Introduction

WHAT IS THIS THING CALLED JAZZ? is an intellectual history focused on African American musicians who have made names for themselves as jazz players. Although members of this community have devoted much of their intellectual energy to the creation and performance of the music itself, this study brings to the foreground the often-ignored ideas of musicians. It analyzes musicians’ writings and commentary in light of their personal and musical histories, as well as in relation to prevailing debates about jazz and broader currents in African American thought. The book also highlights the contradictory social positions of African American jazz musicians as intellectuals working both within and outside culture- producing institutions. Some might argue that what these musicians have had to say about jazz in words is less important than what they have had to say through their music. My response is that musicians’ commentary is both interesting and important in its own right and that it adds to our understanding of the changing meaning of jazz in American culture. At a ba- sic level, the ways musicians have interrogated the word “jazz” and wondered about its relevance to their projects provide a guide for re- thinking the idea of a coherent jazz tradition. Beyond that, a focus on musicians’ ideas and identities as thinkers gives us greater insight into how they have assisted in the development of this music, the discourses surrounding it, and its role in American and African American life and letters. Social theorist Antonio Gramsci argues that almost everyone is to some extent engaged in intellectual activity, though only a few have the social status of intellectuals. He also describes how intellectuals participate in the creation and dismantling of social hierarchies.1 Gramsci’s expansive deﬁnition of intellectual life, his attention to power, and his distinction

xiii INTRODUCTION / xiv between the everyday intellectual work of individuals and an intellectualism that is commonly recognized are all useful here. This study is concerned first with analyzing a group of people whose ideas are seldom acknowledged because they do not have the formal status of intellectuals. Unfortunately, African American intellectualism is still often seen as oxy- moronic; and jazz, as many of the musicians cited here point out, is commonly seen as a product of emotion or instinct rather than as self-conscious activity. The book also explores how these musicians have been cast in intellectual roles and how they have embraced intellectual identities themselves. Even if musicians’ social status as intellectuals has seldom been acknowledged and has been contradictory, it is important to recognize that in their e¤orts to articulate their aesthetic visions and pub- licly address issues relevant to their lives, they have functioned as arbiters of cultural tastes and cultural politics and have had a significant impact on the meanings circulating around jazz. Beyond merely recognizing that musicians have participated in and helped to shape the jazz discourse, this study charts some of the partic- ulars of this conversation. A fundamental challenge for musicians has been that jazz is, in Thomas Carmichael’s words, “a field of both achievement and restraint.”2 Generally, this predicament has been rooted in the racial meanings associated with jazz and in the economic relationships that structure the music industry. Some African American musicians have celebrated jazz as a symbol of black accomplishment and have derived great pleasure and satisfaction from its status as such. At times, they have welcomed and benefited from the ways jazz has been written about and marketed as a mode of black virtuosity. Yet others have rejected the term “jazz,” in part because it has represented both limitations on their artistry and restrictions on their lives as African Americans. Some musicians have even tried to replace the word “jazz” with terms such as “creative music,” “new world music,” “African American improvised music,” or simply “music.” Like other African American intellectuals and artists, jazz musicians have tried to cast o¤ the burden of race while nevertheless celebrating aspects of African American life and culture. At times, invoking jazz as a culturally, spiritually, or militantly black expression has seemed a personally redeeming or politically and economically expedient course of action. Yet at other times, claims of racial authenticity have come into INTRODUCTION / xv conflict with the dictates of the marketplace, the opinions of others, and musicians’ own aesthetic and social visions. One manifestation of this dilemma has been the tension between black nationalism and univer- salism evident in musicians’ thoughts. Some musicians have celebrated jazz as a racially or culturally defined black music, but many of these same figures have for various philosophical or strategic reasons also seen it as an articulation of a broader human community and consciousness. Musicians have also negotiated the fields of jazz and classical music, sometimes reifying the distinctions between them and at other times seeking to dismantle the boundaries that separate them. Their e¤orts have been rooted in their own aesthetic projects as well as in the politics of the music world. For musicians and commentators alike, jazz and classical music have symbolized separate spheres of African American and European (or white) artistic accomplishment. Many jazz musicians have been trained as classical players but have seen their ambitions in the realm of concert music stymied by racial discrimination. They have also been aware of jazz’s “second-class” status in relation to classical music. For some of these musicians, seeking to dismantle the divisions between the fields or defining their music as an alternative “classical” tradition has been a means of legitimating their own artistic projects. Yet for others, empha- sizing the distinctions between jazz and classical music has been a more a‹rming vision. A corollary to this discussion of jazz and classical music has been the conversation about improvisation and composition. Both improvisation and composition (traditional notation, alternative forms of writing out music, or “head” arrangements) are integral to jazz, but they have frequently been seen as discrete modes of artistic expression that correspond to the division between jazz and classical music as separate realms of black and white artistic achievement. Developing alongside these tensions between jazz and classical music have been those between jazz and popular music. On the one hand, creating music with popular appeal has represented the possibility of earn- ing a good living as a musician. And for some players who at various moments have wanted to reach the masses (and particularly a black mass audience) for ideological reasons, playing popular music has been integral to the activist identities these musicians have embraced. On the other hand, popular music has sometimes been seen as a threat, on economic and artistic grounds, to those committed to creating art music. For many INTRODUCTION / xvi jazz musicians, popular music has come to represent a lack of musician- ship, the intrusion of market values into the arena of artistic production, or both. Another important theme involves the way musicians have understood creativity and their roles as artists through the lens of gender and, in particular, a kind of masculine Romanticism. Most jazz musicians have been male, and it has generally been men (primarily black men and white men) who have defined the jazz discourse. African American male musicians, who receive much of the attention in this book, have often expressed their own masculinity, as well as a belief in the patrilineal development of the jazz tradition, when defining their artistic projects. In order to understand the contours of the intellectual history of jazz, this study tries to come to terms with the centrality of masculinity in the formulations and interpretations of jazz artistry. Chapter 4, however, additionally explores the “womanist” implications of jazz singing. Musicians have also pondered the aesthetic components of their work from their vantage points as laborers. Most notably, they have protested the conditions under which they have had to perform and the accom- panying low wages. They have been attuned to the way that racism in- forms the operations of the music business. African American musicians have challenged what they have seen as appropriation, and sometimes theft, by white artists as well as the greater economic rewards and critical acclaim reaped by some white jazz players. Black musicians have re- sponded to charges of reverse discrimination when white critics and musicians have argued that they were receiving an inordinate amount of critical attention or economic support. Making sense of the political dimensions of this music is another important aspect of the intellectual life of the jazz community. While keep- ing in mind that commentators sometimes exaggerate the political meaning of jazz, the following chapters show how musicians have theorized the relationship between jazz and its social context. Indeed, the second half of the book focuses primarily on musicians who have defined activist roles for themselves and their music. Some have restricted such en- deavors to the personally therapeutic dimensions of music, while others have seen their music as ushering in broader social changes. Musicians also describe their role in social change in terms of spirituality. Although jazz has largely developed in a secular context, the spiritual dimensions INTRODUCTION / xvii of the music—how it can serve to express musicians’ spirituality or how it might create spiritual bonds between musicians and audiences—have been a concern of many. In addition to charting the specifics of this intellectual history, What Is This Thing Called Jazz? intervenes in several scholarly discussions. First, I intend this book to be a corrective to scholars’ tendencies across disci- plines either to ignore the self-conscious aspects of black cultural production or to pay lip service to this self-consciousness without taking it seriously enough to analyze what the producers of black cultural texts think about these texts. This oversight is not surprising, given the often simplistic and sometimes racist academic practices brought to bear on black culture. But even astute, politically committed scholars working in African American or black intellectual and cultural history, some of whom describe black music as an intellectual activity, seldom devote much attention to musicians’ ideas, even when analyzing the meaning and significance of their music. By presenting an account of the ways African American musicians have made sense of the idea of jazz at a variety of historical junctures, this study illuminates a seldom-explored component of twentieth-century African American history and tries to expand our definitions of what constitutes African American intellectual life as a terrain and as a practice. This book also enters discussions in jazz studies. The past few decades have seen a flowering of scholarship on jazz: musicologists, ethnomusi- cologists, historians, literary theorists, American studies and cultural studies scholars, and others have written a number of insightful monographs and essays that analyze jazz in its social context and contribute to our understanding of the music and its place in American society. To this may be added a growing number of provocative collections of commentary about jazz, compiled by academics and nonacademics alike, which provide access to primary sources that reveal how musicians and others have conceptualized jazz at various historical moments. This multidisciplinary body of work has moved beyond the aesthetic concerns of traditional musicology and the biographical focus of much journalistic writing. We are now well aware that jazz is a hybrid cultural practice, with African, European, Latin American, and North American cultural roots; that it has been a vehicle for identity formation and self- actualization for members of disparate cultural communities; that its de- INTRODUCTION / xviii velopment has been structured by race relations, migration patterns, cap- italist development, technological innovations, and the rise and decline of urban areas; and that the reception of jazz and its place in American society are fundamentally informed by beliefs about race, gender, class, sexuality, culture, commerce, and other issues. When this scholarship turns its attention to the experiences of musicians themselves, it shows how they have drawn from a variety of musical and cultural influences as they labored under conditions that often restricted their creativity. And some of the most interesting recent work explores the multiple ways in which jazz has a profound resonance in American intellectual life. Despite the value of this scholarship, there is still a need for sustained, historical discussions of what African American musicians have said pub- licly about their music, their positions as artists, the “jazz tradition” in general, and the broader social and cultural implications of this music. Most studies that address the public dialogue about jazz tend to focus on commentary by white critics and other nonmusicians and pay scant attention to the ways that African American musicians have participated in the discourse and helped to create the mythology about jazz. Over the course of writing this book, however, I have been buoyed by the publication of several studies that are fundamentally concerned with how musicians understand their music and what they have to say about it. Paul Berliner’s Thinking in Jazz and Ingrid Monson’s Saying Some- thing are pathbreaking ethnomusicological studies of the contemporary jazz community that explore the thought behind the art of improvisation and describe its broader cultural implications. And Ronald Radano’s New Musical Figurations, Scott DeVeaux’s The Birth of Bebop, Sherrie Tucker’s Swing Shift, and Graham Lock’s Blutopia fuse musical, cultural, and historical analyses as a means of understanding distinct musical move- ments and the work of individual musicians in their larger cultural and historical contexts.3 What Is This Thing Called Jazz? builds upon the insights of this work by charting the public face of the conversation in the musicians’ community over the course of the twentieth century. I believe it is possible to write jazz history that addresses sociological and aesthetic concerns, as well as continuity and historical particularity, and in doing so places the ideas of African American musicians at its center. Paying attention to musicians’ ideas provides a more complicated understanding of the INTRODUCTION / xix relationship between jazz and its historical context, allowing us to understand jazz creativity as more than just a sonic epiphenomenon of social processes. By acknowledging the self-conscious aspects of African American musical production, this approach also challenges and com- plicates familiar narratives that ascribe a singular meaning or purpose to the history of jazz, whether it is seen as a struggle of competing class- based ideologies, a consistently oppositional black cultural statement, an expression of the human condition, or the realization of the possibilities of participatory democracy in the United States.

A Note on Method and Organization Any broadly conceived intellectual or cultural history is, by definition, an exercise in exclusion. A number of musicians who appear only briefly in this study could have easily been the subjects of their own chapters, and indeed some of them already have one or more books devoted to them. Mary Lou Williams, George Russell, Ornette Coleman, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Muhal Richard Abrams, John Lewis, and Randy Weston are only a few of the musicians whose art and ideas call for fur- ther work. Then there are the great many musicians who have discussed important and interesting ideas in venues that are not accessible to scholarly research. I chose the subjects of this book, in part, because their ideas seemed important or influential and because sources about them were readily available. But the common themes and concerns expressed by the musicians in this study tell me that their ideas are emblematic of those of a much larger community. Concerning sources, the fact that the subjects of this study are or were professional musicians and, with a few exceptions, not professional writ- ers and scholars has required me to employ a variety of sources, only some of which are typically used to write intellectual histories. Certainly intellectual historians commonly employ autobiographies, analytical books and essays, correspondence, and interviews, as I have done here, but I have also had to search for fragments of musicians’ ideas in brief quota- tions in magazine or newspaper articles, course syllabi, promotional ma- terials, liner notes, and other unconventional sources. One can argue that almost any text reflects the ideas or expectations INTRODUCTION / xx of individuals (such as editors, publishers, interviewers, or anticipated readers) other than the person given credit for authorship. But reading the unconventional texts just described demands a special recognition that musicians’ commentary has been used and at times manipulated to serve the needs of jazz critics, record companies, and others. When using such sources, I have tried to remain aware of the possibility that musicians’ ideas have been distorted, and my analysis is based upon an understanding that many of these texts were collectively created. My general standard for determining whether a particular source provides a more or less accurate reflection of what a musician thought about an issue has been to look for consistency across a range of sources concerning that musician and, in some situations, to search for consistency in the ideas of similarly placed members of the musicians’ community. There are also instances in which more “traditional” sources were clearly influenced by people other than the musician authors—ghostwriters, business part- ners, spouses, lovers, and editors, for example. In such cases, I draw attention to these instances in the text or notes; again, my basis for using such sources is to look for consistency or to confirm in other scholars’ assessments of these sources that they do justice to what the musician was thinking. Chapter 1 explores the comments of African American musicians who attempted to make sense of jazz in the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s and situ- ates their ideas in broader currents of African American thought. Chap- ter 2 examines both the bebop movement of the 1940s and musicians’ embrace or rejection of the term “bebop” as products of a collective, worldly African American intellectual orientation I term “critical ecu- menicalism.” Chapters 3 and 4 focus on the music and words of Charles Mingus and Abbey Lincoln, respectively, two musicians who have re- garded their art as a vehicle for personal transformation and who have also negotiated the political and gendered meanings of jazz. Chapter 5 extends the treatment of Mingus’s and Lincoln’s political concerns by exploring how a Black Arts imperative—what Larry Neal described as a duty to “speak to the spiritual and cultural needs of black people”— developed in the jazz community in the 1960s and 1970s. Chapter 6 en- gages the self-published writings of Yusef Lateef, Marion Brown, Wadada Leo Smith, and Anthony Braxton and shows how each explored his own aesthetic philosophy and engaged in acts of critical intervention by cre- INTRODUCTION / xxi ating an extramusical discourse on his own terms. Chapter 7 completes the study by discussing some of the broader implications of Wynton Marsalis’s attempt to define a jazz canon from the 1980s to the present.

A Note on the Word “Jazz” I use the term “jazz” in this book with some trepidation because many musicians, including most of the people discussed here, have expressed some ambivalence about the word or have rejected it outright. As sug- gested earlier, some musicians have seen “jazz” as an inadequate label for describing the variety of styles and complicated artistic projects catego- rized under its rubric. Others have objected to its derogatory connota- tions, arguing that it demeans the music by linking it to the brothels and gin houses of New Orleans, where legend says it originated. However, the terms musicians have o¤ered instead—such as “creative music,” “new world music,” or “African American improvised music”—speak to a larger community of musicians and a broader set of musical practices. I ap- preciate fully musicians’ attempts to use such terms, precisely in response to the compartmentalization of black music by critics and record companies; yet, for all its problems, the word “jazz” remains a useful short- hand for referring to this music, and, more important, it denotes a particular process by which music and musicians have been discursively and economically positioned. And some musicians do continue to embrace the term “jazz.” Thus I retain the use of “jazz” and “jazz musician” as a reference to the way each has been situated in society, and the title of the book refers to a history of musicians’ critical engagement with the array of ideas and issues that have been invoked by the term. I try to make it clear when the subjects of this study are speaking about their music as something other than jazz. This page intentionally left blank