INTRODUCTION: BLUE NOTES TOWARD A NEW JAZZ DISCOURSE MARK OSTEEN, LOYOLA COLLEGE I. Authority and Authenticity in Jazz Historiography Most books and articles with "jazz" in the title are not simply about music. Instead, their authors generally use jazz music to investigate or promulgate ideas about politics or race (e.g., that jazz exemplifies democratic or American values,* or that jazz epitomizes the history of twentieth-century African Americans); to illustrate a philosophy of art (either a Modernist one or a Romantic one); or to celebrate the music as an expression of broader human traits such as conversa- tion, flexibility, and hybridity (here "improvisation" is generally the touchstone). These explorations of the broader cultural meanings of jazz constitute what is being touted as the New Jazz Studies. This proliferation of the meanings of "jazz" is not a bad thing, and in any case it is probably inevitable, for jazz has been employed as an emblem of every- thing but mere music almost since its inception. As Lawrence Levine demon- strates, in its formative years jazz—with its vitality, its sexual charge, its use of new technologies of reproduction, its sheer noisiness—was for many Americans a symbol of modernity itself (433). It was scandalous, lowdown, classless, obscene, but it was also joyous, irrepressible, and unpretentious. The music was a battlefield on which the forces seeking to preserve European high culture met the upstarts of popular culture who celebrated innovation, speed, and novelty. It 'Crouch writes: "the demands on and respect for the individual in the jazz band put democracy into aesthetic action" (161). How this interaction is more "democratic" than the interaction in, say, a rock group or string quartet is not explained. See also Belgrad 2. GENRE XXXVI - SPRING 2004 - 1-46. COPYRIGHT © 2005 BY THE UNIVERSITY OF OKLA- HOMA. ALL RIGHTS OF REPRODUCTION IN ANY FORM RESERVED. Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/genre/article-pdf/37/1/1/412981/0370001.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 2 GENRE was a confrontation between the old and the new, between traditionalists and iconoclasts. Indeed, writes Kathy Ogren, "to argue about jazz was to argue about the nature of change itself' (7). And so it is today, when jazz, now dubbed "America's classical music," has again become the site of a culture war, one that eerily recalls many earlier ones in its history. On one side are those determined to preserve and protect the music and celebrate its foremost practitioners of the past. This camp is engaged in canon-building, using a Great Masters approach that, as Krin Gabbard notes, is based "on paradigms that have been radically questioned in other disciplines" ("Introduction" 12), where canons are now viewed as exercises in hegemonic power consolidation. This camp wants to make jazz more fully bourgeois. On the other side is a motley aggregate of musicians and musicologists, historians, and literary and cultural critics who see flexibility and innovation as the essence of jazz. This group accuses the traditionalists of a multitude of sins—turning the music into a set of museum pieces, smothering it in high seriousness, barring the doors of innovation by restricting who may enter the house—all of which are killing jazz. Yet it was always thus, as John McCombe's essay in this issue sug- gests: jazz history is a chronicle of a hundred years of such controversies. This newest furor first bloomed in the 1980s, when trumpeter Wynton Marsalis was hailed in mass-market publications such as Time as a messiah who would resurrect a moribund art form. It grew hotter in the early 1990s, after Marsalis was appointed Artistic Director of the prestigious Jazz at Lincoln Center program. Since then he has actively and, in many ways, admirably used his posi- tion to educate the public about jazz history, hold workshops, visit schools and colleges, showcase young musicians, and revive earlier forms of jazz. Unfortu- nately, he has also used it to utter inflammatory and ill-informed pronounce- ments about jazz past and present. When Marsalis was featured prominently in Ken Burns's mammoth PBS miniseries Jazz in early 2001, the battle was re- engaged. For Burns's sometimes stirring, sometimes boring seminar on jazz his- tory adhered closely to what Scott DeVeaux calls the "neoclassicist" (486) party line, as propagated by Marsalis and his mentors, journalist Stanley Crouch and novelist/critic Albert Murray. After it aired, Jazz was widely criticized for dissem- inating a narrow and tendentious version of the music in which at least four questionable premises were presented as facts: 1) that jazz is a form of the blues; 2) that jazz has been and should be an African-American music; 3) that virtually all music created after about 1965 is not really jazz and can therefore be dis- Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/genre/article-pdf/37/1/1/412981/0370001.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 INTRODUCTION 3 missed; 4) that the Marsalis-led neobop revival of the '80s and '90s saved jazz from the barbarisms of (brrr!) Free, the stultifications of (snore) Third Stream and the corruptions of (shudder!) Fusion. These principles, particularly the first two, derive in part from Albert Mur- ray's 1976 book Stomping the Blues, a colorful if somewhat cranky history of what he calls "blues-idiom" music. For Murray, jazz is really a branch on the blues tree, and hence acts as a "counterstatement" to an oppressive, racist politi- cal system and an expression of "affirmation . and continuity in the face of adversity" (68, 6). Yet he does not really argue the premise that jazz is blues in Stomping the Blues; rather, he simply asserts it repeatedly (often in photo cap- tions) by referring to "the blues musician (also known as the jazz musician)," by commenting on "jazz which is to say blues music," and by describing Duke Ellington as a "blues musician" (17; 182; 214).2 Few serious scholars doubt that jazz arose partly from the blues. However, Murray's label would radically narrow the range of the music by eliminating, for example, a good deal of swing and the cool school and all of Latin jazz, and also fails to account for many contempo- rary styles (which, of course, is precisely the point, since they aren't "really" jazz).3 Hence, when Marsalis declares that "what makes fusion not jazz is that certain key elements of jazz are not addressed. First and foremost the blues. If you aren't addressing the blues you can't be playing jazz," he is reading out of Murray's fake book (qtd in Thomas 295). More disturbing to some are the apparent racial implications of Murray's premises: that white musicians cannot authentically play blues or jazz. Of course, 2This description seems to violate Ellington's much-noted disavowal of labels and "categories of any kind" (Ellington 452). Although Murray attempts to distinguish between "folk blues" and "fine art" blues, this distinction seems mostly to be a tortured attempt to avoid using the term "jazz." 3The inadequacy of Murray's description is exposed when he mentions the "endless list of out- standing blues-idiom compositions derived from the songs of Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin, George Gershwin" and other Tin Pan Alley composers (205). He is referring to so-called "contrafacts" (Park- er 169): bebop tunes that set different melodies to standard chord progressions, such as Charlie Park- er s > "Ornithology" (based on the changes of "How High the Moon") or "Ko Ko" (based on "Chero- kee") and the endless variations of "I Got Rhythm" changes. But what places these tunes in the "blues idiom?" If it is the harmonies, then wouldn't that make Berlin, Gershwin, et al, "blues" composers as well? Is it the act of improvisation? Then were baroque and early classical performers who impro- vised also playing the blues? Is it the fact that the "blues-idiom" composers and performers were pri- marily African Americans? Wouldn't that mean, then, that any music performed by black people is blues? News to Kathleen Battle, I'm sure. Is it the use of the blues scale? Actually, bop and post-bop jazz use a myriad of different scalar forms, some blues-based, some not. When examined closely, in short, this assertion falls apart. Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/genre/article-pdf/37/1/1/412981/0370001.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 4 GENRE neither Murray nor Marsalis states such views outright and if asked would no doubt deny them.4 Nonetheless, the essentialism implicit in the notion that jazz is blues, and the way that jazz history was presented in Burns's series, imply this position. Of course, strict adherence to such ideas would yield absurdities such as that only the Irish can really play Irish ballads, or only Poles can play polkas. Not surprisingly, these views, as stated by Marsalis in particular, have drawn fire from many quarters. One of the harshest responses issued from Gene Lees, who in the final chapter of Cats of Any Color lambastes Marsalis and others for their racialist pronouncements, particularly the claim that whites have appropriated jazz from African Americans.5 While there is scarcely space here for a thorough analysis of the music's racial politics, it is safe to say that race remains the elephant in the kitchen of jazz discourse. The righteous desire not to minimize the history of racism and the necessity to acknowledge that most of the greatest innovators in jazz have been African American, coupled with the need to respect the contribu- tions of white musicians, promoters, critics and audiences, has handicapped jazz historiography by engendering often pugnaciously polarized statements (see Gabbard, "Introduction" 17).