Conference Agenda

This paper considers the musical revolutionary action of several major jazz figures in the early 1960s (Charles Mingus, Abbey Lincoln, and Max Roach) in light of the long and enduring history of slave revolts and maroonage that their protest against racial capitalism draws on and, I argue, participates in. Using the critical foundations laid by Amiri Baraka and Acklyn Lynch, I focus in particular on the staging of a Black counter-festival (the “Rebel Festival”) to rival the hegemonic (and White-owned) Newport Jazz Festival in the summer of 1960. I position myself against the historiographical lacuna that leaves the maroonagic aspects of jazz culture generally unrecognized or understudied, especially given the racist political economy that has dominated jazz for as long as it has been a commercial industry.

What the figures of Mingus, Lincoln, and Roach exemplify is both the withdrawal from dominant White institutions towards creative self-determination and the synthesis of various Black musical traditions from Africa and the Caribbean into a pan-African mode of creative resistance. Following the insights of Greg Thomas (2016), Carolyn Cooper (1993, 2007), and Umi Vaughan (2012), we can think of this moment of Black jazz resistance in the 1960s as a kind of “erotic maroonage,” a form of embodied resistance to notions of propriety and polite society. Taking up Thomas’s argument that maroonage demands articulation beyond “restrictive conceptions, equating all maroonage with encampments or mountain ‘reservations’” which would fix the maroon practice of collective flight and resistance in terms of geographical or nation-state specificity, I want to trace the wider international lineages and resonances of these artists’ liberationist practices. What the 1960 Rebel Festival attests to is an aspect of jazz culture—its anti-colonial, anti-racist, anti-capitalist force—that has been increasingly occluded by prevailing stereotypes which associate the music with high society and refined taste, thereby undermining its political potency. This paper takes seriously the task of recovering this essential characteristic of jazz history and contemporary practice through the underappreciated framework of maroonage.

Throughout his bandleading career, Black American jazz instrumentalist/composer Don Cherry (b. 1936-d.1995) employed strategies for supporting spontaneous change and speculative community in musical ensembles he facilitated. Central to Cherry’s approach was a compositional catalogue of melodies and other musical figures gathered across musicians he worked with from divergent parts of the world. These materials were activated in group performance without predetermination, improvising musical form while articulating cross-cultural possibility. As Cherry expressed, his intent was a constant processual emergence of known and unknown, navigating structure and cultural-geographic terrain at once.

This study centers Cherry's ensemble approach, investigating its aesthetic, philosophic, and material coordinates. I draw from ethnography with former Cherry collaborators, archival research, and music analysis to spotlight continuity but also subtle shifts in Cherry’s bandleading dispositions—from virile avant-garde energies of the mid-1960s to child-friendly, invitationalist approaches cultivated from a schoolhouse in rural Sweden with partner/visual artist Moki Cherry, to neo-traditional turns of his later career. I relate these to concurrent jazz trends of their times while grounding them in the contours of Cherry’s situated environments, networks, and egalitarian values.

While rooted in jazz studies, my methodologies also build upon recent Black Study theorists who resonate with Mu, a double 1969 album exemplary of Cherry’s divergent ensemble and philosophic-spiritual orientations (Carter, Hartman, Han, Mackey, Moten, Okiji: 2015, 2016, 2021, 2024). Mu unfolds through “open, unfinished sound,” echoing the word’s etymological negation of fixed definition and closure. I extend this sensibility beyond the albums themselves, arguing for the ways Cherry’s broad commitments to ongoing structural malleability and expansive cultural breadth support not only particular group-sonic aesthetics but immanent diasporic subjectivity. Cherry’s compositional catalogue and its attendant ensemble strategies—the spontaneous improvisation of form, the articulation of community—remain idiosyncratic manifestations of radical mobility. They chart identifiable, jazz-aligned practical-theoretical strategies that gesture towards speculative sociomusical possibility.

Known today as one of the vanguards of jazz, Wynton Marsalis gained fame in the early 1980s as a trumpet prodigy in jazz and classical music. Like many, Marsalis looked up to Miles Davis, who had been at the forefront of jazz trumpeting for decades. By the 1980s, Davis was well into his controversial “electric era,” where he pushed his music on through funk, rock, and pop, a turn that Marsalis disapproved of. Due to their fame and conflicting interests, Davis and Marsalis often spoke and spat about each other through popular interviews and magazines. In 1986, Marsalis eclipsed Davis as “trumpet player of the year” in DownBeat (Lange 1986). Despite their media feud, Davis and Marsalis interacted in person only once. At the 1986 Vancouver International Jazz Festival, Marsalis uninvitedly walked on stage and played during Davis’s performance.

The circulation of accounts and responses to the 1986 “encounter” has contributed to a convoluted cartoon that does not represent what might have actually happened (Marsalis 2015). These popular receptions are based on a conflict between so-called jazz traditionalists (like Marsalis) and so-called jazz evolutionists (like Davis). Several scholars write about jazz in terms of this tradition-evolution dialectic: as a “changing same,” (Baraka 1963) an “entire…avant-garde movement” (Washington 2004), or an “intratextual discourse” (Barzel 2012). However, the nature of the Davis-Marsalis conflict is far more complex.

In this paper, I investigate how Davis and Marsalis each fail to represent this dialectic and are ideologically self-contradictory. Drawing from jazz critics, newspapers, interviews, Davis’s autobiography, Maraslis’s biography, and academic scholarship, I assemble the material and ideological histories of their feud, their meeting, and the conflict’s legacy. In 1986, Davis and Marsalis are at odds, but across timelines, there is harmony in their ideologies and aesthetics. For example, in a 1986 interview, David Murray heard a 1964 Davis recording and confused it for a Marsalis performance, incorrectly parsing subtleties between the two (Mandel 1986). Through lenses of ideology, class, genre, and respect, I disentangle the histories and legacies of this conflict to complicate and reinterpret this notorious moment in jazz history.