The Rise of a Jazz Art World (review)

Paul Lopes's detailed and lengthy study explores the evolution of ideas about the nature and significance of jazz, both as a music and as a cultural phenomenon, during the entire twentieth century. Lopes, a sociologist, begins by noting that creators and aficionados of many musical styles seek legitimacy and institutionalization within their culture, and that in the United States the legitimacy that is sought is usually modeled on that afforded European art music. For jazz musicians, critics, and listeners, the "quest for legitimacy" meant negotiating a modern mass culture which alternately used, abused, and ignored jazz for diverse reasons and purposes. "The key question," Lopes writes, "is how jazz came to signify various contours of status, distinction and identity in American music confronted by professional musicians and others" (p. 8). Influenced primarily by the work of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who writes about social "fields of force" that shape the definition and reception of artistic products, Lopes traces discourses on jazz since the 1910s.

As his title indicates, Lopes finds that by about 1950 jazz discourse had given rise to an elitist, professional "jazz art world." Before these decades, however, jazz was heavily contested by critics and musicians, and was often disdained or considered controversial. Lopes stresses that by 1900 music professionals, backed by their aggressive union, the American Federation of Musicians, had taken control of aesthetic and social discourse about music in the United States, and also dictated the economic terms of American musical life. Borrowing a concept from the music historian H. Wiley Hitchcock, Lopes stresses the hostility of this elitist, middle class, classical music-oriented "cultivated" tradition to all forms of "vernacular" music (Hitchcock's terms). Lopes has done voluminous research in such musicians' publications as Metronome and shows vividly how musicians and music educators haughtily dismissed all popular music, and jazz in particular. The key turn in the discourse began in the 1920s, though, when pro-jazz critics and musicians started synthesizing American musical attitudes, treating jazz as a "cultivated vernacular" worthy of the sophisticates' approval. The African American origins of jazz were a major obstacle, however; "the greatest challenge in the evolution of jazz music in the twentieth century was in disturbing the racial hierarchy in American culture" (p. 9).

The swing vogue of the 1930s and 1940s brought mass acceptance to black- influenced hot jazz, and created strong momentum for serious critical and aesthetic appreciation. Musicians' disdain for the insensitive "jitterbugs," who ironically were the mass consumers of swing concerts and recordings, exemplified this momentum. The war of the critics in the 1940s between jazz traditionalists, who championed Dixieland, and modernists, who championed bebop and progressive jazz, nurtured many new jazz journals and furthered the self-conscious development of a jazz art world. Jazz education, textbooks, and histories also marked this development, which received second wind during the jazz renaissance of the 1950s, when cool jazz, hard bop, and modal jazz reinvigorated the post-Big Band scene and the Civil Rights movement brought full recognition to African American musicians. The avant-garde trends of the 1960s and 1970s only reinforced the critical and institutional apparatus of the jazz art world.

Lopes should be commended in particular for his exhaustive research into jazz journals, reaching back to Metronome (which evolved from a general music periodical into a jazz magazine in the 1930s) and Down Beat, and reaching forward to the founding of Music and Rhythm in the 1940s and beyond. The gradually evolving attitudes of professional musicians and educators, from an early cultivated bias to the cultivated vernacular synthesis that welcomed jazz, are carefully traced in this study, with copious quotations and helpful analysis. Lopes also displays a command of the secondary literature in jazz studies, giving an especially full portrayal of the musicians' and critics' cohorts in various decades...