Writing Jazz Encounters: Questions of archives, affect, and transculturation
Chair(s): Katherine Brucher (DePaul University)
This panel offers new perspectives on theorizing jazz encounters both in and outside of the United States. From diplomacy (Von Eschen 2006) to cross-racial musical collaborations (Roberts 2016) to white voyeurism (Monson 1995; Heter 2022), jazz, as a musical genre, functions as an imagined space where social identities are negotiated and cultural meaning is constructed (Jackson 2012; Teal 2021). Extending this scholarship, the four panelists prioritize the affective and political affordances of jazz to ask: how do we as scholars write about moments of encounter? Working across ethnographic, archival, and music-theoretical methods, we theorize encounters in various times and places including: the contentions of insider and outsider-ness between Creole of color and Black American communities in early jazz formations; American women jazz musicians’ contributions to U.S. Cold War diplomacy; Charles Mingus’s sonic disruption and interactions with white audiences; and Lester Bowie’s cross-racial collaborations with the Polish “yass” band Miłość. Although these case studies differ historically and geographically and span several subgenres, collectively, we focus on moments of encounter to understand how musicians and listeners feel in space together, how cultural hybridity shapes genre, and the ways in which dominant jazz narratives flatten the nuances of these interactions. Our research highlights the complexity and often contradictory nature of these encounters. By challenging one-sided analyses, we orient ourselves toward the multi-faceted and intertwined structures of feeling that have emerged throughout jazz history.
Presentations in the Session
When Outsiders Become Insiders: Riffs in the Creole of Color Community at the Birth of Jazz
Hannah Krall
Shaw University
In jazz histories, the Creole of Color community of New Orleans during the late-nineteenth century is depicted as monolithic with a shared cultural agenda including language, politics, religion, and the arts. The Black American community, who came to New Orleans after the Civil War, is often pitted against them due to differences in culture. For many scholars, it is their musical and cultural interactions with one another that led to the creation of jazz. Recent scholarship by Travis A Jackson, however, suggests that there was some cultural overlap between these two seemingly opposed communities. I argue that with close attention to primary resources, such as oral histories and meticulous ancestral research, this assertion remains true. Through two case studies, I delineate the outsider status of “Big Eye” Louis Nelson (Delisle) and Jimmie Noone, two clarinetists from what I call the second generation of jazz musicians in New Orleans, largely considered Creole in scholarship. My research reveals that they did not have the established history in New Orleans at birth, but they were more or less accepted into the Creole community due to familial and geographical connections. It is clear that the Creoles were generally tight-knit and wary of outsiders, but Nelson and Noone were able to cross the boundaries set up by the Creole community with differing levels of success due to colorism. This phenomenon suggests a reevaluation of what it meant to be Creole or Black in New Orleans at the turn of the century.
Women College Musicians Take on the World: Gender in Cold War Jazz Diplomacy and Collegiate Jazz Programs
Kari Lindquist
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
In U.S. Cold War jazz diplomacy, a focus on women as student musicians reveals how they were relating to their audiences while promoting jazz worldwide. Because they were not as famous as other high-profile professional musicians who also toured with the State Department (Von Eschen 2006; Fosler-Lussier 2015), these college jazzwomen are harder to find in the historical record because of their place in the institutions they represented, but important nonetheless. Drawing on archival materials from university archives, the National Archives, and Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs Collection, I reveal the ways collegiate women jazz musicians contributed to diplomatic efforts despite archival limitations. Following scholars like Sherrie Tucker, this paper fills in details about these women’s experiences from interviews and oral histories to counter the historical record kept by the institutions that limited their participation and its documentation. Through case studies of academic jazz diplomacy tours through the 1960s, I argue that collegiate women jazz musicians operated within and pushed beyond social constructions of gender at the time period, and in doing so they made a distinct and unacknowledged contribution to U.S. cultural diplomacy. While institutions controlled the dynamics of their performances, these women expanded the types of people that were reached across gender, racial, and national divides on the tour. They facilitated meaningful and affective interpersonal connections with international jazz musicians and audiences, revealing their overlooked but influential impact on Cold War musical diplomacy.
The Angry Man of Jazz: Jazz, Coolness, and the Cultural Politics of Emotion
Varun Chandrasekhar
Washington University in St. Louis
Charles Mingus was often called "the Angry Man of Jazz." To some extent, this accurately describes the bassist’s temperament; Mingus’s explosive flare-ups were infamous. However, such an analysis discounts the complex work anger plays in Mingus's performance of what Nichole T. Rustin-Paschal (2017) terms "jazzmasculinity." Rustin-Paschal uses this term to explicate the emotional labor that jazz musicians are required to perform to be accepted by audience members. Rustin-Paschal builds her theoretical framework upon Ahmed's (2004) conception of emotions. Ahmed argues that emotions are not internally but are cultural signifiers. To be emotional is to be defined as emotional through hegemonic distinctions of power. I argue Mingus used his anger to overcome the racialized expectations of the performance of coolness (which I treat as an emotion). By drawing on studies of coolness (Dinerstein 2017, Monson 1995), I argue that Mingus exaggerated his anger to highlight how white fans expected a detached performance of "coolness." Dinerstein argues that there were two brands of jazz cool in the 1950s, one white and one Black, but they had a complex convergence. Critically, white cool (a la Norman Mailer) was predicated on a fetishistic view of Blackness. Hipsters like Mailer defined jazz musicians as cool as a way to justify their own hipness, which becomes a form of cultural capital. If Mailer can call a jazz musician cool, then he is cool for knowing the cool jazz musician. These discourses caused white fans to expect Black male musicians to perform "cool," limiting Mingus’s expressive potential.
“We’re Freaks like You”: Lester Bowie’s Sojourns in Poland (1994–1997)
Jenna Przybysz
Stanford University
In a 1996 review, a critic from Jazz Forum magazine noted how sparingly Lester Bowie played during his first concert with the Polish band Miłość, a band that sowed the seeds of the ‘yass’ movement in Poland during the late 1980s to 2000s and critiqued the status quo of Polish jazz institutes. Bowie’s sparse playing is also evident on the album Live in Gdynia (2022), which was recorded during the same tour. His silences prompt the following question: why does Bowie refrain from playing despite his central role as guest of honor at these concerts? In this paper, I engage with the silences found within Bowie’s playing to examine the (re)production of jazz histories, specifically outside of the U.S. (Trouillot 1995; Hartman 2008). Bowie’s encounter with Miłość is well-documented in Polish newspapers and magazines, in a documentary about the band, and in the autobiographies of band members. However, their collaboration has been overlooked outside of Poland. Utilizing interviews that I conducted with musicians who knew Bowie, I address this source imbalance to explore the American trumpeter’s perspective of this musical collaboration. From these interviews, a broader picture of Bowie as a musical bridge emerges, suggesting further insight into his various cross-cultural musical exchanges such as his collaboration with Nigerian Afro Beat artist Fela Kuti, and the Norwegian band the Brazz Brothers. In doing so, I reveal how Bowie’s silence–bothphysical and documented–challenges dominant jazz narratives that often oversimplify cross-cultural exchanges as one-sided.
