music which evolved in America are specific realizations of this shared conceptual framework which reflects the peculiarities of the American black experience. As such the essence of their Africanness is not a static body of something which can be depleted but rather a conceptual approach, the manifestations of which are infinite. The common core of this Africanness consists of the way of doing something, not simply something that is done. (20)

      These approaches are manifest in jazz performance in the ways in which jazz performers choose and adapt material, sometimes originating in other forms of African American music. Moreover, they are evident in the way that musicians adapt and play with those materials, regardless of source.

      In experiential terms, then, jazz is a form inseparable from other African American musics. The pathways that musicians traverse in coming to it and continuing to develop necessitate engagement with more than the technical aspects of jazz performance. Arguments that, through selective historical interpretation, reduce jazz to technical parameters and render it as a neutral and expansive American tradition are perhaps arguments that paint over African Americanness to assuage European American anxiety. Although asserting that jazz is an African American music is equally ideological, it is not simply an argument about race or even one that makes a simplistic appeal to historical precedent. It is instead a statement about the relationship of culture and experience, an understanding that emerges from examining the way that musicians of varying backgrounds have learned to perform the music. Each of them has had to marry whatever musical skills they had—however they acquired them—with the conventions and aesthetic priorities of jazz performance, which remain consistent with the aesthetic imperatives of other African American and African-derived musical forms. On their pathways, in other words, these musicians have explored the changing cultural and musical practices of African Americans beyond the years of jazz’s emergence. Complaints about the relative valence of race and culture or history and memory surely have a part to play, but the work of musicians is less about the ideas associated with those dyads—integration, racial exclusion, expansive Americanness, or fiery fundamentals—than it is about strategies for negotiating structure and performance that emerge from and are consistently enriched by other African American musics. To the degree that there is a unified jazz tradition, it is predicated on cultural practice and memory-based reconstruction, both of which are decidedly oriented more toward the future than the past.

      PART TWO

      Scenes in the City

      CHAPTER 3

      Jazz and Spatiality

       The Development of Jazz Scenes

      On many nights during my fieldwork, I would leave my apartment on 119th Street and walk to the 1/9 train station at 116th and Broadway. After descending the stairs on the downtown side, I would proceed to the far end of the station in order to get a seat in the front car. Upon arriving at 14th Street, I’d exit the station on the downtown side and walk up the stairs into the New York night. Turning 180 degrees toward 7th Avenue South, I’d orient myself by looking for St. Vincent’s Hospital and then looking right, where I could see the now-fallen twin towers of the World Trade Center dominating the southern horizon. Walking down 7th Avenue in their direction, I would soon encounter the red awning of the Village Vanguard stretching over the sidewalk. If I continued in that direction, I could look to the right at 10th Street, as I passed under the sign for Dix et Sept, and see patrons waiting to enter Smalls. Going further down, past Christopher Street, I might also see the enclosed sidewalk café of Sweet Basil (later Sweet Rhythm), through whose windows I could gauge the number of patrons within and perhaps catch a glimpse of the performers. Alternatively, I might have turned left at Christopher and headed toward 6th Avenue and West 3rd Street, where by going to the left I could choose between performances at the Blue Note and Visiones in a single block.

      Other potential routes might have taken me north and east toward Bradley’s on University Place, north and west toward Zinno on 13th Street, or much further south, into Tribeca, where the Knitting Factory was located on Leonard Street. Regardless of my destination on a given night, the proximity of those venues to one another, as well as to Russ Musto’s Village Jazz Shop (at 163 West 10th Street), made that area of Greenwich Village a jazz neighborhood. More accurately, my walks through the city on those evenings, my routes and routines (Certeau 1984, 97–110; Román-Velázquez 1999, 64–65), created a jazz-related understanding of the neighborhood through my deemphasizing spaces that equally characterized the area: piano bars like Rose’s Turn, rock clubs like the Lion’s Den and the Bitter End on Bleecker Street, or the various pizza shops, cafés, lounges, restaurants, and bars that might have attracted other people. Indeed, in discussing the neighborhood with friends who had a stronger interest in other aspects of New York nightlife, I was generally astonished to find that we had wildly divergent conceptions of the same terrain.

      Such experiences reinforced for me the notion that space, in its geographic and theoretical dimensions, is a crucial component for understanding and conceptualizing jazz. Accounts of the music’s development, usually starting in New Orleans, moving to Chicago, and finally settling in New York—with brief side trips to Kansas City, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and other locales—generally acknowledge the role of space, but, like race, its importance registers in such accounts primarily in jazz’s past. Those locales figure in the historical narrative only as backdrops for the supposed real action: the development of musical style as exemplified in the work of the music’s masters. The places where Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, or Ornette Coleman, for example, spent their childhood years (in New Orleans, Washington, D.C., and Fort Worth, respectively) are important only because they initially shaped musical lives that seemed less affected by geography once those individual musicians’ styles were formed. In other words, rather than being considered constitutive of musical or historical development or being viewed dynamically, the

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