Blue Notes: Jazz Poetics, Politics and History
Special Issue of Genre, Fall/Winter 2004
No longer accepting submissions

Although Ken Burns’s Jazz series offered an enlightening seminar in the origins of America’s greatest musical art form, to many viewers it promulgated a narrow, tendentious version of the music. Codified most forcefully in Albert Murray’s book Stomping the Blues and passed down by Stanley Crouch and trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, this history declares jazz to be founded upon the blues; thus any form of music–whether improvised or not–whose chord structures or tonalities stray from blues-based harmonies is cast out of the jazz canon. Since jazz is inextricably affiliated with the blues, it is quintessentially African-American music that is best performed by African Americans. Finally, this definition of jazz disdains practically all of the music produced since the 1960s–with the exception, naturally, of the neobop movement spearheaded by Marsalis–as a betrayal of jazz. Although this view has been challenged by many jazz historians and musicians, it holds a good deal of sway in popular and scholarly discussions of the music. Hence the time is ripe for a reconsideration of jazz history and aesthetics that places the music within a more inclusive framework.

Burns’s series also revealed how jazz musicians and writers have fictionalized the music’s origins and mythologized its heroes. Indeed, it becomes clear through the course of the series that jazz history is in many ways a species of fiction or legend, in which certain famous stories–about Buddy Bolden’s mystique, about the death of Bennie Moten, about the birth of bebop, etc.--are embellished and repeatedly recycled. Conversely, jazz fiction and poetry have drawn almost exclusively from figures and movements in jazz history. For example, Michael Harper elevates John Coltrane to an African-American Christ in “Dear John, Dear Coltrane”; John Clellon Holmes’s Edgar Pool, in his novel The Horn, is loosely based upon tenor saxophonist Lester Young; Ross Russell’s hero in The Sound is a thinly disguised portrait of Charlie Parker, and so on. Oddly enough, this large body of jazz fiction and poetry–much of it worthy of concentrated study--has been almost entirely neglected amidst the current revitalization of interest in the music. We might begin our reconsideration, then, by investigating the interpenetration of fact and legend in jazz fiction and nonfiction.

But even the best jazz writing–whether “fiction” or “nonfiction”–has rarely met its greatest challenge: how to render verbally the experience of playing, listening to, or writing music. Whether this is because, to cite the old adage, writing about music is like dancing about architecture–a clash of dissonant art forms--or because few jazz musicians possess the literary skills to translate musical terms into words, and few writers lack the musical knowledge to gain an insider’s purchase on the music, in any case, attempts to create a jazz poetics have been plagued by inconsistencies and misconceptions. One thinks, for example, of Jack Kerouac’s misguided attempt in The Subterraneans to imitate bop improvisation by spontaneous effusions of prose. A few writers (Amiri Baraka, Xam Cartier, Bob Kaufman, Quincy Troupe) have made more successful attempts to capture jazz rhythms and harmonies in words, but this writing (aside from Baraka’s) has been mostly ignored in academic circles.

Much jazz writing has instead concentrated on the political questions surrounding the music, which indeed are significant and complex. For example, is improvisation a peculiarly American activity and jazz a particularly democratic art form? What are the tensions in jazz performance between individualism–the emphasis on soloing–and communal interaction? What are the relationships between mainstream culture and the vanguard, bohemian and “alternative” subcultures of jazz musicians and audiences? How do those jazz subcultures–e.g., West Coast vs. East Coast, regional vs. national, avant-garde vs. traditional, Latino vs. Anglo, African American vs. Caucasian–interact and compete musically, financially, and socially? Who comprises the audiences for the various genres within jazz? How do educational, cultural and commercial institutions such as the educational establishment, music festivals, and record companies, shape the music? To what degree does race matter in jazz performance and composition? Is jazz a dead art form?

This project invites innovative work on these and other questions raised by jazz writing, questions that are, in turn, key questions about American art and culture. I particularly hope to inspire scholars to rediscover the little-known fictional and poetic works involving jazz, and to use them to supplement the theoretical and historical writing that has dominated jazz discourse.

Papers and proposals by June 1, 2003, to:

Mark Osteen
Department of English
Loyola College
4501 N. Charles St.
Baltimore, MD 21210

mailto:mosteen[at]loyola.edu.

New Histories of Writing
A prospective volume sponsored by the Cultures of Writing Project

Currently, the Cultures of Writing project is seeking submissions for a prospective volume, "New Histories of Writing," which will seek to identify, define, and develop a new interdisciplinary research focus combining theories of the material production of texts, the history of the book, information/media studies, and histories and practices of writing instruction. We wish to interrogate the boundaries between such disciplinary endeavors that, by categorizing textual production into segregated forms and genres, elide important ideological relationships among a variety of writing practices, while exaggerating claims of coherence within their own domains. The goal is to foster conversation among scholars within these fields with an eye to discerning 1) the ways in which the material history of writing, broadly conceived, sheds light on current sites, structures, technologies and economies of writing, and 2) how recent changes in our own discourse environments may provide new insight into the work of writing in the past.

We anticipate that the volume will be loosely organized around consideration of the following areas: sites of writing (geographies, institutions, disciplines); forms of writing (textual elements, conventions, and generic considerations); economies of writing (the market, legal considerations, circulation systems); and technologies of writing (the pen, the press, the Internet, page or screen). Scholars engaged in work in the history of the book and the cultural studies of texts are encouraged to reflect on the ways in which their research has relevance to recent forms and practices, while pedagogical theorists are invited to consider how classroom activities might benefit from interrogation of the cultural/historical forces (socioeconomic, political, legal, material, etc.) that have shaped them.

Suggested topics include, but are not limited to: the material history of forms, norms, conventions, rules, rituals, and rhetorics (e.g., the expository essay, the thesis, citation practices, grammar drills or process writing); new analyses of authorship, including student authorship, ownership, and collaboration; the business of writing/writing of business; histories and ethnographies, especially sustained analyses of specific discourse communities; the relationship between present and past pedagogies; metropolitan and/or imperial writing instruction; histories of "creative" writing or other genres or disciplines of writing; histories of nontraditional forms and practices; print culture dominance in the classroom; the pencil/press/computer and writing; histories and futures of publishing.

New Histories of Writing: Investigations of the ways in which the "material" history of writing sheds light on current sites, structures, technologies and economies of writing, and how recent changes in our own discourse environments may provide new insight into the work of writing in the past. We expect to submit a table of contents to prospective publishers by 1 May 2003.

If you are interested in contributing to the volume, contact:

Lisa Maruca (lisa.maruca[at]wayne.edu)
or Martha Woodmansee (maw4[at]cwru.edu)