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 to determine the difference between a popular but insignificant trend and a fresh contribution to the art. (Crouch 1990b, 31)
The suggestion that Crouch is thinking only in racial terms is difficult to support when one asks what he means by an “Afro-American approach to sound and rhythm” that one might disavow. Might it not be possible for Crouch to recognize whites who adhere to that approach? For all the insults contained in the passage, Crouch still seems to be asserting something about a way of doing things, about a particular form of musical competence. Implicit in his work as well as that of Murray and Marsalis is the notion that musicians of whatever background must learn to be jazz performers.
Part of the difficulty Murray and Crouch’s critics have is that they reductively interpret “Afro-American” as denoting color rather than culture. The highly publicized moves of black leaders in the 1980s to have “Afro-American” and then “African American” replace “black” were intended in part to separate phenotype and practice, that is, to relocate the commonalities of those once described racially as black to a historically and geographically based narrative of shared practices and worldviews. While the aesthetic formulations of Murray, Crouch, and Marsalis have, to their credit, deemphasized an outmoded racial discourse, they are, nonetheless, like those of their critics, rooted in claims of historical objectivity, give short shrift to memory, and don’t go far enough into the realm of practice. In other words, these figures offer a particular historical interpretation to support their vision. But in saying that blues, swing, and sonic invention are and have always been important, they perhaps fore-close on a more textured investigation of the practices that might support their project.
One possible way for them to refigure the terms of the debate would lie in their focusing more detailed attention on the ways in which individuals have come to jazz performance as well as their understandings of its meanings. For many jazz musicians, there is a wide world of music making and many ways to move through it. Although they may at times enter strategically into the debates in which scholars and critics engage, their work is more concerned with the ins and outs of performance, composition, interaction, and financial survival. An examination of the paths they have taken to become jazz musicians and the activities and practices that sustain them in this endeavor may, in fact, offer a useful way to resolve questions about jazz’s pedigree.
In the jazz master narrative mentioned previously, the linkages between jazz and other African American (and African diaspora) musics are primarily restricted to the past. They surface only in cursory mentions of jazz’s birth, along with spirituals and the blues, from a seemingly passive “mixture” of European and African elements in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (see, e.g., Brothers 1994). At some point after this hazy period of origins—generally with the emergence of bebop in the 1940s—the historical narrative continues with jazz becoming an autonomous stream whose connections to more popular manifestations of African American music become problematic (Levine 1977). Those connections are bracketed, or set aside, in favor of understanding jazz as a species of modernist art that transcends its humble, racially bound origins.22
The musicians I interviewed during my fieldwork questioned the rightness of separating jazz as musical form and structure from African American culture, both in their talk about music and through their performances. Saxophonist Donald Harrison, for example, expressed disappointment when I told him of a debate on whether jazz was “African American music” that took place in a New York University classroom where I lectured in October of 1994. He invoked the words of drummer Art Blakey, who said he didn’t care what the music was called as long as everyone “gave credit to the music’s creators and innovators,” whom he felt were primarily African American. Numerous other statements by performers and listeners in my field notes express a similar view, one that is summarized by the late pianist James Williams’s assertion that there’s no separation between jazz and other forms of African American music: “It all comes from the same place. I have no problem playing religious songs in the clubs or playing [John] Coltrane in the church, as long as I play with the proper spirit and attitude. [Jazz and gospel] run in parallel. They not only criss-cross, they often come together” (field notes, 11 October 1994). All African American musics, he argues, are linked together and are different facets of the same entity.
One way to explore Harrison and Williams’s assertions is to focus on the pathways and practices of jazz musicians, showing that whatever motivation jazz performers or listeners may have to categorize what they perform and consume as “art,” the sounds and their choices
