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 who have forgotten the role that whites have played in the music’s development. In his estimation 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
