The Routledge Companion to Jazz Studies

Nicholas Gebhardt, Nichole Rustin-Paschal, Tony Whyton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781315315782
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

The Routledge Companion to Jazz Studies presents over forty articles from internationally renowned scholars and highlights the strengths of current jazz scholarship in a cross-disciplinary field of enquiry. Each chapter reflects on developments within jazz studies over the last twenty-five years, offering surveys and new insights into the major perspectives and approaches to jazz research. The collection provides an essential research resource for students, scholars, and enthusiasts, and will serve as the definitive survey of current jazz scholarship in the Anglophone world to-date. It extends the critical debates about jazz that were set in motion by formative texts in the 1990s, and sets the agenda for the future scholarship by focusing on key issues and providing a framework for new lines of enquiry. It is organized around six themes: I. Historical Perspectives, II. Methodologies, III. Core Issues and Topics, IV. Individuals, Collectives and Communities, V. Politics, Discourse and Ideology and VI. New Directions and Debates.

Part I
Historical Perspectives

1
Wilkie’s Story

Dominant Histories, Hidden Musicians, and Cosmopolitan Connections in Jazz

Tony Whyton

In this chapter, I want to examine the relationship between established traditions and hidden histories to explore ways in which local musicians play a part in creating, informing, and disrupting dominant narratives. As Tim Wall and Simon Barber have stressed in their study of Birmingham-based musician collectives, researching local musicians can challenge both the totalizing histories that define jazz and the dominant representations of British jazz. By examining the lives of local jazz musicians, we have the potential to create valuable alternative narratives that shed light on the unique distribution of music in different regional and historical contexts (Wall and Barber 2015, 119–120).

Furthermore, rather than viewing the work of a musician in one isolated setting, I want to consider the relationship between local musicians and global events, between hidden histories and dominant histories, and to explore ways in which jazz both reflects local sensibilities and has functioned as a transnational music over time, informed by cosmopolitan influences and international encounters. I want to use the personal or family archive as a route to the discovery of new insights into specific historical periods and cultural contexts and, through one musician’s story, offer an alternative to limited representations of jazz history. Family archives can be used as a basis for discussing the hidden histories of musicians and the role they play in the ecologies of jazz; I want to show how archival materials such as these can provide compelling examples of hidden musicians who have contributed to the development of jazz in complex and multidimensional ways. Finally, I aim to reflect on the historical relationship between musicians, entrepreneurs, promoters, and audiences, exploring the multifaceted roles that musicians have performed historically, and continue to play, and how these hidden roles inform jazz discourses more broadly.

Constructed, Hidden and Microhistories

Over the past thirty years, the development of New Jazz Studies has led to the creation of new, cross-disciplinary perspectives on jazz history, where naturalized presentations of the past have been replaced with complex cultural readings of history and historiography. Indeed, as this Companion demonstrates, jazz research now features a plurality of methods that have sought to disrupt ever-popular canonical, linear, and causal narratives (Whyton 2010). In his influential essay, “Constructing the Jazz Tradition: Jazz Historiography,” Scott DeVeaux demonstrated how what we come to understand as jazz history is often shaped by ideological choices, mediating influences, and the constantly changing values of particular cultural groups (DeVeaux 1991). In constructing a tradition, decisions about what is included and excluded from history often fall to institutions charged with creating and preserving a sense of shared cultural heritage, or to influential gatekeepers who seek to celebrate and champion certain cultural forms over others. Within a jazz context, one only needs to consider the output of Martin Williams—whose books and work on the Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz attempted to define the jazz tradition—to get a clear idea of the way in which the history is both narrated and often invented. For example, DeVeaux describes the way in which Williams truncated Louis Armstrong’s 1926 recording “Big Butter and Egg Man” for the Smithsonian collection in order to construct an idealized view of jazz history:

What was left out? The first thing removed was a full chorus by the other star performer, the vaudeville singer May Alix. Relatively little is recorded in jazz history about Alix. We know that she worked at the Sunset Café, and that she used to do splits on stage. But such vague information about vaudeville performers is typical in jazz history, despite the fact that some of them (like Butterbeans and Susie) occasionally crop up on early jazz recordings. Alix’s presence—and ultimately, her absence from the Smithsonian—tells us a good deal about boundaries. Eliminating her from the recording helps to separate jazz from two things simultaneously: gender and commerce.

(DeVeaux 2005, 24)

This example offers a simple demonstration of how jazz history can be written and rewritten to support particular ideological constructions of the past. Somewhat problematically, the constructed nature of traditions is often overlooked or downplayed, as a sense of the past becomes naturalized and history is presented as fixed and unchanging. Here, it is important to remember that all histories are written in retrospect and are often fraught with contradiction; what jazz means is very much dependent on cultural perspective, or the values that are expressed in different times and places.

Within this context, studying hidden or local histories can offer jazz scholars a powerful means of addressing these issues; hidden histories not only offer an alternative to dominant narratives about the past but also provide added layers of complexity to the historicizing process. Published at a similar time to a number of seminal New Jazz Studies texts, Ruth Finnegan’s book The Hidden Musicians offered a challenge to traditional representations and modes of understanding music through an ethnographic study of local music scenes in Milton Keynes. Her influential work highlighted the importance of amateur music making in everyday life and unveiled the overlapping infrastructures, dynamics, and organizational characteristics of local musical networks that, until that time, had frequently remained hidden to participants and audiences alike. In her introduction to the revised 2007 edition of the book, Finnegan also highlighted a range of areas where the concept of the “The Hidden Musician” could be expanded and developed in future, for example, to include studies of professional contexts for music making, the impact of mass media and technology on changing representations and understandings of music, or on the contribution of minority groups to the development of local scenes (Finnegan 2007, xi–xv). These issues have as much relevance to jazz studies today as they did thirty years ago. For example, understanding the role musicians play in everyday life, what jazz means to people in different contexts, and how the music has been invented, adapted, and transformed across time and place are pressing issues for jazz researchers today. Equally, it is important to understand why certain musicians and minority groups have been excluded from popular histories of the music.

In his book Footsteps in the Dark: The Hidden Histories of Popular Music, George Lipsitz suggests that the study of hidden histories inevitably involves a blending of the public and private, given that details about musicians not featured in dominant narratives will equally not be featured in the holdings of official archives, public libraries, and museums. In putting together his study of the hidden in popular music, Lipsitz promotes the need to examine the “alternative archives of history, the shared memories, experiences, and aspirations of ordinary people, whose perspectives rarely appear in formal archival collections” (Lipsitz 2007, xi). Lipsitz’s efforts to present a multitude of perspectives and the politics of narrative evoke the broader field of microhistory, where scholars have advocated the need to move historical research beyond what is published or held in public archives. Building on this, microhistorians are interested in not only facts but also perspectives, and they have also been keen to build the narrative procedures of research itself into their own work, to include identifying agendas (including their own) and the limitations of documentary evidence, as well as highlighting techniques of persuasion and interpretative constructions. This acknowledgment of perspective, narrative procedures, and potential biases breaks with the traditional idea of historical writing being absolute, assertive, and authoritarian, and reality being understood as purely objective. As Giovanni Levi states,

Microhistory tries not to sacrifice knowledge of individual elements to wider generalization, and in fact it accentuates individual lives and events. But, at the same time, it tries not to reject all forms of abstraction since minimal facts and individual cases can serve to reveal more general phenomena.

(Levi 1991, 109)

Microhistorians have sought to identify contradictions within standard historical representations and, subsequently, the social is not perceived as an object to be studied but is instead regarded as a set of ever-shifting relationships.

Microhistories enable a rethinking of previously assumed knowledge by focusing on the detail of individual lives or moments in time. The change in scale and focus of investigation provides a means of injecting new life into previously represented subjects to reveal new meanings for historians. For Levi, microhistory promotes the “belief that microscopic observation will reveal factors previously unobserved” (Levi 1991, 96–97) and that by focusing on specific details in everyday life, general concepts about the historical process can be exemplified.

Taken as a whole, work on constructed, hidden, and microhistories promotes a fluidity of understanding the past that rejects binary constructions and rigid typologies. The challenge for jazz scholars today is not simply to replace dominant and canonical narratives with alternative local and hidden histories. Indeed, by resisting binary formations of history, it is important to explore intersections between local and dominant histories, to consider how the lives of hidden musicians both within and outside of the US have informed and been informed by the household names of jazz, and to examine how dominant narratives around jazz have been formulated and sustained. By doing this, it would be possible to move the field of jazz studies forward by creating a more complex and holistic picture of both the historicizing process and the ecologies of jazz, as well as the multifaceted roles musicians play in everyday life. To illustrate some of these points, I want to draw on a recent encounter with the family archive to demonstrate how the hidden and the dominant, the private and the public, the local and the global, intersect.

Exploring the Family Archive: Wilkie’s Story

My mother-in-law recently handed me a box of materials that belonged to her uncle William—or Wilkie—Davison. On presenting the box of materials, she said that she was not sure about the contents and whether any of the materials had any meaning in relation to Wilkie’s career or broader value in terms of jazz history. Wilkie was a clarinet and saxophone player who developed a career as a multi-instrumentalist and entrepreneur from the late 1920s onwards. According to family recollections, Wilkie began his career as a brush salesman and began playing music as a sideline amateur pursuit.

Opening the box, I was surprised to see a range of materials from different parts of Wilkie’s musical life, including photographs (many of which were signed or had personal messages inscribed on them), press clippings, brochures, festival programs (including a copy of the 1948 Nice Jazz Festival program), and correspondence linked to specific engagements Wilkie was coordinating as a bandleader and intermediary. The materials spanned a twenty-five-year period, dating from the late 1920s to the early 1950s.

On first inspection, many of the materials appeared unrelated; there were general publicity photographs, letters, and programs, but following the dating and chronicling of materials, cross-referencing certain information with the UK National Jazz Archive, and undertaking conversations with family members, three overarching themes emerged that feed directly into the discussion of constructed and hidden histories outlined above. These themes are by no means exhaustive but provide an illustration of the potential of the studies of local musicians and family archives to reveal the powerful and dynamic networks that underpin the transnational development of jazz.

Adapting to Change—Entrepreneurial Spirit

Image 1.1 The Shanghai Five c.1927.

Courtesy of Anne Goh.

Looking through the materials, I was immediately struck by the way in which Wilkie’s career exemplifies an entrepreneurial spirit. As a musician working from the late 1920s to the 1940s, the personal archive reflected the period’s musical and cultural changes compellingly, from photographs of the Shanghai Five (Image 1.1) dating from the late 1920s to letters of thanks for performing at a benefit concert for the Bakelite Company in 1941 in support of the war effort. Wilkie was clearly adaptable, performing music that catered for the needs of the time and reflected contemporary attitudes.

For example, consider the Shanghai Five. Wilkie’s materials include an original program from a dinner, cabaret dance at the Hotel Metropole in London in 1928 which featured the Shanghai Five as the resident band, alongside a couple of photographs of the group on stage. Within the context of the late 1920s, Shanghai could be seen as a simple novelty signifier of the exotic, a marketing gimmick to appeal to British cafe society. However, in an era where the American jazz age was at its peak, Shanghai would have meant something to British audiences. The Chinese city would have appealed to British dance band society as a symbol of the internationalization of the music, the performers, and Britain’s connections with one of the world’s largest cities (indeed, around this time, Shanghai was regarded as the Paris of the East, the cabaret and jazz center of Asia). As Catherine Tackley has noted, British dance bands in the mid-1920s, such as the Savoy Orpheans, promoted themselves as “international orchestras,” and the activities of American musicians in Britain were increasingly opposed during this time (Parsonage 2005, 172). Indeed, British dance band culture was undergoing a transformation while the relationship to America was being renegotiated. In this context, Shanghai performs as a useful signifier of the exotic and as a marker of the internationalization, industrialization, cultural hybridity, and immigration identified by E Taylor Atkins as crucial to the jazz age (Taylor Atkins 2003). Furthermore, the group also reinforces Tackley’s theories of British dance band music at this time as being simultaneously modern, novelty based, and striving for a distinctiveness that set it apart from America (Parsonage 2005, 173).

There is a definite sense of adapting to change within these materials and the ability to transform musical line-ups and repertoire according to context. A simple example is found in a le...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• List of Figures
• List of Images
• List of Tables
• List of Examples
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• PART I Historical Perspectives
• PART II Methodologies
• PART III Core Issues and Topics
• PART IV Individuals, Collectives, and Communities
• PART V Politics, Discourse, and Ideology
• PART VI New Directions and Debates
• Index