Landing on the Wrong Note: Jazz, Dissonance and Critical Practice (review)

Landing on the Wrong Note: Jazz, Dissonance and Critical Practice. Ajay Heble. New York: Routledge, 2000. Pp. xiv + 258. $85.00 (cloth); $19.95 (paper).

Since its appearance in the 1920s, jazz criticism has been implicated in an ethical stance towards Culture (as opposed to mere culture). Even those critics in the 1920s who denounced its influence on morals and manners were compelled to recognize its potential to corrupt or, at the very least, to distract musicians and listeners. At the same time, there were others (say, the composer Aaron Copland) who sought to define its specific attributes over and above--or, indeed, as the basis of--its social effect. Around this question of the value of jazz there was no immediate consensus other than perhaps an agreement that answering that question meant addressing another, equally difficult, one: What is jazz? For contemporary critics, nothing much has changed; except, of course, everything. Both jazz scholarship, now raised to a tenuous academic status, and jazz artists, as exemplars of the universalized and universalizing conditions of African American and American cultural production, are caught in larger sociopolitical transformations for which questions of ethical value are deemed paramount. Consider, for example, the acrimonious debate in the United States that followed the broadcast of Ken Burns's television documentary about jazz. Such debate demonstrates that when one begins to analyze a musical form in ethical terms--that is, by considering its value and meaning for society as such--at issue is the structural position accorded that form in the cultural totality.

This is certainly the issue that Ajay Heble confronts in his wide-ranging book Landing on the Wrong Note. Speaking as both the codirector of the Guelph Jazz Festival and as an academic theorist, he seeks to "open up valuable questions about the complex ways in which identities are constructed and mobilized, and taken up in practices of representation" (11). He claims that the encounter with jazz musicians through the Festival has enabled him "to think with rigor about the forces and assumptions that have shaped and determined [his] interpretive and critical habits" (7). Utilizing a range of critical theories--from Ferdinand de Saussure to Susan McClary--his overall concern is to explain how dissonances, or "wrong notes," function in jazz. In this he intends to determine how a theory of dissonance might find a parallel in and, in fact, challenge contemporary academic theories of postmodern subjectivity. For Heble, the recognition of "out of tune" sounds can help both jazz musicians and contemporary scholars "foster alternatives to oppressive systems of knowledge" (ibid.). An ethics of critical practice, if you will.

The most interesting sections of the book address jazz's "ethicopolitical authority, its status as a music of protest, as an oppositional form of discourse" (221). In these sections there is a sense of the author having to account for the concrete social situations in which jazz musicians play and live as well as the contradictions and inconsistencies--the dissonances--that arise therefrom. For Heble (and his codirectors) a major ethical problem that emerges is whether the Guelph Festival should book free jazz saxophonist Charles Gayle. Gayle is notorious for his homophobic views, which he likes to express in the course of his performance. The resolution to the problem--to forgo a Gayle concert--which Heble found disappointing from a musical point of view, proved necessary from the ethical perspective of universal human rights. Likewise, the discussion of reactions to the Festival's "Women in Jazz" theme offers perceptive observations on the "social and institutional forces at work framing the very way we think about women's role in jazz. . ." (164).

Less convincing are those sections in which Heble seeks to draw correlations between developments in jazz and contemporary literary theory, from post-structuralism to the neopragmatism of Charles Taylor. Thus his discussion of Ornette Coleman is related to the rise of semiotics, while his analysis of Sun Ra pertains to theories of...