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 see and live every day (Hall 1980). As categories, they draw attention to the similarities that allow us to group people and concepts together. In other words, race and culture, if they are constructions, are relational ones. Whether or not points of similarity are specified by a particular writer or speaker, color-based labels such as black, white, yellow, and red presuppose commonalities among races that in the academic sense are attributable to cultures. That is, by substituting a racial or color designation for a cultural one, an individual implicitly says that those terms signify roughly the same thing and assumes that others equate them as well. In such cases, laypeople and scholars’ statements alike reveal that race per se has less to do with how people look (as the visual markers would suggest) than it does, in the Geertzian sense, with culture: those practices and frameworks for interpretation they share.3
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
