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1. Studying Jazz
- University of California Press
- Chapter
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3 As the second decade of the twenty-first century begins, we are undoubtedly at a pivotal moment in the development of jazz. Major and independent record labels and a number of cultural institutions have, particularly since the early 1980s, presented jazz to varied publics in ways that promote both its essential “Americanness” and its supposed universality . They have devoted considerable resources to preserving and promulgating the music via new recordings, reissues of older ones, sponsorship of concert and lecture series, the mounting of museum exhibits, and the production of documentaries as well as syndicated radio and television programs. Popular publications and their advertisers, moreover, have also shown interest in the music, as evidenced by feature articles on jazz and jazz musicians in periodicals as diverse as the New York Times, the Washington Post, Newsweek, GQ, Essence, Out, and Rolling Stone and by the appearance of jazz musicians in stylish advertisements for Johnston & Murphy shoes and Movado watches, among other products .1 Two further indicators of the increased importance of jazz have been its designation by the House of Representatives and the United States Senate as a “rare and valuable national American treasure” in 1987 and frequent references to its status as “America’s classical music.”2 At the same time, after the high points of the 1980s and 1990s, younger audiences seem less interested in jazz,3 and the music seems to be receding from mass public consciousness—receding so far, at least in the United States, chapter 1 Studying Jazz 4 | Black, Brown and Beige that commentators such as Stuart Nicholson (2005, xi) have asserted that continued performance of jazz may require the kinds of public subsidy more common in Europe. In the midst of these activities and alongside such arguments, academics have also had their say. Sociologists, psychologists, literary scholars , art historians, and cultural critics have found ways to see jazz through the lenses of their respective fields. Indeed, even those scholars working in the normally conservative and slow-to-change subdisciplines of musicology took notice: historical musicologists, ethnomusicologists, and music theorists have added their voices to an expanding discourse, using jazz to confirm, extend, and challenge the validity of paradigms of musical analysis and musicological research. All involved—whether they were trying to find the essence of American culture, trying to account for the impact that the music has had on its listeners, or attempting to understand how canonical musicians achieved their status—seemed fixed on jazz almost as though it might hold answers to some of life’s most intractable mysteries, as though it might help them to make sense of the modern world and how it came to be. In the outpouring of work that has accompanied “the modern resurgence ” of jazz (Nicholson 1990), however, views of the music, the musicians , and the world that they inhabit have rarely risen above the myopic or the romantic. On one hand, musicologists have spoken of jazz primarily in the terms they developed for European concert music. Thus meticulous transcriptions and analyses of jazz, focused on the “immanent and recurrent properties” (Nattiez 1990, 10–11) of “music itself,” and nearly obsessive attention to discographical detail have made much jazz scholarship seem a replication of score-based analysis and sketch studies. In such research, sometimes defensively oriented toward the elevation of the music, jazz often appears as an imperfect version of classical music rather than as something vital and examinable in its own right.4 Ethnomusicologists have, over the last couple of decades, widened the horizon, emphasizing the roles of culture and musical interaction, but, like other academically trained music researchers, they have tended to rely exclusively on commercially released recordings for their music analytical work. Those academics approaching jazz from other disciplines have refracted it through the prisms of their respective fields, for example, occupational and organizational behavior, deviance, musical taste/preference, political protest, and social interaction, among other things (e.g., Becker 1951; Winick 1960; Katz and Longden 1983; Gridley 1987; Kofsky 1970; Sharron 1985). On the other hand, those writers concerned with reaching [44.221.43.208] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 07:06 GMT) Studying Jazz | 5 a lay audience have focused on the personal triumphs and foibles of musicians , who either overcome misfortune and tragic circumstances or succumb to them. In either case, only rarely do the writers connect their hypotheses convincingly to the lives or work of the musicians or their supporters . Jazz, as a result, has become a facile metaphor for...