(2005, xi) have asserted that continued performance of jazz may require the kinds of public subsidy more common in Europe.
In the midst of these activities and alongside such arguments, academics have also had their say. Sociologists, psychologists, literary scholars, art historians, and cultural critics have found ways to see jazz through the lenses of their respective fields. Indeed, even those scholars working in the normally conservative and slow-to-change subdisciplines of musicology took notice: historical musicologists, ethnomusicologists, and music theorists have added their voices to an expanding discourse, using jazz to confirm, extend, and challenge the validity of paradigms of musical analysis and musicological research. All involved—whether they were trying to find the essence of American culture, trying to account for the impact that the music has had on its listeners, or attempting to understand how canonical musicians achieved their status—seemed fixed on jazz almost as though it might hold answers to some of life’s most intractable mysteries, as though it might help them to make sense of the modern world and how it came to be.
In the outpouring of work that has accompanied “the modern resurgence” of jazz (Nicholson 1990), however, views of the music, the musicians, and the world that they inhabit have rarely risen above the myopic or the romantic. On one hand, musicologists have spoken of jazz primarily in the terms they developed for European concert music. Thus meticulous transcriptions and analyses of jazz, focused on the “immanent and recurrent properties” (Nattiez 1990, 10–11) of “music itself,” and nearly obsessive attention to discographical detail have made much jazz scholarship seem a replication of score-based analysis and sketch studies. In such research, sometimes defensively oriented toward the elevation of the music, jazz often appears as an imperfect version of classical music rather than as something vital and examinable in its own right.4 Ethnomusicologists have, over the last couple of decades, widened the horizon, emphasizing the roles of culture and musical interaction, but, like other academically trained music researchers, they have tended to rely exclusively on commercially released recordings for their music analytical work. Those academics approaching jazz from other disciplines have refracted it through the prisms of their respective fields, for example, occupational and organizational behavior, deviance, musical taste/preference, political protest, and social interaction, among other things (e.g., Becker 1951; Winick 1960; Katz and Longden 1983; Gridley 1987; Kofsky 1970; Sharron 1985). On the other hand, those writers concerned with reaching a lay audience have focused on the personal triumphs and foibles of musicians, who either overcome misfortune and tragic circumstances or succumb to them. In either case, only rarely do the writers connect their hypotheses convincingly to the lives or work of the musicians or their supporters. Jazz, as a result, has become a facile metaphor for American democratic ideals, a paradigmatic instance of racial/cultural integration, and/or the most singular contribution of the United States to the world.5
Blowin’ the Blues Away was conceived, in part, as a response to those alternatives. Rather than confront jazz using a loose biographical approach or conventional musicological techniques, this study instead focuses attention on the kinds of “interpretive moves” (Feld 1994b, 86–89) that performers and other participants in musical events make as they engage with music. What kinds of aesthetic—normative and evaluative—criteria do they bring to their engagement? How have those criteria developed, and how do they change with the passage of time? Such questions remind us that the meanings of jazz are not simply in the music; rather, they are constructed from the ongoing, dynamic relationship between what one encounters in musical events, the dispositions one brings to those events, and the relationships between the two. In short, this book examines the way that “strictly musical” parameters of performance constrain but don’t completely determine the kinds of interpretations that might emerge (Jackson 2000; DeNora 2000, 27–31).
An exploration of the meanings and interpretation of jazz cannot proceed, however, without an examination of the contested nature of the term in both scholarly and popular writing. One major question is how inclusive a definition of jazz can be. Can or should it embrace entities as disparate as the free improvisations of Derek Bailey, the meticulous arrangements of New York Voices, and the recordings of Norah Jones? Although scholars have attempted to address these questions using a number of criteria to distinguish jazz from nonjazz, or the more jazzlike from the less jazzlike (Gridley et al. 1989; Jackson 2002), their results have not always been illuminating. Such questions, responses aside, go directly to the heart of the struggle over who can lay claim to the title “jazz” or have their music labeled thus. For some musicians and other social actors, the stakes are high, since jazz, starting in the 1950s, has increasingly come to be viewed as a prestigious art music in American society (DeVeaux 1991; Gabbard 1995).
During my research, two radio stations in the New York City metropolitan area, WBGO-FM (Newark, New Jersey) and WQCD-FM (Manhattan), both of which were self-described jazz stations, illustrated this struggle.6 WBGO programmed those styles that nearly any scholar or layperson would define as jazz, styles commonly referred to as “traditional,” “mainstream,” “straight-ahead,” “bop,” “neo-bop,” and, in some cases, “free bop.”7 These styles are played primarily on acoustic instruments by small groups of three to seven musicians; make frequent use of thirty-two-bar song forms, twelve-bar blues, and “modal” frameworks, as well as various modifications of them; and are historically rooted in the practices of paradigmatic jazz musicians in general and African American jazz musicians in particular. WBGO at times used the phrase “real jazz” in its on-air promotional spots to distinguish itself from WQCD, which programmed what its own advertisements referred to as “smooth jazz” or sometimes “contemporary jazz.” Smooth or contemporary styles are highly dependent on electronic instruments and have developed more self-consciously from the practices of rhythm and blues, soul, funk, and fusion musicians from the mid-1970s forward. In fact, many of the artists programmed on smooth jazz stations—such as Anita Baker and Sade—also appear in “urban contemporary” or “quiet storm” radio formats, which cater to audiences for soul and rhythm and blues classics from the 1970s and 1980s. In any event, people listening to either station might potentially have prided themselves on being culturally informed members of society who listened to jazz.
My focus here is on the styles that would be programmed on WBGO. Those styles are also distinct from smooth as well as experimental ones in a number of other respects, including the training, background, and philosophies of the musicians and other musical event participants; the venues in which performances take place; and the publications and media channels that promote them. That is, other styles, such as jazzrock fusion, various forms of free jazz, and those styles associated with cocktail-lounge combos, may use harmony in similar ways, place great emphasis on improvisation, or have a repertoire comprising popular tunes drawn from Tin Pan Alley and American musical theater—all characteristics that one might attribute to straight-ahead jazz performance. But those styles exhibit such features under different circumstances and in different venues from those that characterize the straight-ahead New York jazz scene. In the interest of ethnographic depth, I chose to focus primarily on the latter. Therefore, in the remainder of the book, when I refer to the “jazz scene,” I am writing primarily about the mainstream scene rather than its counterparts.8
My project has been to understand how participants in the jazz scene, and especially musicians, construct and construe meaning in musical events. As Ruth M. Stone (1982, 3, 4) describes them, such events are complexes of activity that are “set off and made distinct from the world of everyday life” and whose participants include “both the individuals producing music and the people experiencing the music performance as listeners or audience.” In part, her aim is to situate music amid a host of other activities that might accompany and frame it, such as speech, dance, and kinesic-proxemic factors. While Stone’s focus is on the direct, face-to-face interactions of participants, her formulation might also encompass those situations in which one, alone or with others, hears only the sonic traces of such events as she construes them (as on a recording; see Horn 2002, 19–21). In either situation, musical events, understood as dynamic and processual, are a space in which performers and other participants interact and negotiate their relationships with each other as well
