Music Colloquium Series: AJ Kluth (CWRU)

AJ Kluth
Friday, September 9, 2022

Harkness Chapel, Classroom

Music colloquia provide a weekly forum for presentation and discussion of recent research by distinguished visitors and CWRU faculty and graduate students in musicology, historical performance practice, and music education.

All talks happen on Fridays at 4:00 PM in Harkness Classroom and are open to the public. 

About the Talk

“What is this Revenant called Jazz?: Nostalgia, Value, and Racialized Listening”

Jazz hasn’t been “popular music” for sixty years and a growing series of movements assert that jazz is, in fact, dead. Yet, something called “jazz” still stalks. Have rumors of jazz’s death been exaggerated? Is this zombie jazz? Something else? Evidently, something called “jazz” persists as a problematic and unresolved category upon whose ostensive grave some artists, communities of cultural expression, and related markets are productively dancing. This paper—part of a developing monograph—addresses some of the why, how, and “so what” of that “dance cadaverous.”

I’ll review some of what we already know: the historical refusal of “jazz” as a limiting category; criticisms of neoclassical jazz’s demands to establish musical aesthetics and strategies around which to secure institutional support and stockpile economic and cultural capital; the institutionalization of jazz education that has enshrined jazz in a gate-kept and dominantly white academic space supported by problematic historical narratives and colorblind politics that obscure the music’s racialized history.

Looking beyond these I consider how, through the growth of a record label and performance series in Los Angeles, international music festivals, and the music and rhetoric of Nicholas Payton, Theo Croker, and Kassa Overall, the assertion that “Jazz Is Dead” is becoming an aesthetic and a brand. This paper investigates what kind of work those demands to divest-from or refigure a relationship to “jazz” might do for musicians and communities of cultural production. 

About the Speaker

AJ Kluth is a musicologist with interdisciplinary interests in music and philosophy. Primarily concerned with music after 1950, his teaching and research focus on experimentalisms, popular music, and aesthetics. His publications appear in the Journal of Jazz StudiesThe International Journal of New Media, Technology, and the Arts, and DownBeat Magazine and he has presented research at conferences throughout the United States, UK, and Europe. As a saxophonist, he has worked in American and European scenes and has been a teaching artist for the Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz. 


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