The suggestion that Crouch is thinking only in racial terms is difficult to support when one asks what he means by an “Afro-American approach to sound and rhythm” that one might disavow. Might it not be possible for Crouch to recognize whites who adhere to that approach? For all the insults contained in the passage, Crouch still seems to be asserting something about a way of doing things, about a particular form of musical competence. Implicit in his work as well as that of Murray and Marsalis is the notion that musicians of whatever background must learn to be jazz performers.
Part of the difficulty Murray and Crouch’s critics have is that they reductively interpret “Afro-American” as denoting color rather than culture. The highly publicized moves of black leaders in the 1980s to have “Afro-American” and then “African American” replace “black” were intended in part to separate phenotype and practice, that is, to relocate the commonalities of those once described racially as black to a historically and geographically based narrative of shared practices and worldviews. While the aesthetic formulations of Murray, Crouch, and Marsalis have, to their credit, deemphasized an outmoded racial discourse, they are, nonetheless, like those of their critics, rooted in claims of historical objectivity, give short shrift to memory, and don’t go far enough into the realm of practice. In other words, these figures offer a particular historical interpretation to support their vision. But in saying that blues, swing, and sonic invention are and have always been important, they perhaps fore-close on a more textured investigation of the practices that might support their project.
One possible way for them to refigure the terms of the debate would lie in their focusing more detailed attention on the ways in which individuals have come to jazz performance as well as their understandings of its meanings. For many jazz musicians, there is a wide world of music making and many ways to move through it. Although they may at times enter strategically into the debates in which scholars and critics engage, their work is more concerned with the ins and outs of performance, composition, interaction, and financial survival. An examination of the paths they have taken to become jazz musicians and the activities and practices that sustain them in this endeavor may, in fact, offer a useful way to resolve questions about jazz’s pedigree.
In the jazz master narrative mentioned previously, the linkages between jazz and other African American (and African diaspora) musics are primarily restricted to the past. They surface only in cursory mentions of jazz’s birth, along with spirituals and the blues, from a seemingly passive “mixture” of European and African elements in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (see, e.g., Brothers 1994). At some point after this hazy period of origins—generally with the emergence of bebop in the 1940s—the historical narrative continues with jazz becoming an autonomous stream whose connections to more popular manifestations of African American music become problematic (Levine 1977). Those connections are bracketed, or set aside, in favor of understanding jazz as a species of modernist art that transcends its humble, racially bound origins.22
The musicians I interviewed during my fieldwork questioned the rightness of separating jazz as musical form and structure from African American culture, both in their talk about music and through their performances. Saxophonist Donald Harrison, for example, expressed disappointment when I told him of a debate on whether jazz was “African American music” that took place in a New York University classroom where I lectured in October of 1994. He invoked the words of drummer Art Blakey, who said he didn’t care what the music was called as long as everyone “gave credit to the music’s creators and innovators,” whom he felt were primarily African American. Numerous other statements by performers and listeners in my field notes express a similar view, one that is summarized by the late pianist James Williams’s assertion that there’s no separation between jazz and other forms of African American music: “It all comes from the same place. I have no problem playing religious songs in the clubs or playing [John] Coltrane in the church, as long as I play with the proper spirit and attitude. [Jazz and gospel] run in parallel. They not only criss-cross, they often come together” (field notes, 11 October 1994). All African American musics, he argues, are linked together and are different facets of the same entity.
One way to explore Harrison and Williams’s assertions is to focus on the pathways and practices of jazz musicians, showing that whatever motivation jazz performers or listeners may have to categorize what they perform and consume as “art,” the sounds and their choices of sound configurations emerge most strongly from African American performative strategies. Songs, structures, and ways of manipulating them in performance become mechanisms for the regulation of group identity and collective memory (Bourdieu 1977, 78; Giddens 1979, 2; Gilroy 1991b, 211). There is, of course, value in approaches that see jazz as a complex system examinable in its own right. But when those approaches radically decontextualize the music, we might be moving toward realizing the state of affairs about which Dizzy Gillespie warned drummer Arthur Taylor in this chapter’s epigraph.
In evoking musicians’ pathways, I am drawing on Ruth Finnegan’s The Hidden Musicians (1989), a book that examines a specific locality, the English town Milton Keynes, and attempts to make sense of the variety of music-making activity in it: choral music, brass band music, jazz, rock, and country, among others. For Finnegan, the pathways that individuals follow in musical performance and their negotiation of urban life are the “known and regular routes which people [choose]—or [are] led into—and which they both [keep] open and [extend] through their actions” (305). Pathways, moreover, are meaningful beyond their offering familiar routes that one can follow or sets of musical practices that one can learn or adapt: “They also [have] symbolic depth. One common impression given by many participants was that their musical pathways were of high value among the various paths in their lives” (305). The importance of these pathways lies in their providing a “framework for people’s participation in urban life, something overlapping with, but more permanent and structured than, the personal networks in which individuals also participate” (323).
Moreover, she argues, “Entry on to particular musical pathways [was] dependent … on family membership [and] partly related to that family’s social and economic resources. Certain activities needed money, transport, or access to specific kinds of venues or networks, or were perhaps related to particular kinds of educational achievements, material possessions, cultural interests, or social aspirations. All these were thus likely to play some part in the selection of particular pathways—though differently in different contexts and for different individuals” (311–12). These varied constellations do not map easily onto notions of class, however. Her data showed that the encouragement and support of parents, siblings, and friends were often more significant for young musicians than their guardians’ incomes, occupations, or education. Gender and age in particular proved more crucial than parental resources or attainment in shaping or constraining the musical pathways chosen by young people (315–16), making it difficult for boys to become involved in classical music or girls in rock bands, for example. In any event, she asserts that “the continuance of … pathways—so often ignored or taken for granted as ‘just there’—depends not on the existence in some abstract sphere of particular musical ‘works’, but on people’s collective and active practice on the ground” (325; see also Goehr 1992, 102–15).
Although Finnegan’s pathways are largely ready-made templates that frame and enable collective and individual practice, her notion may be extended to include the literal pathways taken by individuals to musical performance. How, indeed, have jazz’s most highly praised practitioners typically learned their craft? What elements have been integral to the process of performing jazz, and what is the role of education, formal or informal, in making young musicians aware of and conversant with those elements? To what degree do class, age, and gender constrain one’s ability to enter a jazz pathway? And how does a musician’s deployment of what he or she has learned affect performance or our understandings of what jazz is? Too often commentators equate education with formal institutions and ignore the other salient ways in which people acquire knowledge. For jazz musicians, as Paul Berliner’s Thinking in Jazz (1994) shows, there are at least as many paths to knowledge as there are individuals willing to embark on them. In the course of a musician’s lifetime, he or she may glean important insights from friends and relatives, private teachers, fellow musicians, books and other pedagogical materials,23