Music scholar Samuel A. Floyd, Jr., has said that “works of music are not just objects, but cultural transactions between human beings and organized sound—transactions that take place in specific idiomatic cultural contexts that are fraught with the values of the original contexts from which they spring, that require some translation by auditors in pursuit of the understanding and aesthetic substance they offer.”21 This book is ultimately about what transactions might have taken place during a Powell performance. How was the sound organized? In which specific contexts did Powell create his music, and in which contexts did it circulate? What aesthetic substance did he offer?
Powell’s contributions are, of course, best interrogated by exploring some of the ideas, activities, and discourses that have shaped our modern-day understanding of bebop. It should come as no surprise that old and new ideas about race percolate through many of these issues. Jazz is a powerful example of the many cross-pollinations occurring among the various cultural tributaries flowing into African American culture. As such, explanations of jazz that consider it essentially and solely “African” do not take into account history, human agency, or the fact that jazz shares a legacy with the European aesthetic value system. In other words, to analyze jazz, one must take seriously the breadth and diversity of African American culture, understand the qualities that make black music distinctive, take artistic human agency into account, consider jazz historiography, and, finally, consider the historical specificity of the work or artist in question. Numerous contested histories are dialogically and vibrantly present in both the art and the letters of modern jazz.
NOTES FROM A BLACK YOUTH UNDERGROUND—AND ITS CRITICS
The bebop movement began as the avant-garde music of 1940s black youth culture, much as Louis Armstrong’s music did in the 1920s and as hip-hop did in the late 1970s and early 1980s. As bebop drummer and pioneer Max Roach implores:
I often have to remind my cohorts, musicians of my generation, that rappers come from the same environment as Louis Armstrong—they came from the Harlems and the Bed-Stuys, the West Side of Chicagos. The rappers didn’t . . . [go] to the great conservatories or universities so they could deal with literature and “learn how to write poetry.” And Louis Armstrong didn’t go to the conservatory where he could learn to write music. And if he had, we wouldn’t have this great music that the world is listening to now. So thinking about that, I have to remind them that these guys are making history, like [John] Coltrane and Pops [Armstrong].22
Roach’s words not only grapple with the issue of youth culture, but also call up a fundamental tension involving “high” and “low” culture in the United States and the role of black youth in it all. Furthermore, they strike at the core of some key concerns involving the supposedly discrete and usually ahistorical boundaries drawn around this dichotomy. The sentiment behind statements such as “Jazz is serious,” “Jazz is not popular or commercial,” or even the now politically correct assertion—one that has been soundly refuted about western art music—that jazz possesses an “implicit universal intelligibility” begs rethinking.23
The idea that some music by its nature can transcend the commercial world and can thus become high art is an accepted tenet of the western art music tradition, particularly in its American context. But art music, in fact, has a commercial history. As William Weber has written: “We must regard the rise of the musical masters [Handel, J. S. Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert] as an early form of mass culture—just early forms, of course, and therefore somewhat limited, but nonetheless clever, profit-seeking mass culture.” In other words, he argues that the “commercial exploitation of the masters was a major starting point of the modern music business.”24 These insights are not lost when considering Powell’s career in jazz. For example, every composition from Powell’s first leader session—with the exception of the two originals and “Indiana”—was considered a hit in the popular music industry at one time or another.25
The aesthetic, and therefore political, challenge leveled by this primarily black male youth culture went public in a highly visible and impacting way. The well-known story of bebop’s move from Harlem jook spaces to the wider commercial world of 52nd Street is, among other things, shot through with the politics of gendered language: commercial conquest, cultural territorialism, violence, and musical “cutting contests” are among the terminologies we encounter in various accounts. Bebop’s move to a “whiter” downtown geographic space represents more than simply a broadening of available venues for the music’s presentation. A huge aspect of bebop’s revolutionary, heroic status should be attributed to its ability to do precisely that: move “out of its place” geographically. As Katherine McKittrick has argued, “The ‘where’ of black geographies and black subjectivity . . . is often aligned with spatial processes that apparently fall back on seemingly predetermined stabilities, such as boundaries, color-lines, ‘proper’ places, fixed and settled infrastructures and streets, oceanic boundaries.”26 Following McKittrick’s model, I believe that bebop’s geographical journey, such as it was, altered the social processes of marginalization, concealment, and boundary making by revealing them as hegemonic strategies that organized race, gender, and class differentiation. In other words, it upset the “traditional geography,” an assumption pertaining to the ways in which we “view, assess, and ethically organize the world from a stable (white, patriarchal, Eurocentric, heterosexual, classed) vantage point.”27
New York in the 1940s was a hotbed of activity for all manner of black artists, but musicians seemed to be in the forefront of what might be called an after-hours renaissance. (We will see later that the emergence of new possibilities in artistic experimentation and black identities was not confined to the jazz world.) Bebop, like any commercially presented music, needed a venue, and Harlem’s nightlife in the early ’40s provided just that. Pianist Mary Lou Williams claims to know exactly how and why bebop got started. According to her, young black musicians often complained about not receiving enough credit for their contributions. Eventually, Thelonious Monk tried to start a big band to “create something that they can’t steal because they can’t play it.” Monk wrote difficult arrangements and began rehearsing in a basement. However, the group disbanded shortly thereafter because “the guys got hungry” and out of economic necessity had to seek employment with other bands: “Monk started as house pianist at Minton’s—the house that built bop—and after work the cats fell in to jam, and pretty soon you couldn’t get in Minton’s for musicians and instruments.”28
The story of how young maverick musicians congregated in afterhours jam sessions at Minton’s Playhouse (and later at Clark Monroe’s Uptown House) is legendary.29 Jam sessions such those that took place at Minton’s and Monroe’s were “a mixture of recreation and business . . . musicians made contacts for future employment, held competitive ‘cutting contests’ to establish a pecking order, and took advantage of the isolation from public scrutiny to experiment with new techniques.”30 A crucial step in bebop’s progression toward economic viability was finding a place that would (1) give the musicians the freedom required to explore new musical territory, and (2) attract an open-minded and supportive clientele, a fan base. For several reasons, Minton’s created a suitable atmosphere for bebop’s early life. The club’s owner, Henry Minton, was a former musician who had, in the 1920s, run the Rhythm Club, an informal clearinghouse for black musicians.31 When Minton’s opened for business, musicians made it theirs. As the first African American delegate of Local 802 of the American Federation of