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.

In 1988, the adventurous U.S. jazz musician Don Cherry (1936-1995) made an educational video that challenged conventional notions of “swing.” Typically a rhythmic domain of triplet subdivision, irregular syncopation, and danceable grooves, Cherry’s “swing” was firstly sonic. “It’s the sounds that swing, the swing is in the sound,” he explained. Cherry’s video featured discussion, performance, and a self-drawn visual diagram that demonstrated how swing reflected timbral variations in sound prior to its rhythmic components. In other words, his concept located “swing” in sound itself, an interventionist approach to musical expression.

This presentation synthesizes the ideas, lineages, and speculative threads that framed Cherry’s sonic perspectives. I engage in close readings of his educational video to, on one hand, demonstrate how his “swing” refracted Black music theories by championing heterogeneity in instrumental and vocal music practice. On another hand, Cherry’s ideas went beyond normative Afro-diasporic space. I show how his incorporation of south Asian influences made generative links between Black sound and other non-West geographies.

By displacing “swing” from rhythm to sound, Cherry framed a provocative rubric for aestheticizing sonic production. His visual diagram in particular elevated the ways that Afro-diasporic sounds intervene upon European/Western norms as they resonated with other non-European traditions. Offered as a pedagogical framework, his philosophy continues to offer insights for history, education, theory, and practice.

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.