Listening at the Edges: Aural Experience and Affect in a New York Jazz Scene by Matthew Somoroff Department of Music Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Louise Meintjes, Co-Supervisor ___________________________ Paul Berliner, Co-Supervisor ___________________________ Philip Rupprecht ___________________________ Mark Anthony Neal Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Music in the Graduate School of Duke University 2014 ABSTRACT Listening at the Edges: Aural Experience and Affect in a New York Jazz Scene by Matthew Somoroff Department of Music Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Louise Meintjes, Co-Supervisor ___________________________ Paul Berliner, Co-Supervisor ___________________________ Philip Rupprecht ___________________________ Mark Anthony Neal An abstract of a dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Music in the Graduate School of Duke University 2014 Copyright by Matthew Somoroff ©2014 Abstract In jazz circles, someone with “big ears” is an expert listener, one who hears the complexity and nuance of jazz music. Listening, then, figures prominently in the imaginations of jazz musicians and aficionados. While jazz scholarship has acknowledged the discourse on listening within various jazz cultures, to date the actual listening practices of jazz musicians and listeners remain under-theorized. This dissertation investigates listening and aural experience in a New York City community devoted to avant-garde jazz. I situate this community within the local history of Manhattan’s Lower East Side, discuss the effects of changing neighborhood politics on music performance venues, and analyze social interactions in this scene, to give an exposition of “listening to music” as a practice deeply tied into other aspects of my interlocutors’ lives. I engage with cultural anthropology, urban sociology, and media studies, applying insights from those fields while engaging perennial concerns and topics of jazz scholarship: the nature of musical improvisation, and relatedly, the dynamics of listening and aural perception, as well as the complex, changing, but continuing relationship between African American cultural practices and jazz. This project makes several contributions to the ethnomusicology of listening and to jazz studies. First, I argue for and demonstrate an ethnographically-informed mode of music analysis: I use ethnographic data on participants’ aural experience as the basis for fine-grained sound analysis. Second, in attending to the processes that produce iv alternative, parallel, and sometimes intersecting canons, I locate the work of canon formation in the everyday lives of listeners and reveal its political and ideological implications. Finally, building on the previous two arguments, I propose that listening, though often experienced as subjective and private, takes place in networks of social relationships that listeners constitute both through real-time interaction and through engagements with history. Although scene participants vary widely in their theories of how to listen, it is through interactions around shared aural experiences that they carry on the ethos of the 1960s countercultural and Civil Rights movements and reproduce their investments in the ideas of social and musical marginality in the post-Fordist New York of the early 21st century. v In memory of MARC WILLIAM SOMOROFF and the many hours of listening we shared vi Table of Contents Abstract ............................................................................................................................ iv List of Figures ................................................................................................................... x Acknowledgments ............................................................................................................ xi Introduction ..................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 1 Setting the Scene: The Lower East Side, the Jazz Avant-garde, and Histories of Marginality ................................................................................................................. 45 1.1 Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 45 1.2 A History of Marginality I: the Lower East Side of New York .................................................. 49 1.21 El Jardin II ................................................................................................................................. 55 1.3 A History of Marginality II: Avant-garde jazz ............................................................................ 58 1.31 El Jardin III ................................................................................................................................ 71 1.4 The Aesthetics of Nonconformity: the Many Lives of the Hipster .......................................... 74 1.5 El Jardin: Reprise ............................................................................................................................. 83 Chapter 2 “There’s No Home for This Music”: Venues and the Marginalization of Jazz in the U.S. Culture Industry ................................................................................... 88 2.1 Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 88 2.11 Bad Vibes ................................................................................................................................... 91 2.2 Silent Listening, “Noisy” Music ..................................................................................................... 94 2.21 Why Is Jazz Dying? ................................................................................................................... 99 2.3 The Venues .................................................................................................................................... 106 2.31 The Local 269 .......................................................................................................................... 107 2.32 The Stone ................................................................................................................................. 114 vii 2.33 The Brecht Forum .................................................................................................................. 118 2.34 The Bowery Poetry Club ....................................................................................................... 123 2.35 Roulette .................................................................................................................................... 128 2.4 Why Is Jazz Dying? (Reprise) ...................................................................................................... 132 2.5 Good Vibes: On the Nomadism of Jazz Venues ....................................................................... 135 Chapter 3 Public Listening: Displays of Aurality and Performances of the Jazz Tradition ....................................................................................................................... 140 3.1 Introduction ................................................................................................................................... 140 3.2 Public Performances of Listening I: Joe McPhee at the Local 269 ......................................... 143 3.21 Performing Images in Response to Musical Performance ................................................ 150 3.3 Performing the Jazz Tradition: Matthew Shipp at Tribes ....................................................... 159 3.4 Performing Listening and the Figuration of Jazz Musicians .................................................. 170 3.5 Figuring Listening During Moments of Performances ........................................................... 189 Chapter 4 I Know About the Life: The Habitus of Listening in the LES Scene .......... 193 4.1 Introduction ................................................................................................................................... 193 4.11 The Feel of the Habitus of Listening .................................................................................... 206 4.2 Telling Stories: Collecting, Narrative, and Collecting Narratives about Collecting ............ 211 4.21 Narrating Obsession: the Addiction to Affect and the Affect of Addiction ................... 218 4.22 Documentarian Impulses: Collecting Live Moments ........................................................ 229 4.3 The Practice of Social Talk ........................................................................................................... 233 4.31 Playing with the Boundaries of Avant-jazz ......................................................................... 238 4.32 The Social Space of Facebook: Solidarities and Conflicts ................................................. 247 4.4 Conclusion: When the Habitus Gets You Down ...................................................................... 251 viii Chapter 5 What We Talk About When We Talk About Listening: Negotiating Sociality in Moments of Listening ...............................................................................