Jazz Criticism: Its Development and Ideologies

Author(s): John Gennari

Source: Black American Literature Forum, Vol. 25, No. 3, Literature of Jazz Issue (Autumn,
1991), pp. 449-523
Published by: St. Louis University
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3041811
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Jazz Criticism: Its Development and
Ideologies

John Gennari

Jazz is written most indelibly in sound, color, texture, and

movement: in the crystalline tones and strutting swagger of
Louis Armstrong's trumpet, in the blue shadings and elegant
cosmopolitanism of Duke Ellington's Mood Indigo, in the bracing
drone and polyrhythmnic ecstasy of John Coltrane's A Love Su-
preme, in the singular piano kinesthetics of Thelonious Monk
and Cecil Taylor. Jazz is written in vinyl grooves, electronically
coded in message units known in the vernacular as "riffs," me-
chanically reproduced in a variety of rhythmic pulses to furnish
a working vocabulary to successive generations of aspiring musi-
cians. Jazz is written in the rich oral tradition of jazz talk-an
endlessly evolving argot which in the 1930s and '40s spoke of
pianists' "ticklin' the ivories" and drummers' "strokin' the
hides"-and in all-night Kansas City cutting sessions crystallized
into epic tales of communal ritual and individual heroism. Jazz,
in other words, is a rich, multi-layered culture that has created
and communicated its meanings in a myriad of ways.
One of the hallmarks of jazz-some would argue its defining
feature-has been its role as a progenitor of new forms, an in-
ventor of new languages, a creator of new ways to express mean-
ing. The blue notes, microtones, polyrhythms, and extended
harmonies of jazz constitute a musical vocabulary and grammar
that cannot be accurately represented by the standard notational
systems of Western music. Likewise, scat singing dissents from

John Gennari, a Dissertation Fellow in the Graduate Group in American

Civilization at the University of Pennsylvania, is working on a history of jazz
criticism as his dissertation project.
Black American Literature Frumn, Volume 25, Number 3 (Fall 1991)
? 1991 John Gennarl
450 John Gennari
the logocentric tyranny of standard English, eschews referential
lyrics in favor of vocalized sounds (e.g., "geef-gaf gee-bap-beda-
dedo d-da-do"I) whose meaning is their own sound. And because
jazz's semantics hinge on process rather than given form, jazz
generates new meanings with every performance. The central
role in jazz performance of the improvised solo both puts a pre-
mium on individual style and makes it necessary for soloists
constantly to seek fresh approaches to familiar material. By
modifying timbre, reworking phrasing, adjusting dynamics, re-
thinking harmonic and rhythmic relationships, and reinventing
melodies, jazz improvisers constantly seek to establish differ-
ence-to distinguish their voices from those of other performers,
and to mark each performance as a distinct statement within
their own oeuvre. Jazz has been improvisational, as well, in its
approach to group organization, configuring itself in a variety of
instrumental combinations in response to evolving artistic agen-
das and economic contingencies. It has challenged the norms of
Western art in regard to the relationship between artist and
audience, shunning formal behavioral codes and audience pas-
sivity (what Richard Sennett has called "silence in the face of
Art" [2301) in favor of active, spontaneous response through vocal
and bodily participation.
Through its subversion of traditional cultural categories and
its reshaping of aesthetic and social boundaries, jazz has helped
define the cutting edge of twentieth-century Western culture.
Rarely does a progressive technique, concept, or attitude surface
in the American and European "elite" art worlds that jazz has
not already discovered among its "vernacular" cultural re-
sources. Louis Armstrong's vanguard techniques are, for exam-
ple, no less central to a definition of twentieth-century
modernism than Picasso's. Both treated the creative act as a
blending of spontaneity and calculation: Picasso's allowing him-
self the flexibility to make point-of-production creative choices,
while at the same time sustaining an idea of overall structural
design, may be compared to the process by which Satchmo's
ur-scat chorus in Heebie Jeebies managed to sound hypnotically
unpremeditated even as it was running the chord changes and
dovetailing perfectly with its sixteen-bar closure. Both employed
collage techniques-Picasso collecting found objects from the
real world, such as scraps of metal and pieces of newspaper;
Armstrong quoting from the mesh calls, animal sounds, whis-
tling street vendors, and barroom quartets of his New Orleans
experience (see Levine, Black Culture 204). Duke Ellington al-
ways had one foot in the academy, as evidenced by his mastery
 Jazz Criticisnv Its Development and Ideologies 451
of traditional European approaches to structure, and one foot in
the street, where he picked up new sounds, rhythms, and
attitudes-a seminal example of the blurring of the distinction
between popular and high art. For more than two decades, The
Art Ensemble of Chicago and Sun Ra have combined music,
theater, poetry, comedy, and politics in their concerts. While the
terms multiculturalism and postmodemism are of recent vintage,
the cultural concepts and aesthetic practices they describe have
strong precedent in the jazz tradition, which began as a Creole
gumbo of musical ingredients drawn from a potpourri of cultures
and which has long honored the practice of splicing quotations
from its own traditional texts into new combinations.
But while jazz's protean character has kept it in the vanguard
of twentieth-century art, jazz has been denied the cultural accep-
tance and intellectual respectability of other arts-indeed, has
had to struggle to be considered an art at all. When Whitney
Balliett wrote in 1954 that, "until the past five or so years, jazz
has been widely regarded in this country as a kind of queer
Victorian aunt who laces her tea, belches at the wrong moment,
and uses improper amounts of rouge" (Sound 14), he was refer-
ring to a relatively benign form of dismissal. More extreme were
the paranoic ravings of Progressive reformers in the 1920s who
held jazz responsible for rising rates of dope addiction and
illegitimate birth, and Protestant ministers who labeled it the
"Devil's music." A source of deep anxiety for middle-class white
parents, who saw it as a threat to social order and to their
daughters' sexual innocence, jazz was also stigmatized, as Arniri
Baraka has pointed out, by the black bourgeoisie: "Jazz was
collected among the numerous skeletons the middle-class black
man kept in the closet of his psyche, along with watermelons
and gin, and whose rattling caused him no end of misery and
self-hatred" (Black Music 1 1).
Jazz weathered such abuse by embracing and transforming
the very values its "square" detractors ascribed to it. It found a
mass audience in the 1930s and '40s for its "hip" stylizations of
sound, movement, dress, and language; a sizeable middle-brow
following in the '50s for its "cool" variations on a range of musi-
cal idioms; and a smaller but fervent group of true believers in
the '50s and '60s for its "free" explorations of the musical un-
known. Today, jazz's most visible symbol, Wynton Marsalis-a
man as much admired for his impeccable tailoring and serious
demeanor as for his musical prowess, a man who speaks of his
art as a moral calling-, seems to have found a rather cozy place
in the bourgeois order.
452 John Gennari
But even though jazz has found a place in such respectable
institutions as the Ivy League university, the New Yorker, and,
just recently, Lincoln Center, it continues to struggle for the
recognition and the critical understanding that it deserves. Such
acceptance of jazz that does exist in the American cultural estab-
lishment seems predicated on the idea that jazz has transcended
its origins in the black community and become universal; that
jazz belongs in the academy or in any serious discussion of
American art because it has aspired to and achieved a level of
excellence comparable to that of the "great" works of the Euro-
pean and Anglo-American canon. If jazz has the complexity, in-
telligence, and timeless significance of true art, the argument
goes, it is because it has overcome the aesthetic limitations of its
conception in the boozy New Orleans red-light district and its
development in the mindless mass-entertainment rituals of the
urban dance hall. Only by suppressing base libidinal urges and
emotional spontaneity in favor of rational reflection and self-con-
trol-only by migrating from the pelvis to the brain-did jazz
begin to produce the refined, ennobling pleasures of true art.
Consider the following words of Gunther Schuller, the noted
composer, teacher, and writer whose magisterial history of jazz-
Volume 1, Early Jazz: Its Roots and Musical Development (1968);
Volume 2, The Swing Era The Development of Jazz, 1930-1945
(1989); third volume on post-1945 jazz forthcoming-has taken
its place on library shelves as the field's authoritative work:
... the entire history of the arts shows that intellectual enlightenment
goes more or less hand in hand with emotional enrichment, or visa
versa. Indeed, the great masterpieces of art-any art-are those in
which emotional and intellectual qualities are well balanced and com-
pletely integrated-in Mozart,Shakespeare, Rembrandt .... Jazz, too,
evolvingfrom humble beginnings that were sometimes hardly more than
sociological manifestations of a particular American milieu, has devel-
oped as an art form that not only possesses a unique capacity for
individual and collective expression, but in the process of maturing has
gradually acquired certain intellectual properties. Its strength has been
such that it has attracted interests in all strata of intellectual and
creative activity. It is natural and inevitable that, in this ever broadening
process, jazz will attract the hearts and minds of all manner of people
with all manner of predilections and temperaments-even those who will
want to bring to jazz a roughly five-hundred-year-oldmusical Idea: the
notion of thematic and structural unity. (Musings94)
This passage, taken from Schuller's influential 1958 analysis of
Sonny Rollins's recorded performance of Blue Seven, is a telling
illustration of a dilemma posed by African-American culture's
incorporation into the Western elite tradition. Implicit in
Schuller's reasoning is that, as long as jazz remained part of "a
particular American milieu," before it acquired "intellectual prop-
 Jazz CriticisrwIts Development and Ideologies 453
erties" and attracted the interest of "all manner of people," it had
yet to achieve the status of art. One wonders whether Schuller
thinks of, say, Vienna in the same way he thinks here of the
black neighborhoods in New Orleans, Chicago, Kansas City, New
York, and other American cities where jazz grew up. Was the
particular milieu of Vienna more worthy of sociological than of
artistic interest before Mozart? Is Mozart's music to be consid-
ered art only because he attracted the "hearts and minds of all
manner of people with all manner of predilections and tempera-
ments," or would it still be art if no one outside Vienna had
heard it?
Schuller, who has been President of the New England Conser-
vatory and Artistic Director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra,
is also one of the founders of the Third Stream (jazz-classical
fusion) idiom. He has been a guiding force since the late 1950s
in urging the American musical establishment to support and
take a serious interest in jazz, and his criticism is the most
comprehensive and technically precise yet produced. But if we
are to understand jazz, in Lawrence Levine words, as "one of
those forces that have helped to transform our sense of art and
culture" ("Jazz" 18), then it is helpful to compare Schuller's ap-
proach to jazz with that of someone whose perspective has been
less conditioned by the European classical tradition.2
Albert Murray's Stomping the Blues (1976) is an effort to de-
velop an aesthetic theory of jazz indigenous to the music, a
theory fully attuned to the cultural values, the aesthetic criteria,
and the social practices of the milieu in which the music has
been created. Murray's interpretation of swing as a "velocity of
celebration" binding jazz musicians to their dancing audiences,
to the African heritage of "percussion and incantation," and,
most crucially, to the "idiomatic accents and tonalities of U.S.
Negroes' downhome experience," pointed jazz criticism in the
direction that Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Houston A. Baker, Jr.,
have been traveling in recent years in their search for an African-
American vernacular literary theory. Gates has eloquently
summed up the rationale behind his own effort:
The Western critical tradition has a canon, as the Western literary
tradition does. I once thought it our most important gesture to master
the canon of criticism, to imitate and apply it, but now I believe that we
must turn to the black tradition itself to develop theories of criticism
indigenous to our literatures. (13)
Gates has tried to reformulate the literary canon of the American
university, not only by redefining the body of literature that
American students should read, but also by cultivating specific
ways of reading that body of literature. He has urged the acad-
454 John Gennari
emy not merely to open itself up to the "difference" of black
literature, but also to engage that difference differently-based
on principles indigenous to the black cultural experience.
Murray is no stranger to the European and Anglo-American
canon: His education and intellectual sensibility, like that of
fellow Tuskegee graduate Ralph Ellison, upholds Matthew
Arnold's valorization of "the best that has been thought and
known in the world" (44-47). For Murray and Ellison, that lofty
category includes not only Shakespeare and Tolstoy, but also
Basie and Ellington. Recounting his education as a writer, Mur-
ray says of the Ellington records he listened to while serving a
term in the Air Force,
They were as valuable to me as the studying I was doing of Mann and
Hemingway, who was not only writing novels but publishing good stuff
in Esqutre. Of course, everybody loading up his literary gun or wetting
his literary reed was paying attention to old Wild Whicker Bill Faulkner,
an absolute necessity. (qtd. in Crouch, Notes 44)
But for Murray the blues tradition "is the product of the most
complicated culture, and therefore the most complicated sensi-
bility, in the modern world" (Omni 166). And just as Gates ar-
gues that "we must turn to the black tradition itself to develop
theories of criticism indigenous to our literatures," so Murray
argues that black music criticism must be an organic extension
of the distinctive African-American cultural experience of the
blues tradition. Criticism not grounded in a secure and sensitive
knowledge of the lived experiences of art-the socio-cultural
sources both of its creation and its use-is not capable, Murray
argues, of reaching the core of an art's meaning.
The blues tradition's "complicated sensibility" has been sub-
jected to transparent, uninformed interpretations by scores of
critics who have mistaken the blues' lyrical descriptions of back-
breaking labor, infidelity, and social dislocation for a sense of
defeat and victimization. The blues have indeed documented the
fact that African-Americans have been rebuked and scorned and
that "nobody know de trouble dey seen"; the blues have mani-
fested, in Ellison's famous formulation, "an impulse to keep the
painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one's
aching consciousness." But the blues have also-to complete
Ellison's thought-transcended that brutal experience, "not by
the consolation of philosophy, but by squeezing from it a near-
tragic, near-comic lyricism" (78)! And Albert Murray has shown
how.
Murray's blues tradition, as Stanley Crouch has put it, is one
of "confrontation more often than lamentation" (Notes 47). It is
 Jazz Criticisrn Its Development and Ideologies 455
ragtime and barrelhouse piano players' confronting the challenge
of entertaining an extremely discerning clientele, people trading
the downhome work week for a downhome good time; people
expecting, along with "all the good barbecue and fried chicken,
seafood, and all the whiskey and all the cigars and cigarettes
and shaving lotions and hair pomade and perfume and powder,"
to dance the whole night long (Murray, Stomping 132). It is
young saxophone players' confronting the rigorous demands of
their craft, trying to establish their identity by spinning a fresh
two-chorus variation on a theme that has been worked over for
years by the very best players of the instrument. It is, in its
ultimate statement, the crowning aesthetic achievement of
swing, a code for living and a profound insight into the human
condition of modern man:
The definitive statement of the epistemological assumptions that under-
lie the blues idiom may well be the colloquial title and underlying decla-
ration of one of Duke Ellington's best-known dance tunes from the
mid-thirties: It Don't Mean a Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing). In any
case, when the Negro musician or dancer swings the blues, he is fulfill-
ing the same fundamental existential requirement that determines the
mission of the poet, the priest, and the medicine man. He is making an
affirmative and hence exemplary and heroic response to that which
Andre Malraux describes as la condition humaine. Extemporizing in re-
sponse to the exigencies of the situation in which he finds himself, he is
confronting, acknowledging, and contending with the infernal absurdi-
ties and ever-impending frustrations inherent in the nature of all exis-
tence by playing with the possibilities that are also there. Thus does man
the player become man the stylizer and by the same token the human-
izer of chaos; and thus does play become ritual, ceremony, and art; and
thus also does the dance-beat improvisation of experience in the blues
idiom become survival technique, esthetic equipment for living, and a
central element in the dynamics of U.S. Negro life style. (Murray, Omni
58)
Like Gunther Schuller, Murray argues that jazz is a fine art
that manifests a higher level of aesthetic achievement than the
folk sources that it grew out of and continues to draw upon.
Though he might quibble with the semantics of Schuller's argu-
ment for jazz's qualification as great art, Murray too embraces
the concept of a hierarchy of culture that distinguishes between
different levels of complexity:
However much there is to say about the authentic earthiness of Blind
Lemon Jefferson and Leadbelly, without whose best output no collection
of twentieth-century American music should be considered truly repre-
sentative, there is a good deal more to be said for the no less authentic
extensions and refinements that have resulted from the playful options
taken from such consecrated professionals as Jelly Roll Morton, Louis
Armstrong, Bessie Smith, Lester Young, Charlie Parker, and Duke El-
lington. (Stomping 214)
456 John Gennari
But Murray parts company with Schuller in his stronger insis-
tence on the fundamental importance of folk sources to the criti-
cal appreciation of jazz, and in his firmer grasp of the way these
folk sources feed the jazz tradition. What Schuller refers to as
the "humble beginnings" and the "sociological manifestations" of
pre-jazz black music, Murray considers as central ingredients in
the jazz aesthetic; as vital, irreducible factors in whatever "intel-
lectual properties" jazz might come to manifest. Murray's ethno-
graphic focus on the lived experience of the blues culture, his
emphasis on the codes of communication cultivated and shared
between performers and audiences, his assumption that the tru-
est meaning of African-American music is that which African-
Americans have communicated among themselves in their
distinctive verbal and kinetic expressiveness-all these features
of his critical orientation make it impossible for him to think
about the musical achievements or intellectual ramifications of
an Armstrong or an Ellington without thinking about the "au-
thentic earthiness" and "downhome" vitality of the environment
out of which jazz emerged.
Murray's focus on context, on folk tradition, and on audience
response is never so fundamental as when he says that "one way
for those whose ears are uninitiated to the idiom to become
oriented to blues music is for them to begin by listening as if
each blues composition was being played by so many talking
drums, some voiced as guitars and banjos, some as pianos,
trumpets, trombones, saxophones, clarinets, and so on" (Stomp-
ing 116). The most perceptive and technically accomplished
white jazz critics-Schuller, Martin Williams, and earlier, the
French composer and writer Andre Hodeir, whose Jazz: Its Evolu-
tion and Essence (1956), published earlier in France as Hommes
et problomes duJazz (1954), was the first successful book-length
exercise in the formal criticism of jazz- all hold the view that the
sophisticated use of rhythm in jazz is central to the music's
aesthetic achievement: the nuanced approach to time, the subtle
variations of phrasing, the ability to make either a sustained
whole note or a cluster of eighth- and sixteenth-notes swing.
These critics understand that jazz broke down European classi-
cal music's categorical distinctions among rhythm, melody, and
harmony in favor of a temporal, spatial, and tonal organization of
sound that heightens the importance of the drum. But Murray
goes much further than these critics in defining the drum's fun-
damental cultural importance as an instrument of ritual and
aesthetic meaning.
 Jazz CriticisrwIts Development and Ideologies 457
Consider this discussion of rhythm, in which Hodeir uses the
rhetorical device of an idealized observer, familiar with both Eu-
ropean and African music, in weighing jazz's debt to Africa:
African drummers do not imprison their figurations in the framework of
the four-bar unit of construction and the four-beat measure. Further-
more, ... they like to repeat the same formula indefinitely. Varying the
rhythm, therefore, like varying the notes, would strike [an] observer as
the sign of an intellectualized art. He could not see Jazz as anything but
the denial of a centuries-old, static African conception, with its leaning
toward incantation, In favor of another conception, European in origin
and based on the development of thought. Listening to the constant
variety of Baby Dodds' rhythmic formulas in 'Drum Improvisations,"
how could he consider this musician as anything but a civilized man
trying, without success, to imitate a primitive? (Jazz 43)
Hodeir's distinction between Baby Dodds's "intellectualized art"
and the pre-intellectual "incantation" of primitive African drum-
mers pushes jazz even further back on the evolutionary chain
than Schuller's "humble beginnings." And in its failure to con-
sider how the African ritualistic use of the drum carries over into
jazz, this view reveals its limitations, as Murray makes clear:
... keeping the appropriate beat is hardly more natural to U.S. Negro
musicians than it was for their drum-oriented forebears in ancestral
Africa, where musicians were always required to be throughly trained
and formally certified professionals. To the Africans from whom the
dance-beat disposition of U.S. Negroes Is derived, rhythm was far more
a matter of discipline than of the direct expression of personal feelings.
African drummers had to serve a long period of rigidly supervised ap-
prenticeship before being entrusted with such an awesome responsibil-
ity as carrying the beat! (Stomptng 106)
In brief, Hodeir's and Schuller's fine technical analyses of ching-
ching-a-ching do not reveal the full extent of the drum's signifi-
cance in the evolution of African-American aesthetics.
Relatedly, Schuller's 800-plus-page book The Swing Era, for all
of its brilliant insight, rich knowledge, and extensive detail, ulti-
mately fails to offer a satisfying definition of swing. True, arriving
at such a definition has been one of the great unanswered
challenges in the history of jazz criticism, but what makes
Schuller's failure especially noticeable is the earnestness with
which he tries to succeed. He starts with an explanation from
pragmatic philosophy and behavioral science: The meaning of
swing is in the physical effects it produces in the listener, such
as foot-tapping, finger-snapping, or dancing. Then he moves to
physiology: The meaning of swing is a natural impulse that reg-
isters as a feeling in the "auditory apparati of the ear and mind."
Then he moves to an architectural analogy: Swing is a "perfect
equilibrium between the 'horizontal' and 'vertical' relationships of
musical sounds." Finally, to illustrate this "performance-energy
458 John Gennari

balance" that is swing, Schuller sends his reader to an appendix

to look at some computer-generated graphics which visually de-
pict "envelopes" of sound that capture the difference between a
swinging Ray Brown bass line and a non-swinging base line by
one Richard Sarpola (223-24). The reader, caught in the warp
and woof of future shock, is not quite certain how all this scien-
tific discourse illuminates Schuller's claim-which he earlier
substantiates in a fine analysis -that Duke Ellington's recording
of It Don't Mean Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing) is a masterpiece.
The point is not that Schuller does not understand swing, or
Ellington. It is that his interpretive scheme sometimes seems at
odds with his subject. Again, consider Albert Murray's indige-
nous perspective, here illustrated in discussions of Ellington and
Parker:
The old saying ['It Don't Mean a Thing . . .1 which Duke Ellington
turned into a popular tune (and also a catch phrase for a generation in
the bargain) was not so much a statement of fact as a declaration of
working principles. Music which is not sufficiently dance-beat oriented is
not likely to be received with very much enthusiasm by the patrons of
downhome honky-tonks, uptown cabarets, and the ballrooms and casi-
nos across the nation. Music can be sweet (and low and ever so slow), or
it can be hot (and also fortissimo and up-tempo) so long as it has the
idiomatic rhythmic emphasis that generates the dance-step response. In
other words, the Incantation must be so percussion oriented that it
disposes the listeners to bump and bounce, to slow-drag and steady
shuffle, to grind, hop, jump, kick, roll, shout, stomp, and otherwise
swing the blues away. (Stomping 144)
Nothing's too fast or too slow to swing, runs Count Basie's correlative to
the Armstrong/Ellington Principle: and in addition to the output of
Basie's own orchestra over the years, there are also the collected works
of Charlie Parker, perhaps the most workshop-oriented of all Kansas
City apprentices, to bear him out in spite of all the undanceable Euro-
pean concert-oriented pretentiousness that has been perpetrated by
self-styled disciples while using his name in vain. What you hear when
you listen to Charlie Parker as a Kansas City innovator is not a theorist
dead set on turning dance music into concert music. What you hear is a
brilliant protege of Buster Smith and admirer of Lester Young, adding a
new dimension of elegance to the Kansas City drive, which is to say to
the velocity of celebration.... Charlie Parker was out to swing not less
but more. Sometimes he tangled up your feet but that was when he
sometimes made your insides dance as never before. At his best he
could make your insides cut all the steps that your feet could not cut
anyway. (Stomping 164-66)
If Murray is better able than Schuller to capture the lived experi-
ence of swing, it is in no small part due to his having been there,
in the downhome honkytonks, sebing for himself the effect that
Charlie Parker had on people's feet. But equally important is
Murray's belief that this kind of social experience-the dancing,
the drinking, the dressing up and getting down-is central to the
 Jazz Criticism:Its Development and Ideologies 459
meaning of jazz, and should be a central part of any effort to
define jazz's aesthetic values.
Contrast this belief with Schuller's description of his method in
writing The Swing Era:
I imagined myself coming to Jazz without any prior knowledge or precon-
ceptions and beginning, tabula rasa, to listen to the recordings - system-
atically and comprehensively. Although it was not possible in this
volume ... to adhere totally to the principle of comprehensive listening,
the basic premise was still to have heard every recording of any artist,
orchestra, or group that would come under discussion-and to listen
systematically/chronologically in order to trace accurately their develop-
ment and achievements.... This kind of systematic/comprehensive
listening to the recorded evidence-often the only reliable information
the Jazz historian has-puts things in true, sometimes glaring perspec-
tive-something that selective listening, no matter how intelligent or
knowledgeable, cannot provide. (tx-x)
Schuller's claim that the truth of jazz is to be found in recordings
("often the only reliable information the jazz historian has") is at
odds with the most fundamental and enduring article of faith in
jazz-namely, that its truth is located in its live performance
aesthetic, its multitextual, non-recordable qualities of emotional
expressiveness and response. Schuller seems to be advocating a
critical approach along the lines of literary New Criticism, which
would approach individual works of art as self-contained, self-
defining objects to be elucidated as autonomous aesthetic works
rather than understood as documents created in specific socio-
historical contexts. If the tenets of the New Criticism have proved
excessively confining for most literary critics, its narrow injunc-
tions are of especially dubious value for critics of jazz, whose
texts are in a constant state of revision, and whose historical
significance to African-American social identity is simply too
compelling to disregard.
In practice, Schuller both offers clear, incisive explanations of
the recordings and displays sensitivity to the social and eco-
nomic forces acting on jazz musicians and shaping their musical
choices. He knowledgeably discusses the vagaries of the music
industry, the personalities of musicians, and the general cultural
climate in which jazz evolves. When it comes to the task the New
Critics most prized, the close reading of a text to discern its
internal logic and its sources of creative tension, Schuller's criti-
cism is the reigning standard.
Albert Murray shares Schuller's empiricism as well as his hu-
manism, his thirst for data as well as his worship of the secular
artist. The difference between them is not so much method and
belief as it is access and angle. In conventional language, the
difference might be described as one between Schuller's elite,
460 John Gennari

cultivated approach and Murray's popular, vernacular approach.

This very vocabulary, however, is the product of the elite tradi-
tion: Only intellectuals use the word vernacular. Murray's ap-
proach is no less cultivated than Schuller's, and, conversely,
Schuller's approach can be described as being in the academic
vernacular. Schuller writes of spending "tens of thousands of
hours" listening to records, systematically and comprehensively
analyzing them with a view to reaching a conclusion about indi-
vidual artists based on their total output. Murray is less explicit
about his methods, but one infers that he too has spent count-
less hours researching the music -many of them, perhaps, in his
living room or office in front of a stereo, but many more of them
as a participant/observer in dance halls and juke joints, compre-
hensively investigating the "velocity of celebration" mutually ani-
mating musicians and dancers, systematically examining the
"technologies of stylization" cultivated in live performance. He is
not uninterested in the way that individual musicians develop
their personal aesthetic, but he is more interested in the way a
collective African-American aesthetic has been absorbed, trans-
formed, and extended. Hence, the organizing principle of his
book is not the chronologies or discrete histories of individual
performers, but the development of themes: -The Blues as Such,"
"The Blues as Music," "Swinging the Blues," "Kansas City
Four/Four and the Velocity of Celebration." Schuller's writing
style is linear and logical, rather like twentieth-century academic
music. Murray's is poetic, improvisational, circular, elliptical,
and paradoxical, rather like jazz itself. Schuller's book has musi-
cal transcriptions and computer-generated graphics. Murray's
has photographs of jazz musicians, dancers, and record labels.
The importance of Schuller's work is well appreciated, and he
deserves all the praise he receives. But the true test of the cul-
tural establishment's acceptance of jazz is not whether it will
publish, buy, study, and discuss a work like Schuller's, which
fits so squarely into the traditional critical framework. The true
test is whether the cultural establishment will acknowledge the
value of a perspective such as Murray's, which asks it to look at
art in a way that it has never before done.
The effort to change the configuration of intellectual and cul-
tural power in American society so as to increase the representa-
tion of African-American culture-an effort which has been
characterized variously as an assault on Western civilization, an
erosion of intellectual standards, and a corruption of art by the
vulgar force of politics-is also an effort to cultivate the critical
tools necessary to produce better interpretations of that culture.
 Jazz CriticisnmIts Development and Ideologies 461
When Henry Louis Gates, Jr., argues that "we must turn to the
black tradition itself to develop theories of criticism indigenous
to our literatures," he is calling for critical practices organically
connected to the idiom they are representing, and therefore bet-
ter able to elucidate the values and meanings produced within
that idiom. To do this, Gates argues, is not to reject other critical
practices, but rather to observe critics' mostfundamental goal of
developing theories which explain how the texts they are study-
ing actually work:
. . . the New Critics tended to explicate the metaphysical poets, the
structuralists certain forms of narrative, and deconstructionists found
their ideal field of texts among the Romantics. While each school of
criticism claims for itself what ITzvetan] Todorov calls 'a universal aspi-
ration," in practice European and American critics tend to write about
European and American writers of one specific sort or another.... to
theorize about black literatures we must do what all theorists do. And
that is to read the texts that comprise our literary tradition, formulate
(by reasoning from observed facts) useful principles of criticism from
within that textual tradition, then draw upon these to read the texts
that make up that tradition. All theorists do this, and we must do this
as well. (406)
Albert Murray's careful observations of the blues culture and
his understanding of the underlying beliefs and practices of that
culture-his illuminating readings of jazz's multitextual canvas
of language, sound, movement, and image stretched against the
backdrop of African-American social life-have produced an in-
digenous aesthetic theory which illuminates the particular mean-
ing of the jazz and blues tradition that is the key to its universal
significance. As Murray says, "The finest art has always been
better because it has always been concerned with what makes a
people particular and universal-even if the creators of it were
only trying to live up to the tradition they were faced with, which
is to say a tradition that was sufficient to make universal state-
ments" (qtd. in Crouch, Notes 42). Murray's Stomping the Blues
is an indispensable supplement to Schuller's The Swing Era in
the effort to fix higher standards, to search for a richer under-
standing of Western civilization, and to celebrate the enriching
power of art.

II
Ours is a century in which percussion and polyrhythm are fundamental to
its identity; in which the machinery of the age and the activities of the people
parallel the multilinear densities and rhythms of the very rain forest that
could easily have been the inspiration for Africa's drum choirs, with their
broad sense of sound and their involvement with perpetual rhythmic motion.
The celebratory rhythm of swing became a new kind of lyricism, a feeling
462 John Gennari
that gave the drums a fundamental position in an art music that didn't
disavow dance, a role in which set and improvised syncopation took on a
fresh fluency. The result was that Negro Americans put the Western world
on two and four, asserting~a conception of time that created an uproar when
Stravinsky emulated the accents of a ragtime band in his Rite of Spring. As
Wynton Marsalls points out, "Stravinsky turned European music over with a
backbeat. Check it out. What they thought was weird and primitive was just
a Negro beat on the bass drum." (Crouch, "Jazz"82)

The first jazz recordings in the early decades of this century

came at a time of enormous ferment in the arts: Post-Im-
pressionism, Cubism, Futurism, Expressionism, Dadaism, and
Surrealism in the plastic arts; the experimental literary forms of
Joyce, Pound, Eliot, Stein, and Malraux; Stravinsky and
Schoenberg in music; Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe
in architecture; Alfred Stieglitz and Man Ray in photography; the
cinema-taken together, what has come to be called modernism.
Any movement encompassing so many different artists and
media resists easy definition, but all of the various projects
grouped under the rubric of modernism explored new levels of
experience, new realms of feeling, new physical and intellectual
technologies: machines that could speed up and slow down im-
ages, the Freudian psychoanalytic method of probing the uncon-
scious, Bergson's view of the malleability of time, Einstein's
theory of relativity. Speed, abstraction, montage, collage, stream-
of-consciousness, the twelve-tone row-all were new modes of
representation designed to capture new visions of the world.
Responding to the incessant, vibrating flux of European and
American society-urbanization, industrialization, immigration,
a devastating world war-, artists sought to capture the sense of
uncertainty, irresolution, ambivalence, and paradox inherent in
their changing cultural condition. Some early modernists re-
sponded to the apparent decline of traditional sources of value
(religion, social status, nationalism) with a sense of loss and
disillusionment. Others glimpsed in the new machine technology
a source of freedom and possibility. Yet others claimed for art
itself a self-defining, self-justifying aura that removed it from any
socio-historical contingencies not directly relevant to the artist's
creative act. Some (particularly Joyce, Pound, and Eliot) consid-
ered formal complexity an aesthetically desired end; others (no-
tably the architect Wright) pursued organic simplicity; still
others (Gertrude Stein, with her automatic writing and fidelity to
the spoken word; the Cubist painters, with their multiple yet
simultaneously perceived planes; Schoenberg, with his twelve-
tone row) proposed neither simplicity nor complexity so much as
entirely new modes of perception.
 Jazz Criticisrn Its Development and Ideologies 463

Uniting this considerable diversity of outlook and approach,

according to American modernist scholar Daniel Joseph Singal,
was a reaction against the stale pieties and inauthenticity of
Victorian culture-its view of art as a didactic vehicle "for com-
municating and illustrating preordained moral truths"; its di-
chotomous view of human nature, positing a firm barrier
between the "higher" rational faculties and the "lower" in-
stinctual ones; its fixed truths and absolute system of morality
(7-26). Modernism reacted against Victorian cultural stasis and
intellectual complacency by stressing the integration of the self-
what Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane have called the
fusion of "reason and unreason, intellect and emotion, [the] sub-
jective and objective" (qtd. in Singal 13)-and by embracing the
state of constant redefinition and incessant adaptation to chang-
ing historical circumstances-in Ronald Bush's felicitous phrase,
the state of "continuous becoming" (qtd. in Singal 15)-that
characterizes modern man's relationship with his social and
physical environments.
In philosophical circles these ideas received their most system-
atic development in the work of John Dewey, the pragmatist
philosopher, progressive educational theorist, and social critic,
who argued for the integration of thought and experience, intel-
lect and instinct, and pushed hard for the cultivation of native
educational and artistic methods. Dewey's Art as Experience de-
velops an aesthetic theory that stresses the notion of "continu-
ous becoming" in exploring how art is made and how it functions
as an element of social life. The central idea of Art as Experience
is that any human experience can be an artistic one, provided
that the experience is shaped in a way that is singularly suited
to the specific material and social circumstances at hand. An
experience distinguishes itself as art, in Dewey's thinking, when
it achieves a sense of finality which retrospectively confirms the
order, harmony, logic, and connectedness-in short, the right-
ness-of the process of its creation. For Dewey, the process of
artistic creation is an integration of action and perception: "The
artist embodies in himself [sic] the attitude of the perceiver while
he [sic] works.... what is done and what is undergone are thus
reciprocally, cumulatively and continually instrumental to each
other" (49-50). Aesthetic meaning and aesthetic value for Dewey
are inseparable from the social context in which art is created
and consumed: Meaning is found in the communication between
artist and audience, value in the qualitative evaluations estab-
lished in this communication. Like art itself, meaning and value
464 John GennanT
are inherently processual, as well as socially and historically
contingent.
No clearer illustration of these ideas could be found at the time
Dewey was writing them than Duke Ellington's incessant re-
working of themes, riffs, tonal colorations, and instrumental
combinations to fit the demands of each particular perfor-
mance -the "social" demand of his audience's desire for interest-
ing dance rhythms and the "artistic" demand of his desire to
fashion the perfect tonal environment for the distinctive voices of
his soloists. No clearer illustration, that is, unless one considers
Louis Armstrong's fresh reconceptualization of phrasing, dynam-
ics, intensity, and note choice to fit the demands of each particu-
lar solo chorus. Indeed, jazz's emphasis on the process of its own
creation, the reciprocity of its means and its ends, epitomizes
one of the dominant achievements of modernism. Jazz im-
provisation is, virtually, a state of "continuous becoming," more
authentically a processual art than, say, the Jackson Pollock
"action painting" experiments that Clement Greenberg celebrated
as the highest expression of twentieth-century formalism.
It may be taken as some measure of jazz's low esteem in Amer-
ican intellectual life in the '30s that Dewey does not discuss jazz
in his aesthetic writings. For here, Dewey missed an opportunity
to embed his aesthetic theory firmly in a uniquely American field
of action, which would have advanced both his theoretical and
his political aims. And with the benefit of Dewey's interest, per-
haps American intellectuals would have come to understand the
significance of jazz to the modernist movement. Jazz's place in
the modernist canon is fundamental. Louis Armstrong's West
End Blues is no less significant a development in American mod-
ernism than the 1913 Armory Show, the stateside publication of
Ulysses, the writing of The Sound and the Fury, or the construc-
tion of Robie House. The shifting rhythms, sliding harmonies,
and instrumental juxtapositions of early New Orleans jazz simul-
taneously conveyed both the fragmentation and the wholeness of
time and sound in much the same way that Cubist painting
conveyed the fragmentation and wholeness of space and color.
The virtuosic fingering of Art Tatum produced profound, timeless
musical statements no less "complex" than the discursive state-
ments of William Faulkner. The 4/4 swing of the Count Basie
rhythm section achieved a kind of understated, spare elegance
not unlike the pared down simplicity of Ernest Hemingway's
prose.
But if modernism was, at least in part, an effort to break
through the firm Victorian barrier "between the 'higher' mental
 Jazz CriticisrrnIts Development and Ideologies 465
functions, such as rational thought and spirituality, and
those 'lower' instincts and, passions that Freud would in
time ascribe to the 'id' " (Singal 14), then the status of jazz
in early twentieth-century culture was not as a modernist art
itself, but as primitivist fodder-as Dionysian instinct, passion,
emotion, subconscious impulse-for the "true" modernists, the
artists who followed Nietzsche's prescription of harnessing
Dionysian energy with Apollonian order and systemization.
When Picasso incorporated African-influenced plastic forms into
his work, he was celebrated for infusing core European art with
the more organic, more natural, vitally "primitive" impulses of
peripheral (to European) culture. But when Louis Armstrong in-
corporated African-influenced tonality and syncopation into his
work, if he was celebrated at all-and mostly he was ignored or
demeaned-, it was for being a "primitive," a creature of instinct,
who was struggling nobly to incorporate European rationalism.
In the modernist discourse of the 1920s and '30s, the differ-
ence between Picasso and Armstrong is the difference between a
"legitimate" artist of wide, catholic taste and a "primitive" artist
of narrow, parochial taste. It is the difference between the genius
who is praised for first mastering the academy and forcing it to
extend its purview, and the genius who is praised for a "natural"
talent that no academy can teach. It is, by extension, the differ-
ence between an artist whom a European-educated (or American
Europhile) intelligentsia canonizes, and one whom they merely
patronize. Jazz's marginality with respect to modernism lies in
the fact that, whereas today Picasso is not only enjoyed but also
studied and taught, Armstrong is only enjoyed-though not
nearly enough.
Both Cubism and early jazz offended the status quo Victorian
sensibility and therefore encountered stiff resistance in their
search for public acceptance. But the Cubists at least had the
support of a battery of critics, writing in the now famous "little
magazines" of downtown New York, persistent in the effort to
define and interpret the art on its own terms. Thus could Marcel
Duchamps' Nude Descending a Staircase practically suffocate
under a heap of abuse in 1913, only to become highly prized by
dealers and museum curators and be thoroughly incorporated in
the art historical canon only a few years later. But jazz, situated
in an ethnic culture that was segregated and degraded, did not
have the same power to define itself within the modernist dis-
course.
In the 1930s, however, jazz did begin to figure heavily in one
transatlantic discourse central to modernism, the discourse of
466 John Gennari
primitivism. In the '30s and '40s, French intellectuals produced
four major books on jazz: Hugues Panassi6's Hot Jazz: The Guide
to Swing Music (1934), which made its author arguably the most
famous jazz critic in the world; Charles Delaunay's Hot Discogra-
phy (1936); and the Belgian exile Robert Goffin's Auxfrontibres
du jazz (1932) and Jazz: From the Congo to the Metropolitan
(1944). These writers and others, led by Panassi6, in 1935
founded Jazz Hot, the first magazine on either side of the Atlan-
tic devoted exclusively to jazz.3 The primitivist credo shared by
this group drew on a tradition reaching back to Jean Jacques
Rousseau's admiration of the savage's "innate goodness"; devel-
oping further with Henri Rousseau, Degas, and (later) Picasso's
interest in African plastic forms; and continuing strongly into the
1930s with the poet Guillaume Apollinaire's self-definition as a
"primitive aesthete." It was a tradition expressing European
intellectuals' disillusionment with modern civilization's excessive
emphasis on the purely rational, its privileging of the mind over
the heart, its stultifying technological and bureaucratic con-
straints, its increasingly remote sensitivity toward real human
feeling.
"Primitive man generally has greater talent than civilized man,"
Panassi6 wrote. "An excess of culture atrophies inspiration, and
men crammed with culture tend to play tricks, to replace inspi-
ration by lush technique under which one finds music stripped
of real vitality" (qtd. in Gioia 29). The ideal primitive man for
Panassi6 and his compatriots-the noblest of all savages-was
Louis Armstrong. "Music was within him, and a melodic frag-
ment was a voice speaking to him," Panassi6 wrote of Armstrong;
"a tune he caught on the mildest rhythm might rouse echoes in
him, thrilling him to the depth of his subconscious" (qtd. in Gioia
19-20). Goffin argued that black jazz musicians were better than
white ones because of their unique ability to achieve a trance
state while they were playing. Each of these writers assumed
(wrongly) that black jazz musicians could not and did not read
music, and argued that this, far from being a deficiency, was a
key to their unadorned, uncompromising, instinctual approach.
Twentieth-century French intellectuals have often thought of
American culture in primitivist terms, and have often embraced
it as such. This is a perspective that has made Jerry Lewis a
culture hero, and has led Jean Baudrillard, in his recent book
America (1988), to embrace the American highway billboard, the
television commercial, and Las Vegas as the truest symbols of
American civilization and as beacons of a postmodernist, post-
industrial, post-rational, "hieroglyphic" world order. While
 Jazz Criticism: Its Development and Ideologies 467

French cultural criticism's reputation is far less diminished by

Panassi6, Delaunay, and Goffin than by Baudrillard, the defi-
ciencies of their understanding of jazz are obvious. None of these
early jazz writers had any first-hand knowledge of the jazz mi-
lieu. None knew the African-American experience well enough to
understand that it had its own ideas about the difference be-
tween civilized man and savage man, and that Armstrong fell
squarely in the first category. None appreciated the fact that
technique was so central a value to Armstrong that he devoted
his life to perfecting it. Despite their upbringing in a culture that
supposedly privileges the intellect, none of these writers showed
much intellectual prowess in basing their acclaim for jazz on the
superior natural musical talent of the black tribe, thus leaving
unexplained why so many naturally endowed black Americans
couldn't match the musical achievements of the product of a
New Orleans waif house. Their allegedly superior power of reason
couldn't explain why Armstrong, supposedly the embodiment of
pure, pre-civilized unself-consciousness, was so brilliant at mod-
ifying and embellishing his style to shape and reflect changing
tastes in American and European culture. Nevertheless, these
writers, Panassi6 In particular, have long been credited for mak-
ing the educated Western world at least cognizant of jazz as
something other than a seedbed of narcotics abuse and anony-
mous sex, a not inconsiderable accomplishment in light of the
overwhelming prejudices they were confronting. The educated
Western world's recognition of jazz's aesthetic properties should
not, however, be confused with its understanding and apprecia-
tion of the art form-as Otis Ferguson understood when he de-
flated the myth of Panassies jazz omniscience in a 1939 review
of Hot Jazz, a book he found "somewhat exhausting, because of
its mixture of disorganization, rapture and inevitable remoteness
from the tradition . . . a standard source of extremely valuable
misinformation" (186).
The astute Ferguson, who wrote for The New Republic before
being killed in World War II, is one of the critics that James
Lincoln Collier uses in his 1988 monograph The Reception of
Jazz in America to support the idea that American writers in the
1930s produced jazz criticism that was far superior to the Euro-
pean, and particularly the French, criticism of the day. Even in
the late 1920s, Collier argues, jazz was receiving sensitive, in-
sightful criticism by American music critics. R. D. Darrell, a New
England Conservatory-trained composer and editor of the con-
sumer magazine Phonograph Monthly Review, took great interest
in jazz after hearing Ellington in 1927 and wrote positive reviews
468 John Gennari

of his and other Ja artists' work. Here are a couple of his

Ellington reviews from the early '30s:
For all the fact that Ellington has become too popular and too busy to
do his best work at all times, the Duke still has an occasional disc up
his sleeve that is not only quite unbeatable, but is a genuine musical
(not merely Jazzical) achievement. His "Jungle Band's' coupling of
Dreamy Blues and Runnin' Wild, on Brunswick 4952, is one of these
works. Runnin' Wild is one of the finest dance tunes ever written (as
Gilbert Seldes and many another has testified) and Ellington's version is
done with an abandon as magnificent as that of the music itself. But the
Dreamy Blues, one of Ellington's own compositions, is the real musical
achievement. It is a poignantly restrained and nostalgic piece with glori-
ous melodic endowment and scoring that even Ravel and Stravinsky
might envy. Indeed It actually recalls those hushed muted trumpets of the
beginning of the second part of the "Rite of Spring." (qtd. in Collier,
Reception 38; emphases added)
Out of the vast bulk of [Ellington's] work, thrown off in his cabaret-
dance-hall-vaudeville recording routine I found a goodly residue of
music that was of the same or superior calibre as [Black and Tan
Fantasy]; and disregarding all that was merely conventional noisy, and
cheap, there was still a quintessence of precious quality for which one
has no apter term than genius.... As a purveyor and composer of music
that must be danced to (if he is to earn his living), Ellington's composi-
tion is narrowly limited by dance exigencies, while he is allowed a wide
range of expression in the way of instrumentation and performance. It is
hardly remarkable that the later experimentation has borne fruit; what
is remarkable Is that working within constricted walls he has yet been
able to give rein to his creative Imagination and racial urgefor expression.
Perhaps the very handicaps, permitting no high-flown excursions into
Negro rhapsodies and tone poems, allowing no escape from the funda-
mental beat of dance rhythm, have enabled Ellington to concentrate his
musical virility, draw out its full juice, dissipating none of his forces in
vain heaven-stormitn. (qtd. In Collier, Reception 39; emphases added)
Darrell, as Collier claims, was a discerning and prescient critic.
But to adduce Darrell's jazz writing as evidence of the full accep-
tance and appreciation of jazz in the United States in the late
'20s and early '30s is singularly wrongheaded.
I will later elaborate on the problems with Collier's broader
argument about the American acceptance of jazz, but let me here
quarrel with Collier's argument about Darrell's significance. Dar-
rell, like many American critics who have written about jazz, was
a classical music critic who did not fully understand jazz's aes-
thetic agenda. His use of European symphonic composers as
absolute indices of musical excellence, his insistence on separat-
ing Ellington's "musical" wheat from his "jazzical" chaff, his ad-
miration of Ellington for overcoming his dance hall
"handicaps"-all testify to a deep-seated assumption that jazz
could become art only by transcending its milieu, that jazz's
creative breakthroughs still required the legitimating, sanctifying
influence of the elite European tradition before it could assume a
 Jazz Criticisnv Its Development and Ideologies 469

place in the modernist canon alongside Stravinsky's Rite of

Spring. Note this tendency in another sample of Darrell's jazz
criticism:
The marvelously gifted (jazzically) pianist of Louis Armstrong's orchestra
[Earl Hines] gets only an occasional opportunity to display his talents in
solo discs, so connoisseurs of ultra-modern jazz should not let his
present coupling of original Caution Blues and A Monday Date slip by.
The former is moderately interesting, but the intently rambling Monday
Date decidedly extraordinary. Strawinskites [sic] and Bartokians will
find more than a trace of their cherished modem feeling right here .
(qtd. in Collier, Reception37)
Darrell was not taken in by the primitivist fallacy that discol-
ored the French critics' perception of jazz. His jazz writing is free
of Negroes blessed with trance powers, natural rhythm, and su-
perior instinct. But his incessant use of the jazz caveat (Hines is
marvelously gifted-jazzically) and his chronic obligatory nods to
Stravinsky and Bartok suggest that Darrell knew his reading
audience to hold prejudices against jazz which he felt he had to
overcome to justify writing about it. The source of these preju-
dices may not have been so much the dance orientation of the
music as the skin color of the musicians; i.e., the people who the
French were calling noble savages were indeed considered savage
by most white Americans, but not in any way noble. Darrell,
notwithstanding his own prejudice against dance music, is to be
commended for staying clear of the noble savage myth -as well
as the mere savage racial slur-altogether. But Darrell's aes-
thetic predilections were such that the strongest endorsement he
could give to an Ellington or an Armstrong was the suggestion
that he had seen through their Negro skin to hearts and minds
that were committed to superior European cultural values. His
criticism could hardly provide a strong foundation for the con-
struction of a critical perspective that approached the music on
its own terms. Indeed, Darrell's criticism might better be used as
evidence for an argument exactly opposite to the one Collier
makes: Darrell's assumption that classical European musical
values were the proper ones for evaluating the artistic talent of
Ellington and Hines can be construed as proof that jazz's intrin-
sic aesthetic was far from fully appreciated by the American
musical establishment.
Not all pre-World War II American jazz writing failed to recog-
nize the uniqueness of the jazz idiom and to treat it on its own
terms, however. Consider Roger Pryor Dodge's discussion of jazz
piano in 'Harpsichords and Jazz Trumpets" (1934):
Owing to the conspicuous commonplaces of our virtuosi, the negro
pianist only too easily slips into the fluid superficialities of a Liszt ca-
denza. This tendency of the negro to imitate the florid piano music of the
470 John Gennari
19th century which he hears all around him, has kept the piano back-
ward in finding its own Jazz medium. It takes a very developed musical
sense to improvise significantly on the piano, a talent for thinking in
more than one voice. The counterpoint that Jazz instruments achieve [in
an] ensemble is possible to a certain extent on the piano alone, but this
takes a degree of development Jazz has not yet reached. The best piano
solos so far, in my opinion, are the melodic "breaks" imitating [thel
trumpet and trombone. Lately the pianist has found some biting chords,
and felt a new desire to break up melody, not only rhythmically as
inspired by the drum, but rhythmically as a percussion instrument
fundamentally inspired by its own peculiar harmonic percussion. This,
perhaps, will lead him to contribute something no other music has. (qtd.
in Crouch, "Jazz" 77)
Whereas Darrell can only think of Ellington in terms of Stravin-
sky, Dodge is not only thinking of 1930s jazz piano in terms of
its own logic, he is (as Stanley Crouch rightly suggests in his
analysis of this passage) doing nothing short of postulating the
future development of jazz piano in the hands of Thelonious
Monk and Cecil Taylor. In suggesting that the jazz piano be
thought of as a percussion instrument capable of its own har-
monic and melodic articulation, he is anticipating by some
twenty-odd years Cecil Taylor's approach to the keys of the piano
"as if they were eighty-eight tuned drums" (Wilmer 51). Dodge is
writing about jazz not as the wholly owned subsidiary of some
European or African musical monopoly, but as an African-Ameri-
can enterprise under the majority control of black aesthetic capi-
tal. He is discussing jazz as a modernist art form with a sense of
self-identity and purpose, in control of its own destiny, nour-
ished by its own beauty, and yet anxious to discover more of its
potentiality.
Of course, jazz's roots in the black social experience and in
African-American aesthetics were well understood by black jazz
musicians themselves, and if the critical establishment had
a
given them voice, it might have produced a critical perspective
better attuned to the values intrinsic to the jazz idiom. In the
writings and pronouncements of James Reece Europe, a black
conductor and composer of early symphonic jazz, for example,
one sees a black race consciousness and black perspective on
jazz beginning to germinate as early as 1914:
... we colored people have our own music that is part of us.... it's the
product of our souls; it's been created by the sufferings and miseries of
our race. Some of the old melodies we played . . . were made up by
slaves of the old days, and others were handed down before we left
Africa. Our symphony orchestra never tries to play white folks music.
... We are no more fitted for that than a white orchestra is fitted to play
our music. Whatever success I have had has come from a realization of
the advantages of sticking to the music of my own people.... I firmly
believe that there is a big field for the development of negro music in
 Jazz Criticisr: Its Development and Ideologies 471
America.... I believe it is in the creation of an entirely new school of
music, a school developed from the basic negro rhythm and melodies.
The negro is essentially a melodist, and his creation must be in the
beautifying and enriching of the melodies which have become his.
The negro's songs . .. are the only folk music America possesses, and
folk music being the basis of so much that is most beautiful in the
world, there is indeed hope for the art product of our race. (qtd. in
Welburn, "Europe' 37-39)
Europe by no means established a full vocabulary or set of cri-
teria for genuine jazz criticism, but this statement, remarkably
frank for its time, points clearly in the direction of an African-
American-centered perspective. But even before his premature
death in 1919, Europe's considerable orchestral and dance
music achievements were being eclipsed in public recognition by
the white Original Dixieland Jazz Band and the (bogus) "King of
Jazz" Paul Whiteman. It goes without saying that Europe's voice
as a pioneer expositor and interpreter of the true jazz idiom was
eclipsed as well.
Had Europe lived through the '20s, it is possible that he might
have influenced leaders of the Harlem Renaissance to look at
jazz more seriously than they did. Alain Locke, prolific editor of
The New Negro and chronicler of the period, published The Negro
and His Music in 1936, a study that showed deep reverence for
the folk traditions in the music, yet Locke seemed almost embar-
rassed by the dance orientation of the music of his own day.
Indeed, it is a shortcoming of the Harlem Renaissance intelligen-
tsia that they failed to appreciate fully the cultural importance of
Armstrong, Ellington, Bessie Smith, Fletcher Henderson, and
other jazz and blues artists-in retrospect the most significant
artists of their time. In his provocative 1971 study Harlem Re-
naissance, Nathan Irving Huggins observes that
Harlem intellectuals promoted Negro art, but . . . except for Langston
Hughes, none of them took jazz-the new music-seriously. Of course,
they all mentioned it as background, as descriptive of Harlem life. But
none thought enough about it to try and [sic] figure out what was
happening. They tended to view it as folk art-like the spirituals and the
dance - the unrefined source for the new art. Men like James Weldon
Johnson and Alain Locke expected some race genius to appear who
would transform the source into high culture.... It is very ironic that a
generation that was searching for a new Negro and his distinctive cul-
tural expression would have passed up the only really creative thing
that was going on. (1 1)
Even if the Harlem Renaissance had taken jazz more seriously,
however, and publications like The New Negro had undertaken
to forge a crucible of African-American jazz criticism, it is un-
likely that such a development would have carried much weight
in white American and European intellectual circles. If the white
472 John Gennari
middle class thought about Harlem at all in this period, it tended
to be either in wholly negative terms (as the site of race riots and
radical Garveyite demonstrations) or in frankly mercenary, voy-
euristic ones (as the place to go for sensual, exotic music and
women). Carl Van Vechten could manifest a sincere interest in
black culture and yet not completely avoid the taint of primitivist
condescension, as Bessie Smith understood the time she
stormed out of Van Vechten's apartment, knocking his wife to
the floor as a parting shot, after performing for his guests and
sensing strongly that she was being looked at "more as a novelty
than as a human being."4 An even better representation of the
elite white intellectual perspective on Harlem was Robert Penn
Warren's famous dismissal of Langston Hughes's poetry as in-
sufficiently metaphysical. In such a climate of opinion at the
seam between black and white culture, any jazz criticism that
hinted of a black-centered perspective would surely have been
met with derision and condemnation, just as it was when such
criticism finally emerged in full throat in the 1960s.
As it happened, American jazz criticism in the 1930s and '40s
made little progress beyond establishing itself as a marginal oc-
cupation with limited esteem in broader intellectual circles. The
one notable exception were the leftist writers-John Hammond,
writing primarily for the New Masses but publishing in many
places; the New Republic's Otis Ferguson; the Daily Workers
Charles Edward Smith; and the Nation's B. H. Haggin-who saw
important connections among the black struggle for civil rights,
the working class's struggle for economic rights, and jazz's strug-
gle for cultural esteem. According to Ron Welburn, the typical
1930s jazz writer
(who hesitated to call himself a critic) was likely to be an opinionated
young Ivy League graduate who collected jazz records, attended night-
clubs and ballrooms to hear his favorite bands and musicians, and
wrote good enough prose for it to be published.... these critics consti-
tuted an interesting, sometimes provocative intellectual subclass in
that, as critics, they first of all were not of the racial background of the
musicians who generated the creative spirit of jazz, and secondly they
could never gain entry to the status of the serious music critic. Despite
their individual and collective shortcomings they forged a jazz press of
journalistic and aesthetic analysis and established a vocabulary for the
critical scrutiny of jazz. New writers for a new music-their youth In age
roughly parallels jazz history itself-they forced the discussion of the
role of criticism forJazz. ("American"14)
As Welburn points out, the generation of jazz writers who came
of age in the 1930s shared a similar background. Welburn dis-
tinguishes a slightly older group born around the turn of the
century-the Chicago Defender's Dave Peyton (1885), the New
 Jazz Criticism:Its Development and Ideologies 473
York Herald-Tribune's Virgil Thomson (1896), Aaron Copland
(1900), and B. H. Haggin (19QC0)-from a younger group born in
the first two decades of the new century-Winthrop Sargeant
(1903), Preston Jackson and Charles E. Smith (1904), Wilbur
Hobson and William Russell (1906), Marshall Stearns (1908),
John Hammond and Charles Delaunay (1910), Stanley Dance
(1911), Hugues Panassi6 (1912), Leonard Feather (1914), and
Barry Ulanov (1918). Whereas the older group wrote about vari-
ous kinds of music (with Thomson and Copland, of course, also
composing music, primarily within the European classical tradi-
tion), the younger group cast its lot completely with jazz, and
considered its own cultural development parallel with that of the
jazz idiom itself. What is significant about the younger group is
its privileged class background, coupled with a skeptical attitude
toward the establishment. All were products of wealth and edu-
cation (Hammond's Vanderbilt pedigree-he dropped out of
Yale-and the affiliations of Stearns with Harvard and Yale and
Ulanov with Columbia are representative). Hammond's rebel-
liousness seemed strongest because of the striking juxtaposition
of his tony upbringing on upper Fifth Avenue and his acquired
taste for the pleasures of Harlem, but all expressed in one fash-
ion or other an impatience with stale or spent bourgeois conven-
tions. And most of them-Hammond in particular-had strong
convictions about the need for improved civil rights for black
Americans.
As befitted persons of their class, many of these young men
had formal music training in the European tradition. To the
horror of their parents, however, as college students and adults
they traded in their Bach scores for Armstrong's Hot Fives and
Hot Sevens, then eschewed the run-of-the-mill security of the
banking and advertising careers that their classmates gravitated
toward in favor of the adventure of scuffling for freelance work
writing about what they believed in, culturally and politically.
Their crowning achievement was the establishment of a small
jazz press-"little magazines" led by Melody Maker, Metronome,
and Down Beat-in which they traded their impressions of the
latest jazz disc releases. The lasting contribution of this group of
writers was the record review: the short, pithy, self-contained
unit of analysis that represents an important first step toward
thorough criticism. Following the methodology pioneered by
R. D. Darrell in Phonograph Monthly Review of identifying and
dissecting the record's total musical design-its timbral integra-
tion, its meshing of soloists and sections, its dynamics, the qual-
ity of its rhythm in conjunction with its melody, the quality and
474 John Gennari

character of its soloists' output-, these jazz critics provided jazz

fans a consumer's guide and a vocabulary for talking about the
music (Welburn, "American"ch. 10).
These were young men-Welburn pegs their average age in
1935 at 26-brimming with enthusiasm over an art form that
was spiky, sensual (in a word, hot) and that seemed to thumb its
nose at bourgeois pieties. These men found their greatest satis-
faction in thinking of themselves as in some way authentically
connected with the cutting-edge achievements of Armstrong, El-
lington, Basie, Chick Webb, and other leading jazz artists. They
took visceral, sublime pleasure in their sense of being inside
jazz's creative core, integrally associated with the mysteries of
artistic conception, communing with the very soul of the artists
they worshipped.5 Nurturing the feeling that, somehow,
Armstrong's latest solo spoke directly to them, to their cultural
condition, they viewed jazz as the touchstone of a new belief
system; a new way of life far more spontaneous and life-affirming
than that of their parents; a new culture far more authentic than
the one propagated in the churches, universities, and corpora-
tions. Their enthusiasm for jazz fits the modernist experience
described by cultural historian Frederic Jameson:
At its most vital, the experience of modernism was not one of a single
historical movement or process, but of a 'shock of discovery," a commit-
ment and an adherence to its individual forms through a series of
religious conversions. One did not simply read D. H. Lawrence or Rilke,
see Jean Renoir or Hitchcock, or listen to Stravinsky as distinct mani-
festations of what we now call modernism. Rather one read all the works
of a particular writer, learned a style and a phenomenological world, to
which one converted.... This meant, however, that the experience of
one form of modernism was incompatible with another, so that one
entered one world only at the price of abandoning another. . . . The
crisis of modernism came, then, when it suddenly became clear that
D. H. Lawrence was not an absolute after all, not the final achieved
figuration of the truth of the world, but only one art-language among
others, only one shelf of works In a whole dizzying library. (1 13)
The young jazz writers of the 1930s and '40s were ardent fans
of particular jazz artists and styles, and their debates about who
should be allowed into the jazz canon were legendary for their
passionate sectarianism. When early-jazz partisan Art Hodes ac-
cused bebop champion Leonard Feather of economically moti-
vated trendiness, Feather responded with a blistering attack on
"moldy figs" who
are to music what Rankin and Bilblo are to politics and Pelger to the
press. They are the extreme right-wingers of jazz, the voice of reaction in
music. Just as the fascists tend to divide group against group and
distinguish between Isic] Negroes, Jews, Italians, and "Real Americans,"
so do the Moldy Figs try to categorize New Orleans, Chicago, swing
 Jazz Crittcisnm Its Development and Ideologies 475

music, as "the real jazz." Just as the fascists have tried to foist their
views on the public through the vermin press of Social Justice, The
Broom, and X-Ray, so have the FAigsyapped their heads off in the Jazz
Record, Jazz Session, and Record Changer. Just as the Gerald L. K.
Smiths regardAmerica as a privateclub to which refugees and members
of various races cannot be admitted, so does the right-wingjazz group
limit itself to a clique in which a nineteenth century birth certificate
from New Orleans is almost the only admission ticket, while all the
young, aspiring musicians of today are barred and branded as 'riff
musicians" or jump and jive men. (qtd. in Leonard 140)
Generally these critics were less concerned with elaborating
systematic aesthetic theories than with initiating a discussion
about Basie's new Decca sides, say, or sparking a debate about
the comparative virtues of Jelly Roll Morton's Hot Peppers and
the New Orleans Rhythm Kings. Their metier was not readily
distinguishable from that of the group commonly called promot-
ers, and often the tone and pitch of their appeals smacked of
some of the vulgar hucksterism associated with the latter group.
Operating at the center of a nexus of exchange among critics,
record producers, and radio and newspaper managers, they were
not notable contributors to the tradition (or myth) of journalistic
objectivity.6 John Hammond's facile transitions from the role of
record producer to that of record reviewer (often for the same
record) are well-known. But it is not unreasonable to assume
that anyone trying to make a living as a jazz critic in the 1930s-
even a young man from a well-heeled family-would have had a
hard time not looking for the most remunerative possibilities
available in the practice of his craft. Record-company payola or
liner-note commissions might have been seen as a necessary and
wholly ethical supplement to a modest Down Beat contributor's
take; certainly there was little money to be made writing about
jazz for top-drawer general-circulation magazines, and virtually
no support available from universities and foundations.
Of course, if critics of the period generally favored record re-
views over more extended discursive forms because of remunera-
tive arrangements with record companies, the effects of this
arrangement on the development of jazz criticism should be eval-
uated frankly. A jazz writer up to his chin in fresh 78s, and
needing for his economic well-being to snap off a few choice
phrases about as many of them as possible, is not likely to
produce a scholarly treatise on jazz aesthetics, or even an ex-
tended "think piece," any time in the immediate future. Further,
a jazz writer whose livelihood was contingent on the economic
well-being of a small jazz magazine ar-d a couple of financially
shaky jazz record labels might not be especially inclined to write
about such issues as, say, the economic exploitation of black
476 John Gennari
jazz musicians. All of the potential sources of income for jazz
critics were part of a political economy that inevitably imposed
limits on the range of acceptable discourse in matters of race.
However gamely Hammond and others challenged these limits
with their progressive civil rights positions, it would still not have
been possible, for example, for a 1930s version of Archie Shepp
to penetrate the white-controlled media, much less get a fair
hearing. As it was, radical black intellectuals such as W. E. B.
Du Bois and Paul Robeson had all they could do to maintain
their citizenship.
Welburn fails to show how these writers, in his words, "forced
the discussion of the role of criticism for jazz," unless he means
the discussion they had among themselves. He gives no evidence
of these writers' achieving visibility or status within American or
European intellectual circles beyond their own, nor does he
prove that these writers developed modes of aesthetic analysis
unique to the jazz idiom. But if these writers did not win for jazz
the kind of cultural prestige that was enjoyed by the other mod-
ernist arts, in no small part this is because they were themselves
as marginalized from the mainstream as the music. They did,
however, establish a lively dialogue about this young art form,
and this was at least a start.

III

In 1958 Martin Williams, soon to join Nat Hentoff in launching

the excellent Jazz Review, wrote an article for Down Beat entitled
"Criticism: The Path of the Jazz Critic" in which he lamented the
mediocre state of jazz criticism and suggested how jazz critics
might improve their craft. Too much jazz criticism, Williams com-
plained, was public relations pablum or amateur journalism being
palmed off as informed opinion, and this was incongruent with the
high quality of the music: "We assure ourselves that jazz is an 'art,'
and often proceed to talk about it as if it were a sporting event."
Arguing that critical tools must be "trained, explored, disciplined
and tested like any other talent," Williams urged a stronger ana-
lytical approach to the music and more of an emphasis on con-
tent and meaning. The jazz critic should have a strong
background in the liberal arts, a firm grasp of Plato and Aristotle
as well as Eliot and Jung, and familiarity with the best criticism
in all fields. With this learning and awareness, the critic could
then analyze jazz works using the same questions that Matthew
Arnold argued should be applied in literary criticism: What is the
work trying to do? Does it succeed? How and why? Is it worth
 Jazz Criticismt Its Development and Ideologies 477

doing? How does it compare with the best works in the field?
Following such a method, Wilfiams hoped, would help jazz criticism
achieve at least some of the distinction of the top-level literary
criticism that was being produced in the United States (1 1).
By the late 1940s the American university had fully absorbed
the ideas of Matthew Arnold, along with the New Critical doc-
trines forged in England in the '20s by I. A. Richards, F. R.
Leavis, and T. S. Eliot, and elaborated in the United States in the
1930s by Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, Cleanth Brooks, R. P.
Blackimur, and other leading critics. Conceived as a response to
the assault on aesthetic and spiritual values by science, technol-
ogy, and materialism, the New Criticism held that the primary
task of criticism is to elucidate individual works of art. The
artwork-usually, for the New Critics, a poem-was seen as a
self-contained, self-defining, self-sufficient object, and criticism
was the investigation of how the work resolves its formal ten-
sions to achieve structural coherence. By the late '40s univer-
sity-based literary critics, imperially confident of the objective,
timeless, authoritative quality of their evaluations, thought
themselves to be identifying precisely those works of literature
which compelled the serious attention of educated, cultivated
people. F. R. Leavis, for example, told his Harvard students that
a scholarly study of the English novel required the reading of
Austen, Eliot, James, and Conrad but not of Fielding, Thackeray,
Dickens, Joyce, or Woolf (Updike 88).7 If a student had the
audacity to question this reading list, Leavis, armed with the
formidable scholarly ammunition of his Great Tradition treatise,
was prepared to fire off as many rounds of Leavisite literary
principle as it would take to quiet the recalcitrant brat.
Whether Williams aspired to this level of high seriousness is
doubtful, but he did want jazz criticism to raise its intellectual
standards and procedures. In jazz circles, though a consensus
might have developed around the idea that Armstrong's Hot
Fives were better than his Hot Sevens, the only tangible evidence
of this consensus might have been a file of scattered Down Beat
clippings and Columbia liner notes. The limited development of
the jazz critical infrastructure at this time was such that the
single most penetrating analysis ever produced of a particular
artist or record could conceivably have perished, before seeing
the light of publication, in the very moment of its expression in
some New York or Chicago tavern. The virtual nonexistence of
"jazz studies," not only as an educational curriculum but as a
concept, made it next to impossible to discern intellectual au-
thority in the expression of jazz opinion. To be sure, some opin-
478 John Gennart
ions carried more weight than others, but the basis of such
critical weight had as much to do with force of personality as
with force of reason. Jazz critics knew who they liked, and per-
haps why, but they did not spell out the specific criteria to be
used in evaluating and interpreting the music.
The 1950s was a crucial decade for jazz, and not only because
the music itself was in the process of assimilating and trans-
forming the momentous aesthetic advances of bebop; not only
because the cool, Third Stream, and free experiments were tak-
ing jazz to places it had never been before. Increased visibility
and status of a certain kind were represented by expanded and
more diverse audiences, the advent of the Newport Jazz Festival,
college concert bookings, and exemplary recording and packag-
ing of the music by labels such as Blue Note, Riverside, and
Prestige. To understand how this came to be, one must look
closely at the changing cultural landscape in the United States
and consider jazz's position within it.
Giddy with the euphoria of post-World War II affluence, nour-
ishing an addiction to Cold War cultural muscle flexing, the
1950s establishment-the government, as well as private inter-
ests ranging from the Rockefeller Foundation to the Schaeffer
Brewing Company-for the first time in American history was
showing real interest in both the quality and the dissemination
of the arts, particularly the performing arts. Not surprisingly, a
disproportionate share of the material resources underwriting
this new interest were directed toward the kind of safe, tradi-
tional, overwhelmingly bourgeois European and straw-hat Amer-
ican tastes that predominated in the professional middle-class,
Organizational-Man cohort. Music, dance, and theater enter-
prises that were proliferating in all parts of the country targeted
their programming at the eponymous man-in-the-grey-flannel-
suit (or, more likely, his wife); indeed, most of the programming
would not have stretched the cultural horizons of President Ei-
senhower himself. But there was political capital available, as
well, in the more complex arts of Abstract Expressionist painting
and jazz.8 "United States Has Secret Atomic Weapon-Jazz," a
1955 New York Times headline announced, with its subhead
adding, "Europe Falls Captive as Crowds Riot to Hear Dixieland"
(qtd. in Levine, "Jazz" 17). Dizzy Gillespie took on the role of
ambassador-at-large for jazz and American culture in State De-
partment-sponsored tours of Asia, the Middle East, and Africa.
But even as jazz was being used as a diplomatic tool abroad, in
the United States the cultural authority of European music was
becoming more firmly entrenched. The refugee conductors
 Jazz Criticisrr Its Development and Ideologies 479
Arturo Toscanini, Serge Koussevitsky, Otto Kiemperer, George
Szell, and Bruno Walter had by now established firm control of
the major American symphony orchestras and were enthusiasti-
cally introducing American audiences to the modernist works of
Stravinsky, Bartok, and Mahler (Diggins 221). The American
composers-notably Aaron Copland and Virgil Thomson-who
had made late teens' pilgrimages to the Paris alter of Nadia
Boulanger had by now gained full entry into the American classi-
cal music establishment. Leonard Bernstein was beginning to
emerge as a singular American artist and entrepreneur, spend-
ing summers serving his mentor Koussevitsky's legacy by treat-
ing Tanglewood audiences to bold interpretations of Mahler and
winters succoring the same audiences-now back in New York-
with scores for very successful Broadway shows.9
The new Lenox School of Jazz at Music Inn in the Berkshires of
western Massachusetts, just down the road from Tanglewood,
summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and a leading
center of classical music education, emerged as the first effort at
establishing an academic basis for the study of jazz performance,
theory, and history. As the site of the formation of The Modern Jazz
Quartet; the inception of the Schuller-led Third Stream movement;
concerts by established artists like Sonny Rollins and emerging
ones like Omnette Coleman; lectures and reportage by Williams,
Steams, and others, the Lenox School of Jazz, along with the com-
mercial success of the Newport Jazz Festival, seemed to augur a
brightening future for jazz in terms of institutional formation and
audience development. With rock 'n' roll fast securing its niche as
the music of adolescent rebellion, jazz-which had so ably filled
that role in the '20s and '30s -was now becoming respectable, even
fashionable, among educated, professional elites. Contributing to
this process of bourgeoisification was the European orientation
of the Third Stream, the new fusion of classical music and jazz
forged by The Modern Jazz Quartet, Gunther Schuller, and oth-
ers, as well as the ersatz symphonic effects and melodic romanti-
cism of many "cool" jazz productions. Notwithstanding Schuller
and Hodeir, themselves composers in the Third Stream move-
ment, many notable jazz critics of the period gave Third Stream
and cool jazz lukewarm receptions, arguing that what jazz gained
from these subgenres in cultural respectability it lost in the
cultivation of its own fully legitimate aesthetic. Regardless of how
dismissive some jazz critics may have been of the Third Stream
and cool in the late '50s, however, all jazz critics benefitted from
-the larger, economically and culturally more powerful audiences
these subgenres secured for jazz.
480 John Gennari
Between 1955 and 1963 the jazz bibliography expanded to
include Hear Me Talkin' to Ya The Story of Jazz as Told by the
Men Who Made It (1955), a compilation by Nat Shapiro and Nat
Hentoff of richly evocative remembrances culled from the jazz
press; Marshall Stearns's The Story of Jazz (1956), a witty,
smooth-reading account, drawing on the research of ethnomusi-
cologists, as well as ample personal familiarity with the New York
scene, of jazz's evolution from West African, Caribbean, Euro-
pean, and native sources into the cosmopolitan complexities of
bebop; Andre Hodeir's Jazz: Its Evolution and Essence (1956), the
first serious formalist study of jazz (which I'll discuss further in a
moment); Francis Newton's The Jazz Scene (1959), an astute
analysis of the social underpinnings of jazz which, in arguing
that "no bar of coloured jazz has ever made sense to those who
do not understand the Negro's reaction to oppression," foreshad-
owed the arguments (considered at length later in this essay) of
Amiri Baraka's highly influential 1963 book Blues People; Nat
Hentoffs MTeJazz Life (1961), a collection of Hentoffs essays
from Harper's, Esquire, Dissent, and Down Beat, whose higher-
journalism sensibility and enlightened perspective on social and
cultural matters raised the quality of the jazz discourse several
notches; Whitney Balliett's The Sound of Surprise (1959), the first
collection of his beautifully written New Yorker pieces; Martin
Williams's Jazz Panorama (1962), which includes Gunther
Schuller's famous piece on Sonny Rollins's Blue Seven and a Nat
Hentoff interview with Miles Davis that is one of the most incisive
statements ever made about jazzlO; and Williams's King Oliver
(1960), Jelly Roll Morton (1962), and the essays from the Ever-
green Review, Saturday Review, and Down Beat-later collected
in The Jazz Tradition (1970)-in which Williams explored key
artists' complete oeuvres and the entire jazz tradition for ideas
about how jazz has evolved as an individual and collective en-
deavor.
Clearly jazz writing had taken a giant step beyond the "hot,
gassy prose, provincialism, inaccuracy, and condescension"
Whitney Balliett described as constituting jazz's unimpressive
critical tradition to that time (Sound 14). The music was begin-
ning to achieve the kind of serious critical recognition that it had
long suffered for, and the criticism began better serving readers
who were looking for intelligent musicological analysis as well as
insight into jazz's connection withi broader intellectual and politi-
cal currents. This flowering of serious thought and commentary
on jazz was a stanching of the wounds that had been inflicted on
jazz in its long history of degradation and marginalization, and it
 Jazz Criticismr Its Development and Ideologies 481

came at a time when American society, in the intersecting trajec-

tories of the Cold War and the Civil Rights movement, had much
to gain from increasing the status of its most important native
art form. In this climate, it became possible and necessary for
jazz criticism to scrutinize itself more seriously than it had in the
past. Should it follow literary New Criticism in the privileging of
texts-in this case, recordings-as the primary focal point of
analysis?I1 Should it consider racial identity and the historical
experience of blacks as issues central to the development of jazz
aesthetics, or as separate issues altogether? Most importantly,
who was it that qualified for the position of jazz critic? What kind
of experience and education did it take to quali1Wsomeone as an
authoritative critical voice? Whose interpretations of jazz were
the most valuable?
Hodeir's Jazz: Its Evolution and Essence, as a pioneer effort in
scholarly, formalist jazz criticism, begins with an effort to under-
line its author's authority and justify his method. Hodeir, in a
piece of neo-primitivist logic that recalls the earlier French en-
gagement with jazz, argues that only artists can judge other
artists, but since jazz musicians demonstrate no capacity for the
kind of thought process that goes into criticism, he is stepping in
to do it for them:
Who has spoken of Schoenberg with more warmth and competence than
Alban Berg? Who has given us a more clear-sighted analysis of Le Sacre
du Prlntemps than Pierre Boulez? However, it is characteristic of the
European composer to meditate. It is not rare to see him become truly
aware of a problem at the very moment when he is in the act of creation.
The jazz musician does not meditate. If he happens to listen attentively
to the work of another musician, he grasps what it has to offer through
intuitive assimilation rather than by reflection. (Jazz 18)
But Hodeir's perspective on jazz easily escapes the pitfalls of
Panassi6's primitivism. A serious effort to elucidate the technical
features of jazz musicianship is evident on every page of the
book; there is no room in Hodeir's resolute search for the truth
of Armstrong's aesthetic for flighty speculation on subconscious
urges or powers of self-hypnosis. Hodeir does, however, share
with Panassi6 an ideological framework that posits a distinction
between "primitive"and "civilized" (or what Hodeir refers to as
"modern")modes of cultural expression. Whereas Panassi6 con-
sidered jazz itself a primitive art form, Hodeir sees jazz as rooted
in primitive art but ever straining to transcend it and achieve
more and more of the systematic intellectual coherence of civi-
lized art.
Hodeir makes much in this book of how much jazz musicians
have taken from the European musical tradition: fixed time me-
482 John Gennart
ters and tonal scales, the architecture of song form, a certain
kind of syncopation. Essentially correct in his assertion that jazz
has profited mightily from its assimilation of European musical
principles, Hodeir also is well-qualified to define these principles.
Like all true artists, like the European modernist composers who
were borrowing heavily from jazz, jazz musicians have used as
many of the cultural resources at their disposal as possible, and
the European musical tradition has been one of them. But what
Hodeir does not contemplate -and in this his neo-prirnitivism is
most marked-is the possibility that jazz musicians have taken
from African music something more than an intuitive, natural
approach to their art, such as important technical principles and
distinct concepts of musicianship.
Hodeir's book was the first to propose under one cover a peri-
odization of jazz history, a canon of jazz performances, a techni-
cal vocabulary for discussing the music, and a theory of the
music's aesthetic essences. The book's form itself is an impress-
ive and illuminating act of criticism: an introductory suggestion
of jazz's place in contemporary culture; an outline of the evolu-
tion of jazz, highlighting key individual achievements
(Armstrong's Hot Five recordings, Ellington's Concertofor Cootie,
Charlie Parker's bop, and Miles Davis's cool recordings) and the
search for a common musical language; and a discussion of the
essential characteristics of jazz. Some American jazz writers and
musicians found the book rarified and laborious-Balliett called
it a "dry and difficult semi-musicological study" and objected to
the "hyper-intensity that leads Mr. Hodeir into the hushed zones
of French theoretical criticism" (Sound 19)-and a few suggested
that Hodeir's remoteness from the American jazz scene and his
experience as a composer in the European tradition led him to
misunderstand the music's fundamental properties. These crit-
ics-notably Balliett and pianist Billy Taylor-took particular
issue with Hodeir's argument that improvisation and the blues
are not essential to jazz. 12
Martin Williams was more receptive to Hodeir, in part perhaps
because the French composer and critic represented for him the
kind of highbrow sensibility that he thought jazz criticism could
use, but equally because he found Hodeir's systematic approach
to jazz history and his effort to define the aesthetic essences of
jazz excellent models for emulation. He was also won over by
Hodeir's perception that Charlie Parker had deeply enriched and
replenished jazz by burrowing deep into the organic roots of the
music, particularly in regard to rhythm, at the same time as he
was crafting innovations out of the harmonic and melodic lan-
 Jazz Criticisnr Its Development and Ideologies 483
guages of European music (Panassi6, the former high priest of
French Jaz criticism, had, by contrast, regarded Parker as "an
extremely gifted musician" who "gradually gave up jazz in favor
of bop" [181).
Williams went on to shape Hodeir's ideas into a framework for
thinking about the entire jazz tradition, arguing that all of the
key stylistic innovations in jazz have resulted from changes in
rhythmic conception, and showing how the jazz tradition broke
down into alternating periods of innovation and consolidation.13
In the late '50s, when Ornette Coleman took the advances of
Charlie Parker a step further-subverting conventional chord
structures, bar lines, and ways of fingering and blowing a saxo-
phone, but keeping his experiments firmly embedded in the
blues-, Williams wrote exceptionally fine, even prescient, criti-
cism which argued that Coleman, more than any of his contem-
poraries (including the more celebrated John Coltrane), was
developing the implicit resources of jazz and pointing to a fruitful
path for jazz's future. Since assuming a curatorial position at the
Smithsonian in the early 1970s, Williams has been the keeper of
the jazz canon for the United States' (and the world's) heritage.
In The Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz, first released in
1973 and still undergoing revision and extension, jazz has its
answer to the Norton Anthology of Literature and Morton Adler's
Great Books series. 14
Williams's The Jazz Tradition is the best representation of his
view of jazz history. In this collection of essays, Williams offers
portraits of the jazz masters and, by tracing the thread of influ-
ence that has connected them, gives credence to his notion of an
evolving tradition. Williams shows that he not only listens closely
to the music, but thinks hard about the creative processes by
which major artists find where their specialness lies. (In his
collection Jazz Masters in Transition, we see Williams pursuing
this angle in the studios of New York and at the School of Jazz in
Lenox. He is clearly fascinated by the making of the art, and
manages to report on these experiences in a sober but crisp
manner.) His writing is clean and unadorned, and he shifts eas-
ily (sometimes too easily) from one recording to the next, one
idea to the next. The essays fall somewhere between the levity of
record reviews and the gravity of scholarly analyses. Here are a
couple of representative passages:
Miles Davis's earliest records were sometimes able and occasionally
faltering, but they showed a very personal approach to the modern jazz
Idiom. From time to time he did espouse the virtuoso manner of Gilles-
pie, and on occasion he showed a perceptive ability almost to abstract
Gillespie's style, as on A Night in Tunisia with Charlie Parker. But more
484 John Gennart
often he was involved in a simple, introspective but sophisticated lyri-
cism which seemed to refute the ideas that many people had about
modernJazz as a virtuoso music whose simple passages had to alternate
with a sustained barrage of sixteenth-notes. And he was sometimes so
good a lyricist as to be able to follow, for example, Charlie Parker's
superb solo on Embraceable You without sounding a hopeless anti-cli-
max. UJazzTradition 203)
[Charlie Parker'sJ Koko may seem only a fast-tempo showpiece at first,
but it is not. It is a precise linear improvisation of exceptional melodic
content. It is also an almost perfect example of virtuosity and economy.
Following a pause, notes fall all over and between this beat and that
beat: breaking them asunder, robbing them of any vestige of monotony;
rests fall where heavy beats once came, now "heavy" beats come be-
tween beats and on weak beats. Koko has been a source book of ideas
and no wonder; now that its basic innovations are familiar, it seems
even more a great performance in itself. (Jazz Tradition 149-50)
Whether sketching a musician's career or focusing on a single
solo, there is a seamless quality to this writing that is at once
seductive and frustrating: seductive in its gliding readability,
frustrating in its lack of sustained argument. It is not easy to
disprove Williams, but that may mean that he hasn't offered
enough substance for an argument. Though not given to the
densely analytical style of literary New Criticism, Williams shares
the New Critics' belief that art transcends its surroundings and
exists for its own sake. The jazz world delineated in these essays
seems to have no tensions other than creative ones, no aspira-
tions other than aesthetic ones, no purpose other than the evo-
lution of style.
Perceiving the need to reflect more deeply on the meaning of
the jazz experience, Williams appended an essay to The Jazz
Tradition entitled 'The Meaning of a Music: An Art for the Cen-
tury" which offers the clearest exposition of his philosophy of
jazz. Williams assails Marxist interpretations of the music for
turning art "into a reductive 'nothing but' proposition, robbed of
its complexities and its humanity.... Art does not reflect society
and environment and consciousness," Williams writes, "so much
as it tells us what environment and society and consciousness
do not know" (251). And what jazz has told us-what makes jazz
the quintessential twentieth-century art-is that we must contin-
ually remake, reinvent ourselves through action. His argument,
reminiscent of both Dewey and existentialism, is that jazz has
uniquely fused thought and feeling, reflection and emotion, into
the act of doing. With their emphasis on performance and im-
provisation, on individual creativity in a group context, on con-
stantly changing approaches to their material, jazz musicians, in
Williams's view, have fashioned the best aesthetic response to
the twentieth century's assault on humanistic values.
 Jazz CriticismrIts Development and Ideologies 485
There is no gainsaying the formidable efforts of the key jazz
critics of the 1950s in pushing for the acceptance of jazz as a
legitimate art, and in initiating the process of forging the tools for
its serious discussion. If jazz enjoyed the position in American
culture it deserves, Martin Williams might now enjoy a reputa-
tion similar to those of the Abstract Expressionist critics Clement
Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg, who are praised widely for
their insight into modern painting's illumination of the twenti-
eth-century human condition. But the problem with Williams's
philosophical claims for jazz-and with Rosenberg's and
Greenberg's claims for abstract painting-is that they tell us
much more about the critic's consciousness than about the
artist's. How does Williams know that the modern jazz musician
shares Williams's philosophical concerns? To be sure, many jazz
musicians have expressed a fundamental faith in the virtues of
doing, in the value of improvisation as a way to reinvent oneself
through direct action. But the meaning of this experience might
be very different for the jazz artist who is undergoing it than it is
for the critic who is interpreting it. In Williams's essays there is
not enough evidence of the jazz musicians' own voices, not
enough of their personal testimony, to substantiate the meaning
that Williams imposes on their art.
Williams is far from ignorant of the social implications of jazz-
"Jazz," he has written, "is the music of a people who have been
told by their circumstances that they are unworthy. And in jazz,
these people discover their own worthiness" (Jazz Tradition
256)-, and as a critic sincerely committed to the idea that Afri-
can-American musical culture deserves far more cultural and
intellectual prestige than it has hitherto received, he has played
no small role in the struggle for black equality. But at a moment
in American history when black people were engaging in a heroic
effort to free themselves from the constraints of segregation, it
was inevitable that, for many blacks, the discovery of "their own
worthiness" in jazz was a process that demanded far more atten-
tion to the social significance of the music.

IV
In his provocative Blues People: Negro Music in White America
(1963), Arniri Baraka (then LeRoi Jones) drew a map of African-
American culture, with blues music-loosely defined by Baraka
to incorporate all of the musical expressions of the black Ameri-
can "folk" community-firmly anchored in the center, and ave-
nues radiating out from that center into other areas of Amaerican
486 John Gennari

life. The outlying areas were identified with signs reading 'Tin
Pan Alley," "Broadway," "Hollywood," and "Carnegie Hall." The
commerce between the center and the periphery was brisk, with
most of the traffic moving from the periphery to the center and
back, parking in the center just long enough to slake its thirst
for sensual pleasure, and to conduct transactions designed to
maintain or increase a trade balance favorable to the periphery.
The center struggled to hold on to its own wealth-a community
treasure chest full of ancestral memories, spirits, languages, ar-
tifacts, and rhythms. It might, in fact, redouble its wealth by
investing in itself, in its not-yet-fully-exploited resources of self-
knowledge, and by seizing the power to shape its own destiny.
But the more tangible and immediate rewards to be found in the
periphery-contracts with record companies positioned in the
lucrative crossover market, the seductive trappings of a bour-
geois lifestyle-were luring the center right out of itself. The
center, in its vulnerable state of diminished self-awareness,
might not hold much longer; might, in fact, cease to see itself as
the center.
The map itself was not new. A similar geography could be in-
ferred from John Hammond's "Spirituals to Swing" concert in the
1930s, in which Hammond, the preeminent jazz critic and im-
presario of the day, unearthed the roots of contemporary urban hot
rhythm, blue tonality, and performer-audience synergy in the rural
crossroads, cotton fields, and downhome churches of the South. 15
But what was for the Vanderbilt scion Hammond a tribute to
America's purest artistic expression (and to his own excellent
taste) was for the proud race man Baraka a birthright, a touch-
stone of self-definition and ethnic solidarity. While white musi-
cians, critics, and entertainment industry workers parlayed their
appreciation of black culture into profit and pleasure, the true
carriers and rightful owners of that culture-Baraka's "blues
people"-struggled to keep it alive in their own communities. The
"modernization" process that inevitably followed the blues
people's migration to northern and western cities had "overex-
posed" them, in Baraka's view, to the "debilitating qualities of
popular expression" in mid-century American culture (i.e., white
dance bands in the 1930s and '40s, "cool" jazz crossover and
white rock 'n' roll in the '50s). Against this onslaught of white-
washing commercialization, Baraka called for an intensified
focus on the folk sources of black music, such as the funky
dance orientation and galvanizing screams of James Brown, and
a commitment to the searching artistic and spiritual quests of
the post-bop, free-jazz pioneers, particularly John Coltrane. 16
 Jazz CriticisrwIts Development and Ideologies 487
At the time Baraka was formulating his ideas for Blues People,
he was moving in Greenwich, Village avant-garde bohemian cir-
cles, tapping into a rich mine of experiences that his Newark
upbringing and Howard University education might not have
augured. In the late 1950s Baraka had aligned himself with
Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and the Beat movement. Though
he may have found some of himself in James Baldwin's Notes of
a Native Son, Baraka apparently recognized more of his own
sensibility and literary aspirations in Ginsberg's "Howl." The
Beats, of course, had strong connections with the late '40s-early
'50s jazz world that Baraka, as an adolescent, had already ex-
plored. The spontaneous creativity of Beat stream-of-conscious-
ness writing had undeniable parallels with jazz improvisation, if
not with jazz Improvisation's reliance on discipline; Jack
Kerouac's writing has been described as bop prosody. One of the
key inspirations of the Beat lifestyle was the parodic, anti-bour-
geois stance of the young black boppers. 17
Baraka's allegiance to the Beats' aesthetic in the late '50s and
early '60s was unwavering. His poems and essays were distin-
guished by brash, highly personalized voicings and fresh, funky
cadences, while his efforts as a small-magazine publisher re-
flected and extended the Beat commitment to the building of
alternative media. But as the '60s came into their own, and the
integrationist Civil Rights movement lost much of its appeal to
those pining for an uncompromising assertion of black power,
Baraka began to find the Village and the Beat movement un-
equal to his burgeoning aspirations. A flurry of writing, painting,
sculpting, acting, and dancing by black artists inspired by the
political climate-the most fertile artistic period in the black
community since the Harlem Renaissance-only served to rein-
force Baraka's dissatisfaction with the Beats, who turned out to
be lazily indifferent to the black (or any other) social struggle.
And in a highly charged atmosphere in which the personal and
the political were tightly intertwined, Baraka's quickening desire
for black solidarity necessitated a (highly publicized) move out of
the white-dominated, bohemian Village and into the Malcolm
X-inspired Harlem streets.
In his Autobiography, Baraka has written with deep visceral
power about free jazz's exhilarating effect on him during this
period:
Albert [Aylerl, we found out quickly, could play his ass off. He had a
sound, alone, unlike anyone else's. It tore through you, broad, Jagged
like something out of nature. Some critics said his sound was primitive.
Shit, it was before that! It was a big massive sound and wail. The crying,
488 John Gennari
shouting moan of black spirituals and God music. Pharaoh ISanders]
was so beautiful and he had a wildness to him too, a heavy force like the
world could be reopened, but Albert was mad. His playing was like some
primordial frenzy that the world secretly used for energy. Yeh, the
Music. Feeling all that, it touching us and us touching it, gave us that
strength, that kind of irrevocability we felt. Like the thunder or the
lightning or the ocean storming and mounting, crushing whatever was
in its path. (194-95)
During this period Baraka was a regular contributor to Down
Beat, where his enthusiasm for the "new thing" was the minority
position. In 1961 and 1962 the magazine became the center of a
heated sectarian dispute-reminiscent of the cleavages of opin-
ion that formed around bebop in the '40s-on the question of
whether the new music should even be considered jazz. The use
of the term anti-Jazz to describe Coleman's and Coltrane's music,
and the continued expression of disdain for the "fanaticism" of
Charlie Parker and the bebop generation, sparked a fire that
raged for several years. 18
Though not a participant in the Down Beat wars, the British
poet and jazz critic Philip Larkin has written a stunning "anti-
jazz" diatribe that captures the feelings of many of the critics
who saw jazz on a steep decline since the '40s:
[Charlie Parker's] tone, though much better than that of some of his
successors, was thin and sometimes shrill. The impression of mental
hallucination he conveyed could also be derived from the pianist Bud
Powell, who cultivated the same kind of manic virtuosity and could
sometimes be stopped only by the flashing of a light in his eyes. Gilles-
pie, on the other hand, was a more familiar type, the trumpeter-leader
and entertainer, but I didn't relish his addiction to things Latin-Ameri-
can and I found his sense of humor rudimentary. Thelonious Monk
seemed a not-very-successful comic, as his funny hats proclaimed: his
faux-naif elephant-dance piano style, with its gawky intervals and ab-
sence of swing, was made doubly tedious by his limited repertoire. With
Miles Davis and John Coltrane a new inhumanity emerged. Davis had
several manners: the dead muzzled slow stuff, the sour yelping fast
stuff, and the sonorous theatrical arranged stuff, and I disliked them all.
With John Coltrane metallic and passionless nullity gave way to gigantic
exercises In absurdity, great boring excursions on not-especially-attrac-
tive themes during which all possible changes were rung, extended
investigations of oriental tedium, long-winded and portentous demon-
strations of religiosity. It was with Coltrane, too, that jazz started to be
ugly on purpose: his nasty tone would become more and more exacer-
bated until he was fairly screeching at you like a pair of demonically-
possessed bagpipes. After Coltrane, of course, all was chaos, hatred and
absurdity, and one was almost relieved that severance with jazz had
become so complete and obvious. (20-2C1)
In light of the deep polemical strain of Baraka's writing (col-
lected in Black Music) from the mid-'60s on, his jazz writing in
the early '60s now seems rather understated, especially when
 Jazz Criticisnr Its Development and Ideologies 489
compared to the work in that period of several white writers-no-
tably Frank Kofsky and Ralph Gleason-who shared Baraka's
ideological disposition. Kofsky's broadsides against writers he
considered reactionary, his disgust with the establishment's hy-
pocrisy in neglecting the music at home while using it as a Cold
War weapon abroad, and his effort to connect the new music
with black nationalism were all delivered in a disputatious spirit
more explicit than the one evident in Baraka's writing during the
period. Also, Baraka had yet to assimilate fully the Marxist doc-
trines that would later become so central to his thinking, and his
critique of the political economy of jazz-the control of its means
of production by a capitalist class perpetuating its own power at
the expense of the music's well-being-was less fully developed
than it was in the work of Kofsky and Francis Newton (the name
under which the eminent British Marxist historian Eric
Hobsbawm writes jazz criticism). But Baraka was no shrinking
violet, and his oppositional stance was more than amply evident
in a piece he wrote in 1963 diagnosing the problem of the white
critic in relation to jazz:
... a hopeless flaw in a great deal of the writing about jazz that has
been done over the years is that in most cases the writers, the jazz
critics, have been anything but intellectuals (in the most complete sense
of that word). Most jazz critics began as hobbyists or boyishly brash
members of the American petit bourgeoisie, whose only claim to under-
standing about the music was that they knew it was diferent; or else
they had once been brave enough to make a trip into a Negro slum to
hear their favorite instrumentalist defame Western musical tradition.
Most jazz critics were (and are) not only white middle-class Americans,
but middle-brows as well. The irony here is that because the majority of
jazz critics are white middle-brows, most jazz criticism tends to enforce
white middle-brow standards of excellence as criteria for performance of
a music that in its most profound manifestations is completely antitheti-
cal to such standards; in fact, quite often is in direct reaction against
them. (BlackMusic 15-16)
When black poet and critic A. B. Spellman asked, "What does
anti-jazz mean and who are these ofays who've appointed them-
selves guardians of last year's blues" (qtd. in Baraka, Black
Music 18), he underlined what was for Baraka the most damning
fault of the white critics who were dismissing the "new thing"-
their failure to recognize that free Jazz, like bebop, was "the exact
registration of the social and cultural thinking of a whole genera-
tion of black Americans." And this was part of a larger failure to
recognize that "the blues and jazz aesthetic, to be fully under-
stood, must be seen in as nearly its complete human context as
possible" (Black Music 16). Blues People was Baraka's effort to
elaborate that "complete human context."
490 John Gennari
Blues People advances several overlapping arguments. One is
that the roots of blues and jazz, as well as the meaning of the
music, lie in the social and political struggles of black Americans
to escape slavery and oppression; that "blues could not exist if
the African captives had not become American captives" (17). A
second is that the black struggle for cultural self-awareness is
threatened by the pervasive power of white-controlled cultural
institutions. Yet a third is that black solidarity is undermined
not only by the class aspirations of the black bourgeoisie, but
also by the tendency of some black creative artists to remove
themselves from the black American social struggle. That these
themes remain highly pertinent to today's debates is ringing
testimony to the seminal quality of this book, but that we are no
closer to resolving the conflicts articulated in Blues People than
Baraka himself was in 1963 underscores the importance of
grasping the book's shortcomings.
Ralph Ellison's famous critique of Blues People is best known
for its classic signifyin' parry: "The tremendous burden of sociol-
ogy which Jones would place upon this music is enough to give
even the blues the blues" (249-50). But Ellison's review proposed
its own sociology of black music, one which incisively underscored
the pessimism inherent in Baraka's argument. If Baraka was cor-
rect in his assertion that black culture had been denuded of its
authenticity-stripped of its essential properties-by its com-
modification in the American entertainment industry, then the
"blues people" of twentieth-century urban America were trapped in
a defensive, reactive posture, fatally consigned to having their cul-
tural expression predetermined by forces beyond their control. In
that case, Bessie Smith's blues and Charlie Parker's bop-which,
after all, though less extensively involved in the commodification
process than, say, Motown soul, were nevertheless produced and
distributed under the aegis of American capitalism-would have
to be recognized not as unadulterated, authentic African-Ameri-
can creativity, not as expressions of a discrete black aesthetic,
but as manifestations of a debased American culture.
As the title Blues People: Negro Music in White America implies,
Baraka in this book defines black music by its relationship to
white culture. The creative impulse in black music, Baraka ar-
gues, has always been one of resistance: The meaning of the
music is to be found in its origins in an oppressed social class
and in its history of challenging European and white American
musical conventions. In the case of jazz, which by the 1930s had
become commercially successful as a popular music and had
also begun to receive at least some recognition of artistic import-
 Jazz Criticism: Its Development and Ideologies 491

ance from Euro-American intellectuals, the very terms on which

the music had gained acceptance became, in Baraka's Hegelian
formulation, the seedbed of a new resistance. The exploitative eco-
nomic arrangements and crossover appropriations of the swing era,
with corrupt white businessmen and inferior, white musicians
reaping the benefits of black creativity, led to the revolutionary
movement of bebop, the animating impulse of which was the desire
of black musicians to maintain control over their cultural product.
Having grown up with bebop and having derived from it a sense of
the possibility of an assertive black male ego, Baraka very much
wanted this music to be seen as a threshold in black-white
relations, as a cultural fault line marking the distinction between
slavery and freedom. Among other things, this enabled Baraka,
at the very moment when he was emerging as a prophetic figure
in black letters and politics, to claim a personal history that
coincided with a liberationist thrust in the black arts.
But Baraka's construction of the bebop movement exaggerates
the rupture between the music of the pre- and post-World War II
periods. When the bebop musicians brought their harmonic ex-
tensions, breakneck tempos, and bass drum "bombs" from
Minton's after hours jam sessions downtown to the clubs on
52nd Street, one of the consequences was a splintering of the
jazz audience and critical establishment. The generational rift
that opened up between swing and bebop was in large part a
dispute between groups that were simply looking for different
things from the music. The established audience was looking for
familiar rhythms and melodies for purposes of dance, romance,
and nostalgia; the newer audience was looking for bold experi-
ments in harmony and fresh approaches to time and tempo for
purposes of sensory inspiration and aesthetic fulfillment. It is
now a commonplace to hear this division of the jazz world in the
'40s referred to as a split between the "entertainment" orienta-
tion of swing and the "artistic"orientation of bebop, between the
Hollywood celebrity status of Louis Armstrong and the bohemian
milieu of Diz and Bird. What this false dichotomy ignores is the
fact that Gillespie's instincts and aspirations as an "entertainer"
were no less evident than Armstrong's, and that Armstrong's role
as an "artist"is clearly no less significant than Gillespie's. More
importantly, the "art" versus "entertainment" dichotomy ob-
scures the fact that the political economy of jazz in the 1940s-
notwithstanding changes of venue (from large dance halls to
intimate clubs) and power struggles in musicians' unions-was
not appreciably different from that of earlier decades. Calling the
seminal Gillespie and Parker performances and recordings from
492 John Gennari
the 1940s "art," "entertainment," or anything else does not
change the reality that bebop was produced, distributed, and
consumed within the same network of capitalist social relations
as '30s swing and '20s early jazz.
There is an obvious contradiction in Baraka's claiming, on the
one hand, that white Euro-American hegemony has robbed Afri-
can-Americans of their culture and, on the other, that African
musical qualities such as polyrhythm, polyphony, syncopation,
and improvisation have survived and indeed flourished in black
American music. Ellison, who, along with Albert Murray, argues
powerfully that blues and jazz have had a profound influence on
the shaping of American culture, proudly embraces just such a
national culture. For him, the key sociological focus is not Ameri-
can capitalism's negative capacity to coopt and balkanize black
music, but American pluralism's positive capacity to absorb and
celebrate it. From this Ellison derives a sense of triumph. His
famous aphorism about the blues' quality of transcendence (8) is
complemented by his gratification in black music's social achieve-
ment of transcendence: its glorious rise from the plantation work
song to the world-famous Minton's jam session, from its role in
local folk rituals to its role as a seminal, trend-setting force in
American culture.19 Ellison argues that Baraka's "version of the
blues lacks a sense of the excitement and surprise of men living
in the world of enslaved and politically weak men successfully
imposing their values upon a powerful society through song and
dance" (256).20 Baraka, by assuming the hegemony of a white
cultural and economic establishment, internalizes a sense of op-
pression. In his argument, authentic black music can only func-
tion as a form of resistance, as a protest against the racial
injustices of American society. Baraka, in 1963, could thrill to
Elvin Jones's polyrhythms, but his thrill was not that of a man
high-stepping to the swaggering cadence of a parade band's cele-
brating victory; it was the thrill of a man who, itching for the
battle he has long been preparing for, finally hears the war beat.
Baraka was one of the quintessential avant-garde figures of the
1960s, a literary vanguardist and a highly visible political activist.
Ironically, however, the creative thrust in his art and politics was
tethered to a dated sociological view that would soon fall into disre-
pute. Even as he was blithely dismissing "nineteen-fortyish"and
"nineteen-thirtyish" writing on black life in 1960 ("Cuba Libre"),
and by the mid-'60s was rejecting white writers' views on black
culture out of hand, his own formula for African-Americancultural
authenticity loudly echoed that of the 1940s social scientist Melville
J. Herskovits. In his paradigmatic MTeMyth of the NegroPast (1941),
 Its Development and Ideologies
Jazz Criticisrnw 493
Herskovits argued for direct continuities between African and
black American culture, partiqularly in the religious sphere. Fol-
lowing Herskovits's emphasis on the survival of a holistic, com-
munal ethos in African-based American slave religious practice,
Baraka, in Blues People, contrasts the "functional" nature of African
music with the "artistic" focus of European music: "It was, and is,
inconceivable in the African culture to make a separation between
music, dancing, song, the artifact, and a man's life or his worship of
his gods. E.pression issued from life, and was beauty" (28-29).
Citing the call-and-response patterns and kinetic dynamism in
pre-emancipation spirituals and praise singing, Baraka under-
lines the African cultural orientation of the slave community.
And in the black church-influenced sounds of Otis Redding,
Aretha Franklin, and James Brown, coupled with the spiritual
questing and cult-like following of John Coltrane's 1960s music,
Baraka finds the makings of a zenith in black communal expres-
sion, with black people united in a common articulation of their
collective, historical identity.
But Baraka's effort to show direct continuities between tradi-
tional African culture and late-twentieth-century urban black
American culture is saddled with the same deficiencies as
Herskovits's African "survivals" thesis. Herskovits, as one scholar
has put it, "failed to perceive that blacks selected, shaped, and
transformed elements of their African heritage as they sought to
cope and adjust in a hostile environment," and so he never
"understood or really examined the process of acculturation of
blacks in American society" (Meier 22). Baraka is similarly guilty
of a lack of clarity and specificity in showing how American
blacks, in slavery as well as freedom, have shaped and adjusted
their cultural practices and forms in response to changing tech-
nology, social structure, and ideology. Curiously, although he
underscores the importance of the process of syncretism in black
music-the phenomenon of black musicians' absorbing and
transforming European musical influences-, Baraka's analysis
is at its most static, its most ahistorical, when he discusses
African musical qualities themselves. Ironically, he seems better
able to distinguish among different genres of "white" American
popular music than black; his taxonomy of white church hymns,
minstrelsy, vaudeville, Tin Pan Alley, Broadway and Hollywood
musicals, and rock 'n' roll is a more impressive exercise in his-
torical elucidation than "the blues continuum," his somewhat
muddled picture of black music's evolution.21 Twentieth-century
gospel music is different from nineteenth-century spirituals, and
they are both different from John Coltrane's A Love Supreme.
494 John Gennari

Blues People, despite its inadequacies, is an important, even

seminal, effort to widen and deepen the discussion of black
music, to suggest that the analysis of the music should take
place on a higher intellectual plane. Ellison's judgment that the
book shattered its "Introductory mood of scholarly analysis" by
"straining for a note of militancy" does not prevent him from
embracing Baraka's intentions:
He has attempted to place the blues within the context of a total culture
and to see this native art form through the disciplines of sociology,
anthropology, and (though he seriously underrates its importance in the
creating of a viable theory) history, and he spells out explicitly his
assumptions concerning the relation between Isic] the blues, the people
who created them, and the larger American culture. (248)
Charles Keil, more sympathetic to Baraka's political position
than Ellison, has argued that the "wild speculations, inconsis-
tencies, misinformation, and absurd arguments that run
through his early chapters on blues prehistory" do not negate
the book's considerable value in attempting to look from the
inside of the blues culture out; and once Baraka "replaces myth
making with reality testing" and discusses that part of the cul-
ture which he really was inside, the late '50s and early '60s New
York avant-garde scene, his observations are incisive (39-40).
Baraka is not an anthropologist or an historian; he is a poet.
And in his poetry-Baraka's own black music-one finds the
most important expression of his black consciousness:
If you ever find
yourself, some where
lost and surrounded
by enemies
who wont let you
speak in your own language
who destroy your statues
& instruments, who ban
your omm boom ba boom
then you are in trouble
deep trouble
they ban your
omm boom ba boom
you are in deep deep
trouble
humph!
probably take you several hundred years
to get
out!22
Baraka's quest to recover the drum and restore its talismanic
status speaks powerfully to the desire for an African-American
culture whose language, art, and rituals express an authentic
 Jazz Crltlcisn: Its Development and Ideologies 495
African pedigree. But, as Stanley Crouch (a drummer, as well as
a jazz critic and essayist) pqints out, the slavemasters' legal
proscriptions on the drum were not monolithic-the slaves being
allowed to play drums and perform African dances to celebrate
holidays-, nor were the slavemasters even remotely successful
in preventing their charges from asserting what Albert Murray
calls the "percussion orientation" of the blues culture. Baraka's
error is in thinking that the drum itself is the irreducible essence
of African culture; what Murray and Crouch emphasize is a
cultural orientation so strong that it can not be limited to any
particular physical object, so foundational that it transforms the
environment around it. When the slavemasters took away the
drums, the slaves made drums out of washboards, bones, sticks,
and their own bodies. The faculty at the New England Conserva-
tory tried to teach Cecil Taylor the traditional European ap-
proach to his instrument, but he insisted that "we in Black
music think of the piano as a percussive instrument: we beat the
keyboard, we get Inside the instrument" (qtd. in Goldberg 243).
It is not surprising to see Baraka picking up the old line that
"drummers are the niggers of the orchestra," but he might also
consider that drummer Max Roach, who now fronts his own
drum orchestra, has also said, proudly: "What we as Black peo-
ple have always done is show that the world of sound is bigger
than white people think" (qtd. in Allen 10).
If Baraka Is sincerely interested in finding his lost ommnboom
ba boom, he need look no further than the next performance by
Roach's M'Boom ensemble. And if he is interested in finding a
critical perspective on Jazz criticism that is firmly rooted in the
African aesthetic-something his work calls for but never satis-
factorily achieves-, he should listen closely to Stanley Crouch:
What existed within the ritual confinements of polytheistic African cul-
tures and has been dubbed "an affinity for distortion' was trans-
mogrifled [in jazz] into what I call a sense of infinite plasticity. In Africa
this sense of plasticity has been observed in the stretching of necks with
rings, extending of lips with wooden plates, the filing of teeth, the elasti-
cizing of slit earlobes so that they could hold large wooden discs, and so
on. The plasticity of stylization in African singing allowed for a sound
that included falsetto, whistles, tongue-clicking, shouts, plaintive, joy-
ous slurs, growls, and enormous changes of register, rhythm, timbre,
accent, and intensity. That the shifts of meter, tempo, and accent in
African drumming reflect this sense of plasticity almost goes without
saying, as should any observation about dancing that demands inde-
pendent coordination of the head, shoulders, arms, trunk, and legs.
(Baker 73)23
The cultural map that Baraka drew in Blues People has all the
places right, and it correctly represents the directions of the
496 John Gennari

movement of black culture into and around America. But it

seems not to have been of much help in showing him the way to
that zone of untrammeled pleasure that Albert Murray found,
where the velocity of celebration was enough to make you lose all
sense of direction.

In recent years Baraka's jazz writing has focused increasingly

on what he calls the "corporate deculturization process," in
which a "national oppression-based superstructure" transforms
the "independent self-determining expression" of black music-
whose creators "are/have been in the main the Afro-American
workers and small farmers"-into a "passage of commodities" in
which "everything is literally reduced to filthy lucre, i.e., shit."
This deculturization is furthered by the "economic-political re-
pression and social and cultural chauvinism" of a "white su-
premacist, fundamentally exploitative, and self-serving" critical
establishment whose "common assumption that European music
is superior to African music reflects the philosophy and aesthetic
values of slavery and fascism."24 In short, for the former "Allen
Ginsberg of black nationalism" (Keil 39), the recovery from Beat
narcolepsy is complete, the assimilation of the orisha25 is a
given, and all is now class struggle.
Standing at the opposite side of the political spectrum -but, I'll
suggest, coming full circle into an ironic embrace with Baraka-
is James Lincoln Collier.26 In The Reception of Jazz in America,
Collier argues that jazz, from its very inception, has been mu-
nificently patronized by Americans; that American intellectu-
als and critics, contrary to longstanding conventional wisdom,
did not have to be tipped off by clairvoyant Europeans that
they had a winning native art form on their hands; that the
leading American jazz critics of the 1930s and '40s were Com-
munist dupes who created a myth of American hostility toward
jazz to make the establishment look bad and who wrongly
claimed that jazz was a black American folk art; and that
today jazz is more appreciated and better supported in the
United States than anywhere else in the world.27 Collier con-
cludes with the thought that jazz
represents much that Is best about America:the frankness and generos-
ity thought to be characteristic of itApeople; the freedom of expression
that is built into its Constitution; and the spontaneity that is so crucial
a part of the music. In sum, what is essential is precisely the American-
ism that lies at its heart; and what is typical of America is this jazz
music that is produced and nurtured. (Reception77)
 Jazz Criticism:Its Development and Ideologies 497
Here, surely, is prose that would have proved immensely useful
to Patrick Buchanan and Peggy Noonan when Ronald Reagan
needed a speech for a tribute to some valiant old jazz warhorse
whose music nobody in the White House ever heard. Here,
clearly, is a welcome reprieve from Amiri Baraka's in-your-face
harangues about the degradation of African-American culture, a
soothing tonic to parching post-'60s art world assaults on the
traditional truths and forms of Western civilization. Here, indis-
putably, is testimony to the success of American pluralism and
the especially notable achievement of racial democracy. After all
the haggling by guilt-ridden leftists, all the grandstanding by
self-serving, power-hungry black nationalists, finally the simple
truth wins out, traditional values are redeemed, and jazz stands
tall and proud as a monument to the uniquely American virtues
of freedom, multiracial democracy, and free-market capitalism.
Collier's perspective on the history of American race relations
is as Pollyannaish as Baraka's is sullen. It begins with Collier's
rosy portrait of early-twentieth-century New Orleans, where
"blacks were not generally physically segregated in ghettos but
frequently lived next door to whites," and where "the black musi-
cian in a white night club, at a picnic of whites, or at even a
private dance in a wealthy white home was completely accepted"
(Reception 5)-a model of racial democracy that the Civil Rights
Commission of the 1980s would embrace enthusiastically. If we
were to ignore the ample evidence that challenges Collier's view
of New Orleans-such as state and municipal Black Codes that
kept blacks out of artisanal trades and polling booths-, we
could then pursue his line of reasoning. But, in that case,
wouldn't it make more sense to reach further back in history to
the days when blacks not only lived next door to whites, but
lived on the very same piece of property? Wouldn't it strengthen
the argument to start with the black musicians who not only
played private dances in wealthy white homes, but who also were
allowed to serve mint juleps to the guests? Indeed, wouldn't the
argument for the rousing reception for black music in the United
States better begin from its very inception-on the Middle Pas-
sage itself, where the proprietors of the slave ships "completely
accepted" the singing and dancing of their cargo, because they
thought it ensured its preservation?
But Collier wants to look forward rather than backward. He
wants to show that New Orleans was a prototype for the rest of
the country, and that when jazz migrated up the Mississippi to
Chicago, and then diffused throughout urban America, its en-
thusiastic reception was a triumph of social and cultural integra-
498 John Gennari
tion. It is rather curious, then, that Collier, to prove the popular-
ity of hot jazz in the late '20s, uses this 9 May 1928 clip from
Variety:
American interest in futuristic Jazz is commerciallymanifested through
the large sales of ultra-modernistic music as recorded by Boyd Senter,
Bix Beiderbecke .. . , Miff Mole, Red McKenzie,Ed Lang, Joe Venuti,
Red Nichols, Frankie Trumbauer, and Condon's Chicagoans on Okeh
disks. Their Jazzique is of the extremely 'heated' variety and the sales
turnover evidences how interested the American youth is in Jazz music
of this calibre .... (qtd. in ReceptIon22)
Curious, because Collier then issues a caveat which
demonstrates an extremely narrow perception of the race issue
in American culture: "Senter aside, all the names on the list are
recognized today as major jazz figures of the period. (For what-
ever reasons, the list does not include any of the equally popular
blacks, like Ellington and [Fletcher] Henderson.)" (Reception 22;
emphasis added). The "whatever reasons" that put Miff Mole
above Duke Ellington in Variety's 1928 hierarchy of Jazz are the
same "whatever reasons" that put Matthew Modine above Denzel
Washington in Variety's 1990 hierarchy of cinema, the same
"whatever reasons" that put The New Kids on the Block above
Young M. C. in Billboard's 1990 hierarchy of popular music, the
same whatever reasons" that put the Juilliard String Quartet
above the World Saxophone Quartet in the New York Times'
hierarchy of concert music. These "whatever reasons" collectively
add up to the institutional racism that prevents even the most
successful black performers, even the wealthiest and most criti-
cally celebrated, from attaining the kind of status in American
culture available to white performers of similar or even lesser
talent.28
Collier appears to believe that institutional racism in American
society ended with the passing of the Jim Crow laws. Far more
damaging to the jazz discourse in his view-and here, in looking
Baraka straight in the eye, he becomes his mirror-is the ethno-
centrism of black music critics. In an article in which he argues
that white writers need to be more aware of their personal biases
when they write about black subjects, Collier concludes with this
rather provocative statement:
It would be especially interesting to read a black scholar's writing about
white musicians. And then, of course, the shoe will be on the other foot.
Blacks, too, in the interest of objectivity, will have to become aware of
their attitudes toward whites. Will ithey be able to admit that white
musicians like Benny Goodman, Bix Beiderbecke, Jimmy Dorsey,
Franky [sic]Trumbauer, Stan Getz, and Bill Evans were formativeinflu-
ences on many blacks-Dorsey and Trumbauer on Lester Young, Good-
man on Jimmy Hamilton and Edmond Hall, Evans on Chick Corea and
 Jazz Criticismn Its Development and Ideologies 499

Herbie Hancock, Beiderbecke on Rex Stewart and countless other black

trumpeters of the 1920s? Unhappily, too much of the writing on black
music by blacks during the 1960s and 1970s was rendered almost
useless to the serious reader by the anger blacks felt toward whites, and
their insistence that jazz was black music which whites could neither
understand nor play. In particular, it became a credo that if you disliked
avant-garde jazz you were a racist. This led to serious distortions of jazz
history, as in Mark Gridley's Jazz Styles (1978), an otherwise useful
book in which Sun Ra is given more space than Armstrong, Morton, and
Waller taken together. ("Face"42)
Now, without deprecating the importance to jazz history of
Benny Goodman's formative influence on Edmond Hall, in "the
interest of objectivity" it might be important to consider that
every one of the fine white artists Collier mentions could not
have been jazz musicians at all had black musicians not in-
vented the art form and engineered all of its decisive stylistic
changes. The "serious reader" has no problem acknowledging
Jimmy Dorsey's influence on Lester Young; what troubles him or
her is that Lester Young's influence on virtually every subse-
quent jazz musician is not yet fully recognized or understood.
The "serious reader" is more than happy to acknowledge Benny
Goodman's and Bill Evans's contributions to American musical
culture; she or he merely wants it understood that Count Basie
and Miles Davis were the primary architects of the musical envi-
ronments in which those musicians worked. The "serious reader"
is well aware of Bix Beiderbecke's considerable vogue in the
1920s, but wonders how important it is to press the point while
the vast majority of Americans remain ignorant of the 1920s
Louis Armstrong recordings that literally signaled a new era in
Western music. The "serious reader" might not care much at all
for avant-garde jazz, but would understand why someone writing
a book on jazz in 1978, particularly someone clued in to the jazz
scene of his own day and sympathetic to its struggle for survival,
might be given to an overblown enthusiasm for Sun Ra-an
injudicious weighting of jazz importance on the same order as,
say, Collier's awarding an entire chapter to "The Dixieland Re-
vival" in The Making of Jazz.29
On the infinitely remote chance that there are any black schol-
ars who have yet to "become aware of their attitudes toward
whites," one desperately hopes they will not be too heavily influ-
enced by Collier. In this same article-a presumptuous account
of the prejudices he assumes all middle-class whites bear toward
black jazz musicians (after reading it, one immediately under-
stands why Collier's biographies of Armstrong and Ellington are
so condescending)-, Collier laments that "white jazz writers
have generally treated their subjects as if the latter were middle-
500 John Gennari

class whites," with the result that "the whole history of early
black entertainment has been gentrified to a considerable extent"
("Face" 33, 38). The history of jazz has been badly distorted,
Collier argues, because left-leaning white jazz writers ideologi-
cally committed to racial equality have willfully falsified the
backgrounds of black jazz musicians to make them appear more
palatable to white bourgeois tastes. Black entertainers have been
more than happy to contribute to this falsification, Collier adds,
because they have been "somewhat embarrassed, or even
ashamed, at having come from ghetto backgrounds, and tend
therefore to 'gentrify' their own pasts. They increase the amount
of schooling they had and sometimes acquire college degrees;
they upgrade their parents' jobs, and in general give a picture of
their home lives that was closer to the middle-class model than it
had been" ("Face" 38).
Collier is correct that blacks have not been middle-class whites
camouflaged in colored skin, and he is just in his denunciation
of white writers who assume this to be the case. No writer is
more worthy of this denunciation, however, than Collier himself.
No writer has strained remotely as hard as Collier to argue that
blacks have aspired to emulate middle-class white norms and
tastes. Why would Collier make so much of black musicians'
"gentrified" self-descriptions if he didn't assume that the things
he accuses the musicians of lying about (college degrees, two-
parent households) were, in fact, the proper criteria for defining
a dignified American life? If a white, middle-class jazz writer
sincerely wishes to avoid imposing his own value system on his
black subjects, his job is not to find out if the musician will lie
about his formal education, but to examine how that musician
has educated himself to be an artist. The salient fact about
Charlie Parker's education is not that he dropped out of high
school, but that he spent countless hours studying Lester
Young's solos and cultivating his own technique. Compared to
his apprenticeship with Parker, Miles Davis's stint at Juilliard
was of minimal significance to his musical education. Ornette
Coleman's singular talent-about which Collier writes (". . . it
seems clear enough that something, somehow, was interfering
with Coleman's understanding of some basic musical principles.
Long after he had become a major figure in jazz he still did not
know how to read or write music correctly. We can also deduce,
from the way he was composing, that he did not really under-
stand music theory, even to the modest degree that many im-
provising musicians know it" [Making 4631)-is best understood
as a musical language unto itself, invented only because Cole-
 Jazz CriticismrIts Development and Ideologies 501
man had the audacity and the vision to resist a conventional
musical education that might hiave dulled his ever-sharp cutting
edge.
No writer, except perhaps Baraka, has been quite so obsessed
as Collier with jazz musicians' economic status. When Collier
challenges Sidney Finkelstein's claim that jazz was "a people's
music and it was a ghetto music" ("Face" 34), his argument is
not that jazz is art and therefore should be judged on aesthetic
rather than on social grounds (which one might expect of some-
one so professedly anti-Marxist); his argument is that in 1948,
when Finkelstein was writing, "Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong,
Fats Waller, and Count Basie were growing rich and famous
playing the music, and dozens of others (such as Billie Holiday,
Art Tatum, Roy Eldridge, and Dizzy Gillespie) were buying Cadil-
lacs and furs from the proceeds of their music" ("Face" 35). If
Collier has such a problem with white jazz writers' treating their
black subjects "as if the latter were middle-class whites," why
does he constantly invoke examples of black entertainers' in-
comes and conspicuous consumption as proof of their American
success? The economic reductionism of Collier's thinking is
highly ironic in light of his charge that John Hammond and his
fellow jazz critics in the 1930s were tainted by a Marxist bias
that distorted their view of the music.
The capitalist value system is one that Collier knows quite well,
having found several rather cozy niches in the American publish-
ing market.30 Perhaps it is his success in selling books that
accounts for the Chamber-of-Commerce perspective Collier
brings to jazz. The great jazz of the music's early classic period,"
Collier argues, "developed because millions of white Americans
liked it, and would pay money to hear it" (Reception 24). John
Coltrane, as Collier never fails to mention when he discusses the
1960s avant-garde, became a very wealthy man plying the jazz
craft, at the time of his death pulling down a quarter-million a
year. For all Coltrane's apparent nonconformity-the Eastern-in-
fluenced religious mysticism, the raga-like modal tonality, the
forty-five-minute sheets-of-sound solos on top of Elvin Jones's
African polyrhythms-, Collier would have us believe that he
simply was tapping into the hallowed tradition of American en-
trepreneurialism, parlaying an accurate forecast of '60s mass
market taste into a tidy chunk of change.
Granting, axiomatically, that if Armstrong, Ellington, Bechet,
and Morton were to have made any decent money, they would
have to have sought an audience outside of the relatively im-
poverished black community, does it therefore follow that their
502 John Gennan
music developed because of white patronage? Does Collier mean
to suggest that, if the more financially lucrative white market
had been unavailable, Armstrong would have shelved his horn
and sought another line of work? That would certainly help us
understand why Collier is so dismissive of free jazzers who (un-
like Coltrane) have not realized financial success, while he is so
embracing of quasi-jazzers, like Benny Goodman, who have
made a fortune.31 In Collier's (as in Baraka's) world view, there
seems to be no room for creativity that is its own best justifica-
tion, for art that defines its own excellence, for a system of
cultural value free of economic considerations.
Collier's sanguine view of the acceptance of jazz in America
ultimately rests on his argument that jazz musicians have been
able to make a good living here. Many indeed have, and many
who have not perhaps have suffered no greater an injustice than
the one that is perpetrated on all serious art by America's busi-
ness civilization. The expatriation of major jazz talent of every
generation and the heavy dependence on foreign sources of in-
come even by jazz musicians who maintain a stateside residence
do not set the jazz economy far apart from that of other modern
arts.32 Today, jazz enjoys considerable cachet among fashion-
able, upwardly mobile urban professionals, enough of whose dis-
posable income has been earmarked for record stores to prompt
major American record companies into a highly profitable spasm
of "classic" Jazz reissues, multi-disc packages of master perform-
ers, and fat-dollar contracts and publicity budgets for young
lions like Wynton Marsalis and Harry Connick, Jr.
But to rest the case for America's reception of jazz on this
evidence is to engage in some very shoddy thinking. When it
becomes possible for American record companies to market
Kenny G. as a jazz musician, it is also possible for them to ignore
David Murray, and to make it necessary for him to turn to Italian
and Japanese companies to record his music.33 When it be-
comes possible for Clint Eastwood to emerge as an authority on
the life and music of Charlie Parker, it is also possible for Holly-
wood not to look for scripts that might treat the jazz life as one of
artistic honor and integrity rather than as one of sociopatho-
logy.34 When it becomes possible for Dizzy Gillespie to receive a
Grammy "LifetimeAchievement" Award, it is also possible for the
people who give him the award to remain unfamiliar with any
particular Gillespie recording. When it becomes possible for
Miles Davis to enjoy full-fledged celebrity status, to see himself
held up as a fashion symbol, it is also possible for a majority of
 Jazz Criticisnm Its Development and Ideologies 503

Miles's worshippers to be ignorant of his ground-breaking re-

cordings in the 1950s.
The question, ultimately, is not whether the United States will
support jazz financially or call it "America's classical music"; the
question is whether it will recognize, understand, and faithfully
represent jazz's central, seminal position in twentieth-century
culture. On October 22, 1990, Time magazine ran a cover story
on "the renaissance of America's greatest rhusical tradition," yet
it did not assign a regular correspondent to cover that tradition.
Thomas Bender's New York Intellect (1987), a highly praised
study of New York City's rise as an international cultural me-
tropolis, has a final chapter tracing the development of New
York's artistic milieu in the 1930s and '40s. It is Bender's thesis
that New York's postwar ascendancy in the arts-painting,
sculpture, photography, music, and especially dance-is rooted
in the "cultural flowering" of the 1930s and 1940s and "embed-
ded in an aesthetic and a theory of culture formulated during
these years that was at once American, grounded in the life of
the metropolis, and international" (322). Now, given jazz's well-
known billing as "America's indigenous art form," coupled with
the fact that New York was the site of the bebop revolution in the
1940s and has been the international capital of the jazz world
ever since, Bender should have been happy to fit jazz into this
paradigm. But it is not clear that Bender is aware that there was
jazz in New York in the middle decades of this century; in this
book, at any rate, there is no discussion-no mention!-of the
art form.35
The Pulitzer Prize committee has yet to acknowledge a jazz
figure, the legacy of a 1943 "gentlemen's agreement" to limit the
music award to works that convey "the American spirit" through
traditional European compositional forms (Giddins, "Evolution"
42). By such criteria, Thelonious Monk's singular compositional
genius-his unique yoking of improvisational and notational ele-
ments In sturdy popular song and twelve-bar blues structures -
does not qualify. Duke Ellington, whose suites and extended
compositions in fact do draw upon traditional European ap-
proaches to musical structure, and whose contribution to Ameri-
can music in this century is unparalleled, nevertheless went to
his grave never having been awarded a Pulitzer, not having been
inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Science, not
even having been accorded the popular recognition of a Grammy
Award. In the view of American culture and American life prom-
ulgated by the Pulitzer committee-a view whose importance ex-
tends far beyond the symbolism of a plaque and a black-tie
504 John Gennan
banquet for awardees, reflecting and extending their works' es-
tablishment legitimacy, ultimately helping to shape the policies
and goals of private and public foundations that finance new
art-, Aaron Copland's Appalachian Spring was worthy of recog-
nition, while Duke Ellington's Black, Brown, and Beige was not.
Is this because Copland better conveyed "the American spirit?"
Or is it because Copland studied with Nadia Boulanger in Paris,
while Ellington merely stayed home and studied the blues?
John Patrick Diggins, a leading twentieth-century intellectual
historian, has recently published a history of the period from
1941 to 1960, The Proud Decades: America in War and in Peace
(1988). In discussing jazz at all, Diggins does better by jazz than
Bender and most other historians. Yet it is quite telling to note
precisely how Diggins discusses jazz. In a section titled "The Fine
Arts and the Literary Imagination" (231-46), Diggins has done
jazz the favor of ranking it as a fine art, on a par with Abstract
Expressionist painting. But, as the title of the discussion sug-
gests, Diggins's assumption is that literature is the primary art
form of the period, and his interest in music and painting lies
mainly in the influence these disciplines had on writing. This
explains why the heavily jazz-influenced San Francisco Beatnik
writers receive three times as much space in Diggins's narrative
as jazz per se; why Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" is treated to a full
explication, while Charlie Parker is summed up in one line
(Ralph Ellison's description of him as a "fertility god") that has
nothing to do with his music.
In the historiography of twentieth-century American thought
and culture, generally, jazz is a bastard stepchild-accepted, al-
beit for his good humor, into the aristocratic family of art-an
influence rather than an achievement unto itself. Jazz is the
authentic folk material that "geniuses" like Stravinsky and Bern-
stein used to give their compositions a fresh, vital, American
flavor. It is the libidinal drug, the aphrodisiac, sampled by Henry
Miller in Paris cafes on his way to a brothel and then home to his
typewriter. It is the "American classical music" that no major
American symphony orchestra will perform, leaving it to their
"Pops" quasi-orchestras for Fourth of July celebrations.

VI

For some of the best jazz critics of the last generation, the
marginalization of jazz has been so obvious and overwhelming
that often it is the starting point for their discussion of the
music. The opening paragraph of the introduction Francis Davis
 Jazz CritkicsnvIts Development and Ideologies 505
wrote for In the Moment: Jazz in the 1980s (1986), a collection of
his excellent pieces, offers a gopd example:
Things are tough all over in the 1980s, but especially so for jazz, a
music long ago banished to the no man's land between popular culture
and fine art, where it figures to remain so long as its mongrel beginnings
are held against it in high places. It's no longer honorable to exist on the
fringes, which leaves jazz musicians out in the cold, in this decade of
the homeless and Ufestyles of the Rich ard Famous. Although jazz is
strictly poverty row so far as the major record companies are concerned,
accounting for less than 4 percent of all disc and tape sales, certain
nouveaux riches pop stars have decided that it has the potential to
become a fashionable address, and they are pricing the original tenants
out. This unexpected gentrification might be amusing if its visible conse-
quences weren't so alarming: Forget People, forget Rolling Stone, jazz
musicians without corporate-level backing (particularly black jazz musi-
cians) are no longer welcome even on the cover of Down Beat. Not when
Sting and Linda Ronstadt pull in a better demographic. Meanwhile,
what little jazz one hears on the radio has paid too dear a cost to get
there, and not enough alternative concert venues have materialized to
replace the jazz nightclubs that padlocked their doors in the '60s and
'70s. (ix)
The excellent Village Voice Jazz Supplements that Gary Giddins
has put together in recent years -Giddins's "Weather Bird" col-
umn in the Voice vies with Whitney Balliett's New Yorker column
as the leading word in jazz commentary-usually lead off with
editorial statements that strike a note of distinct pathos:
Jazz Styles of the Obscure and Neglected (June 1988): All jazz musicians
are underrated. The greater they are, the more lamentable the neglect.
What musician is more misunderstood by his countrymen than Louis
Armstrong?
Jazz Obsessions (August 28, 1990): We all have personal favorites that
the rest of the world stubbornly ignores. We know we are right and
everyone else is wrong, but that's small comfort when the world goes on
being wrong. Eventually, of course, Bach finds his Mendelssohn. "Moby
Dick" is beached in the classroom, and Van Gogh's 'Sunflowers" ex-
ceeds the national debt. Meanwhile it's scuffle, scuffle, scuffle.
The dolorous tones sounded here do not drown out the trium-
phant ones that stud Giddins's writing; he may feel lonely in his
witness to excellence, but he is not ashamed to convey the plea-
sure that it brings him:
I thought of Armstrong several times during the Rollins concerts of
recent years, chiefly, I suppose, because for me no other living musician
operates on Armstrong's pinnacle. More specifically, I'm reminded of the
flamboyant virtuoso Armstrong became in the '30s, when he seemed to
settle comfortably into the tunes and rhythms of the swing era and yet
transformed them with the sheer stubborn might of his incomparable
sound and a nearly arrogant economy. Armstrong turned transient mel-
odies into steely artifices as timeless and calculated as the playthings in
Yeats's Byzantium. Rollins visits those heights, and like Armstrong,
lessens the terror inherent in such relieved glory with an utter natural-
506 John Gennart
ness of expression; he gives the illusion of playing what he's hearing.
His music is human and stylish and warm and intense and lucid and
funny and fecund and, finally, ecstatic and deeply moving. (Riding 127-
28)
The deep feeling of such a statement is vaguely reminiscent of
the devotional quality that Jazz criticism manifested in the '30s
and '40s, but it is based on a far richer critical sensibility.
In the case of Stanley Crouch, who emerged in the '80s as a
critic of deep convictions, a normally censorious voice-singu-
larly so in acerbic commentaries on his principal theme, the
shortcomings of black nationalism as an intellectual and aes-
thetic paradigm-suddenly makes an about face and shades into
hagiography when it turns to the masters of the jazz tradition,
and to the younger players (notably Wynton Marsalis) who
demonstrate solemn fealty to that tradition.
Crouch is out to extend his mentor Albert Murray's insights
into the complexities and deep human significance of the blues
culture, and to argue for jazz's position in the pantheon of not
only American, but also world, civilization. So, for example, when
he went to the Umbria Jazz Festival in Perugia, Italy, in 1983, he
was not content merely to report on the performances of Dizzy
Gillespie, Freddie Hubbard, Jackie McLean, Herbie Hancock's
V.S.O.P. II, George Coleman, and other distinguished jazzmen:
He would use the whole of Italian history, from the Etruscans to
the Red Brigade, as the backdrop for an imaginative depiction of
the evolution of African-American culture, and he would try but-
tressing jazz's claim to world-historical artistic importance by
comparing its aesthetic development with that of Italian art. In
"Body and Soul," Crouch's essay on his Italian journey, the mu-
sical genius of African-American slaves, their ability to breathe
rhythmic life into stiff Protestant hymns, is posited as a cultural
reference point serving the same function as the mastery of per-
spective in early Renaissance painting. The best of the black
preaching tradition is credited with having ascended to the level
of epic poetry on the order of Dante. Louis Armstrong's seminal-
ity-his pioneering ideas about "the relationship between artistic
consciousness and the body," his discovery for jazz of the power
of the individual voice, his fixing of a balance between the func-
tional and the decorative-is likened to Giotto's influence on the
Renaissance. The "sullen gravity, majesty, and defiance" of Char-
lie Parker's saxophone is adduced as evidence, no less compel-
ling than Piero della Francesa's The Flagellation of Christ, that
"only in the transcendence of the difficult can we know the
intricate riches and terrors of the human soul." Photographs of
 Jazz CriticisrwIts Development and Ideologies 507
Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Lester Young, Charlie Parker,
Jo Jones, and Thelonious Monk elicit reference to Kenneth
Clarke's description of the men in a Masaccio: "They have the air
of contained vitality and confidence that one often sees in the
founding fathers of a civilization" (Notes 244-65).36
A country which produces Michelangelo will of course grasp
the cultural significance of Louis Armstrong, and will expect jazz
musicians to uphold the high standards of great art, to remain
faithful to their craft, resisting the seductions of the trendy, the
faux-hip, the adolescent. This is a country for Stanley Crouch.
Here, the audiences will boo even the venerable Dizzy Gillespie
off the stage for failing to honor the tradition that he himself
created. Crouch is fond of citing unnamed observers. "In Italy,
we feel if a musician is great, he should be great," an Italian
purportedly says to Crouch, explaining an audience's vocal dis-
appointment with Gillespie's attempt to play funk. "In America, it
may be necessary for Miles Davis or Sonny Rollins to play rock
and roll-or perhaps it is less painful to act young than wise.
Here we feel sad or angry when a great man will abandon wis-
dom for ignorance. The more polite would say innocence. Why
should they travel this far to put on a silly mask?" Here, where
aesthetic quality is "thick in the air," the aspiring musicians
embrace the high demands of art. "The reason cats come over
here and have a good time is that they hear the truth," Crouch
quotes pianist Harold Mabern as saying. "These people want the
best that they can get. They don't let this skin scare them into
some other stuff. They want the real deal" (Notes 247, 255).
For Crouch, the marginalization of jazz in America, a country
that shows its adolescence by making Prince and Michael Jack-
son famous, is a sign of the music's health: True art, almost by
definition, resists popularization. A more serious threat to jazz
than American record company neglect is posed by "jazz musi-
cians so studied in bohemian ways that they wear their hair like
dirty pipe cleaners or step on bandstands looking as though they
just came in from Men's Shelter-and yet have to figure out why
their audience is almost totally white" (Notes 50).37 But jazz is
too rich, too resilient, too majestic-to use one of Crouch's favor-
ite words-to be threatened even by the impieties of dreaded
bohemians:
Music is sometimes a mask or a pair of invisible dancing shoes, some-
times a shield or a wing, sometimes a combination dream and memory
bank. In any of Its definitions, any of its applications, the purpose is to
express the passion, the place, and the sweet, mysterious, or tragic
predicament of the human soul. In our age, this time of marvelous and
monstrous human machinery, of equally marvelous and monstrous
508 John Gennari
human action, African-Americanmusic has said some special things
about how we exist in this inspiringjungle and muck-strewn junk yard.
It has created many masks and many pairs of dancing shoes, a militia
of shields and a full sky of multi-colored wings -a fresh universe held
together with the mortar of dreams and nostalgic or miserable memory.
And jazz, in all its blues-and spiritual-derivedpower-is, with cinema
and modern dance, one of the new arts that will most surely be used to
someday define the quality of our century.38
Crouch, like Martin Williams before him, but with a stronger
proselytizing impulse, is pushing the idea that the high moments
of jazz have been not only crowning aesthetic triumphs, but a
kind of sanctuary of humanistic values against the ravages of
industrial civilization. Unfailingly eloquent, though often tainted
by strained metaphor, Crouch's jazz writing can be a wild oscilla-
tion between jeremiad and jubilee.
Far more even-keeled-not only when compared to Crouch, but
to just about everyone who writes in the English language-is
the eminent Whitney Balliett, the New Yorker's jazz writer since
the 1950s.39 A kind of metronome of understatement, Balliett
exudes the aura of a reposed man of cultivation who has settled
on the subject matter that most easefully feeds his cultivation.
Under the New Yorker banner, which invests Balliett and all of
its writers with the power of presumptive cultural authority, jazz
need not strain to defend its legitimacy, need not flaunt its strug-
gle to overcome traditional Europhile biases, need not document
its role as a political force in various movements for African-
American empowerment. The New Yorker does not need to argue
discretely or explicitly that jazz is on the same level as "Musical
Events," "The Current Cinema," "The Theater," "Dance," or
"Books"; Its Table of Contents implies that the argument has
already been settled. In turn, Whitney Balliett does not need to
harangue his readers about racism, lament America's neglect of
jazz, or evangelize for the music's highbrow aspirations.
Balliett approaches jazz as a novelist: The jazz world is for him
a source of wonderful stories, colorful characters, memorable
impressions. Jazz musicians enrich and inspire his writing not
only with the sound of their instruments-what he has splen-
didly described as "the sound of surprise"-but with their idio-
syncratic approaches to life's everyday problems and
possibilities. It is to Balliett's eternal credit not to have suc-
cumbed to the common tendency to treat the jazz life as a study
in deviant, antisocial, or nonconformist behavior, and yet to re-
main alive to his subjects' fascinating creativity in the crafting of
their lives.
 Jazz CrttictsrwIts Development and Ideologies 509
In a recent profile of Dizzy Gillespie, Balliett wrote of the
trumpeter's "hurrying silver tone, the sly, jumping attack, the
epigrammatic melodic fills, the rhythmic bobbing and weaving,"
his fondness for "filling a note to bursting and letting it float
smartly away," his use of a mute that sounds "as if he were
humming in the next room" ("Dizzy" 48). Fully a quarter of the
article is a transcription of Gillespie's conversation over dinner at
a venerable Manhattan French restaurant, ranging from Charlie
Parker to improvisation to a racist snubbing at the hands of a
white barber in his hometown of Cheraw, South Carolina.
Balliett sets the scene by describing Gillespie devouring haute
cuisine frogs' legs with the same relish he brings to a basket of
roadstand fried chicken. A whimsical coda at the article's end
shows a reproduction of a drawing Gillespie executed on a ma-
nila folder during the dinner, and tells us that, when Gillespie
was asked for an explanation of the seemingly aimless, abstract
doodle a week later, he said it looked to him like "three seals on
a sled."
We learn no new technical information about Gillespie's art-
istry, but we can not deny that Balliett has successfully and
entertainingly illuminated his subject, and not with hype, titilla-
tion, or condescension, but simply with good writing. If musical
analysis often seems secondary to Balliett's interest in jazz
musicians' domestic lives -his tendency to shift from musicians'
performing styles to their handiness around the kitchen (who
would have thought that Pee Wee Russell makes a fine meat
sauce?)-, his gift for teasing dialogue out of his subjects has
given his readers subtle insight into the jazz culture.
That culture, however, is so polygenous, so fraught (as Crouch
suggests) with the spirit of mask-trading metamorphosis, that
Balliett, for all of his virtuosity, can not exhaust its capacity for
meaning. In the Gillespie profile, Balliett says: "No one talks like
Gillespie. His voice is potatoey, burred, edgeless. His consonants
and vowels are indistinguishable, a gumbo. His laughter barks"
(49). This is good writing; it is simple, yet specific enough to
define its subject, colorful enough to endure in a reader's mem-
ory. But try now to imagine this gumbo of a voice in the telling of
the barbershop anecdote:
Almost everybody is nice to me in Cheraw. They had a Dizzy Gillespie
day there a while back and the ex-mayor gave a cocktail party for me,
and I asked him if it would be all right for me to bring my cousin and I
went uptown to a colored barbershop. Full, and people waiting. We went
to the other colored shop in town, and it was the same. I told my cousin
to take me to a white barbershop. The owner was alone, sitting in a
barber chair and reading the paper. 'What can I do for you?" he said. I
510 John Gennart
said I wanted a haircut, and he said, 'Sorny. We don't cut colored hair."
Then he said, 'I know you," and he started talking about my family and
such, but I walked out. Later, I got a letter from Cheraw asking me if I
would mind if they put up a sign on the outskirts saying Dizzy Gillespie
was born there. I said I would mind-it would embarrass me if someone
I knew came through and wanted a haircut and couldn't get it. But later
I relented. (51)
What has happened to the Dizzy Gillespie who was one of the
progenitors of bop talk, one of the seminal creators of the lexicon
and syntax of '40s hipsters and '50s Beats? What has happened
to that inventive voice-"Say sumpn" hip, Daddy-o!"-urging oth-
ers to verbal artistry?
It would be presumptuous to claim that Gillespie can not or
does not speak in the language of this quoted passage, and it
would be condescending to suggest that this particular tone is
inappropriate for the message he conveys. Gillespie, master ra-
conteur and proud black man, speaks in any way he pleases.
But what seems suspicious is that all of the Gillespie dialogue in
this piece, and most of the Jazz voices heard in Balliett's pieces
through the years, sounds like ... well, rather like Balliett him-
self, or like the high-placed, anonymous sources in Elizabeth
Drew's "Letters from Washington," or the "friends"whose letters
make it into "Talk of the Town" columns. It does not sound very
much like the voices one hears when jazz musicians rap between
sets or after a gig is up. The speech Dizzy Gillespie used with
Whitney Balliett in an elegant French restaurant in 1990 was
doubtless different from the speech he used with his band in
buses traveling across the United States in the 1950s, or the
speech he uses even today with his friend and fellow jazz comic
James Moody. But by representing the Gillespie who asks the
ex-mayor of his hometown "ifit would be all right for me to bring
my cousin" to a cocktail party in his honor, rather than the
Gillespie who might have lit that party up playing the dozens
with his homeboys, Balliett fails to challenge his readers to rec-
ognize how different, how distinctive, how black, the jazz culture
truly iS.40
Indeed, it is jazz's articulation of an ever-changing, multi-lay-
ered, and infinitely wondrous African-American aesthetic which
ensures that no jazz critic has the final word. In the hands of
Balliett, Crouch, Murray, Dodge, Giddins, Hentoff, Williams,
Hodeir, Schuller, and Baraka, criticism has closed the gap as it
has sought to catch up with the cutting edge of the music. But
the race is still very much on. One hopes that it never ends.
 Jazz Crttckism Its Development and Ideologies 511

Notes

'The scat line Is from Louis Armstrong's Heeble Jeebles. For an excellent
discussion of scat singing and scat talk and their ritualistic and aesthetic
functions in jazz culture, see Leonard 91-95.
2Jazz criticism grows in maturity the more perspectives it nurtures. Of all
the perspectives discussed in this paper, one is conspicuously absent-that
of the female. Historically, the male domination of the bandstand has been
matched by similarly unequal gender representation in the ranks of the
critics. Few male critics, moreover, have shown the interest or the aptitude
to analyze the highly charged sexual dynamics of jazz performance and the
jazz life. Perhaps the palpable sexual tension at the center of jazz has been
thought too obvious to warrant discussion. More likely, the negotiations of
gender and racial identity that have been conducted in the jazz world have
been of such subtlety and complexity that it is only now, after a generation
of absorbing, refining, and reformulating the feminist movement, the black
studies movement, and the potent intersection of the two, that critics finally
have the intellectual equipment it will take to understand and discuss these
issues satisfactorily.
3A debate about which periodical was the first dedicated solely to jazz
hinges more on the definition ofjazz-whether the term encompasses blues,
boogie-woogie, and other styles-than on publications' actual start-up dates.
While some have claimed Jazz Hot as the first jazz magazine, Morroe Berger
has advanced a claim for the Swedish magazine Orkester Joumalen (1:
322-35).
4The story is told in Albertson 139-45. Van Vechten invited Smith to his
apartment to perform for his guests, including George Gershwin and Adele
Astaire. She 'was met at the door to Van Vechten's apartment by an assort-
ment of white faces wearing perfumed smiles and stares that blended outer
warmth with cautious curiosity. Some of the guests undoubtedly shared
their host's admiration for Bessie's artistry, but she could hardly have failed
to realize that she was being regarded more as a novelty than as a human
being or even a performer." Smith sang a few numbers, compensated herself
handsomely at Van Vechten's liquor cabinet, and headed for the door. Before
she could escape, however, the hostess Fania Marinoff Van Vechten em-
braced her and said, "Miss Smith, you're not leaving without kissing me
goodbye." "Get the fuck away from me," Smith shouted, pushing Fania
Van Vechten away from her so hard she fell to the floor. "I ain't never heard
of such shit!"
5My discussion here has been heavily influenced by Leonard's Jazz.
6This is characteristic of the jazz press right down to our own day, and
often has been noted as an especially troublesome feature of jazz criticism.
For two quite different, but each in its own way rather self-serving, discus-
sions of this problem, see Kofsky 69-99 and Keepnews 219-38.
7For a discussion of the New Criticism's influences on the American uni-
versity, see Culler; Eagleton.
8For a discussion of the ideological uses of Abstract Expressionism, see
Guilbaut.
9Bernstein even spent time in the television studio taping a beginner's jazz
lecture (which aired in 1955 as The World of Jazz) whose simplicity may
have set American ja appreciation back as much as a quarter-century.
'01n this interview-typical of Hentoffs luminous effort in the late 1950s
and into the '60s and '70s to give jazz musicians plenty of space in his
essays to elaborate their own feelings about the music and American life-,
Davis eloquently discusses the evolution of his aesthetic, and comments
512 John Gennari

honestly and incisively on recordings that Hentoff plays for him. Down Beat
pioneered the 'blindfold test' and has published many musicians' insights
into the craft of their peers and antecedents, but nothing ever published in
Down Beat quite equals this Hentcff-Davis exchange.
"These jazz critics did not explicitly debate the virtues and defects of the
New Criticism; indeed, there appears to have been no explicit naming of the
concept in their debates, at least those of them that have been published. I
would suggest, however, that the New Criticism, despite the limits on its
appeal due to its narrow strictures and to the conservative political ossifica-
tions of some of its key practitioners, did exercise considerable influence in
shaping the questions that critics in all fields were asking about their per-
spectives and methodologies.
'2Balliett and Leonard Feather organized a debate about Hodeir's book in
which these views were given voice. Hodeir's response to his critics appears
in ch. 6 of TowardJazz.
'3See Hodier, Jazz 99-116; Williams, Jazz Tradition 3-10, 135-54.
14See, in addition to the Coleman chapter in Me Jazz Tradlition,Williams's
liner notes for Coleman's The Shape of Jazz to Come and Free Jazz, and his
"Letter from Lenox." For an assessment of Williams's work on the Smithson-
ian Collection by one of today's best critics, and one who cites Williams as a
singular influence on his own work, see Davis, "Struggling."
l5Dave Marsh describes the concert this way: "In 1938, Hammond put
Carnegie Hall to a purpose that perfectly married his concerns: the Spiritu-
als to Swing concert. Spirituals to Swing was partly the product of Ham-
mond the impresario because it gave him an excellent showcase for
Goodman and Basie, but it also served more theoretical purposes by bring-
ing together the entire spectrum of America's black-based popular music,
including the gospel harmony group Golden Gate Quartet, the New Orleans
saxophonist Sidney Bechet, and an amazing quartet of boogie-woogie pia-
nists: Pete Johnson, Albert Ammons, Meade Lux Lewis, and James P. John-
son. Putting those musicians in Carnegie Hall 50 years ago made a powerful
statement about the artistry of popular musicians who came from the most
despised parts of society' (78).
l6One of the curiosities of Baraka's Blues People, as well as some of the
pieces in Black Music, is his stated enthusiasm for the Supremes, Martha
and the Vandellas, the Impressions, and other popular black artists. I do not
mean to suggest that Baraka should not like this music; but since he spends
so much effort condemning the forces of commercialization, it seems odd
that he would express such delight in the most commercially oriented, cross-
over-conscious black music of the period. In addition to making this very
point, Charles Keil notes Baraka's neglect of the contemporary blues and
gospel musics that would better serve his argument for a stronger commit-
ment in the black community to its folk roots (42).
17Norman Mailer's well-known 1957 article 'The White Negro" im-
aginatively depicts the cult of the hipster as an existential pose inspired by
the artistic genius and social pathologies of bop practitioners, particularly
Charlie Parker. For a sober assessment of Mailer's mythology, see Hentoff,
Jazz Life 138-42.
'8See Feather and Tynan for the beginnings of the anti-jazz controversy.
For an extended discussion of the polemics of the period by a writer firmly
committed to the 'radical" position, see' Kofsky. One of the more interesting
debates of the decade occurred between Kofsky and Ira Gitler in a series of
open letters in Jazz magazine in 1965 and '66. Kofsky took the title of
Charlie Parker's Now's the Time as emblematic of the bebop generation's
political consciousness. For Kofsky the title meant "Now's the time to abolish
 Jazz CriticismwIts Development and Ideologies 513
racism, discrimination, etc." Gitler disagreed: 'I deny the 'obvious social
implication.' The title refers to the music and the 'now' was the time for
people to dig it' (see Kofsky 56). What was perhaps most revealing about the
debate was the failure of either participant to buttress his arguments with
solid testimony from the many musicians who knew Bird well enough to
testify authoritatively to his intentions. But a reading of Kofsky's interview
with John Coltrane (Kofsky 221-47) suggests part of the problem: Kofsky is
so anxious to have Coltrane assent to the view that his music is vitally and
irreducibly connected to Malcolm X's political messages that he doesn't seem
to be able to hear what Coltrane is saying.
IT17hisspirit of celebration, of satisfaction in the artistic triumphs of blues
and jazz, is exemplified in the tone and the content of Ellison's essays on
Minton's, Mahalla Jackson, Charlie Parker, Charlie Christian, and Jimmy
Rushing in Shadow and Act (199-247). I am not alone in believing this to be
the finest writing in all the jazz literature. The connections between Ellison's
disposition toward the blues and Albert Murray's views, discussed earlier,
should be quite clear.
20Though I am clearly siding with Ellison here, I agree with Charles Keil
(44-45) that Ellison pays insufficient attention to the legacy of black music's
appropriation by the white-controlled music business and to the ways in
which resentment of this has shaped black musicians' efforts to reappropri-
ate and revitalize their music. And when Ellison writes that ". . . today
nothing succeeds like a rebellion (which Jones as a 'beat' poet should know)
and while a few boppers went to Europe to escape, or become Muslims,
others took the usual tours for the State Department' (253), he leans toward
the untenable position that rebellion is necessarily a stance, which makes
him as guilty as Baraka of imposing a narrow limit on the meaning of art.
211t is, of course, the nature of a "continuum' to emphasize continuity over
disjunction. But Levine has demonstrated that the argument for a linear,
coherent tradition in black music need not sacrifice detailed description of
stages -distinct cultural and political formations -in its evolution.
22"Nobody Knows the Trouble I Seen," Wise I of Why's/Wise. Baraka uses
this poem, narrated by a griot telling the story of Africans in America, in
"Jazz Criticism' 57.
23This is from Crouch's response to Baraka's 'Jazz Criticism" (Baker 73).
In this exchange, which I find one of the most interesting and illuminating in
the whole history of jazz criticism, Crouch seems to me to get the better of
Baraka, not only by focusing more firmly on the actual aesthetic achieve-
ments of black music, but by pointing to jazz criticism (such as that of
Martin Williams, Andre Hodeir, and Roger Pryor Dodge) that, despite its
limitations of perspective, has helped immensely to establish an analytical
basis for understanding the music. Crouch rose to intellectual prominence
in the '80s based mainly on his considerable gifts as a writer, but also on the
ripeness of the decade's political climate for his withering attack on the
black nationalist doctrines that he most closely associates with Baraka (see
Crouch, Notes).
Here, Crouch's censorious voice is in fine form: "When I received a copy of
the preceding paper, it appeared to have been written in one sitting, its very
sloppiness symbolic of the lack of aesthetic seriousness so obvious in its
content. In an effort to redline the artistry of jazz to no more than political
pulp, LeRoi Jones [which is how Crouch always refers to Barakal has simpli-
fied the complexity of inspiration, invention, adaptation, and context to a
battlefield on which black victims war against a conspiracy of racist corpo-
rate heads and white jazz writers. Clearly any analysis of Negro American
history [as Crouch is fond of calling the history of black Americans] that
514 John Gennari
Ignores racism as an enduring element would be naive. But what Lincoln
Kirstein called a '1 bravado' (to describe what we have now come to expect
from tenured Marxist revolutionaries) so dominates Jones' thesis that the
grandeur of an internationally influential music has been reduced to either
the cries of the victimized or the anthems of a homemade, far-left square
dance. Jones further convolutes his largely hysterical argument by describ-
ing jazz as a latter-day variation on possession-oriented African religion, as
well as an expressive protest against the conventions of Western art and the
economics of capitalism. Only LeRoi Jones could try to strap such a light-
weight saddle to the galloping horse of jazz and expect us to miss the fact
that all he largely has to offer is a mouthful of dust' (Baker 71-72).
Baraka has been far more charitable in his views of Crouch, referring to
him In 'Jazz Writing' as a 'very knowledgeable analyst on the IV~llage]Voice'
and distinguishing Crouch not only from the white Gary Giddins ('the con-
stant factor of jazz definition at that burnt-out ex-liberal rag") but also from
the black Greg Tate (the purveyor of "very rococo gee-whizology") (254).
I shall have occasion later in this essay to critique Crouch, but as should
be clear from my references to him thus far, his work has done much to
shape my own thinking about jazz.
24The claim that black music's creators "are/have been in the main the
Afro-American workers and small farmers'-which is not without founda-
tion, but is less true for jazz than for popular black music forms such as
blues (both urban and rural), rhythm 'n' blues, funk, gospel, and rap-is
from "Class Struggle" (317). The rest of the phrases are from "Jazz Criticism'
(Baker 56-70). My implication here is that Baraka's deepening Marxism has
resulted in an even greater emphasis than that in his 1960s writing on the
institutionalized oppression of African-American culture, with the (in my
view) unfortunate result that his recent writing is less illuminating than
Black Music about artists' approaches to their music. A notable exception is
Baraka's very interesting "Miles Davis: 'One of the Great Mother Fuckers.' "
Certainly African-American culture continues to be degraded and bastard-
ized, but Baraka's recent writings have not been particularly illuminating
about the actual process of that marginalization.
25The ortsha are the Yoruba deities who "represent the impact of the mind
and spirit of millions of Yoruba in West Africa on key black urban popula-
tions in the Americas" (Thompson xv).
26What I mean, and what I hope to convey in the following discussion, is
that Baraka goes so far left and Collier so far right that the two end up
melting into each other. This is an exaggeration of sorts, but I think it
touches on one of the ironies of '80s politics: The neo-conservatives and the
Marxists (or some of them anyway) mirror in each other, and doubtless
reinforce in each other, a tendency to treat economics as the sole arbiter of
value.
27Collier first offered this quasi-McCarthytte reading of 1930s cultural
history in The Faking of Jazz" (1985). There, Collier exposes John Ham-
mond, Otis Ferguson, Charles Edward Smith, B. H. Haggin, Barry Ulanov,
George Frazier, and others as the Soviet agents they really were. He suggests
that these writers were influenced ("to what extent . . . is impossible to
know") by the 1928 Comintern policy of looking at American blacks as a
colonized nation that the coming revolution would liberate, and so consid-
ered jazz as a " 'folk music' of these colonized people" that was degraded by
the reactionary American establishment. This, Collier argues, was a dis-
torted understanding of the music, which in fact was, from the 1920s on, a
bourgeois cultural form heartily embraced by the American mainstream.
 Jazz Crititismr Its Development and Ideologies 515

280n this issue Baraka is, of course, passionate: 'Chauvinist garbage like
Len Lyon's Great Jazz Pianists exqludes Duke, Monk, Tatum, Waller, Bud,
Willie the Lion, and James P. Johnson! It includes Joe Zawinul, Jimmy
Rowles, Keith Jarrett, Paul Bley, Dave Brubeck, Marian McPartland, George
Shearing, Steve Kuhn, Chick Corea, and Ran Blake! The same author's 100
Greatest Jazz Records is filled with similar twisted racism, there being more
of those 'greatest' from Corea and Zawinul than Bud Powell. The Reagan-led
rightward motion of society is clearly duplicated by the steady flow of chau-
vinist, reactionary scribbling passing as commentary or analysis of the
music. Consider, for example, Jack Chambers's incredibly racist book on
Miles Davis, one of the main themes of which is that Miles played his best
when he played with white musicians! Or Lincoln Collier, whose various
writings give off the distinct aroma of a rotting mint julep' ("Jazz Criticism'
64-65).
As my preceding paragraph suggests, I think it is necessary to measure
cultural certification using several different criteria, and even then it is a
notoriously difficult matter. When I argue that, in popular music and film,
white performers achieve more certification than black ones, the criteria I'm
using are those of the popular-culture milieu. A key one of these, of course,
is the financial revenue that accrues from popular appeal, which leads
directly to increased representation in popular-culture industry trade jour-
nals like Billboard and Variety and in the mainstream media generally,
which in turn leads to more money, etc. Black performers such as Michael
Jackson, Michael Jordan, and Spike Lee certainly have not done badly when
it comes to this kind of certification, but the question Is whether comparable
white talents (if such exist, and of course this measurement is itself one that
is impossible to make) make out even better.
The case of the certification procedures of the New York Times is more
straightforward. The Times' editorial distinction between "Music" (by which it
means European concert music) and "Jazz/Pop" is clearly illustrative of a
Europhile bias. These categories of classification persist in the Times, inter-
estingly, despite the fact that several of the newspaper's music wiiters argue
persistently and eloquently that such categories are misleading and/or per-
nicious. Tmnes columnist John Rockwell, in AU American Music, treats Orn-
ette Coleman, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, and the Talking Heads as
American composers on the same level of aesthetic achievement as Elliot
Carter and Milton Babbitt. And, throughout 1989 and 1990 hardly a week
passed when Jon Pareles did not file an article which discussed the blurring
boundaries between 'Pop" and 'Elite" musical culture.
29Collier's perspective on jazz is fundamentally flawed in its assumption
that jazz developed as a dialectical relationship between a black subculture
and a mainstream white culture. He is unable to consider the possibility
that black musicians had their own aesthetic, and that whatever they took
from outside of it in either new ideas to be absorbed and transformed or
material rewards to underwrite this very process, they were in command of
their cultural expression. This does not exclude non-black American per-
formners, audiences, or critics; it does not deny that jazz has been played
excellently, discussed meaningfully and intelligently, and felt deeply all over
the world. Nor does it give African-Americans a superior claim to the music
on grounds of racial essence. Rather, it argues that jazz was founded and
forged in the crucible of African-American culture, and that all of its signifi-
cant stylistic advances have been part of a broader evolution of African-
American aesthetics.
30His jazz books include a survey history that has had multiple reprint-
ings, as well as his well-publicized biographies of Armstrong, Ellington, and
516 John Gennari
Goodman. He also has several music education titles, and a number of
children's books.
3lJust the opposite holds true in the typical Baraka formulation: A large
part of the argument for Albert Ayler as a truer artist than Benny Good-
man - to hypothesize an appropriate comparison - is Ayler's relative material
deprivation, both a symptom and a consequence of his anti-bourgeois aes-
thetic. The flip side of Collier's claim that jazz has flourished because of its
white patronage is Baraka's argument that the white power structure has
continually and persistently debased the music. The truth lies somewhere
between these two extremes.
321n The Reception of Jazz, Collier firms up his connections to Reaganism
with a peculiar argument that lends itself to the American government's
meager support of the arts as compared to support in the European coun-
tries. Using the kind of laissez-faire, jingoistic logic that has Americans
attributing Toyota's conquest of the American car market to 'unfair" Japan-
ese state subsidization, Collier argues that the much vaunted support of jazz
abroad is misleading, because it hinges on 'unrealistically low" ticket prices
underwritten by government subsidies. I suspect that the many American
jazz musicians and dancers who draw most of their income in Europe and
Japan would not be much impressed by Collier's bullish confidence in the
unsubsidized American performing arts market.
331 refer here to the persistent and pervasive problem for American jazz
artists-particularly those like Murray, whose music does not have the mass
appeal of Marsalis's or Connick's-in obtaining contracts with major Ameri-
can record companies. In the past twenty years, for example, much of the
cutting edge of jazz has been represented on record by the Italian Black
Saint and the German ECM labels.
34The double-edged nature of jazz's increased mass media recognition in
recent years is clearest in the case of the commercial cinema, where the
hackneyed stereotype of jazz as the milieu of hipsters and junkies has
proved its durability as a seductive, salable image. Bertrand Tavernier's
'Round Midnight (1986), the best of the lot, centers on the torment of an
expatriate, tragically dissolute saxophonist (rendered exquisitely by Dexter
Gordon) and, like the music itself, runs the gamut of human emotions from
pathos to celebration. But in showing the jazz musician and his music
dependent for their very existence on the good will of a poor, saintly Parisian
painter, the film reinforces the perception of jazz as perpetually mired in the
id phase of human development, unconsciously searching for a parental
superego.
Clint Eastwood's Bird (1988), a well-intentioned but pathetically conde-
scending paean to Charlie Parker, is a story taken from the perspective of
Bird's widow rather than from that of Bird's fellow musicians, which ex-
plains why the movie focuses on Bird's substance abuse problems and poor
performance as a husband and father rather than on his transcendent
music.
But most disappointing in its failure to capture the essence of the music is
Spike Lee's Mo' Better Blues (1990). Lee's demonstrated brilliance as a
chronicler of African-American culture; his deep personal connections to the
jazz world through his bassist/composer father; and his pre-film promo-
tional campaign promising a corrective response to the patronizing, voyeur-
istic, and misinformed images that make up jazz's film history combined to
generate great hope for Mo' Better Blues as a turning point in the relation-
ship between jazz and cinema. But, far from celebrating jazz's cultural tri-
umphs, the film instead reinforces the image of jazz as a netherworld of vice,
greed, and betrayal. The film's trumpeter/protagonist, Bleek Gilliam, is yet
 Jazz Critticism Its Development and Ideologies 517
another tragic figure, another casualty of the struggle-seemingly taken by
all jazz filmmakers as the very essence of jazz-to reconcile the music with a
decent middle-class life.
Mo' Better Blues parallels previous jazz films in its failure to show us the
creative process in jazz, to let us feel the fire that bums in the soul of an
artist poised at the edge of discovery, to let us dwell in the communal spirit
that binds musicians to each other. Bleek Gilliam says that jazz is his life;
without it, he claims, he would just crawl up in a corner and die. But Bleek's
actions in the film suggest that what he wants most is to continue sleeping
with and having his ego stroked by two beautiful women. When Bleek does
lose his ability to play-in a highly contrived episode in which Bleek's life-
time friend and ineffective manager Giant (played by Lee) yanks the film's
focus away from jazz and onto his gambling problem-, his resulting course
of action makes it hard to believe that jazz was ever anything more for him
than a pose, a stylized front masking his mundane desires for sex and
bourgeois comfort. Evidently we are supposed to feel sorry for Bleek when, in
his first time back on stage after having his face crushed by a goon squad
settling a score with the welshing Giant, he discovers that he no longer has
his old chops. But a serious jazz musician would never take the stage if he
had any doubt about his ability to play up to his reputation. Bleek's fate at
the fllm's end, when he apparently gives up jazz to become a family man,
reinforces the stale notion that a jazz life and a respectable American family
life are mutually exclusive. But many jazz musicians manage to be success-
ful as both professionals and parents-indeed, judging from Bill Lee's roles
in Spike Lee's films, this would appear to be true of the Lee family itself.
35Along the same lines, Giddins ('Evolution" 41) notes that a mid-1980s
issue of the New Criterion devoted to the arts in New York failed to find room
for jazz in its purportedly comprehensive survey of the eighteen (!) most
Important arts in the city.
36When Stanley Crouch uses the word soul, generally he's talking about
something other than collard greens and black-eyed peas. But-and this is
what keeps his work poised so beautifully between elitism and populism-he
does want to connect his mother's downhome cooking with the most search-
ing, complex artistic endeavors. And so he asks Albert Murray about Italy,
and Murray tells him: 'Long before there were Southerners in the U.S.A.,
there were Southerners in Italy, and it also meant a certain climate, a
certain hospitality, a certain musicality in the language, and sometimes even
a certain kind of violence and tendency to vendetta. In the more learned
circles, the European vision of the Southerner is much like that of anyone
who understands our South: the feeling created is that of an easeful rela-
tionship to culture and a spontaneity that says, deep down-the point of
learning how to cook all this food and talk this way and wear these fine
clothes is to have a good goddam time, man!" (Notes 248-49).
37Crouch's dress code is best exemplified by Wynton Marsalis's very fine
Italian suits. But he's also mightily impressed with the black-tie statement
made by the Modem Jazz Quartet, among others. "Three years ago or so,"
Crouch writes in his liner notes for the Modem Saxophone Quartet's Revue,
'the World Saxophone Quartet played two shows in Manhattan opposite Art
Ensemble of Chicago, and the sidewalk score was WSQ - 2, AEC - 0. As
usual-, most of the jazz press missed the point, interpreting the tuxedo and
gleaming shoes worn by each player as some sort of superficial commentary
or parodic assault, when any examination of bandstand dress by black
American musicians prior to the influence of rock and roll will reveal aristo-
cratic modes of dress, sometimes given even deeper idiomatic turn by the
518 John Gennari
presence of those banjos in the laps of the proud musicians seated in rows
behind a smiling James Reece Europe."
What's most intriguing about Crouch-and what's easily forgotten when
he's sounding like a cranky fig or an Alan Bloom disciple lashing out at
popular culture-is that his apparent elitism is rooted in a vernacular sensi-
bility and in an essentially populist political ideology. This is clear, among
other places, in 'Ready on My Mind," his discussion of Jesse Jackson (Notes
3-19). Like his mentor Albert Murray, Crouch is looking for the ultimate
refinement of his local, native condition. When he moved to New York from
the West Coast in the '70s he holed up in a Bowery loft (later shared with
David Murray) which functioned as a performance space for the emerging
downtown avant-garde that included, in addition to Murray, Arthur Blythe,
James Newton, and Butch Morris. When he later looked to transcend this
bohemian condition, he passed on Harlem, which 'has been harpooned by
various forms of deprivation," robbing it of the 'sophistication and molten
elegance' that made Ralph Ellison consider it a counterpart of Paris, and
settled instead in the West Village. That decision, Crouch tells us in 'New
York's Rhythm," has worked out very well: ". . . as a man who has lived
happily in Greenwich Village for the past 12 years-and who can have
himself a very good time all the way up to Birdland on Broadway and 105th,
enjoy the social integration of the Upper West Side, take my visiting daugh-
ter to Lincoln Center and dance to the swing bands there on summer nights,
pack in Merton Simpson's birthday party at his Madison Avenue African art
gallery where Danny Moore's band moves back and forth from bebop to a
backbeat that inspires dance, meet my mentor, the writer Albert Murray,
down near City Hall and talk books and Ellington until his bus comes, sit
through the mesmerizing Ring cycle as conductor James Levine stitches the
epic together with the tip of his baton, watch Charles Dutton change the
weight of the air in August Wilson's 'The Piano Lesson,' maybe sip Cham-
pagne among the pulchritudinous dazzle and handsomeness of the crowd at
B. Smith's, walk back to the West Village through Tribeca after lunch talking
and joking with thoroughbred intellectuals, listen to the Boys' Choir of
Harlem at Aaron Davis Hall, finish up with a superb meal at Anton's on
West 4th Street, where the saxophonist-chef lays down a heavy culinary
swing-I don't think New York is so bad at all (A31). This, obviously, is not
one of the stronger manifestations of Couch's populist spirit-the problem
being that, in New York, all these vernacular experiences carry elite price
tags.
38From Crouch's liner notes for the World Saxophone Quartet's Revue,
crowned the best jazz album of the 1980s in a 1990 Village Voice poll of
thirty-three critics.
39Of late, Balliett's publication schedule has been much softer than in
years past, and the New Yorker is often silent on jazz matters, other than its
repeatable "Goings On About Town" listings. One couldn't help but notice,
by way of contrast, the transition that recently took place in the magazine's
coverage of the cinema. Pauline Kael's exalted status in the criticism estab-
lishment, higher even than Balliett's (film being more firmly entrenched than
jazz in high- and middle-brow American taste cultures), did not prevent the
New Yorker from publishing film criticism during the widening lapses be-
tween her submissions in recent years. First the New Yorker announced that
Terence Rafferty would share the "Cinema" beat with Kael, then later an-
nounced he would succeed her as first-string film critic. This suggests an
assumption on the magazine's part that film is, and will continue to be, a
fixture of American culture and so deserves unbroken coverage. Jazz fans
hope the magazine feels the same way about jazz. Supplementing Balliett's
 Jazz Criticisnm Its Development and Ideologies 519

column with pieces from other jazz writers, or showing evidence of the
grooming of an eventual successor to Balliett, would be the surest means of
nurturing these hopes.
401'msuggesting here, if a bit obliquely, that jazz criticism (not only that of
Ballett, but of all practitioners) can and should go further in sounding the
vernacular voices at the center of the jazz culture. This has been a primary
goal for the Village Voice's Greg Tate, whose writing Baraka sees as 'very
rococo gee-whizology," whom Crouch sees as a Baraka-like performer in an
ongoing Zip Coon show that degrades the grandeur and majesty of classical
black expression, and whom many white readers of the Village Voice see as
either purposefully obscure or excessively tendentious. I think Tate's work
plots an important route that jazz criticism must travel further. When he
has not been busy accusing Crouch of being pretentious, reactionary, and
dull, Tate has been writing about contemporary black music (African pop,
hiphop, rap, funk, and soul as well as jazz) as the expression of a pan-Afri-
can vernacular impulse combining sensual pleasure and social engagement,
rhythmic ingenuity and verbal prowess. In other words, he is approaching
the music on terms not unlike Albert Murray's in Stomptng the Blues.
Crouch is right in seeing Tate as unequal to Murray's high standards, but
Tate seems to me to share much more of Murray's aesthetic than Crouch is
willing to admit. Part of what is at work in Crouch's and other's animus
toward Tate and other younger critics is moldy figism: Exposed are the
anxieties of an established audience witnessing the emergence of a new
audience with different cultural reference points and different experiences of
absorbing jazz into its life.
Tate's inside audience-"cultnats," 'freaky deakys," a certainfaux-bohem-
ian subset of the Buppie cohort; collectively, the bane of Stanley Crouch's
existence-came of age at a time when jazz was suffering a grave identity
crisis, a time when the cutting edge in black music was being forged more by
a funk maestro such as George Clinton than by anyone working in jazz. For
this audience, the high-quality jazz of the '80s may seem less the renais-
sance of a grand old tradition than the emergence of a new set of very fine
sounds-more elegant than rap, more technically sophisticated than pop,
but part of the same musical universe. It stands to reason that this audience
would listen to jazz and talk about it in different ways than past audiences,
and it should be expected that criticism would evolve so as to address its
audience on new terms. But this does not mean that everyone over thirty
should not be trusted. In recent months I have heard two major figures from
the grand old tradition, Miles Davis (who assiduously-and rather patheti-
cally-pursues the younger audience) and Max Roach (who lets the audience
come to him), waxing enthusiastic about hiphop, noting in particular the
similarities between DJ scratching and bebop drumming, since both explore
the infinite possibilities of the off-beat.
Where Tate veers away from Murray and heads in the direction of the
young Village bohemian LeRoi Jones-and it is this move that most rankles
Crouch-is in his cynicism about white intellectuals' discourse on 'art." For
Tate, the Crouch-Wynton Marsalis take on jazz is a lot of highbrow postur-
ing: 'Is jazz as we know it dead? When the Art Ensemble of Chicago popped
the question in 1970 they took it for a joke, a setup for Lester Bowie's arch
retort, That depends on what you know.' Back then jazz could stand a little
mock irony. It was to laugh a few years later when saxophonist Billy Harper
said all this talk about jazz being on the way out was tantamount to saying
the black man was on the way out. Would that he'd foretold hiphop, the new
black machismo, so he'd know that our nuts would again be safe for democ-
racy. Nowadays the discussion done got grim. You got muhfukahs so hyped
520 John Gennan
on a jazz is dead kick idea they want to be the first on the block to deliver
last rites and shit.... It doesn't take a genius to know that things ain't what
they used to be in jazz, when innovation used to be the music's stock-in-
trade. If you want the cutting edge of formal experimentation and progres-
sive thought in black music then you're listening to hiphop, house, and
black rock. Yet, in the immortal words of Frank Zappa, jazz isn't dead, it just
smells funny. And if these young (35 and under) black jazz musicians would
tune into our avant-pop culture for instruction and inspiration, their music
might not sound so stale and juiceless by comparison. Keeping one ear to
the street and the other to the academy was good enough for Edward
Kennedy Ellington. Therefore it ought to be good enough for these antedilu-
vian whippersnappers" (81). There is more going on here than an effort to
judge black music by whether it functions as a new and better aphrodisiac.
Tate's take on hiphop echoes Baraka's use of bebop as the touchstone of an
assertive black male ego. And it may be that much of the animosity toward
Tate on the part of older black men, white men, and women of all ages and
shades of color reflects the mixture of envy and threat often evinced in our
culture by a young black man who chooses to brandish his sexuality.

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Discography
Armstrong, Louis. HeebteJeebtes. Qkeh, 8300-A, 1926.
. West End Blues. Okeh, 8597, 1928.
Coleman, Ornette. Free Jazz. Atlantic, SD-1364, 1960.
. The Shape of Jazz to Come. Atlantic, SD- 1317, 1959.
Coltrane, John. A Love Supreme. Impulse, 77, 1964.
Copland, Aaron. Appalachian Spring. RCA-Victor, DM- 1046, 1946.
Ellington, Duke. Black and Tan Fantasy. Victor, 21284, 1927.
. Black, Brown, and Beige. RCA, LAS-3071, 1944.
. Concertofor Cootie. Camden (RCA), 60207, 1940.
. Dreamy Blues. Brunswick, 4952, 1931.
. It Don't Mean a Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing). Brunswick, 6265,
1931.
.Mood Indigo. English Brunswick, 1068, 1930.
. Runnin' Wild. Brunswick, 4952, 1931.
Hines, Earl. Caution Blues. Milestone, MLP-2012, 1928.
. A Monday Date. Milestone, MLP-2012, 1928.
Parker, Charlie. Embraceable You. Dial, LP-203B, 1947.
. Koko. Savoy, MG- 12014, 1945.
. A Night in Tunisia. Dial, LP-201A, 1946.
. Now's the Time. Savoy, MG-12001, 1945.
Rollins, Sonny. Blue Seven. Prestige, 7079, 1956.
Stravinsky, Igor. Le sacre du printemps rCheRite of Sprtng). 1913. Columbia,
67703-07D, 1929.
World Saxophone Quartet. Revue. Black Saint, BSR-0056, 1980.

Filmography
Bird. Dir. Clint Eastwood. USA, 1988.
Mo' Better Blues. Dir. Spike Lee. USA, 1990.
'Round Midnight. Dir. Bertrand Tavernier. France, 1986.
The World of Jazz. Featuring Leonard Bernstein. Omnibus, 16 Oct. 1955.

Assistant Professor/Instructor of English

Continuing appointment in an eight-person department at a
selective, national liberal arts college located 32 miles north of
Chicago. Nineteenth-centwvyBritish literature, with additional
concentration of poetry writing and on theory. Teaching re-
sponsibilities (3 courses per semester) include composition
and introductory courses. Ph.D. required, with successful
teaching experience. Letter of application, c.v., and three let-
ters of recommendation by December 1, 1991 to Richard
Mallette, Chairperson, Department of English, Lake Forest
College, 555 North Sheridan Road, Lake Forest, Illinois
60045-2399. Applications from minorities and women are ac-
tively encouraged.