Civic Jazz: American Music and Kenneth Burke on the Art of Getting Along by Gregory Clark (review)

Irreconcilable differences. Such a notion seems an apt description of democratic life in American culture today, particularly as we traverse the intellectual inroads of American pluralism. Everyday we are confronted with the challenges of equality in issues of race, gender, sexuality, class, and politics. This cultural dissonance resounds in thought, attitude, value, and belief. But if we channel the spirit of the “black keys,” resolution is merely a half step away from dissonance. Cue the Mixolydian mode of Gregory Clark’s Civic Jazz, which riffs eloquently through the realms of American music, Kenneth Burke, and the art of getting along.

In accounting for the particulars of Clark’s selection of jazz as a model for getting along, jazz pianist Marcus Roberts frames the essence of the book when he writes in the foreword, “Quite often, it takes much more imagination, ingenuity, and energy to fıx something together than to just move ahead with your own plan” (xii). I concur with Roberts’s assessment that Clark provides helpful insights and strategies that illustrate ways of getting along together. For instance, Roberts demonstrates how John Coltrane’s intention to create music as a force for good reveals how jazz performers embody civic possibility through selfless acts of turning mistakes or unfortunate occurrences within music into something good. In civic life, as in jazz, this requires selfless sacrifıce on the part of the citizen/performer.

One of the more intriguing and enlightened aspects of Clark’s criticism is that he focuses on Burke the public intellectual and civic theorist (and not merely as scholar critic or rhetorician), as if to draw upon the spirit of Jack Kerouac’s Beat prosody, that is, the mad ones—mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved. In chapter 1, “Setting Up,” Clark remains true to this as he outlines the particulars of his argument, which takes the form of a musical progression in jazz standards. “Discussions of Burke’s ideas will lead into discussions of jazz, stories about jazz will connect to explanations of America, and explorations of civics will develop into descriptions of getting along” (21).

In chapter 2, “A Rhetorical Aesthetic of Jazz,” Clark broadens our understanding of Kenneth Burke’s aesthetic form, which imagines the possibility that civic life, like jazz’s spontaneous demand upon the individual performer to hold nothing back in joining with others in the making of music, means “to risk giving the self over to the music they are making together, music each one can help shape but cannot control” (25). Put differently, given that our encounters with art are mediated through experience, Clark delineates Burke’s rhetorical project as the constitution of identity within the realms of the rhetorical and the aesthetic—argument and art—with an honest recognition of the American penchant to claim independence at the expense of interdependence.

In chapter 3, “What Jazz Is,” Clark illustrates how jazz making models civic participation. Of particular note, Clark repurposes Burke’s assessment of social unrest in the Nation, amid the social turmoil of the late 1960s, and reminds us what is most at stake in civic life: “True, there are mean places.…But there is also the humanity of our people, the fountain of good will that keeps swelling up anew. And with this we would be identifıed, with this we must be identifıed, for otherwise the supersonic this or that, the moon shots, the great new realms of knowledge, the sheer genius of all such accomplishments, the whole thing becomes a damned lie” (44–45).

In chapter 4, “Where Jazz Comes From,” Clark delves more deeply into the frictions inherent in the convergence of individuals and community in American cultural history to constitute conflicts as constructive possibilities. That is, Clark argues resolving our conflicts should not necessarily be our goal, as oppositions can be understood as...