The first or maybe second time I read Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha, I became enamored of the character of Vasudeva, the ferryman. The ferryman, as you may remember, has learned from the river how to listen. “Without his saying a word,” Hesse writes, “the speaker felt that Vasudeva took in every word, quietly, expectantly, that he missed nothing. He did not await anything with impatience and gave neither praise nor blame—he only listened […] with a still heart, with a waiting, open soul, without passion, without desire, without judgment, without opinions” (ps. 85, 87). I wanted to emulate Vasudeva: I, too, wanted to master the art of listening. Whenever my students tell me, as they have occasionally, that they liked my class because they felt I was invested in the conversations and truly interested in what they had to say—and whatever my reservations today about the novel’s philosophy—I feel that I owe a debt of gratitude to Hesse and Siddhartha.

There is no music in Siddhartha, at least that I recall. Others of Hesse’s novels—Steppenwolf, The Glass-Bead Game—are steeped in music. But Siddhartha comes to me from the farther reaches of memory as a silent book, or no more aural than the soundscape of, say, the river itself. The ferryman has mastered the art of listening to others speak. Would the same hold true for music? If so, would it not be lovely for a fiddler to bring his fiddle onto that ferry, a guitarist her guitar? There he would be, the one true listener, a sufficient audience unto himself.

Hesse’s ferryman came back to me as I was reading Thomas Greenland’s Jazzing: New York City’s Unseen Scene (Illinois UP, 2016), one of two ethnographies of jazz I read this year; the second, which I read first, was Travis Jackson’s Blowin’ the Blues Away: Performance and Meaning on the New York Jazz Scene (California UP, 2012). Both studies examine New York jazz in the ‘90s and ‘00s, with Jackson’s concentrating on traditional (“WBGO”) jazz, and Greenland’s on a combination of “trad” and “downtown,” or avant-garde. Both authors stress the need to understand jazz by looking beyond the music itself, to the contexts of its production and consumption. For Jackson, this context mostly means African American culture as it is revealed through attending performances and recording sessions, and interviewing musicians. For Greenland, it mostly means the way different actors—musicians, fans, club owners, journalists, and so on—interact to make New York jazz possible and meaningful. (I say “mostly” because Jackson does consider the different actors in the scene, and Greenland does cite some interviews with musicians; but the bulk of their attention, respectively, lies elsewhere.) It was Greenland’s attention to jazz fans, whom he compares to sammi’ahs (of tarab music) and cabales (of flamenco), “dedicated connossieurs who think and feel music on a deep level” (48; Greenland’s emphasis), and who inspire others, including the musicians who perform for them, that recalled the ferryman to me. I like the colloquial term for these Vasudevian listeners, too: they have “big ears.”

Before going any further, I should admit a narcissistic attraction to these texts. I was active on the scene during the periods Jackson and Greenland study. As a fan, I was eager to see myself in the mirror of these texts, to imagine the authors as phantom patrons who might once have sat at the table next to mine, and to nostalgically identify with the places described—to murmur to myself, “I was there.” Indeed, by Scott DeVeaux’s definition (cited in Greenland), I was, for almost two decades of my life, a hard-core fan, one among only about half a per cent of jazz listeners who attend at least one set per month (more like one or two sets a week). I was—to use another lovely colloquialism from Greenland—“chasing the dog.” (A colleague of mine, who is still chasing the dog in his early seventies, describes himself as “a geriatric club-rat.”)*

What this means is that, in gleaning what I could from these books, I also had the expectation that I would learn something about myself. Not just, that is, how scenes function to create meaning, which would have repercussions for the way I understand other popular musics that I think and write about on this blog, or any other nuggets of wisdom I might acquire about jazz history or the recording industry or music per se (and there were plenty); but also about the musical history and context of the city in which I came of artistic age. I can’t help but see music through the lens of New York; and, musically speaking, I can’t help but see myself through that same lens. What might these studies reveal to me about the lens itself?

*

The goal of Jackson’s project is to understand “how participants in the jazz scene, and especially musicians, construct and construe meaning in musical events” (6-7; Jackson’s emphasis). As noted, for Jackson you get the most out of analyzing jazz in the context of the scene and, more broadly, the culture from which it arises. In fact, trying to examine the music outside of its cultural context reflects a bias imported from the study of Western (classical) music; and this bias has historically hampered our understanding of jazz. White critics who have told the story of jazz have tended to “whitewash”—Dizzy’s term, which Jackson uses as a chapter epigraph; they have “molded what they saw as primarily African American musical practices in the image of Western literary and musical traditions” (28). But jazz, Jackson asserts, can’t be just “about itself”; it is inseparable from African American tradition; it comes out of, and feeds back into, African American culture (212). Part of Jackson’s project, then, is to bring to bear on the music the specifically African American cultural context of jazz that many earlier studies had erased.

Jackson calls jazz “a spiritually oriented ritualized activity” (22) governed by a “blues aesthetic,” an “African American approach to music-making” whose elements he begins to describe via the scholarly writing of composer Olly Wilson: “use of (overlapping) call-and-response techniques, off-beat phrasing of melodic accents, percussive approaches to performance, timbral heterogeneity, use of polymetric frameworks, and the integration of environmental factors into performance” (Jackson 47). Overall, if jazz music and performance are deeply rooted in African American experience, which itself feeds back into said culture, then to consider jazz from a traditional musicological framework not only misses all the subtleties that can’t be notated by Western scorekeeping and analysis, but the very thing that makes jazz jazz.

Among other things, the above conclusions mean that Jackson must grapple with the knotty and contentious relationship between jazz and race: between, that is, jazz as American music (e.g., “America’s classical music”) and jazz as African American music. He traces the history of this controversy back to the emergence of the neoclassicism of the ‘70s and ‘80s, through the eventual institutionalization of Wynton Marsalis et al. at Lincoln Center, and the predictable backlash—particularly predictable against the backdrop of concurrent debates over affirmative action. White critics lamented that whites’ contributions to jazz were being overlooked, and argued that jazz was “supposed” to be about integration, a point Jackson legitimately questions (32-3). For Marsalis, Albert Murray, and Stanley Crouch, jazz was all about “blues feeling, timbral nuance, and rhythmic swing” (34)— that is to say, elements it derived from African American musical tradition.

Jackson consistently emphasizes that this is a question culture, not color, even as he acknowledges how much race and culture share. “Musicians of varying backgrounds,” he writes, “have learned to perform the music. Each of them has had to marry whatever musical skills they had […] with the conventions and aesthetic priorities of jazz performance, which remain consistent with the aesthetic imperatives of other African American and African-derived musical forms” (48; Jackson’s emphasis). The same, one imagines, should hold true for audiences: listeners “of varying backgrounds” can learn to listen to jazz. But the way race and culture shade into each other in the popular imagination and discourse makes me wonder. For the Marsalis camp, it is far from clear that racial/cultural others are capable of mastering the requisite elements of African American tradition as players (cf. Crouch’s comments on trumpeter Dave Douglas; Jackson himself notes that Crouch is “harder to defend” than Marsalis or Murray, and treats him, I think, rather too gently). The same seems to be true for listeners, at least based on some of the interviews Jackson foregrounds in his study. Any music, Joshua Redman opines, can be played with soul; and anyone can connect with music on a spiritual level. But there’s soul and there’s soul, “a certain kind of emoting which is associated with the blues idiom and blues expression” (qtd. in Jackson 115). For saxophonist Sam Newsome, for example, a black audience member who is familiar with the music—and possibly one who isn’t—hears the “soulful” side of his playing; a black audience member hears and appreciates what white audiences can’t. Others might connect intellectually, and perhaps “spiritually,” but not on that “deeper” level (Jackson 118-9). Again, Jackson himself calls this “learned cultural knowledge.” But is the spiritual learned? Or perhaps it’s the appeal to the spirit, the path to it, that is learned? If so, is there a point at which this learning must start, if we’re to imagine a listener able to connect on that “deeper” level? Is “deeper” a question of quantity or quality, degree or kind? However we slice it, in Newsome’s formulation, culture—and again, it is difficult not to project race onto the term—does determine how near an audience member can get to a music’s essence. By this logic, Newsome would presumably never hear Beethoven’s “Tempest” piano sonata the way I do.† There is always a residue of culture/race that will prevent the Other from reaching the citadel of “deep” connection, from hearing the way a musician “work[s] through and re-present[s] that culture for the benefit of ritualized performers and listeners” (Jackson 140).

As I struggled with these questions, I couldn’t help but think of Henry Louis Gates’s Jefferson lecture on Phillis Wheatley, the revolutionary-era African American poet I mentioned in a recent post (“Refined,” 5.30.18). According to Gates, when news of her poetic capabilities reached Jefferson’s ears, he took it upon himself to review her work (just as earlier an august committee of white men had taken it upon themselves to cross-examine her, to determine whether she could possibly be its author). In a letter to a friend, Jefferson basically makes the case that, while hers might look like poetry, it isn’t really poetry. Wheatley, like a monkey or parrot, had learned to mimic poetic form, poetic speech—this much was true; but the essence of poetry, the thing that makes poetry poetry, was absent. And so with the (culturally?) “white” player of jazz: he or she can, like parrot or monkey, copy what is played—can do, in other words, all those things that Western music recognizes in jazz (harmony above all; melody, less so; rhythm, not sure); but “timbral nuance, swing, and blues feeling” remain the exclusive property of the cultural other. And so for the listener. What I myself love isn’t quite jazz, but rather some watered-down version of it. Like a virtuous pagan, I remain forever on the outside of the circle of the elect, full of desire but without hope, as Dante had it. As the night of Wheatley’s blackness forever blots out the sun of true Poetry, so the suburban middle-class whiteness I carry with me like the mark of Cain forever sequesters from me true Jazz. No matter how much I learn or how deeply I listen, I am condemned to listen impoverishedly.

Miles touches on this whole issue of cultural learning beautifully in his autobiography. Visiting his grandfather in Arkansas, walking country roads at night, hearing music out of nowhere: he was the middle-class son of a dentist; but his skin color, and his contact with earlier generations, made it possible for him to be exposed to something that forever inflected his musical voice: “that blues, church, back-road funk kind of thing, that southern, midwestern, rural sound and rhythm” (Autobiography, p. 29; shades of “Sonny’s Blues” here, no?). A similar point was made in one of the roundtables Down Beat devoted to the question of jazz and race in the early ‘60s. Needless to say I don’t have any good answers here, and I’m wary of going on so long about a point which, after all, Jackson works mightily to contextualize. But I will throw out what are hopefully a few useful questions. If it’s true that African American culture has, through the agency of hip hop (one of the post-bebop Black popular musics Jackson notes have interacted with jazz in the last half-century), “become” American culture—or, perhaps better, white youth culture has more intimate contact with a particular strain of African American music-making than it ever has before—then to what extent does it still make sense to talk about a separate African American musical culture, as opposed to, say, a youth (urban?) musical culture deeply inflected by that of African America? (N.B.: This is not to say that we’re living in anything close to a post-racial society … which means I’m probably contradicting myself. Since it’s a question, I’ll let it stand and just move on.) Indeed, Jackson himself alludes to how much has changed in jazz over the last thirty years: the way the music has entrenched itself in conservatories;§ the way the scene, and the blues aesthetic itself, can change over history—indeed must, by his very definition of the music feeding back into and transforming Black culture. And then musicians today—like their audiences—are steeped in a wide variety of genres, some of them African American, from which they draw liberally, and which certainly impacts the way a listener hears jazz. “One might only guess,” Jackson writes, “what kind of impact such shifts will have” (213). But haven’t they already? And so what do these shifts mean vis-à-vis the “essence” of jazz and the relationship between “race”/culture and the music?

Conversely, if jazz has become, in the last half-century-plus, a music played and adored by European and Asian musicians and audiences—and if at least Europeans have remade jazz into something that blends their own tradition with African American music (see, for example, Northern Sun, Southern Moon, Yale UP, 2005)—not to mention the way jazz has inflected the music of other parts of the world, particularly (but not solely) those within the African diaspora—then to what extent does it still make sense to say that only those with cultural know-how about African American music-making can understand the “essence” of jazz, or to claim that the music’s essence is somehow restricted to “timbral nuance,” etc.? Should we give the music another name? Wouldn’t it sound as sweet? Or should we simply accept that this astonishingly brilliant cultural property (that word!) African Americans developed over the first half-plus of the twentieth century was a gift to world culture, and that part of giving this gift is the expectation that others will make it their own? Indeed, if the gift was anything, it was perhaps a recognition of possibilities, of a sheer openness about music-making. (I should probably remind readers that Jackson states at the outset that he is working with mainstream jazz, so the appeal to African American culture pace Crouch et al. makes sense. Then again, mainstream is an incredibly fraught term.)

Oh, you’re probably rankled now. African Americans already “gifted” their labor to the world—that is to say, it was stolen from them—and now they must gift their arts as well? Is what rankles the lack of recognition and recompense, the long history of appropriation and exploitation of black cultural forms by white artists and entrepreneurs? If it’s any consolation, jazz makes up an idiotically miniscule fraction of the music industry. It’s not like Led Zeppelin not paying royalties for “Bring It On Home,” or whatever. In fact, Jackson himself documents the economic insignificance of jazz: the way major labels’ jazz divisions, no longer profitable but once important for prestige purposes, folded and artists were dropped as these labels moved to a portfolio model (cf. the 1976 film Network).**

In all this hand-wringing, I find myself a little flummoxed about the source of my own anxiety. It seems disproportionate to the issue. On the face of it, the idea of a style of music being a group’s cultural property that others can neither appreciate fully nor perform sensitively, at least without enormous labor and attempted immersion into said culture (and perhaps not even then), seems like common sense. I learned the lesson well enough from living in Andalucia and dilettantishly “studying” flamenco (which really meant reading and watching vids at the wonderful Centro Andaluz de Flamenco, and taking some lessons in guitar and compas). The andaluces are weaned on it; I couldn’t even begin to comprehend the level to which the rhythms, the palos, the whole ethos of the music, had been absorbed. So why my hand-wringing at the idea that jazz belongs to a cultural other, and is a form for which my appreciation remains limited? Is it because, whatever I might mouth about jazz being African American music, I still believe in my gut that jazz is an authentically American expression, and thus belongs to me, too? Or, as I noted above, that it might have begun as African American music, but now belongs to all citizens of the world? Is it that I still want to believe, in my core, that music is indeed a universal language, that its cultural specificities are a surface feature beneath which lies the pan-human experience; that, as such, it creates bridges in deep places; and that this is true, not just of classical music, as its one-time missionaries believed, but all music? I might note that my flamenco example is somewhat extreme, if less so than thirty years ago, given the difficulty of successfully translating it into other contexts. Some musics are harder to adapt, and so have remained sheltered and rooted in one place, while others have spread around the globe. Of course, such globalization (and “art-ification”) may also dilute a music’s cultural essence (whatever that is), just as a classical composer’s use of folk tunes may. Or would it be more correct, or at least more hopeful, to say—depending on the particular pattern of diffusion a music undergoes—that globalization simply shifts the center of that music, finds new essences, that these losses are compensated for by other gains?

I am perhaps particularly sensitive to this question right now, living through a historical moment where certain elements of the literary culture take offense at fiction writers “writing about experiences not their own,” which seems to me the yet-more-pernicious obverse of that spurious old coin “write what you know.” (So much for Siddhartha’s ferryman!) Perhaps we need to consider—as I have argued on this blog before, but here with Vasudeva in mind—that every act of listening, like every act of reading, is an imaginative act, an opening to an Other; that, for example, when Hester Prynne, pleading with the authorities Hawthorne describes as wise but utterly incapable of sympathy, to keep her child, and she turns to the child’s unacknowledged father and basically loses her shit at him, a young black or Hispanic woman in my class who has ever had to deal with CPS, or who simply has had struggled to raise children, might be able to see across the wide swath of history and culture and feel her words as deeply as any reader ever has; just as I, white, male and childless, am somehow always moved to near-tears every time I read this passage; because, somehow, Hawthorne, in his intermittent and fickle genius, has managed to capture something of her rage and despair so perfectly that the screen of years and the stilted, antiquated language and the alien culture in which the events are set suddenly drops away, and I feel, somehow, that the text becomes utterly and magically transparent. Probably I’m just deluded—you know, one white guy foisting another white guy—a dead one—on my black female (and male) students, and asking them to weep with me. Ugh. (It’s not like I’m not problematizing Hawthorne’s own status as a male writer and his constructions of femininity, of the “mysteries of an erring woman’s heart” that he claims to be able to fathom. Maybe we should be asking Suzan-Lori Parks why she wrote In the Blood?)

Basta. For me, it always comes back to the same questions. Have I listened closely? Have I really listened? How do I construct myself as a listener so that I really hear? That is, it always comes back to that ferryman, just as the ferry does, crossing the river over and over again, and always landing in the same spot. It is always the same river and always a different one; it is always the same spot and always a different one.

*

To formulate what he calls the “blues aesthetic” that governs jazz performance, Jackson mines his interviews and comes up with the following elements: “having an individual voice; developing the ability to balance and play with a number of different musical parameters in performance; understanding the cultural foundations of the music; being able onself to ‘bring something to the music’; creating music that is ‘open enough’ to allow other musicians to bring something …; and being open for transcendence to ‘the next level’ of performance, the spiritual level” (110). There’s nothing wrong with lists per se … but after the rather lengthy theoretical discussions that precede it, it feels a little reductive.†† The problem may stem from an overreliance on musicians as his source. Ironic that Jackson, who, pace Amiri Baraka, questioned twentieth-century writing on jazz for being overly influenced by the New Critical idea of the centrality of the text (and, more broadly, for too many doltish literary types trying to write about something they don’t understand (101)), seems to have reacted by resurrecting the artist from the ashes of Romanticism. The problem—one problem—is that musicians, like most artists, have a tendency to speak in tongues. Music, their true language, is at once utterly candid and maddeningly oblique. Like Socrates’s poets, they speak according to the inspiration of their god; their knowledge, their consciousness about what they do, is as the haze on a horizon after sundown. (There are of course exceptions to this rule; Joshua Redman, one of Jackson’s sources, is preternaturally articulate.) Now, Jackson himself does call attention to this. Discussing musicians’ difficulties in trying to explain the role that tradition plays in their music, he writes, “The silence […] is perhaps an indicator not of the illegitimacy of the concept, but of the difficulty of verbalizing experiential and musical concepts that are deeply felt” (120). True enough; but it puts a bit of a dent in his methodology, and, I think, points to a broader weakness of this study. Jackson seems to regard language as a transparent means of communication that, unlike music, well, anyone can do, rather than a craft that, like music, attempts to unfold one’s feelings and ideas—including feelings about music—via the messy, gummy medium that is words. It helps account, I think, for a certain flatness in his writing, a certain obtuseness about his argument. It most impacts his book when he moves from competently synthesizing the materials of other scholars and his interviewees to trying to describe the aesthetics and interactions of performances and recording sessions. (I will return to this question of language more extensively in my “year”-end post.)

Reading Jackson’s take on the Greenwich Village of the ‘90s, I found myself wishing, page after page, that he had more to say. A “jazz-related understanding of the neighborhood” (52)—yes; that a venue isn’t just, as it’s often been understood, “a scrim in front of which [jazz musicians] marched on their way to making history” (52)—yes again. As per Jackson’s thesis, you need a scene to facilitate and create meaning, and scenes include musicians, venues, and record stores, as well as changes in things like zoning and rent laws. But beyond these generalizations, I get little sense of what changes made what differences in the ‘90s Greenwich Village that purports to be his subject. We get a general description of clubs, their importance to the scene, their typical layout, and the way that they can en- or discourage audience-musician interaction, and camaraderie among fans. But what about, say, Smalls, or Smalls versus the Vanguard, the Vanguard versus Sweet Basil, in terms of, well, pretty much everything: how they’re set up, the relationship between audience and performer, the pictures they have on their walls, etc.? Jackson also mentions the perennial problem of staying in business, the way rent hikes drive up cover charges, which also tends to make clubs risk-averse, and to favor big-name artists with major-label contracts rather than allowing such decisions to be made in the more intimate, autochthonous interaction between artists, club owners, and audiences. That’s great; but again, there’s ne’er an example to illustrate this, to engage the reader, or to probe the way that particular venues or particular changes participate in the creation of particular meanings. What is Jackson’s jazz-related understanding of the Village, based on all his footwork and interviews? Where’s Gaston Bachelard when you need him?

When he gets to music and the mechanics of performance, Jackson seems to have even less to say. He discusses how performances are framed and organized, and how jazz tunes work, perhaps on the assumption that another ethnographer reading this text will have little to no understanding of jazz, or that a musicologist coming from another genre will need a crash-course. Perhaps my own fan status—spiritual deficiencies aside—blinds me to what other readers would need to know. After reading Jackson’s clear and complex theoretical underpinning to jazz as a ritual activity, and ritual activities like jazz performances producing “ritualized bodies,” I wanted to see these ritualized bodies—isn’t that the point of ethnographic fieldwork, of attending jazz sets with one’s anthro-cap on? But I never get more than a hint of them—certainly no fleshed-out portraits. As a result, although Jackson argues that observing performance in terms of its visual, proxemic and kinesthetic dimensions is essential for understanding (and that, conversely, recordings are biased and partial representations of musical events),§§ I never got the sense from his study that the recording sessions or sets he observed added much of anything. He notes, for example, the significance of body movement, and of glances exchanged among and between musicians and audience members. But his descriptions are too rote to be in any way revealing. A typical example: “One of my table companions […] was moving her head up and down in time, entrained to the groove in the same way I was” (152). Another: “Teekens, Bolleman, and I were glancing at each other briefly during these interactions, as if to say, ‘Did you hear/see that?’” (176). Again: “[The music of Meldhau, Hutchinson, and McBride] pulled everyone in the control room … into the performance, leaving us mesmerized” (184). (If this were music journalism, rather than academic anthropology, that’s the sort of bland generalization that would never make it into a magazine or newspaper.) Yet again: “Audience members were shaking heads as if to say, Wow!” (195). The smiles recorded between different participants come so fast and furious that I began to wonder if “smile” would be an entry on the index. (It was not.) The upshot: either Jackson’s own lack of data torpedoes his thesis that these other dimensions of performance are essential (i.e., there is simply little to nothing to observe); or his field observations were not sufficiently detailed to lead to any persuasive conclusions; or he is unable (as a writer) to communicate the nuances of his data. If the last, it’s a fitting reminder that the words aren’t just something; they’re the only thing.***

My frustration fairly boiled over with the recurring phrase “taking it to the next level.” It’s a colloquialism he adopts from an interview with Steve Wilson, if I remember correctly; but after a number of iterations it began to sound just plain silly. It also moved in and out of quotes willy-nilly, as if Jackson himself were unsure how to consider it. He writes, “When performers successfully synthesize and work with all the materials of a performance (space, time, tune, form, other performers. and other participants)—when they exhibit ritual mastery—that is when a performance is most likely to proceed to the next level” (151). Later, the music of Meldhau, McBride and Hutchinson “made it clear that they indeed ‘took it to the next level’” (187). (Did they, indeed?) Later, “The tunes were well played but never really moved to the next level” (197). And so on. I can just hear an audience in postgame analysis: “Was it on the next level?” “I think it was on the next level.” “No, wait: maybe it was on the same level.”

And so with this study: it never “proceeds” to the next level. A shame, because Jackson is incredibly knowledgeable about the music; he is well-versed in theory and thoughtful about the issues of race, culture, and history, whatever my penchant for hand-wringing. Perhaps it’s a problem of autoethnography, or its obverse; that is, perhaps Jackson thought that too much description and reflection, too much a book written not just about but according to a blues aesthetic, would make it appear he had sacrificed objectivity on the altar of navel-gazing. Or perhaps it’s the perennial problem of the reticence of the social sciences, at least when the reader is from the humanities. What else did you see? What’s it all mean? Can’t you speculate? Where does the language take you? Where is your imagination in all of this? (Chomping at the bit to talk about the “Sokal squared” scandal, I restrain myself, even from a footnote.) If jazz is a “synechdoche for African American culture,” does that mean we stop or start hearing it as jazz? What is lost, and what is gained? Is there only an anthropology of music today? Am I just a victim of my own narcissism, wanting to see myself in a text that, finally, doesn’t let me see much of anything?

*

Greenland’s Jazzing suggests not. Of the two, it’s the more satisfying contribution to the ethnography of New York jazz. I don’t think it’s just because the book comes half a decade later, so that Greenland has the opportunity to build on the work of Jackson and others in what, after all, is still a sub-field under construction. I don’t think it’s because Greenland is a particularly better writer, either—in fact, his paragraph conclusions are so clunky they made me rethink the standard pedagogy on paragraph structure. Rather, I think it’s because (1) he narrows much of his work to the New York avant-garde scene, and this allows him to speak with greater specificity and density about how this scene is organized and operates; and (2) his mosaic of interviews with critics, club owners, jazz-inspired visual artists, and fans gives a more well-rounded and grounded sense of how scene creates meaning.

Some of my favorite stuff in this book comes from his interviews with club owners. It certainly gave me a new, more humble perspective on going out to hear jazz. God knows I’ve kvetched about prices, and I’ve thrown more than one crusty look at a loud talker or phone addict during a set. The irony had never quite dawned on me: were it not for liquor and assholes—and expanded and diversified musical offerings, something else that sets off hard-core fans—these clubs simply couldn’t survive. Not that I was ever the sort to nurse a soda or anything; but it does make me feel like a huge churl to have complained to a friend that Smalls was now charging sixteen dollars for a Brooklyn Lager (or was it eighteen?)—to recollect that I had in fact refused to order a drink in silent protest over such ridiculously inflated prices. And I cringe within myself to remember the night I stood at the door of Smoke and declined to take the last cramped bar seat because, in my mind, it was unreasonable to charge the same as for a table. I mean, I had every right not to go in—where the hell was I going to put my backpack overstuffed with NYC loot for starters? It’s the self-righteous anger of the oblivious consumer I cringe at, the one for whom jazz has become another fetishized commodity. Anyway, there are a number of great vignettes in his chapter, and one diatribe, by Smoke owner Frank Christopher, is so hiliariously dead-on that I was tempted to type the whole two pages into this post. (Conscious of the length to which this double review has grown, I demure.) It might be argued that cheap talent is the perennial New York problem. But that would be to ignore the elephant in the room, one that comes up over and over in this chapter, as it did in Jackson’s study: if it was always hard as hell to run a moderately profitable jazz club in New York, in the Trump era it’s become pretty much impossible. (Sometimes, when I look around at my beloved city, I can’t help but see the skyline wearing a cheesy yellow toupee, like a smog.) Smoke’s Christopher sums it up beautifully: “The musicians play for less than what they deserve and more than we can afford” (108).

It was also nice to get some horse’s-mouth downtown history, particularly the backstory of the kerfuffle around The Knitting Factory, the one-time center of avant-jazz in New York. Musicians who had performed regularly at “The Knit” up through the mid-‘90s ended up defecting over their perceived exploitation by owner Michael Dorf. Chief among them was John Zorn—apparently the whole thing finally blew up over taping a Zorn rehearsal—who then went on to open Tonic, in 1998; and, when Tonic fell victim to the Lower East Side real estate boom a decade later (and that big fugly blue hotel that opened up across the street), the spartan avant-gallery The Stone, now become a ward of academia via The New School. (I’ve written about both the latter venues in earlier posts: Tonic in “Two Free Jazz Epitaphs,” 12.7.12, and The Stone most specifically in “Master/Class” (11.23.12) and “Un/coiffed”). Nor did I know that The Stone was named after Irving and Stephanie Stone, godparents of the downtown scene. Like club owners, hard-core fans like the Stones were a rich vein for stories, observations, and commentary for Greenland, both in terms of the history of the scene and the philosophy of jazz-loving.

I similarly appreciated Greenland’s discussion of the phenomen of transcendence, which is enriched by the attention his study devotes to audience. Jackson’s, while also fascinating, is largely limited to musicians’ descriptions of the feeling, when a performance is going well, that he or she is in touch with a higher power, variously described as channeling, becoming a vessel, or the sense that “the instrument is playing itself.” Jackson also draws important cultural connections to the Black church, and the concominant role of venue and audience to creating the proper ambience. Greenland’s study takes off from here, drawing out the role his “big-eared” audiences play in facilitating transcendence. “The collective act of serious listening,” he writes, “generates palpable energy that galvanizes and guides the creative efforts of improvising musicians” (156); the audience members become “vessels for mediated transcendence” (155; my emphasis). He cites saxophonist Sedric Choukroun on the chemistry between performer and audience, “reflecting your music and surrounding you with its attention,” that allows the performer to forget him or herself, to surender the ego (165). This connection, Greenland notes, creates a “synergistic feedback loop” that “dissolves” the boundary between audience and musicians (165). (Or, as the saxophonist Joe Maneri put it, the audience becomes “another instrument” (Otumo, qtd. in Greenland 166).) The audience’s experience of transcendence similarly depends on the communal nature of the event, as Greenland sediments in a lovely quote from Matthew Somoroff: audience members “want to bring their interiority into contact with those of the musicians and other listeners, to experience an interiority that paradoxically gains intensity from its grounding in public and/or social situations of performance and audition that enable a shared feeling of ‘we-ness’” (62). There is something at once exhilirating and terrifying in this, as there is in all acts of ecstatic worship to which the practices of free jazz bring us closest (see, again, “Two Free Jazz Epitaphs”): the intensity of the tongue of flame and the bacchanal; the sacrifice, the blood ritual that lies just beneath the mask of institutionalized religion or art, straining at its boundaries, and which comes through quite clearly in the words of Irving Stone: “I’m for blood” (166).

*

For all I appreciated the depth and detail of Greenland’s work, and the space he gives to different scene members—and even as I find this mosaic view more compelling and satisfying than Jackson’s—I am not entirely persuaded, and perhaps even a little troubled, by his foregrounding of audience … which is to say, his thesis, into which I will now back the belching tractor-trailer that is this “review.” From the outset, Greenland refers to audience members as “offstage participants” who are “‘performing’ jazz”; “they constitute the unseen jazz scene, the silent and not-so-silent majority that forms an integral part of communal music-making” (34). His goal, like Jackson’s, is to broaden the musicological lens, here to the audience, who he feels has been marginalized, just as, for Jackson, African American culture has been in jazz studies. In doing so, I wonder whether he swings the pendulum too far away from the stage. It reminded me of—and perhaps my reservations are based on—the postmodern “active audience” tradition in popular music studies: the idea that the audience is not a passive vessel for whatever the culture industry wishes to pour into it, as per the Frankfurt School, but rather active creators of their own meanings from the bits and pieces said industry proffers. Admittedly, this analogy doesn’t work very well for jazz, and is particularly ill-suited to the downtown scene, where labels are tiny, musicians and venues hawk their wares after sets, and many musicians and hard-core fans are on a first-name basis. Here, industry mediation shrivels to almost nothing. Such a scene permits an intimacy and a sense of community impossible in the world of pop music.

It’s not just a question of the size of the scene. As improvised music, Greenland notes, jazz in performance is uniquely susceptible to audience influence; audience response, or merely the so-called “energy in the room” brought by a particular crowd, can shape how musicians perform, and with what sort of intensity, both of which find their way into musical parameters like duration, tempo, repetition and dynamics.

Based on these criteria, to say that the audience is part of the performance is warranted. Even in stadiums, audiences do shape performances; and both the intimacy of this scene and the nature of this music gives them an agency perhaps unparalleled in other genres of music. A musician needs sympathetic, knowledgeable, and well-trained (i.e., “big-eared”) audiences who “play their part” in the “ongoing performance” that is a music scene, just as the musicians (and club owners, and music critics, and so on) do. They (musicians) might even speak in inflated terms about the music not “being there” if not for the audience. And all this may help us to re-imagine audiences, and give them their due in a scene. It may even help us to understand more fully certain nuances of how scenes operate. But if we take such statements too literally, we end up with absurd propositions about notes falling silently because no one’s there to applaud. And to call audience members performers seems to me to speak in postmodern generalities that do more to muddle than to clarify. An audience’s role is, finally, subordinate to and tightly circumscribed by the musicians and the music. I found myself bristling at the term.

What is performance, beyond that postmodern urchin we find begging on the corner of every humanistic discipline? Jeff Schlager, the jazz “action painter” who paints two-handed during performances at the Vision Festival, and thus himself becomes an object of attention, is quite obviously performing in the traditional sense of the word, even as his product is different, its mode of consumption bifurcated. We might even extend the idea of performance to the music critic, if we want to think about writing-as-performance—though here we are getting into murkier territory. This isn’t, after all, Lester Bangs beating up his typewriter on stage at a rock concert, though my first drafts often make me feel that way. When we extend the circle wider, to people like me, who show up and put their coats on the back of their chairs, their backpacks on the floor, and open their ears … can I really claim to be performing? Yes, I am “performing” my role in the scene. I may applaud a solo I like vigorously. I may even muster a “whoo!” or “yeah!” if things are going particularly well. And I do hope the attention and energy I bring as a listener combines, in some metaphysical way, with other listeners’, and that it is captured, somehow, by the musicians. But the level of activity is at once so much less integral and so different from the music-making, that I fear lumping everything together under the rubric “performance” is to empty the word of meaning, and does a disservice to both audiences and musicians.

“When listeners perform,” Greenland writes, “and performers listen, the imaginary boundary between them dissolves, clearing the way for mutually mediated collective improvisations” (156). And, elsewhere: “Attending live concerts allows audiences to become coauthors of collective improvisations in a living jazz scene” (49). Collective improvisations? Co-authors? Really? It’s just this sort of hyperbole that makes me suspicious of the whole framework of audience agency. In other places, Greenland hedges: “By closely following artists for an extended period, fans feel they are part of history in the making, witnesses to and participants in a voyage of discovery” (52; my emphasis). Aye, there’s the rub: do we “feel” it, or are we? Are witnesses “part of history in the making,” and if so, to what degree? To what extent can witnesses be participants? How much, if at all, do we really matter?

As with the question of cultural learning, I shouldn’t leave this point without turning the analysis back on myself. I think part of what rankles me is that, as a literature person, I associate it with the rise of the “new novel” in the mid-twentieth century, a novel that was supposed to break down the wall between writer and reader, and make readers co-authors, or something like that. I always found such experiments in “breaking the wall” much more manipulative than classic fiction; instead of revolutionary, they seemed to reify the existing ideology, making audiences believe they had powers they do not. And so with music. Like certain elements of the punk scene, the downtown jazz scene may bring us closer to a differently-imagined society than any other; but we’re deluding ourselves if we think it doesn’t still largely operate according to the rules of said system, even as it tries to carve out a different niche from within. When I pick a night to go to Vision, I’m looking for Hamid Drake, and Rob Brown, and then anyone else I can fit in. Of course, the more music I want to go hear, the more I have to oil the gears of capitalism. The musicians, as Greenland quite viscerally reminds us, also need to eat.

Maybe, though, I’m blinded by the prejudices of my own discipline, and would do well to tread more lightly on the paradigms by which another organizes itself. Maybe music is something else. For what has often troubled me about all of this active-audience stuff is how it plays into the contemporary moment. It’s the disease of the internet, of the cell phone, of connectivity. Today, it seems a listener can only imagine him- or herself as a co-creator, an author, an actor … never just a listener, a reader. We have become even more the people we always were. We are bewildered by the things Siddhartha learned when he was a samana (ascetic): to think, to wait, and to fast. (Well … I’d drop fasting. For me, fasting means thinking about eating. Two out of three ain’t bad.) But if the musician, as Jackson heard from his sources, has to learn to abandon his or her own ego, and the audience, as Greenland also records, does as well—if both musician and audience are conceived as parabolic mirrors in which Music can find its perfect echo, then perhaps in music is a way out of our postmodern madness. The terms—active, agency, co-author—are illusive; it is actually an abandonment of agency by all involved. In a world almost devoid of ferrymen, everyone who gathers in such spaces to listen, including the musicians themselves, are hearing the great river of Music flowing out of Time and back into Time.

We have much to learn from that river, today more than ever!

* Another wonderfully resonant moment from Greenland: the old NYC dilemma of too much going on at once. Downtown stalwart Steve Dalachinsky’s quip that “it’s always the best show when you’re not there” (79) was hilariously resonant, as was Stephanie Stone’s chiding him: “He’s afraid to miss anything, so he misses a lot.” (80) My jazzhead friends have occasionally lauded me for the way I succeed in jigsawing together two sets in an evening, trying to figure out, say, if I can walk across the Village in the probable downtime between sets. But then I spent years working as a part-timer, cobbling together complex calendars of cheap and free music around the City, particularly in the summers. By the time I had a full-time job and disposable income, I was an old hand.

† Except, perhaps, by the idea that Beethoven was “black,” which a student was finally able to source for me, a documentary called Hidden Colors, which I have not found time to watch yet. It seems to imagine a Beethoven who lived in the antebellum South instead of Vienna, and who was hence subject to the one-drop rule—so much for the distinction between race and culture Jackson is so at pains to make—; this tainting of the hemoglobin presumably connects Beethoven to contemporary Black America. I understand a certain protectiveness about one’s cultural property when it has been robbed for generations. But this is a strange fantasy to be sure. It reminds me of those Mormons who find the ancestors of people who have converted to Mormonism, and then convert them (or rather, their remains) posthumously on their gravesites. I imagine these poor souls, who now have to pack up their harps and such, and move to another heavenly condo, are not terribly grateful, unless what the Mormons say is true, that their condos have all sorts of amenities the other ones don’t. I guess I would feel about the whole race-of-Beethoven argument the way at least some Jews feel about these posthumous conversions, if I didn’t find the whole thing so silly. (It also strikes me as too much beneath the spirit of Judaism for Jews to even bother kvetching about.) And anyway, what would happen to my poor Black Beethoven living in the antebellum South? I either have to imagine that he would have held his tongue when ol’ massa came by, and so was not Beethoven at all—that is, the Beethoven who told a prince there would be thousands of others like him, but only one Beethoven; who refused to bow to royalty when Goethe did, but rather pulled down his cap and kept walking; and who gave the world music as earth-shattering as the Eroica—that is, a Beethoven without ‘tude; or I have to imagine my Black Beethoven scourged to death before he published even his first piano sonatas; for he was no br’er rabbit. (He might, for all that, have passed, just as he apparently did in Vienna.) Or should I imagine my Black Beethoven as Frederick Douglass—the hair, the hair!—who, when he finally had enough, fought back against Mr Covey, and became, as Douglass puts it, a man?

I should backtrack a little and note this represents an interesting pendulum-swing. Once upon a time (and perhaps still, for some), it was presumed that Western classical music was the pinnacle of musical achievement, and the expectation was that anyone from any culture would appreciate its greatness (and, by extension, the relative inferiority of their “own” music) if they were properly educated. Today, the paradigm seems to be that musics can only be fully appreciated by members of the culture that produced them, and remain partly or wholly inaccessible to everyone else: a matter of degree, to a point; a matter of kind, possibly, beyond that point. By the old universalist idea, Newsome would have access to the “Tempest” to the degree that he abandoned (or ignored) the tenets of his own culture.

Another way to think about the same problem: As Western classical music aspires toward universalism, it sheds its cultural markers, and by doing so its essence (embedded, I presume, in some romantic notion of the European folk musics from which it evolved). Of course, aspiration is not reality. A conundrum: either classical music is as culturally specific as any other music, and hence as accessible or inaccessible as, say, jazz, or any other “art” music that draws on culturally-specific materials; or it is drained of any cultural specificity, and hence accessible to everyone, but only at the price of what it has lost, to become what Miles, in one of his stupider comments, called “robot shit” (and the people who play it “robots”), that is, the mechanical reproduction of a score. So: either Miles in his time at Julliard couldn’t grasp the essence of this music, which belonged to a culture to which he was incompletely assimilated or wholly unassimilated; or classical music is indeed universal or trans-cultural, but at the price of some cultural essence that gave it life.

Before leaving Newsome, I should relate a wonderful anecdote that speaks to this very question. The Jazz Museum of Harlem organized a series of performances-discussions at the Maysles Theater maybe a decade ago. For one of them, Newsome performed solo soprano sax, and then spoke and answered questions. A woman in the row in front of mine noted the variety of sounds he got out of his instrument, and that, at one point, he was mimicking the drawing of a bow across strings. I don’t remember Newsome’s words, but I do remember his smile. Was it that the woman, who was “white,” came to the music with a different cultural preparation, and this allowed her to hear something in Newsome’s playing that many African American audience members might not? (Even when the bow comes out in traditional jazz, it is used with much more pluck than draw; my ignorance about other/later Black American music prevents me from generalizing.) Suffice to say the more widely and deeply we have listened, the more resonant any music will become to us; and the more we listen to what each of us has to say about what we hear, more still.

One last note: my cultural familiarity with the “Tempest” comes via the circuitous route of the Europeanized Argentinian intellectualism of the mid-twentieth century in which my parents were acculturated, and my father’s training as a pianist. Does that get me any “closer” to early nineteenth-century Vienna than Newsome? If so, how much? And why do I presume, based on Newsome’s skin color, that he himself didn’t come from a household in which classical music was listened to and/or performed? If either of us wants to really hear Beethoven, we still have to open ourselves, to make the imaginative leap, to listen. (By the time you’ve read the end of this footnote, you’ve probably read the bit about Hawthorne above, so … I’m being redundant.)

Footnote to the footnote: While I’m capable of imagining an affinity with jazz based on cultural origins regardless of whether the listener is “familiar with the music,” as Newsome suggests, I do have to point to the irony captured so well in #116 of Stuff White People Like: “Black music that black people no longer listen to.”

§ Interestingly, many players noted you have to be apprenticed to a master musician to really “get” the music. I am unclear why this wouldn’t happen inside conservatories, where so many master musicians now reside, though it’s true some of Jackson’s interviewees argue that conservatories, like the scholarly writing on jazz, have downplayed the role of African Americans. That acknowledged, there seems to be a weird romantic holdover about jazz being about the road and the speakeasy, just like hip hop is supposed to be about the ghetto.

** Based on record sales, European jazz musicians should live as hand-to-mouth as their American jazz counterparts. The difference is that European countries are more generous about funding their arts. I remember seeing a depressing article in the Times about this some years ago, suggesting the Euro jazz artists are pampered by their governments. As usual, the mainstream of American thought can only imagine extending American austerity for arts and culture to other countries, rather than trying to adopt a more robust approach to funding our own—a perfect example of the blindness of ideology.

†† In this regard, it might be helpful if Jackson noted what elements of the “blues aesthetic” are shared by music more generally. Transcendence is a big one. I still remember a story told by my junior high school music teacher, Mr Babbitt. (My parents thought he was beneath us because he liked The Beatles, which is probably a better indicator than anything else I could ever say of the musical environment in which I was raised.) In the story, a conductor was using a cane or staff to beat time with the music. This man was so enraptured that he didn’t realize until after the symphony was over that he was driving the cane through his own foot. Apocryphal? Probably. But that such a story exists—and dozens, if not hundreds of poems, and philosophical treatises about the sublimity of the musical experience—makes me wonder how this particular aesthetic might overlap with aesthetics more broadly.

§§ It’s true that audio recordings are a partial and biased representation of musical events which leave out much of what is most central to the musical experience. But how much less mediated are live performances? How “authentic” are they, and how much that happens there is really spontaneous? There seems to be a festishization of spontaneity here, which is imagined to happen in live performance. It may be more likely to happen live than in a soundbooth, but …. As Miles once noted, it was rare that he came up with something entirely new when he played live.

*** I still remember a set I went to in the late ‘90s, during the year or two Ron Affif’s Monday night sets at the Zinc (when the Zinc was still on Houston) were the preferred venue for passing musicians to sit in with him and Essiet Essiet and Jeff “Tain” Watts. There was one night that was so insanely good—I can’t remember who else showed up, or if it was just the three of them, which was usually more than enough—that I walked up the stairs to Houston Street, and Essiet was pacing back and forth on the sidewalk saying, “That was a great set. That was a great set,” as if he hadn’t yet figured out a way to come back down to the quotidian reality of New York: the honking traffic, the groups of Jerseyites going from bar to bar, the night breeze swaying the branches of the few sidewalk trees. And we were only a few steps beneath him in feeling the un-reality of the New York night, compared to the intensity of what we had just experienced. We thanked him. He looked at us. I am not sure he even registered us. I think he did. It hardly matters. The point: Jackson went to zillions of shows in the nineties, and I’m sure was lucky enough to see more than a handful of sets like this one. Where are they? Where are the musicians and audience members whose experiences are written on their faces, in their bodies, in their gestures, imprinted on the city around them?