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CHAPTER 1

Studying Jazz

As the second decade of the twenty-first century begins, we are undoubtedly at a pivotal moment in the development of jazz. Major and independent record labels and a number of cultural institutions have, particularly since the early 1980s, presented jazz to varied publics in ways that promote both its essential “Americanness” and its supposed universality. They have devoted considerable resources to preserving and promulgating the music via new recordings, reissues of older ones, sponsorship of concert and lecture series, the mounting of museum exhibits, and the production of documentaries as well as syndicated radio and television programs. Popular publications and their advertisers, moreover, have also shown interest in the music, as evidenced by feature articles on jazz and jazz musicians in periodicals as diverse as the New York Times, the Washington Post, Newsweek, GQ, Essence, Out, and Rolling Stone and by the appearance of jazz musicians in stylish advertisements for Johnston & Murphy shoes and Movado watches, among other products.¹ Two further indicators of the increased importance of jazz have been its designation by the House of Representatives and the United States Senate as a “rare and valuable national American treasure” in 1987 and frequent references to its status as “America’s classical music.”² At the same time, after the high points of the 1980s and 1990s, younger audiences seem less interested in jazz,³ and the music seems to be receding from mass public consciousness—receding so far, at least in the United States, that commentators such as Stuart Nicholson (2005, xi) have asserted that continued performance of jazz may require the kinds of public subsidy more common in Europe.

In the midst of these activities and alongside such arguments, academics have also had their say. Sociologists, psychologists, literary scholars, art historians, and cultural critics have found ways to see jazz through the lenses of their respective fields. Indeed, even those scholars working in the normally conservative and slow-to-change subdisciplines of musicology took notice: historical musicologists, ethnomusicologists, and music theorists have added their voices to an expanding discourse, using jazz to confirm, extend, and challenge the validity of paradigms of musical analysis and musicological research. All involved—whether they were trying to find the essence of American culture, trying to account for the impact that the music has had on its listeners, or attempting to understand how canonical musicians achieved their status—seemed fixed on jazz almost as though it might hold answers to some of life’s most intractable mysteries, as though it might help them to make sense of the modern world and how it came to be.

In the outpouring of work that has accompanied “the modern resurgence” of jazz (Nicholson 1990), however, views of the music, the musicians, and the world that they inhabit have rarely risen above the myopic or the romantic. On one hand, musicologists have spoken of jazz primarily in the terms they developed for European concert music. Thus meticulous transcriptions and analyses of jazz, focused on the “immanent and recurrent properties” (Nattiez 1990, 10–11) of “music itself,” and nearly obsessive attention to discographical detail have made much jazz scholarship seem a replication of score-based analysis and sketch studies. In such research, sometimes defensively oriented toward the elevation of the music, jazz often appears as an imperfect version of classical music rather than as something vital and examinable in its own right.⁴ Ethnomusicologists have, over the last couple of decades, widened the horizon, emphasizing the roles of culture and musical interaction, but, like other academically trained music researchers, they have tended to rely exclusively on commercially released recordings for their music analytical work. Those academics approaching jazz from other disciplines have refracted it through the prisms of their respective fields, for example, occupational and organizational behavior, deviance, musical taste/preference, political protest, and social interaction, among other things (e.g., Becker 1951; Winick 1960; Katz and Longden 1983; Gridley 1987; Kofsky 1970; Sharron 1985). On the other hand, those writers concerned with reaching a lay audience have focused on the personal triumphs and foibles of musicians, who either overcome misfortune and tragic circumstances or succumb to them. In either case, only rarely do the writers connect their hypotheses convincingly to the lives or work of the musicians or their supporters. Jazz, as a result, has become a facile metaphor for American democratic ideals, a paradigmatic instance of racial/cultural integration, and/or the most singular contribution of the United States to the world.⁵

Blowin’ the Blues Away was conceived, in part, as a response to those alternatives. Rather than confront jazz using a loose biographical approach or conventional musicological techniques, this study instead focuses attention on the kinds of “interpretive moves” (Feld 1994b, 86–89) that performers and other participants in musical events make as they engage with music. What kinds of aesthetic—normative and evaluative—criteria do they bring to their engagement? How have those criteria developed, and how do they change with the passage of time? Such questions remind us that the meanings of jazz are not simply in the music; rather, they are constructed from the ongoing, dynamic relationship between what one encounters in musical events, the dispositions one brings to those events, and the relationships between the two. In short, this book examines the way that “strictly musical” parameters of performance constrain but don’t completely determine the kinds of interpretations that might emerge (Jackson 2000; DeNora 2000, 27–31).

An exploration of the meanings and interpretation of jazz cannot proceed, however, without an examination of the contested nature of the term in both scholarly and popular writing. One major question is how inclusive a definition of jazz can be. Can or should it embrace entities as disparate as the free improvisations of Derek Bailey, the meticulous arrangements of New York Voices, and the recordings of Norah Jones? Although scholars have attempted to address these questions using a number of criteria to distinguish jazz from nonjazz, or the more jazzlike from the less jazzlike (Gridley et al. 1989; Jackson 2002), their results have not always been illuminating. Such questions, responses aside, go directly to the heart of the struggle over who can lay claim to the title “jazz” or have their music labeled thus. For some musicians and other social actors, the stakes are high, since jazz, starting in the 1950s, has increasingly come to be viewed as a prestigious art music in American society (DeVeaux 1991; Gabbard 1995).

During my research, two radio stations in the New York City metropolitan area, WBGO-FM (Newark, New Jersey) and WQCD-FM (Manhattan), both of which were self-described jazz stations, illustrated this struggle.⁶ WBGO programmed those styles that nearly any scholar or layperson would define as jazz, styles commonly referred to as “traditional,” “mainstream,” “straight-ahead,” “bop,” “neo-bop,” and, in some cases, “free bop.”⁷ These styles are played primarily on acoustic instruments by small groups of three to seven musicians; make frequent use of thirty-two-bar song forms, twelve-bar blues, and “modal” frameworks, as well as various modifications of them; and are historically rooted in the practices of paradigmatic jazz musicians in general and African American jazz musicians in particular. WBGO at times used the phrase “real jazz” in its on-air promotional spots to distinguish itself from WQCD, which programmed what its own advertisements referred to as “smooth jazz” or sometimes “contemporary jazz.” Smooth or contemporary styles are highly dependent on electronic instruments and have developed more self-consciously from the practices of rhythm and blues, soul, funk, and fusion musicians from the mid-1970s forward. In fact, many of the artists programmed on smooth jazz stations—such as Anita Baker and Sade—also appear in “urban contemporary” or “quiet storm” radio formats, which cater to audiences for soul and rhythm and blues classics from the 1970s and 1980s. In any event, people listening to either station might potentially have prided themselves on being culturally informed members of society who listened to jazz.

My focus here is on the styles that would be programmed on WBGO. Those styles are also distinct from smooth as well as experimental ones in a number of other respects, including the training, background, and philosophies of the musicians and other musical event participants; the venues in which performances take place; and the publications and media channels that promote them. That is, other styles, such as jazzrock fusion, various forms of free jazz, and those styles associated with cocktail-lounge combos, may use harmony in similar ways, place great emphasis on improvisation, or have a repertoire comprising popular tunes drawn from Tin Pan Alley and American musical theater—all characteristics that one might attribute to straight-ahead jazz performance. But those styles exhibit such features under different circumstances and in different venues from those that characterize the straight-ahead New York jazz scene. In the interest of ethnographic depth, I chose to focus primarily on the latter. Therefore, in the remainder of the book, when I refer to the “jazz scene,” I am writing primarily about the mainstream scene rather than its counterparts.⁸

My project has been to understand how participants in the jazz scene, and especially musicians, construct and construe meaning in musical events. As Ruth M. Stone (1982, 3, 4) describes them, such events are complexes of activity that are “set off and made distinct from the world of everyday life” and whose participants include “both the individuals producing music and the people experiencing the music performance as listeners or audience.” In part, her aim is to situate music amid a host of other activities that might accompany and frame it, such as speech, dance, and kinesic-proxemic factors. While Stone’s focus is on the direct, face-to-face interactions of participants, her formulation might also encompass those situations in which one, alone or with others, hears only the sonic traces of such events as she construes them (as on a recording; see Horn 2002, 19–21). In either situation, musical events, understood as dynamic and processual, are a space in which performers and other participants interact and negotiate their relationships with each other as well as with other events that have occurred in the past. In those moments, as well, they condition themselves, consciously and unconsciously, for future events.

In contrast, many of the writers whose histories, essays, and analyses I have read have either been interested primarily in musical analysis focused on “great men” in jazz history (Schuller 1968, 1989), have concerned themselves with exploring connections between music and cultural history (Tirro 1977; Collier 1978; Kenney 1993; Stowe 1994), or—in extreme cases—have subjected musicians to psychoanalytic scrutiny (Collier 1987; cf. Carner 1991). In other words, these writers have taken as their object a static conception of “the music” and/or the individual and have relied upon the standard tools and methodologies of musicological and historical investigation. If they have widened their scope to encompass anything comparable to musical events, to see music ontologically as process as well as product (Bohlman 1999), they have done so only as a secondary concern. Their modes of inquiry are heavily dependent on documents, entities whose isolatability and seeming fixity make them amenable to textual interpretation.

As such documents, audio recordings have been valuable sources for scholars interested in jazz performance. By facilitating repeated listening, they enable a researcher to grasp performative and textu(r)al nuances that might otherwise pass unnoticed. They also make possible comparative projects, so that one might examine the two complete takes of “Parker’s Mood” from Charlie Parker: The Complete Savoy Sessions or use Thelonious Monk’s numerous takes of “’Round Midnight” on Thelonious Monk: The Complete Riverside Recordings as a basis for understanding jazz improvisation as practice and process.⁹ At the same time, recordings also minimize the importance of the researcher being in close physical proximity to the musicians at a given performance, “live” or recorded, and that lack of proximity often creates interpretive blind spots. Performances, after all, are multitextured events, filled with proxemic, kinesthetic, visual, and other contextual stimuli and information. Recordings containing only the audio information are unique but ultimately incomplete representations of them.

Despite such obvious limitations, some of jazz’s most influential analysts have written as though recordings were transparent windows into the past or into performance practice. In the preface to Jazz: Its Evolution and Essence (1956), for example, André Hodeir explains his reliance on recordings for research by emphasizing their fixity: “The judgments of jazz in this book are based on recordings, which have reached a state of technical perfection that makes such an approach valid. Besides, the recording is the most trustworthy witness we have in dealing with an art form of which nothing that is essential can be set down on paper. The reader should not be surprised, therefore, if the words work and record are used interchangeably throughout” (2). While acknowledging the limited efficacy of notation, Hodeir asserts that recordings are similar to written scores in that they offer analysts access to musical works.¹⁰ Like Hodeir, Gunther Schuller posits an equivalence between recordings and works when he writes that the jazz historian must evaluate “the only thing that is available to him: the recording” (1968, x).¹¹ Schuller does question whether such “one-time affairs” can be viewed as definitive, but he feels that—in absence of other texts—they, as “primary source[s],” are all that historically minded analysts have at their disposal. And since the most prominent methods of musical analysis were developed for notated music, jazz researchers who want their work to be intelligible have to transcribe music from a recording—to transform it into a score/work, and in the process reduce complex sonic events to the parameters of pitch, rhythm, and volume—before analyzing it.¹²

The work perspective, though, founders partly because recordings are not “acoustic window[s] giving access to how the music really sounded” (Rasula 1995, 135). Or, as Anthony Seeger explains, “[no recording] preserves sounds. What it preserves are [selective] interpretations of sounds—interpretations made by the people who did the recordings and their equipment” (Seeger 1986, 270, emphasis in original; see Jairazbhoy and Balyoz 1977). Microphone selection and placement, recording media, room construction, frequency equalization, dynamic range compression, and countless other choices affect what we hear on a recording. A change in any one of them can appreciably alter the final product.¹³ Each of these choices constitutes a human decision, whether a producer’s, engineer’s, or performer’s, oriented toward getting a specific kind of sound, doing something in one way rather than in others.¹⁴

Indeed, based on evidence from a number of recordings in the 1990s, one might assert that the now-standard reliance on multitrack recording and on digital editing has led to a broader anxiety regarding the fidelity of recordings to a live performance ideal.¹⁵ In the notes for pianist Jacky Terrasson’s 1995 release Reach, for example, Mark Levinson offers the following account of the CD’s recording:

Years ago, musicians recorded music as they played—informally, in close physical proximity, without much editing. What they played was what people heard on the record. Today that approach has been all but lost. Studios separate the musicians, put them behind glass booths, give them headphones and cue tracks, and leave most of the production decisions to engineers in the post-production process—mixing, editing, and mastering.… [In my approach, only] two microphones are used, positioned carefully in the optimum location. The balance between instruments is therefore created by the musicians themselves. There is no opportunity later to change this balance…. Musicians and engineer are in the same room with no glass windows or partitions between them. No headphones or monitors are used by the musicians.¹⁶

Here, again, the assumption is that recordings, at least when done well, can provide direct access to what musicians do. Many other releases from the 1980s and ’90s contain similar statements, such as “recorded live to 2-track,” perhaps intended to make them seem more authentically representative of live jazz performance and more accurate as historical documents.

In that capacity, they might also give us privileged access to the authorial intentions of individual musicians. This second kind of fidelity is compromised when we take account of how musicians decide what and when to record (see DeVeaux 1988, 127, 135). In his autobiography Reminiscing in Tempo (1990), for example, producer Teddy Reig explains that he allowed Charlie Parker to choose all of the tunes recorded during his sessions for Savoy—provided they were “original” compositions, that is, ones that did not require the record label to pay royalties to other composers. Orrin Keepnews, however, took a more hands-on approach in recording Thelonious Monk for Riverside:

My partner [Bill Grauer] and I had decided that our initial goal was to try to reverse the widely held belief that our new pianist was an impossibly obscure artist; therefore, we would start by avoiding bebop horns and intricate original tunes. We proposed an all-Ellington trio date: certainly Duke was a universally respected figure and major composer…. [Monk] agreed without hesitation, despite claiming to be largely unfamiliar with Ellington’s music. I insisted that Thelonious pick out the specific repertoire, and eventually he requested several pieces of sheet music. (Keepnews 1988, 122–23)

Monk’s second session for Riverside produced another album of jazz standards, again at the request of Grauer and Keepnews. It was only with his third release that Monk was allowed to record his own compositions.¹⁷ Likewise, Joshua Redman (1995a) told me that his decision to record Eric Clapton’s “Tears in Heaven” for the album Wish (1993) came after he listened to a cassette compilation suggestively given to him by Matt Pierson, his producer.¹⁸

Finally, it is rarely clear whether the compositions on a given release were rehearsed by a band prior to recording or whether they were created in the studio. Charlie Parker’s most celebrated quintet—with Miles Davis, Duke Jordan, Tommy Potter, and Max Roach—was a working band that almost certainly had performed some of the tunes they recorded in live settings before entering the studio. At the very least, they had performed tunes with similar harmonic progressions. But according to both Teddy Reig (Reig and Berger 1990, 22) and Miles Davis (Davis and Troupe 1989, 88–89), there were also numerous tunes recorded by Parker and his groups whose melodies were composed and learned by musicians on the spot. Such instant composition and performance were certainly affected by the time constraints of recording. As Helen Oakley Dance and James Patrick point out, prior to the 1950s it was standard practice to record four tunes in a three-hour recording session.¹⁹ Up to forty-five minutes then, on average, could be allotted to the recording of each three-minute tune. Such generous amounts of time, however, could be diminished by in-studio rehearsal, by false starts and mistakes, or by decisions to change repertoire or modify arrangements. Alternatively, Robert Palmer (1985) suggests that the high quality of recordings on the Blue Note label in the 1960s was due to the label’s policy of financing two to three days of rehearsal prior to each recording session.²⁰

These examples make clear that one cannot definitively say whether an individual recording truly represents a first-time, improvisationally brilliant performance.²¹ For those writers interested in locating such performances, the use of commercially released live recordings is not a viable corrective, for such releases are as subject to post-performance manipulation as studio recordings. When artists like Joshua Redman and Joe Lovano made their live recordings at the Village Vanguard in the 1990s, it was likely as apparent to other audience members as it was to me that these were not typical performances. Intricate networks of wires and cables ran from the stage to other areas of the club and up the stairs to large mobile recording units parked in front of the club on both occasions. If that weren’t evidence enough, the musicians took care to inform us in each case that the evening’s performance was being recorded for commercial release.²² Moreover, as is standard with studio recordings, some recorded material, such as the intervals between songs or “extraneous” audience noise, didn’t appear on the final releases. Finally, audience applause was recorded on separate microphones to be mixed in later, and the individual tunes chosen for inclusion on the final recordings were sequenced in a manner that didn’t replicate their order on the evening(s) of performance.²³

Where musical analysis is concerned, the process of transcribing those same recordings strips dense sonic phenomena of all that cannot be translated into a particular notational system, discourages study of musics not easily transcribed, and privileges the aspects of sound that researchers dependent on Western notation have been trained to emphasize (Tagg 1982, 41–42).²⁴ Consequently, through notational dependence the analysis of jazz has come to resemble the analysis of Western concert music (see Walser 1995, 170–71, for a strategic use of notation-centered analysis). As a result, the majority of jazz analytical work concentrates on the improvised solos of historically prominent musicians, with most writers being content to focus their attention solely on the structural and melodic parameters of those solos.

Following Potter (1990), one can loosely group the analytical approaches to jazz in the categories represented in table 1. Analyses mapping pitch onto harmony or mode examine, moment to moment, what pitch choices are common or idiomatic for a particular improviser. Those analyses classed as “thematic/motivic/formulaic” have attempted to show how specific improvisers such as Charlie Parker, Sonny Rollins, and John Coltrane developed themes or motives in individual improvisations or consistently used the same melodic shapes (formulae) over specific harmonic progressions. Schenkerian analyses have been applied to show that “instantaneous composers—improvisers … think in long-range terms” (Potter 1990, 66) similar to those of the concert music composers on whom Heinrich Schenker based his work. The schemata under reductive techniques/pitch-class set analysis apply the implication-realization models of Eugene Narmour and Leonard Meyer or set analysis to melodic entities. Although reductive analyses attempt to show that certain melodic moves require or imply their own continuation, pitch-class set analyses reveal the relations between vertical or horizontal collections of pitches. Those studies termed “linguistic” have explored parallels between spoken language and jazz improvisation and have borrowed linguistic techniques and concepts, such as generative grammar, competence, and performance. The stylistic category encompasses analyses that are essentially descriptive, aimed at elucidating stylistic parameters such as harmonic or melodic usage. Studies of performance interaction focus on the ways in which performers interact with each other in the course of performance, particularly through their manipulation of harmony, rhythm, timbre, and other musical parameters.

TABLE 1 ANALYTIC APPROACHES

Analytic Framework	Representative Examples
Relation of pitch to harmony or mode	Published transcriptions in Down Beat, listed by Koger 1985
Thematic/motivic/formulaic	Williams 1958; Schuller 1958; Owens 1974;Tirro 1974; Gushee 1981; Kernfeld 1983; Smith 1983; Spring 1990; Van der Bliek 1991
Schenkerian/harmonic	Owens 1974; Stewart 1979, 1982; Larson 1993, 1998, 2009; Martin 1996; Julien 2003; Waters and Williams 2010
Reductive techniques/pitch-class set analysis	Pressing 1982; Williams 1982; Block 1990, 1993
Linguistic	Perlman and Greenblatt 1981; Steedman 1984; Suhor 1986
Stylistic	Williams 1982; Wildman 1985; Strunk 1979; Stein 1977; Koch 1985
Signification—derived from the work of Henry Louis Gates Jr. (1988)*	Murphy 1990; Floyd 1991, 1993, 1995; Walser 1995
Performance interaction	Katz and Longden 1983; Porter 1985; Stewart 1986; Rinzler 1988; Bastien and Hostager 1991; Washburne 1991; Jackson 1992; Berliner 1994; Monson 1996; Borgo 2005; Benadon 2006; Butterfield 2000, 2006, 2010

* Gates reaches into the African past to ground his concern with “Signifyin(g),” and, like Houston A. Baker Jr. (1984), he sees the African American vernacular as a source of new tools for literary criticism. “Signifyin(g)”—Gates explains his spelling of the term on page 46—defined as “repetition, with a signal difference” (1988, 51), is for him the master trope of the black English vernacular: “Black formal repetition always repeats with a difference, a black difference that manifests itself in specific language use. And the repository that contains the language that is the source—and the reflection—of black difference is the black English vernacular tradition” (xxii–xxiii). The importance of “Signifyin(g)” for literary criticism is its naming of a kind of intertextuality: “All texts Signify upon other texts, in motivated and unmotivated ways” (xxiv). Noting that “one does not signify something … one signifies in some way” (54), Gates delineates a number of ways in which Signifyin(g) is used by African American speakers, writers, and musicians, especially through the repetition, revision, blurring, and inversion of formal structures; pastiche; parody; and reinterpretation. In addition to numerous language-based examples, Gates provides music-based ones to support his assertions: “When playing the blues, a great musician often tries to make musical phrases that are elastic in their formal properties. These elastic phrases stretch the form rather than articulate the form. Because the form is self-evident to the musician, both he and his well-trained audience are playing and listening with expectation. Signifyin(g) disappoints these expectations; caesuras, or breaks, achieve the same function. This form of disappointment creates a dialogue between what the listener expects and what the artist plays. Whereas younger, less mature musicians accentuate the beat, more accomplished musicians do not have to do so. They feel free to imply it” (123).

To some degree, the analytical projects outlined above have been important in convincing an older generation of scholars that jazz was indeed worthy of study. But because of their intentions or target audiences, many of those researchers privileged (and privilege) categories, concepts, and methodologies drawn from the study of Western concert music and derive their research questions from them. One might gain useful knowledge from such strategies, but it is clear that they might fail to engage other important issues. Indeed, much promise for the future of jazz studies and jazz analysis lies in developing analytical schemata that are more capable of accounting for what is distinctive about jazz (see Walser 1995; 179; Butterfield 2000). Studies based on ethnographic fieldwork and performance interaction, though in their infancy, seem to be positive steps in that direction.

Such studies require a more direct engagement of the scholar with music, performers, listeners, and the cultures and contexts that support their interaction. The perspectives gained through fieldwork and personal knowledge are, of course, not inherently superior to other perspectives, but they open a space for improving and refining analysis as well as avoiding all-too-common pitfalls (see Horowitz 1982). They allow a researcher to investigate issues that audio recordings and published sources alone cannot illuminate. By situating themselves in the context(s) of performance and allowing the data gathered to shape their analyses, researchers studying living performers emphasize what they might learn from people, particularly the individuals and groups who perform and otherwise participate in musical events.²⁵

Indeed, one might argue that attempts to assert jazz’s status as an art music in the academy have depended on the erasure of the “extramusical” from its study, an erasure that deemphasizes the music’s roots in and continued interactions with African diaspora cultures and other African American musics (Radano 1993, 15–21; Horn 2002, 28). As a result, works by African American writers whose perspectives on the music and its relation to African American and American cultures have been critical in illuminating the music’s cultural functions have until recently been overlooked by jazz scholars. To be sure, the work of Baraka (1963, 1967a), Ellison (1964c, 1986), and Murray (1970, 1976) contains historical errors and misapprehensions of specific musical-technical matters, but its importance lies in its ability to articulate the spirit of the music, not only via cultural foundations but also via the music’s meanings within and inseparability from the African American communities that have nurtured it.²⁶ In other words, these writers raise questions about the meaning of jazz performance that are concerned with, in saxophonist Antonio Hart’s charged phrase, “what the music is really about” (Hart 1995) for one group of people intimately involved with it. And as writing on and the study of jazz have become ensconced in the academy and in conservatories, particularly since the 1950s, those writings that come from outside established academic disciplines or mainstream jazz criticism have, like the music’s cultural connections, been underemphasized (for further discussion, see Gennari 1991; Gabbard 1995; Ramsey 1999).

Drawing inspiration from those writers’ cultural focus, I have used ethnographic methods as well as the theories and methods of ethnomusicology to try to get at one version of what the music is “really about.” Particularly inspirational for me have been Alan Merriam’s model of cyclical relationships between concept, behavior, and sound (1964, 32–35); Timothy Rice’s focus on formative processes—how music is historically constructed, socially maintained, and individually created and experienced (1987, 472–80); and issues pertinent to the ethnography of musical performance (McLeod and Herndon 1980; Béhague 1984). The authors of these models individually and collectively propose ways of viewing music as a dynamic process, including but not limited to a sound object. Though I do not make explicit reference to these concepts at every point, they are embedded in the arguments in subsequent chapters, especially those related to the value of “native” categories in understanding music making, the importance of musical events, and the ways in which musicians and fans respond strategically to questions about music making.

How do participants in musical performances or events engage with the various cultural matrices that surround and inform, and are surrounded and informed by, musical performance?²⁷ One might argue, as Steven Feld does, that as they attend to or participate in a musical event, they come to comprehend it, to understand its meanings, through a series of “interpretive moves” (1994b, 86–89). Such moves, which he describes as locational, categorical, associational, reflective, and evaluative, can be highly individual and idiosyncratic, for they draw upon each individual’s past experiences.²⁸ By extending Feld’s argument, one comes to see that such individual understandings become social or cultural meanings when they are shared among and/or debated by participants. That is, “Collective systems of meanings are created as individuals reveal their individual understandings to one another … through [their] input into the shared perspective from individual experience…. The collective system of meanings is also cumulative, like the individual consciousness. It expands as individuals face new experiences together, inform each other of individual perceptions against the background of what they already have in common, or discover additional facets of their individual systems of meanings to be shared” (Hannerz 1980, 284).

The musical event, participation in it, responses to it, and talk about it force participants to face new experiences together, share perceptions, and discover new ways to share their understandings. The resultant meanings, then, are never wholly fixed. They are constantly emerging and being shaped through the interpretive moves of various participants in musical events and the contribution of those moves to and their acceptance (or rejection) in larger systems of meaning. For my purposes, then, musical meaning is what emerges from the shared and variable understandings that participants bring to and create through participation in musical events (see Jackson 2000).

Moreover, as the wording above indicates, meanings never emerge ex nihilo. Individuals who participate in musical events bring with them understandings from other kinds of musical events and other realms of activity; they bring ways of deploying interpretive moves that may have as much to do with jazz performance as with other kinds. In that sense, the discourses of meaning that surround jazz performance and its interpretation are inseparable from and overlap in significant ways with other discourses about meaning, the nature of “artistic creation,” and the functions of music, for example. Attempting to understand the meanings that are attached to and emerge from jazz performance, then, means entering into a complex discourse always and already in progress (Williams 1977, 35–42; Lipsitz 1990, 99–100), one that has tangible connections to other discourses.

My method of understanding that process of discourse merging and development has been to focus on the jazz scene in New York City, where I conducted fieldwork continuously between July of 1994 and December of 1995 and more sporadically from 1997 to 2001. Some aspects of my fieldwork were informed by the research I did between January and July of 1992, also in New York City, for a master’s thesis (Jackson 1992). The contacts I made with musicians for the earlier project allowed me to begin understanding and mapping the jazz scene and to see it and the performances that take place on it as the most appropriate unit of investigation (rather than an era, an individual musician, or a body of recordings). Through following some of those musicians in the time between my first fieldwork period and my second, I gained access to and an understanding of the larger network of individuals, venues, record labels, educational institutions, and media that comprise the scene that I describe in chapters 3 and 4.

In the summer of 1994 I began contacting some of the musicians I had met previously, such as guitarist Peter Bernstein, saxophonist Antonio Hart, and drummer Gregory Hutchinson, to interest them in my new project. I explained to them that I was interested in observing their performances and recording sessions to gain a better understanding of the workings of the scene and their place in it. In addition, I told them that I would welcome suggestions for other musicians whose perspectives they thought I should seek. I also reestablished the few relationships I had with recording industry personnel, most notably Sharon Blynn, then at Verve Records. In addition, to acquaint myself with what was happening on the New York scene and beyond, I started systematically reading the national and local jazz periodicals (Down Beat, JazzTimes, and Cadence) as well as jazz-related articles in newspapers such as the New York Times and the Village Voice. I focused not only on feature articles and short news items but also on reviews of recordings and advertisements. In the process I familiarized myself with a number of performers, producers, and recording industry personnel of whom I had not previously been aware; learned something of the current activities of ones about whom I already was aware; and gained greater understanding of their backgrounds and relationships to one another and the scene. Through these different forms of inquiry, I started to develop a picture of the variety of jazz activity occurring in the city. Each individual with whom I was personally acquainted led or introduced me to others. They also kept me apprised of performances, recordings, recording sessions, and other information about the functioning of the scene.

Particularly toward the end of August 1994, I started regularly attending the performances of musicians I knew as well as the performances of others. During breaks, I would introduce myself to the musicians and to interested audience members and tell them about my study.²⁹ I informed them that I was a graduate student studying jazz performers on the New York scene and was interested in finding out “what makes this music so powerful and important.” I told the musicians that participation in the study would require my seeing them perform and record as well as my interviewing them. Most responded favorably and exchanged phone numbers with me. Not all, however, responded to my phone calls or agreed to become part of the study. In particular, my attempt to include female musicians in my sample was hampered by their tacit refusals, even in those situations where other musicians or scene participants vouched for me.³⁰

My entry into some areas of the scene was easier because of another contact I made in August of 1994. Through Robert G. O’Meally of Columbia University I met Peter Watrous, then the only full-time jazz critic for the New York Times. I served as Watrous’s intern from September of 1994 to August of 1995. My duties consisted of helping him to catalog and file the dozens of recordings and books he received on a weekly basis. In exchange for that work I was able to accompany him to nearly every performance he attended (when my own plans did not conflict with his) and was introduced to musicians, club owners, booking agents, publicists, photographers, record label personnel, and writers whom he knew. I also gained insight both into the role of the media in the scene’s functioning and into the music editorial procedures of the New York Times. Sometimes that understanding emerged from direct conversation with Watrous. At other times it came more obliquely, through attending and discussing shows with him and comparing the verbal “drafts” of his reviews with what eventually was—or was not—published.

My primary method was participant observation: I made observations at musical events—rehearsals, live performances, and recording sessions—in which I functioned as a participant in some capacity. I also made observations in those settings in which I listened to or discussed recorded music with other individuals. Evaluations of recordings generally included conversation about the background of the artists and the conditions under which recordings were made, if such information was known to anyone present. I kept chronological field notes recording the observations I made at musical events as well as my impressions from listening sessions. Among the data recorded were the date, place, time, and relative length of musical events or sessions; the role(s) of specific individuals or groups in those events; narration of moment-to-moment communication and interaction among the participants (see Jackson 1992); listings of the musicians present and the songs played; the responses of audience members to a musical event; records of conversations with other participants; and my own impressions and evaluations. During musical events I produced handwritten “scratch notes” that, combined with my recollections and other “headnotes” (see Sanjek 1990; Ottenberg 1990), were the basis for typed field notes. I typed these notes as soon as possible after a musical event, generally before going to sleep or, when that was not feasible, upon awakening later in the day. In the typewritten notes I attempted to capture as much as I could remember of what I observed but had not written down, mingling reporting with interpretation and evaluation. In addition, my chronological field notes contain records of phone conversations and other discussions that were not tape-recorded, appointments, phone numbers, contact information, biographical sketches, and any other information directly related to or drawn from the participant observation portion of my fieldwork—both at and away from musical events.

The central activities that comprised my fieldwork entailed progressively deeper involvement with the functioning of the scene. In the first couple of months I limited my activities to attending live performances alone and making contact with musicians and other participants. I used this time to establish myself as a regular on the scene, to be recognized as a participant in it. That process required major shifts in my lifestyle, particularly my sleeping habits. I quickly found myself waking between noon and 1 PM and retiring between 4 and 5 AM. Such a schedule made it easier for me to hang out with the musicians I knew and was coming to know. Being able to stay through the last set of a musical performance (such as the 2 AM set at Bradley’s) and, more importantly, for the socializing that took place after it ended allowed me to participate in conversations that the most casual scene participants—or those with day jobs—typically miss. In part because of that schedule, my involvement with friends and colleagues not related to my research became largely non-existent. By the end of my fieldwork period, the jazz scene had become my social world: whenever I went to live performances I would see someone I knew well in the audience, whether or not I knew the musicians who were performing. I’d frequently sit through a set or two with whomever I met and go with them afterward to Bradley’s for the late set.

During those times I engaged in conversation with musicians and others about aspects of performances and got recommendations about upcoming performances that I should attend as well as certain “blessed records” that they liked or felt had exerted great influence on them.³¹ In some cases, discussion of such recordings was triggered by the music that happened to be playing on the stereo system in the venue.³² Sometimes musicians who didn’t know me well would test me by asking me to identify the performer(s) on a recording by listening attentively. Making both my own choices about performances and following the recommendations of musicians and Peter Watrous, I generally attended no fewer than four live performances per week during the fieldwork period, sometimes going to three venues in the course of one evening. By attending performances and studying blessed recordings, I gained more insight into the criteria that distinguished good performers and recordings. I also enhanced my ability to recognize songs from the standard jazz repertoire and to analyze performances instantly, discerning elements of form, feel, meter, harmony, and substitutions as well as other parameters.

After this early period I started attending performances with the musicians and other individuals whose acquaintance I had made. The conversations that resulted from our reactions to what we were hearing and experiencing helped me to understand the evaluative criteria of individuals on the scene and to compare those criteria with my own. Among the many things that I learned in this process was that my criteria were not significantly different from those of the musicians and listeners with whom I interacted. Like them, I was listening, for example, for aspects of form, arrangement, style, creativity, and play in individual performance and group interaction.

In late September I started attending recording sessions sporadically as well as spending time with musicians outside of performance contexts, such as in their apartments or on social outings. These activities, combined with the observation of numerous performances, helped me to ascertain the “communicative norms” of individuals on the scene. Charles L. Briggs (1986) recommends that one attempt to learn these norms in the early phases of fieldwork, paying particular attention to how queries are framed, who has the right to ask questions, of whom, and on which topics. Based on that investigation, one can then design an interview methodology that takes into account what one has discovered.

In late October I started reviewing my field notes to see which issues had been prominent during my field experience. In those notes I had included potential questions to ask in interviews, such as questions about the role of various people in the recording industry, the importance of audience interaction, and conflicts among musicians in touring groups. I also noticed topics on which I needed more information. In comparing the issues raised in my notes with my central questions, I began to formulate an interview schedule focused on the dynamics of the scene, its various agents and actors, and interactive parameters of performance. I started conducting tape-recorded formal interviews with musicians in November 1994 and continued until September 1995. Although some interviews were conducted in restaurants, cafés, or offices, the majority were conducted in the homes of the musicians. Conducting interviews in musicians’ homes generated other questions regarding their record collections and memorabilia.³³ (I also conducted a series of informal interviews with recording industry personnel, most frequently in performance venues, that allowed me to understand the work they did and its function in the scene.) I prepared for musicians’ interviews by reviewing whatever notes I had taken on performances by them, reviewing comments that had been made about them by other musicians or in the press, and listening to a sample of their recordings to generate questions specifically geared toward them. When interviewing non-musicians, my questions focused on their work, their pathways to it, and their knowledge and understanding of music.

The musicians’ interviews, although guided by the schedule, were open-ended. A few lasted as little as ninety minutes. More typically, they lasted from two to four hours, and some had to be done in multiple sittings. I reviewed each of the tapes and took detailed notes. In comparing the notes, I identified common concerns and selectively transcribed relevant portions. Those excerpts were then combined in word-processing documents so that I could look at individual comments on the same topic in close proximity to one another and thus make comparisons and further refine the concepts that emerged from them. The data gathered from the interviews provided more questions for observation in the last phases of fieldwork, particularly regarding the ways in which performers actualized their normative statements about performance. I rendered my transcriptions as literally as possible, making no attempts to convert the grammatical irregularities of speech into the regularities readers are accustomed to seeing. My reason for doing so was to preserve the moments of “interpretive time” that characterized the interviewees’ and my attempts to “force awareness to words” (Feld 1994b, 93).

In the spring of 1995, while I continued attending live performances, observing recording sessions, and conducting interviews, my involvement with the scene became deeper as I became a freelance writer, researching a two-page sketch of jazz past and present for the New York Times Magazine (Jackson 1995) as well as writing a number of artist biographies, brochures, and record reviews for various labels and publications. These activities exposed me to more of the behind-the-scenes work that led not only to writing about record releases and public performances but to the recordings or performances themselves. I had already begun to learn, through my internship with Watrous, the kinds of information that record labels provided to writers, but by becoming one myself, I participated in the creation and dissemination of such information.³⁴ I also learned more about the role that publicity firms, record release parties, and other promotional activities play in the day-to-day functioning of the scene by fostering familiarity and contact among critics, recording industry personnel, and musicians.

Through engaging in all these activities over an eighteen-month period, I gained an understanding of the complexity of the interactions that comprise the scene. The roles of specific individuals on the scene were often multiple and overlapping. Writers whom I associated only with the popular press sometimes had serious commitments to the recording industry. At least one of them, Jeff Levenson, moved from a job as a writer (jazz editor at Billboard magazine) to a position at a record label (Warner Brothers). I also noted the cyclical nature of the scene, which was characterized by the prolonged absence of many performers from the city during the summer festival season, the opening and frequent closing of clubs, the launching and failure of jazz labels, and the signing and dropping of performers from those labels’ rosters.

My fieldwork in the mid-1990s and in 2000–2001 forms the basis for this book, which has three major sections. The first, “Black, Brown, and Beige,” which includes this chapter and the next, examines the issues raised by the study of jazz in the 1990s and, more importantly, directly engages the issues of race, culture, history, memory, education, and experience that are integral to (and frequently debated with regard to) the making of jazz. Indeed, one of the most trenchant questions in chapter 2 is whether jazz is African American music, American music, or something else altogether. My response hinges on problematizing notions of race/culture and history/memory, seeing them as constructs that have been strategically deployed by various commentators. While the writings of these commentators frequently conflate race and culture with one another, they stake their claims to authority by valorizing history at the expense of memory without seeing the two as related rather than opposed entities. As a corrective, I consider the pathways taken by various musicians to performing, recording, and listening to jazz. In doing so, I draw attention to the roles of practical activity, lived experience, and notions of social, economic, and cultural capital to argue that there are compelling reasons to consider jazz African American.

The second section, “Scenes in the City,” builds on the first by examining the convergence of musicians’ and other participants’ pathways on the New York jazz scene. I argue that one cannot have a comprehensive understanding of the meanings that might be attached to the music without relating it to the geographic, economic, and social contexts in which it is performed and evaluated. In chapter 3, therefore, I suggest that consideration of space and spatiality enhances a jazz historical narrative that generally renders geography as inert and subservient to time. In particular, those two concepts highlight the impact that attempts to regulate the use of space in cities has had on jazz historically—determining, among other things, where jazz musicians can perform, how often, and for whom. Zoning laws, uneven spatial development, and a shift from an industrial to a service economy over the last several decades have been just as crucial as developments in musical style for the making and interpreting of jazz. Toward the end of chapter 3, I argue that jazz performance is inseparable from a loose and shifting assemblage of agents and institutions—the jazz scene—that facilitates (and inhibits) the public presentation of the music and musicians in live performance and on recordings. In chapter 4, I examine in more detail the contours of the New York scene in the 1990s, describing its network of agents and institutions and their relation to one another.

The first two sections provide the context in which one might most fruitfully understand the book’s title and the framework developed in the third section, “Blowin’ the Blues Away.” Chapter 5 focuses on the normative and evaluative statements that my interviewees made about performing and learning to perform jazz. I use those statements to hypothesize a “blues aesthetic” that encompasses what performers are trying to do and how they evaluate musical events. In chapter 6, I argue that discourses on race and culture as well as history and memory work with a blues aesthetic to frame jazz performance as a spiritually oriented ritualized activity. In chapter 7, I analyze three studio recordings and three live performances to illustrate the efficacy of seeing jazz through the lenses of a blues aesthetic and ritualization. In the final chapter, I consider the implications that the perspective presented here might have for future research and writing on jazz as well as other forms of music. Finally, noting the ways that the scene has changed since I conducted the research, I speculate on the directions in which the musicians may head in the future.