it takes for audiences to comprehend the best of its works. In an article published during bebop’s early years (1941), Theodor Adorno compares the cultural work of “popular” and “serious” audiences, especially as they relate to the notions of simplicity and complexity:
Listening to popular music is manipulated not only by its promoters but, as it were, by the inherent nature of this music itself, into a system of response mechanisms wholly antagonistic to the ideal of individuality in a free, liberal society. This has nothing to do with simplicity and complexity. In serious music, each musical element, even the simplest one, is “itself,” and the more highly organized the work is, the less possibility there is of substitution among the details. In hit music, however, the structure underlying the piece is abstract, existing independent of the specific course of the music. This is basic to the illusion that certain complex harmonies are more easily understandable in popular music than the same harmonies in serious music.64
Jazz, in Adorno’s mind, belongs to the popular realm. He does recognize, however, that it possesses qualities not found in other popular genres. But to him these qualities only camouflage jazz’s inherent banality: “In jazz the amateur listener is capable of replacing complicated rhythmical [sic] or harmonic formulas by the schematic ones which they represent and which they still suggest, however adventurous they appear.”65 (If what Adorno says is true, it seems to suggest a certain level of sophistication on behalf of jazz audiences that largely goes unnoticed.)
Establishing the point that jazz is not popular has composed an important part of the jazz studies agenda over the last thirty years. In doing so, jazz scholars have ignored or usurped the varied nature of the jazz audience. One strategy has been to make the jazz audience appear to have the same goals and tastes that western art music audiences do. This strategy invariably attempts to place jazz in the realm of high art.
In the fifth edition of his Jazz Styles, a popular “jazz appreciation” textbook, Mark Gridley’s didactic explanation of why jazz is not “popular music” shows some of the problems implicit in attempts to reify the perceived boundaries between high and low culture: (1) “jazz musicians represent a highly versatile and specially trained elite whose level of sophistication is not common to the population at large”; (2) jazz “is appreciated for its esthetic and intellectual rewards, and it is approached with some effort”; and (3) jazz “requires a cultivated taste.”66 All of Gridley’s statements are true. But they rub against his other ideas, designed to put the undergraduate music appreciation student at ease: “Jazz can be a lot of fun to listen to. But some people miss that fun because they let themselves be intimidated.”67 In my view, however, jazz audiences are dynamic entities that defy static representation, and they invite a reconfiguration of terms such as sophistication, taste, intellectual, cultivation, and even fun as they concern the reception of jazz.
Naturally, this suggests that a history of “the” jazz audience begs to be written.68 Such a study could help to clear up some commonly held misconceptions, among them that after the advent of bebop, black citizens shunned jazz in favor of rhythm and blues. Such sentiments fail to acknowledge the diversity and complexity of African American audiences, especially in the postwar period. Black audiences have continually demanded that musicians be avant-garde with regard to their treatment of traditional musical materials.
Moreover, history also proves that for many reasons, African Americans have generally shown little interest in preserving idioms for posterity’s sake. That attitude toward music making has produced a huge body of music, some of it among the most influential and widely appreciated music of the twentieth century. Susan McClary has coined the term terminal prestige to explain the results of certain contemporary, academic composers’ view that audience approval is a symbol of artistic compromise.69 Some writers have suggested that bebop musicians’ temperaments resulted in the same terminal prestige for modern jazz—especially among African American audiences. What these accounts fail to acknowledge, however, is that the black audience’s continual demand for an avant-garde necessarily positions every musical idiom, artist, and genre as a candidate for supplanting. Such was the case with swing at the appearance of bebop, and with bebop at the advent of rhythm and blues.
There also remains a huge misunderstanding about how black audiences “take music seriously.” For many scholars, critics, and other observers, this confusion has led to the assumption that whites are better caretakers of black music making than blacks themselves could be. Martin Williams wrote the following passage in 1964, a racially contentious moment indeed, as a challenge “to the next man who does a sociological study of jazz”:
Now everyone knows, musicians themselves aside, that it had been white men, by and large, who have taken jazz seriously, written its history, cataloged its records, criticized its players, and called it an “art.” One might easily say that the mode of the white man’s education prepared him to treat this musical activity called jazz in that manner, since he had been trained to treat painting, architecture, literature, and music in a similar manner. Whereas fewer Negroes have been exposed to that sort of education, to that sort of treatment of artistic endeavor, and therefore did not think in those terms. Or those who had been, again, were brainwashed against jazz by middle-class standards.
Williams notes that even black jazz musicians agreed with him: “Louis Armstrong often said that, throughout his musical life, his work was better attended and better appreciated by white men than by members of his own race. And Duke Ellington did not even begin to discover the size of his talent until he started to play at the Cotton Club for audiences that were predominantly white and where Negroes knew they were not welcome.”70
Williams’s argument raises two points worth pursuing here. First, his two examples highlight the need to understand the impact of black jazz audiences on jazz musicians’ careers. In that light, Williams’s conclusions raise important questions. Was Armstrong far past his vogue, at least as far as black audiences were concerned, when he expressed the sentiments above? In which ways did whites demonstrate their “appreciation”? Could the fact that white audiences at the Cotton Club were able to provide the financial support necessary for Ellington’s musical growth be a factor in his “epiphany”? If so, then Williams’s concerns are more economically based than they are racial. Can the same patterns be seen in the bebop audience?
The second point concerns the role of cultural values and hierarchies. During her tenure in the Billy Eckstine Orchestra, Sarah Vaughan witnessed bebop’s impact on audiences. Her comments imply that black audiences paid their highest compliments by dancing: “We tried to educate people. We used to play dances, and there were just a very few who understood who would be in a corner, jitterbugging forever, while the rest just stood staring at us.”71 Mary Lou Williams also recalls that bebop, for a time, pleased dancers where the space allowed: “Right from the start, musical reactionaries have said the worst about bop. But after seeing the Savoy Ballroom kids fit dances to this kind of music, I felt it was destined to become the new era of music, though not taking anything away from Dixieland or swing or any of the great stars of jazz.”72 These examples show the necessity of historizing statements about the tastes and reactions of African American audiences (or any audience), because these sentiments are dynamic ones that constantly shift. In fact, Lawrence Levine shows that jazz generally enjoys an audience in much the same way that opera in mid-nineteenth-century America did: “Like Shakespearean drama, then, opera was an art form that was simultaneously popular and elite. That is, it was attended both by large numbers of people who derived great pleasure from it and experienced it in the context of their normal everyday culture, and smaller socially and economically elite groups who derived both pleasure and social confirmation from it.”73 In other words, whether one writes histories, catalogues records, founds archives, or “jitterbug[s] forever,” there are many ways to get at the meaning and the history of cultural expressions.
The tensions surrounding any simplistic view of these points can be illustrated by a recent visit I made to Jazz at Lincoln Center. Situated atop an upscale mall in midtown Manhattan, its stunning facilities have become symbolic of jazz’s century-long trek from brothel Muzak to artistic artifact. An in-house repertory ensemble keeps the flame of previous jazz