Jazz Cultures (review)

If you haven't seen A Great Day in Harlem, the film about the photo, you've seen the photo: Art Kane's casually iconic shot of fifty-seven jazz stars and cult legends, dressed in suits, shirtsleeves, or summer dresses, draped around the stoop of a Harlem brownstone in 1958. Jo Jones and Gene Krupa hover on the stairs, drummers gravitating to the riser even on their day off. Pianists Marian McPartland and Mary Lou Williams share a confidence and a cigarette at street level. Count Basie crouches at the curb, contemplating a pick-up orchestra of neighborhood kids. The most pointed annotation of the photo in jazz literature can be found in Albert Murray's Stomping the Blues (1976), the sui generis meditation that anticipated most of the respectable ideas in present-day jazz neoclassicism. Murray provided his readers with a numbered key identifying every musician in the image; as far as this key is concerned, Sonny Rollins, the hard-bop improviser, and Miff Mole, the Paul Whiteman veteran, occupy the same plane in the photo's guide to the jazz world. But Murray's commentary also divided the photo's population into three unequal classes, presumably on the basis of varying degrees of "familiarity with the special syntax of the blues convention." The black musicians in the photo are named to the all-star band proper; the black kids on the curb become, in traditional New Orleans terms, the "second line" of dancing fans and disciples; while the white musicians are consigned, one and all, to an obscure "third line," removed from bona fide jazz reception as well as from syntactically correct jazz production. In Murray's judgment, the photo illustrates a great day in Harlem, to be sure, but great thanks to only some of those pictured.

By contrast, David Ake's Jazz Cultures proposes that the value of Kane's photo depends on the full spectrum of its musical congregation. For Ake, the shot "beautifully illustrate[s] the diversity of jazz styles"—and of jazz players—"available in New York City at the end of 1950s." In tune with the plural title of his book, Ake maintains that the vital lines in jazz are multiple, contradictory, yet often intersecting. No hard distinctions among first, second, and third ranks can do justice to the big-tent vision of the music that has circulated among many jazz musicians. Performers "from different stylistic orientations have always played and hung out together," Ake insists, sharing "concert and club stages" as well as crowded Harlem staircases. And he has reason to know: before earning a Ph.D. in musicology, Ake worked as a professional jazz pianist in Munich, Los Angeles, and New York. If he were alive and gigging in the Manhattan of 1958, he just might have made it uptown for the great jazz day, and his book suggests that jazz journeymen have a perfect right to elbow into such portraits of the jazz universe. The guiding assumption behind Jazz Cultures is that jazz matters not because it is America's classical music, "a dignified and wholly autonomous art form" controlled from a small V.I.P. room of geniuses, but because it has affected people longer than any other twentieth-century sound. Ake's book thus puts best-of lists and formalist timelines aside to tackle a handful of the ways in which "[m]illions of individuals from a broad spectrum of communities the world over have played, listened to, [and] fought over" the music, body and soul.

Ake's eclectic nights as a jazz pianist are not the only inspirations for his vision of jazz as a diverse "site where individuals and cultures construct . . . their identities." From the "New Musicology" of such critics as Susan McClary, Robert Walser, and elder statesman Christopher Small, he inherits a distaste for Romantic models of musical autonomy and a fresh enthusiasm for the exploration of art's social meanings now routine among anthropologists and literary critics. From the...