Jazz, Collectivity, and Space
Chair(s): Maya Cunningham (University of Massachusetts, Amherst), Colter Harper (University at Buffalo)
This panel brings together four papers that examine different locales of jazz performance and how their musical and community practices participate in the production of space. Space encompasses physical location, cultural expression, and socioeconomic relations and has been theorized in human geography and ethnomusicology. Drawing on the mission statement of the SEM Jazz Special Interest Group, the authors connect theories of space to African American studies and recognize the contested nature of the term “jazz” as well as the importance of framing jazz studies within a larger discourse of Black musical traditions. Drawing from a diverse range of methods such as ethnography, archival research, and historical analysis, panelists seek to answer the following questions: how has jazz practice in a variety of contexts–from Accra to New Orleans to Chicago to Pittsburgh–produced collectivities through its reclaiming of urban space? What are the impediments to such placemaking? How does musical space encrust or sediment archives and history? How does place manifest affectively in phenomenological experience? Due to the expansive literature on space, we have created a reading list to focus our discussions of jazz venues, performance, and placemaking. A few of these works include, Jazz Places: How Performance Spaces Shape Jazz History (Teal, 2021), Dark Agoras: Insurgent Black Social Life and the Politics of Place (Roane, 2023), The Jazz Bubble: Neoclassical Jazz in Neoliberal Culture (Chapman, 2018), and Loft Jazz: Improvising New York in the 1970s (Heller, 2016), Jazz Cosmopolitanism in Accra: Five Musical Years in Ghana (Feld, 2012).
Presentations in the Session
Maroon Resonance: Fugitive Ecologies of Sound and Jazz Spatiality
Benjamin Barson Bucknell University
This paper explores the historical and theoretical intersections between marronage, space, and jazz. I do this through a critical analysis of archival records, musical practices, and Black ecological practice. Situating this discussion within the framework of Black geographies, the article draws on the works of Nathaniel Mackey, Édouard Glissant, Sidney Bechet, and Fred Moten to illuminate how fugitive musicianship in antebellum New Orleans shaped the social and cultural contours of Black music throughout the late-nineteenth and twentieth century. Through antebellum police records that depict unauthorized musical gatherings of runaways and free people of color, this paper highlights the role of music in constructing maroon ecologies and horizontal social relations practiced by Louisianan Black communities through Reconstruction and beyond. Employing a methodology that blends music “history from below” with what Saidiya Hartman calls critical fabulation, the study examines the intertwined spatial, ecological, and sonic dimensions of marronage. The framework of “maroon resonance” helps contextualize the aurality of antebellum fugitivity and offers a renewed lens to understand jazz as a site of radical transformation and liberation.
“Keeping Music Live!”: +233 Jazz Bar & Grill and the Making of Ghanaian Jazz History
Samuel Boateng St. John’s College, Oxford
The discourse of jazz history has traditionally framed Africa as the primitive cultural entity that produces the raw materials needed to create jazz in America. While research on African jazz continues to challenge this narrative, the majority of that scholarship tends to focus on perspectives from South Africa, thereby creating an incomplete picture about the implications of jazz in contemporary African lives. This paper offers a much-needed intervention in African jazz research by considering the intersections between jazz practice, space, and Ghanaian jazz history. Situating my discussions within Doreen Massey’s (2013) view of space as “a meeting-up of histories,” and “the product of relations,” as well as Steven Feld’s (1996) notion that “experiencing and knowing place” occurs through “a complex interplay of the auditory and the visual,” I examine the history, role, and cultural impact of the Ghanaian jazz club known as +233 Jazz Bar & Grill. Established in 2010 along Accra’s Ring Road, +233 is an extremely active live music venue where local and international audiences engage with jazz and popular music. Drawing from interviews and archival research, I argue that +233 is essential for understanding Ghanaian jazz history due to its prolonged efforts towards jazz education, jazz preservation, transnational collaborations, and its support for various styles of jazz. I suggest that despite the challenges of running a music venue, the club maintains a significant cultural, social, and international cache that distinguishes it from other live jazz spaces in the Ghanaian music scene.
More than Memories: Jazz Clubs and Post-Industrial Urban Redevelopment
Colter Harper University at Buffalo
Jazz clubs, such as Pittsburgh’s Crawford Grill no. 2, Detroit’s Blue Bird Inn, and Buffalo’s Colored Musicians Club, sustained a form of Black placemaking (Hunter et al., 2016) that intertwined jazz performance, entrepreneurship, labor organizing, civil rights activism, and music education in mid-20th century African American communities. These venues grounded active listening, public discussions of modernity, cultural production, and musical innovation in African American communities and provided countervisions to city-led development (Harper, 2024). Drawing from interviews as well as scholarship from urban (Winant 2021; Taylor Jr., 1990), jazz (Chapman, 2018; Teal, 2021), and Black studies (Lipsitz, 2011; Roane, 2023), this paper explores various ways non-profit, city government, and private organizations continue to draw on memories of these venues in current redevelopment projects impacting African American neighborhoods in Pittsburgh, Buffalo, and Detroit. The spectre of displacement and divestment, driven by government and private industry-driven appropriations of space in the 1950s, looms over a new era of post-industrial development defined by urban population increases, rising costs of housing, “Eds & Meds” economies, and rapid gentrification. How will the lived experiences of Black-owned jazz clubs that operated during the mid-twentieth century guide community-led efforts to honor and preserve African American communities as well as rationalize large-scale projects that accelerate gentrification in American post-industrial cities and what does this reveal about jazz as a living archive of the city?
“Hold the Space, Grow the Space”: The Velvet Lounge & Recent Creative Improvised Music Organizing Strategies in Chicago
Eli Namay University of Pittsburgh
As many theorists of neoliberalism point out (Harvey 1989, Harvey 2005, Gilmore 2022), racial capitalism deeply affects socio-cultural geographies. Zoning laws, redlining, and the exchange value imposed on physical space create topographies that musicians must navigate. Scholars such as George Lewis (2008), Paul Steinbeck (2010), Michael Heller (2016), Benjamin Looker (2004), and many others have detailed such topographies, along with the strategies creative musicians who seek to organize artist-run spaces have used to navigate them. As a Chicago musician, I have navigated such topographies in my organizing, and worked with many creative musicians who are actively challenging the constraints of neoliberal geographies, as well as the atomization and manufactured scarcity that so often plagues both commodified and non-profit funded cultural production alike. In this panel, I present findings from my research on Chicago creative music organizing strategy, focusing on currently active artist-organizers involved with Elastic Arts, Slate Arts, and Cafe Mustache. In my interviews, I focus on exploring the ways artist-organizers reflect on how their work interfaces with economic structure, how they navigate these constraints and openings, how this is informed by their values as creative artists and improvisers, and how this ultimately manifests in felt experience. I emphasize how profoundly the organizing ethics of Fred Anderson’s work at the Velvet Lounge has influenced communal values in Chicago creative music. These are lessons for how to hold space and grow space that challenge the borders of racial capitalism, affirming a spirit of abundance and inclusivity with the music.
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