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 public consciousness—receding so far, at least in the United States, that commentators such as Stuart Nicholson (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.