But Is It Jazz?

One of the most alluring and enduring American images of our time — what John Szwed has deemed “the first truly nonmechanical metaphor for the 20th century” ¹ — is the black jazz musician. Successor to the English Gentleman as a globally emulated model of sartorial and verbal style, the jazz musician has evolved a constellation of personae ranging from, say, Louis Armstrong the Rabelaisian jester to Wynton Marsalis the demure professional. Buttressed by a plentiful — if, until recently, ² underrecognized — critical, journalistic, and mythopoetic literature, jazz performers have been savvy coconspirators in the crafting of their public images, deftly appropriating the latest social and technological fashions to fit the cardinal African-American musical value of artist-audience symbiosis.

Two new jazz books grapple with the elusive subject of jazz musicians and the discourse that frames their images. John Edward Hasse’s Beyond Category: The Life and Genius of Duke Ellington deals with a certified American classic, the composer, bandleader, and celebrity whose work represents, in the words of a sympathetic observer, “by far the most comprehensive orchestration of the actual sound and beat of life in the United States ever accomplished.” ³ Ronald M. Radano’s New Musical Figurations: Anthony Braxton’s Cultural Critique takes as its subject, by contrast, an almost singularly esoteric artist, an avant-garde experimentalist dubbed by one critic as “the Buckminster Fuller of Jazz.” Hasse, hewing to a vein of jazz commentary that reaches back to the 1930s, achieves something of an apotheosis of traditional jazz historiography. Radano, challenging and deconstructing this entrenched paradigm, dares to propose a new conceptual framework for jazz scholarship.

Hasse’s Ellington will be unfamiliar only to those whose perspective on this famous figure derives from an uncritical reading of James Lincoln Collier’s controversial 1987 biography. ⁴ Coming in the wake of the firestorm unleashed against Collier for his portrait of the Duke as a relentless manipulator and artistic underachiever, Hasse’s book appears as a modest, unpresuming reminder of the consensus line on Ellington as great artist, as cultural hero, as American genius. It is a useful corrective. Only the most contentious among us can deny the Duke his nonpareil status as a brilliant visionary and craftsman in matters of blues tonality, ensemble textures, and the underlining of a soloist’s distinctive personality. (Ellington: “You can’t write music right unless you know how the man that’ll play it plays poker,” p. 84.) Only the most jaded can fail to be fascinated by Ellington’s colorful lifestyle or awed by his dogged determination to maintain the solvency and relevance of his band over a half-century of rapidly changing musical fashion.

That Ellington was “beyond category” is indisputable. Following his own dictum of keeping one foot in the academy and one in the street, Ellington evolved a musical language that imposed formal order on the rhythms, timbres, and attitudes of African-American everyday life. He struck a fine balance between organizational discipline and individual expressive freedom; and merged the traditionally distinct roles of composer and bandleader by embedding the writing process in a Deweyian social process of performative experimentation. The shifting contours of Ellington’s life and career — the industrious, religious mentoring of his parents embellished by what he called his “poolhall education”; the solid middle-class black Washington of his youth supplanted by the sensuous elegance of the Cotton Club during high tide of the Harlem Renaissance; the hurly-burly pace and fluid social exchange of dance halls and night clubs on the way to august European concert halls and mixing with the Brahmins — render foolish and shortsighted any effort to pigeonhole Ellington (or jazz itself) into neat sociological or artistic categories.

One need not endorse Wynton Marsalis’s fundamentalist excesses — his literalist reading of it-don’t-mean-a-thing-if-it-ain...