Blowin’ the Blues Away: Performance and Meaning on the New York Jazz Scene

6. Jazz Performance as Ritualized Activity

136 The scene and a blues aesthetic are two related means of framing musical events as jazz and as performance. Although the scene—space and place through time—constitutes both a setting for and snapshot of jazz performance , the criteria of a blues aesthetic provide participants a way to negotiate the resultant spatio-temporal formation. Other forms of music or performance might be framed or understood via their positioning in other scenes and/or via the normative and evaluative criteria of other aesthetics. Within a jazz scene and working within a blues aesthetic, the emphasis placed by musicians on “taking it to another level,” their many mentions of spirituality, and participants’ church-derived responses to jazz performance together suggest a view of jazz musical events as ritualized performances. To describe these events as ritualized is different from describing them as ritual, a category of activity anthropologists and scholars of comparative religion and literature have long seen as important in structuring human experience (e.g., Van Gennep 1960; Kluckhohn 1942; Eliade 1959; Turner 1969; Asad 1983; Comaroff 1985; Smith 1987; CombsSchilling 1989; Seremetakis 1991; Bell 1992).1 In addition to being used to explain society and religion, insights from the study of ritual have figured in other scholars’ work on African-derived musics, including jazz (Marks 1974; Burnim 1985, 1988; Leonard 1987; Small 1987a; Salamone 1988). In each case the meanings of the term ritual have been subject to debate with a limited set of views tending to dominate, both chapter 6 Jazz Performance as Ritualized Activity Jazz Performance as Ritualized Activity | 137 within and beyond the academy. In one such grouping, commentators have tightly circumscribed the concept such that“definitions of ritual . . . have tended to share a presupposition about their object . . . [Ritual has been] indigenously represented as ‘ancient’ and unchanging, [connected] to ‘tradition,’ the sacred, to structures that have generally been represented in stasis” (Kelly and Kaplan 1990, 120). In this view, rituals are essentially conservative and devoted to maintaining a status quo or (re) establishing social and/or cosmic equilibrium. Those performing rituals, then, follow relatively rigid scripts from which deviations might be dangerous . It is precisely in this sense that many everyday speakers equally attach the word to activities that carry great social significance and to others that call for formulaic adherence to a more or less predetermined sequence of events. In another grouping, that former set of views has been challenged in anthropological theory since the late 1970s, particularly on the grounds that not all rituals are seasonal, calendrical, or concerned with healing or social integration, for example. Just as researchers studying identity and ethnicity have come to see those concepts as plastic and negotiable— concerned more with policing boundaries than with specifying content (Barth 1969)—so too have anthropologists come to view ritual more dynamically. Some see it as possessing varying degrees of and responses to formalization (Irvine 1979; Schieffelin 1985; Kelly and Kaplan 1990) and as characterized less by rote repetition than by performative negotiations with structure that are enunciative, that rely upon multiple media, and that have indexical relationships to—that is, that point toward—other aspects of social life (Tambiah 1979, 119).2 Whether one sees ritual as conservative or performative, common threads regarding its role in individual and social transformation and its power to organize experience still emerge in the literature, threads that might have value for research on musics and musicians. Comaroff (1985), for example, sees the efficacy of ritual in its ability to play “most directly upon the signifying capacity of symbols, using them as the means through which to grasp, condense, and act upon qualities otherwise diffused in the social and material world” (78). African Zionists in South Africa, she notes,“construct rituals so as to reform the world in the image they have created, to reestablish a dynamic correspondence between the self and the structures that contain it” (198). In this case, ritual escapes the connotation it has, for some, with meaningless routine. That is, ritual not only informs the interactions that one might have with the surrounding world, but it also provides a means through which one might intervene 138 | Blowin’ the Blues Away directly in that world to change its structures or, at least, one’s relation to them. Similarly, in her book Sacred Performances: Islam, Sexuality, and Sacrifice (1989), M.E. Combs-Schilling stresses ritual’s usefulness for combining images or ideas metaphorically...