musicians’ interviews, although guided by the schedule, were open-ended. A few lasted as little as ninety minutes. More typically, they lasted from two to four hours, and some had to be done in multiple sittings. I reviewed each of the tapes and took detailed notes. In comparing the notes, I identified common concerns and selectively transcribed relevant portions. Those excerpts were then combined in word-processing documents so that I could look at individual comments on the same topic in close proximity to one another and thus make comparisons and further refine the concepts that emerged from them. The data gathered from the interviews provided more questions for observation in the last phases of fieldwork, particularly regarding the ways in which performers actualized their normative statements about performance. I rendered my transcriptions as literally as possible, making no attempts to convert the grammatical irregularities of speech into the regularities readers are accustomed to seeing. My reason for doing so was to preserve the moments of “interpretive time” that characterized the interviewees’ and my attempts to “force awareness to words” (Feld 1994b, 93).
In the spring of 1995, while I continued attending live performances, observing recording sessions, and conducting interviews, my involvement with the scene became deeper as I became a freelance writer, researching a two-page sketch of jazz past and present for the New York Times Magazine (Jackson 1995) as well as writing a number of artist biographies, brochures, and record reviews for various labels and publications. These activities exposed me to more of the behind-the-scenes work that led not only to writing about record releases and public performances but to the recordings or performances themselves. I had already begun to learn, through my internship with Watrous, the kinds of information that record labels provided to writers, but by becoming one myself, I participated in the creation and dissemination of such information.34 I also learned more about the role that publicity firms, record release parties, and other promotional activities play in the day-to-day functioning of the scene by fostering familiarity and contact among critics, recording industry personnel, and musicians.
Through engaging in all these activities over an eighteen-month period, I gained an understanding of the complexity of the interactions that comprise the scene. The roles of specific individuals on the scene were often multiple and overlapping. Writers whom I associated only with the popular press sometimes had serious commitments to the recording industry. At least one of them, Jeff Levenson, moved from a job as a writer (jazz editor at Billboard magazine) to a position at a record label (Warner Brothers). I also noted the cyclical nature of the scene, which was characterized by the prolonged absence of many performers from the city during the summer festival season, the opening and frequent closing of clubs, the launching and failure of jazz labels, and the signing and dropping of performers from those labels’ rosters.
My fieldwork in the mid-1990s and in 2000–2001 forms the basis for this book, which has three major sections. The first, “Black, Brown, and Beige,” which includes this chapter and the next, examines the issues raised by the study of jazz in the 1990s and, more importantly, directly engages the issues of race, culture, history, memory, education, and experience that are integral to (and frequently debated with regard to) the making of jazz. Indeed, one of the most trenchant questions in chapter 2 is whether jazz is African American music, American music, or something else altogether. My response hinges on problematizing notions of race/culture and history/memory, seeing them as constructs that have been strategically deployed by various commentators. While the writings of these commentators frequently conflate race and culture with one another, they stake their claims to authority by valorizing history at the expense of memory without seeing the two as related rather than opposed entities. As a corrective, I consider the pathways taken by various musicians to performing, recording, and listening to jazz. In doing so, I draw attention to the roles of practical activity, lived experience, and notions of social, economic, and cultural capital to argue that there are compelling reasons to consider jazz African American.
The second section, “Scenes in the City,” builds on the first by examining the convergence of musicians’ and other participants’ pathways on the New York jazz scene. I argue that one cannot have a comprehensive understanding of the meanings that might be attached to the music without relating it to the geographic, economic, and social contexts in which it is performed and evaluated. In chapter 3, therefore, I suggest that consideration of space and spatiality enhances a jazz historical narrative that generally renders geography as inert and subservient to time. In particular, those two concepts highlight the impact that attempts to regulate the use of space in cities has had on jazz historically—determining, among other things, where jazz musicians can perform, how often, and for whom. Zoning laws, uneven spatial development, and a shift from an industrial to a service economy over the last several decades have been just as crucial as developments in musical style for the making and interpreting of jazz. Toward the end of chapter 3, I argue that jazz performance is inseparable from a loose and shifting assemblage of agents and institutions—the jazz scene—that facilitates (and inhibits) the public presentation of the music and musicians in live performance and on recordings. In chapter 4, I examine in more detail the contours of the New York scene in the 1990s, describing its network of agents and institutions and their relation to one another.
The first two sections provide the context in which one might most fruitfully understand the book’s title and the framework developed in the third section, “Blowin’ the Blues Away.” Chapter 5 focuses on the normative and evaluative statements that my interviewees made about performing and learning to perform jazz. I use those statements to hypothesize a “blues aesthetic” that encompasses what performers are trying to do and how they evaluate musical events. In chapter 6, I argue that discourses on race and culture as well as history and memory work with a blues aesthetic to frame jazz performance as a spiritually oriented ritualized activity. In chapter 7, I analyze three studio recordings and three live performances to illustrate the efficacy of seeing jazz through the lenses of a blues aesthetic and ritualization. In the final chapter, I consider the implications that the perspective presented here might have for future research and writing on jazz as well as other forms of music. Finally, noting the ways that the scene has changed since I conducted the research, I speculate on the directions in which the musicians may head in the future.
CHAPTER 2
History and Memory, Pathways and Practices
The African Americanness of Jazz
History will either off you or make you valid.… I think the idea now is for blacks to write about the history of our music. It’s time for that because whites have been doing it all the time. It’s time for us to do it ourselves and tell it like it is. The whites have a whitewash look at our music. Naturally, they’re going to try to ooze off as much as they can to the whites, but they can’t, because we’re documented in records and the truth will stand.
—Dizzy Gillespie, quoted in Taylor (1993, 126–27)
There are perhaps no issues more vexed in discussions of jazz than the concepts of race and culture. Whenever one encounters them, whether those offering their opinions are musicians, critics, historians, or musicologists, what is arguably at stake is legitimation: who can rightfully lay claim to jazz and on what grounds? Is it African American music, America’s classical music, or just music (Walser 1995)? When stories about jazz, however conceived, are told, which narratives receive priority: those transmitted in historical writing, those produced by critics, or those based in memory and orally transmitted among musicians and aficionados of the music? In differing
