best friends and colleagues I could have hoped for. Through countless dinners, drinks, impromptu jams, discussions of recordings, late-night listening sessions, and reading suggestions (as well as through performances with other members of the short-lived Ann Arbor Noise Collective), they made life seem like an endlessly gratifying voyage of discovery. I feel privileged to have been able to share so much with and learn so much from them. Many of the same observations are true of their wives, Victoria von Arx and Toko Shiiki-Santos, respectively. Their collective friendship is one of the greatest gifts I have ever received.
At the University of Chicago, my home since 2003, I have had an unparalleled interdisciplinary and collegial experience. In particular, my contact with faculty and staff across the university, some of whom have now taken positions elsewhere, has been both invigorating and positively challenging. Although I am certain to omit some people inadvertently, I have particularly grown through my association with (from the music department) Melvin L. Butler, Thomas Christensen, Martha Feldman, Philip Gossett, Berthold Hoeckner, Robert L. Kendrick, Kaley R. Mason, Marta Ptaszynska, Steven P. Rings, Anne Robertson, and Lawrence W. Zbikowski (with special thanks to Kathy Holmes) and (from the university more broadly) Lauren Berlant, Bill Brown, James Chandler, Cathy Cohen, Nicole M. Guidotti-Hernández, Deborah L. Gillaspie, Robert von Hallberg, Melissa Harris-Perry, Elise M. LaRose, Waldo Johnson, Scott Landvatter, David Levin, and Jacqueline Stewart. Among those whom I first encountered as graduate students, Nathan Bakkum, Vicki Brennan, Eric Brinkmann, M. Celia Cain, Sinan Dora, Byron Dueck, Luis-Manuel Garcia, Donald James, Jaime Jones, Kristen McGee, Kevin McKenna, Andrew Mall, Marina Peterson, Rumya Putcha, Melissa Reilly, Peter Shultz, Greg Weinstein, and Mark Yeary have been invaluable conversation partners and good friends. In my time at Chicago, though, Philip V. Bohlman and Martin Stokes (now at King’s College London) were my greatest sources of inspiration, both because of the breadth and depth of their intellects and because of their unfailing generosity of spirit. For good reason, they remain exemplars of what ethnomusicologists are and can do as scholars and human beings.
My ten-year-plus association with the Jazz Study Group at Columbia University also widened my horizons and expanded my acquaintance with some of the leading scholars working today. Spearheaded in its first incarnation by Robert G. O’Meally, to this day one of my most cherished mentors, the group was a place where I first tried out some of the ideas presented here and garnered feedback that helped me to hone them further. The group’s scholars and staff over the years have my undying gratitude. They include Herman Beavers, Gerald Early, Brent Hayes Edwards, Krin Gabbard, John Gennari, Farah Jasmine Griffin, William J. Harris, Robin D. G. Kelley, Sue Laizik, George E. Lewis, Bill Lowe, Timothy R. Mangin, Ingrid Monson, Fred Moten, Richard J. Powell, Guthrie P. Ramsey, David Lionel Smith, John F. Szwed, Jeffrey Taylor, Salim Washington, and many others. The varied fruit of the group’s work is on display in two volumes: The Jazz Cadence of American Culture (1995), edited by O’Meally and curated by the group, and Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies (O’Meally, Edwards, and Griffin 2004), featuring contributions from the group and its affiliates. I would be remiss in not extending warm thanks to James C. “J. C.” Sylvan, whose administrative expertise and wry humor helped to make the time I spent at Columbia’s Center for Jazz Studies in 2000 and 2001 all the more rewarding. That sabbatical year was funded in part by a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship.
In the much broader worlds of academia and the jazz scene, I have been enriched by my experiences with Paul Austerlitz, Gage Averill, Amy Bauer, Mellonee V. Burnim, Aaron Cohen, Scott DeVeaux, Kate Dumbleton, Daniel Ferguson, Kai Fikentscher, Aaron A. Fox, Alyssa Garcia, Melissa Gonzalez, Jocelyne Guilbault, Harold J. Haskins, Cheryl L. Keyes, Donna L. Kwon, Ferentz Lafargue, Steven Mamula, Portia K. Maultsby, Robin D. Moore, Zachary Ross Morgan, Michelle Nasser, Katherine S. Newman, Danielle Pacha, Steven F. Pond, Lewis Porter, Michelle Smith-Bermiss, Gabriel Solis, Nicole Stahlmann, George L. Starks Jr., Maurice Stevens, Michael E. Veal, Bonnie L. Wade, Richard Wang, Jeremy Wallach, Christopher J. Washburne, Christopher A. Waterman, Peter Watrous, and Cynthia P. Wong-Lippe. A stellar group of friends dating back three decades, especially Charles B. Adams, Jennifer Clary, Jeffrey Fracé, Adam Glaser, Beverly James, Stephen Lapointe, Carmen Maldonado, Jerusha Ramos, Roberto B. Vargas, and Paula Young, has also provided loving moral support through the years.
More so than most projects, this book has had a long development. It was delayed at some points by my unwillingness to declare it done and at others by the disciplinary disagreements that various drafts have occasioned. Some of the arguments contained herein will likely engender further disagreement and commentary, but both are welcome and, in fact, necessary. Through the whole process, Mary C. Francis has been a perceptive and accommodating editor. Taking over from Lynne Withey shortly after I signed my contract, she has guided this project through sometimes difficult straits with grace and seemingly endless patience. Eric Schmidt, Sharron Wood, and Mari Coates likewise have helped me work through the most intricate issues in the production process with skill and aplomb.
Miriam Tripaldi came into my life late in my work on this project, and she has quickly become a loving supporter and a true partner, making my life fulfilling and the work of finishing this book enjoyable in ways I never could have imagined: I owe her debts a lifetime will be too short to repay. But I look forward to that lifetime.
Most importantly, however, my extended family, centered in Nashville, Tennessee, has kept me going. In a world where many increasingly delay marriage and child rearing, having the opportunity to know one’s great-grandparents or even grandparents past one’s early years is a privilege. Because I was lucky on both counts, my great-grandparents in rural Tennessee and rural Louisiana, present mostly in memory over the last few decades, are a constant reminder of what struggle, strategic planning and creative improvisation can mean beyond the individual life. My grandparents, and especially my grandfathers, have been exemplars, people who taught me more about being in and hearing the world than I ever realized it was possible to know. On a more day-to-day level, my siblings, Lawrence Jackson Jr. and Melody Morris, as well as their children have always been only a phone call away and ready to remind me both that I am loved and do love and that there is a world beyond work. In the same way, my parents, Lawrence Sr. and the late Sherryl L. Jackson, were ever-interested, ever-supportive, ever-loving, even when the child who always wanted to be a pediatrician suddenly declared an interest in some strange thing called ethnomusicology. Without them nothing you read here would have been possible. The faults in this book are all mine, but any celebration or congratulations should be all theirs.
PART ONE
Black, Brown and Beige
CHAPTER 1
Studying Jazz
As the second decade of the twenty-first century begins, we are undoubtedly at a pivotal moment in the development of jazz. Major and independent record labels and a number of cultural institutions have, particularly since the early 1980s, presented jazz to varied publics in ways that promote both its essential “Americanness” and its supposed universality. They have devoted considerable resources to preserving and promulgating the music via new recordings, reissues of older ones, sponsorship of concert and lecture series, the mounting of museum exhibits, and the production of documentaries as well as syndicated radio and television programs. Popular publications and their advertisers, moreover, have also shown interest in the music, as evidenced by feature articles on jazz and jazz musicians in periodicals as diverse as the New York Times, the Washington Post, Newsweek, GQ, Essence, Out, and Rolling Stone and by the appearance of jazz musicians in stylish advertisements for Johnston & Murphy shoes and Movado watches, among other products.1 Two further indicators of the increased importance of jazz have been its designation by the House of Representatives and the United States Senate as a “rare and valuable national American treasure” in 1987 and frequent references to its status as “America’s classical music.”2 At the same time, after the high points of the 1980s and 1990s, younger audiences seem less interested in jazz,3 and the music seems to be receding from mass
