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  • Jazz Matters: Sound, Place, and Time since Bebop by David Ake
  • Peter Kenagy
Jazz Matters: Sound, Place, and Time since Bebop. By David Ake. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010. ISBN: 9780520266896. Hardcover. ISBN-13: 978-0-520-26689-6. Softcover. Pp. ix, 199. $60.00/$24.95.

David Ake’s most recent book is a collection of six short essays that demonstrates the depth of discourse in jazz studies today, while offering an optimistic and instructive outlook on the diverse future of the music itself. Ake himself is exceptionally qualified: a musicologist, professional jazz educator, and jazz insider—he plays piano—and in his work he wears these hats simultaneously, not only trying to prove something about music, but also enhancing one’s listening experience and overall comprehension of the sounds and cultures of jazz.

The book is not a “comprehensive overview of postwar jazz” (12) but a series of case studies that analyze the interactions and symbolic relationships between jazz musicians, audiences, media, industry executives, politicians, writers, scholars, students, and educators—all of whom are participants in the broad jazz world. For Ake, then, jazz is not just about music or musicians in isolation, but comprises a web of meanings that extend across time and place, and he encourages a complex conversation that includes the perspectives of race, gender, class, nationality, myth, heroism, and other issues in post–World War II America. Nonetheless, this book is devoid of theoretical language (words such as “historiography” appear in italics). Consequently, the collection is also appropriate as an undergraduate text and certainly as independent reading for the serious fan. Ake’s easy pace, tone, and writing style incorporate the jazz and musicology literature as it supports his purposes—mostly through endnotes—but he avoids taking any specific scholars to task. As is implicit in the title, Ake’s book studies jazz’s competing aesthetics, dogmas, and hierarchies, while at the same time reinforcing the vitality and historical importance of the music and people who make it.

The essays are grouped in two parts. The three chapters comprising part 1, “Sound and Time,” consider how jazz is heard, both live and on record. Ake looks at the old and new through two canonic figures, John Coltrane and Miles Davis, as well as Steven Bernstein’s group Sex Mob and their “carnivalesque” approach to jazz of the “lower strata” in the late 1990s. The three chapters in part 2, “Place and Time,” deal with properties of culture that pertain to location, be they real or imagined places. Here, Ake looks first at Pat Metheny, Keith Jarrett, and ECM’s brand of pastoral jazz of the 1970s and 1980s, and then at jazz’s prevalence in higher education today, concluding with a discussion of musical identities based upon race, national origin, and language through the specific example of contemporary American musicians working and living abroad in Paris. This work illuminates a history that is often overlooked: Metheny and Jarrett, for example, did not appear in Ken Burns’s Jazz film, for which Ake all but blames Wynton Marsalis. He also proves just how present jazz is in college [End Page 263] music curriculum and notes that while jazz is hardly in peril, its landscape has changed dramatically. As leading jazz musicians nurture future professional musicians in schools, notions of “the street” as the place for transmission of real jazz knowledge have been replaced by the contemporary classroom. Ake also provides an appendix showing where a selection of jazz musicians born since 1950 studied jazz at the college level.

Ake frequently weaves his own interpretative narration into his musicological approach, serving as a tour guide for the music he clearly loves. In “Being (and Becoming) John Coltrane: Listening for Jazz ‘Subjectivity,’” he proposes three “predominant performance models” (17) in which John Coltrane operated during phases in his career: (1) Being, (2) Becoming, and (3) Transcendent. In rough terms, the Being phase casts Coltrane as a creative master of language and of sustained physical intensity (as heard in “Giant Steps”) within the bebop practice he inherited from Parker and Gillespie. In the Becoming phase, Coltrane’s performances take on new forms, have broader architecture...

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