-
3. Jazz and Spatiality: The Development of Jazz Scenes
- University of California Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
51 On many nights during my fieldwork, I would leave my apartment on 119th Street and walk to the 1/9 train station at 116th and Broadway. After descending the stairs on the downtown side, I would proceed to the far end of the station in order to get a seat in the front car. Upon arriving at 14th Street, I’d exit the station on the downtown side and walk up the stairs into the New York night. Turning 180 degrees toward 7th Avenue South, I’d orient myself by looking for St. Vincent’s Hospital and then looking right, where I could see the now-fallen twin towers of the World Trade Center dominating the southern horizon.Walking down 7th Avenue in their direction, I would soon encounter the red awning of the Village Vanguard stretching over the sidewalk. If I continued in that direction , I could look to the right at 10th Street, as I passed under the sign for Dix et Sept, and see patrons waiting to enter Smalls. Going further down, past Christopher Street, I might also see the enclosed sidewalk café of Sweet Basil (later Sweet Rhythm), through whose windows I could gauge the number of patrons within and perhaps catch a glimpse of the performers. Alternatively, I might have turned left at Christopher and headed toward 6th Avenue and West 3rd Street, where by going to the left I could choose between performances at the Blue Note and Visiones in a single block. Other potential routes might have taken me north and east toward Bradley’s on University Place, north and west toward Zinno on 13th Street, or much further south, into Tribeca, where the Knitting Factory chapter 3 Jazz and Spatiality The Development of Jazz Scenes 52 | Scenes in the City was located on Leonard Street. Regardless of my destination on a given night, the proximity of those venues to one another, as well as to Russ Musto’s Village Jazz Shop (at 163 West 10th Street), made that area of Greenwich Village a jazz neighborhood. More accurately, my walks through the city on those evenings, my routes and routines (Certeau 1984, 97–110; Román-Velázquez 1999, 64–65), created a jazz-related understanding of the neighborhood through my deemphasizing spaces that equally characterized the area: piano bars like Rose’s Turn, rock clubs like the Lion’s Den and the Bitter End on Bleecker Street, or the various pizza shops, cafés, lounges, restaurants, and bars that might have attracted other people. Indeed, in discussing the neighborhood with friends who had a stronger interest in other aspects of New York nightlife, I was generally astonished to find that we had wildly divergent conceptions of the same terrain. Such experiences reinforced for me the notion that space, in its geographic and theoretical dimensions, is a crucial component for understanding and conceptualizing jazz. Accounts of the music’s development, usually starting in New Orleans, moving to Chicago, and finally settling in New York—with brief side trips to Kansas City, Los Angeles, Philadelphia , and other locales—generally acknowledge the role of space, but, like race, its importance registers in such accounts primarily in jazz’s past. Those locales figure in the historical narrative only as backdrops for the supposed real action: the development of musical style as exemplified in the work of the music’s masters. The places where Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, or Ornette Coleman, for example, spent their childhood years (in New Orleans, Washington, D.C., and Fort Worth, respectively) are important only because they initially shaped musical lives that seemed less affected by geography once those individual musicians’ styles were formed. In other words, rather than being considered constitutive of musical or historical development or being viewed dynamically, the locales in which jazz musicians have flourished were a scrim in front of which they marched on their way to making history. Even those works that have explored the role played by various cities, states, and regions in jazz’s development (e.g., Ostransky 1978; Gordon 1986; Pearson 1987; Gioia 1992; Oliphant 1996; Björn and Gallert 2001; Suhor 2001) see space as subsidiary to time, devoting less space to geography after jazz styles or musicians have emerged. In differing ways, these writings describe the built environments, legal structures, and migration patterns that make certain places attrac- [54.85.255.74] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 11:50 GMT) Jazz and Spatiality | 53 tive and fertile (temporary) destinations or...