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13 chaPter 1 The Problem with Community a case study in contrasts There are many constituencies within the jazz community, separated by race, age, mode of performance, level of professional involvement, geography, and other factors. I would like to offer two stories that underscore the ways that individuals position themselves within jazz communities, and how they are seen as part of those communities by others. The first offers us an aging African American saxophonist who, having experienced little acceptance for his music in his home country, relocated to Paris, where he finds his music appreciated more than in his native land. His gravelly voice and tendency toward selfdestruction in his personal life reinforce commonly held stereotypes about jazz musicians, as do his deeply soulful performances, often in small, smoky, dimly lit nightclubs. Eventually, he returns to the United States to find that little has changed with respect to the treatment of African Americans, or the public’s general disregard for his music. A short time later, he dies, a master artist relatively unknown in his own land. The second scenario involves a fourteen-year-old trombonist growing up in a rural area of an even more rural state, playing in his junior high jazz band. With a repertoire ranging from stock arrangements by Nestico to arrangements of Lionel Richie tunes, his interest in jazz is sparked when he hears a Miles Davis record in his band director’s office. He continues with jazz band in high school, traveling to rehearsals and concerts over snow-covered roads, gaining experience and winning some accolades along the way. Eventually he begins to listen to more jazz, learning the basics of improvisation via method books and Aebersold play-along records.1 He too develops some bad habits, notably an affinity for coffee at an uncharacteristically young age (no doubt a result of too many morning rehearsals before physics class). He considers himself to be part of a community based first and foremost on his fellow students, whose bond is shaped by long hours of rehearsal and travel on under-heated the ProbleM with coMMUnity 14 school buses to festivals and contests. Occasionally, his world broadens to include like-minded students from other schools, whose experiences in the music are similar to his own. He too, is relatively unknown outside his immediate musical world. These individuals seem far removed from one another, in terms of geography , generation, race, and in almost every other way. The single thread that links them is their involvement in jazz, and even here the experiences are radically different, one facing the end of a career defined by struggle, the other just beginning his involvement in jazz performance. Should these individuals be considered part of the same community? Is a shared interest in jazz enough to link them in this way, given the distinction between their personal and historical narratives? Despite what seems an impossibly wide historical divide, these two accounts are actually drawn from the same time period, the mid1980s . The first account is fictional, the central character of Dale Turner from the 1986 film Round Midnight, based loosely on the lives of Lester Young, Bud Powell, and Dexter Gordon, who portrayed Turner in the film. The second account is very real, and is, in fact, my own, drawing on my experiences as a young musician in rural Maine, where I attended public schools until 1989. I remember seeing the film Round Midnight while in high school, and feeling a sense of exotic fascination with the story (reinforcing many of my own stereotypes about jazz), and with a musician who played masterfully this music I was coming to know; there was also a sense of distance, another world that was far removed from my own. Though it is horribly clichéd as a worldview of a working-class white household to say this, there really were only a few black students at my high school, and to see a figure such as Dale (or Dexter) and connect to him, at even the most superficial level, was a formative moment in my understanding of the music, and of my place in a wider jazz community. The term community itself is often misunderstood and misapplied when referring to the identities or activities of groups, especially large groups dispersed over distances while sharing some interest or other identifiable activity. Burt Feintuch likens community to other terms such as authenticity and tradition that have become largely disconnected from their original meaning, applied at will...

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