Jazz is a narrative art form that expresses profound emotions, preserves historical stories, and transmits and adapts cultural values across generations. By examining both instrumental and vocal jazz, this essay argues that jazz’s storytelling power lies in its dual capacity for musical and linguistic metaphoricity, which facilitates its globalization as a medium for diverse cultural narratives. Fumi Okiji describes jazz performance as a palimpsestic narrative, where each rendition reinterprets personal and historical stories, showcasing jazz’s ability to reflect individual identity within a shared cultural memory. Sven Bjerstedt notes jazz’s dual metaphoricity—the language about music is metaphorical (linguistic metaphoricity), and the music is perceived as metaphorical (musical metaphoricity). This duality allows jazz to convey complex stories beyond verbal communication, promoting its global reach as a storytelling medium. This flexibility enables various cultures to weave their narratives into the adaptable framework of jazz, transforming it into a vehicle for local tales. However, this dual metaphoricity is more subjective in instrumental jazz than in vocal works, as vocal performances anchor the narrative through lyrics, creating a more directed storytelling experience. This distinction influences audience engagement and cultural adaptation, as seen in Oscar Brown’s “Signifyin’ Monkey,” where the lyrical content guides the interpretation, contrasting with the abstract storytelling in instrumental jazz. This essay explores the storytelling metaphor in instrumental jazz, arguing that its capacity for subjective interpretations fosters a narrative openness that drives jazz’s global adaptability in contrast with the narrative specificity of vocal jazz.

During the antebellum period, Black freedom seekers from the United States settled in St. John’s Ward, later known as The Ward, in Toronto. After the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, many refugees returned south, and the remaining Black community gradually saw their freedoms eroded. The Ontario Common Schools Act of 1851 established separate schools for Black students, while restrictive covenants allowed landowners to prevent individuals deemed 'undesirable'— Blacks, Jews, and Asians—from purchasing property. The 1939 Supreme Court case Christie v. York entrenched merchants' right to discriminate based on race. Black Canadian jazz musician Archie Alleyne (1933-2015) enjoyed a career that spanned over 60 years. He performed with legends like Billie Holiday and Lester Young and became the first Black musician to work at the CBC. The Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), founded in 1920, played a significant role in Alleyne's early life. In 1928, the UNIA purchased a building at 355 College Street which became a hub for dances and jam sessions, fostering both community life and generating revenue. Later, Alleyne formed Band 355, featuring alumni of the UNIA, recalling its vibrant history. Their performances from the late 1990s to the early 2000s compelled audiences to bring the UNIA into contemporary discourse. The Archie Alleyne archives contain photographs of Black musicians at The Hall between the 1940s and 1960s. This paper will utilize these sources to theorize placemaking as resistance to the erasure of Black presence in Canada.

Jam sessions function as important sites of social reproduction in New York City jazz culture. Through intergenerationally transmitted and relationally (re)constructed forms of socialization, jam sessions help set, instill, and perpetuate expectations around common knowledges and practices—both musical and socio-cultural—in jazz. Vibing—a phenomenon that occurs both on and off the bandstand—may manifest as a behavior in which musicians are perceived to test, undercut, or safeguard one another’s musical knowledge, performance abilities, and social and cultural capital (Bourdieu 1986). Vibing upholds jazz's high standards while simultaneously perpetuating exclusivity, potentially limiting opportunities for junior musicians and reinscribing unequal power relations. Drawing on jazz musicians’ lived experiences of vibing through ethnographic interviews, oral histories, social media discourse, and (auto)biographies, this paper examines the multi-dimensional ways in which vibing is performed and interpreted, and the meanings it holds for jazz musicians. With an eye on racial and gender dynamics, I suggest vibing serves to both preserve the cultural codes of the jazz tradition while also being a significant conduit for hegemonic masculinity in jazz (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005). By analyzing musicians’ accounts of these behaviors in jam sessions, this paper sheds light on the ways in which hegemonic masculinities are intertwined with other forms of social reproduction in jazz (Hall and Burke 2023). These gendered dynamics are encoded, reinforced, and contested within complex and often contradictory forms of musical and social interaction that produce both negative and positive effects in jazz culture and among jazz musicians.

Jayna Brown writes that “the messy worlds of the cabaret, the nightclub, the variety stage, and the dance competition…are places where dance, song, and improvisational comedy all together made ‘jass’” (Brown 2008). Nonetheless, mainstream histories of jazz in the first decades of the 20th century continue to focus on male instrumentalists like Sidney Bechet, Louis Armstrong, and Fletcher Henderson winnowed from the dancers, comedians, vocalists, and women bandleaders with whom they performed at the time as equal parts of a whole. In attempting to offer a more robust history, I trace the early career of Count Basie, examining his work with vocalist, dancer, alto saxophonist, actor, and bandleader, Gonzelle White. Basie joined White’s Big Jamboree Company in Harlem in 1926 and toured on the TOBA circuit, eventually landing the entire band in Kansas City. Gonzelle White had been working as a professional musician and dancer since at least the age of fifteen, entering the profession as Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, Valaida Snow (and Count Basie) did—through variety show work. A nationally recognized performer, White mentored Basie and he credits her throughout his autobiography. Even so, her contribution is not a “story with legs” and her role, along with other roles and activities later deemed “not jazz,” are lost as elements that are important to what jazz is. I argue these elements are important to what jazz was and, in some minds, is: a practice of inclusivity that is less about genre and hierarchy and more about spirit and care.