Institute for Studies In American Music Conservatory of Music, Brooklyn College of the City University of New York NEWSLETTER
Volume XXXIII	No. 1 Fall 2003
Inside This Issue: Music of Williamsburg by Carol J. Oja The Germania Musical Society by Nancy Newman Music of Carl Ruggles by Stephen Slottow Scorsese's Narratives of Blues Discovery: Review by Ray Allen Eric Porter's What is This Thing Called Jazz?: Review by Salim Washington Roger Sessions and Arthur Berger: Review by Anton Vishio Sondheim's Bounce: Review by Gayle Sherwood and Jeffrey Magee	Thinking Jazz By Salim Washington Eric Porter’s What is This Thing Called Jazz?: African American Musicians as Artists, Critics, and Activists (University of California Press, 2002; $22.50) is a critical contribution to jazz studies. The work builds upon the insights of a new vanguard of jazz scholarship including Paul Berliner’s Thinking in Jazz, Farah Jasmine Griffin’s If You Can’t Be Free, Be a Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday, and Ingrid Monson’s Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction, all of which focus on how jazz musicians think about their music. Recognizing certain black jazz musicians as a class of Gramscian intellectuals who may lack the formal status enjoyed by academics, but who exercise a learned authority by means of their organic relationship to the communities for which they speak, Porter investigates their public utterances concerning the meaning of their art and craft. As a rule, the thoughts of jazz musicians about their music have carried less cachet than their thoughts as expressed through their music. The most obvious exception, of course, is Wynton Marsalis, who, through his position at Lincoln Center, his PBS specials, his indefatigable efforts as an educator and supporter of young musicians, and his passionately delivered speeches and writings, has acquired the status of the official face and voice of jazz in America. By contrast, the intellectual pronouncements of previous jazz icons like Ellington and Armstrong were more tolerated than celebrated, and too often simply ignored. Even today after the advent of Marsalis’s celebrity, journalists, critics, and academics are the major players in the public discourse about jazz. In this important book Porter makes a compelling case for including the public speeches, books, articles, and other writings by jazz musicians as an integral part of this conversation. By examining figures as diverse as Duke Ellington, Abbey Lincoln, Mary Lou Williams, and Anthony Braxton, Porter reveals that the commentary of black musicians constitutes an intellectually vibrant, conflicting and varied, deeply probing body of thought. Among the ideas discussed in this book are the propriety of the term jazz; the degree to which jazz is a symbol of black achievement versus the degree to which it is properly understood as a part of universal human culture; the aesthetic, political, and economic tensions between jazz and European art music; and the tensions between jazz and popular music. Along with other recent works such as Sherrie Tucker’s Swing Shift, Scott DeVeaux’s Birth of Bebop, and Ronald Radano’s New Musical Figurations, Porter’s effort offers sustained analyses of how specific musical movements and figures are situated with respect to larger historical and cultural concerns. Consequently, the relationship of jazz to issues of gender roles and sexuality, black nationalism, cultural exploitation, and spirituality are explored in depth. Porter is not tendentious and avoids taking sides, always careful to give each position its best light. Rather than posit a coherent narrative about the ultimate meanings of jazz he argues that jazz music and practice have remained a paradox for over a century, given the contradictions inherent in a putative American expression thoroughly ensconced in capitalism that managed to provided an important voice of cultural dissent. Porter documents how jazz musicians have functioned in this paradoxical space with a full and complicated understanding of all the ironies and tensions inherent in jazz practice. Such an argument goes against the prevalent mythologies that portray jazz musicians as naive artists at best and idiot savants at worst. The crucial point for Porter is that some musicians have moved through this paradox self-consciously—that is, they have not only participated in jazz activities, but they have thought about their positions and have theorized their meanings and possibilities. So, for instance, “[African American jazz musicians] have not merely produced music that speaks of the forces of capitalist production; they have articulated what it means to contend with these forces while trying to create an artistic expression” (p. 335). Porter covers ample terrain moving diachronically throughout the twentieth century. The chapter “A Marvel of Paradox” discusses jazz in association with African American modernity. Assuming that African American modernity intersects with white America’s modernism of the 1920s, Porter includes the writings of J. A. Rogers and discusses the ways in which jazz in the twenties impacted the New Negroes and the black nationalist movements of the time. The bulk of the chapter, however, examines how musicians such as Duke Ellington, W. C. Handy, and Louis Armstrong confronted notions of a jazz tradition and its ideological content. The chapter “Dizzy Atmosphere” addresses the challenge of bebop by engaging the canonical writings of DeVeaux, von Eschen, Baraka, Lott, as well as the voices of Mary Lou Williams, Billy Taylor, Herbie Nichols, Gil Fuller, Richard Boyer, et al. The place of bop within the fractious jazz community was contested through political activism, religious statement, theoretical musings, and genre bending. Porter demonstrates how the consciousness of the jazz community was forever changed by this musical movement, and how the music’s political and aesthetic reverberations went far beyond the market boundaries of bebop. Subsequent chapters examine other seminal moments in jazz history, covering a carefully selected set of themes from the beginning of the twentieth century to its close. While there is no chapter on gender per se, Porter engages gendered and sexualized aspects of jazz music. By exploring Charles Mingus’s explicitly rendered sexual politics in his autobiography Beneath the Underdog, and Abbey Lincoln’s critiques of black masculinism in her 1966 Negro Digest essay, “Who Will Revere the Black Woman?,” Porter complicates the traditional set of polemics surrounding gender and sexuality in jazz. A similar dialectical structure can be construed in the juxtaposition of two chapters on “creative music” that probe the iconoclastic upstarts of the 1960s and 1970s such as Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, and Andrew Cyrille, with the final chapter, “The Majesty of the Blues,” which examines Marsalis’s neo-conservative movement. Eric Porter succeeds magnificently in his corrective to one of the gaping holes in African American intellectual history and in jazz studies. His volume will make it impossible for musicologists and historians to ignore the voices of jazz musicians when seeking to understand the place of jazz in twentieth-century American culture. —Salim Washington Brooklyn College