Jazz Consciousness: Music, Race, and Humanity (review)

With Jazz Consciousness, ethnomusicologist Paul Austerlitz contributes a theoretically thoughtful work on jazz that seeks to resolve its seemingly contradictory meanings as an African American, American, and global art form. To do this, Austerlitz draws on W. E. B. DuBois's concept of double consciousness, highlighting jazz's multivalent meanings. The author argues that jazz has transcended its ethnic, racial, and national distinctiveness (whether constructed or otherwise), having been adopted and adapted by musicians across the globe. At the same time, Austerlitz reaffirms jazz as constituting an empowering mode of expression for African Americans and other Afro-diasporic musicians contending with the Americas' long history of cultural, social, and racial strife. The author uses "consciousness" in the title and throughout the book as an underlying trope connecting jazz musicians from diverse geographical and historical spaces and with varied world views. He views jazz musicians as constituting a transnational or cosmopolitan community, one which does not share a geographic homeland, yet is united through the music's capacity to attain, borrowing from Paul Gilroy, "planetary humanism." Ultimately, Austerlitz sees jazz as a redemptive musical space in which "we can confront, learn from, and even heal the contradictions resulting from social rupture" (xvi) no matter whether one is in the United States, the Dominican Republic, or Finland.

The book is organized into six chapters. In chapter 1, "Jazz Consciousness in the United States," Austerlitz sets the stage for jazz's double consciousness by historically contextualizing music in the United States, focusing on its reception at various moments as a symbol of primitivism, of American nationalism, and an expressive mode of black nationalism and racial and musical inclusiveness. The author shifts his methodological approach in chapter 2, "Kente Cloth to Jazz: A Matrix of Sound," to contextualize jazz in relation to other Afro-diasporic musical traditions. Specifically, he sets out to "capture the feel of African-influenced musics" by introducing "kente notation," an adaptation of the TUBS (Time Unit Box Notation System), which graphically attempts to convey different timbres with different colored boxes and the interrelationship between the dancers' "motor beat" and the "melo-rhythmic" texture of the music (26). As the author notes, the result of the colored boxes bears an uncanny similarity to West African narrow-strip textiles. He applies this intriguing system of notation to the musical textures of salsa, Ewe agbekor, batá drumming, Haitian Vodou drumming, and merengue. More importantly, the author highlights the significance of the musical interplay of time which he argues constitutes an underlying aesthetic foundation in jazz and other Afro-diasporic musical styles.

Chapter 3, "Machito and Mario Bauzá: Latin Jazz in the U.S. Mainstream," focuses on the seminal Latin jazz and mambo big band Machito and His Afro-Cubans, as well as on the period (1940s) in which the band and its music emerged. Austerlitz argues that the Machito group was a North American institution that helped make Latin jazz and mambo two of the most important artistic contributions to twentieth-century popular culture in the United States. More important still, the artistic collaborations between Afro-Latin and African-American musicians in this ensemble are described as seminal moments in the history of the African diaspora leading to, in the author's words, the "healing of wounds brought on by centuries of social rupture" (43). This chapter focuses on Francisco "Machito" Grillo, Graciela Grillo, Mario Bauzá, René Hernández, Luciano "Chano" Pozo, and Arturo "Chico" O'Farrill, providing biographical information on their lives and musical careers in Cuba as well as in New York City. It also attempts to situate these musicians, most of whom were of color, in the complex and intersecting histories of racial discrimination in Cuba and the United States. For Austerlitz, Latin jazz and mambo ultimately provided a forum that "brought all ethnicities together in an avowedly New York-bred brand of inclusiveness," adding that these musicians' "pan-African vision pulled disparate constituencies...