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After
a long period of critical neglect, the autobiographical writings
of jazz musicians have now begun to evoke scholarly interest. While
musicians published accounts of their lives and accomplishments
as early as the 1920s and 30s,1 the extensive body of texts we call
"jazz autobiography" has generally been dismissed as the
literarily insignificant, often ghost-written self-promotion of
jazz celebrities trying to further their careers, or as memoirs
of marginal figures seeking to cash in on the financial rewards
offered by the market value of jazz. To my knowledge, no major study
of American autobiography, nor any essay in a collection of articles,
so much as mentions jazz autobiographies, with the single exception
of Rebecca Chalmers Barton's Witnesses for Freedom: Negro Americans
in Autobiography, which devotes a short chapter to blues composer
W. C. Handy's Father of the Blues (1941). As Mark Sanders acknowledges,
the life writings "of numerous African American entertainers
and popular figures remain ignored by the critical community,"
even though they "have much to add to what we understand as
American and African American self-portraiture" (456-457).
Christopher Harlos has identified the publication of an increasing
number of life narratives by jazz musicians in the 1980s and 90s
as evidence of a changed textual field in jazz studies (cf. 132-133).
Writing nearly a decade after Harlos, at a time when the "battles"
over jazz and its role in American culture and history are still
being fought, we need to extend Harlos's assumptions and read jazz
autobiographies through a complex frame of critical reference. Unlike
one side of the present cultural divide on jazz, which has embraced
a coherent and conveniently reductive narrative of democratic and
artistic triumphs (as does Ken Burns's recent multi-volume documentary
Jazz), the "other" side of jazz studies labors against
the simplification of jazz's many complexities.2 Brent Hayes Edwards's
description of that "other" type of jazz scholarship guides
my own investigation into the politics and performance dynamics
of jazz autobiography:
[I]t is undaunted by the insights of poststructuralist theory into
issues of voice and
text; it . . . seeks new interdisciplinary approaches to the music;
it matches a commitment to revisionary historization (striving to
tell the story of the music beyond anecdotal mystification, without
wallowing in the cults of personality and pathology) with a concern
for the intricacies of cultural politics-the ways the music reflects
dynamics of race, class, sexuality, and gender. (Introduction 5)
The present essay develops a theoretical lens through which jazz
autobiographies can be read productively, without either accepting
the basic "untruth" of autobiographical narrative, as
poststructuralist critics might advocate, or damning the texts to
the status of simple eye-witness accounts and biographical sources
of information on jazz history. I will focus on five major texts
and explore the narrative strategies the musicians mobilize in order
to activate performative and improvisatory impulses by fashioning
autobiographical selves that echo the complexities and dynamics
of jazz practices. Instead of creating stable and fixed selves,
Louis Armstrong's multiple autobiographies (1936-70), Mezz Mezzrow's
Really the Blues (1946), Billie Holiday's Lady Sings the Blues (1956),
Charles Mingus's Beneath the Underdog (1971), and Duke Ellington's
Music Is My Mistress (1973) invent elusive autobiographical personas
that are positioned extra-textually and are only signified upon
in the narratives, thus creating compelling public images. These
images render the autobiographical self unstable and shifting, improvised
and performed, while musical improvisation is translated into autobiographical
narration through the invention of a self that cannot be pinned
down and is evoked as an element of an overall self-mythology. The
musicians preserve the popular myth of artistic genius-the elusive
nature of improvisatory originality and its display in the fleeting
moment-while, at the same time, becoming "coconspirators in
the crafting of their public images" (Gennari, "Jazz Criticism"
91). As cultural heroes and co-creators of an extensive jazz mythology,
they imagine themselves to be "beyond category," as Ellington
liked to put it.3
Four questions serve as focal points for the following investigation:
Why have so many jazz musicians turned to autobiography? How do
they negotiate between the aesthetics of autobiographical realism
and the creative possibilities offered by the invention of a literary
self? How does the form of autobiography shape the musicians' choices
of authorial voice, style, structure, and content? And how do they
connect the improvisatory and performative practices we find in
jazz with the static form of written text? The many impulses that
compel jazz musicians to publish written versions of their lives
are discussed in a first section (Autobiographical Impulses4 ),
while section two assembles a concept of autobiographical performativity
(Autobiographical Improvisations). The final chapter applies the
performance paradigm to the autobiographies of Armstrong, Mezzrow,
Holiday, Mingus, and Ellington (Autobiographical Practices).
Autobiographical
Impulses
The reasons for the jazz players' turn to autobiography are manifold.
Jazz historians, musicologists, and journalists have long worked
at erecting a pantheon of jazz masters by combining the musicians'
personal aura (Louis Armstrong's "primitive" genius; Duke
Ellington's "sophistication") with a geniality they hear
in the music. Autobiography, capitalizing on the ensuing infatuation
with heroic tales of musical and personal success, is therefore
premeditated as the medium to which jazz musicians turn to tell
their story. Furthermore, since the standard narrative of jazz follows
the music's "low" beginnings in New Orleans to its achievement
first of popular and then of art status in the 1930s and 40s, autobiographical
narration lends itself conveniently to the recounting of memories
and experiences of those who lived and played the music. Louis Armstrong,
perhaps the most visible and charismatic among jazz's many icons,
is a case in point. In the introduction to the music section included
in Armstrong's first autobiography, Swing That Music, Horace Gerlach,
a British musician, opines: "Louis Armstrong's story of the
evolution of modern American music has traced its growth from the
barbaric phase through to today's refined and developed forms"
(125). Gerlach's view recalls Spengemann and Lundquist's assertion
of an American autobiographical myth, which, "in its most general
form, describes human history as a pilgrimage from imperfection
to perfection . . ." (503). This narrative of ascent, from
sin to redemption, slavery to freedom, country to city, poverty
to wealth, immigrant to American citizen, and "primitive"
to modern, is inscribed in jazz history, and it provides an equally
common narrative pattern for American autobiography.
Jazz autobiography, then, capitalizes on the myth of personal and
cultural ascendancy. The cover of the first Signet paperback edition
of Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans shows how Armstrong's publishers
mobilized American autobiographical myth. "The riotous story
of the ONE AND ONLY Satchmo," the caption reads, while the
back cover announces: "FROM SLUM BOY TO JAZZ KING! You'll laugh
and cry and enjoy every minute of this tender, hilarious, rollicking
autobiography of Satchmo-the world's greatest jazz trumpeter-and
an all-time great as a man." Apart from functioning as marketing
ploy and authenticating documents, the paratexts stand in a tensional
relationship to the actual narrative.5 In his writings, Armstrong
demonstrates his familiarity with the myth, but not without creating
narrative disruption. His autobiographies project a personality
that remains positioned outside of the text; because it is not accepted
as part of the myth, it is unable to unfold within the confines
of the mythological patterns sanctioned by American popular ideologies.
As part of the Western, modern, secular, capitalist, male myth,
autobiography narrates a process of singularization, an affirmation
of an already existing significant persona. "The writer's singularity
is at once a premise and an end of autobiography," John Sturrock
notes. "The autobiographer already has a proper name that is
known to others as a result of the public achievements that entitle
him to come forward as an autobiographer; he is singular to start
with. The function of the account he will give is to reaffirm his
singularity from within, by justifying it not as an original given
but as a lived process" (27).6 Duke Ellington's Music Is My
Mistress demonstrates jazz autobiography's double allegiance with
autobiographical politics and poetics. The autobiography's opening
lines establish a fairy tale version of predestination and thereby
affirm and mock the process of singularization: "Once upon
a time a beautiful young lady and a very handsome young man fell
in love and got married," the story begins. "They were
a wonderful, compatible couple, and God blessed their marriage with
a fine baby boy. . . . They raised him, nurtured him, coddled him,
and spoiled him. They raised him in the palm of the hand and gave
him everything they thought he wanted" (x). These sentences
code Ellington's narrative of success ironically in "white"
terms. The "Duke" is the son of a beautiful lady and a
very handsome young man; in this Americanized fairy tale, the black
musician invents himself as the chosen one, a visionary destined
to change the course of American music.
Sturrock's emphasis of autobiography as a representation of a significant
life in process is also significant in the context of jazz autobiography
because the musicians enter the public negotiation over their personal
images at a moment when their names and faces are already associated
with sets of expectations shaped by preceding acts of presentation
(magazine articles, reviews, novels, poems) and self-presentation
(album covers, live performances, the music itself, interviews).
Billie Holiday's public life, for instance, had already been dissected
in the press by the time Lady Sings the Blues was published in 1956,
and Armstrong had been recognized as the musical hero of the Hot
Five and Hot Seven recordings of the mid- to late 1920s, when Swing
That Music was introduced to readers in 1936.
The autobiographical recounting of the process of singularization
is frequently motivated by a crisis, personal or cultural, that
initiates a search for answers about the self and its position in
the surrounding culture.7 For writers routinely forced to the margins
of American culture-African Americans (Mingus, Ellington, Holiday,
Armstrong), Jewish Americans (Mezzrow), women (Holiday), and jazz
musicians in general-the notion of crisis is self-evident. Jazz
autobiographies frequently address pre-existing images, myths, and
misrepresentations of "blackness" and "jazz."
But instead of simply refuting these images, the musicians can utilize
the creative and liberating potential inherent in the writing of
their life stories; thus, they frequently seize the opportunity
to re-mythologize the self. Craig Hansen Werner demonstrates how
racial mythology and subversive counter-mythology are linked through
W. E. B. Du Bois's notion of double consciousness: "A particular
myth," Werner argues, "simultaneously imposes a particular
interpretation/understanding of experience and points to the more
complex history behind that understanding. A comprehensive understanding
therefore demands awareness of both the system that imposes the
myth [gift as poison] and the history it veils from sight"
(64-65), the gift of double vision. Jazz autobiographies, I would
suggest, narrate cultural myths and counter-myths at the same time.
They "unfix" pre-existing myths about jazz by rejecting
what Barthes calls the "already complete[ness]" (117)
of myth and by reinstating alternative versions of self and music.
The personal or cultural crisis Alfred Hornung identifies as the
starting point for autobiography finds a parallel in the artistic
processes involved in the jazz performance. For one, Ralph Ellison's
definition of the blues as "an autobiographical chronicle of
personal catastrophe expressed lyrically" (129) locates Hornung's
autobiographical crisis within African-American musical experience.
In addition, Roger Porter has described the "autobiographers[']
seeking an informing plan that gives meaning to their lives even
as they acknowledge a certain formlessness in them. If the life
is fragmented, autobiographers seem to say, then writing the self
into coherence testifies to an ability to remake oneself" (xiv).
Jazz autobiographies, however, occupy a somewhat more complicated
position. Armstrong, Mezzrow, Holiday, Mingus, and Ellington certainly
engage in forms of remaking themselves, but they continually undermine,
question, and trouble the very coherence Porter's assessment implies.
In Beneath the Underdog, for instance, the narrative frame of the
therapy session signals the text to be one of soul-searching. But
when Mingus's therapist notes, "'That sounds like the happy
ending of a romantic novel, Charles. Hero escapes life of vice and
corruption and takes up with new love,'" Mingus replies sardonically,
"'Nope, the hero didn't escape, Dr. Wallach, I guess endings
don't come that easy'" (305). The fragmentation and formlessness
of life, though transformed into an artistic expression that takes
on the specific form of autobiographical narrative, never ceases
to gravitate back to the notion of fluidity suggested by the experience
of living and by the aesthetics of jazz.
Besides the urge to assemble unique and fluid autobiographical identities
out of the cultural materials available to the musicians, a second
element of crisis initiating the turn to jazz autobiography is the
musicians' desire to correct what has been written about the music
by journalists and critics, who are often regarded as colonizing
outsiders. Harlos thus maintains that "the turn to autobiography
is regarded as a genuine opportunity to seize narrative authority"
and "deconstruct the label jazz" (italics in the original;
134). Mingus, for instance, rejects jazz and foregrounds issues
such as misrepresentation, economic exploitation sanctioned by racism,
and a racially restricted musical topography. In a letter to jazz
critic and friend Nat Hentoff, he complains: "I am a good composer
with great possibilities and I made an easy success through jazz
but it wasn't really success-jazz has too many strangling qualities
for a composer. . . . If I want it right, Nat, guess I'll have to
leave jazz-that word leaves room for too much fooling" (Beneath
340).8
Since most musicians express dissatisfaction with "jazz"
as a label for their music, autobiographies provide discursive space
for reassessment and reconfiguration. Questions of authority lie
at the center of debates over jazz, but they are of substantial
concern in autobiography studies, as well. Who is authorized to
"set the record straight" and supplant conventional historiography's
objectification of experience with personal narrative? Who can legitimately
speak or write of personal experience and history? And can we award
special authority to "insider" perspectives, to the narratives
of jazz musicians, who, after all, were "there" and can
recount what they thought, felt, heard, and played? As one view
of autobiographical theory, which G. Thomas Couser labels "metaphysics
of presence," posits, "autobiography is non-fictional,
since it records the experience of a historical person, not an invented
'character.'" A related assumption, Couser continues, "is
that the author is present in the text, that a pre-existent unique
personality can be conveyed through-or despite-literary mediation."
However, autobiography should rather be understood "not as
produced by a pre-existing self but as producing a provisional and
contingent one[,] . . . bound and (pre)determined by the constraints
of the linguistic resources and narrative tropes available to the
'author'" (italics in the original; Couser 15, 19).
If we acknowledge the pitfalls of autobiographical memory and historical
"truth," then why is there, as Harlos reminds us, "an
overarching sentiment that a good deal written about the music does
not necessarily correspond with the sensibility or even lived experiences
of the musicians themselves. . . ?" And why do readers and
scholars reach for jazz autobiographies as "a significant alternative
to 'mainstream' jazz history" (137)? Answers to these questions,
I believe, involve the opportunity for jazz autobiographers to create
narratives that can be regarded as artistic manifestations, including
not only the musicians' take on such issues as composing, performing,
practicing, soloing, recording, and touring, but also conveying
a specific self-image of the player and providing political and
social commentary on how they judge their reception by the jazz
audience.
Mingus's romantic (and often pornographic and misogynist) tale of
sexual conquests and his search for true artistry and self-expression
move the text from potential musical analysis to a controversial
self-portrait of the jazz composer. Like Holiday's Lady Sings the
Blues and Armstrong's writings, the work foregoes musical analyses
and detailed descriptions of musical performances. The significance
of the literary works of jazz musicians lies exactly in the realization
that music cannot be translated into writing but gains its energy
from the same artistic impulses that inspire the turn to autobiography.
McNeilly argues accordingly that in Beneath the Underdog, "[j]azz
music, unrepresentable in established semantic or syntactical forms,
is overwritten in the text by conversations, verbal exchanges among
musicians on the stand, whose voices tend to meld into a multitextured,
indeterminate polylogue . . ." (66). The music is represented
by ellipses, and the conversations embracing these ellipses illuminate
Mingus's autobiographical goal. His readers are encouraged to pay
attention to the literary vision performed by the autobiography;
the text goes beyond Mingus's music and represents more than a mere
footnote to the musicians' "real" art, jazz.9
Autobiographical
Performances
The "performance" theorem, as employed here, is made up
of different but related sets of meaning. Feminist Judith Butler's
understanding of identity as "acts, gestures, enactments .
. . [that] are performative in the sense that the essence or identity
that they otherwise purport to express are fabrications" (italics
in the original; 136) introduces the notion of identity as a performance
that must be reaffirmed, or improvised, within the "normative
and/or regulatory discourses" through which we "produce
. . . the appearance of substance and the illusion of origins"
(Christian 16). Autobiography, as a literary form that foregrounds
issues of identity construction, lends itself well to musicians
whose public image stands in dialogic relation to a variety of demands
(self-perception, audience appeal, institutional pressures). Identity,
Karen Christian observes, becomes "a spectacle requiring an
audience for interpretation" (16).
Reading jazz performance as a spectacle of self-presentation means
acknowledging the parallels between the social formation of identity
and the practices of jazz. As music shaped by interaction and inventiveness,
jazz takes place within the "normative and/or regulatory discourses"
that determine each performance and its reception. Ajay Heble elaborates:
"[I]mprovisation's link with processes of identity formation
and struggles for self-definition has less to do with a creative
actualization of the self as a stable origin of meaning than it
does with unsettling the very logic of identity" (95). That
is to say, jazz improvisation engages in a negotiation of identity
(in a multilogue with other players; for and in front of an audience;
in a dialogue with the musical material itself) and in a constant
rephrasing of identity: Instead of expressing an essential identity
through musical statement (reaching the core of the self at the
climax of the solo), the jazz improviser's interest in creating
original and exciting music troubles critics' and fans' notions
of fixity and essence. The reflexive and collective dynamics of
jazz and the dialogic construction of identity connect improvisatory
qualities with "the slipperiness, mobility, and inventive flexibility
of the speaker's discourse" (Heble 91). Jazz autobiography
thus serves as a medium for musicians to transform personal aesthetics
to written discourse, not by simple translation of musical principles,
but by reconfiguring the artistic, social, and political impulses
that also inspire and influence their music.
Heble's approach supports Sidonie Smith's notion of autobiographical
performance as a means of resisting socially mandated models of
self. Smith argues that autobiography is the performance of a performance,
the reiteration of a self already produced and assembled in the
social realm through continuous acts of narrating "historically
specific identities" that gain "narrative coherence and
meaning" in the social interaction with others (17). The complicated
relation between interiority and exteriority, the feelings and thoughts
of the individual composing the autobiography and their translation
onto the written page, attains special significance because a prime
interest in jazz autobiography is the search for the wellspring
of identity fueling the musician's work. The jazz autobiographer
negotiates between the wish to present a unique self that rivals
his/her uniqueness in music and the demands of an audience of implied
readers "for whom certain discourses of identity and truth
make sense" and "who expect a certain kind of performativity
that conforms relatively comfortably to criteria of intelligibility"
(Smith 19-20). Therefore, the bourgeois notion of "soul,"
of an interior landscape in need of examination (through autobiographical
self-questioning and "soul"-searching), is transformed
in jazz autobiography to the (usually) black, elusive "soul"
that drives the musician's playing and improvising.
In Beneath the Underdog, for instance, Mingus suffers from a divided
"soul" and seeks the integration of his selves to a unified
whole untroubled by the plagues of racism and economic exploitation
that dominate his life. He fails, of course; his "split"
personality's explicit function is to emphasize the performative
dimension of the autobiographical narrative, and, in the tradition
of the romantics, locate the tortured "soul" as the source
of musical creativity and compositional originality. "It is
as if the autobiographical subject finds him/herself on multiple
stages simultaneously, called to heterogeneous recitations of identity,"
Smith states, but "[t]hese multiple calls never align perfectly.
Rather they create spaces or gaps, ruptures, unstable boundaries,
. . . limits and their transgressions" (20). These ruptures
and transgressions explain the selves which Armstrong, Mezzrow,
Holiday, Mingus, and Ellington position outside of the world of
their autobiographies. Aware of the constructed nature of self and
identity, these musicians self-consciously mobilize the tensions
between what can be portrayed in a static text and what can only
be evoked through the medium of writing.
The extra-textuality of identity underscored in jazz autobiography
raises questions of how the process of "literalization"
can be equated with musical improvisation and performance. In this
context, Richard Poirier's assessment of the "performing self"
in literature is invaluable. Poirier defines "performance"
as the opportunity for human beings to "release . . . energy
into measured explorations of human potentialities" (xiii).
Instead of looking at the text itself as the exclusive performance,
he shifts the view to the actual performance/composition of that
text: "The gap between the completed work . . . and the multiple
acts of performance that went into it is an image of the gap between
the artist's self as he [or she] discovered it in performance and
the self . . . discovered afterward in the final shape and the world's
reception of it" (88). In that sense, the autobiographical
text becomes, not unlike a musical recording, the result of a performing
self that has been brought into existence by the energy, the drive
of the musician/writer that compels him/her to create representations
of self and the life of that self. And if "any self-discovering,
self-watching, finally self-pleasuring response to . . . pressures
and difficulties" (Poirier xiii) is part of the performance,
then being self-conscious of the autobiographical format and the
discourses that legitimize or de-legitimize the self-presentations
of jazz musicians unveils the performative nature of the autobiographical
text. That is, it signals a difference between the energy manifested
in the initial occasions of writing and the published work as a
fixed textual product containing residues (or clues) of the original
performance.
According to Porter, then, the performative dynamics of autobiography
can be found in "a writer's energy that projects an ego and
expresses a self through, in, or against the chosen form" (xi).
Analyzing Homer's use of autobiographical form in Odysseus's tales
of travel, Porter determines an "essential shiftiness"
("eluding those who seek to appropriate him for their ends
[4-5]"). Placing this notion at the core of jazz autobiographical
discourse, we can extrapolate that the tension between eluding and
facing the jazz audience creates an energy in jazz and jazz autobiography
that produces music and text: It recreates the performativity of
the music (audience involvement, self-reflexivity, writing as action)
and mimics musical improvisation by constantly inventing new layers
and eclectic versions of self.
Autobiographical
Practices
Louis Armstrong employs two major techniques of performing his autobiographical
self. The first is a form of "versioning," an ongoing
production of autobiographical narratives which generate an array
of stories and anecdotes that recount a similar narrative pattern
(the myth of racial uplift; the American success story) while providing
room for shifts in emphasis and narrative voice. This ranges from
statements such as "I have always loved my white folks"
in Satchmo (152) to a much grittier tone in his interview with Richard
Meryman for Life magazine: "'Always keep a white man behind
you that'll put his hand on you and say, `That's my nigger´'"
(27-28).
As early as the 1920s, Armstrong began evoking his New Orleans childhood
in letters, essays, and interviews. Depending on his audience and
the occasion of the performance, Armstrong shaped the particulars
of his basic narrative. Standard elements are his family's poverty,
his relationship to his mother and the moral lessons she taught
him, New Orleans musical traditions, his love of legendary players
such as Buddy Bolden and King Oliver, and the time he spent in a
home for boys (where he learned to play the cornet). The set of
autobiographies that follows this pattern creates Armstrong's self-mythology;
but instead of inserting himself into the already existing body
of myths surrounding his life and career by authorizing a fixed
version of his life, Armstrong mobilizes Barthes's "double
function" of myth, "authorizing" several versions
of his life that capitalize on the stories and legends that have
grown around his persona. He invests these narratives with enough
variation to call their individual authority in question, thereby
rendering them instable and all the more intriguing.
The continuing impulse to narrate his life is connected to the politics
of representation that reigned over the construction of Armstrong's
public image. Swing That Music and Satchmo are shaped by the control
the trumpeter's editors and publishers wielded over the end product.10
Joe Glaser, Armstrong's manager, enforced an image of the all-American
icon and good-will jazz ambassador and therefore suppressed the
publication of a sequel to Satchmo. A look at the manuscript, published
only after Armstrong's death, explains Glaser's concern: "This
whole second book might be about nothing but gage [marijuana] …
Of course there'll be a lot of sore heads who'll probably resent
this …," Armstrong had announced (Own Words 114).
Editorial anticipations of audience tastes and the concern with
marketing Armstrong as the smiling face of jazz instigated a flexible
autobiographical approach. Armstrong accommodates his readers' interests
while still shaping an ambiguous life in textual form. He accomplishes
this by recasting himself as "Satchmo," a public figure
assembled from the cultural echoes of Sambo, the notoriously simple-minded
and accommodating minstrel character, and a "New Negro"
awareness of self-reconstruction in the realm of popular entertainment.
The tensions between Sambo and self-awareness (expressed mainly
through irony and jive) release Armstrong's autobiographical self
from fixity and signal a self that ultimately remains elusive: He
is both Sambo and the artist playing Sambo's role; he is both accommodating
and subversive.11 Imagination and referentiality, autobiographical
mask and historical being, textual self and extra-textual self:
We are confronted with an elusive autobiographical identity, a musical
"genius" we can sense in the music but cannot arrest in
textual form.
These ambivalences, the multiplicity of messages delivered through
the medium of autobiography, rewrite jazz history and Armstrong's
personal history as myth and as mythology. While jazz myths abound-his
invention of scat singing when he dropped the lyric sheets in the
studio; his stories about the parades, funerals, whorehouses, exotic
characters, and communal mores of black New Orleans, irretrievably
gone by the time of his writing-Armstrong's obvious glee in reiterating
these myths and his disregard for a strict script further substantiate
the notion that the jazz musician's playing with biographical material
and his/her distinct style of telling lies at the heart of jazz
autobiography. Armstrong mobilizes improvisatory and performative
impulses in every new instance of autobiographical telling; a string
of provisionary selves is produced, constrained by the language
and narrative tropes culturally available to the teller, but improvised
nonetheless. There is no pre-established autobiographical model
for the black jazz musician, so Armstrong assembles his own.
As a second technique of evading textual stasis, Armstrong annotated
his manuscripts with a multitude of markings that surround the text
and seem to communicate meaning transcending the words of the autobiographical
narrative. These markers (dashes, ellipses, apostrophes, parentheses,
interjections, rhetorical questions, underlinings), which were edited
out of Swing That Music and Satchmo but can be studied in Brothers's
recent publication of unedited manuscripts, have been interpreted
persuasively as a visualization of performative excess. Edwards's
theory of "scat aesthetics," proposing a notion of scat
singing as an "excess of meaning, a shifting possibility of
a multitude of meanings" ("Syntax" 624), demonstrates
how Armstrong's autobiographical self is always in flux. Through
its obvious semantic flexibility, what Edwards and Nathaniel Mackey
call a "[d]eliberately 'false' vocal production . . . supplementing
the sayable," sometimes playfully and humorously engaged in,
at other times signifying emotions deeper than words, scat "creatively
hallucinates a 'new world' . . . [and] indicts the more insidious
falseness of the world as we know it" ( "Syntax"
625). Armstrong's autobiographies transpose the indeterminacy of
scat to written form; the reader has no reliable means of deciphering
the rules that govern the generation of meaning. Like Armstrong's
musical innovations (growls, slurs, and buzzes), the writing produces
an "excess of signification" (Edwards, "Syntax"
641) that signals the musician's sense of self but positions the
access to that self outside of the reader's grasp.12
Mezz Mezzrow's Really the Blues, in its quest for the origins of
a "black" excessive expressiveness that finds its configuration
in Armstrong's performances, is an important specimen of autobiographical
performance in many ways.13 Seeking to unveil the mystery of "black"
jazz and the improvisatory genius of Mezzrow's heroes, the narrative
engages in a project of translating the mythical aura surrounding
jazz and its players for a predominantly white readership, with
the Jewish Mezzrow at the forefront of the cultural exchange. His
self-proclaimed aim is "racial conversion": "I was
going to be a musician, a Negro musician, hipping the world about
the blues the way only Negroes can" (18). But if Mezzrow wants
to become "black," wants to overcome skin color through
cultural learning, his autobiographical quest already begins as
a performance. The notion of identity captured in writing is rendered
unstable and elusive from the start.
Mezzrow, son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, was known in the jazz
world as a somewhat obscure figure, a "flamboyant clarinetist
and sometime saxophonist, prolific weed pusher, self-professed opium
eater, and prototypical 'white Negro' hipster . . ." (Wald
53). Routinely treated as a player of minor influence by jazz historians,
Mezzrow taps into the debates over New Orleans jazz, Dixieland,
swing, and bebop raging in the early 1940s, when he was working
on the autobiography.14 Entering these discourses, Mezzrow places
the autobiographical interest in his life on his "cross[ing]
the color line" (320) and on the uniqueness of his experience.
On the final pages of the autobiography, he is told by journalist
and co-writer Bernard Wolfe that his life is "a chunk of Americana,
. . . and it should get written. It's a real American success story,
upside down: Horatio Alger standing on his head" (334). This
self-conscious employment of American autobiographical patterns,
cast as a reversal of the Alger myth, in fact uses the prototypical
success story and works as a manifestation of Spengemann and Lundquist's
autobiographical myth: Readers identifying as hipsters and jazz
fans can embrace Mezzrow's rejection of the "square" white
world and take the musician's attainment of quasi-mythical status
in the canon of traditional New Orleans jazz to be the narrative's
ultimate expression of success.
Mezzrow's declaration of racial conversion points to an essential
conflict in Really the Blues. While his transformation can never
be complete in the world outside of the text, it can be narrated
as a successful performance. As Wald notes, "Mezzrow stakes
the authenticity of his narrative on his ability to compel the reader's
belief in the naturalness of his own performance" (72). Like
Armstrong, whose extra-textual markers and ambivalent presentations
of self create participatory discrepancies, Mezzrow asks his readers
to rescue the text from stasis. His striving for "blackness"
and his conversion to jazz, as Wald is correct in pointing out,
"can be interpreted as a set of narrative variations on a single,
but never exhausted, theme: Mezzrow's life-long pursuit of a standard
of cultural or racial 'realness,' which, because it derives from
his own idealized constructs of 'black authenticity,' he can never
really achieve" (63). His readers, then, are asked to judge
his improvisations over that theme and marvel at the quality of
Mezzrow's handling of his life in writing.
Part of Really the Blues's innovation lies in Mezzrow's use of language,
an exaggerated form of hipster argot and jazz jive cast as representative
of African-American expressive practices and identified as the source
of pre-modern "authenticity." This verbal appropriation
locks the autobiography in a complex position. As a "bordered"
text, one that negotiates between "racial" worlds demarcated
as mutually exclusive by socially and politically enforced norms,
Really the Blues derives its performative energy from an oscillation
between Jewish hipsterism and the "black" world of jazz.
Mezzrow improvises his "word jazz" in an extended jive
section and then explains how the performance is structured; the
relation between orality and text becomes the subject of examination:
"[Y]ou don't get the full flavor of this street-corner poetry.
This lingo has to be heard, not seen, because its free-flowing rhythms
and intonations and easy elisions, all following a kind of instinctive
musical pattern . . . can only hit the ear, not the eye" (italics
in the original; 220). This insight is paradigmatic for Mezzrow's
autobiography and can be applied to jazz autobiography in general.
The life narratives' main contribution to our understanding of jazz
writing is the notion that music and identity cannot be easily represented
in writing. As Fritz Gysin has argued, "it is exactly the anxiety
of voice that seems to be at the core of . . . texts preoccupied
with Jazz [sic]." Applied to the performative dynamics in autobiographical
writing, the "problematic of voice" (Gysin 277) also becomes
the problematic of self: Mezzrow's obviously stylized and overdetermined
use of jive marks identity as a series of improvisations and the
text as a performance. Verbal style, the improvisation with materials
by altering and personalizing them, is sought to substitute in the
text for the elusiveness of music and suggests the existence of
a self that resides in the performance, activated through the performance
and temporarily erasing the modernists' distinction between life
(Lebenswelt) and poetic practice (cf. Ostendorf 524).15
Myths of blackness and the mythical potential of jazz as a life
force close to the human spirit, able to salvage the lost modern
self from alienation, underscore Mezzrow's investment with jazz
mythology. Rejecting swing music as inauthentic and commercial,
Mezzrow realizes that by 1927-28, "Storyville was fast becoming
just another chapter in the jazzman's storybook, a fable about some
mythical land-of-dreams" (138). The aim of the autobiography
is to soak up the legendary power of New Orleans jazz. At the end
of the narrative, Mezzrow falls into a trance induced by the powerful
spirit of the music and the energy released by the interaction with
his band mates. He is finally able to speak "the ageless language
of New Orleans" and metamorphoses into a list of black New
Orleans jazzmen: "I was Jimmy Noone and Johnny Dodds and Sidney
Bechet, swinging down Rampart Street and Basin Street and Perdido
Street, down through Storyville, . . . blowing all the joy and bounce
of life through my clarinet." Mezzrow unites the magic of these
players and dreams that he is "back in the great days when
jazz was born, back at the throbbing root and source of all jazz,
making it all fresh and new." Issues of identity, ethnicity,
and class dissolve into the autobiography's self-mythology: Mezzrow
becomes "authentic," becomes Other, and solves the riddle
of self-knowledge while performing jazz. He can finally "speak
my piece" (322-323).
I would argue that the passages quoted above express a keen understanding
of jazz that captures a fundamental ambiguity characteristic of
the music. If Ostendorf defines jazz performance as the coexistence
of ecstasy and fleetingness/elusiveness (cf. 525), then Mezzrow's
trance-like state gives shape to the ecstatic element of jazz as
well as its existence in the moment. Once the music ends, Mezzrow
will be himself again. Therefore, the autobiographical self is released
from fixity by the act of finding itself in the musical performance,
in the fleeting sounds of jazz and in the interaction with other
players: For a few moments, Mezzrow is able to shed his provisional
self (the Jewish hipster longing to be "authentically"
black) and become a mensch, no longer defined by the normative/regulatory
discourses that stigmatize Jewishness, blackness, and jazz, but
defining himself in and through his music.16 Identity, autobiographical
and Other, Mezzrow is telling us, can never exist outside of the
demand for continuous negotiation.
Billie Holiday's Lady Sings the Blues echoes the sensationalism
of Mezzrow's autobiography in its portrayal of a persona audiences
and readers already knew from the popular press. The narrative never
ventures beyond this bandstand persona but only indicates the existence
of an extra-textual self through variations in self-invention and
self-presentation. Robert O'Meally has pointed out substantial incongruities
between Holiday's life and its appearance in the autobiography.
But instead of merely "correcting" myths or lamenting
Holiday's infatuation with, and proliferation of, her own self-mythology,
O'Meally situates the original impulse for autobiographical self-invention
within Holiday's overall artistic impulse: Her public faces "were
among her compositions" (21) and part of the "shining
identity as an artist" (10) she claimed for herself. In other
words, the jazz musician's art is generated through the embrace
of a multiplex public image (or mask) that allows the singer to
elude appropriation while producing a series of satisfactory performances.
This is an essential lesson taught by jazz autobiography: Every
writer examined in this essay creates a public stand-in, a figure
that diverts the audience's gaze from the artist's more private
sense of self. This elusiveness is understood as essential to the
act of musical creation because musical performance derives much
of its power from the veil that separates audience and performer
and clothes the act in an aura of "geniality."
Lady Sings the Blues obscures and simultaneously reconfigures Holiday's
life story. After delving into her history as a troubled child (she
grows up without a father; her family is poor; she gets raped when
she is only ten years old), Holiday "tries on" different
identities, such as maid, prostitute, dancer, and singer. Although
these autobiographical personas satisfy the popular interest in
the tragedy and drama in Holiday's life, they also provide her with
significant narrative space to sanction a public self-image. Poirier's
observations on the nature of the written self are worth recalling
here: Poirier distinguishes between "the completed work"
(here: Lady Sings the Blues) and "the multiple acts of performance
that went into it" (Holiday's self-mythology). In Holiday's
case, the artist presenting herself in a series of original performances
and the editor/writer who assembled and rewrote these performances
are different individuals acting at different times and with different
agendas. While it is Dufty's job to turn her story into appealing
form, Holiday's interests lie elsewhere: The slipperiness and inventive
flexibility of the autobiography is a self-conscious expression
of the elusiveness with which she inscribes her self-portrait.17
Farah Jasmine Griffin offers a compelling reading of Holiday's projection
of a calculated self: "In many ways, this is not the life story
of Eleanora Fagan [Holiday's birth name]," Griffin maintains,
"or maybe not even the story of Billie Holiday [the name on
the cover], but it is the story of Lady Day [the name given to her
by Lester Young]" (50). Changing her family history, for instance,
and investing her life as a teenager with the stuff of jazz legend
(listening to Armstrong and Bessie Smith recordings in a whorehouse),
Holiday focuses on her own innocence and the abuse she suffered
by others. She improvises, as Heble suggests, "a narrative
of origins" (108) that not only reshapes experience into compelling
form but also arrives at the past by way of the present. While her
professional history was more or less known (an Ebony feature article
in 1949 had told her story), her childhood years were not. Holiday
thus literally improvises a story that uses public knowledge about
her life as a framework within which she juggles facts and invents
a fascinating narrative. By manipulating the public knowledge about
her life, she is taking a major role in constructing, and simultaneously
deconstructing, her public face. The autobiography thus testifies
to the complexity of the singer's self image and her desire to escape
fixed expectations of what it meant to be a black woman in the 1930s-50s.
Since Heble, O'Meally, and Griffin provide instructive readings
of Holiday's autobiography, I want to confine myself here to a brief
analysis of a theme of narrative dissonance that confirms Heble's
connection between the fluidity of identity formation (social and
autobiographical) and the jazz player's push to reinvent herself
over and over again. Dissonance occurs when Holiday's story opens
itself to interpretations that trouble a one-dimensional understanding
of the singer's life. A first crack in Lady Sings the Blues appears
only a few pages into the autobiography, when Holiday remembers
her great-grandmother. Having lived as a slave on an Irish slaveholder's
plantation in Virginia, the great-grandmother "used to tell
[Holiday] how it felt to be a slave, to be owned body and soul by
a white man who was the father of her children" (8). Relating
this passage to the complaints about economic exploitation Holiday
associates with jazz, we can see that the white man not only owns
her body (through rape and drugs) but also her children (her music;
"Body and Soul" is a popular tune Holiday used to sing).
And if her "body and soul" are controlled by the white
man, if she is just a slave on the music plantation, then Holiday's
insistence on obscuring Eleanora Fagan and featuring Lady Day can
be seen as an act of self-protection as well as an act of resistance
and defiance.
Troping slavery and the literary accounts of the black self shaped
in and by the writing of slave narratives enables Holiday to document
the struggle involved in telling her story. Lady Sings the Blues
reiterates the tension between repression and the desire for freedom,
mobilizing it as a commentary on her life as a black artist in America
as well as on the politics of autobiography, which rule over the
presentation of her literary self. Using her great-grandmother as
an alter ego, Holiday is "just a slave on [the master's] plantation"
and can only use subversive techniques to evade his control. But
while her great-grandfather, the white man who owned her great-grandmother,
knows about the life of his slaves (and "mingles" with
them both socially and sexually), jazz fans in the 1930s never see
the world of black folk:
Sure, some of them patronized the after-hour joints; they came to
the Cotton Club-a
place Negroes never saw inside unless they played music or did the
shakes or shimmies. But these were just side shows specially set
up for white folks to come and pay their money for kicks. These
places weren't for real. The life we lived was. But it was all
backstage, and damn few white folks ever got to see it. (42)
Distrusting her audience, Holiday spread stories about herself that
kept the boundaries between stage, backstage, and off-stage intact.
O'Meally explains how "women are often fiercely protective
of their life stories. Sometimes, their stories are virtually all
they have, and even if they have manufactured them (perhaps especially
if they have manufactured them), they try hard to permit no one
to tell their tales except themselves."18 While this view seems
to clash with Holiday's willingness to let Dufty tell her story,
it in fact emphasizes her wish to preserve control over the representation
of her life: By changing facts about herself, Holiday keenly distinguished
between her own sense of self and Lady Day, the singer in the musical
and literary spotlight. Her music, not her life and autobiography,
O'Meally argues, was "all that really mattered"; the "story
. . . was in her music" (197), and it showed a self-conscious
and masterful artist whose stories were expressions of craft and
musical command and not a simple vehicle for voicing the blues singer's
lament.
In Mingus's Beneath the Underdog, self-performance becomes self-composition.
The subtitle, His World as Composed by Mingus, aptly captures the
intricacies of the work. By conflating biography ("his world")
and musical autobiography ("composed by Mingus"), it announces
a "running commentary on the function of artifice within the
act of self-inscription" (Harlos 141). Mingus self-consciously
violates conventions of autobiography-the composer must follow his
vision and break conventions in his search for originality and innovation.
A disclaimer signals an acute awareness of autobiographical poetics,
the tension between imagination and referentiality: "Some names
in this work have been changed and some of the characters and incidents
are fictitious" (Beneath n. pag.). From the start, we are told
that, for the jazz musician/composer, the imagination is an integral
part of the autobiographical performance. Questions of narrative
composition and literary voice thus lurk over Mingus's autobiography,
as they do over (jazz) autobiography in general.
Myself When I Am Real, Gene Santoro's biography of Mingus, echoes
the popular perception of Beneath the Underdog as Mingus's "quest
to become a legend" through the creation of an extensive self-mythology:
"His autobiography . . . distorts, rearranges, and frames facts.
. . . [H]e composed his life as a work of art, just like he did
his music, from a nourishing diversity of raw thematic materials"
(6-7). While Santoro's claim fits comfortably within the argument
of jazz autobiography's self-conscious performativity, the likening
of musical processes to the approach to narrative self-representation
and self-invention requires further exploration. Suggesting that
Mingus composed his life in the same way he wrote his music assumes
a musical drive that precedes its translation into autobiographical
text. But identity, whether musical, autobiographical, or social,
is always subject to the pressures of self-performance. Autobiography
is not so much the production of a self preceding the autobiographical
telling as it is the construction of a provisional self that is
subject to a variety of discursive constraints.
Beneath the Underdog begins with an account of a psychoanalytic
session with Dr. Wallach, Mingus's Jewish psychoanalyst, which introduces
a fragmented autobiographical subject:
In other words, I am three. One man stands forever in the middle,
unconcerned, unmoved, watching, waiting to be allowed to express
what he sees to the other two. The second man is like a frightened
animal that attacks for fear of being attacked. Then there's an
over-loving gentle person who lets people into the uttermost sacred
temple of his being and he'll take insults and be trusting and sign
contracts without reading them and get talked down to working cheap
or for nothing, and when he realizes what's been done to him he
feels like killing and destroying everything around him including
himself for being so stupid. But he can't-he goes back inside himself.
(3)
Insisting that all three selves are real, Mingus constructs the
autobiography as a series of "self-divided and self-critical
performances" (McNeilly 53) that dramatize Porter's notion
of performance by locating the origins of creativity in the ongoing
struggle for self-definition within and against one's social environment.
The multiracial jazz composer, confused by conflicting demands on
his personality, projects not one ego, nor does he express one self
through, in, or against the chosen form of autobiography. Rather,
he invents a three-fold self, signaling to the reader that autobiography
is only the form through which Mingus stages his public self-analysis,
the journey into the abyss of the composer's mind. Trying to find
a structure in the events of his life and yet reinventing himself
in his own textual world, Mingus utilizes the discourse of psychoanalysis
to enlist both himself and the reader in the search for the musician's
identity. The act of coming to terms with himself and his position
in the world is a process Mingus evokes as a parallel to the composer's
creative motivation and quest for innovation.
Philipe Lejeune's autobiographical pact, the congruity of author,
narrator, and protagonist, undergoes a complicated treatment in
Beneath the Underdog. Mingus's use of narrative perspective, his
separation of narrator and protagonist by insisting on third-person
narration, forces the reader to ask questions about literary and
performative agency. The distinction between a grammatical person,
to which an autobiographical "I" or "he/she"
refers, and "the identity of the individuals to whom the aspects
of the grammatical person refer" (Lejeune 6) indicates that
Beneath the Underdog emphasizes the discrepancy between the Mingus
outside of the autobiography and the self-image of the composer
developed in, and through, the text. We might say that the third-person
narration "draws attention to itself in a provocative way:
the procedure comes across as being artificial because it shatters
the illusory effect of the first person . . . " (Lejeune 35).
This division of narrator and protagonist documents an awareness
of the fact that unity-of the autobiographical self in the text
and of the author's identity in the world outside of the text-is
always a fiction. As Lejeune concludes, "we witness the . .
. performances in front of a three-way mirror, of . . . another
person who remains locked in his identity, even if he sets all its
elasticity in motion" (44).
The fractured Mingus of Beneath the Underdog performs Mingus's life
for a reading audience. Mingus's acceptance of an identity in need
of constant renegotiation within an array of normative and/or regulatory
discourses links autobiographical and musical practice: Elasticity
can be achieved (in improvisation with available materials), but
it must be presented within the frame of musical composition or
literary structure. This tension between textual stasis and imaginative
flexibility creates the energy that renders the autobiographical
self a performance and the jazz musician a compelling subject for
autobiography.
Mingus's aspiration to be accepted as a leading American composer
and his investment with the multiplicities of self connect Beneath
the Underdog with Ellington's Music Is My Mistress. The epilogue
to Ellington's narrative, titled "The Mirrored Self,"
is perhaps the most explicit instance of the Duke's playfulness
with the politics of autobiographical self-portraiture:
Let us imagine a quiet, cozy cove. . . . Nearby is a still pool,
so still that it resembles a limpid mirror. If we look in it, what
we see is the reflection of ourselves, just as we thought we looked,
wearing the identical clothes, the same countenance …
Ah, this is us, the us we know, and as we savor the wonderful selves-of-perfection
we suddenly realize that just below our mirror, there is another
reflection that is not quite so clear, and not quite what we expected.
This translucent surface has a tendency toward the vague: the lines
are not firm and the colors not quite the same, but it is us, or
should
we say me, or rather one of our other selves? (italics in the original;
451)
The scene goes on; Ellington writes of a third and fourth self located
below the second reflection. Baffled and unsure which one of these
selves to love, he asks what this proliferation of selves is doing
to him. Significantly, these many selves can be seen only until
ripples in the pool make them disappear. The instability signaled
by the epilogue substantially troubles the autobiography's otherwise
prevailing tone of self-assuredness.
Ellington's benign, quasi-aristocratic authorial voice and his adherence
to upper-class sensibilities advance a view of the composer seeking
to cast himself beyond race, politics, and sexuality in ways almost
directly opposite to Mingus's angry stance toward these issues.
Ellington's proud reports of socializing with the agents of the
very power formations that traditionally looked down on jazz, favored
classical composition over Ellington's "jungle music,"
and controlled the economic exploitation of black artists are routinely
placed within a narrative of achievement, both musical and social.
However, what Ellington ultimately accomplishes has to do with the
complex dynamics within which musical and textual performance gestate.
Music Is My Mistress not only reinforces the notion of elusiveness,
a sometimes cynical reduction of the musician's life to his celebrity
status; it also links the improvisation and performance of a personal
self to the writing of Ellington's music. Like the textual Ellington,
the person outside of the text carved out a niche within American
institutions and cultural economies by inventing a kind of music
able to satisfy many, and often conflicting, demands. It is based
in the blues and therefore distinctly African-American, but it equally
appeals to musical tastes of those who perceive themselves as "refined"
and "classical." As an elegant and suave performer, Ellington
appeals to notions of respectability and musical class that made
him a success with more conservative listeners and critics.
Edwards speaks of a "literary imperative" behind Ellington's
music, a "'story-telling' impulse behind the very process of
creating music" ("Literary" 4). This impulse, not
musical but rather performative in nature, lies behind the autobiographical
telling. Ellington writes that musicians used to "send messages
in what they play[ed], calling somebody, or making facts and emotions
known. Painting a picture, or having a story to go with what you
were going to play, was of vital importance. . . . The audience
didn't know anything about it, but the cats in the band did"
(47). In other words, readers of the autobiography are invited to
consume the performance and witness the display of facts and emotions,
while they cannot "know" the underlying story, Ellington's
private sense of self.
Conclusion
Readers and critics seeking to discover the musician's inner self,
his or her "true" character and source of musical "geniality,"
are confronted with autobiographical self-performances that do not
revoke the layers of social and musical self-invention that the
jazz performance so forcefully veils but never fully denies. Music
and autobiography are the result of a creative evocation of identity,
of a temporarily arrested notion of self that heeds audience demands
but always rescues the self from stasis by demonstrating the musicians'
self-conscious investment with the poetics and politics of self-staging.
Reading jazz autobiography, we should be motivated to ask questions
of narrative and musical agency rather than feel compelled to find
answers to the riddles of musical, literary, and social identity.
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Whiteman, Paul, and Mary Margaret McBride. Jazz. New York: J. H.
Sears, 1926.
Notes
I thank Mark Osteen for his critical reading and invaluable suggestions.
1 The earliest jazz autobiographies are Paul Whiteman's Jazz (1926),
Louis Armstrong's Swing That Music (1936), and Benny Goodman's Kingdom
of Swing (1939).
2 See also Gabbard and Radano. For a deconstruction of the streamlined
version of jazz history, see Gennari, "Jazz Criticism"
and DeVeaux.
3 See also Hasse's biography of Ellington, titled Beyond Category:
The Life and Genius of Duke Ellington.
4 I borrow the term from Gunn 12.
5 William Kenney writes: "Swing That Music offers a sort of
conversation between whites that frames the black jazz star's narrative,
recreating the structural characteristics of the nineteenth-century
former slave narratives that were similarly surrounded by the comments
of white abolitionists" (40).
6 This view has been criticized for its narrowness and focus on
the canonical works of the Western male tradition. See also Smith
and Watson.
7 Cf. Hornung 70.
8 Mingus's aim had been "to write about the true jazz scene
that has made our masters millions and taken the most famed to their
penniless graves they had awaited as the only escape from the invisible
chains on black jazz as an art" (italics in the original; quoted
in Santoro 175). For Duke Ellington, "'Jazz' is only a word
and really has no meaning. We stopped using it in 1943. To keep
the whole thing clear, once and for all, I don't believe in categories
of any kind" (452).
9 Mingus and many others have described jazz improvisation as telling
a story or "saying something." See also Monson, Saying
Something, especially chapter 3. The musical example most frequently
referred to in this context is a live version of "What Love"
(Mingus at Antibes, 1960, CD 7567-90532-2, Atlantic, 1986), on which
Mingus and Eric Dolphy (bass clarinet) "converse" through
their instruments.
10 For a detailed discussion of the editorial restrictions to which
Armstrong had to submit, see Kenney.
11 Houston Baker's concepts "mastery of form" (the "narrator's
self-conscious adoption of minstrel tones and types to keep his
audience tuned in" [30]) and "deformation of mastery"
(the "ability to give the trick to white expectations, securing
publication for creative work that carries a deep-rooted African
sound" [49]) apply here.
12 Charles Keil has labeled this phenomenon "participatory
discrepancies"; it includes many of Armstrong's musical trademarks,
such as "inflection," "creative tensions," "groove,"
and "swing" (275). The trumpeter's graphic additions to,
and narrative variation of, his autobiographies constitute a "swing"
or "groove" approach to literature: The annotations signal
that in order to get audiences to feel the groove (or readers to
respond positively to the autobiographical narrative), a performance
must contain instances of dissonance, of fissures in narrative coherence
that enlist audiences as decoders and invite them to take part in
the performance.
13 Mezzrow's narrative, like all other autobiographies discussed
in this essay, is not the exclusive product of the jazz musician.
Armstrong was edited all his life; Holiday's Lady Sings the Blues
is assembled from interviews and articles by William Dufty; Mingus's
Beneath the Underdog was shortened and edited by Nel King; Ellington's
Music Is My Mistress was put together by Stanley Dance. One could
argue that the very collaboration between musician and editor/co-writer
constitutes yet another element of performance: The text is shaped
interactively. Count Basie and Albert Murray declare this to be
the aesthetic principle of Basie's autobiography: ". . . I
finally decided to bring in a co-writer and see if I could work
things out with him, the same way that I've spent all of these years
working up materials for the band with my staff arrangers. . . .
[Murray] comps for me pretty much as I have always done for my soloists
. . ." (xiii).
14 For further analysis of debates between proponents of traditional
jazz, swing, and bebop, see Gendron. Mezzrow appropriates patriarchal
structures by celebrating a masculinist ethos of jazz. For a critique
of this position, see Wald and Monson, "The Problem with White
Hipness."
15 Mezzrow's quest for self-knowledge is ultimately connected to
the possibilities implicit in the jazz player's perception of America,
the opportunity for re-inventing and remaking oneself. "I was
. . . a Chicago-born Jew from Russian parents, and I'd hardly ever
been south of the Capone district, but I sounded like I arrived
from the levee last Juvember," Mezzrow boasts (111-112). This
juxtaposition of inherited Jewishness with chosen "blackness"
indicates ways in which the world of entertainment promises discursive
space for self-construction. The son of Jewish immigrants improvises
a new identity that shuttles back and forth between cultural allegiances.
Mezzrow's identity of choice utilizes the appeal of black culture
but retains the possibility of returning to "whiteness"
or "Jewishness"-the performance can be turned on and off.
16 His father reminds him to "sei a mensch" (italics in
the original; 188). Mezzrow translates the phrase from Yiddish as
"to be human." Menshlichkayt signals, in the words of
Irving Howe, "a readiness to live for ideals beyond the clamor
of self, a sense of plebeian fraternity, an ability to forge a community
of moral order even while remaining subject to a society of social
disorder . . ." (645).
17 It is impossible to tell exactly how much of the autobiography
is Dufty's invention and how much of it is based on his personal
knowledge of Holiday and on press material available to him. But
according to Farah Jasmine Griffin, "[s]o much of the autobiography
repeats information appearing in interviews given years before its
publication" that we can assume that "she had some role
in constructing the way her story would be told" (51).
18 O'Meally bases his argument on Phyllis Rose's Jazz Cleopatra:
Josephine Baker in Her Time (New York: Doubleday, 1989).
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