“Myriad Subtleties”: Subverting Racism through Irony in the Music of Duke Ellington and Dizzy Gillespie

In his autobiography, Dizzy Gillespie recognizes the impact racism had on his youthful behavior and acknowledges his misreading of Louis Armstrong’s minstrelsy-influenced performance style: “Hell, I had my own way of Tomming. Every generation of blacks since slavery has had to develop its own way of Tomming, of accommodating itself to a basically unjust situation. . . . Later on, I began to recognize what I had considered Pops’s [Armstrong’s] grinning in the face of racism as his absolute refusal to let anything, even anger about racism, steal the joy from his life and erase his fantastic smile” (2009, 296). Since jazz, from its origins in the early 1900s in New Orleans, was increasingly performed by black musicians for white audiences, African-American jazz musicians have often been a focal point for racial conflict in the United States, especially during the first half of the twentieth century. As Gillespie suggests, black musicians frequently dealt with racial prejudice by relying on strategies derived from African-American culture, in particular signifying, which includes a variety of rhetorical strategies including indirection, irony, and verbal disjunction. “Tomming,” a reference to the eponymous character from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin ([1852] 1982), is generally used pejoratively to criticize blacks who apparently ingratiate themselves with white society by unctuous and exaggerated servility; however, this persona might equally be regarded as a form of signifyin(g), or more specifically, indirection or masking that facilitates ironic subversion. Although the guise it took in jazz performance changed from apparent submission to feigned aggression, signifying often characterized black dealings with the dominant white culture both in slavery and during the 1940s when the social changes that occurred in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century gradually began to mitigate the racist oppression African Americans had suffered for several centuries.

Critical Approach

The primary focus of this discussion is on the gradual decline in irony used in jazz during the first half of the twentieth century as a “political” (Gates 1988, 45) and satiric tool to attack the ideology of white supremacy. During this period, the parodic revisioning of the various elements that constitute jazz performance (e.g., musical narrativity, costume, gesture, and language), which has been a seminal characteristic of jazz since its inception, gradually achieved greater expression and became a significant factor in the emergence of bebop. A discussion of this nature is problematized by the complexity of irony and the related genres of satire and parody, the still relatively opaque nature of musical meaning, and the difficulty of tracking microlevel social change. Irony, as Linda Hutcheon argues, is “a discursive strategy operating at the level of language (verbal) or form (musical, visual, textual)” (1994, 10). It also involves, according to Margaret Rose, “a statement of an ambiguous character, which includes a code containing at least two messages, one of which is the concealed message of the ironist to an ‘initiated’ audience, and the other the more readily perceived but ‘ironically meant’ message of the code” (1993, 87). Thus, there are several key elements that must be in place for ironic communication to take place: (1) the social context in which the irony occurs; (2) the decoders or interpreters whose comprehension of the ironic message is often based on a community of understanding they share with the encoder that excludes those who don’t grasp the ironic meaning; (3) the encoders or ironists who perceive ironic incongruity and fashion a message reflecting that insight; and (4) the message itself, which can be transmitted in performance by various means. Irony, moreover, is foundational to both satire, which aims at correcting social or extramural ills, and parody, which focuses on the form of discourse or the intramural. Of course, in practice, these genres are highly complex, rarely clearly delineated, and more frequently manifested as parodic satire or satiric parody.

The social and historical context in which jazz emerged is of primary importance to this discussion. The oppression of slavery fostered a community of ironic understanding that allowed blacks to pass encoded messages...