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8. Conclusion
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205 The events analyzed in chapter 7 could be viewed exclusively in terms of the musical parameters preserved on a compact disc and capable of being transcribed into Western notation. Presenting a performance thus transcribed might privilege and perhaps encourage the analysis of the sounds in terms similar to those for Western concert music (see Seeger 1958, 186). Such analysis, although perhaps making one more aware of the rhythmic, melodic, and harmonic parameters of the musical event, would omit the kinds of interactions taking place prior to,within,and after the event that are equally constitutive of and contributory to its impact. The meanings of jazz performance, however, have just as much to do with kinesic and proxemic factors in performance, with the roles of race/ culture and memory/history in shaping musical performance, and with the importance of the scene and a blues aesthetic. In that sense, it is more accurate to see jazz’s primary meanings as contextual, as process-oriented rather than the product-oriented. No musical sounds are meaningful outside the varied cultural, spatial, and temporal contexts that name and specify the forms that meanings can take. In those contexts, the understandings of event participants, resulting from their individual and collective interpretive moves and made evident through musical, visual, and verbal communication, allow the performances to become meaningful and powerful for them. “What this music is really about,” as the musicians and some scholars have stated, is making connections (see, e.g., Stanyek 2004). In that chapter 8 Conclusion 206 | Blowin’ the Blues Away sense, there are three discernible but interrelated registers of meaning in jazz performance, three distinct ways in which performers might make connections with other participants in a musical event. In what we might term the most common register, participants see themselves as engaged in culturally important activity, thus reinforcing self-identified cultural or group identities. It is here that discourses about jazz performance as “art,”“America’s classical music,” or as “African American music” are of the most importance. Performing, listening to, or otherwise supporting jazz becomes partially an act of patronage and preservation. Bruce Barth’s description of European audiences’ respect for jazz and their understanding of it as an American music and a black music resonates most profoundly in this register of shared understanding. Likewise, many of the analyses of jazz by previous scholars could be said to be motivated by this understanding of jazz’s nature and role in American and world cultures . As I observed previously, however, this kind of understanding requires the least engagement with the scene or a blues aesthetic. It is the register in which extrinsic discourses hold considerably more sway in the evaluation of a musical event. The second register is accessible through one’s greater degree of engagement with the scene and a greater understanding of a blues aesthetic. It is in this register that, in addition to being considered a culturally important activity, a ritualized musical event is a potentially transcendent experience. Here, participants attribute meaning to or derive it from a musical event through engagement with the ways in which performers negotiate the frames around jazz performance, through the ways in which they play with its ritualized structures and constraints. One here interprets a musical event by attending to musical sound and performerperformer and performer-audience interaction in addition to the history of the music, the scene, and individual performers, seeing all of these items as means to an end, as ingredients, if you will, in an improvised recipe. In other words, participants ideally understand the music through their knowledge of the scene and an aesthetic, and by deploying that knowledge participants might take the music, or follow it, to the next level. In the third register, understanding a musical event as both culturally important and potentially transcendent, participants see an event as a metaphoric expression of a way to negotiate living, as a form of aesthetic “equipment for living.” Engagement with the scene and an aesthetic , with the ritualized nature of performance, becomes a way of relating to the social world. Jazz, in this register, can be likened to a “lifestyle.” [34.229.223.223] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 14:31 GMT) Conclusion | 207 Antonio Hart says that he learned this aspect of meaning from older musicians: What I’ve learned from all those cats, man, is to love music. And to take it very seriously, but to have fun at the same time. That’s it. Music is...