Blowin' the Blues Away - Travis A. Jackson Music of the African Diaspora

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Brown, and Beige,” which includes this chapter and the next, examines the issues raised by the study of jazz in the 1990s and, more importantly, directly engages the issues of race, culture, history, memory, education, and experience that are integral to (and frequently debated with regard to) the making of jazz. Indeed, one of the most trenchant questions in chapter 2 is whether jazz is African American music, American music, or something else altogether. My response hinges on problematizing notions of race/culture and history/memory, seeing them as constructs that have been strategically deployed by various commentators. While the writings of these commentators frequently conflate race and culture with one another, they stake their claims to authority by valorizing history at the expense of memory without seeing the two as related rather than opposed entities. As a corrective, I consider the pathways taken by various musicians to performing, recording, and listening to jazz. In doing so, I draw attention to the roles of practical activity, lived experience, and notions of social, economic, and cultural capital to argue that there are compelling reasons to consider jazz African American.

      The second section, “Scenes in the City,” builds on the first by examining the convergence of musicians’ and other participants’ pathways on the New York jazz scene. I argue that one cannot have a comprehensive understanding of the meanings that might be attached to the music without relating it to the geographic, economic, and social contexts in which it is performed and evaluated. In chapter 3, therefore, I suggest that consideration of space and spatiality enhances a jazz historical narrative that generally renders geography as inert and subservient to time. In particular, those two concepts highlight the impact that attempts to regulate the use of space in cities has had on jazz historically—determining, among other things, where jazz musicians can perform, how often, and for whom. Zoning laws, uneven spatial development, and a shift from an industrial to a service economy over the last several decades have been just as crucial as developments in musical style for the making and interpreting of jazz. Toward the end of chapter 3, I argue that jazz performance is inseparable from a loose and shifting assemblage of agents and institutions—the jazz scene—that facilitates (and inhibits) the public presentation of the music and musicians in live performance and on recordings. In chapter 4, I examine in more detail the contours of the New York scene in the 1990s, describing its network of agents and institutions and their relation to one another.

      The first two sections provide the context in which one might most fruitfully understand the book’s title and the framework developed in the third section, “Blowin’ the Blues Away.” Chapter 5 focuses on the normative and evaluative statements that my interviewees made about performing and learning to perform jazz. I use those statements to hypothesize a “blues aesthetic” that encompasses what performers are trying to do and how they evaluate musical events. In chapter 6, I argue that discourses on race and culture as well as history and memory work with a blues aesthetic to frame jazz performance as a spiritually oriented ritualized activity. In chapter 7, I analyze three studio recordings and three live performances to illustrate the efficacy of seeing jazz through the lenses of a blues aesthetic and ritualization. In the final chapter, I consider the implications that the perspective presented here might have for future research and writing on jazz as well as other forms of music. Finally, noting the ways that the scene has changed since I conducted the research, I speculate on the directions in which the musicians may head in the future.

      CHAPTER 2

      History and Memory, Pathways and Practices

       The African Americanness of Jazz

      History will either off you or make you valid.… I think the idea now is for blacks to write about the history of our music. It’s time for that because whites have been doing it all the time. It’s time for us to do it ourselves and tell it like it is. The whites have a whitewash look at our music. Naturally, they’re going to try to ooze off as much as they can to the whites, but they can’t, because we’re documented in records and the truth will stand.

      —Dizzy Gillespie, quoted in Taylor (1993, 126–27)

      There are perhaps no issues more vexed in discussions of jazz than the concepts of race and culture. Whenever one encounters them, whether those offering their opinions are musicians, critics, historians, or musicologists, what is arguably at stake is legitimation: who can rightfully lay claim to jazz and on what grounds? Is it African American music, America’s classical music, or just music (Walser 1995)? When stories about jazz, however conceived, are told, which narratives receive priority: those transmitted in historical writing, those produced by critics, or those based in memory and orally transmitted among musicians and aficionados of the music? In differing ways, anyone concerned with answering these questions has to turn the past into something usable. It becomes a charter variously interpreted to authorize (or invalidate) cultural practices (Appadurai 1981;Trouillot 1995; Sider and Smith 1997).

      Even without consideration of jazz, race and culture are highly contested terms in the United States. Many lay commentators use the two interchangeably. Both, after all, are rough-and-ready ways of explaining and understanding the myriad differences between individuals and social groups. For most people, substituting one for the other perhaps seems unobjectionable. Scholars, however, have often thought it better to distinguish the terms. In recent academic writing, then, race is a sociopolitical construction (Holt 2000), an emergent result of processes of “racial formation” (Omi and Winant 1994) derived from visual markers: based on physical appearance (i.e., phenotype) any person might be ascribed membership in one of a number of groups that can ultimately trace their ancestry to specific geographic locales (Asia, Africa, and Europe, for example). For its part, culture, particularly as used by anthropologists, is a term that focuses on the widely varying practices that distinguish human groups from one another.

      So defined, these terms are not without their difficulties. What happens, for example, when we heed the scientists who have convincingly argued that as a matter of biology and/or genetics race does not exist? Do we then also conclude that those who see race as a social construction mean to discount the effects that race—in the non-academic sense—might have on people’s daily lives?1 Does a focus on constructedness support assertions that, in the twenty-first century, the United States is postracial? One need not go that far, for it is certainly possible to disentangle seeing race as an arbitrary construction from seeing it as lacking any real function or meaning. More than likely, constructionists hope that emphasizing race’s social and political valence, rather than its “naturalness,” may give everyone—scholars, politicians, and laypeople—tools to understand and minimize the negative effects of policies and beliefs derived from simplistic notions centered on phenotypes.

      Where culture is concerned, anthropologists, at least since the 1970s, have questioned whether it is a useful way to understand the ways that human beings relate to one another and the world around them. At worst, some uses of the culture concept draw attention away from the cumulative, processual nature of human interaction. Rather than seeing human groups as dynamic and adaptive, such usage encourages us to see them as static, reductively described via an inventory of habits, customs, food-ways, moral codes, and the like. Similarly, by focusing on culture as something shared, some anthropologists’ writings have had the (unintended?) effect of deemphasizing the conflicts between members of cultural groups—for example, those situations where behavioral and moral matters are contested (Abu-Lughod 1991). As a result, those researchers interested in addressing the complexity and variability of different groups’ practices have increasingly had to suggest conceptual alternatives that carry fewer of the homogeneous, utopian connotations that culture has accrued.2

      To people outside academia, these debates may appear precious and disconnected from common sense. Race and culture aren’t constructions: they are real things that people

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