30041955

Conversing with Ourselves: Canon, Freedom, JazzAuthor(s): Catherine Gunther KodatSource: American Quarterly, Vol. 55, No. 1 (Mar., 2003), pp. 1-28Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30041955 .Accessed: 01/02/2014 15:57

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Conversing with Ourselves: Canon, Freedom, Jazz

CATHERINE GUNTHER KODAT Hamilton College

Jazz is not what it "is" .. . it is what it is used for.

-Theodor W. Adorno, "On Jazz"'

I. Dux

OF COURSE I MEAN TO BE PROVOCATIVE IN PLACING A QUOTATION FROM Adorno's notorious essay on jazz at the head of my own rather elliptical consideration of modernism and jazz in canon. Since my broader concern (unfortunately only lightly touched upon here) is less with demonstrating the modem-ness of jazz, or the jazziness of the modem, than with exploring how a set of expressive practices common to modem literature and jazz music-for example, condensation, frag- mentation, and the innovative use of "found" material, articulated always with an eye toward a prior "tradition"-figure the problem of human freedom in the age of mechanical reproduction, opening with Adorno's fraught and widely misunderstood effort to grasp the nature of jazz's relationship to the culture industry seems a potentially fruitful way to begin. For despite the narrowness of its conception (a narrowness due not only to Adorno's limited experience with jazz but also to the moment in jazz's own historical unfolding in which "On Jazz" was written), I have found his essay's exploration of precisely what jazz "expresses" useful to my own effort to think through problems of innovation and freedom in modernism,2 and how those problems are

Catherine Gunther Kodat is an associate professor of English and American studies at Hamilton College.

American Quarterly, Vol. 55, No. 1 (March 2003) 2003 American Studies Association 1


2 AMERICAN QUARTERLY

embedded in contemporary processes of canon formation, processes perhaps best described as efforts to update-or modernize-how we go about the business of literature, the business of music, the business of art: in short, the business of culture.

I emphasize the word business by way of indicating the relationship of contemporary canon formation-in literature, in visual art, in music-to the marketplace, what John Guillory, in his study of literary canon formation, reminds us is the "inescapable horizon of social life."3 The market is also the inescapable horizon of jazz, and not just because jazz is an aspect of life: when we consider New Orleans's Congo Square as the originating locus of American jazz, the connection between jazz and exchange starts to appear more than merely acciden- tal. Marshall Steams places the beginnings of jazz in the Congo Square dancing and socializing permitted African slaves in antebellum New Orleans; the dances, which records indicate began as early as 1817, became an important tourist attraction for the city.4 One could even say that the links binding freedom, commodification, and jazz music were first forged in these highly structured and supervised stagings of the musical expressions of "property,"5 and that jazz's later, complex relationship to mechanical reproduction in the Fordist (and post- Fordist) culture industry largely follows from these historical conditions of its emergence. So now let me pose the guiding question of my discussion: what does it mean to create a canon (for we are already far down the road of jazz canon formation; indeed, Ken Burns's Jazz would be unimaginable were we not) and thus, inescapably, a market niche, for jazz without acknowledging how its relationship to the marketplace has always been vexed-and, as Adorno claims, so frequently audible? In regards to literary canon formation, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. has written humorously that being on the "A list of great literature" guarantees authors a "payout" that is "all perks,"6 and it is primarily the completely justified conviction that it is high time jazz music and musicians collected some overdue "payout"-or rather, payback, spiritual as well as material-that motivates the new champions of jazz canon formation. But canon formation for any art form comes at a cost (one does not enter into exchange, after all, without giving something up), and it seems to me that those costs emerge with particular clarity in the case of jazz. Are there not other ways of imagining a musical canon that might be more appropriate to the case of jazz than one rooted in concepts of law and of mastery?7


CONVERSING WITH OURSELVES 3

In working through those questions, I turn now to Adorno's "On Jazz," reading the essay largely as an early attempt to describe jazz's relationship to the "laws" of production and consumption established within the culture industry. As Jamie Owen Daniel has shown, Adorno was inspired in writing "On Jazz" by his friend Walter Benjamin's essay on film, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduc- tion."8 Adorno imagined "On Jazz" as a companion piece to Benjamin's insofar as it posed a similar question-is there any progressive social potential in the new industrial mass media of film, radio, and sound recordings?-and explored similar issues: the possibilities such media present to the emerging fascist regimes, and the degree to which these media promote "the adjustment of reality to the masses and of the masses to reality".9 As was the case with Benjamin's approach to film, Adorno's concern was not primarily with "jazz as such, but rather ... its commercial production and consumption in the Europe of the 1930s ... and the extent to which [jazz was] incorrectly believed to represent a liberation."10 In this sense, then, "On Jazz" marks one of the very earliest attempts to think through modern white fantasies of "primi- tive," "vital" black energies, and the supposedly salubrious effect such energies, allegedly liberated through jazz music, would have on "repressed" white psyches.

Indeed, the most frequently-cited (and, for many readers, the most shocking) moment in the essay-Adorno's claim that, in jazz, "the skin of the black man functions as much as a coloristic effect as does the silver [sic] of the saxophone"-arises precisely from Adorno's effort to grasp the relationship between, on the one hand, the historical realities of jazz as African American music and, on the other hand, culture industry packaging of jazz as African American music, and the degree to which this packaging disguises some of the ideological uses to which the music is put. " That Adorno was not well-positioned to explore the first premise (that is, jazz's historical relationship to African American experience) does not, it seems to me, automatically nullify the value of his attention to the second. This becomes clearer when we realize that the specific musical examples Adorno cites in the article can best be described not as examples of jazz but precisely as examples of culture industry "jazz use": Ray Noble's "Isle of Capri" and "Tiger Rag," and Paul Whiteman's "Valencia."12 Adorno was a critic of culture industry, not a jazz aficionado: his interest was exactly in what was popular, what sold, what received the most radio play, not in what was



developing on the streets and in the clubs. Once this is clearly understood-once Adorno's analysis is placed in the context of the swing era, with its "new mass audience [of] mostly white, youthful, and relatively affluent" Americans and Europeans, with its "system of economic interdependence in which individual musicians played clearly defined roles," its "virtually inescapable" "networks of production and dissemination controlled from New York and Los Angeles" that required "the individual [musician] to yield more and more autonomy to the system"3-Adomo's "On Jazz" can no more be styled a simple "attack" on the whole of jazz than can Pat Metheny's outburst about Kenny G. It is, however, a discussion of what culture industry presents as "jazz"; this is the case even though Adorno himself seems uncertain of the degree to which the bracketed subject of his analysis-that is, jazz as such-is a creation of culture industry or its captive.14

I should make clear that, though his work is obviously crucial to some aspects of my argument, my point is not to "redeem" Adorno's complex and problematic critique of culture industry, but rather to indicate its continuing importance in a world where "administered" culture remains a concern, if one acknowledged only in passing, and where technology (understood as the realm of mechanical reproduction largely conceived) has considerably altered our understanding of technique. By technique I mean the physically expressive capacities of the human body-ears, eyes, fingers, mouth, lungs, limbs-that demand education (training) and daily work (practice) to maintain a level of expressive skill imagined in terms of the analog (the representative) rather than the digital (the replacement). Seeing this connection between culture industry and pedagogy has led me to think about the possibility of linking Frankfurt School critique with the social analysis of Pierre Bourdieu, whose work (though here largely filtered through John Guillory's study) is just as important to this essay as Adorno's. Thus, and despite its very real limitations (which I am interested in exploring, not defending), "On Jazz" has value for critics interested in thinking through problems of freedom and resistance in cultural productions, particularly as they are expressed in movements, like literary modernism and jazz music, that draw upon and blend "high" and "low" cultural styles, and that require of their audiences some degree of training or education in order to realize their full effects.'5 Like film, the subject of Benjamin's critique, modem jazz is a creature of, and so thus expressive of, the contradictions of Western industrial



capitalism: jazz seems to speak the language of resistance and subver- sion, but it is nonetheless enmeshed in the imperatives of capitalist production and consumption. It is quite literally the case that modem jazz as we know it and hear it could not exist without the means of mechanical reproduction: I have yet to discover a jazz history book that fails to mention those artists of the early twentieth century who died unrecorded and thus come down to us only as lost voices in the narrative of jazz history.16 One measure of the degree to which the commercial audio recording has been almost completely naturalized- rather than critically examined-as the primary instrument of jazz history transmission (and now jazz canonization) is the breathless tone in which viewers were informed, in the second installment of Ken Bums's Jazz, that the legendary trumpeter Freddie Keppard actually refused to be recorded."7

It is very much the problem of jazz's relationship to capitalist regimes of consumption and mechanical reproduction that Adomo hears expressed in the music itself, and it is to his credit (given what he's listening to) that he does in fact understand that the power of jazz resides in its potential "element of interference" (56) with the status quo, an interference that Adomo hears in jazz's liberal use of syncopation and vibrato (which he calls, suggestively, an effort to register "the possibility of letting the rigid vibrate" [47]). This promise of interference is further elaborated in the relationship between production and reproduction as it is expressed in jazz improvisation: "the piece as such ... is banal; its reproduction is characteristic, exquisite, virtuoso, often disguising the piece to the point of unrecognizability" (55). We need only supply, as an example of a banal "piece as such," something along the lines of "I Got Rhythm," "Tea for Two," or-and at a later historical point-"My Favorite Things" to grasp Adomo's point here. Yet Adomo seems to anticipate what jazz history itself has shown: despite the exquisite, virtuosic effort lavished over these "banal" chord changes, the work, and the artist, can nonetheless remain immured in culture industry: "'Once I was standing next to Coltrane after he finished playing "My Favorite Things" in a club,' a renowned singer recalls. 'He told me that he was so tired of audiences requesting the tune, he was sorry he ever recorded it in the first place.'"18

The "ambivalent use" of jazz music on popular radio and in European dance halls led Adomo to conclude that the music expressed less a reality of social opposition than its never-to-be-fulfilled dream, a



point he develops in his discussion of the problems faced by the jazz arranger:

The interjection of the interpreter or arranger in jazz does not permit ... a real altering of the material in order to give rise to a subjective proclamation. The stimulation and the artistic piece, the new color and the new rhythm, are merely inserted along with the [pre-existing] banal-just as the jazz vibrato is inserted into the rigid sound, and syncopation in the basic meter. This element of interference in jazz is accomplished by the arrangement of the composition. But its contours remain the old ones. The schema can still be heard, even through the most digressive breaks in the arrangement. (56)

In other words, it would be precisely the continued detectability, however faint, of Rodgers and Hammerstein's "My Favorite Things" in the interstices of John Coltrane's choruses that, for Adomo, shackles jazz's promise of human freedom. As he puts it more directly, the jazz musician "is permitted to tug at the chains of his boredom, and even to clatter them, but he cannot break them" (56).

It would be wrong to imply that Adomo's concern was with the degree to which a capitalist culture industry had maimed an original liberatory jazz impulse, if only because Adorno's relentlessly dialectical method would see the recovery of such an impulse as a highly dubious proposition. And it is here that critics of "On Jazz" do the greatest disservice to the essay: they consider it in a kind of double isolation, first by ignoring or minimizing the very real differences between what Adomo heard as jazz and what most readers today understand jazz to be; then by failing to see how his essay works as part of a larger critique of culture industry "pre-digestion" of music generally. Indeed, the claim that Adorno's criticism of jazz must stem from his own racism or anti-American elitism can only be made if one is unfamiliar with his equally scathing attacks on such culture industry phenomena as the celebrity of Arturo Toscanini and the programming practices of "classical" music radio.19

Most important, though, is the need to place "On Jazz" in the context of Adorno's overall critique of art in society. As Aesthetic Theory makes clear, even those works of art seemingly most authoritatively autonomous, and so most expressive of human freedom, bear witness to the "unfreedom" that gave them birth and that perpetuates their power.20 In a fallen world, only the artwork's capacity for dialectical "immanent critique"-that is, its ability to engage critically with the material conditions (political, social, economic) that actually make its



emergence possible-has the potential to redeem its complicity with social and political dominance. For Adorno, then, jazz's "failure" lies precisely in the fact that immanent critique is detectable in the music, even as it is smothered in its swinging cradle. But what Adorno could not see in 1936 (and what he could not hear, with the examples of Paul Whiteman and Ray Noble before him) was the degree to which jazz recognized its potential as the "immanent critique" of both Western art music and popular musical production in the "free jazz" movement of the 1960s.

I want to return to the specific example of Coltrane's "My Favorite Things," which was released twenty-four years after Adorno's essay and which serves to illustrate both the strengths and limitations of "On Jazz." Gates has cited Coltrane's recording as an instance of African American signifying; it is, he writes, a sly revision of the "Julie Andrews's version."21 However, a quick date check shows that Coltrane's recording was released five years before the 20th Century Fox film and just one year after Mary Martin won a Tony award for her performance as Maria von Trapp in the original Broadway version of The Sound of Music. In fact, Ingrid Monson raises the distinct possibility that Coltrane had never heard anyone sing the song before he blew it through his horn:

"My Favorite Things" was not widely known at the time [of Coltrane's album release], for the Broadway show . . . for which it was originally written, had only been in production for approximately one year. A song plugger supplied the sheet music to the Coltrane quartet while they were performing at Joe Termini's Jazz Gallery in New York in 1960. McCoy Tyner reported that he was not very enthusiastic about the tune at first, but Coltrane was. One of the things about it that appealed to audiences, according to Tyner, was that it was in triple meter (3/4) at a time when very few jazz tunes ventured beyond duple meter: "The audience really liked it, the way we played it in three-quarter time. It was probably the only jazz waltz they'd ever heard since Sonny Rollins's 'Valse Hot.' So John decided to record it on his next album."22

While it is highly doubtful, then, that Coltrane had a particular performance of "My Favorite Things" in mind as an object of his signifying-and while it is even more unlikely that jazz audiences in 1960, when Coltrane was trying out the tune in his club dates, heard it as a critical revision and repetition of a prior vocal performance-it is nevertheless the case that his interpretation departs from the Rodgers and Hammerstein original in ways that are musically important and



unique to jazz.23 Monson in fact does see Coltrane's "My Favorite Things" as a type of signifying text, but her additional observations that the recording "invokes some of the standards of European classical music against European American musical theater songs" and that "jazz musicians . . . are able to invoke selectively some of the hegemonic standards of Western classical music in their favor" (119, 120) implies a broadly Adornian ideal of aesthetic immanent critique, as well. This is especially so when we recall how "My Favorite Things" later "became a vehicle for extended improvisations by Coltrane and his group" as they embraced some of the emerging free jazz principles of performance in improvisations that "became a symbol of increas- ingly open direction in improvisational aesthetics" but that also "fueled the criticism of jazz critics that Coltrane played 'too long'" (107). Coltrane's later, extended forays through "My Favorite Things" can, in fact, be seen as an effort to release his work (rather than the Rodgers and Hammerstein original) from culture industry constraints that led audiences to demand the tune repeatedly in its most recognizable, commercial (and shortest) form. The later versions of "My Favorite Things" do indeed signify: on the first Coltrane recording as a culture industry captive. "My Favorite Things" thus simultaneously demonstrates the merits of Adorno's thesis ("he was sorry he ever recorded it in the first place") and its drawbacks, insofar as Adorno was unable to predict jazz's potential to develop an immanent critique of culture industry aesthetics.

As it happens, though, the free jazz movement that enabled Coltrane's most radical departures from culture industry imperatives has presented some knotty problems for the new jazz canon-which we might describe as an effort to establish a "law" for jazz consumption under the regime of capital. Perhaps the most forceful and public effort to establish a contemporary jazz canon can be seen in Wynton Marsalis's still-ongoing tenure as director of New York City's Jazz at Lincoln Center; Marsalis's programming practices, largely shaped in consulta- tion with the writers Stanley Crouch and Albert Murray, have been the subject of some controversy and, occasionally, bitter critique. A proper discussion of the "jazz wars" of the 1980s to 1990s would require its own essay, since, at the very least, the controversy needs to be considered in historical context: certain aspects of the dispute seem to continue, under an only slightly modified banner, the very old debate over the definition of jazz itself.24



It seems to me, however, that the most frequently repeated charge against Jazz at Lincoln Center-that of "reverse racism"-is largely mistaken, as my discussion of the new canon's view of free jazz, a genre deeply inflected by Afrocentrist notions of artistic production, should make clear.25 For the "texts" of free jazz, while dutifully acknowledged as extensions of musical principles unique to jazz, resolutely have been denied canonical status; indeed, they have been treated for the most part as a largely mistaken side trip in the smoothly progressive, historicist model of the jazz "tradition" endorsed by the new jazz canon. The partial and awkward treatment that free jazz receives in Bums's documentary illustrates my point here. Omette Coleman and Cecil Taylor are both still alive and still making music, but neither man, although mentioned, was interviewed for the program. Indeed, Lester Bowie and Charlie Haden are made to speak for all of the jazz avant-garde. On camera, Murray condemns free jazz as a "formless" "embrace of chaos." Cecil Taylor's reported comment that, just as he prepares for his concerts, so should his audience, is dismissed by Branford Marsalis as "total self-indulgent bullshit." Revealingly, Marsalis likens a jazz performance not to an aesthetic experience but to a sporting event (specifically, a baseball game), in which the point is entertainment, not thought, and cash exchange the guarantor of the consumer's rights: "we pay to see them do what they do."

This is not to say that the problem of jazz's relationship to culture industry has gone unrecognized, however; rather, jazz's current canonizers almost unanimously claim the more musically accessible bebop as the moment that black musicians sought simultaneously to cast off the shackles of culture industry "entertainment" values and to establish themselves, once and for all, as serious musical intellectuals and artists. The claim for bebop as the moment when jazz became conscious of itself as an art form-in short, when it became modem, autonomous, and non-commercial-is so widespread as to hardly need explanation, but I will draw out observations from three critics, writing at quite different times in the history of jazz, in order to illustrate the salient points of the argument.

Most recently, Eric Lott links bebop's effort to establish jazz as "one of the great modemisms" with a militant politics of style that, first and foremost, was "brilliantly outside" the commercial considerations of swing and deeply (if indirectly) involved in the struggle for racial equality as it gained urgency over the course of World War II; in many



ways Lott adds a more clearly racial and political dimension to Marshall Stearns's earlier observation that "by 1940 jazz had attained enough momentum and maturity to stage a revolution more or less within itself."26 At the musical level, Lott casts the "widespread practice of appropriating the chord changes of popular tunes" as "essentially an old blues impulse that was further refined," thus acknowledging bebop's link to culture industry through its use of popular tunes, but showing how the link is mediated, made self-critical, through a prior, non-commercial, folk-based "blues impulse."27 Finally, Amiri Baraka has imagined the difference between bebop and swing as a measurable increase of freedom in artistic expression:

there had to be a feeling of freedom and the excitement that goes with individual expression, because all of this began in the midst of the Swing Era, when the arranger, not the soloist, was the important man in jazz. There were good soloists in the worst popular swing bands, yet even in the best bands, the arrangement wore the soloists like a Bellevue sport coat. But Minton's [the Harlem nightclub widely acknowledged as central to the emergence of bebop] was where these young musicians could stand up and blow their brains out all night long, and experimentation led to innovation.28

The refining of a pre-existing blues discourse (Lott); a self-motivated revolution (Steams); the freedom of individual expression (Baraka): all imply that bop constituted not only a musical immanent critique of culture industry but a distinctly racial one, as well. Indeed, bop has been seen as a racial critique of culture industry racism. As Scott DeVeaux notes, one of the "durable axioms of bebop" is the claim, attributed to Thelonious Monk, that the musicians at Minton's should organize a "big band" in order "'to create something that they can't steal because they can't play it.'" "Monk's comment is almost always interpreted along racial lines," DeVeaux adds, "with they understood to refer to the white musicians who would, given the chance, 'steal' bebop just as they had stolen swing (and jazz and ragtime)" (351).

Contemporary critics of the new jazz canon have complained that it is precisely a perceived effort to write white musicians out of the canon that is the movement's greatest flaw. Defenders of the movement might well respond that, yes, white jazz musicians are indeed getting less attention in the canon than they did when they were producing for the market, and that (given the retributive power of canonical status) is precisely the point. But to cast race as the signal issue in the debate over the contemporary jazz canon is to misread the substance of



Monk's sentence, which is not about race (nowhere explicitly named, actually) but about theft. Monk's concern was not race at least-not race as such-but ownership (and, collaterally, market access: Monk cast the still-popular swing-style big band as the setting for the new music).

Once this is acknowledged, the theory that bebop represents some sort of non- or a-commercial modernism (and thus, in Adornian terms, jazz's immanent critique) becomes a bit harder to sustain. And in fact this claim has been strongly, if somewhat indirectly, contested by DeVeaux's The Birth of Bebop, which takes the view of bop as characteristically anti-commercial and neatly stands it on its head. Bebop was born not out of a desire to escape culture industry swing, DeVeaux demonstrates, but rather out of a deliberate effort to create new commercial opportunities, within the existing entertainment industry, for black jazz musicians. The preferred medium of expression in bop-the small combo jam session-had been a constant, although largely non-commercial, part of jazz musicians' landscape well before the swing era, and even had become somewhat institutionalized in after-hours cutting contests among swing band members looking to socialize, sharpen their skills, or simply unwind after the dance halls closed. The 1942 American Federation of Musicians recording ban; the domination of radio play (and record sales) by white swing bands; the grind (and frequently, in Jim Crow states, the horrors) of road and rail touring for black bands; the prohibitive expense of maintaining large bands in an economic climate already inhospitable to black musicians: all these factors led to a movement, among the musicians themselves, to take "advantage of the disadvantages" by refashioning the pre- existing non-commercial jam session into a profitable commodity. DeVeaux's argument is worth quoting at some length:

The commodification of bebop . .. required a conscious commitment on the part of musicians to reorient the music to existing commercial channels. This process was set in motion early in the 1940s by the lure of public jam sessions and the nightclubs on 52nd Street, both of which put jam-session- style jazz on a profitable footing. It accelerated as the war years unexpectedly opened up new opportunities, further encouraging young musicians to imagine using a novel idiom of their own invention as the means to achieve a degree of artistic and financial independence.

Along the way, the music would have to be deliberately transformed. The repertory would have to be converted into clearly defined economic units,



preferably original compositions, for which authorship could be precisely established. The often chaotic atmosphere of the jam session would need to be streamlined and subtly redirected toward paying audiences. Reputation among musicians would have to be translated into commercial reputation, a name on a nightclub awning that would draw customers inside. The music would have to be given a label or tag, something akin to a brand name for marketing purposes.

Inevitably, something was lost and something was gained. (298-299)

I should make clear that DeVeaux sees the commercialization of the jam session largely as a victory (however short-lived) for the musicians-who, as a result of bop's popularity, enjoyed not only improved artistic status but broader market access and a generally higher standard of living-and, I have no intention of claiming otherwise, or of tasking the musicians for somehow "selling out." But a battle to establish a lucrative foothold within culture industry should not be confused with a battle to separate from, or create an art critical of, culture industry; my concern, then, is with the contemporary effort to canonize bebop as the aesthetic pinnacle of jazz history as if the second instance were the case rather than the first. Indeed, it seems to me that DeVeaux's analysis raises the possibility that casting bop as the peak of jazz's musical development might ultimately serve less to elevate the music's unique and brilliant properties than to celebrate jazz's ability, however briefly, to link commercial success with aesthetic distinction in such a way that the latter renders the former completely transparent, almost thoroughly naturalized. In other words, to canonize bebop in this way is to canonize correlatively the music's reconciliation with capitalist culture industry, its ability, as Adorno put it in "On Jazz," to "simultaneously develop and enchain productive power" (54), rather than its ability to resist, or critique, culture industry imperatives.29

Concomitant with the establishment of bop's high canonical status within jazz has been the marginalization of those practices, emergent in the late 1950s, generally termed free jazz. While there are many different ways to describe free jazz (and many different kinds of music- making have been grouped under that catch-all term), one characteristic shared by the music of Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry, Cecil Taylor, Albert Ayler, Anthony Braxton, and (as I've already mentioned) the late work of John Coltrane is the fact that it doesn't sell. As we've seen, most contemporary jazz canonizers see the advent of jazz modernism in the birth of bebop, but the following "negative features" of free jazz



more clearly align it with the kind of immanent critique Adorno saw as the signal feature of modernist work: "the absence of tonality and predetermined chord sequences; the abandonment of the jazz chorus structure and its replacement by loose designs in which collective improvisation takes place around predefined signals; an avoidance of 'cool' instrumental timbres in favor of more 'voice-like' sounds; and the suspension of standard time-keeping patterns for a free rubato."30

Bop's high canonical status, then, is troubling not only to the extent that it represents a resigned acceptance of jazz's imprisonment within culture industry modes of production and consumption but also to the degree that it indicates an embrace of a culture industry notion of "success" as jazz's own. It also forces us to consider how the new jazz canon has taken up, with very little examination, a model of the "canon" of European musical "classics" not as it is transmitted in music education (and I do mean music education, not music appreciation, as will become clear) but as it appears in the record stores and on the radio, a model that values above all "classical" music's ability to "melt" into the background and that has given us nearly endless recordings of Pachelbel's Canon, somewhat fewer of Anton von Webern's opus 21 symphony.31 It is a system, above all, of musical subordination, a model that values not what "classical" music is but (to revisit "On Jazz") what the music can be used for.32

The near-complete erasure of free jazz from the jazz canon has had rather predictable musical consequences for contemporary jazz: on the one hand, "soft" jazz-rock fusion (i.e., Spyro Gyra), and, on the other, the neo-bop revival, neither of which seem able or willing to address jazz's relationship to its own commodity character.33 Indeed, the oft- repeated claim that "jazz is America's classical music" not only begs the question of just what we mean by "classical music"; it leaves embedded, and unexamined, the question of what it means to be "America's" music. Is jazz the musical expression of the United States's history of racial oppression, an Adomian "element of interference" in the American dream? Or is it, on the other hand, the very soundtrack of empire? And what does it mean if it is both?

II. Comes

As we were reminded over and over again during the recent "culture wars," literary canon formation models itself along a juridical-ecclesi-



astical system of hierarchy and distinction in which certain works, upon meeting certain criteria, are acknowledged as masterpieces. Critics writing on canon formation throughout the 1980s and 1990s delighted in clever puns on their subject, and most of the language-play simply underlined the terms of the argument: we were involved in a war about cultural law and cultural religion. So we read a lot about "loose canons," about "canon fodder," about literature professors facing "canon to the right of them" (or "canon to the left of them," depending on their political orientation); the canon was loaded, aimed, and fired, and some works were actually shot out of it. The battle imagery was so pervasive, so all-encompassing, that no other way of thinking about canon ever seems to have been proposed, let alone seriously considered. No one ever wrote about what happens when people sing in canon.34

In this section I want briefly to sketch out another approach to canon formation that draws upon musical notions of canon as a way to emphasize the educational (rather than evaluative) purposes of canons, purposes that might be described (admittedly idealistically) as entailing not only a system for enforcing connections between the social elite and the aesthetic elite but also a means of estranging those connections. I am thinking here of Guillory's effort, via Pierre Bourdieu, to imagine the school as a means of "disarticulat[ing] . . . cultural capital from the system of class formation" by enabling artistic "production for the producers."35 This notion of production for producers (which, as Guillory notes, "entails consumption by the producers" as well36) chimes with Jacques Attali's utopic idea of "composition" as a musical "activity as an end in itself," a rejection of an "accumulation" model of artistic capital that amounts to a "collective questioning of the goal of [aesthetic] labor."37 Not surprisingly, Attali identifies free jazz as:

the first attempt to express in economic terms the refusal of the cultural alienation inherent in repetition, to use music to build a new culture. What institutional politics, trapped within representation, could not do, what violence, crushed by counterviolence, could not achieve, free jazz tried to bring about in a gradual way through the production of a new music outside of the industry.38

In 1475, Johannes Tinctoris defined musical canon as "a rule showing the purpose of the composer behind a certain obscurity."39 Framing my discussion of musical canon through Tinctoris's seemingly oblique definition has an advantage over the ever-popular (and over- simplified) musical example of the round ("Row, Row, Row Your



Boat") by drawing attention to the fact that musical canon does share a common linguistic origin with ecclesiastical or literary canons: the game is played by a rule. Tinctoris here was referring to specific "compositions which are notated incompletely or in a deliberately false manner (the 'puzzle canon'), and to which a verbal canon (i.e., a rule or guide), couched in more or less cryptic terms, supplies a hidden clue to the proper manner of performance."40 In these cases, the performers have before them sheet music consisting of only a single melodic line-the dux, or theme-with accompanying written directions for performing the comes, or answering voice. The comes may be nothing more than a simple repetition of the dux (the voices answer each other in flowing parallel, "gently down the stream"), or it may run the dux through any one of a number of possible changes: the theme may appear in half or double time, in melodic inversion, backward (the "crab" canon), or inverted and backward (and in half or double time). Canons can be strict (that is, the comes repeats the dux exactly) or they may be free (the comes introduces minor alterations in the dux, usually accidentals that enhance the underlying harmony). Finally, canons may be infinite (or perpetual, or circular), leading always back to their beginning ("merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily"), or they may be finite, with clear and certain endings.

Though the name canon comes from the early need to derive the piece from a written rule for its execution, it is almost certainly the case that "canons existed long before the term was coined." For a musical canon is actually not a rule for consumption (or analysis, interpretation, or valuation), but rather a set of guidelines for playing, for musical production-or, if you will, for having a musical conversation-and musicians were experimenting with ways to have musical conversations long before the rules for such conversations were codified. Tinctoris's definition, which casts canon as process, rather than product, was the usual way of thinking about canon until the Seventeenth century, when, amid the growing practice of writing out all the voices, the term finally came to mean "the piece itself" rather than the means of its creation.41

It would be wonderful if I could assert, at this point, that all we need to do to get past this convoluted business of canon formation (jazz or literary) is simply junk the judicial-ecclesiastical model in favor of the musical one; after all, what's not to like about good conversation? It's important to keep in mind, however, that musical canon is not a



conversation open to everyone; life is not yet that kind of dream. Rather, it is open only to those with the proper training. One may know a canon if one knows "Row, Row, Row Your Boat"; but it would be the height of folly to assume that a few rounds of that tune sufficiently prepares one for sight-reading through Jean d'Ockeghem's Missa prolationum. It is on this issue of canon's relationship to education that we see the second point of contact between musical canon and literary canon, for if the point of musical canon is more to outline a particular process than to categorize a product (arguably the work of the literary canon), it is nonetheless true that neither canon is accessible to performers, to readers, lacking the proper training. A process of canon creation/formation that depends upon an ability to keep up one's end of the conversation demands education; one simply cannot converse if one doesn't know the language. And it is a fact (quite seldom acknowledged, let alone addressed) that too few people in this country know the language of music, let alone the language of jazz. Most Americans are simply not in a position to assess the various claims of musical greatness, originality, and authenticity that have been invoked in shaping the new jazz canon. And, indeed, much of the discourse surrounding the new jazz canon is a discourse of culture industry music "appreciation" rather than music education or analysis ("Ken Bums Picks the Top 10 Jazz Legends of All Time"42), a discourse that may enhance the sales of CDs but does little to improve the overall level of musical conversation.

Guillory implies that it is in part the reproducibility of literary texts that accounts for their reliance on the school as a means of establishing value and managing their otherwise potentially problematic access: it is precisely the emergence of a "correct" reading that limits the work's range of circulation and enforces a kind of "rarity."43 One might imagine that this model would map fairly easily onto music of all kinds, including jazz, especially given its double reproducibility in written and recorded form. Yet one might further suspect that aspects of the immanent development of jazz-in particular, its fraught relationship to capitalist means of mechanical reproduction-should make it an ideal tool for exploring canon formation and the degree to which, in the United States especially, it has been structured by culture industry, rather than, for example (and to postulate what many will feel is a wildly utopic vision of what U.S. education might have been), emerging in the context of a free and broad-based system of public music



education. But the new jazz canon's muzzling of free jazz's immanent critique of culture industry has blunted this potential: the overall effect of the new jazz canon seems (to repeat my earlier point) also to have entailed the canonization of culture industry itself. And since the overall work of culture industry is to produce consumers (not producers), the danger to jazz of culture industry canonization has turned out to be musically quite serious: not only a suspicion of new forms in favor of the tried and true, but also an erosion-indeed, sometimes it seems like the active rejection-of musical value in and for itself. Wynton Marsalis's disdain for rap is quite well known, but it's worth thinking about the degree to which the popular embrace of a form of "musical" expression that actually demands almost no music training whatsoever (substituting, in the place of musical ability, facility in the techniques of mechanical reproduction) may be the result not only of the almost complete collapse of music education in American public schools, but also of a deepening complacency about musical culture industry that the new jazz canon has helped to further, however indirectly.44 Indeed, the "jazz education" program offered through Jazz at Lincoln Center is not actually a program of music education-it does not teach students how to read music or how to play an instrument- but rather a program in music appreciation, a system of "education" with the primary aim of increasing the numbers of music consumers: teaching a child to "appreciate" Ellington's horn lines is simply not the same as teaching her to how to play them.45 The former consists of "schooling" in consumption; the latter requires a real involvement in the very process of music-making, itself demanding what Adorno called the "conscious perception of music." And in losing our ability to engage with and account for music as music, in its own terms as well as in emotional, political, or sociological ones, we lose something beyond music. We lose "freedom."46

III. Coda

Before going any further, I should make clear what I am not claiming here. I am not saying, first and foremost, that jazz is not art; nor am I saying that any effort to assess the relative quality, as art, of different jazz performances is misguided. And I am certainly not saying that we should all give up Thelonious Monk and listen exclusively to Cecil Taylor, as my discussion of the work of Bill Evans, musically much



more closely aligned to Monk than Taylor, will bear out. My primary purpose here is largely interrogative: I mean to raise questions that, with any luck, will continue to resonate through our future musical experiences and lead us to question the assumptions underlying efforts to discipline and regularize listening and performance practices in a medium that, as art, deserves nothing less than the freedom of music in and for itself.

In concluding with an extremely brief discussion of Bill Evans's Conversations with Myself, I will bracket an entire series of questions about my choice of example, including the question of Evans's own position within the new jazz canon. Evans is often dragged out as "exhibit A" in the afore-mentioned "jazz wars" over the programming at Lincoln Center and its alleged "anti-white" bias. It does seem undeniable that Evans's contributions to jazz are not sufficiently recognized in the new jazz canon; but I don't believe the reasons for this neglect are primarily racial. Stanley Crouch, for one, seems to have an almost visceral antipathy to Evans's music that appears to derive more readily from issues of gender and sexuality than those of race: Evans's shy, unassuming manner; his geeky, almost fey, air; and his marked propensity for lyrical expression (and waltz time) all translate as markedly "feminine" traits that don't comport well with Crouch's professed admiration for hard-swinging, rough-edged, 4/4 jazz. (In- deed, Crouch's most widely-reported complaint about Evans is that he is a "punk"; i.e., not a "real man.")47

Dispute over Evans's "canonicity" aside, Conversations with Myself may seem an odd choice for other reasons, for though it won Evans his first Grammy award, it can not be seen as a typical jazz album of the period, or even a typical jazz album, period: a solo album, it employs multi-tracking to approximate the call-and-response effect of group improvisation so characteristic of jazz performance. As Peter Pettinger notes in his biography of Evans, this studio technique, although "around for some time," was "generally viewed . . . with suspicion" in the jazz world, since it seemed antithetical to the practices of live performance and collective improvisation that were (and are) so crucial to jazz as a unique musical tradition.48 Evans was quite aware that Conversations with Myself would be controversial, and the liner notes for the album consist of his own statement of aims in making the record. Though not as elegant or compelling as his liner notes for Kind of Blue, they bear close reading:



There is a viewpoint which holds that any recorded music which cannot also be produced in natural live performance is a "gimmick" and therefore should not be considered as a pure musical effort. Because the performance and recording procedure used in this recording might stimulate this issue to a question in some minds, I requested the opportunity to state my firm belief in the integrity of the idea upon which this album was conceived and some supporting reasons.

... In my opinion the only solid and interesting question that the music making here presents is that of whether this should be regarded as a group or solo musical performance.

Until the evolution of jazz group improvisation the history of Western music or music as we know it outside of jazz represents the reflection of one psyche. For the first time in a music of Western origin, jazz group improvisation represents the very provocative revelation of two, three, four, or five minds responding simultaneously to each other in a unified coherent performance.

I remember that in recording the selections, as I listened to the first track while playing the second, and the first two while playing the third, the process involved was an artificial duplication of simultaneous performance in that each track represented a musical mind responding to another musical mind or minds. The argument that the same mind was involved in all three performances could be advanced, but I feel this is not quite true. The functions of each track are different, and as one in speech feels a different state of mind making statements than in responding to statements or commenting on the exchange involved in the first two; so I feel that the music here has more the quality of a "trio" than a solo effort.

. Yet, I hesitate to state this recorded result is identical to trio performance or more valuable aesthetically or in depth or intensity of emotion. It is in the end still the product of one subject.49

First, and most obviously, Conversations with Myself raises the stakes of the question Adorno poses regarding the extent of jazz's dependence upon a regime of capitalist mechanical reproduction: the album simply would not exist without the technology. Evans is less interested in apologizing for this "gimmick" than in making clear the use to which he puts it: multi-tracking allows him to split the performing subject into three "different minds" (to use Evans's termi- nology), allowing him to create a work that both is and is not "the product of one subject." This splitting of the creative subject gives Conversations with Myself license to explore the problem of the relationship between freedom and alienation or, to put the issue in



Adornian terms, the degree to which culture industry substitutes alienation for freedom ("the use value of jazz does not nullify alienation, but intensifies it. ... [t]hat which is alienated . . . presents itself as unconscious and 'vital'").50

The apparent ease with which Evans chooses to artistically exploit the tensions arising from jazz's relationship to its commodity character is perhaps unsettling, but a television interview conducted some three years after the release of Conversations with Myself makes clear that it was his working method. In an exchange with his brother Harry, Evans makes clear his belief in the importance of what Adorno would term the "banal piece" of jazz expression: the (usually well-known) popular tune that serves as the basis for improvisation:

It's very important to remember that no matter how far I might diverge or find freedom in this format, that it is only free insofar as it has reference to the strictness of the original form. And that's what gives it its strength. In other words, there is no freedom without it being in reference to something. You take this form, this strict form, and you find some way to get away from it, and that gives it meaning . . . when I play, I'm playing everything I play against the strict squareness of the original form.

... I can remember coming to New York to make or break, you know, in jazz, and saying to myself, how should I attack this problem of becoming a jazz musician, of making a living and so on. And ultimately I came to the conclusion that all I must do is take care of the music, even if I do it in a closet, see. And if I really do that, somebody's going to come and open the door of that closet and say, hey, we're looking for you.

. .. Otherwise, if I spread myself out all over the place I would have lost sight of everything. It's like, you say, isn't it terrible that there's a war here and starvation there and poverty and what am I going to do as a human being about this whole thing, you know? Well, gosh, if you try to accept every problem you're just going to go insane. So you have to choose some field in which you will operate at your best capacity and which will then serve as an influence to deter all those other things that you're worrying about. So I figure if I take care of the music as best I can, with my truest belief, than all these other things will be affected as I desire them to be affected, as much as I can affect them.51

For Evans, then, freedom in jazz does not exist in pure opposition to pre-existing musical convention (or culture industry imperatives); on the contrary, freedom in jazz emerges in conversation with its formal and commercial limitations: jazz "is only free insofar as it has reference to the strictness of the original form." Evans claims that the autonomy



character of art does prevail in jazz, but it does so precisely through jazz's commodity status: single-minded dedication to making jazz music will translate into "making a living," a proposition certainly not shared by all art media. In other words, Evans's music-making does not contradict Adorno's analysis of jazz's imbrication in commodity aesthetics; rather, it forces us to face that imbrication in all of its complexity. Conversations with Myself is an album that thinks through its status as commodity, its relationship to the means of mechanical production, and how that status and relationship impinge upon the horizon of freedom against which the music emerges. It offers us neither the praxis of culture industry repudiation embodied in free jazz nor the unconscious acquiescence to culture industry that Adorno detected in swing. Rather, it gives us a jazz model of the thinker who, confronted with the music's life in culture industry, "neither signs over his consciousness nor lets himself be terrorized into action," a thinker who resists "the intellectual reproduction of what already exists anyway" in favor of "possibility." It insists that such "thought is happiness, even when it defines unhappiness: by enunciating it."52 And thus it draws our attention to the cultural contradictions that have structured (and continue to structure) jazz's modernist aesthetic practices-contradictions that arise from the music's formative history in African-American folk culture, Western art music, and a capitalist regime of mechanical reproduction-and announces a willingness to live and create within the constraints created by those contradictions. This willingness, I believe, is the modernist gesture par excellence- but perhaps a full discussion of that claim is best left for another day, and another conversation.

NOTES

Thanks to Michael Coyle, Bernard Gendron, Lydia Hamessley, John T. Matthews, and Peter Rabinowitz for crucial advice, criticism, and encouragement, and to the readers for American Quarterly for recommendations that helped refine and clarify my claims.

1. Theodor W. Adomo, "On Jazz," 47 trans. and intro. by Jamie Owen Daniel, Discourse 12 (fall/winter 1989-1990), 39-69.

2. My larger project explores issues of form and freedom, as well as the challenges of American racial history, in late modem literature, jazz, and film. Here, I focus exclusively on the music.



3. John Guillory, Cultural Capital (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1993), 326. Future citations will appear in text.

4. Marshall Steams, The Story of Jazz (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1956), 50- 55. Most recent narrative jazz histories begin their discussions of the music at a much later date, during the rigid, post-Reconstruction imposition of Jim Crow in New Orleans and the subsequent enforced musical fraternization between light-skinned, high-caste Creoles of color, who favored European styles of music, and the Africanist music making of darker-skinned, working-class blacks. Stearns's work, though in some ways superceded by efforts of contemporary jazz scholars, remains important, and his discussion of Congo Square, while often ignored, has not, to my knowledge, been disputed.

5. The Congo Square dances began "at a signal from a police official" that "summoned" the slaves to the square. Herbert Asbury, The French Quarter (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1936), 269; quoted in Steams, Story of Jazz, 51. In a later study, Steams notes that the Congo Square dances were "a tourist attraction that had the sanction of the city government." Marshall and Jean Stearns, Jazz Dance: The Story of American Vernacular Dance (1968; New York: Da Capo Press), 19.

6. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1992), 3.

7. Krin Gabbard also addresses problems of jazz canon formation. While he, too, decides that "the creation of a jazz canon ... is ... self-defeating" (2-3), and precisely because of the problem of mastery, his reasons for reaching this conclusion are somewhat different from mine, largely because his interest is in jazz studies-and the consequences of canon for jazz studies-rather than in jazz. Gabbard draws parallels between the nascent field of jazz studies and the somewhat more established disciplines of film and women's studies to make his argument. I have no dispute with his claims- they in fact seem to me entirely accurate-but, as later sections of my essay make clear, I remain concerned about the musical and educational consequences of the assumption, implicit in some of what is written under the rubric of jazz studies, that one need not understand music in order to understand jazz. Krin Gabbard, "The Jazz Canon and Its Consequences" in Gabbard, ed., Jazz Among the Discourses (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 1995), 1-28.

8. Daniel, intro. to "On Jazz," 41-42. Later quotations from Adorno's translated original will be cited parenthetically in the text.

9. Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 223.

10. Daniel, 39-40. 11. "On Jazz," 53. Hereafter page citations to "On Jazz" will be noted in the text. 12. Adorno's mention of Duke Ellington, the only African-American artist discussed

in the essay, is extremely brief and serves largely to introduce his discussion of the retention of whole-tone compositional techniques beyond their historical moment (the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth centuries). A proper analysis of this single paragraph (59-60) would take up far more space than I have here; I will only point out that Adorno's general impatience with French impressionist "epigones" (whether they be jazz composers or composers in the style of Western "art" music) derives from his overall suspicion of reified form. And as Scott DeVeaux has recently pointed out, there are good musical reasons supporting Adorno's critique of whole-tone effects:

Whole-tone scales entered jazz through the music of Debussy and Ravel. As an easily grasped and indisputably "modern" effect, they were eagerly adopted by American composers, songwriters, and arrangers. Dance band arrangements from the 1920s



abound in whole-tone interludes and modulations, and adventurous jazz musicians exploited whole-tone scales either to induce a kind of reverie ... or aggressively for their hard dissonance.

As virtually everyone who has tried to use them has discovered, it is difficult to proceed beyond such superficial effects with whole-tone scales (unless one is willing, as in the music of Debussy or Monk, to displace received chord formations with a virtually new harmonic language). (DeVeaux, The Birth of Bebop: A Social and Musical History [Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1997], 107).

13. Ibid., 118. 14. Late in his career Adorno revisited the question of jazz's relationship to culture

industry in a way that seems to indicate that he saw jazz as its prisoner: "Certainly, jazz has the potential of a musical breakout from this culture on the part of those who were either refused admittance to it or annoyed by its mendacity. Time and again, however, jazz became a captive of the culture industry and thus of musical and social conformism." (Adorno, Introduction to the Sociology of Music, trans. E. B. Ashton [New York: Continuum Publishing Company, 1989], 33-34). The claim that jazz's periodic "musical breakouts" from its culture industry prison will result in stronger policing of musical conformism has obvious bearing on my analysis later in this paper of the status of free jazz in contemporary jazz canon formation.

15. Certainly "On Jazz" is of interest to critics of popular mass culture (which, I would argue, does not require specialized literary or musical education in its audience in order to work its effects), but I want to make clear that popular culture is not my concern here. Given the extremely small percentage of the American population that listens to jazz with any regularity, it seems to me that jazz most certainly is not "popular" music in any sense of the term. Of course, this does not mean that it is immune from culture industry, even though a common mistake made by critics of Adorno's argument is to equate "the popular" with culture industry. As Adorno himself was well aware, work may be "unpopular" (even "elitist") and still be the product of culture industry; his discussion of "classical" music is precisely on this point. In any case, for one exchange over the merits of Adorno in assessing popular culture, see the spring 1991 issue of Telos.

16. Freddie Keppard and Buddy Bolden are only the most famous examples. 17. But see Jed Rasula, "The Media of Memory: The Seductive Menace of Records

in Jazz History" in Gabbard, ed., Jazz Among the Discourses, 134-62. Rasula's focus is on the problem of historiography in jazz rather than its relationship to culture industry, but he is certainly right to question the nearly fetishized status of recordings in jazz discourse, in which "critics and historians . . . [use] jazz records as primary sources, while pretending that what they are really talking about is something else, some putative essence of a 'living tradition' that cannot be 'captured' by the blatant artifice of technology" (135).

18. Paul F. Berliner, Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1994), 482. The context Berliner provides for this quotation is worth reproducing here: "Record companies . . . [may] delineate idiomatic bounds within which improvisers work. The company's influence can guide artists along a conservative route, as when, in order to build on past success by promoting a consistent musical product, it persuades performers to continue creating music that has proved itself commercially. Artists can become 'prisoners of their own success' in this regard" (482).

19. The crucial essay here is his 1938 "On the fetish character in music and the regression of listening" in J.M. Bernstein, ed., The Culture Industry (New York: Routledge, 1991), 26-52. Much of the essay is taken up with a discussion of how



"serious music [has been] domesticated under the barbarous name of classical so as to enable one to turn away from it again in comfort" (27), although jazz is also a subject. So far as I know, no critic of Adorno's position on jazz has acknowledged his comment, toward the end of this essay, "if one compares the special knowledge of a jazz expert with that of a Toscanini worshipper the former is far ahead of the latter" (51). To gain a sense of the continuing pertinence of Adorno's critique of culture industry "classical" music, insert the Three Tenors phenomenon in the place of Toscanini, or the recent, monstrous, exploitation of David Helfgott.

20. "The authoritarian effect of great artworks ... both legitimates and indicts them. Integral form is inseparable from domination, though it sublimates it. Greatness is the guilt that [art] works bear." Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. and ed. by Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis, Minn.: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1997), 187.

21. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1988), 104.

22. Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1996), 107. Later quotations will be cited in text.

23. See Ingrid Monson, op. cit., 106-21, for a superb reading of the recording. 24. See, for example, Bernard Gendron's essay " 'Moldy Figs' and Modernists: Jazz

at War (1942-1946)," in Gabbard, ed., Jazz Among the Discourses, 31-56, for an excellent discussion of the dispute over the jazz canon generated by the emergence of bebop. Gendron's Foucauldian reading of jazz history sees swing as both mediating and provoking disputes over the shape of the jazz canon between the champions of New Orleans-style jazz (which underwent a brief revival in the late 1930s by jazz aficionados revolted by swing's "pandering to mass markets" [32]) and modernist bebop. Gendron notes that the New Orleans revivalists "want[ed] the word 'jazz' all to themselves," a point still being made today by contemporary critics of the move to establish the new jazz canon, which seems motivated by a nostalgia not dissimilar to that driving the New Orleans revivalists of the 1930s.

25. For representative examples of "jazz wars" criticism, see Eric Nisensen, Blue: The Murder of Jazz (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997); and Gene Lees, Cats of Any Color: Jazz, Black and White (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1995). The novelist and jazz critic Albert Murray has agreed that canon formation is one of the chief concerns of Jazz at Lincoln Center (Comments at Hamilton College History of Jazz class, Sept. 24, 1997). For a discussion of free jazz that emphasizes the Afrocentric values of many of its practitioners, see Ronald M. Radano, New Musical Figurations: Anthony Braxton's Cultural Critique (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1993). Radano terms the new jazz canon a "neoclassical" approach that "goes wrong ... in its presumption of telling the whole story of jazz" (270). He does not develop a critique of the "neoclassical" canon that explores its congruence with culture industry imperatives of consumption, but his analysis does complement such a critique.

26. Lott's essay, "Double V, Double-Time: Bebop's Politics of Style," has been widely reprinted since its first appearance in Callaloo 11 (summer 1988): 597-605; here, I am citing the essay as it appears in Gabbard, Jazz Among the Discourses, 249, 246. (The essay also appears in The Jazz Cadence of American Culture, ed. by Robert G. O'Meally [New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1998], 457-68). Steams, The Story of Jazz, 218.

27. Lott, "Bebop's Politics of Style," 249. However, Lott invokes a view of the blues that recently has been contested by DeVeaux, whose thoughtful and nuanced discussion of the status of the blues for bop musicians questions the assertion of many contemporary jazz writers that the blues constitute something like the music's essential and unchanging folk soul. On the contrary, DeVeaux reveals the blues to have been



well-incorporated within culture industry by the 1940s and a source of serious disagreement among jazz musicians, the site of an "internecine debate over style, pitting the calculated urbanity of northern-based black musicians like [Cab] Calloway (or later [Billy] Eckstine and [Dizzy] Gillespie) against the stubbornly rural ethos of the masses" (345). DeVeaux acknowledges that this struggle

is often overlooked in the history of jazz because it does not fit the prevailing paradigm [which casts the blues] ... as the center of an essentialist conception of black identity. But [bop musicians] . . . knew that the white-controlled culture industry was only too happy to stereotype them as blues musicians as an excuse for restricting their sphere of influence to the "race market" (siphoning off the lion's share of the profits in the process). For the bop generation, the blues was both opportunity and obstacle. (345- 46)

Thus, bop and blues do not appear as opposite ends of a spectrum of commercialization, but rather as terms governing the strategic market placement of black musicians in culture industry.

28. LeRoi Jones (Amiri Imamu Baraka), Black Music (1968; New York: Da Capo Press, 1968), 22-23. Baraka's recognition of the expressive limitations inherent in swing-era jazz arrangements aligns suggestively with Adorno's.

In choosing these three critics-Lott, Steams, and Baraka-as illustrative of the dominant view of bebop as an effort to release jazz from the clutches of commercial culture, I am deliberately bracketing the work of Ralph Ellison, easily the most-cited authority on this issue. A proper assessment of Ellison's writing on jazz (much of it collected in the "Sound and the Mainstream" section of Shadow and Act) would require an article of its own; let me simply indicate here that Ellison's work on bebop specifically, and jazz generally, is far more complex than is commonly understood. His fondly nostalgic essay on the emergence of bebop, "The Golden Age, Time Past," for instance, is widely cited as a kind of "history" of Minton's that seems to endorse the notion that the "chord progressions and the melodic inversions worked out by the creators of bop sprang partially from their desire to create a jazz which could not be so easily imitated and exploited by white musicians" (Ellison, Shadow and Act [New York: Vintage Books, 1972], 212); less frequently noted is the way in which the essay itself is framed by nods to the place of white musicians in jazz history (in the opening description of the white clarinetist in the mural above the bandstand at Minton's [200] and in the closing acknowledgment that "white musicians like Tony Scott, Remo Palmieri and Al Haig .. .were part of the development at Minton's" [212]). In addition, Ellison's review of Baraka's (then LeRoi Jones's) Blues People anticipates Scott DeVeaux's thesis (discussed here in some detail) that bop arose from commercial considerations: "Jones sees bop as a conscious gesture of separatism, ignoring the fact that the creators of the style were seeking, whatever their musical intentions-and they were the least political of men-a fresh form of entertainment which would allow them their fair share of the entertainment market, which had been dominated by whites during the swing era" (252).

29. In an earlier essay, DeVeaux drew on the work of Hayden White to examine the various "emplotments" employed by jazz historiographers and thereby to question the purposes of a jazz canon. See "Constructing the Jazz Tradition" in O'Meally, ed. Jazz Cadence of America, 483-512 (the essay originally appeared in Black American Literature Forum, 25:3 [1991], 525-60). As DeVeaux points out, by casting bebop as the art music toward which jazz's "'straight line of development'" has aimed, "the whole narrative for jazz history must be adjusted accordingly," lest the earlier jazz styles find themselves in the "precarious position" of not-quite-art (498). The preferred means for "rescuing" the earlier styles has been some sort of "great man" version of



jazz history, and this indeed was the approach favored by Bums's Jazz: Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Count Basie were shown to have transcended the commercial entertainment values within which their music emerged. I of course find much to agree with in DeVeaux's reading; he does not, however, draw Adorno into the argument, preferring to cast the problem in terms of an imperfectly conceived historiography rather than the music's relationship to culture industry.

30. J. Bradford Robinson, "Free Jazz" in Barry Kernfeld, ed., The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994), 405.

31. It is precisely this status of "background" music that free jazz explicitly rejected. As Coleman put it (in the liner notes to Free Jazz [Atlantic 1961]), "Let's try to play the music and not the background."

32. Of course, culture industry does offer "classical" music a broader range of action than simply serving as background; but, for culture industry, all of those possible effects are valued precisely to the degree that they do not force engagement with the music as such. Listeners may, for example, prefer a certain piece for its ability to excite rather than its capacity to lull. For one discussion of the various types of listeners and their relationship to culture industry, see the chapter "Types of Musical Conduct" in Theodor Adomo, An Introduction to the Sociology of Music, 1-20. According to Adorno, after the "expert" and the "good listener" comes the "cultural consumer," who, "for the spontaneous and direct relation to music, the faculty of simultaneously experiencing and comprehending its structure . . . [substitutes] hoarding as much musical information as possible, notably about biographical data and about the merits of interpreters"; for this listener, "the unfoldment of a composition does not matter" (6- 7). Adorno goes on to identify four additional "types" of listeners after the cultural consumer, each more utilitarian in its approach to music-or, to use the Adornian phrase, distracted from music-than the last.

33. For a vivid depiction of the current jazz scene in this regard, see David Hajdu's article about the singer Jane Monheit, "a young siren in the tradition of a swing-era chanteuse [who] seems to embody mainstream jazz's wholesale submission to nostalgia" and whose debut album, Never Never Land, featuring jazz veterans Ron Carter and Kenny Barron, made Billboard's jazz top ten shortly before Christmas 2000 ("Things Are What They Used To Be," New York Times Sunday Magazine, Dec. 31, 2000, 32). Hajdu describes an excruciating meeting to plan Monheit's second album that concludes with the decision to "'go with the classical material, but bring in a new crew [of musicians] a little younger-younger versions of the classic players, younger people doing the old things.'" Hajdu concludes: "To accompany the young heir to Ella Fitzgerald, they would employ the successors to Tommy Flanagan, Ray Brown, and Herb Ellis. The discussion shifted to various up-and-coming musicians and the jazz elders they sounded like" (37). One could hardly find a better illustration of jazz's embrace of culture industry notions of "classical" music.

34. Though see Joseph Kerman, "A Few Canonic Variations," Critical Inquiry 10 (Sept. 1983): 107-25. Kerman's essay represents an effort to think through the premises of (juridical-ecclesiastical) "canon formation" as they apply (or don't) to music history; he quite rightly notes that musicians and music history scholars speak of a "repertory" rather than a "canon," not only because "canon" has a particular musical meaning but also because "repertory" carries within it a reminder of the performance aspect of music history. He also organizes the sections of his essay as if they were illustrations of the various methods of musical canon: first a statement of the theme, then a perpetual canon, a canon in contrary motion, canon by augmentation, etc. He does not take up the idea of conversation that I offer here, however.

35. Guillory, Cultural Capital, 339.



36. Ibid. 37. Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. Brian Massumi,

foreword by Fredric Jameson, afterword by Susan McClary (Minneapolis, Minn.: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1985), 135, 142.

38. Ibid., 138. Attali's further point that, in contradistinction to composition as an end in itself, "the requirements of the accumulation of commodity-value are reaction- ary and demand policies that are objectively conservative, even if they are camouflaged as an equalization of the condition of access to commodities" (146) offers one, admittedly unforgiving, reading of the underlying structure of contemporary jazz canon formation.

39. Terminorum Musicae Diffinitorium (Dictionary of Musical Terms), Latin and English edition, trans. and anno. Carl Parrish (London: The Free Press of Glencoe, Collier-Macmillan Limited, 1963), 13.

40. Ibid., 81. 41. Don Michael Randel, The New Harvard Dictionary of Music (Cambridge, Mass.:

Belknap Press of the Harvard Univ. Press, 1986), 128, 130. Even so, it is useful to remember that, although we now use the term canon mainly to identify "the piece itself" (that is, the product), it is still the case that canons arrive only via a particular compositional process.

42. USA Weekend, Jan. 5-7, 2001, 6-10. These sort of "top ten," "year's/decade's best" lists are all-pervasive in culture industry; they not only influence sales but, arguably, mediate the aesthetic experience itself. "Mass culture has finally rewritten the whole of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit in accordance with the principle of the competition. The sensuous moment of art transforms itself under the eyes of mass culture into the measurement, comparison, and assessment of physical phenomena." (See Adorno, "The schema of mass culture," in J.M. Bernstein, ed., The Culture Industry, 75.) In other words, art is consumed according to the rules of sport. This is not unique to jazz, of course; again, I simply point to the packaged phenomena of the Three Tenors.

43. Guillory further notes that "as cultural works recede into the past, they simultaneously gravitate into the realm of 'restricted production' (whatever the context in which they were produced), by virtue of the fact that the knowledge required to decipher them is the cultural capital of the school" (Guillory, Cultural Capital, 330). Rather than simply condemn the school as the blunt instrument enforcing class stratification, however, Guillory teases out what he calls the "utopian" dimension of Bourdieu's thought that sees, within the school, the potential to judge "the cultural capital embodied in cultural products ... on aesthetic grounds . . . [rather than solely] on the basis of their inaccessibility" (339).

44. For a recent discussion of the dominance of mechanical reproduction in contemporary popular music, see Tony Scherman's article "Strike the Band: Pop Music Without Musicians," The New York Times, Sunday, Feb. 11, 2001, sect. 2, p. 1, 32. The article begins with the vivid example of Zach Danziger, a talented young drummer whose musical skills have declined in direct proportion to his increasing facility with techniques of digital reproduction. Of his second album, Mr. Danziger says, "I'd be exaggerating if I told you there were 16 bars of real drumming on it .... Basically, it's me playing two measures, cutting them up in the sampler... and making a tune out of them" (1, 32).

45. The Jazz at Lincoln Center education program is quite obviously modeled on Leonard Bernstein's famous "Young People's Concert" broadcasts for CBS from 1958 to 1973 and similarly rely on the personality and charisma of the conductor/bandleader to work their effects. I should make clear that I am not opposed to such programs-



indeed, they serve the important function of exposing children to wonderful music that they may not otherwise discover--but I remain concerned about the degree to which such programs substitute for genuine music education, particularly among students whose parents lack the sometimes considerable resources needed to finance musical instruction. The actual music education programs sponsored by Jazz at Lincoln Center--particularly its "Essentially Ellington" program, which features jazz band competitions and musicians' workshops, and which distributes Ellington charts to participating high school bands-are laudable, but they serve students who are already musically literate.

46. Adorno, "On the fetish character of music," 41. 47. Nisensen, The Murder of Jazz, 176-77. In this sense, Evans's disbarment from

the canon resembles that of the homosexual Cecil Taylor. Clearly, issues of gender and sexuality in jazz history (and jazz canonization) need to be more thoroughly explored than they have been heretofore.

48. Peter Pettinger, Bill Evans: How My Heart Sings (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1998), 142.

49. Bill Evans, "A Statement," Conversations with Myself (Verve/MGM Records, 1963). I have kept the original punctuation.

50. "On Jazz, 48, 49. 51. The Universal Mind of Bill Evans, produced by Charter Oak Telepictures, Inc.,

in association with Helen Keane. Directed by Louis Cavrell (New York: Rhapsody Films, 1966).

52. Theodor Adorno, "Resignation" in Critical Models: Interventions and Catch- words, trans. and with a preface by Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1998), 292, 293.


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Issue Table of ContentsAmerican Quarterly, Vol. 55, No. 1 (Mar., 2003), pp. 1-147Front MatterConversing with Ourselves: Canon, Freedom, Jazz [pp. 1-28]"Our Jerusalem": Americans in the Holy Land and Protestant Narratives of National Entitlement [pp. 29-60]Unnatural Selection: Mothers, Eugenic Feminism, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Regeneration Narratives [pp. 61-88]Exhibition ReviewReview: Museo without Walls [pp. 89-102]

Book ReviewsReview: Abolition and the Color Line [pp. 103-112]Review: Stranger in a Strange Land: A History of Transatlantic Exchange [pp. 113-120]Review: Dying Is Easy, Comedy Is Hard [pp. 121-130]Review: Agent Butterfly [pp. 131-139]Review: The Health of a Nation: Race, Place, and the Paradoxes of Public Health Reform [pp. 141-147]

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