UNIVERSITY of CALIFORNIA Santa Barbara Haunted Changes: How
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Santa Barbara Haunted Changes: How Cleveland’s Segregated Landscape Shapes Aesthetic Agency and the Social Life of “Real Jazz” A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Music by George Kaeser Blake Committee in charge: Professor Timothy Cooley, Co-Chair Professor George Lipsitz, Co-Chair Professor Gaye Theresa Johnson Professor Dick Hebdige September 2017 The dissertation of George Kaeser Blake is approved. ____________________________________________ Dick Hebdige ____________________________________________ Gaye Theresa Johnson ____________________________________________ George Lipsitz, Committee Co-Chair ____________________________________________ Timothy Cooley, Committee Co-Chair September 2017 Haunted Changes: How Cleveland’s Segregated Landscape Shapes Aesthetic Agency and the Social Life of “Real Jazz” Copyright © 2017 by George Kaeser Blake iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would first like to thank my incredible committee: Timothy Cooley, George Lipsitz, Dick Hebdige, and Gaye Johnson. At UC Santa Barbara, I have also had the amazing opportunity to work closely with Stephanie Batiste, Chris McAuley, Jeffrey Stewart, Scott Marcus, David Novak, Jane Duran and Ruth Hellier-Tinoco. My time in graduate school has been tremendously enriched by the wisdom and friendship of Matt Wright, Kara Attrep, Rob Wallace, Charlie Lockwood, Nick Loewen, Rimas Simaitis, Kevin Moseby, Greg Burris, Kum-Kum Bhavnani, Jay Stemmle, Kiley Guyton Acosta, Rudy Busto, Erin Putnam, Emily Baker, Alex Blue, Paul Megna, Natasha O’Neill, Lillie Gordon, Mario Barrera, Dennis Russell, David Seubert, Vanessa Thompson, Jason Busniewski and Aranye Fradenburg. Thanks to Nick Williams, Seeta Sistla, Nick Ragheb, Leida Tolentino, Julian Spiro, Hareem Khan and Alexandra Magearu for making Santa Barbara so fun! My intellectual horizons were opened with the amazing education I received at Wesleyan University. Thanks to Gina Ulysse, Amanda Scherbenske, Justin Duffy, David Cordes, Lagu Androga, Anthony Braxton, Demetrius Eudell, Gayle Pemberton, Mark Slobin, Jay Hoggard and Renee Romano. I am immensely indebted to the tremendous generosity of everyone I spent time with over my year of fieldwork in Cleveland. Special thanks to Norm Krumholz, Drene Ivy, Mark Souther, John James, Carl Pantejo, Joe Mosbrook, Jerome Jennings, Jim Wadsworth, Lafayette Carthon, George Foley, Valerie Salstrom, Andrenée Fant Priest, Bill Ransom, Willie McMillon III, AJ Curry, Monica Carter, Jay Forman and Mario Gant. I am tremendously grateful to Cal Rose, Greg Slawson, Joe Hunter, Jim Maraniss, James Bane, iv Jackie Warren for the formative inspiration that led to this project. I am very fortunate for years of searching with Danny McNamara. I am very thankful to friends like Omar Davis, Ben Winger, Kate Herrmann, Liza Forrester-Frolkis, Owen Roberts, Ashley Hiestand, Rachel Elliot, Austin Purnell and Anders Eskildsen for sustaining me over the years. I would also like to thank kindred academic spirits Denise Elif Gill, Alex Rodriguez and Matthew Omelsky for making me excited about ideas every time I speak with them. None of this would have been possible without my family. Thanks to Susie Kaeser, Gerald Blake, Sarah Blake, Sarah Cooper, Lucia Maraniss, Ardath Blake, Gigi Kaeser, Ruth Gillett and Donna Wilkinson for everything. v VITA for George Kaeser Blake March 2017 EDUCATION Bachelor of Arts with Double Major in African-American Studies and Music, Wesleyan University, May 2007 Master of Arts in Music, University of California, Santa Barbara, Summer 2011 Doctor of Philosophy in Music, University of California, Santa Barbara, September 2017 PROFESSIONAL EMPLOYMENT Teaching Associate, Department of Music, University of California, Santa Barbara: Spring 2015, Summer Session B 2014, Summer Session B 2012, Spring 2012 Teaching Assistant, Department of Music, University of California, Santa Barbara: Fall 2012, Summer Session A 2012, Winter 2012, Fall 2011, Spring 2010-Summer 2009 Teaching Associate, Department of Black Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara: Winter 2017 Teaching Assistant, Department of Black Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara: Fall 2016, Spring 2016, Winter 2016, Fall 2015, Winter 2015, Fall 2014, Spring 2011, Winter 2011, Fall 2010 AWARDS Dean’s Prize Teaching Fellowship 2014-2015 Excellence in Ethnomusicology for Scholarly Activity Award 2010-2011 Excellence in Ethnomusicology for Scholarly Activity Award 2008-2009 University of California, Santa Barbara Regents Central Fellow 2008-2013 FIELDS OF STUDY Major Field: American Popular Music Minor Fields: Blackface Minstrelsy; Global Jazz; Global Hip-Hop Studies in Music, Space and Race with Professors George Lipsitz and Gaye Johnson vi ABSTRACT Haunted Changes: How Cleveland’s Segregated Landscape Shapes Aesthetic Agency the Social Life of “Real Jazz” by George Kaeser Blake This dissertation examines diffuse Cleveland jazz scenes as locations in which the confusing meanings and importance of race in the post-civil rights era are debated and enacted. An impossible contradiction at the core of the scene is that jazz is legitimated by its institutionalization and ascendancy on the cultural hierarchy at the same time that many of its new homes remain inaccessible to black people because of the continuing legacy and continuity of racial spatial containment. As a consequence, seemingly neutral questions of aesthetics and musical categorization are pitched to racial inflections. Through ethnographic research, I explore how the complex and sometimes incongruous baggage ascribed to jazz resonates on Cleveland’s segregated streets and suburbs. The paradoxes built into Cleveland jazz show the fault lines between music’s power to create new racial subjectivities and the entrenched material conditions of race. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Preface: Inaudible Lives and Flyover Jazz………………………………………………..1 Introduction: Creative Programming……………………………………………………...4 Chapter 1: Musicking Against the Ghetto Game and Performing Interracial Stability Against the Grain: Defying the Forces of (Re)Segregation…………………………….. 36 Chapter 2: Democratizing Opportunity to the National Metaphor of Democracy: Freedom to Substantive Equality and Jazz in a Segregated City………………………75 Chapter 3: Genre Uplift in Haunted Venues: How Racist Stereotypes and Spatial Apartheid Haunt Cleveland Jazz……………………………………………………….. 108 Chapter 4: Smooth Jazz’s Community Based in the Airwaves and the Live Groove: Black Retro-subjectivity, Audience Appeal, Cultural Memory and the Redeeming Possibilities of Groove Passed Consonance……………………………………………..146 Chapter 5: A Tale of Two Cities (and Two Ways of Being Inauthentic): The Politics of College Jazz, Creative Labor and the Ethics of Communal Emoting Between “Official Cleveland” and “the Other Cleveland”……………………………………… 198 Coda: “It Is What It Is”: Improvising in the Spaces That Are, Hearing What the Spaces Can Be..…..……………………………………………………………………….239 Works Cited……………………………………………………………………………… 241 viii Preface: Inaudible Lives and Flyover Jazz The first question people tend to ask on learning that I’m doing a doctoral dissertation on jazz in Cleveland, Ohio, is: “Does Cleveland have a good jazz scene?” My response is generally, “No, it’s a flyover city, with flyover lives and a flyover music scene.” Piqued by my sarcasm, they ask me to elaborate on what’s wrong with the question, and I go on to say it reproduces logics of hierarchy and scarcity. Scholarly work is appealing to me because it creates a space for analyzing those logics, particularly as they are inflected by race: Is there an assumption about “who matters” that buttresses the evaluative criteria for “good” jazz? Is it possible for writers to challenge cultural assumptions that some jazz lives matter more than others? Are there ways in which constructions of “good” jazz can serve purposes that do not align with what is good for black communities? Besides, I’m more interested in the urban poor than in regional pride or territorial competitiveness. Promoting jazz with a view to boosting the city’s image or attracting investment is likely to disproportionately benefit the middle class, and may even have a detrimental impact on the urban poor (Perry 2015). I love Cleveland, but instead of saying that Cleveland is better at jazz than other places, I’d rather devote my energy to questioning what people mean when they say “good” jazz, and explore how that category falls within the contemporary racial order. Jazz, as Joel A. Rogers wrote during the Harlem Renaissance, is a “marvel of paradox” (Rogers in Porter 2001: 2). It contains multitudes and thus serves as a valuable entryway to understanding the disjunctive interpretations of the role of race in urban and suburban life. Because race operates in contradictory ways, the racial meanings of jazz need to be approached from different levels of analysis. I’m working to conceptually 1 welcome the incongruity and ambivalence brought into view by the generative discomforts of race, jazz and Cleveland. After the “How would Cleveland fare in a jazz contest?” question, I’m asked if Cleveland can boast any world-class players. I respond by stating that there are indeed exceptional performers from Cleveland, but that this is not my primary interest. At least, I’m not interested in exceptionality in the traditional sense of the word. Framing the project around exceptional individuals would risk re-inscribing the values of institutional and commercial