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The tenor of recent jazz discourse more than suggests an escalating
antagonism among factions engaged in the interchange; it also belies
the utopian facade of racial harmony romanticized throughout much
of the historical narrative. Although notions of race are deeply
embedded in jazz discourse, the debate has evolved from the simple
black-corporeal/white-cognitive binary, evident in much early jazz
criticism, into a more complex postmodern struggle for representation
and ownership. One result of this shift in tone (apparent in both
formal and informal jazz writing and general jazz discourse) is
mounting tension between an ever-growing black subjectivity and
agency, and normalized white subjectivity habituated by a race-based
hierarchy of power. Two examples of the shift can be seen in responses
to the recent publication of Richard Sudhalter's Lost Chords: the
Contributions of White Musicians to Jazz, 1915-1945, and reaction
to Ken Burns's 10-part film entitled Jazz.
This essay surveys the history of jazz writing and asks questions
about the intent, function, and effect of formal and colloquial
jazz discourse-specifically jazz criticism and Internet discussions.
My position in this paper is an investigative take on possible causes
for this latest iteration of racialized and revisionist discourse.
In this exploratory study, I will argue that although mainstream
jazz discourse has expanded to include heretofore excluded black
perspectives-including professional jazz critics and the general
black jazz consuming public- old anxieties around race and representation
persist. How these anxieties relate to a growing cultural trend
of portraying whites as victims will also be explored.
Characterizing Ken Burns's Jazz as an historical misrepresentation
filled with "distortions, omissions and fabrications,"
critic Jonathan Yardley also suggests in a February 5, 2001, Washington
Post column that only "die-hard aficionados" and those
"keenly attuned to the subtlest nuances of race relations in
the United States" bothered to tune in. Yardley reports that
he was able to divide, by race, responses to an earlier article
he had written about the program in which he criticized the film
for "so obsessively plac[ing] race at the center of the tale
that it manage[d] to politicize it." He was able to make this
determination because his critique "sat well with some readers
(mostly white) . . . but poorly with others (mostly black)."
What may be driving this discourse-along with abiding representations
of sexualized black bodies and the metonymic function of jazz for
freedom, transgression, and licentiousness-is the perceived expurgation
of white influences in the making of the music, or what Yardley
describes as "gratuitous slights on even the finest white jazz
musicians."
In the ever widening rift of postmodern social relations, particularly
racial and cultural difference, critics and fans argue that jazz
is elementally equal parts African and European. The attenuation
of black influence in the music, coupled with calls for a color-blind
outlook, only thinly veil anxieties of erasure in an ever expanding
concept of what constitutes American culture. While jazz discourse
has become much more nuanced, it remains firmly rooted in an black/white
binary. As ever, such representations are associated less with the
creation and more with dissemination and consumption of the music.
I
No longer excoriated as the "low streak" of American
expressive culture, jazz has ascended to the status of art in America
and throughout the world. Yet, despite this cultural evolution and
cachet, jazz also endures as trope for the exotic, the sublime,
and the taboo. In the 2001 electronic version of Webster's Collegiate
Thesaurus, the following words are listed as synonyms for jazz:
nonsense, baloney, bull, bushwa, crap, flimflam, guff, malarkey,
moonshine, and poppycock. And elsewhere in our complex postmodern
commercial world, "jazz" often denotes emotion and sensuality.
One example is an automobile manufacturer's use of Sarah Vaughan's
lush and sonorous vibrato's longing coo of
Key Largo
Alone on Key Largo
How empty it seeeeeems
With only my dreeeeeams . . .
. . . as the product glides across the 7-mile bridge in light,
air, and mist almost palpable to the flesh. This specific example
of how music functions in the world of commerce is a rather cogent
linking of jazz with sensuality. And, with regards to the corporeal,
there is, of course, sex. In nearly any film or television program
with a music track, it is not the perfectly metered plink plink
plink of a harpsichord, but the wail of a jazz saxophone that signifies
the sexual touch before the fade to black. Without suggesting that
other musical genres are not as frequently mined for their evocative
prowess, jazz has somehow settled in our collective consciousness
as metaphor for antipathy, desire, and release. Perhaps Vaughan's
rendition of Key Largo was selected to sell the luxury vehicle for
the sheer visual and aural beauty conjured by their combination,
but it is just as likely that the voice was chosen for its utter
sensuality - desire is so precisely captured you virtually feel
the sound.
Although this admittedly incomplete summary of evocations of the
unrestrained and the sensual as they relate to jazz are as old as
the music, the connotations have not always been the favorable surfeit
of excitement and pleasure we associate with it today. In contrast
with these postmodern notions of desire, jazz once evoked anxiety
and contempt, as illustrated in a 1918 New Orleans newspaper article
quoted a length below:
Why is the jass music, and, therefore, the jass band? As well ask
why is the dime novel or the grease-dripping doughnut. All are manifestations
of a low streak in man's tastes that has not yet come out in civilization's
wash. Indeed, one might go farther, and say that jass music is the
indecent story syncopated and counterpointed. Like the improper
anecdote, also, in its youth, it was listened to behind closed doors
and drawn curtains, but, like all vice, it grew bolder until it
dared decent surroundings, and there was tolerated because of its
oddity. . . . On certain natures loud sound and meaningless noise
has an exciting, almost an intoxicating effect, like crude
colors and strong perfumes, the sight of flesh or the sadic pleasure
in blood. To such as these the jass music is a delight . . . . In
the matter of jass, New Orleans is particularly interested, since
it has been widely suggested that this particular form of musical
vice had its birth in this city-that it came, in fact, from doubtful
surroundings in our slums. We do not recognize the honor of parenthood,
but with a story in circulation it behooves us to be last to accept
the atrocity in polite society, and where it has crept in we
should make it a point of civic honor to suppress it.1
-emphasis added
Gerald Early advises that "Jazz was suspect or disliked simply
because its origins lie with a group of degraded and socially outcast
people,"2 yet eight decades of popular exposure and access
to jazz have given audiences time to cultivate enjoyment and acceptance
of this American production. Long after this newspaper's disavowal
of jazz, because of its "uncivilized" origins and "doubtful
surroundings," evidence of a struggle for acknowledgment and
credit for jazz's past, present, and future can be gleaned from
recent writing about jazz. One example is a February 2001 letter
to the editor in response to the recent Ken Burns Jazz mega series.
On the one hand, unlike the New Orleans newspaper reporter, the
letter writer champions jazz and the possibility that the series
may have introduced jazz to a previously uninitiated audience. On
the other hand, like the 1918 New Orleans reporter, the 2001 letter
writer does express anxiety about the racial associations of jazz.
The letter reads in part, "[w]hile it's hard to knock any program
that has a chance of introducing Americans (particularly young Americans)
to a pantheon of great American music and musicians, I, too, have
been disappointed at the racial overkill in the series."3 By
distinguishing Ken Burns' interpretation of jazz history from the
music itself, and by no means eschewing the music altogether as
did the 1918 report because of its putative origins and feared deleterious
affect on the general public, the new letter's admonition is instead
similar to one heard in much of recent jazz discourse - in order
to keep jazz palatable for all Americans, refiguring the music's
genealogy is necessary, and avoiding overt references to race is
essential. Now that jazz is fully American as the 2001 letter suggests
and no longer the cultural atrocity to be hidden in societies's
basement, foregrounding the music's pedigree may disrupt some consumer's
reception and enjoyment. Race, at this late date, seems only to
muddy American's clear cultural waters, making the distance that
jazz has traversed from "We do not recognize the honor of parenthood
. . . and where it has crept in we should make it a point of civic
honor to suppress it," to "a pantheon of great American
music and musicians" a remarkable account.
For a music discounted as the faddish entertainment of an historically
disfavored segment of American society and declared dead more than
once in its 100-year history, jazz's journey from humble beginnings
to international acclaim is a marvelous one. Although as equally
racialized as its modern precursor, postmodern jazz discourse carries
a distinctive tone unique to a time that finds America engaged in
the project of determining what constitutes American culture. Despite
being salted with racial signifiers, the lingua franca of postmodern
jazz discourse has shifted away from the twentieth century demonization
of the music because of its racial pedigree and instead now focuses
on the twenty-first century contestation of the pedigree itself,
a shift possibly caused in part by the hard earned cultural capital
of the music. The conundrum then is how can a music, and its history,
represent the complexities of America and also be the creation of
a marginalized and vilified segment of American society. Might the
expediency to redefine what constitutes American culture have some
bearing on efforts to re-imagine a utopian and unfractured America
and, by extension, its cultural productions, specifically jazz music?
The American preoccupation with defining and describing itself can
be read in responses to significant events in our collective experience
such as, for instance, the above mentioned reaction to the popularization
of jazz in New Orleans in 1918. Jazz and its musical antecedents,
because of their uniquely American pedigree, or, as Antonín
Dvorák appraised in 1893, American Negro music's centrality
in the founding of any uniquely American music, provide a useful
lense through which to read this process of self definition and
the evidence the process leaves in its wake. According to Dvorák,
Negro melodies "must be the real foundation of any serious
and original school of composition to be developed in the United
States."4 However, as we have seen, the argument of this observer
of American culture was counterpointed twenty-five years later in
1918 by the opinion articulated in the New Orleans article cited
earlier. Gerald Early explains these differing lines of thinking
thusly:
In the 1920s there was a conflict occurring about the racial origins
and the racial future of the American self. It was largely a battle
about authenticity and authenticating a glorious or at least praiseworthy
heritage of achievement. This authenticating heritage became, in
effect, an authenticating essence of some sort of national or racial
peoplehood. Jazz became one of the major cultural happenings of
the twenties in which this preoccupation with authenticating the
American self in racial and national ways was most intense.5
In his essay "The Meaning of Lindbergh's Flight," the
popular responses John W. Ward cites from many contemporaneous sources
capture the popular fervor resulting from the success of the solo
May 1927 transatlantic jump. Pointing up the social significance
of that flight, Ward writes,
the moment he landed at Le Bourget, Lindbergh became, as the New
Republic noted 'ours . . . . He is no longer permitted to be himself.
He is US personified. He is the United States.' Ambassador Herrick
introduced Lindbergh to the French, saying, 'This young man from
out of the West brings you better than anything else the spirit
of America,' and wired to President Coolidge, 'Had we searched all
America we could not have found a better type than young Lindbergh
to represent the spirit and high purpose of our people.' This was
Lindbergh's fate, to be a type. A writer in the North American Review
felt that Lindbergh represented 'the dominant American character,'
he 'images the best' about the United States. And an ecstatic female
in the American Magazine, who began by saying that Lindbergh 'is
a sort of symbol. . . . He is the dream that is in our hearts,'
concluded that the American public responded so wildly to Lindbergh
because of 'the thrill of possessing, in him, our dream of what
we really and truly want to be.'6
The popular fervor of Lindbergh's accomplishment brings to mind
the particularized passion for jazz music. And, given its vilified
pedigree and contested history, it is both ironic and exhilarating
- at lest to jazz fans - that the music's present-day world-wide
cultural utility can in some ways be compared with the impact of
Lindbergh's accomplishment. With extreme license, I argue that recent
events in the ongoing discourse, although not solely responsible
for its present discordant tenor, may be viewed as similarly stirring
to the popular imagination as the Lindbergh event. Consider the
following interpolation of Ward's report:
. . . from the moment [jazz] landed . . . [it] became . . . 'ours
. . . [Jazz was] no longer permitted to be [itself. It] is US personified.
[Jazz] is the United States.' [It] brings you better than anything
else the spirit of America' . . . . 'Had we searched all America
we could not have found a better type . . . to represent the spirit
and high purpose of our people.' [Jazz] represented 'the dominant
American character,' [it] 'images the best' about the United States.
. . . [Jazz] 'is a sort of symbol . . . what we really and truly
want to be.'
Although the cultural status of jazz is no longer contested, the
cultural capital attending its status coupled with arguments about
jazz's genealogy may explain some of the rancor associated with
the current discourse. And as was the case with Lindbergh's flight,
the influence of major jazz events also generate responses from
which readings of the extent to which their impact has on the continuing
discourse can be measured. One such event occurred of late.
II
Ken Burns' Jazz: A History of America's Music (KBJ) - a 10-tape
VHS set, a 10-disc DVD edition, a 490-page coffee-table book, a
five-CD boxed set, and an interactive web site - aired in ten installments
on Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) stations in early 2001. And,
as early as February 10, 2001, a Billboard article reported that
KBJ "debuted to an audience of 13 million viewers [on] January
8," which, according to a February 5 Cahners Business Information
report, translates to a 3.6 rating, nearly double the average PBS
prime time 2-point rating. Cahners also reported that the "five-CD
boxed set . . . had sold more than 500,000 copies as of January
12" thereby achieving "gold" status in sales. Additionally,
scores of newspaper and magazine reports, website dialogues, and
internet chats presaged, punctuated, and trailed the broadcast.
KBJ, multi-layered, grandly presented, and broadly realized in its
media scope and saturation, simply stated, was a major cultural
event, and, evinced by the volume and pitch of the discourse surrounding
the film, this event caused a stir that continues to resonate throughout
the jazz community many months after its initial airing. But KBJ
not only captured the public's imagination, its multi-media approach
to the subject also created a residual product: a wealth of documented
responses to the broadcast that lay ready for mining - mining for
meaning(s) of the event and the music to the multi-faceted audience
who received it in one or more of its iterations, and for insight
into the nature(s) of the vast KBJ and jazz audience itself. Enlivened
by KBJ, audiences, old and new, contributed to the jazz discourse
with their flood of documented responses to the event, responses
that reflect recent shifts in the jazz narrative. Their responses
are a significant installment to the evolving narrative, and reading
those responses is the focal point of this essay. Inasmuch as the
argument for the centrality of black culture to any definition of
American culture is not new, the scale on which KBJ presented the
argument and the audience to which it was presented was significant.7
Burns' two earlier popular and critical successes with baseball
and the Civil War made, by default, his treatment of jazz the highly
anticipated event that it was, and, having the measurable impact
on the audience that it did, it further invigorated the ever vocal,
if elite and shifting, jazz audience. KBJ's unprecedented media
scope, particularly the more than 18 hours of film, broadened the
discourse by engaging a largely uninitiated audience, if only for
the duration of the series. Burns undertook this years-long project
of telling a story of jazz because the subject interested him, as
did baseball and the Civil War, and, specifically, because he believed
that "[j]azz has offered a precise prism through which so much
of American history can be seen - it is a curious and unusually
objective witness to the 20th Century."8 He further describes
the significance of jazz for him as,
a story about race and race relations and prejudice, about minstrelsy
and Jim Crow, lynchings and civil rights. JAZZ explores the uniquely
American paradox that our greatest art form was created by those
who have had the peculiar experience of being unfree in our supposedly
free land. African-Americans in general, and black jazz musicians
in particular, carry a complicated message to the rest of us, a
genetic memory of our great promise and our great failing, and the
music they created and then generously shared with the rest of the
world negotiates and reconciles the contradictions many of us would
rather ignore. Embedded in the music, in its riveting biographies
and soaring artistic achievement, can be found our oft-neglected
conscience, a message of hope and transcendence, of affirmation
in the face of adversity, unequaled in the unfolding drama and parade
we call American history.9
This positioning of jazz as a "curious and unusually objective
witness to the 20th Century" is what renders the collected
responses to the series useful in reading perceptions about how
American race matters are received and reproduced.
The broadcast of KBJ opened a usually private, although always spirited,
discourse to a broader audience revealing characteristics and sentiments
of that expanded audience through the many postings, letters, reviews,
and reports the series spurred. These audience responses - full
of meaning for what receivers of the series felt and thought about
jazz music and how they thought KBJ impacted the music - are divisible
into two categories: internet exchanges culled from jazz boards
and websites, referred to here as electronic responses; and published
articles, reviews, and reports, referred to throughout as more orthodox
responses. These reactions captured in the responses to KBJ aptly
represent the tenor of much of current jazz discourse which focuses
on provenance and ontogeny. This current focus sets the new discourse
apart from earlier dialogues, which ostensibly supported the argument
that jazz was the creation of American blacks, but, nevertheless,
linked the music with overly sexualized and debauched black imagery.
That linkage supported the modernist notion of the exotic primitive
and also granted any who partook of black expressive culture permission
to transgress the boundaries of civil society. Ironically, despite
the seditious tone of earlier jazz writing, the discourse rarely
argued the music's pedigree.
KBJ touched an exceptionally sensitive nerve in both the uninitiated
and seasoned jazz consumer, who, in their process of consumption,
catalyzed what Lawrence Levine calls "a process of interaction
between complex texts that harbor more than monolithic meanings
and audiences who embody more than monolithic assemblies of compliant
people."10 Among the stated goals for the project was Burns'
desire to present jazz to the general public as a history of a music,
a history of a people, and to frame jazz as "the only art form
that Americans have ever invented."11 It follows then that
as Levine suggests, the complexities and contradictions apparent
in the people are also apparent in the people's opinions. And, while
a cursory scan of the responses reveals considerable attention paid
to the minutia of "facts" versus "conjecture,"
the refrain of larger contextual issues - such as the meaning behind
how KBJ expanding the jazz audience by popularizing the music, and
the centrality of race in the KBJ story - are also evident.
When asked if he considered himself an expert on jazz after making
KBJ, Burns replied "I'm not an expert in anything. I'm certainly
not a historian. I'm an amateur historian. What I am is a filmmaker,
and I'm curious about the way my country ticks."12 Because
of the controversial nature of Burns' subject and the inherent dynamism
of audiences, it can be argued that audiences imbued the film, book,
and DVD with meaning as individual as themselves. However, more
significant to this discussion is the transformative influence audiences
have on the culture and events they receive and what those reactions
reveal about them.
III
KBJ, because of its scale, set up a new version of an old debate
about race as it relates to jazz - a new debate captured in the
various types of audience responses to the series. Despite differences
between the internet discussants and the orthodox responders mentioned
earlier, we are, nonetheless, able to ascertain subtle distinctions
between the two groups, perhaps because of the uniqueness of each
milieu. Whereas internet posters have an expectation of privacy-the
assumption being that posters and lurkers on the site alike share
a specific interest in the board's subject matter which is usually
more single issue focused than information on the same subject from
a more "public" source-the orthodox responders often speak
to a more general readership. Both audiences and contributors to
these two forums do, however, address the same issues arising in
post-postmodern jazz discourse. This problem of race in jazz discourse
was addressed in a moderated online Grove Music discussion on KBJ
by music scholars and educators Krin Gabbard and Scott DeVeaux.
What follows are excerpts from DeVeaux's and Gabbard's response
to the question, "What about the racial theme in the documentary?"
SD: I have to say that of the criticisms I've seen the one that
I am least in sympathy with is the claim that music really should
be kept separate from politics and that the emphasis on race and
politics is a distorting factor in the film . . . the fact that
jazz was embedded in a history of race relations in American life
I thought was probably the film's greatest strength . . .
KG: I agree, but what I have to add to this is that race is such
a deeply vexing subject for Americans. Americans, black and white
then and now, are deeply conflicted about race. It's almost impossible
to speak about race in the United States without becoming inflammatory
in some way, without offending someone.
SD: Without being misunderstood.
KG: Exactly, so I'm not sure it was a good idea to foreground race
as aggressively as they did. I agree with Scott entirely that it's
work that must be done. That these things must be said. That those
photographs of people being lynched, as well as those photographs
of black Americans experiencing the normal daily humiliation of
the black-American experience must be seen. But I just don't know
how it could have been handled in a way that didn't upset people
and allow cheap shots like 'it's really about the music, it's not
about race'. I also think what's most missing from the programme's
attitude toward race is the really deeply conflicted fascination
that white Americans have with black Americans.
SD: Yes, that's an excellent point.
KG: One could write a history of jazz based on how white people
have tried to cast black people in their own mythology. And at any
given moment you can tease out elements in that fascination that
are profoundly racist but also profoundly envious. White people
are jealous of black people in some ways and they can hate them
and love them and admire them and fear them all at once. And that
is an essential part of the reception of jazz by the white public;
it's an essential part of all those white musicians who listened
so carefully to those black musicians; and it's also an essential
element of the performance practice of a lot of black musicians.
It's impossible to think of Miles Davis without talking about this
strange fascination that whites have for blacks and the way blacks
have responded to that. There is none of this in the Ken Burns documentary.13
In contrast with that modernist discourse briefly mentioned in
the previous section, some segments of the KBJ audience sustain
the tone of the new discourse, a tone that musician and writer Richard
Sudhalter describes in his recent book, Lost Chords: White Musicians
and Their Contribution to Jazz 1915-1945, as a much needed challenge
to a "black creationist orthodoxy."14 The off-putting
asymmetry of this argument, however, is that while overlooking contributions
to jazz by whites would indeed be a troubling omission in the narrative,
narratives placing blacks at the center of jazz's creation and development
are considered outright racist. Accusations of a "black creationist
orthodoxy" recur in responses to KBJ. And, although both electronic
and orthodox media responses are seemingly about the music and KBJ's
interpretation of it, both oblique and acute references to race
are woven into this sustained discussion and reflect the tenor of
the ongoing American discourse on race. So, not surprisingly then,
embedded in these exchanges is jazz's inextricable link with black
American culture and all the psychosocial connotations the linkage
invokes, including a retrenchment on both sides of the racial divide
around who owns jazz and who has the authority to represent and
interpret the music. Again, Gerald Early supposes that the nexus
of black America, white America, and jazz was a "new way to
bring about a sort of racial syncretism by allowing whites to pretend
that they were primitives of some sort, not through sight, not visually
through picture imagination as blackface minstrelsy suggested, but
through sound and one's response to the sound both as adventuresome
musician and as adventuresome audience."15 And in addressing
the effects of long-term pan-racial consumption and re-production
of jazz, Early continues,
Here is the paradox: Blacks may very well have created most American
forms of music and dance, but they certainly could not popularize
them. This means, strictly speaking, that they never created American
popular music and dance but rather contributed a lion's share of
the ideas that helped to shape an American popular imagination.
They constantly needed whites as brokers, intercessors, collaborators,
and promoters in order to help introduce then to a wider audience
and to make the music truly popular.16
Although not provided here, a closer reading of the examples from
both the postings and orthodox sources described above may offer
evidence of how the KBJ audience regarded jazz prior to the event,
and how the audience interpreted and responded to the KBJ version
of jazz, specifically how the series and its products popularized
a once almost cultishly appreciated artform. However, the impact
of KBJ on its audience as well as clues to who comprised that vast
audience - from novice to connoisseur and all points along that
continuum - are evident in the responses to the event. Those sources
will be examined in greater detail below.
The following three examples of responses from the KBJ audience
began to bring into focus an idea of the scope of opinion on the
series' impact and accomplishments, while at the same time revealing
a bit of the controversy surrounding the program. In a July 19,
2001, report from a British monthly, a writer declared, "Ken
Burns' massive documentary . . . tripled sales of jazz CDs in the
US," and "[w]hilst the jazzerati noted its various weaknesses
and ellipses, television critics were largely exuberant."17
Another report from an American weekly presented a very different
facet of the jazz audience under the headline "Burns' Myopic
Jazz Carries a Sour Tune." In this report the writer, Ralph
de Toledano, stated that "Ken Burns not only has a tin ear,
but what he knows about jazz you could stick in a fly's ear."18
The critique further offered that Jazz "was a disaster any
way you look at it . . . [a] voice-over 'Sociology 101'" course,
that espoused a "faded, reactionary propaganda of the dead
left hand" [from a] "black-is-everything school . . .
whose hearts belonged less to jazz and more to Karl Marx."19
The report concluded that KBJ failed its mission and the reason
for the failure was because "Burns chose as his three mentors
jazz writers whose names do not merit mention and Wynton Marsalis,
jazz boss at the Lincoln Center in New York City who should have
his mouth washed out with detergent every time he shoots it off."20
Yet another facet of the jazz audience, reflected in a South African
daily, announced that although "Jazz has come in for flak from
critics in the US . . . [it] has achieved what it set out to do:
make people aware of its existence."21 This small sampling
of varied opinions from differing segments of the KBJ audience may
reveal how individual frames of reference, shaped by experience
and expectations, also shape what has evolved into a very complex
jazz audience. Revisiting Levine helps in understanding the KBJ
audience as "complex amalgams of cultures, tastes, and ideologies
. . . [who] come to popular culture with a past, with ideas, with
values, with expectations, with a sense of how things are and should
be."22 Furthermore, it is probable that in the case of Burns
the filmmaker and KBJ the series and products that "the control
any creator has over the manner in which her or his creation is
received is always incomplete and fragmentary."23 The comprehensiveness
of the KBJ phenomenon and the filmmaker's stated goals notwithstanding,
this multi-layered text invites its audience to make meaning of
it - meaning fomented by each recipients particular preexisting
cultural frame of reference. The postings and reviews produced in
response to the series convey a sense of the varied meanings the
KBJ audience derived and constructed from this event.
Revisiting the audience response above from the British monthly,
which argues that KBJ increased record sales and succeeded in promoting
jazz and informing an otherwise uninitiated fan base, we also see
how the writer marks the distinction between the "jazzerati"
and the general viewing public, pointing up the differing expectations
of both. A poster from the "Now that you've seen 'Jazz'"
thread made the same observation in reporting that,
The strangest thing I find with the whole "controversy"
about this series, is the fact that jazz people think that the flaws
of this series are, 1) unique to this particular film, and have
never before been present in such TV documentaries; and 2) that
because these problems are "unique" to this film by Ken
Burns about Jazz, that they were brought about by a massive conspiracy
directed by Mr. Crouch and Marsalis on the hapless Burns.24
Another poster to the same thread also commented, "Burns is
not concerned with correctness of details because it doesn't matter
to the Great Unwashed."25 These examples illustrate a rather
harshly drawn distinction between the long-term jazz fan and those
new to the music, and it is important to note that this distinction
was most often made in the electronic responses. However, the series
viewer commenting in the American weekly further contrasts the differences
between the seasoned and the novice jazz fan by impugning the filmmaker's
knowledge of jazz and the jazz world, and, consequently, his authority
to treat the subject. One poster registered similar skepticism as
"Kenny B is now PBS' poster boy and America's pop TV historian."26
Another poster also concluded that " . . . the historical background
came across as a Readers Digest summary of history. . . . Wynnie's
scatting and eye rolling was, I guess, aimed at the unwashed masses
. . . And that tender moment when he was asked about 'race' was
way, way too much."27 The middle ground view reflected in the
South African daily praises the efforts of KBJ for expanding the
audience, leaving aside criticisms of specific content and/or structural
flaws. This read of KBJ was also humourously reflected on the web
thus:
I'm outraged! I watched the whole damn episode and not even five
seconds on Peter Brotzmann!!!! Is Burns crazy? Doesn't he realize
if you start at the beginning and use human voices to explain things
that people might learn something? How dare he not pander to the
jazz cognoscente. Clearly, General Motors wanted their money spent
on us, the 1% of the population, and not the idiot 99% of all consumers,
the ones who know or care nothing about jazz. Why, it's pearls before
swine to make jazz compelling to the average Joe. What a pointless
pursuit, when it's *our* sophisticated and arcane tastes that need
confirmation from the mass media. . . .And I'm going to watch every
minute of it just so's I can complain about it.28
These perspectives demarcate the fault line in the jazz audience,
traceable in the proprietary claims by connoisseurs who limit the
scope of who may unselfconsciously receive and enjoy the music in
its popularized form. Returning again to the "Now that you've
seen 'Jazz'" thread, the chauvinism of one hard-core jazz lover
is expressed as " . . . you mean Ossie Davis can have opinions,
but people who have devoted much of their lives to jazz can't? .
. . . Frankly, I think there are some people 'in the jazz community'
who have earned the right to have an opinion about jazz -- at least
as much as actor Davis, who, as far as I know is neither a jazz
musician, a jazz critic, nor has played one on TV."29 - emphasis
added. And concerning Gerald Early's appearance in the series as
a talking head another poster complains, ". . . of the non
musician talking heads he is the only one that hasn't come off like
he doesn't belong discussing Jazz."30 . - emphasis added. How
the posters decide what constitutes authority of experience as it
relates to jazz is an interesting criterion that will not, however
be examined here. What were the conflicting expectations of the
divergent audience sectors, and what was the basis for the differences?
IV
For all the distance between the New Orleans Times-Picayune characterization
of jazz and its place in American culture, and the tenor of the
KBJ audience responses, the debate remains the same. In many ways,
the established jazz community is a self-contained system often
very resistant to incursions from outsiders: a closed "jazz
world" patterned after other systems of organization. It is
a system designed to mediate the creation, distribution, response,
and appreciation of jazz, and as such, does the work of reinscribing
the values of the larger social world. In light of this entrenchment
of values, one might wonder if there exist any hope for dislodging
the world of jazz criticism from its patterning after the larger
social world's race-based hierarchy of power and control. This notion
of a "jazz world" and its relationship with how jazz discourse
has been institutionalized by the community of connoisseurs, writers,
critics, musicians, scholars, and fans will be discussed in slightly
greater detail below. And, although the "connoisseurs"
posting on the "Now that you've seen 'Jazz'" and "Ken
Burns 'Jazz'" threads constitute only a segment of that community,
they often make measurably more contentious arguments in their analyses
of the role of race in jazz discourse and who does and who does
not have the authority to address this issue.
Many connoisseurs, fans, and critics position themselves as the
community responsible for jazz's survival in an era of immense musical
variety and availability and have determined that the popularization
of jazz, by KBJ and other means, has both demystified and dumbed-down
the music, by first seeking to engage a very large and primarily
uninitiated audience followed by foregrounding its pedigree. To
a large degree, the jazz community - in its efforts to define what
is and is not jazz, privileging levels of jazz knowledge, and determining
who does and who does not have the authority to re-present jazz
and jazz history - does the work of institutionalizing jazz discourse.
Borrowing Howard Becker's art worlds analysis mentioned above to
examine the world of jazz discourse, one may argue that the same
apparatuses that regulate other systems of organization also mediate
the jazz discourse. In fact, how people acting collectively define
the character of any given subject is what seems to have occurred
in the dialogic wake of KBJ. The audience reactions to KBJ attempt
to 1) negotiate and determine what collectively agreed upon criteria
constitutes good, innovative, authentic music; 2) decide who is
and who is not innovative, authentic, and qualified to speak authoritatively
about jazz, and; 3) determine to whom and how the music should/will
be produced and consumed.31 The internally imposed censorship Becker
describes as the central feature of "art worlds" with
its coercive and normalizing influence on taste and contingencies
of support (which also reflect overarching social and cultural agendas)
militate against actual democracy and freedom, both often invoked
as tenets of jazz. Social definitions create reality, whose in and
whose out, and what constitutes authority of an individual or group.
Jazz discourse, including what we have heard from the KBJ audience,
is a carefully mediated system - an institution. And, as institutions
exist to reproduce themselves by what Mary Douglas calls in her
analysis of institutions "collective representations"
recreated and preserved with a "self-sustaining functional
loop," jazz discourse is in many ways also sustained by this
doctrine.32 Douglas continues,
Any institution then starts to control the memory of its members;
it causes them to forget experiences incompatible with its righteous
image, and it brings to their minds events which sustain the view
of nature that is complementary to itself. It provides the categories
of their thought, sets the terms for self-knowledge, and fixes identities.33
The new jazz discourse, perhaps seeking to "sustain the view
of nature that is complementary to itself," one in which the
jazz community and all discussion about the music are colorblind,
is poised to "forget experiences incompatible with its righteous
image" by re-visioning the racial history of jazz. Critic Ira
Gitler made it clear in an early 1960s review of Max Roach's Freedom
Now that he considered the audience a key player in the discourse.
His rather harsh characterization of Abbey Lincoln's performance
as being the agitprop of a "professional Negro"34 that
succeeded in alienating the intended audience reveals his assumptions
about who Lincoln's intended audience was. Gitler's marginalization
of Americans involved in the black liberation struggles of the time
who may have empathized with Freedom Now's message and delivery
is curious. The subtext is that references to the stickiness of
American race relations are best left aside when reception of jazz
as pure art is in jeopardy of disruption by such issues.
What DeVeaux and Gabbard earlier concluded about Burns' sharp focus
on race stands in stark contrast with many reviews and postings
on the same subject. One particularly salient counterpoint is critic
Diana West's Weekly Standard article of January 15, 2001, in which
she assesses the film in part "for what it says about a tightly
blinkered view of history and race that has come to dominate the
presentation of music in America."35 West further comments
that Burns relied too heavily on and "found as mentors the
trumpeter Wynton Marsalis and writers Stanley Crouch, Gerald Early,
and Albert Murray, who anchor the commentary for the nineteen-hour
documentary . . . [and] also provide the thematic core of the book."36
What West describes as "freshly shocking" is Burns and
his "mentors" "role in the . . . documentary, . .
. [r]ather than helping viewers to hear the rich and varied history
of jazz, they are there to instruct us in how to see it: as the
exclusive domain of the black, blues-oriented musicians who have
long suffered at the hands of the white and derivative interloper."37
West continues,
The result is a vigorous exercise in political correctness, a distortion
of cultural history that only deepens racial division while ill-serving
the music it sets out to celebrate. Even more dispiriting is the
fact that Ken Burns passed up a genuine opportunity to showcase
one of the only organically and expansively multicultural movements
in American history -- the evolution of jazz.38
At least three letters to the editor support West's critique of
the prominence of race in KBJ. They argue, as does Gitler, that
jazz is best received when not heavy-handedly inscribed with racial
markers. One response to West's article, a letter from Holyoke,
Massachusetts, reads in part, "Diana West is on target in her
view of Ken Burns and jazz. Burns skews culture and history to advance
a political agenda on race, while West's knowledge of an affection
for jazz is obvious."39 Some segments of the jazz audience,
most often the most vocal segment, have made colorblindness a condition
of ones love for the music and the fixity of its status as a pure
art.
Recent jazz writing suggesting that the best and more innovative
jazz produced today emanates not from the United States but from
Europe may have fueled an already fractious discourse. Furthermore,
the rancor expressed in the sources referenced for this essay concerning
the preeminence of race in the jazz narrative may in some way connect
with arguments that situate Europe as the new creative center of
jazz. Might a reasonable supposition be that instances of racialism
in the discourse, though random, are also episodic? And, finally,
what might the timing of KBJ and the ever increasing cultural capital
of jazz (for example, the Jazz at Lincoln Center enterprise, The
Carnegie Hall jazz organization, and the Smithsonian Institution's
Jazz Masterworks Orchestra among others) to do with these racialized
exchanges? Whether or not answers for these questions can be recovered
from internet posts and critical reviews, what seems true for both
the formal and informal written reactions to jazz events in particular
and jazz world in general is that they reveal the respective authors'
feelings about American race relations independent of their jazz
experience.
Given the history of race matters concerning jazz and Americans,
it is difficult to imagine a colorblind jazz world. Might exporting
jazz to a land less rancorously bifurcated by race be the answer
to the question of how one loves something so embedded in so violent
a racial history? And so goes the struggle for stewardship of jazz's
future and authority to interpret its past - who in fact are the
masters and architects of jazz?
Notes
1 "Jass and Jassism," New Orleans Times-Picayune,
June 20, 1918: 4.
2 Gerald Early, "Pulp and Circumstance: The Story of Jazz in
High Places," In The Jazz Cadence of American Culture, ed.
Robert G. O'Meally. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. 404.
3 Russell Evansen, Letter to the editor, The Weekly Standard, sec.
Correspondence, 6, load date, February 5, 2001.
4 Antonín Dvorák, "Real Value of Negro Melodies,"
New York Herald, 21 May 1893.
5 Gerald Early, 241.
6 John W. Ward, "The Meaning of Lindbergh's Flight," American
Quarterly, Volume 10, Issue 1 (Spring, 1958), 6.
7 It is important to note that there are at least three distinct
production and consumption exchanges associated with the KBJ event.
First, there is the music itself and the viewers' relationship to
it prior to their exposure to the series. Next is the presentation
itself, a re-presentation of a creation/reception story of jazz,
in all its complexity and variety, fashioned and refashioned by
its shifting audience over its 100-year life span. The third exchange,
and focal point of this paper, produced the audience responses to
the filmmaker's interpretation and codification of jazz. From the
body of responses to KBJ come many cogent and on-point comments,
including those from two threads on the Jazz Corner website, and
scores of articles and reviews from the orthodox media. The thread
called "Now that you've seen 'Jazz'" ran for 1,382 posts
over the course of six weeks from January 8 through February 21,
2001. A second thread of nearly 600 posts called "Ken Burns
'Jazz'" meandered for 14 months from November 11, 1999, to
January 9, 2000 - a full year in advance of the PBS airing - and
ended the day following the premiere.
8 Ken Burns, 2001. Behind the Scenes, Interview with Ken Burns at
the PBS website. Available: http://www.pbs.org/jazz/about/about_behind_the_scenes3.htm
9 Ibid.
10 Lawrence W. Levine, "The Folklore of Industrial Society:
Popular Culture and Its Audiences," The American Historical
Review, Volume 97, Issue 5 (Dec., 1992), 1381.
11 Burns, 2001. Behind the Scenes.
12 Ibid.
13 From the Grove Music website, "Ken Burns Jazz: A Discussion
with Scott DeVeaux and Krin Gabbard," Available: http://www.grovemusic.com/macmillan-owned/music/feature5.htm
14 Richard Sudhalter, "A Racial Divide That Needn't Be,"
The New York Times, Sunday, January 3, 1999, sec. 2.
15 Early, 408.
16 Early, 418-419.
17 Mark Cousins, Prospect, July, 19, 2001.
18 Ralph de Toledano, Insight On The News, June 11, 2001, sec. The
Last Word, 48.
19 Ibid.
20 Ibid.
21 Don Albert, Financial Mail, May 11, 2001, 84.
22 Levine, "Folklore," 1381.
23 Levine, "Folklore," 1381.
24 From the Jazz Corner website, "Now that you've seen 'Jazz'"
http://www.jazzcorner.com/index2.html, #28.
25"Now that you've seen 'Jazz'", #158.
26 "Now that you've seen 'Jazz,'" #161.
27 Ibid., #97.
28 Ibid., #40.
29 Ibid., #231.
30 Ibid., #260
31 Howard Becker, Art Worlds, Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1982, 149.
32 Mary Douglas, How Institutions Think, (Syracuse: Syracuse University
Press, 1986) 112.
33 Ibid.
34 Ira Gitler, Down Beat, Review of "Straight Ahead,"
(March 1962.)
35 Diana West, The Weekly Standard, January 15, 2001, sec. Books
& Arts; 33.
36 Ibid.
37 Ibid.
38 Ibid.
39 Bill Hassan, The Weekly Standard, sec. Correspondence, 7.
.
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