Weird Bodily Noises: Improvising Race, Gender, and Jazz History,” I Raise Three
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WEIRD BODILY NOISES: IMPROVISING RACE, GENDER, AND JAZZ HISTORY By ©2013 Peter Anson Williams Submitted to the graduate degree program in American Studies and the Graduate Faculty of the University of Kansas in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. ________________________________ Chairperson, Sherrie Tucker ________________________________ Ketty Wong ________________________________ Nicole Hodges Persley ________________________________ Ryan Dohoney ________________________________ Michelle Heffner Hayes Date Defended: June 19, 2013 The Dissertation Committee for Peter Anson Williams certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: WEIRD BODILY NOISES: IMPROVISING RACE, GENDER, AND JAZZ HISTORY ________________________________ Chairperson, Sherrie Tucker Date approved: July 11, 2013 ii ABSTRACT This dissertation explores avant-garde jazz in Kansas City in the late 20th and early 21st centuries to find out how they both reproduce and complicate narratives of jazz history and norms of race and gender. Working in a city associated with an historical subgenre—“Kansas City Jazz”—and in a style whose histories limit avant-garde activity largely to New York City, these musicians pay respect to that history even while their performances complicate it. As practices of improvisation that use music, dance, costumes, and visual art, their performances highlight the embodied aspects of identity—the ways that bodies move with and against norms of race and gender and through space. My dissertation thus seeks to show how local, avant- garde, improvised performances can speak about power relations on a broader scale. The title of my dissertation indicates three primary questions for this study: How do experimental performances that seem “weird” both challenge and reproduce normative ways of thinking about race, gender, and power? In what ways are bodies constrained aesthetically, socially, and historically, and how do they improvise within those constraints? How do avant- garde performances complicate the dominant history of jazz, making it “noisy”? This interdisciplinary study relies on several methodologies, including ethnographic interviews and participant-observation, oral history, and archival research. Chapter One establishes historical precedent for avant-garde jazz in Kansas City by examining performances and performers in the 1960’s, showing how local musicians in the scene both complicated and reproduced dominant historical narratives about one of the “cradles of jazz.” Chapter Two analyzes several recent performances in Kansas City that use humor and the bodily noise of laughter to point out and critique social inequities while also reproducing social iii hierarchies. Chapter Three explores the complex questions of appropriation, cultural borrowing, and influence that arise when three white musicians in Kansas City cross imaginary racial lines to perform avant-garde music. Chapter Four looks closely at several performers associated with musician Mark Southerland, whose “wearable horn sculptures” highlight the role of the body in improvisation while they both reinforce and complicate normative gender roles. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank Sherrie Tucker for her encouragement, patience, and guidance throughout my graduate school experience. I’d also like to thank the members of my dissertation committee for their help and support: Nicole Hodges Persley, Ketty Wong, Michelle Heffner Hayes, and Ryan Dohoney. Several faculty from the departments of American Studies and African and African American Studies at the University of Kansas have also provided support and guidance along my journey: Tony Bolden, Cheryl Lester, Ben Chappell, Randal Jelks, Shawn Alexander, and Anne Schofield. I thank Kevin Whitehead for his mentoring, advice, musical conversations, and friendship. I am also grateful to fellow graduate students in American Studies at KU—Liz Yeager, Will Bishop, Damon Talbott, Rachel Vaughn, Stephanie Krehbiel, Crystal Boson, Jordan Wade, Sean Malone, and Chris Robinson—for their camaraderie, sympathetic ears, and occasional diversions from writing. I would like to thank my parents, Judith and Wallace Williams, for instilling in me a sense of hard work, intellectual curiosity, and a love of learning, and my sister, Cynthia Williams Insko, for teaching me how to read. Finally, I am most grateful to my wife, Jen Nevergole, for her continued patience, encouragement, and positivity. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract iii Acknowledgements v Introduction: Sounding Out Weird Bodily Noises 1 Chapter One: Weird Bodily History 27 Chapter Two: Bodily Noises: Improvisation and the Sound of Surprise 98 Chapter Three: Weird Noises: Avant-Garde Jazz and the “Cross-Racial Imagination” 160 Chapter Four: Weird Bodies: Gender, Bodies, and Wearable Horn Sculptures 206 Conclusion 249 Bibliography 255 vi INTRODUCTION SOUNDING OUT WEIRD BODILY NOISES In a nightclub in Kansas City, MO, a woman in a brightly colored Spandex suit stands at the front of the stage. The suit covers almost her entire body, leaving only her face, hands, and feet exposed. A brass tube curves over her right shoulder and around her right breast, ending in a small saxophone-like bell. A similar bell protrudes from the middle of her abdomen. Just inches behind her stands a tall man in a bright, multi-colored robe and hood that covers his entire body. He blows into a saxophone mouthpiece attached directly to the brass tubes curving around the woman’s body. A warbling, reedy sound emanates from the saxophone bells, playing a vocal-like, plaintive cry as the woman slowly moves her hips from side to slide. As the melody continues, she slowly lifts her left hand, bending her arm at the elbow. She twists her wrist and rolls her fingers, as if physically manipulating the sounds coming out of the bells. * * * The gathering of 100 or so revelers, wearing bright costumes of dime-store sequined masks, feather boas, and face paint in purple, green, and gold, moves east down 18th St. Many of them play instruments—trumpets, saxophones, guitars, bass and snare drums, washboard, flutes, and other hand percussion. Informally organized versions of “Iko Iko” and “When the Saints Go Marching In” play up and down the loose column of people, led mostly by the drummers near the front of the parade. The parade proceeds down a mostly deserted street, near empty warehouses and office buildings closed for the day, and past the occasional art gallery or bar. 1 Parade leaders, dressed in white and carrying feathered fans, occasionally herd participants into the right lane of the street so that cars can pass by on the left, yelling, “Keep that lane open!” As the group nears the intersection of 18th and Vine Streets., the entrance to Kansas City’s historic Jazz District, a loud, celebratory cheer goes up. * * * This dissertation explores the weird bodily noises of avant-garde jazz performances in Kansas City in the late 20th and early 21st centuries to find out how they both reproduce and complicate narratives of jazz history and norms of race and gender. Working in a city associated with its own historical subgenre—“Kansas City Jazz”—and in a style whose histories limit avant-garde jazz activity largely to New York City, these performers pay tribute to that history even while their performances challenge it. Those performances, as practices of improvisation that use music, dance, costumes, and visual art, highlight the embodied aspects of identity—the ways that bodies move with and against norms of race and gender and through space. My dissertation thus seeks to show how local, avant-garde, improvised performances have something to tell us about human interaction, identity, and history on a larger scale, as well as the creative ways humans interact with the social norms that define and constrict us. The dominant public imaginary of jazz, as in racist discourse on a broader scale, depicts non-white bodies as inherently “free” both emotionally and sexually, and white bodies as repressed and constricted. This discourse is in direct opposition to the material conditions of these bodies throughout history—non-white bodies have been bound and restricted by freely moving white bodies. The discourse of ostensibly free non-white bodies also depicts these bodies 2 as highly sexualized, virile, animalistic, emasculated, and feminized; the history of minstrelsy is but one example. Furthermore, scholars of race and minstrelsy have argued that white performers who cross the imaginary racial line between white and non-white inhabited black bodies in order to experience by proxy the sexual and emotional freedom ascribed to black bodies. Traditional histories of jazz depict the music as breaking with these norms in the intellectual activity of bebop and the destruction of all musical constraints in avant-garde jazz—a destruction that, depending on who tells it, either signaled the “death of jazz” in the 1960’s or the romanticized beginning of a new music free from the bounds of history and genre.1 Despite associations of improvisation with freedom in the public imagination, complex power relations of race and gender remain; performances that ostensibly illustrate “freedom” can both challenge and reproduce normative concepts of race, gender, and sexuality. Some recent improvised performances of music and dance—primarily “avant-garde” or experimental ones that stretch traditional definitions of “jazz”—continue to demonstrate these complex power relations.