All That Jazz Was: Remembering the Mainstream Avant-Garde

In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. By Fred Moten. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. 296 pages. $19.95 (paper).

Freedom Is, Freedom Ain't: Jazz and the Making of the Sixties. By Scott Saul. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003. 416 pages. $29.95 (cloth).

Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies. Edited by Robert G. O'Meally, Brent Hayes Edwards, and Farah Jasmine Griffin. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. 544 pages. $24.50 (paper).

Jazz is American. Jazz is black. Jazz is local and global, traditional and avant-garde, a universal mother tongue and the most hermetic in-joke in cultural history. Jazz is all of these things and none of them. Jazz is impossible to pin down. Jazz is power.

Or was, at least.

Analyses of jazz are as old as the music itself. This is because its history is intimately bound to the cultural and political history of the twentieth century, to a depth few could claim for any other art form. Nearly every American and African American social development of the last four generations has been refracted, amplified, and inflected by jazz. Urbanization and ghettoization, segregation and civil rights, globalization and postmodernity, black power and white flight. Each of these movements and developments had its analog in a shifting musical lexicon whose points of contact with popular culture—concerts, recordings, and criticism—only hinted at a massive edifice buried just beneath the surface of mainstream society.

So what happened? For most Americans today, jazz is little more than a signifier, a cellophaned sonic sweetmeat sitting next to the biscotti at the Starbuck's checkout counter. It is a relic, a cultural monument consigned, like Mount Rushmore or the steam engine, to the passionless limbo of commemorative postage stamps and self-congratulatory television documentaries. In the historical scale equivalent to the blink of an eye, jazz has been defanged, deflated, deified and reified, wrapped up, retired, and put out to pasture.

In the nearly forty years since the death of John Coltrane, arguably the last jazz musician to capture a mainstream audience while at the vanguard of social and aesthetic progress, many overlapping and contradictory explanations have emerged to account for this sudden pressure drop. Rock music is one oft-named culprit, as are institutional racism, avant-garde self-indulgence, and the ascendancy of a black bourgeoisie uninterested in either social change or Afrocentric arts. There is no doubt some truth to each of these claims. However, despite the multiplicity of causes attributed to the decline, nearly all scholars and aficionados of jazz would agree on one maddeningly ironic fact. As jazz music became increasingly infused with a sense of its own social purpose, from the self-determination of postwar bebop to the aggressive and uncompromising demands of late-1960s free jazz, society found less and less purpose for the music itself. Even black audiences largely abandoned jazz for more accessible (and less overtly political) alternatives such as funk, soul, and R&B. Most of them never returned, as newer genres such as disco, rap, and hip-hop gained prominence over the years.

And yet, like Rasputin, jazz has stubbornly refused to die. The music still has millions of listeners, countless critics, and, most important, a seemingly unending supply of new practitioners, many of them freshly minted in the scores of jazz studies departments that have flowered at American universities in the wake of the Great Deflation. This contradictory and confusing situation forces contemporary jazz critics into a difficult double bind, the cultural equivalent of conducting a postmortem on a comatose patient. How can we fully understand what happened if it's still happening? Can we mourn the dead without first pulling the plug?

Three new books treat this challenging subject matter in radically different ways, and with varying degrees of success. Fred Moten's dynamic and ambitious In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition explores the tension between...