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

'All-consciousness reveals that while social boundaries are real, there is no boundary to humanity' (p. 190). So ends the ethnomusicologist and jazz musician Paul Austerlitz's second book, whose lofty title belies what is, in many ways, a very personal project. Indeed its eclectic mix of topics-from Ghanaian drumming to Dominican popular music to Finnish jazz-is scarcely comprehensible without reference to the author's personal narrative. As he explains, Austerlitz grew up in New York, the son of Finnish immigrants. Following an undergraduate degree specializing in Black Music, his interest in Afro-diasporic styles led him to become 'committed to Latino culture, learning to speak Spanish and moving to a Dominican neighborhood' (his first book was Merengue: Dominican Music and Dominican Identity (Philadelphia, 1997)). But in graduate school he experienced a desire to return to his roots and began work on Finnish music (hence the Finnish jazz). Much of the book, then, stems from at least some level of personal experience, as a performer, as well as from his ethnographic research. Austerlitz writes eloquently, even movingly, about his own journey through jazz as part of his broader experience of life. The last chapter is devoted to interviews with the extraordinary African-American drummer, vocalizer, composer, martial artist, researcher, teacher, and healer Milford Graves, who was one of his college professors and a huge influence. As Austerlitz writes at the end of his Introduction, such musicians have, for him, articulated a 'vision of pan-humanity' which 'has touched people all over the world and has been central to my own journey, my own quest for wholeness. This book is thus one European American scholar-musician's perspective on the spiritual striving of jazz consciousness. I share it in the hope that it will enrich others' (p. xxii). But is the 'jazz consciousness' the author identifies as widely felt or applicable as he believes?

Austerlitz takes as his starting point the paradox that many African-American musicians describe their music as at once Black and American or even universal, observing that 'the major innovators of jazz have been black, but the music is played and enjoyed by U.S. citizens of all backgrounds, and indeed, by people the world over' (p. ix). In 1903, W. E. B. Du Bois famously wrote that African Americans (as we now say) experience a 'double-consciousness' born of their position both inside and outside mainstream American life: 'An American, a Negro: two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body' (The Souls of Black Folk (repr. Boulder, 2004), 2). Austerlitz borrows this notion of doubleness as his central metaphor (ironic given Du Bois's distaste for black popular genres) and applies it rather indiscriminately to explain both how jazz has often signified differently to different groups, and how it has drawn together peoples and musics that would not otherwise meet. The 'musical consciousness' jazz creates, he believes, 'can unite things that are separated in nonmusical reality' (p. xiii). Thus he argues: '[T]he consciousness of the jazz community has articulated an aesthetic of inclusivity and an ethos of ecumenicity. By melding many different influences . . . jazz creates an expansive space. The experience of playing, listening, or dancing to jazz . . . manifests a holism that reconfigures the mind-set' (pp. xiii-xiv).

While Austerlitz realizes that this inclusivity has not always extended to all-women, non-blacks under some forms of black nationalism (pp. 18, 184), and (though he does not mention it) often African Americans themselves-his utopian vision is sometimes so blinding that the reader could be forgiven for wondering how Kum Bah Ya sounds jazzed up. Similarly, Austerlitz understands that the global spread of jazz came alongside other forms of US hegemony, but he is in fact more interested in how its black roots enabled it to be perceived as a counterforce; how it resisted absorption into the system that promoted it. Instead of globalism, he prefers a notion of...