and African-derived musical forms. On their pathways, in other words, these musicians have explored the changing cultural and musical practices of African Americans beyond the years of jazz’s emergence. Complaints about the relative valence of race and culture or history and memory surely have a part to play, but the work of musicians is less about the ideas associated with those dyads—integration, racial exclusion, expansive Americanness, or fiery fundamentals—than it is about strategies for negotiating structure and performance that emerge from and are consistently enriched by other African American musics. To the degree that there is a unified jazz tradition, it is predicated on cultural practice and memory-based reconstruction, both of which are decidedly oriented more toward the future than the past.
PART TWO
Scenes in the City
CHAPTER 3
Jazz and Spatiality
The Development of Jazz Scenes
On many nights during my fieldwork, I would leave my apartment on 119th Street and walk to the 1/9 train station at 116th and Broadway. After descending the stairs on the downtown side, I would proceed to the far end of the station in order to get a seat in the front car. Upon arriving at 14th Street, I’d exit the station on the downtown side and walk up the stairs into the New York night. Turning 180 degrees toward 7th Avenue South, I’d orient myself by looking for St. Vincent’s Hospital and then looking right, where I could see the now-fallen twin towers of the World Trade Center dominating the southern horizon. Walking down 7th Avenue in their direction, I would soon encounter the red awning of the Village Vanguard stretching over the sidewalk. If I continued in that direction, I could look to the right at 10th Street, as I passed under the sign for Dix et Sept, and see patrons waiting to enter Smalls. Going further down, past Christopher Street, I might also see the enclosed sidewalk café of Sweet Basil (later Sweet Rhythm), through whose windows I could gauge the number of patrons within and perhaps catch a glimpse of the performers. Alternatively, I might have turned left at Christopher and headed toward 6th Avenue and West 3rd Street, where by going to the left I could choose between performances at the Blue Note and Visiones in a single block.
Other potential routes might have taken me north and east toward Bradley’s on University Place, north and west toward Zinno on 13th Street, or much further south, into Tribeca, where the Knitting Factory was located on Leonard Street. Regardless of my destination on a given night, the proximity of those venues to one another, as well as to Russ Musto’s Village Jazz Shop (at 163 West 10th Street), made that area of Greenwich Village a jazz neighborhood. More accurately, my walks through the city on those evenings, my routes and routines (Certeau 1984, 97–110; Román-Velázquez 1999, 64–65), created a jazz-related understanding of the neighborhood through my deemphasizing spaces that equally characterized the area: piano bars like Rose’s Turn, rock clubs like the Lion’s Den and the Bitter End on Bleecker Street, or the various pizza shops, cafés, lounges, restaurants, and bars that might have attracted other people. Indeed, in discussing the neighborhood with friends who had a stronger interest in other aspects of New York nightlife, I was generally astonished to find that we had wildly divergent conceptions of the same terrain.
Such experiences reinforced for me the notion that space, in its geographic and theoretical dimensions, is a crucial component for understanding and conceptualizing jazz. Accounts of the music’s development, usually starting in New Orleans, moving to Chicago, and finally settling in New York—with brief side trips to Kansas City, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and other locales—generally acknowledge the role of space, but, like race, its importance registers in such accounts primarily in jazz’s past. Those locales figure in the historical narrative only as backdrops for the supposed real action: the development of musical style as exemplified in the work of the music’s masters. The places where Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, or Ornette Coleman, for example, spent their childhood years (in New Orleans, Washington, D.C., and Fort Worth, respectively) are important only because they initially shaped musical lives that seemed less affected by geography once those individual musicians’ styles were formed. In other words, rather than being considered constitutive of musical or historical development or being viewed dynamically, the locales in which jazz musicians have flourished were a scrim in front of which they marched on their way to making history. Even those works that have explored the role played by various cities, states, and regions in jazz’s development (e.g., Ostransky 1978; Gordon 1986; Pearson 1987; Gioia 1992; Oliphant 1996; Björn and Gallert 2001; Suhor 2001) see space as subsidiary to time, devoting less space to geography after jazz styles or musicians have emerged.
In differing ways, these writings describe the built environments, legal structures, and migration patterns that make certain places attractive and fertile (temporary) destinations or points of embarkation for musicians. Each city, state, or region (with New York City as a notable exception) experiences a rise and fall (cf. Kruse 2003, 14), so that New Orleans ceases to be important after the closing of the Storyville red-light district; Chicago loses much of its centrality once New Orleans migrants and other musicians, following a crackdown on speakeasies in the late 1920s, depart for New York; Kansas City “fades out” with the end of the Pendergast political machine; and Detroit’s lively jazz scene is eclipsed by the rise of Motown Records. Studies of jazz outside the United States (Godbolt 1984, 1989; Kater 1992; Starr 1994; Atkins 2001, 2003) act as supplements that mildly challenge the standard narratives without necessarily expanding the role of geography. Those nations and regions are simply other places whose roles in jazz’s development merit consideration. The master narrative itself, however, remains intact—at least in the United States—and isn’t subject to modification or elaboration.
Careful observers, however, might notice the threads linking local stories and might see as well what many of those tales tend not to emphasize: that jazz activity does not disappear from those localities after their supposed declines. The elements that comprise a given scene—musicians, educational institutions, performance venues, and the like—continue operating long afterward, if only on a muted level. After all, New Orleans from the 1970s to the ’90s nurtured the careers of Wynton and Branford Marsalis, Terence Blanchard, Donald Harrison, Nicholas Payton, Peter Martin, and Brian Blade. Detroit did the same for Robert Hurst, Kenny Garrett, Geri Allen, James Carter, Jaribu Shahid, and Craig Taborn, just as Chicago earlier did for Sun Ra, various members of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, Steve Coleman, and Lonnie Plaxico or as Los Angeles did for Charles Mingus, Horace Tapscott, Charles McPherson, Arthur Blythe, and David Murray, among others. Even those places that might seem peripheral in the development of jazz, like St. Louis and Memphis, have done similar work for musicians such as Lester Bowie, Julius Hemphill, James Williams, Mulgrew Miller, and Donald Brown. Although some of those musicians might have moved to specific metropolitan areas as young adults, the role played by their previous homes in their development is unassailable.
These observations suggest another way of examining jazz’s development, one that devotes greater attention to the roles of space and spatiality over time and addresses the ways in which jazz musicians and other interested parties have sought to negotiate them. As developed in the work of Marxist geographers (e.g., Harvey 1989b; Soja 1989), inspired by the work of Henri Lefebvre (1974), those terms draw our attention to the variability and contingency of geography. Although literal space might be taken as a given, seen in commonsense terms as an arrangement of physical elements or a particular landscape, spatiality is something different, a function of how people manipulate space and make it useful for their own ends. As a concept, then, spatiality is—like society—a dynamic product of the relationships between individuals and groups and is, as a result, instrumental in the way that they navigate both space and time.
Edward W. Soja writes that, for its part, spatiality is distinct from both the “physical space of material nature and the mental space of cognition and representation, each of which is used and incorporated into the social construction of spatiality but cannot be conceptualized as its equivalent” (1989,
