We find similar tensions in discussions about the nature of the jazz sound itself. Martin Williams, for example, believes that Charlie Parker was not “a great composer.” Parker’s best composition, he asserts, is “Confirmation,” primarily because of one quality it possesses: “a continuous linear invention,” or, in other words, its complexity.74 (Williams has plenty of distinguished company who share his preferences.) Whenever jazz seemed to stray from certain ideals held in western music, critics have responded hastily. The history of jazz has seen more than its share of calls for greater motivic unity in solos, praise for longer forms in composition, denunciations of repetition, and appeals for formalized concert decorum. Of course, it has seen calls for “back to the basics”/“down-with-elitism” movements as well.
The suggestion that jazz needed a transfusion from the western art music tradition is curious, considering the music’s debt to European traditions in the first place. Certainly Powell’s early training in classical music provides an obvious case in point. Yet on a deeper level this privileging of the “West” points to the need to understand the complexity of the relationship between African American culture and modernism. Elsewhere, I have employed the term Afro-modernism to describe a specifically African American response to modernity, especially in the United States. Its concerns are not just aesthetic, but also social, political, and economic. Expressive practices such as music, photography, visual art, poetry, and literature both reflect and shape these domains. All these factors intersect in the world of one musician: Powell.
SCHOOLING BEBOP
In the 1990s, during jazz’s new academic surge, Scott DeVeaux summed up the prevailing view of bebop’s new modernist pose:
The transition from swing to bebop is more than the passage from one style to another. Bebop is the keystone in the grand historical arch, the crucial link between the early stage of jazz and modernity. Indeed, it is only with bebop that the essential nature of jazz is unmistakably revealed. There is an implicit entelechy in the progression from early jazz to bebop: the gradual shedding of utilitarian associations with dance music, popular song, and entertainment, as both musicians and public become aware of what jazz really is, or could be. With bebop, jazz finally became an art music.75
I add that with bebop, jazz became a genre separate from other popular music styles, complete with a new social contract with the public, cultural institutions, and musicians.
This perceived change in pedigree has inspired numerous speculations on the art of the politics and on the politics embedded in the art of bebop, with writers coming down on one side or the other of the aesthetics-versus-politics divide. These cultural differences are seen clearly in the language used to argue for this or that position in these debates. If gender is about power, with the ideals of male and female representing different points on a continuum of prestige, then bebop has existed as a slippery, transgendered discourse, at various times being assigned the mantle of great, masculinist art, and at others relegated to “weaker” cultural positions vis-à-vis western art music. Yet certainly one gets the impression from DeVeaux’s characterization that, finally, through aesthetic discourse, jazz had “manned up.”
Although bebop is recognized as black music, its pedigree has been elevated as the work of an elite class of musicians, akin to modernist composers of the western art music tradition such as Schoenberg, Stravinsky, and Webern. Subsequent musicians who worked in the style known as free jazz inspired similar comparisons to this group of avant-garde, experimental composers. Powell’s music (and that of other beboppers) has achieved, in some respects, the status and appeal that cultural critics and theorists desired for black classical musicians such as William Grant Still, whose activities blossomed during the Harlem Renaissance. In fact, African American composers of classical music still do not receive the attention they deserve in the broad scheme of American music studies. Jazz musicians, on the other hand, have become crucial figures in these histories.
The popularity of jazz in the curricula of American colleges and universities is a reliable measure of the respect it now attracts. Performing ensembles and theory and history courses bring serious study to the music once thought unworthy of sustained consideration. Universities bestow honorary doctorates on jazz musicians in this new “jazz age,” and their names are cited among the same cadre of honorees as prominent scientists, physicians, educators, artists, and scholars. Yet for all of its sonic riches and rewards, the music alone accounts for only part of this pedigree shift. Writers—both critics and scholars—have played a key role in establishing the music’s new and improved social profile.
Jazz criticism as an enterprise has appeared in many guises. Truly international in scope, its expressions are myriad, ranging from publicists’ ravings in trade journals to freelancers’ rants about the latest pressing controversy. From the French critic Andre Hodeir to the black nationalist Amiri Baraka, from the southern new criticism of Martin Williams to the Big Apple poetics of Gary Giddins, from the staunch and testy prose of Stanley Crouch to the leftist politics of Nat Hentoff, jazz criticism has constituted an eclectic bundle of journalistic impulses. Taken together, these writings brought to the American public a sustained level of critical and aesthetic discourse about a music that had at one time struggled for widespread aesthetic legitimacy.76
For its part, jazz scholarship—its most current iteration is dubbed “the new jazz studies”—is now a bona fide area of the music subdisciplines and appears across an interdisciplinary spectrum of humanities fields, including English, history, and American studies. Partly as a result of the deconstruction of the canon and partly inspired by the 1980s jazz renaissance (replete with “young lions” dressed in business suits, new recording deals, and historical classics reissued on compact disc), the 1990s surge in dissertations, scholarly monographs, and articles changed forever how the music was perceived: as a serious artistic pursuit on par with other fine arts. The new jazz studies insists that jazz music is much more than an abstract set of technical principles, chord changes, rhythms, and organizations; it is also a cultural phenomenon whose scope of influence can be experienced in the visual arts, literature, dance, and film.77
Since the 1990s, jazz historians have moved beyond the aesthetics of universalism that once ruled jazz academic discourse and led us into richer readings of the topic. A number of scholars (the work presented below is merely suggestive of the available studies) have taken on the challenge of bebop specifically, producing nuanced interpretations of the musicians, the music, its audiences, and the historical contexts that produced them. The most broadly conceived and sweeping of these bebop studies is Scott DeVeaux’s blockbuster study The Birth of Bebop (1997). DeVeaux writes about the emergence of bebop style by attending to musical analysis and to the political economy of the jazz world during the years that bridged the swing and bebop eras. When the book won the American Musicological Society’s best book award in 1998, it sent a resounding signal to this corner of the academic world that jazz studies was viable, attractive, and rigorous. Other scholars tightened their focus around more specific topics. Ingrid Monson’s Saying Something (1996) penetrates and explains the social meanings generated within the improvisatory setting of the typical rhythm sections of modern jazz ensembles. Her ethnographic work weds the social theories of anthropology to musical analysis and the broader field of cultural studies, the latter of which had rambled through the humanities during the 1980s and 1990s. In What Is This Thing Called Jazz? (2002), Eric Porter takes a discerning look at modern jazz musicians as bona fide intellectuals—not as naturally gifted noble savages, but as self-conscious participants in both their creative work and the critical discourses that surround it. Porter’s American studies–styled readings of a multiplicity of texts illuminate how bebop opened a space in the popular sphere for aesthetically challenging black music, serious black audiences, and virtuoso black musicians. In two of its chapters, Bernard Gendron’s Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club (2002) focuses on critical discourses during the bebop era and argues that modern jazz represents a postmodern turn in the historical relationship between high and low culture. By this argument, Gendron