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CHAPTER 2

History and Memory, Pathways and Practices

The African Americanness of Jazz

History will either off you or make you valid.… I think the idea now is for blacks to write about the history of our music. It’s time for that because whites have been doing it all the time. It’s time for us to do it ourselves and tell it like it is. The whites have a whitewash look at our music. Naturally, they’re going to try to ooze off as much as they can to the whites, but they can’t, because we’re documented in records and the truth will stand.

—Dizzy Gillespie, quoted in Taylor (1993, 126–27)

There are perhaps no issues more vexed in discussions of jazz than the concepts of race and culture. Whenever one encounters them, whether those offering their opinions are musicians, critics, historians, or musicologists, what is arguably at stake is legitimation: who can rightfully lay claim to jazz and on what grounds? Is it African American music, America’s classical music, or just music (Walser 1995)? When stories about jazz, however conceived, are told, which narratives receive priority: those transmitted in historical writing, those produced by critics, or those based in memory and orally transmitted among musicians and aficionados of the music? In differing ways, anyone concerned with answering these questions has to turn the past into something usable. It becomes a charter variously interpreted to authorize (or invalidate) cultural practices (Appadurai 1981;Trouillot 1995; Sider and Smith 1997).

Even without consideration of jazz, race and culture are highly contested terms in the United States. Many lay commentators use the two interchangeably. Both, after all, are rough-and-ready ways of explaining and understanding the myriad differences between individuals and social groups. For most people, substituting one for the other perhaps seems unobjectionable. Scholars, however, have often thought it better to distinguish the terms. In recent academic writing, then, race is a sociopolitical construction (Holt 2000), an emergent result of processes of “racial formation” (Omi and Winant 1994) derived from visual markers: based on physical appearance (i.e., phenotype) any person might be ascribed membership in one of a number of groups that can ultimately trace their ancestry to specific geographic locales (Asia, Africa, and Europe, for example). For its part, culture, particularly as used by anthropologists, is a term that focuses on the widely varying practices that distinguish human groups from one another.

So defined, these terms are not without their difficulties. What happens, for example, when we heed the scientists who have convincingly argued that as a matter of biology and/or genetics race does not exist? Do we then also conclude that those who see race as a social construction mean to discount the effects that race—in the non-academic sense—might have on people’s daily lives?¹ Does a focus on constructedness support assertions that, in the twenty-first century, the United States is postracial? One need not go that far, for it is certainly possible to disentangle seeing race as an arbitrary construction from seeing it as lacking any real function or meaning. More than likely, constructionists hope that emphasizing race’s social and political valence, rather than its “naturalness,” may give everyone—scholars, politicians, and laypeople—tools to understand and minimize the negative effects of policies and beliefs derived from simplistic notions centered on phenotypes.

Where culture is concerned, anthropologists, at least since the 1970s, have questioned whether it is a useful way to understand the ways that human beings relate to one another and the world around them. At worst, some uses of the culture concept draw attention away from the cumulative, processual nature of human interaction. Rather than seeing human groups as dynamic and adaptive, such usage encourages us to see them as static, reductively described via an inventory of habits, customs, food-ways, moral codes, and the like. Similarly, by focusing on culture as something shared, some anthropologists’ writings have had the (unintended?) effect of deemphasizing the conflicts between members of cultural groups—for example, those situations where behavioral and moral matters are contested (Abu-Lughod 1991). As a result, those researchers interested in addressing the complexity and variability of different groups’ practices have increasingly had to suggest conceptual alternatives that carry fewer of the homogeneous, utopian connotations that culture has accrued.²

To people outside academia, these debates may appear precious and disconnected from common sense. Race and culture aren’t constructions: they are real things that people see and live every day (Hall 1980). As categories, they draw attention to the similarities that allow us to group people and concepts together. In other words, race and culture, if they are constructions, are relational ones. Whether or not points of similarity are specified by a particular writer or speaker, color-based labels such as black, white, yellow, and red presuppose commonalities among races that in the academic sense are attributable to cultures. That is, by substituting a racial or color designation for a cultural one, an individual implicitly says that those terms signify roughly the same thing and assumes that others equate them as well. In such cases, laypeople and scholars’ statements alike reveal that race per se has less to do with how people look (as the visual markers would suggest) than it does, in the Geertzian sense, with culture: those practices and frameworks for interpretation they share.³

Where race and culture are collapsed into one another, history and memory are frequently kept apart despite their similarities. “Both processes,” Geneviève Fabre and Robert G. O’Meally have written, “involve the retrieval of felt experience from the mix and jumble of the past…. [But at] least until quite recently, many observers would agree that while history at its finest is a discipline,… memory is something else again, something less. Memory, these same observers would say, is by definition a personal activity, subject to the biases, quirks, and rhythms of the individual’s mind” (Fabre and O’Meally 1994, 5). That is, where people’s memories are variable and fallible at best, historians’ focus on facts and responsible interpretation raises their work to a presumably more objective level. The process through which certain events and social actors come to be regarded as historically significant, however, is not in the end drastically different from the reconstruction and sense-making processes of memory. After all, the “balanced and sober modes of analysis” (Fabre and O’Meally 1994, 6) that characterize the writing of history are equally selective and interpretive. In Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s characterization (1995), historians base their conclusions on data gathered from archives of various kinds, specially maintained repositories of papers and artifacts, to be sure, but more generally from whatever records remain from the past: newspapers, magazines, books, photographs, and audio and video recordings, for example. Archivists of whatever kind cannot fully document and preserve every bit of potential historical data. They must continually decide which items to keep and which to discard. Furthermore, they must develop aids for researchers who might use the materials they have kept: Which materials do they group together? Which criteria do they employ in determining what those groupings will be? The evidence of the archive and its documents, then, are necessarily filtered through the biases, quirks, and rhythms of the minds of archivists and historians before they reach readers or auditors.⁴

Debates over the relative importance of race and culture in jazz’s development and performance are intimately tied to those over the relative importance of history and memory as evidence for whatever claims one makes about the music. Those writers who favor particular visions of jazz—as African American music or America’s classical music, for example—frequently appeal to history to support their assertions. In the process, they attempt to raise their understandings to a level higher than the supposedly ideological, selective memories of others. One clear example of how the dyads race/culture and history/memory are relationally connected is the ongoing debate about the nature and constitution of the jazz tradition, a debate that was both fresh and resonant during my fieldwork. Both sets of categories provide the means through which understandings of tradition and claims over legitimacy are configured in written and musical discourse, as Gillespie’s previously quoted comment suggests.⁵

The jazz tradition, one might say, is the invention of Martin Williams, who in 1970 first published a collection of essays that put the definite article in front of the words jazz and tradition.⁶ Williams further solidified his conception of a coherent tradition with the release of the multi-LP Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz in 1973. Whether he intended this outcome or not, his choices for that compilation became for a time the de facto standard repertoire in the teaching of jazz history, the “classic” recordings made by the most important performers. Partially because of the Smithsonian’s imprimatur, numerous municipal and school libraries purchased the original set as well as its later revisions. Moreover, given the collection’s wide availability up to the late 1990s, the authors of a number of jazz textbooks, including Tirro (1977), Porter (1993), and Gridley (1997), chose the majority of their listening examples from the Smithsonian set.⁷

The tradition as Williams understands it emerges from the work of a series of exemplary figures. Great improvisers like Louis Armstrong and Charlie Parker “reassessed the music’s past, gave it a new vocabulary, or at least repronounced its old one,” while great composers like Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk “gave the music a synthesis and larger form” (1983, 5). Williams’s tradition also has clear racial and gendered dimensions. He writes, “Jazz is a music evolved by black men in the United States. It has been in general best played by [them], and its development has been dependent upon their artistic leadership. But at the same time, it is a music which men of other races, and men in other countries, can play and sometimes play excellently” (249; see also Wilmer 1970, 3). Because of his language, one can’t help but wonder whether he is conflating race and culture (were these musicians capable of providing artistic leadership simply because they had dark skin?). In addition, his (tacked-on) acknowledgment that blacks aren’t the only skilled performers might leave some nonblack musicians and listeners wondering about the legitimacy of their involvement with jazz. Williams’s masculinist version of tradition rests on the belief that the deeds of African American men are central to any understanding of jazz. Indeed, the narrative he presents has its support in what he sees as the determining roles of race and culture and in the play of history and memory: he chose outstanding African American male performers and composers from the much wider universe of musicians whose work he knew (remembered) and, through writing and argumentation, fashioned them into a now foundational account.

Williams’s invented tradition is, of course, not the only one: writers like André Hodeir (1956) and Gunther Schuller (1968) had already assembled similar pantheons of greats to support their own visions of a jazz tradition. Interestingly, all three brought to their work ideas and prescriptions originating outside the music they discussed. Williams, a former English student enamored of the New Criticism he read in college, was interested in the degree to which close reading of recordings could illuminate jazz’s artistic qualities (Gennari 1991, 2006). Hodeir and Schuller both brought concert music backgrounds to their encounters with and writings on jazz. Whatever their backgrounds, these three writers molded what they saw as primarily African American musical practices in the image of Western literary and musical traditions.⁸ Along with a number of others (e.g., Baraka 1963; Tirro 1977; Collier 1978; Sales 1984; Porter et al. 1993; Gridley 1997), moreover, they have created what we might call the master narrative of jazz history—one concerned with rapid advances in harmonic and rhythmic vocabulary and successive stylistic permutations spearheaded by a number of “great men,” Ferdinand “Jelly Roll” Morton, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, and Ornette Coleman, among them. Taken together, those musicians and their body of recordings form the central core of jazz: without due consideration of their work, the argument might go, no understanding of the music is possible.

Other writers have convincingly pointed out all there is to critique in the resulting narrative (DeVeaux 1991;Tomlinson 1991; Gabbard 1995; Tucker 2000). In effect, such writing can do little more than present a view of jazz history as selective as the memories it attempts to organize. The point is not that being selective is inherently bad. No single historical work can be truly comprehensive: some stories, some figures, some styles have to be omitted or discussed less extensively. Selective or not, though, the wide acceptance of Williams, Hodeir, and Schuller’s interpretations has allowed them to become a baseline for discussions of the roles of race, culture, history, and memory in jazz. At one and the same time, they provide evidence for both those who endorse their visions and those who might take a different view.

Although it is impossible to say how widely Williams’s work informed subsequent debates, by the late 1970s the nature of the jazz tradition was also being discussed publicly by musicians and critics, who prominently featured the catchphrase “in the tradition.” Indeed, the phrase might have entered wide circulation as the title of a 1979 LP by saxophonist Arthur Blythe.⁹ Blythe was among a number of musicians based in New York City in the 1970s who developed their craft in semicommercial loft spaces in Lower Manhattan. At the time and since, performances in these spaces were celebrated for wide-ranging, exploratory music that frequently fell outside the stylistic parameters that club owners and record executives thought marketable.¹⁰

In that context, Blythe’s work is notable for its eclectic but respectful embrace of the past. In an interview published shortly after the album’s release, he explained why he chose the approach he did: “What prompted me to do that album now was not an attempt to be part of any trend, because several players are going back to the tradition, but just a sense that now the feeling would be right for an album like this…. The music on In the Tradition is basic and fundamental to so-called jazz. If you don’t acknowledge anything of that nature then what are you doing?” (Blumenthal 1980, 64). Indeed, he amplifies his comment later in assessing his own work as well as that of like-minded performers: “People don’t have to be innovative to be creative. For a while everybody was trying to be innovative, but everybody isn’t. I’ve always felt that the innovative thing comes about when one does his homework being creative…. You don’t have to reject everything that has been dealt with already and go look for the new horizons, because you could be out in the dark where you don’t see shit” (Blumenthal 1980, 64).¹¹ On the recording he leads his quartet through compositions by Duke Ellington, John Coltrane, and Fats Waller. His repertoire choices repeat, in a different medium, the canonizing gestures of earlier writers, but with a signal difference. Through the inclusion of two original compositions, one might say that Blythe sees himself as someone capable not only of playing in the tradition, but also of adding to it. One result of his recording, as Francis Davis suggested in a piece originally published in 1983, was the addition of a new phrase to the discourse on jazz: “When Arthur Blythe formed a quartet … and began mixing tunes by Ellington, Waller, Monk, and Coltrane in with his originals, he gave a movement—or more precisely, a moment—its name and unintentionally became its figurehead. Any performance that swings or follows a chord sequence or makes an overt reference to the past is now said to be in the tradition. And any performance which doesn’t do any of those things isn’t” (Davis 1986, 194–95).

Thus, although many commentators have associated a “neoconservative” return to traditional playing with the rise of Wynton Marsalis in the early 1980s (Pareles 1984; Sancton 1990), Blythe’s comments make clear that other musicians were motivated to explore previous styles without the prompting of the young trumpeter. Indeed, many of the issues that would be part of the debate regarding tradition and conservatism in the 1980s and ’90s are prefigured in Blythe’s statement and his work.¹²

Through the 1980s, greater investment by major recording labels, more extensive media coverage, and the institutionalization of jazz in schools and performing arts institutions strengthened the related visions of tradition presented by Williams, Blythe, and, eventually, Marsalis. Many of the musicians who would become prominent figures in the mid-1990s had their interest in acoustic jazz sparked by the evidence of a venerable jazz tradition around them. Critic Tom Piazza describes the era in this way: “At the beginning of the 1980s, it would have been hard to imagine young musicians who were playing demanding acoustic jazz being signed to major labels…. But by 1990 they were appearing constantly, and at an amazing rate” (Piazza 1997, 96). While the interest young musicians and fans were displaying might have been regarded as a sign of the music’s vitality, there were critics who were less sanguine about the newcomers. “Predictably,” Piazza continues,

the phenomenon … stirred up a backlash among reviewers … with odd racial overtones, as many of the music’s young players were, for the first time in quite a while, African-American. The gist of the attacks was that the young musicians, instead of making a Coltrane-like, self-immolatory journey of self-discovery, were focusing too much energy studying previous work in the idiom. Along with this, the attacks ran, they paid entirely too much attention to their appearance—dressing in suits and ties with a sophistication that hadn’t been seen in jazz musicians since the Miles Davis of the mid-1960s[,] and this effort was taken to be symptomatic of the superficiality of the Yuppie ’80s. There was a sneering, hostile quality to many of the attacks; the young musicians were being characterized as “neo-conservative,” “reactionary,” and “Reaganite.” … Some enlightened soul even came up with the snide phrase “young black men in suits” to characterize the movement. (97)¹³

As the decade ended and Lincoln Center chose Wynton Marsalis to be the artistic director of its summer “Classical Jazz” series, the attacks grew more vicious. Critics regarded young black men in suits as something more pernicious than conservative: they were antiwhite.

In a widely cited Down Beat interview (Crouch 1987), Marsalis had stressed the need for budding jazz musicians to study the work of the masters. And, since all of the masters he named were African American (as had been the case with Williams), many commentators saw his vision of tradition as racially exclusive. Even more, Marsalis’s seeming refusal to feature tributes to white musicians in Lincoln Center’s programs and the absence of white musicians in various young black bandleaders’ bands were prima facie evidence that Marsalis and his acolytes were militantly rejecting white musicians.¹⁴ Likewise, the record labels that seemed to be favoring young black musicians such as trumpeter Roy Hargrove and guitarist Mark Whitfield for presumably lucrative recording contracts were also—and quite paradoxically—regarded as antiwhite. It mattered little that the same label that promoted Hargrove also put significant promotional energy behind a white saxophonist named Christopher Hollyday or that Harry Connick Jr., Joey DeFrancesco, Benny Green, and Ryan Kisor were also signed to major labels at that time (for a more complete list, see DiMartino 1991). Furthermore, comments by African American musicians to the effect that jazz was a form of African American music would lead writers like James Lincoln Collier, Gene Lees, and Terry Teachout by the mid-1990s to level charges of “reverse racism” at them. In other words, those young players were not only denying the contributions of white musicians to jazz, they were also denying white musicians the opportunity to support themselves playing a music they too loved and, as Americans, should receive equal credit for having created.¹⁵

The crux of the argument, then, was that jazz was historically an American music rather than an African American one. In differing ways, these writers each conceded that jazz had (partial) roots in African American musics or resulted from a mixture of European and African elements (Collier 1993, 183–224; Lees 1994, 187–246; Teachout 1995).¹⁶ That is, where African Americanness might once have been an important factor in the development of jazz, its impact registered only in the past: in post–Civil Rights–era America, it no longer mattered. In fact, labeling jazz as African American ran counter to the music’s democratic, integrationist spirit and was a politically correct attempt to elevate black musicians while erasing the contributions of white ones. The introduction of Richard M. Sudhalter’s Lost Chords: White Musicians and Their Contribution to Jazz (1999b) places it squarely in this ideological camp. He writes, for example,

The rage for “multiculturalism” in the arts—as in society at large—has led to the reassessment of, and often elevation of, artistic traditions of non-European and non-white cultures. With it has come recognition of many black artists and writers whose achievements long stood hidden from public sight…. Applied to jazz history, such thinking has spawned a view of early white efforts as musically insignificant and—particularly in the 1920s and ’30s—vastly overpublicized. Jazz, says the now-accepted canon, is black: there have been no white innovators, few white soloists of real distinction; the best white musicians (with an exception or two) were only dilute copies of black originals, and in any case exerted a lasting influence only on other white musicians. (xvi)

Such a state of affairs leads him to lament the resulting distortion, for in truth “in at least one important field, black and white once worked side by side, often defying the racial and social norms of their time to create a music whose graces reflected the combined effort.” Jazz represents, then, true, nonpoliticized multiculturalism, “living proof that the races and ethnic groups can cooperate to the common good” (xvii).

Drawing inspiration from the work of Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Sudhalter asserts that his work is grounded in historical facts and therefore both ideologically neutral and capable of correcting the sins of those who have forgotten the role that whites have played in the music’s development. In his estimation writers who have unduly stressed the African Americanness of jazz and players who hire musicians presumably based only on their color are betraying the music’s mandate to be a model of interracial cooperation. (Exactly who gave the music this mandate is never clearly specified; unlike other elements singled out for historical investigation, this assertion has gone largely unexamined.)¹⁷ Sudhalter and the others contrast their views with those put forward by Albert Murray, Stanley Crouch, and Wynton Marsalis, prominent figures on the board of Jazz at Lincoln Center.¹⁸ These latter three they accuse of overlooking the importance of figures like Bix Beiderbecke, Benny Goodman, Gil Evans, and Bill Evans through programming that focuses almost exclusively on the work of African American performers and composers. Furthermore, they assert that the aesthetic judgments of Murray and the others, which foreground blues playing and swing, implicitly exclude white musicians from meaningful and publicly sanctioned participation in jazz.

Although many of these arguments have been stated in almost identical terms for decades (see, for example, Hentoff 1961a), they had a particular resonance near the close of the twentieth century. The use of words and phrases such as meritocracy, reverse racism, and politically correct connected the project of Collier, Sudhalter, Teachout, and Lees to the affirmative action debates of the 1990s and perhaps constitutes an attempt to resist any reframing of historical narrative.¹⁹ Even worse, in a move reminiscent of the era’s conservative politicians and radio talk show hosts, Collier, Lees, Teachout, and Sudhalter placed selected black musicians and scholars in roles similar to those voluntarily assumed by black conservatives such as Clarence Thomas, Shelby Steele, and Ward Connerly, making Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Gerald Early, for example, unwitting yes-men for arguments they might never have independently endorsed. Toward the end of “The Color of Jazz,” for example, Teachout quotes Duke Ellington as having told an interviewer in 1945, “Twenty years ago when jazz was finding an audiences [sic], it may have had more of a Negro character. The Negro element is still important. But jazz has become a part of America. There are as many white musicians playing it as Negro…. We are all working along more or less the same lines. We learn from each other. Jazz is American now. American is the big word” (Teachout 1995, 53; see also Tucker 1993, 254).

Teachout then comments, “Five decades later, this spirit is being undermined by cultural politicians for whom the word ‘American’ has validity only when it lies on the far side of a hyphen. That jazz, the ultimat cultural melting pot and arguably America’s most important contribution to the fine arts, would have fallen victim to such divisive thinking is an especially telling index of the unhappy state of our culture at the end of the 20th century” (Teachout 1995, 53). One wonders, however, what Ellington, who often insisted on calling his work “Negro music” rather than jazz (Ellington 1939), might have thought of his words being so characterized, particularly without the context of his comments being considered. He was, after all, speaking near the end of the Second World War; was talking to an unidentified, but presumably white, interviewer; and knew that his words would appear in PM, a “liberal newsmagazine” whose “readership [was] more accustomed to [reading about] opera, symphonies, and art museums” than jazz (Kelley 2009, 132). When one remembers how important dissembling has been for African American survival in the United States (Hine 1989; Roberts 1989) and how few negative opinions Ellington ever expressed publicly, his intentions become germane. His repeated references to jazz’s modern, American qualities (he likens the music to the automobile and the airplane) make it seem that he might have been self-consciously striving to present a patriotic view, whether or not it expressed all that he thought (see Cohen 2010, 227–28, 232, 239, 242). Teachout’s interpretation, however, doesn’t leave room for that possibility.

In the collective work of Collier, Lees, Teachout, and Sudhalter, then, to mention race is to be divisive and to delay the arrival of a truly colorblind society. Like the conservative cultural critics with whom I’ve aligned them, they have effectively turned the rhetoric of the 1950s and 1960s American civil rights movement against it. A clear example of this rhetorical strategy is Teachout’s plea for a world in which “artists are judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their choruses” (Teachout 1995, 53).²⁰ In short, even though Collier, Lees, Teachout, and Sudhalter defend their project as neutral historical recuperation, their ideology is just as apparent as the one they seek to expose.

In fact, the writers and musicians they single out for criticism share some of their assumptions regarding the primacy of skill and the relative importance of race. Murray (1976), Crouch, and Marsalis, to be sure, feel that the essence of jazz lies in the “fire” of its fundamentals: blues feeling, timbral nuance, and rhythmic swing. These immutable fundamentals (see DeVeaux 1997, 17; Rudinow 1994)²¹ are most profoundly audible in the work of a group of musical masters like Morton, Armstrong, Ellington, Monk, and Coltrane. One might infer, as Teachout does, that the fundamentals were chosen to exclude white musicians. I see no other way to understand his inference beyond seeing in it a conflation of race and culture. He assumes, based on their programming choices and their list of masters, that Marsalis, Crouch, and Murray believe that blues and swing are the exclusive province of black men and that they attribute the excellence of African American jazz musicians to their skin color (cf. Lock 1988, 115–16). Teachout used as evidence esteemed New Yorker critic Whitney Balliett’s assertion (1977) that Murray’s view of jazz history in Stomping the Blues (1976) was racist, for Murray allegedly discussed only one white musician (Gene Krupa) in main text of the book.

It is difficult to substantiate these charges when one carefully examines the writing in question. Indeed, it seems as though Teachout and Balliett have grossly misread Murray, seeing in his work only that which seems to support their opposition to him. Murray, in fact, is primarily concerned with asserting that jazz performance is about skill and nuance rather than racial essences or inborn gifts, particularly when, using blues as a synonym for jazz, he writes:

No matter how deeply moved a musician may be, whether by personal, social, or even aesthetic circumstances, he must always play notes that fulfill the requirements of the context, a feat which presupposes far more skill and taste than raw emotion…. [Such skill and taste] represent … not natural impulse but the refinement of habit, custom, and tradition become second nature…. Indeed on close inspection what was assumed to have been unpremeditated art is likely to be largely a matter of conditioned reflex, which is nothing other than the end product of discipline, or in a word, training. (Murray 1976, 98)

More than anything, Murray is trying to disentangle those cultural and practical concerns that he feels are actually operative in performance from racist assumptions. His focus is on an approach to music making. When he later writes of those “conditioned by the blues idiom in the first place” as having certain advantages over those who were not, writers like Teachout read that argument as racial, focusing attention on dark persons rather than on what Murray foregrounds: skill, conditioning, and discipline. Murray is ultimately concerned with musical competence, as Benjamin Brinner (1995, 1) would later describe it: “an integrated complex of skills and knowledge upon which a musician relies within a particular cultural context” (see also Stanyek 2004).

Though his position is harder to defend, Stanley Crouch likewise maintains what I consider a focus on practice and action rather than race or phenotypical notions of it. Indeed, he has no shortage of negative criticisms of hip-hop or rhythm and blues or of African American musicians who fail to work within the tradition as he understands it (see Crouch 1990a). Writing about Miles Davis’s The Birth of the Cool recordings, for example, he excoriates Davis, implicitly condemns arranger Gil Evans, and questions the discernment of other jazz critics in one magisterial sweep:

Davis’s nonet of 1948–50 played little in public and recorded only enough to fill an album, but it largely inspired what became known as “cool” or “West Coast” jazz, a light-sounding music, low-keyed and smooth, that disavowed the Afro-American approach to sound and rhythm. This style had little to do with blues and almost nothing to do with swing…. Heard now, the nonet recordings seem little more than primers for television writing…. The overstated attribution of value to these recordings led the critical establishment to miss Ellington’s “The Tattooed Bride,” which was the high point of jazz composition in the late 1940s. Then, as now, jazz critics seemed unable to determine the difference between a popular but insignificant trend and a fresh contribution to the art. (Crouch 1990b, 31)

The suggestion that Crouch is thinking only in racial terms is difficult to support when one asks what he means by an “Afro-American approach to sound and rhythm” that one might disavow. Might it not be possible for Crouch to recognize whites who adhere to that approach? For all the insults contained in the passage, Crouch still seems to be asserting something about a way of doing things, about a particular form of musical competence. Implicit in his work as well as that of Murray and Marsalis is the notion that musicians of whatever background must learn to be jazz performers.

Part of the difficulty Murray and Crouch’s critics have is that they reductively interpret “Afro-American” as denoting color rather than culture. The highly publicized moves of black leaders in the 1980s to have “Afro-American” and then “African American” replace “black” were intended in part to separate phenotype and practice, that is, to relocate the commonalities of those once described racially as black to a historically and geographically based narrative of shared practices and worldviews. While the aesthetic formulations of Murray, Crouch, and Marsalis have, to their credit, deemphasized an outmoded racial discourse, they are, nonetheless, like those of their critics, rooted in claims of historical objectivity, give short shrift to memory, and don’t go far enough into the realm of practice. In other words, these figures offer a particular historical interpretation to support their vision. But in saying that blues, swing, and sonic invention are and have always been important, they perhaps fore-close on a more textured investigation of the practices that might support their project.

One possible way for them to refigure the terms of the debate would lie in their focusing more detailed attention on the ways in which individuals have come to jazz performance as well as their understandings of its meanings. For many jazz musicians, there is a wide world of music making and many ways to move through it. Although they may at times enter strategically into the debates in which scholars and critics engage, their work is more concerned with the ins and outs of performance, composition, interaction, and financial survival. An examination of the paths they have taken to become jazz musicians and the activities and practices that sustain them in this endeavor may, in fact, offer a useful way to resolve questions about jazz’s pedigree.

In the jazz master narrative mentioned previously, the linkages between jazz and other African American (and African diaspora) musics are primarily restricted to the past. They surface only in cursory mentions of jazz’s birth, along with spirituals and the blues, from a seemingly passive “mixture” of European and African elements in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (see, e.g., Brothers 1994). At some point after this hazy period of origins—generally with the emergence of bebop in the 1940s—the historical narrative continues with jazz becoming an autonomous stream whose connections to more popular manifestations of African American music become problematic (Levine 1977). Those connections are bracketed, or set aside, in favor of understanding jazz as a species of modernist art that transcends its humble, racially bound origins.²²

The musicians I interviewed during my fieldwork questioned the rightness of separating jazz as musical form and structure from African American culture, both in their talk about music and through their performances. Saxophonist Donald Harrison, for example, expressed disappointment when I told him of a debate on whether jazz was “African American music” that took place in a New York University classroom where I lectured in October of 1994. He invoked the words of drummer Art Blakey, who said he didn’t care what the music was called as long as everyone “gave credit to the music’s creators and innovators,” whom he felt were primarily African American. Numerous other statements by performers and listeners in my field notes express a similar view, one that is summarized by the late pianist James Williams’s assertion that there’s no separation between jazz and other forms of African American music: “It all comes from the same place. I have no problem playing religious songs in the clubs or playing [John] Coltrane in the church, as long as I play with the proper spirit and attitude. [Jazz and gospel] run in parallel. They not only criss-cross, they often come together” (field notes, 11 October 1994). All African American musics, he argues, are linked together and are different facets of the same entity.

One way to explore Harrison and Williams’s assertions is to focus on the pathways and practices of jazz musicians, showing that whatever motivation jazz performers or listeners may have to categorize what they perform and consume as “art,” the sounds and their choices of sound configurations emerge most strongly from African American performative strategies. Songs, structures, and ways of manipulating them in performance become mechanisms for the regulation of group identity and collective memory (Bourdieu 1977, 78; Giddens 1979, 2; Gilroy 1991b, 211). There is, of course, value in approaches that see jazz as a complex system examinable in its own right. But when those approaches radically decontextualize the music, we might be moving toward realizing the state of affairs about which Dizzy Gillespie warned drummer Arthur Taylor in this chapter’s epigraph.

In evoking musicians’ pathways, I am drawing on Ruth Finnegan’s The Hidden Musicians (1989), a book that examines a specific locality, the English town Milton Keynes, and attempts to make sense of the variety of music-making activity in it: choral music, brass band music, jazz, rock, and country, among others. For Finnegan, the pathways that individuals follow in musical performance and their negotiation of urban life are the “known and regular routes which people [choose]—or [are] led into—and which they both [keep] open and [extend] through their actions” (305). Pathways, moreover, are meaningful beyond their offering familiar routes that one can follow or sets of musical practices that one can learn or adapt: “They also [have] symbolic depth. One common impression given by many participants was that their musical pathways were of high value among the various paths in their lives” (305). The importance of these pathways lies in their providing a “framework for people’s participation in urban life, something overlapping with, but more permanent and structured than, the personal networks in which individuals also participate” (323).

Moreover, she argues, “Entry on to particular musical pathways [was] dependent … on family membership [and] partly related to that family’s social and economic resources. Certain activities needed money, transport, or access to specific kinds of venues or networks, or were perhaps related to particular kinds of educational achievements, material possessions, cultural interests, or social aspirations. All these were thus likely to play some part in the selection of particular pathways—though differently in different contexts and for different individuals” (311–12). These varied constellations do not map easily onto notions of class, however. Her data showed that the encouragement and support of parents, siblings, and friends were often more significant for young musicians than their guardians’ incomes, occupations, or education. Gender and age in particular proved more crucial than parental resources or attainment in shaping or constraining the musical pathways chosen by young people (315–16), making it difficult for boys to become involved in classical music or girls in rock bands, for example. In any event, she asserts that “the continuance of … pathways—so often ignored or taken for granted as ‘just there’—depends not on the existence in some abstract sphere of particular musical ‘works’, but on people’s collective and active practice on the ground” (325; see also Goehr 1992, 102–15).

Although Finnegan’s pathways are largely ready-made templates that frame and enable collective and individual practice, her notion may be extended to include the literal pathways taken by individuals to musical performance. How, indeed, have jazz’s most highly praised practitioners typically learned their craft? What elements have been integral to the process of performing jazz, and what is the role of education, formal or informal, in making young musicians aware of and conversant with those elements? To what degree do class, age, and gender constrain one’s ability to enter a jazz pathway? And how does a musician’s deployment of what he or she has learned affect performance or our understandings of what jazz is? Too often commentators equate education with formal institutions and ignore the other salient ways in which people acquire knowledge. For jazz musicians, as Paul Berliner’s Thinking in Jazz (1994) shows, there are at least as many paths to knowledge as there are individuals willing to embark on them. In the course of a musician’s lifetime, he or she may glean important insights from friends and relatives, private teachers, fellow musicians, books and other pedagogical materials,²³ audio and video recordings, and close observation of live performance, as well as from classroom instruction in history, music theory, and performance practice.

None of these activities has to be focused specifically on the different musical approaches generally subsumed by the label “jazz.” Indeed, at the most basic level, singers and instrumentalists need to find ways to use their respective tools. In some cases they can proceed admirably by learning to deal with the practical issue of generating sound without much reference to the aesthetic parameters of jazz or African American musics. Nor do musicians’ educational activities always have to concern music. Much work in ethnomusicology and anthropology since the 1960s has focused on the interconnectedness of different domains of experience. Writings dealing with musics as diverse as those from Papua New Guinea, the Amazonian rainforest, Liberia, and Nigeria as well as those most easily labeled jazz, country, and European concert music all stress the importance of knowledge of history, ecology, and social and cultural codes for music making (Feld 1994a; Seeger 1987; Stone 1982; Waterman 1990; Monson 1996; Kingsbury 1988; Fox 2004). Thus, learning about music requires engagement with a wide range of materials that may not be part of formalized instruction or simplistic understandings of race and history.

Mark Tucker’s description of Duke Ellington’s musical education (1991) encompasses what Ellington learned from musicians like Willie “The Lion” Smith, Will Marion Cook, and Bubber Miley, as well as what he gained from studying piano rolls such as James P. Johnson’s “Carolina Shout.” John Coltrane’s education includes what he took from studying at the Ornstein School of Music in Philadelphia and playing with Eddie “Cleanhead” Vinson, Miles Davis, and Thelonious Monk alongside what he gathered from immersion in African American religious rituals, listening to recordings of Indian and African music (Weinstein 1993, 60–72; Porter 1998, 25–34, 41–53, 63–72), and reputedly practicing with Nicolas Slonimsky’s Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns (1947). And, in a more contemporary example, Joshua Redman’s musical education combines early experiences playing gamelan, rhythm and blues, and ska with those gained from playing in the jazz band at Berkeley High School in California and touring with his father, saxophonist Dewey Redman, in the late 1980s. A thorough and usable jazz education, therefore, is more often than not idiosyncratic and encompasses more than what might be typically taught in a classroom (see Reed 1979).

Classroom settings, however, were not foreign or inimical to jazz even before the beginning of formalized college-level jazz education in the late 1940s.²⁴ Hsio Wen Shih’s description of the backgrounds of influential 1920s jazz musicians (1959) highlights the degree to which seeing these musicians as untutored omits crucial information. The typical 1920s innovator, he writes,

was born about 1900, into a Negro family doing better than most, possibly in the Deep South, but more likely on its fringe; in either case, his family usually migrated North in time for him to finish high school. If he had gone to college, and he often had, he had gone to Wilberforce or a … school like Howard or Fisk. He might have aimed at a profession and fallen back on jazz as a second choice. He was, in any case, by birth or by choice, a member of the rising Negro middle class; he was Fletcher Henderson, or Don Redman, or Coleman Hawkins, or Duke Ellington. (174)

Moving forward in time, we discover that the “young lions”²⁵ who emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s are not the only ones to have had significant formal schooling in music. Among the prominent examples, saxophonist Joe Lovano studied at the Berklee College of Music in Boston; pianist Cecil Taylor at the New England Conservatory; saxophonists Joe Henderson and Julian “Cannonball” Adderley at Detroit’s Wayne State University and Florida A&M University, respectively; and keyboardist Lyle Mays at the University of North Texas.

These examples show that the ways in which one learns to be a jazz musician are extremely varied. No one is actually born a jazz musician, even those who are phenotypically black. Instead, she or he must acquire the necessary skills through a lifetime of engagement with music making in general and by gathering as much information as possible from diverse sources. Young women have traditionally had a more difficult time acquiring such skills, given the extreme homosocial and masculinist practices that characterize the discourse and social world of jazz musicians (Tucker 2004). Formalized jazz education, complemented by antidiscrimination laws, has ameliorated the situation somewhat by functioning as a surrogate for the neighborhood bars and the numerous performance venues that dotted American cities prior to the 1970s. Before that time, musicians acquired their skills primarily, but not exclusively, in a performance world that limited opportunities for women. From the large corpus of musical and performative skills that musicians develop in either setting, a few merit more extensive consideration: developing proficiency and individual style; developing the ability to perform with other musicians and improvise in real time; and learning to navigate the professional world of music making.

Musical proficiency can most simply be glossed as the ability to produce the sounds that are in one’s head with whatever musical tools are at one’s disposal. Such proficiency is a function of knowing the capabilities and limitations of one’s instrument so well that the conduit from concept to execution seems almost direct. The fluidity and ease with which exceptional performers such as Charlie Parker have plied their craft typically leads the outsider to think that musicians are playing without reference to conscious knowledge. More accurately, though, they are exhibiting in such moments a mastery of their instruments and the structural, interactive, and textural parameters of performance that makes what they do seem natural. The ability to speak furnishes a useful comparison. In one’s adult years, the specific steps taken in acquiring that ability may have receded from consciousness, but one’s skill at deploying it, even while carrying out other activities simultaneously, is the result of having deeply internalized it.

For developing proficiency, education has a great role to play, particularly when we remember that education can happen effectively both within and outside institutional walls. Although guitarists Wes Montgomery, Allan Holdsworth, and Russell Malone learned to play with little or no formal instruction, they are indeed exceptions. Almost always, someone somewhere has been crucial to the young musician’s ability to navigate his or her instrument, tease appropriate and inappropriate sounds from it, and use them in a group performance context. At nearly every point in jazz’s development, young musicians have been eager to mine whatever they could from the accumulated wisdom of experienced musicians, teachers, and bandleaders. Since the 1970s, formalized study at institutions such as the New England Conservatory, William Paterson University, the University of North Texas, and Berklee has afforded young players apprenticeship opportunities with faculty such as David Berger, Loren Schoenberg, Joe Chambers, Jim Hall, James Williams, Rodney Whitaker, and Reggie Workman. Few aspiring players would pass up the chance to have the harmonic and rhythmic intricacies of their most prized recordings revealed to them in courses that deal with the development of particular jazz styles. Where sound is concerned, those institutions perhaps cannot and should not be expected to foster the development of individual style. Learning to improvise and learning to play with other musicians in real time are also skills that musicians can develop in a number of settings, from practicing with recordings that provide accompaniment or using functionally similar MIDI-based software like Band-in-a-Box to participating in jam sessions with like-minded musicians or performing in school or professional ensembles. In any event, musicians are constantly faced with having to listen and to think critically about what they’re hearing and how they’re contributing to it. What formalized institutions provide are spaces where musicians can practice, rehearse, perform, and assimilate a wide body of knowledge in an arena where the stakes are considerably lower than they are in professional performances.

According to the musicians I interviewed, the area in which institutions are perhaps the most deficient is the teaching of improvisation. In the decades after the appearance of George Russell’s The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization for Improvisation (1959),²⁶ a number of improvisation primers were published that stressed what jazz educators commonly refer to as the chord-scale approach to improvisation (e.g., Reeves 1989). In an simplest terms, improvisers using this approach associate a particular scale with each harmony in a composition, so that upon encountering a G major seventh chord, they think, for example, “play a G Lydian scale or an F# minor pentatonic.” Such an approach, on one hand, makes it much easier for novice educators to teach jazz improvisation and, on the other, potentially encourages musicians to play scale patterns over harmonies rather than address the varied ways that expert players improvised in similar situations.²⁷ Indeed, one inside joke among jazz musicians is that schooled musicians are easy to identify, for in improvising they instinctively employ the melodic minor scale a half step up from the root of a dominant chord whenever one appears on a lead sheet. Saxophonist Sam Newsome said that Terence Blanchard would always yell, “Get out of there!” when he heard his bandmates falling back on such clichés in performance (Newsome 1995).

Many musicians told me that educators work more effectively when they inculcate in students the idea that learning the conventions and rules of jazz performance constitutes a base for further exploration rather than a rigid formula to be applied. Jazz improvisation requires not only having the theoretical materials at hand: it also requires knowing how to use them. As vibraphonist Gary Burton has observed, jazz education such as that offered at Berklee “allows [the young musician] to go further faster” (Helland 1995, 24). Burton explains, “A typical classical musician studies how music works, how harmony works, what the grammar of this music is in order to play better. You study your instrument with a master player. You study these same things as a jazz musician, but instead of using as an example a piece by Beethoven, you use a piece by Monk or Ellington. You’re still learning musical information, which helps you to be a more knowledgeable, proficient player” (quoted in Helland 1995, 23). Through courses in harmony, improvisation, composition, and arranging and participation in ensembles, students are presented with the opportunity to assimilate the advances of the past in a systematic manner.

When it comes to negotiating the professional world, there are a number of ways in which formal and informal settings are again complementary. Professional musicians need, in addition to performance knowledge, an understanding of copyrights, music publishing, recording processes, booking, promotion and marketing, and survival on the road. In the past, the only way for musicians to learn such things was by gleaning them from conversation, trial and error, and experience. Jazz education in no way obviates the need for musicians to actually have such experiences, reflect upon them, and develop their own strategies for coping with them. What it does do, however, is to give them more reasonable expectations and the opportunity to benefit systematically from others who have already made and worked through mistakes. Perhaps the most significant, and perhaps unintended, consequence of jazz education is its contribution to the formation of musical networks that I discuss in chapter 4.

Despite differences in age, geographical background, cultural identity, and musical training, each of the musicians I interviewed stressed the importance of various African American musics and cultural practices in their education and experience as jazz artists. Pianist James Williams, for example, was born in Memphis, Tennessee. His early musical education included lessons focused on Western piano repertoire. His training included his work as a pianist and organist in church. In my interviews and subsequent conversations with him, he stressed the profound influence 1960s free-format radio stations in Memphis had on him. In addition to programming a variety of rhythm and blues, doo-wop, blues, and Motown-produced music, those stations played rock and roll that drew largely upon African American musical practices. Williams studied music at Memphis State University, dividing his time between jazz performance, classical performance, and music education. Upon graduation in the early 1970s, he took a teaching position at the Berklee College of Music. He left there toward the end of the decade to join Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers in the version of the group that included an eighteen-year-old Wynton Marsalis. Williams left Blakey’s group in the early 1980s and, over the next several years, established himself as a reputable composer, side-man, and producer of recordings for other jazz musicians. Through his production company, Finas Sound Productions, he hosted concerts in the mid- and late 1990s that paid tribute to (then) living jazz legends like Milt Jackson and John Lewis. From the late 1990s until his death in 2004, he was director of the jazz studies program at William Paterson University.

Pianist Bruce Barth was born in Pasadena, California, in the late 1950s. His family moved to New York state when he was seven. Like that of Williams, his early musical training included classical piano lessons, which he continued through the end of high school. He also spent time playing guitar and learning rock and jazz songs by ear in his preteen and teen years. His serious engagement with jazz started with a Mose Allison record, Back Country Suite, that he received as a gift when he was fourteen.²⁸ Through Allison’s music, and later through engagement with the work of pianists like Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk, Oscar Peterson, Wynton Kelly, and Red Garland, Barth learned to play jazz.²⁹ He earned a bachelor’s degree in music from the University of Michigan and a master’s degree in music from the New England Conservatory. Since the late 1980s, he has performed with Stanley Turrentine, Terence Blanchard, and Danilo Pérez among others; made recordings under his own name; and produced recordings for other jazz musicians, particularly singers.

Saxophonist Steve Wilson was born in Hampton, Virginia, in the early 1960s. His father sang in a group that traveled and performed spirituals in the area around Hampton and exposed his son to a wider world of African American music. The younger Wilson developed an interest in jazz through listening to his father’s copy of Ahmad Jamal’s But Not for Me: Live at the Pershing and through seeing saxophonists Eddie Harris and Rahsaan Roland Kirk at the Hampton Jazz Festival in the early 1970s. He took lessons on the alto saxophone and the oboe through high school and developed as a performer through playing in his school’s concert band, in funk and rhythm and blues bands in Hampton, and in the horn section of singer Stephanie Mills’s band. He attended Virginia Commonwealth University, where he studied with Doug Richards, who introduced him to the music of Duke Ellington, Jelly Roll Morton, and Fletcher Henderson. After graduating in the mid-1980s and moving to New York City, he played with the collective Out of the Blue and, in addition to leading his own ensembles, has been in demand as a saxophonist since then, performing with Lionel Hampton, Buster Williams, Chick Corea, Claudia Acuña, Bruce Barth, Maria Schneider, Mulgrew Miller, and Leon Parker.

Parker, who is a drummer, was born in White Plains, New York, in the mid-1960s. His parents had a record collection that not only spanned jazz history—from Lionel Hampton and Count Basie to Art Blakey, Miles Davis, and John Coltrane—but also included important Latin jazz recordings by artists such as Tito Puente and Mongo Santamaria. His musical training was less formal than Williams’s or Barth’s but no less extensive. He involved himself in the musical life of Westchester in the 1970s, playing in his high school’s jazz ensemble as well as in gospel groups and blues and rock bands. During this time he started performing in jazz clubs in Westchester and turned down a scholarship to Fordham University to start playing full-time in New York City. He began studying classical percussion around that time. In the late 1980s he became associated with some of the young musicians who were part of the New School for Social Research’s jazz program and started to develop his reputation on the jazz scene. Since then, he has recorded and performed with Kenny Barron, Jesse Davis, David Sánchez, Jacky Terrasson, Bruce Barth, and Steve Wilson. He has also released four CDs under his own name and collaborated with choreographers on various “body percussion” works.

Lastly, guitarist Peter Bernstein was born in New York City in the late 1960s. Because of the demands of his father’s work as a journalist, his family moved frequently—to Chicago shortly after he was born, back to New York for a few years, then to Israel for four years before finally returning to New York. Public interest in Scott Joplin’s work in the early 1970s—inspired by the film The Sting—inspired a six-year-old Bernstein to learn to play piano. While his family was in Israel, he started exploring his parents’ record collection, which included recordings by Simon and Garfunkel and James Taylor as well as the Dizzy Gillespie Big Band and Charles Mingus. Bernstein started taking guitar lessons there, mostly learning to play Bob Dylan tunes and songs like “Proud Mary.”³⁰ His world changed, however, when he heard Jimi Hendrix and began to explore the blues-based conceptions of guitarists such as B.B. King, Freddie King, Albert King, and Eric Clapton. Hearing them eventually led him to Pat Metheny, George Benson, Kenny Burrell, Wes Montgomery, and Grant Green and cemented his interest in jazz. He attended Rutgers University, where he studied with Ted Dunbar and Kevin Eubanks. Like Leon Parker, he became associated with the jazz program at the New School in the late 1980s and started performing publicly in the city. Since then, he has recorded and performed with Jesse Davis, Lou Donaldson, Larry Goldings, Joshua Redman, and Diana Krall, among others.

It might be obvious what broad racial/cultural identities one might ascribe to these musicians. Without my making those ascriptions (or the musicians’ own self-identifications) explicit, there are tangible regularities in the paths they have taken to jazz performance. All are men who have benefited from the support of their parents, siblings, and teachers. Two of them have had extensive training in European instrumental techniques and repertoire, while two more have had less serious engagement and the remaining musician almost none. Regardless of their knowledge of concert music and its performance practices, however, their approaches to learning and developing have primarily entailed engagement with the work of African American musicians and various kinds of African American musics: jazz, in particular, but also gospel, rhythm and blues, blues, and funk. As musics that draw from a common fund of musical practices, these styles have been pivotal in each musician’s development. Indeed, they have all learned to play jazz through close listening and through performance. Many of them have concentrated on keeping central in their performances and choice of repertoire the African Americanness of the music.

Although these issues will be explored in more depth in chapter 5, their importance here lies in musicians’ foregrounding of an African American approach to music making, one that has been most aptly described in scholarly writing by composer Olly Wilson. In 1974, he proposed that “a black-music cultural sphere exists which includes the music of the African and African-descendant peoples of the following geographic areas: the Atlantic Ocean in the center, bounded by West Africa on the east with the northern part of South America and the Carribean [sic] Islands on the south-west and the United States on the north-west” (6). Within that sphere, various musics are connected to each other via common conceptual approaches to music making: use of (overlapping) call-and-response techniques, off-beat phrasing of melodic accents, percussive approaches to performance, timbral heterogeneity, use of polymetric frameworks, and the integration of environmental factors into performance.³¹ Wilson summarizes his argument as follows:

The relationship between African and Afro-American music consists not only of shared characteristics, but importantly, of shared conceptual approaches to music making, and hence is not basically quantitative but qualitative. Therefore the particular forms of black music which evolved in America are specific realizations of this shared conceptual framework which reflects the peculiarities of the American black experience. As such the essence of their Africanness is not a static body of something which can be depleted but rather a conceptual approach, the manifestations of which are infinite. The common core of this Africanness consists of the way of doing something, not simply something that is done. (20)

These approaches are manifest in jazz performance in the ways in which jazz performers choose and adapt material, sometimes originating in other forms of African American music. Moreover, they are evident in the way that musicians adapt and play with those materials, regardless of source.

In experiential terms, then, jazz is a form inseparable from other African American musics. The pathways that musicians traverse in coming to it and continuing to develop necessitate engagement with more than the technical aspects of jazz performance. Arguments that, through selective historical interpretation, reduce jazz to technical parameters and render it as a neutral and expansive American tradition are perhaps arguments that paint over African Americanness to assuage European American anxiety. Although asserting that jazz is an African American music is equally ideological, it is not simply an argument about race or even one that makes a simplistic appeal to historical precedent. It is instead a statement about the relationship of culture and experience, an understanding that emerges from examining the way that musicians of varying backgrounds have learned to perform the music. Each of them has had to marry whatever musical skills they had—however they acquired them—with the conventions and aesthetic priorities of jazz performance, which remain consistent with the aesthetic imperatives of other African American and African-derived musical forms. On their pathways, in other words, these musicians have explored the changing cultural and musical practices of African Americans beyond the years of jazz’s emergence. Complaints about the relative valence of race and culture or history and memory surely have a part to play, but the work of musicians is less about the ideas associated with those dyads—integration, racial exclusion, expansive Americanness, or fiery fundamentals—than it is about strategies for negotiating structure and performance that emerge from and are consistently enriched by other African American musics. To the degree that there is a unified jazz tradition, it is predicated on cultural practice and memory-based reconstruction, both of which are decidedly oriented more toward the future than the past.