of high school. He also spent time playing guitar and learning rock and jazz songs by ear in his preteen and teen years. His serious engagement with jazz started with a Mose Allison record, Back Country Suite, that he received as a gift when he was fourteen.28 Through Allison’s music, and later through engagement with the work of pianists like Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk, Oscar Peterson, Wynton Kelly, and Red Garland, Barth learned to play jazz.29 He earned a bachelor’s degree in music from the University of Michigan and a master’s degree in music from the New England Conservatory. Since the late 1980s, he has performed with Stanley Turrentine, Terence Blanchard, and Danilo Pérez among others; made recordings under his own name; and produced recordings for other jazz musicians, particularly singers.
Saxophonist Steve Wilson was born in Hampton, Virginia, in the early 1960s. His father sang in a group that traveled and performed spirituals in the area around Hampton and exposed his son to a wider world of African American music. The younger Wilson developed an interest in jazz through listening to his father’s copy of Ahmad Jamal’s But Not for Me: Live at the Pershing and through seeing saxophonists Eddie Harris and Rahsaan Roland Kirk at the Hampton Jazz Festival in the early 1970s. He took lessons on the alto saxophone and the oboe through high school and developed as a performer through playing in his school’s concert band, in funk and rhythm and blues bands in Hampton, and in the horn section of singer Stephanie Mills’s band. He attended Virginia Commonwealth University, where he studied with Doug Richards, who introduced him to the music of Duke Ellington, Jelly Roll Morton, and Fletcher Henderson. After graduating in the mid-1980s and moving to New York City, he played with the collective Out of the Blue and, in addition to leading his own ensembles, has been in demand as a saxophonist since then, performing with Lionel Hampton, Buster Williams, Chick Corea, Claudia Acuña, Bruce Barth, Maria Schneider, Mulgrew Miller, and Leon Parker.
Parker, who is a drummer, was born in White Plains, New York, in the mid-1960s. His parents had a record collection that not only spanned jazz history—from Lionel Hampton and Count Basie to Art Blakey, Miles Davis, and John Coltrane—but also included important Latin jazz recordings by artists such as Tito Puente and Mongo Santamaria. His musical training was less formal than Williams’s or Barth’s but no less extensive. He involved himself in the musical life of Westchester in the 1970s, playing in his high school’s jazz ensemble as well as in gospel groups and blues and rock bands. During this time he started performing in jazz clubs in Westchester and turned down a scholarship to Fordham University to start playing full-time in New York City. He began studying classical percussion around that time. In the late 1980s he became associated with some of the young musicians who were part of the New School for Social Research’s jazz program and started to develop his reputation on the jazz scene. Since then, he has recorded and performed with Kenny Barron, Jesse Davis, David Sánchez, Jacky Terrasson, Bruce Barth, and Steve Wilson. He has also released four CDs under his own name and collaborated with choreographers on various “body percussion” works.
Lastly, guitarist Peter Bernstein was born in New York City in the late 1960s. Because of the demands of his father’s work as a journalist, his family moved frequently—to Chicago shortly after he was born, back to New York for a few years, then to Israel for four years before finally returning to New York. Public interest in Scott Joplin’s work in the early 1970s—inspired by the film The Sting—inspired a six-year-old Bernstein to learn to play piano. While his family was in Israel, he started exploring his parents’ record collection, which included recordings by Simon and Garfunkel and James Taylor as well as the Dizzy Gillespie Big Band and Charles Mingus. Bernstein started taking guitar lessons there, mostly learning to play Bob Dylan tunes and songs like “Proud Mary.”30 His world changed, however, when he heard Jimi Hendrix and began to explore the blues-based conceptions of guitarists such as B.B. King, Freddie King, Albert King, and Eric Clapton. Hearing them eventually led him to Pat Metheny, George Benson, Kenny Burrell, Wes Montgomery, and Grant Green and cemented his interest in jazz. He attended Rutgers University, where he studied with Ted Dunbar and Kevin Eubanks. Like Leon Parker, he became associated with the jazz program at the New School in the late 1980s and started performing publicly in the city. Since then, he has recorded and performed with Jesse Davis, 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
