Jazz Endings, Aesthetic Discourse, and Musical Publics

The title above contains a melodic fragment from the closing bars of Billy Strayhorn’s “Take the A Train.” It is often called the “Ellington ending” after the composer and musician for whom the piece became a signature tune. Despite its close motivic relationship to the rest of the piece, it long ago began circulating on its own as a musical tag, and musicians still employ it in a range of contexts to signal musical closure. There are many such concluding patterns, and in the account that follows I will examine how one group of young instrumentalists mobilizes some of them (including the Ellington ending) while collectively arranging a tune. In part, then, this article explores an instance of musical bricolage, as musicians experiment with an array of formulas and come to an agreement regarding how they will establish musical closure with them.

But it is equally concerned with exploring forms of jazz sociability: the intimacies of musical rehearsal on the one hand and the “imagining” sociability that enables musical publics on the other. These modes of sociability need some explanation here at the beginning. “Intimacies” describe immediate, face-to-face interactions with known and knowable others. “Imaginaries” (which I will also refer to as “publics”), in contrast, are larger social formations: networks of mass-mediated circulation that come into being as agents perform and publish for audiences of strangers and as they orient their minds and embodied practices toward those of other, imagined musicians

I use these terms in ways that differ in some respects from other authors who write about intimacy and public culture (e.g., Warner 2002, Berlant 2008, and Stokes 2010), but like them, I understand intimacy and imagining to intersect in complex and complementary ways. The face-to-face interactions that go on in rehearsals, jam sessions, and other performances are enabled by a fund of shared knowledge and techniques that participants learn in part from mass-mediated recordings, broadcasts, and publications. Conversely, and just as importantly, musicians broadcast or publish performances for a public, and their musical intimacies circulate as the commoditized stuff of public culture. Jazz, then (like many other contemporary musical practices), is simultaneously a “tradition” of face-to-face dialogue, exchange, learning, and argument—and a practice reliant upon the dissemination of recordings, broadcasts, and publications (see Berliner 1994, Born 2005, McGee 2009, Monson 1996, and Toynbee 2006). Bound up with, and in fact enabling, both intimate and imagining sociability are musical and discursive formulas that circulate in mass-mediated form. These include, most obviously, musical patterns such as the Ellington ending, but also aesthetic discourses and iconic national and racial associations. These patterns, discourses, and icons will be a particularly important focus in what follows.

There are three broad goals in exploring as a site of jazz sociability a rehearsal by musicians still relatively new to jazz. The first is to consider the practices of often-underacknowledged members of the jazz public—students, amateurs, and non- and semi-professionals (drawing inspiration from work by Ruth Finnegan 2007 and Robert Faulkner and Howard Becker 2009). Jazz is clearly much larger than the spheres of highly professionalized and polished performance typically privileged in scholarly explorations of art musics. Accordingly, the following pages consider the work-in-progress of musicians who, while talented and engaged, are relatively inexperienced. This focus is not without methodological benefit: the sometimes laborious process of acquiring musical competency can foreground the methods and materials used to that end. A second goal is to explore the concept of publicness—as developed in the aforementioned work by Warner, Berlant, and Stokes—in ways that focus less on mass-mediated texts than on how these are entextualized in the course of face-to-face interactions. Writing on social imaginaries has tended to focus on performances and publications that circulate in the public sphere, with less attention to the contexts of face-to-face engagement in which agents deploy them. Investigating such contexts is important because it is not only through the circulation of broadcasts, recordings, and texts that publics are constituted, but also as musicians...