Jazz & Culture Vol. 2, 2019 PDF

ARTICLES
Mary Lou Williams as Apology: Jazz, History,

and Institutional Sexism in the
Twenty-First Century
Kimberly Hannon Teal
Risk, Creative Labor, and the Integrative Jazz-Film:

Producing the Improvised Soundtracks of
Birdman and Afterglow
Gretchen Carlson
“Where You Are Accepted,You Blossom”:Toward

Care Ethics in Jazz Historiography
Vanessa Blais-Tremblay
JAZZ & Culture

ORAL HISTORIES
“Music Is No More Than a Reflection of Its Times”:
Max Roach and Marion Brown on Jazz and
Politics in the 1960s and Beyond
Interviewed by Charles Hersch
Without Qualification: Bill Dixon

on Black Music and Pedagogy
Interviewed by Andrew Raffo Dewar
POETRY
The Human Tornado; “Young Hearts,
Run Free” (’76); DeBarge
Amaud Jamaul Johnson
REVIEWS
Volume 2 2019
This content downloaded from

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All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Jazz and Culture (print ISSN: 2578-4765 and online: 2578-4773) is published annually in the Jazz and Culture is an annual publication devoted to publishing cutting-edge research on jazz
spring by the University of Illinois Press, 1325 S. Oak Street, Champaign, IL 61820–6903 (www from multiple perspectives. Founded on the principle that both scholars and musicians offer
.press.uillinois.edu), for the Jazz Studies Department at the University of Pittsburgh. invaluable contributions, the journal juxtaposes groundbreaking work by researchers alongside
oral histories and articles written by master artists in the field. All methodological approaches
© 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois are welcome, including ethnomusicology, music theory, and critical and cultural studies. The
journal particularly encourages work relating to jazz’s international scope.
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Editor-In-Chief
Dr. Michael C. Heller, University of Pittsburgh
Poetry Editor
Dr. Lauren Russell, University of Pittsburgh, Center for African American Poetry and Poetics
Editorial Board
Dean Larry E. Davis, University of Pittsburgh
Dr. Dwight Andrews, Emory University
Mr. Herb Boyd, Author/Journalist, City College of New York
Dr. Kent Engelhardt, Youngstown State University
Dr. Gary Fienberg, The College of New Jersey
Dr. Farah Jasmine Griffin, Columbia University
Dr. Vijay Iyer, Harvard University
Dr. Travis A. Jackson, University of Chicago
Dr. Robin D.G. Kelley, UCLA
Dr. George E. Lewis, Columbia University
Dr. Portia K. Maultsby, Indiana University
Dr. Ingrid Monson, Harvard University
Mr. Lester Monts, University of Michigan
Mr. Dave Pistolesi, University of Pittsburgh (retired)
Dr. Guthrie Ramsey, University of Pennsylvania This publication is made possible through generous gifts from the
Dr. Robert Sacre, University of Liege Erroll Garner-Martha Glaser Foundation, the University of Pittsburgh Year of Diversity, and
Mr. Ed Sarath, University of Michigan through ongoing support of Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh.
University of Pittsburgh Jazz Studies Program Assistant
Frank Hammond Jr.
University of Pittsburgh Jazz Studies Core Faculty
Nicole Mitchell
Michael C. Heller
Aaron J. Johnson
In Memoriam
Geri Allen (1957–2017)

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JAZZ
VOLUME 2 • 2019
& culture
ARTICLES
1 Mary Lou Williams as Apology: Jazz, History, and Institutional

Sexism in the Twenty-First Century
27 Risk, Creative Labor, and the Integrative Jazz-Film:

Producing the Improvised Soundtracks of Birdman and Afterglow
Gretchen Carlson
59 “Where You Are Accepted,You Blossom”:Toward Care Ethics

in Jazz Historiography
ORAL HISTORIES
84 “Music Is No More Than a Reflection of Its Times”: Max Roach

and Marion Brown on Jazz and Politics in the 1960s and Beyond
101 Without Qualification: Bill Dixon on Black Music and Pedagogy

POETRY
113 The Human Tornado; “Young Hearts, Run Free” (’76); DeBarge

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REVIEWS
116 The Jazz Bubble: Neoclassical Jazz in Neoliberal Culture,

by Dale Chapman
Dean S. Reynolds
122 The Kind of Man I Am: Jazzmasculinity and the World

of Charles Mingus, Jr., by Nichole Rustin-Paschal
Better Git It in Your Soul: An Interpretive Biography
of Charles Mingus, by Krin Gabbard
Sean Sonderegger
128 The Improvisation Studies Reader: Spontaneous Acts,

edited by Rebecca Caines and Ajay Heble
Mark Lomanno
131 Contributors to This Issue

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Mary Lou Williams as Apology:
Jazz, History, and Institutional
Sexism in the Twenty-First Century
In the spring of 2017, pianist and jazz writer Ethan Iverson released an interview
with fellow musician Robert Glasper on his popular blog, Do the Math. Iverson, well
known for his role in the trio The Bad Plus, has also worked as the music director of
the Mark Morris Dance Group and is currently on the faculty of the New England
Conservatory. His jazz writing has appeared in the New Yorker, and his blog is known
for detailed analyses of recordings and lengthy interviews with other working jazz
professionals that often weigh in at fifteen to twenty thousand words, engaging deeply
with harmonic and rhythmic techniques and the music’s historical background.
Three-time Grammy winner Robert Glasper, best known for his blending of jazz and
hip-hop on his own projects like the 2012 album Black Radio and Kendrick Lamar’s
To Pimp a Butterfly, spoke with Iverson during a Blue Note jazz cruise in early 2017.
Their conversation meandered through how they conceptualize accompaniment
practices in jazz, genre crossovers, and the generation of pianists that interested and
inspired them as young players. One particular passage of this interview, however,
ignited a public response that, by jazz standards, was among the most heated in re-
cent memory, ultimately making its way into National Public Radio and New York
Times coverage. In this portion of the conversation, Glasper complimented Iverson’s
music with The Bad Plus by pointing out that he had heard it praised by “women
you would think never listen to jazz: young, fine, Euro chicks,” to which Iverson
responded, “I guess that’s one of the reasons to play, really.” Glasper went on to define
what it was he believed appealed to female listeners as follows: “I’ve seen what that
does to the audience, playing that groove. I love making the audience feel that way.
Getting back to women: women love that. They don’t love a whole lot of soloing.
Jazz & Culture Volume 2 2019

© 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

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2 Mary Lou Williams as Apology Kimberly Hannon Teal
When you hit that one groove and stay there, it’s like musical clitoris. You’re there,
you stay on that groove, and the women’s eyes close and they start to sway, going
into a trance.”1 The social media response to this statement was swift and heated,
with commenters objecting to Glasper’s suggestion that women do not or cannot
appreciate improvised solos. Some also critiqued Iverson’s willingness to agree with
Glasper on attracting women as being a reason to play jazz and lack of willingness
to edit, censor, or otherwise comment on the sexism in Glasper’s words. Both men
eventually apologized for the content of the interview, though neither was quick to
do so initially. Their apologies came only after they were criticized by many members
of the jazz community including fellow pianists Rachel Z. Hakim and Vijay Iyer,
the latter of whom pointed out that not one of Iverson’s forty-two posted interviews
was with a female musician.2 On the heels of Iverson’s apology came a write-up on
his blog about pianist and composer Mary Lou Williams.
What does Mary Lou Williams do for Ethan Iverson and other jazz writers,
musicians, and listeners in a situation like this? There has been significant interest in
Williams in the last few decades, with two substantial biographies of her published
in 1999 and 2004 by Linda Dahl and Tammy Kernodle.3 Each May, the Kennedy
Center stages its annual Mary Lou Williams Jazz Festival, initiated by Billy Taylor as
the Mary Lou Williams Women in Jazz Festival in 1996. There were celebrations of
the centennial of her birth in 2010, and she has often been featured in wider efforts to
document the role of women in jazz history. In what follows, I would like to consider
Mary Lou Williams not as a person and musician grounded in the realities of her
own time, but as what historian Wyn Wachhorst defines as a “culture hero.”4 In his
book on Thomas Edison, Wachhorst specifies that his project is “not a biography” but
rather “chronicles the evolution of a culture hero, analyzing the factors in Edison’s
life and character which transformed man into myth; but its final concern is with the
myth rather than the man, the image rather than the reality.”5 He writes, “As a form
of myth, the culture hero functions to resolve mechanically contradictory cultural
values into a single paradoxical reality. . . . Neither a separation nor a synthesis of
the two poles is necessary; rather, the paradox itself provides a schematic diagram
of a reality directly perceived only in symbol and myth.”6 To think of a culture hero
is to see a person as standing outside life as we know it because of the seemingly
irreconcilable contradictions they embody—we mythologize them because they are
too paradoxical to be perceived as real.
Wachhorst traces public perceptions of Edison and changes in the mythology
that surrounded him over time, beginning during Edison’s lifetime. Throughout
decades of shifting ideas about Edison through changes in his career and the sur-
rounding culture, “for each of the overt themes in the Edison symbol there has been a
covert antithesis.”7 For the purposes of understanding the use of Mary Lou Williams
as a culture hero in the context of twenty-first-century jazz culture, I am most inter-

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Mary Lou Williams as Apology Kimberly Hannon Teal 3
ested in the final chapters of Wachhorst’s study, those that consider paradoxes in the
Edison mythology in the decades after his death. Describing Edison’s legacy in the
years following World War II, Wachhorst writes: “The fact that Edison remained the
American symbol of science while interest in the subject increased and the realities
of the man himself became ever more anachronistic resulted in the paradox of most
culture heroes in [the twentieth] century: appreciation without interest. . . . Edison
came to exemplify not so much what people were interested in as what they believed
others (especially youth) should be interested in.”8 While the reception of Mary Lou
Williams’s music and image has varied significantly depending on such factors as
time period and the race, gender, age, and cultural background of those who have
heard, seen, and described her, what I write here is particularly concerned with the
mythology of Williams that has emerged since around the turn of the twenty-first
century in discourse on jazz and gender, an era of conversations in which her status
as a symbol of jazz diversity has been often in play. In her role as culture hero, it is
useful to understand the contradictions she seems to embody that make her a power-
ful myth, and also to think carefully about who is shining a spotlight on that myth,
and to what purpose—does it reflect an interest in Williams’s music, life, and career,
or a belief that someone should have such an interest? I argue that the two poles of
the myth of Mary Lou Williams, twenty-first-century culture hero, are “master jazz
composer-instrumentalist” and “woman,” because those are indeed largely conflict-
ing ideas in the context of jazz culture. Because the myth of Williams contains both
of these traits, her status as a culture hero can be used to paint a picture of a present
and past version of a jazz world that embraces and celebrates the contributions of
diverse artists, women included.
Williams’s remarkable achievements and their retelling can draw attention to
the diverse voices in jazz, but that attention does not necessarily guarantee a culture
that fully supports historically underrepresented groups. As Sara Ahmed describes
in her book On Being Included, public statements on and depictions of diversity can
function as extensions of the very barriers that they seem to break down. “If the
emphasis on equality as a positive duty takes the form of finding practical solutions
to problems,” she writes, “then it might be that the solutions are creating problems
by concealing the problems in new ways.”9 If a lack of gender diversity in jazz is a
problem, and celebrations of Mary Lou Williams are presented as a solution, Ahmed’s
line of thought encourages us to consider how uses of the Williams myth might ob-
scure the relative absence of women’s voices in jazz rather than solve the problem. As
Ahmed goes on to argue, in an atmosphere in which institutions use statements on
diversity as a form of public relations, “solutions to problems are the problems given
new form.”10 In considering gender imbalance and institutional sexism in jazz as a
problem, I argue that holding up Williams as evidence that jazz represents diversity
gives that original problem new form. When we use Mary Lou Williams, culture hero,

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as evidence that the jazz world is not a sexist one, we lose the opportunity to confront
and change the underlying problem that forms her paradoxical mythology; without a
perceived contradiction between the roles of “master jazz composer-instrumentalist”
and “woman,” Williams would not be a symbol of diversity.
Iverson himself pointed out the role so often assigned to Williams as culture
hero in his post on her: “For obvious reasons, Mary Lou Williams is the most conve-
nient topic in jazz for gender studies and empowerment. There’s nothing wrong with
that on the surface, but I am bothered when Mary Lou is treated as a black woman
first and as an artist second. . . . I was looking forward to writing about her just as
another great, not as a woman.”11 The ways in which we currently talk about Williams
show us the lack of gender diversity in jazz, not a solution to a diversity problem.
In what follows, I will explore this old problem’s new form through materials that
have shaped Williams’s image as a diversity culture hero, a consideration of jazz in
the context of studies on gender in male-dominated workplaces, and contemporary
perspectives on gender in jazz drawn from interviews with young working musicians.
When Williams is held up as a culture hero who did or could solve the problem of
gender inequity in jazz, the message is often, as Wachhorst noted of Edison in the
years following his death, directed toward young people, suggesting that they, espe-
cially those not identifying as male, should be interested in Williams. If Williams is
to be used as a role model, however, it is important to carefully consider what these
young audiences, especially women and girls, are supposed to take from her example
and how twenty-first-century jazz culture treats them when they do seek to follow
Williams into a life in jazz. After all, Nichole Rustin-Paschal argues that Williams’s
success in the male-dominated jazz culture of the mid-twentieth century was shaped
in part by her embrace of what Rustin-Paschal calls jazzmasculinity, “her acceptance
of a form of female masculinity, one that allowed her to acknowledge the dominant
ways of thinking about the music (that it is for men, that women are novelties) and
subvert that way of thinking through her own descriptions of her masculine style,
both as a performer and a composer.”12 When we suggest that girls follow Williams’s
lead, are we suggesting that jazz today has room for diverse voices? Or that women
who put in the extra effort of not only mastering their instruments but also master-
ing the skills necessary to thrive in a male-dominated culture should continue to be
the handful of people who ease that culture’s collective conscience by making jazz
appear diverse?
Williams As Culture Hero
Although Iverson expressed a desire to write about Williams without reference to

gender, he stated outright that his blog post was a response to the public outcry
against the Glasper interview and the fact that his writing, as he put it, had “been

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light on coverage of women.”13 His post, since deleted, contained a thoughtful analysis
of unusual key relationships in Williams’s “Nite Life” and a transcription of a 1939
recording of “Little Joe from Chicago,” but he made clear that his motivation for
writing about her at that time was to add gender diversity to his blog in response
to heavy public criticism. While the post elicited positive responses from some, like
saxophonist Caroline Davis, who thanked Iverson on Twitter, for others it fell short of
atoning for Iverson and Glasper’s missteps.14 For example, a few months after Iverson
and Glasper apologized, the controversy it provoked still carried enough weight to
inspire a lengthy and widely read blog post by young vibraphonist and New School
student Sasha Berliner entitled “An Open Letter to Ethan Iverson (And the Rest of
the Jazz Patriarchy).”15 Her six-thousand-word essay detailing her own struggles with
sexual harassment and negative gender stereotypes was referenced in the New York
Times in an article declaring 2017 a “year of reckoning” for women in jazz.16 Not long
afterward, a group of female and nonbinary jazz and improvisatory musicians formed
the We Have Voice collective to create a code of conduct for professional settings,
asking others to sign on to create safe(r) workplaces for musicians. These efforts
arose in response to the #MeToo movement and other gender discrimination cases
that, alongside the Iverson and Glasper discussion, received national press coverage
in 2017 and early 2018.17 In the present moment, public discourse about Williams is
very frequently linked to larger conversations about women in jazz, either to celebrate
their presence or to take a stand against their underrepresentation or mistreatment.
The twenty-first century certainly does not mark the first appearance of Wil-
liams in widely shared public conversations on jazz. Holding up Williams as the
iconic example of the female jazz instrumentalist has a long history, though what
her example stands for has varied considerably depending on context. For example,
an early public image of Williams emerged through coverage of her career in the
African American press in the mid-1930s and early 1940s (during her period with the
Andy Kirk band), which frequently presented her as an outstanding example of black
female success. In 1936, Williams was called “the only woman pianist now working
in a first-class sepia band” and “one of the few women musicians travelling with
colored bands,” descriptions in which the combination of her race and gender was
used to frame her as exceptional.18 She was recognized as excellent, but often in an
explicitly gendered manner, in phrases and appellations such as “America’s outstand-
ing feminine pianist,” “the greatest woman pianist in the world,” “First Lady of the
Piano and lively Queen of the Ivories,” and “the greatest woman swing pianist in the
game.”19 These descriptions also at times pointed to what Rustin-Paschal would later
label Williams’s jazzmasculinity, like one describing Williams as “The ‘Tom Boy’ of
Piano Pickers” who “has the rare drive and force at the piano which is characteristic
of male pianists.”20 Williams was even presented as a black female champion over one
of her popular white male counterparts in the swing era, with one writer claiming:

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“Mary Lou Williams of Kirk’s unit, highest ranking jazz pianist in the world, has Jess
Stacey, Goodman’s white ivory tickler, sitting up nights. She wore out every note of
one of Pete Johnson’s best boogie-woogie piano solos—and Stacey hasn’t yet been
able to play it.”21 Marking Stacey’s whiteness in this passage coupled with the choice
not to comment explicitly on Williams’s gender shows that her image at the time
could also be put to the rhetorical purpose of representing African American people
more broadly rather than black women or female instrumentalists in particular. In
the earliest coverage of her rise to national and then international notoriety, journal-
ists often used Williams’s gender, race, or intersectional identity as a black woman
as frames that mythologized her as a singular phenomenon.
Tracing Williams’s reception through other periods of her life and career, such
as work as a soloist and leader of her own groups after leaving Kirk’s band, her focus
on religious music, or her time teaching at Duke University, would reveal other
variations in her public identity and the representational power of her narratives in
alignment with surrounding cultural trends. Shifting our attention now to depictions
of Williams since around the turn of the twenty-first century will help set up the
mythology at play leading up to her appearance in the Iverson-Glasper controversy
and the #MeToo movement. It is not unusual for Mary Lou Williams to figure
prominently in contemporary discussions of women in jazz; she was mentioned in
Berliner’s blog post and her name and its attendant mythologies continues to show
up in women in jazz events and programming. Iverson is far from alone in discuss-
ing Williams largely as a gendered culture hero—I have written elsewhere of Jazz at
Lincoln Center’s Mary Lou Williams centennial concert hosted by tennis star and
feminist icon Billie Jean King, for example, that framed her induction to their jazz
hall of fame primarily in reference to her gender.22 As Iverson suggested when he
wrote that Williams is often “treated as a black woman first and as an artist second,”
while different narratives may emphasize her race and gender to different degrees,
one or both are typically explicitly marked.
An important arena in which Williams’s status as twenty-first-century culture
hero stands out is in representations of her as a role model for young women and
girls. While some elements of the Williams mythology that emerged in the African
American press of the 1930s recur in these twenty-first-century retellings, new pur-
poses for that story shape the details that are cast as most important. For example,
a recent concert in the Jazz for Young People series at Jazz at Lincoln Center titled
“Who Is Mary Lou Williams?” advertised that “families will learn the inspiring tale of
a young woman who realized her dreams through determination, imagination, incred-
ible talent, and a famously big heart.”23 This description focuses on elements of her
biography that present her as an appropriate person for children to aspire to emulate.
The reference to “incredible talent” certainly parallels the stories told in the thirties of
Williams the exceptional black female celebrity. Yet those earlier accounts were also

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more likely to emphasize her physical beauty than her kindness or grit, calling her
“lovely” or a “Western beauty” rather than a determined high achiever.24 No longer
a young female star to be enjoyed in part as a physical spectacle, the Williams of the
twenty-first century (like the Thomas Edison of the late twentieth century) has made
a transition from living subject of public consumption to, in part, posthumous icon
presented as a role model for young people. Specifically, the children who are called
to emulate Williams are girls. Jazz at Lincoln Center also held a piano competition
during her centennial year for girls fifteen and under called “Are You the Next Mary
Lou Williams?,” an event that asked quite directly for young girls to follow in Wil-
liams’s musical footsteps by learning and playing her music.25 In addition to departing
from earlier descriptions of Williams by prioritizing hard work over glamour, these
Jazz at Lincoln Center events all emphasize her gender more than her racial identity.
Here, Williams as woman functions as a diversity culture hero for an institution that
has been criticized for underrepresenting women, but her African American identity
is not as prominent in their rhetoric. This is particularly noteworthy given the in-
stitution’s history of centering black artists to the point of being accused at times of
racially discriminatory hiring and programming practices.26 Similarly, in the context
of the Iverson-Glasper interview controversy, Williams’s gender is the primary focal
point of her identity. Although race was a factor in Glasper’s comments, his surprise
stemmed not just from seeing women listen to Iverson’s music, but “Euro chicks.”
Implicit within the conversation was the notion that blackness is framed as more
rather than less authoritative than whiteness within jazz culture, an assumption that
set up Iverson’s follow-up post on Williams to identify her gender, not her race, as
the significant barrier overcome in earning jazz-specific respect.
A pair of recent books for young readers also participates in the trend of my-
thologizing Williams as a role model for girls, but it does so in a more racially marked
manner. While conversations in jazz circles are more likely to assume a black racial
identity as advantageous in establishing authenticity and credibility in this historically
African American genre—though also acknowledging issues of racism that have im-
pacted and continued to impact musicians of color in their everyday lives—the world
of children’s books has an opposite history in which black central characters remain
more difficult to find than their frequently depicted white counterparts. In the first
decade of the twenty-first century, stories by and about people of color accounted
for only about 10 percent of the approximately five thousand new children’s books
available in the United States each year.27 Especially given that female characters have
historically also been underrepresented in children’s literature, it makes sense that
the Mary Lou Williams of these books has a more explicitly intersectional identity.28
The Little Piano Girl by Ann Ingalls and Maryann Macdonald, published in 2010, is
a picture book illustrated by Giselle Potter, and Sarah Bruce Kelly’s Jazz Girl from
the same year is a young adult novel.29 As the titles indicate, both books emphasize

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the significance of Williams’s gender, and both depict events in her childhood as
related in Dahl’s Morning Glory, ending their stories where Williams’s professional
career began with successful entrance into a life of jazz performance presented as a
triumphant happily ever after. The final chapter of Kelly’s novel is entitled “Jazz Is
Love,” and the fictionalized Williams narrates the resolution to a childhood strug-
gling against poverty, racism, and a difficult family life by declaring, “I knew jazz
would always be my most faithful friend. It would live in my heart forever, and it
would save me.”30 Similarly, the Williams in the Ingalls and Macdonald picture book
successfully launches herself into a jazz career where she “banish[es] the bad sounds”
of her childhood struggles with racism by moving on to consort “with all the Kings
and Dukes and Earls of jazz.”31 Framed as a Cinderella figure who goes from being
mocked at school for her old and ill-fitting shoes to a fashionable woman who buys
her own beautiful ones with the proceeds of her successful career, jazz fills the place
originally held by Prince Charming. In both stories, jazz is presented as a goal, a hero,
and a safe space for a young woman lifting herself out of a life of discrimination and
hardship, a version of Williams’s coming of age that spotlights its fairy-tale qualities
while leaving its darker realities unmentioned.32
Following the Women-in-Jazz Pioneer?
The story told in these children’s books is certainly inspiring, but it is worth asking
what awaits the next generation of “jazz girls” who take up the challenge to be “the
next Mary Lou Williams.” Is, as Kelly’s version of Williams asserts, jazz really “love”
for young women seeking a place in the world as jazz instrumentalists? So much
of the twenty-first century mythology of Williams is wrapped up in her potential
as a role model to grow female participation in jazz that it is worth considering
what the recent and present jazz scene looks like for those who might be inspired
by such an example. Music education research by Katherine McKeage and Erin
Wehr-Flowers helps paint a picture of the jazz culture that young women musicians
encountered in the early years of the twenty-first century. McKeage’s 2004 study of
628 undergraduate musicians found that gender imbalance in jazz began early only
to become dramatically more pronounced as students got older. According to her
survey, 80 percent of male college band participants played jazz in high school, and
only 52 percent of female players did. Perhaps even more significant is the number
of female instrumentalists who played jazz in high school but did not continue in
college despite continuing in instrumental music. McKeage writes, “The attrition rate
for women between high school and college jazz was dramatic. While 62% of men
who played jazz in high school played in college, only 26% of women who played
in high school attempted jazz in college.”33 Wehr-Flowers suggests a possible reason
for this significant drop-off, pointing out that while “research thus far has failed to
find differences in the skills of males and females in the field of jazz improvisation,”

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her own studies “indicate that females are significantly less confident, more anxious,
and have less self-efficacy . . . towards learning jazz improvisation.”34 Participants
in McKeage’s study cited instrument choice, lack of time, not seeing jazz in their
career futures, and the lack of comfort described by Wehr-Flowers as reasons for
leaving jazz behind. As McKeage summarizes, “In jazz, women must not only master
their instrument, but must negotiate a place within a traditionally male-dominated
field.”35 In short, due to existing gender patterns, succeeding as jazz instrumentalists
is more work for young women than it is for young men. Now more than a decade
since McKeage’s study, high-profile college jazz programs continue to have very low
female enrollment. Young trombonist Kalia Vandever wrote in “Token Girl,” an
article for the popular blog host Medium, that during her time as a Juilliard student
from 2013 to 2017, there were two to three women in a jazz program of forty to fifty
total students.36 Sasha Berliner describes similar numbers at the nearby Manhattan
School of Music, and both she and Vandever write of struggling not only to master
their instruments but also to combat gender stereotypes and sexual harassment.
These recent examples echo the types of challenges suggested in McKeage’s and
Wehr-Flowers’s research, showing how these institutionalized issues continue to
affect young women in the field.37 Girls and young women do need powerful role
models, but they also need a supportive environment in which to follow those role
models unless we are satisfied with a culture in which each and every woman must
face the same obstacles as those who came before her. Gender imbalance in jazz thus
perpetuates more gender imbalance in jazz.
While McKeage’s and Wehr-Flowers’s research points to the added effort neces-
sary for young women to pursue jazz training, Yoko Suzuki’s writing on female jazz
saxophonists traces some of the ways that extra work continues in the early stages of
women’s professional careers. Although much of Williams’s portrayal as culture hero
comes from the way in which she symbolizes diversity within the jazz canon, musi-
cians interviewed by Suzuki discussed a common pressure women feel to avoid actually
sounding any different from the men who make up the predominate jazz culture. Ac-
cording to Suzuki, “It can be said that various elements regarding improvisation and
its styles are associated with masculinity and femininity.”38 She points out that some
of her female informants felt considerable pressure, especially early in their careers, to
demonstrate the ability to play aggressively, quickly, and with sophisticated harmonic
approaches in order to show themselves to be proficient, whether those musical ap-
proaches were musically satisfying to them or not. Suzuki writes, “The need to ‘prove
oneself’ seems to obsess both men and women in the early stages of their career, however,
women feel more pressure to prove that they can play strong because they are more
likely to be labeled as musicians who ‘play like a girl.’”39 As saxophonist Sharel Cas-
sity told Suzuki, “A lot of times, I’d like to leave more space. I don’t like to dominate
everything all the time. But they think that they [bandleaders] need to push me to do
that [play aggressively] because I’m a woman and I’m probably very timid.”40 In Suzuki’s

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words, “Cassity thus sometimes performs ‘masculinity’ in order to meet the expectations
from bandleaders.”41 In professional jazz settings, women are allowed their minority
gender identities in proportion to their perceived success in establishing masculinity
in their musical identities. This echoes Rustin-Paschal’s assessment of Williams and
other female jazz musicians active during the mid-twentieth century as “female jazzmen
[who] thrived in this homosocial culture by embracing the aggression, competition,
arrogance, discipline, and creativity associated with men—and, at times, ‘doing’ it better
than men.”42 To play with men, they must equal or beat them at their own game, not
sound as though their music maps onto feminine stereotypes of gentleness or timidity
or provides genuine sonic difference as a result of their different identities, experiences,
or perspectives.
Sherrie Tucker describes this process of giving jazz nominal diversity through
the presence of women without actually creating sustained changes in the gendered
nature of the music’s predominate culture as “adding in” the women, a type of “ex-
clusionary inclusion” that by its very nature must be constantly repeated. She writes
of “the conundrum of women-in-jazz—a category that has endured in one way or
another throughout the history of jazz, and a category that is endured by many women
jazz musicians and their allies, many of whom would prefer it would go away—if only
if it didn’t threaten to take them with it.”43 In Tucker’s analysis, women involved in
jazz cannot avoid the cordoned-off category she calls “women-in-jazz.” Whether they
set out to fight a battle against entrenched gender imbalance or simply to be involved
in the music in any capacity while happening to be female, any women connecting
with jazz will be heard from certain angles as a part of a women-in-jazz subfield, a
category that simultaneously stands for the genre’s diversity on the surface while only
existing because of that diversity’s shallow nature. The existence of women-in-jazz is
only noteworthy because there are so few women in jazz. In Tucker’s words:
Among the many things I have learned while explicitly not doing women-in-
jazz inclusion work, is that no matter what I think I am doing, or what I say I
am doing, I am always, at some level, doing women-in-jazz inclusion work. The
bottom line is this: so long as women and jazz are both on the table, I am work-
ing, in part, in the woman-in-jazz conundrum. Thinking I am doing race and
gender analysis of jazz discourse, and, in fact, doing it, doesn’t change the fact
(indeed, it explains it) that what I say I am doing in my work is not the same as
what my work does. Within a discourse in which jazz is democratic and women
are either absent or added in, to speak of women instrumentalists (or even to
make room for their presence) is to diversify an institution that values diversity
but defines it differently.44
While Tucker is describing her experiences as a scholar, much of what she says can be
applied to the female instrumentalists she studies. Just as Tucker cannot get around
a situation in which “the main feedback [she] hear[s about her scholarship] is how

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exciting it was to learn that there were women musicians in jazz history,” despite
numerous earlier efforts by other scholars to document the many women involved in
jazz since its earliest occurrences, women who play jazz cannot choose to avoid the
women-in-jazz category; they cannot choose whether their performances are heard
and seen in terms of their gender.45 Williams was and is no exception. As Tucker
writes, “This image of lone pioneer continues to haunt her legacy in representations of
jazz history. And represented she is—often as the exceptional woman in an otherwise
man’s world of jazz history, even though Williams, herself, respected and worked
with other women musicians under conditions of her own choosing.”46 Discussing
Williams and her legacy in contemporary contexts engages with the women-in-jazz
conundrum, but engaging the category often means reframing a persistent problem,
not necessarily solving it.
Gender in the Jazz Workplace
To look at the problem of adding women to jazz from another angle, I turn to litera-
ture on tokenism and critical mass in other male-dominated industries. Writing on
academia in the 1970s, Judith Long Laws defined tokenism as “the means by which
the dominant group advertises a promise of mobility between the dominant and
excluded classes. By definition, however, tokenism involves mobility which is severely
restricted in quantity, and the quality of mobility is severely restricted as well.”47 In
other words, the occasional token woman in jazz is symbolic of diversity, but has
too little real power on her own to change the culture that excludes other women
and curtails her own full participation in the scene. She is granted the appearance
of equality without an equal share of power within her field. While early ideas of
correctives for the problem of tokenism focused on simply increasing the proportion
of women in male-dominated fields until a critical mass turned the tide of gendered
expectations, by the 1980s, Lynn Zimmer and others were criticizing this strategy
as unproven and insufficient for resolving workplace power imbalances. As Zimmer
writes: “Without evidence of a causal link between relative numbers and occupational
consequences, there is no reason to assume that increasing the number of women
in an organization will necessarily improve their conditions of employment. It may
even be the case that increasing the number of women, without addressing the sex-
ist attitudes imbedded in male-dominated organizations, may exacerbate women’s
occupational problems.”48 Indeed, Zimmer’s critiques have largely been borne out
in subsequent studies. A recent summary of the research on critical mass compiled
as part of a discussion of integrating women into the Marine Corps Infantry states,
“A reoccurring theme within the critical mass literature is the complete rejection of
the idea that gender proportions, in and of themselves, influence patterns of gender
interactions.”49 Looking at this information in the context of jazz, it is important

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to consider the likely possibility that a growing collection of “The Next Mary Lou
Williamses” cannot on their own change the conditions that have made the master
female jazz instrumentalist a rare and paradoxical figure.
Catherine Turco’s 2010 work on what she calls the “cultural foundations of
tokenism” in the leveraged buyout industry—a field in which firms buy corporations
with borrowed funds to later sell them for a profit—points to possible explanations
for the disappearance of female instrumentalists in jazz as they mature and begin
professional careers. Turco takes Zimmer’s critique of tokenism a step further, ar-
guing that it is not just broad societal issues like sexism or racism that define the
experience of minority participants in a given field, but the specific internal culture
of that field itself. In interviewing both women and African American men in a field
largely populated and controlled by white men, Turco found the experiences of the
two minority groups to be quite distinct. “I argue that the local cultural context
in which tokenism is embedded explains these differences,” Turco writes. “Many
women enter the LBO [leveraged buyout] industry lacking cultural resources that
are highly valued within it . . . while African American men, on average, enter the
industry with a greater stock of these valued resources, enabling them to bond more
easily with majority colleagues and to better integrate into the workplace.”50 She goes
on to say “that through a hierarchy of cultural resources and an ideal worker image,
an occupation’s culture can define even ostensibly irrelevant factors . . . as relevant
to its work.”51 It would go against the very nature of Turco’s work to paint directly
the challenges for women she identifies as specific to the LBO world onto women
in jazz. Yet, I am struck by the parallels between the image of an ideal LBO worker
described in Turco’s article and the description of traits necessary for a successful
twentieth-century jazz career written by Williams biographer Linda Dahl. According
to Turco’s findings, the ideal LBO investor is generally coded as male because he is
perceived to be aggressive and fully committed to his career above family life. Of jazz
musicians, Dahl writes: “Clearly, the qualities needed to get ahead in the jazz world
were held to be ‘masculine’ prerogatives: aggressive self-confidence on the bandstand,
. . . [and] a single-minded attention to career moves, including frequent absences
from home and family.”52 Rustin-Paschal similarly notes that ideal jazz workers are
coded as male, writing, “They are black men embodying ideals of manhood (that
is, they are self-determining) and masculinity (such as their capacity for expressing
emotional or metaphysical states like being cool, or spiritual, or defiant).”53
Turco further notes how traits that ostensibly have nothing to do with work
create barriers to women’s success in the LBO field by conflicting with the ideal worker
image. For example, women with children are often seen as incapable of achieving
the ideal worker’s total commitment to the job because of their family responsibili-
ties, even when they take extreme measures to counter stereotypes by doing things
like working on the day of a scheduled C-section or taking conference calls in the

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delivery room.54 Turco also discusses women’s challenges in finding equal footing
in the workplace due to their lack of interest or expertise in masculine-coded, non-
work-related socializing during or after hours, specifically with regard to sports as a
model for the aggression idealized in the industry. While motherhood and a lack of
interest in sports have no direct bearing on a woman’s ability to secure an investment
deal, they do impact her ability to earn the trust and respect of her colleagues in ways
that would make her professional life both easier and more successful. No matter
how many women enter industries in which masculine-coded traits are perceived as
ideal, they continue to experience additional challenges in their professional lives,
as numerical equity does not necessarily result in an equal share of power.
It is with this idea of the ideal worker in mind that I return to Williams, Iver-
son, and Glasper. For all that we hold up Williams as a culture hero representing
women in jazz, she described herself as playing, “heavy, like a man,” in other words
as sonically embodying the masculine aggression of the ideal jazz worker stereotype.55
It is not my purpose here to call out Iverson, Glasper, or even Williams as sexist.56
For, as Ahmed writes in reference to race, “The reduction of racism to the figure
of ‘the racist’ allows structural or institutional forms of racism to recede from view,
by projecting racism onto a figure that is easily discarded.”57 To label Iverson and
Glasper sexists is an oversimplification that puts the full problem of their conversation
firmly in their own hands, quietly vindicating the rest of jazz culture in the process
by allowing the impression that there is not a gender problem in jazz, but simply an
Iverson and Glasper problem, which is much smaller and more easily solved through
punishment of the two scapegoats. Both Iverson and Glasper have, in fact, been
outspoken on issues of social justice in other arenas, and Iverson self-identifies as a
feminist. Extending Ahmed’s arguments, this is exactly what is most disconcerting
about the Iverson-Glasper interview: rather than functioning as rogue sexists in an
otherwise unproblematic culture, Iverson and Glasper were discussing their work in
terms that are normative enough within the shared culture of the jazz workplace that
even these two relatively progressive individuals could not initially see any problems
with the conversation they had, transcribed, reviewed, and published, even in the
early days of the critical response.
The concept of the moral credential effect as described by psychologists Ben-
oît Monin and Dale T. Miller offers a useful means of understanding this delayed
recognition of a misstep by both Iverson and Glasper. To define moral credentials,
Monin and Miller use the following example: “The more a man has shown that he
is not a sexist, the less he will fear that his current behavior might be attributed to
sexism and the more comfortable he will be expressing a pro-male attitude.”58 In
the unfolding controversy, Iverson at one point defended his choice to publish the
unedited Glasper interview by writing, “I’m enthralled by the intellectual power
of women. I didn’t communicate that in the interview, maybe I should have, but

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poke around [the blog], the proof of that assertion is there.”59 Similarly, in Glasper’s
apology on social media, he first described his preexisting and ongoing respect for
women before acknowledging that he had said something harmful, writing, “Women
are my teachers, co-conspirators and collaborators. I learned music from a woman:
my mom was a musician—she is the reason I do what I do.”60 Iverson and Glasper
both attempt to establish past credentials of respect for women in order to assert
that their present behavior should not be read as sexist. In Monin and Miller’s study,
they found that participants who were asked to make two hypothetical hires for a
company were more likely to choose a man for a stereotypically male position de-
spite lesser qualifications if they had already selected a female candidate for another
job. Similarly, they were more willing to voice the opinion that a particular job was
better suited to a man if they had previously been given the opportunity to disagree
with blatantly sexist statements. Demonstrably, nonsexist behavior in one endeavor
was used as the basis for a nonsexist self-image, then allowing individuals a sense of
moral leeway that they used to excuse future instances of sexist behavior in other
endeavors.
Labeling Iverson and Glasper as sexists or nonsexists is not a viable solution
to the problems of sexism and gender inequality in jazz, but noticing what they
said, the context in which they said it, and the rhetoric they used to first defend and
then apologize for their actions is instructive. The Iverson-Glasper interview struck
a nerve because it made the homosocial masculine culture of the music so starkly
visible, opening a conversation between the two men into a broad, mix-gendered
discursive space. The fact that the explicitly gendered comments constituted one
brief moment in an otherwise unmarked musical conversation does not make it less
significant. Rather, it emphasizes the degree to which heteronormative masculinity
and jazz musicianship are culturally linked. The artists involved are not just talking
about women in isolation, they are talking about women in relationship to how
they perceive their own musicianship. The fact that both men apologized for giving
unanticipated offense points to the fact that conversations like this one are not out-
side of the realm of normal. The fact that Iverson then chose to reinsert Mary Lou
Williams into the conversation at this particular moment demonstrates the extent
to which her story, image, and music can be used as a moral credential, establishing
jazz as a nonsexist genre and thereby excusing any present and future wrongs.
Women’s Work
To further explore the role of gender in shaping the jazz workplace, the following
offers perspectives of two young professionals currently navigating jazz culture as
composer-instrumentalists, Alexa Tarantino and Nick Finzer. Of particular interest
here are their experiences with the social aspects of their professional lives. Build-

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ing from Turco’s work, I want to consider jazz as a field of employment and think
about the role of social interaction in defining the opportunities and barriers met
by individual workers. In his study of the New York City jazz scene, Travis Jackson
writes about “hanging” as an important aspect of how musicians form professional
networks, a process through which “one’s place in the scene is confirmed when one
is recognized as part of the scene and included in conversations.”61 While Jackson
rightly adds the caveats that players who don’t hang socially can still be valued and
that issues of race, gender, and sexuality alone are not the only factors that define
social groups within a jazz scene, they also “form bases on which boundaries can
be constructed that include or exclude certain musicians.”62 Jackson points out that
musicians are also often united through geographical origins, generation, and the
schools they attend. With this in mind, I turn now to Tarantino and Finzer, two
musicians who are close in age, studied in the same schools, and proceeded to pursue
freelance careers based in New York City, to note ways in which their work experiences
differ due to gender. While both expressed commitment to the inclusion of women
in jazz workplaces, both also made comments that acknowledge the increased effort
required to create and work in mixed-gender ensembles.
Both Tarantino and Finzer were familiar with the Iverson-Glasper interview
and resulting backlash prior to our conversations, and their responses highlight an
aspect of minority experience theorized by Ahmed. When a worker within a minority
group encounters a problem based in racism or sexism, that person often becomes
responsible for pointing out and explaining the problem to a dominant culture that
may not even see it due to a position of greater privilege that prevents the problem
from impacting the majority, a task that requires considerable diplomatic effort. In
Ahmed’s words, “It is not noticeable . . . until you point it out, becoming a feminist
killjoy, making a sore point, being a sore point, assumed to be sore because of your
point.”63 While both were critical of Glasper’s comments and Iverson’s response (or
lack thereof ), Tarantino’s response was consistent with a trend I noted throughout
our conversation of seeking to understand and articulate the position of the domi-
nant group carefully and in as positive a light as possible before offering critique.
This approach thus tempered her appearance as a “sore point” even while relaying a
perspective from outside the dominant culture of her field. Responding to Glasper’s
description of the “musical clitoris,” she said:
I understand both sides of people’s arguments. Like people will say music is art,
part of our humanity, and you can relate it, boil it all down to human desire or
whatever, sex and love and everything, and groove. I understand how it can all
be . . . connected. But in terms of an interview that’s going public, I’m just not
sure that that was totally necessary, especially the way that it was addressed so gen-
erally . . . I can see that maybe he didn’t mean it that way . . . and I think that if
the interviewer had been a woman, he wouldn’t have said that type of thing.64

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Tarantino’s generous and subtle response to Glasper’s words was gently phrased,
avoiding a hostile tone despite her implication of the inappropriate nature of the
comments by suggesting they may have been misread or accidental.
While Finzer also found the tone of the Glasper “musical clitoris” comment
inappropriate, when asked about other instances of discussing music in gendered
terms like asking musicians to “play with balls” in order to get them to play louder or
more aggressively, he was initially surprised that I would make a connection between
the two ideas: “When you just said that, I hadn’t really considered the gender—not
ramifications, but the innate bias, biases of that statement, but that’s definitely some-
thing that’s said pretty often. So in that way, then, I guess, yes, there is a lot of that.” 65
As a woman, Tarantino’s response to Glasper carefully points out how male-to-male
musical descriptions relying on gendered language and stereotypes form a wall that
is not necessarily apparent to male players. As a man, Finzer can avoid running up
against or even seeing the same wall.
In addition to discussing the Iverson-Glasper interview, I talked with both
players about their experiences navigating gender issues in professional situations.
Both have worked in bands with both male and female leaders, in ensembles that
are gender segregated, and in mixed-gender ensembles. Tarantino and Finzer have
both substituted with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, of particular interest
due to the high public visibility of that ensemble, Artistic Director Wynton Mar-
salis’s rhetorical framing of jazz as democratic and diverse, and critiques of a lack
of genuine diversity within the organization, particularly with regard to gender, by
Tracy McMullen and others.66 The band has recently hired more female substitutes,
Tarantino among them, yet has never had a woman as a full-time member. Taran-
tino describes the experience of touring with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra
as quite distinct from her experiences in working in the all-female DIVA big band:
[When I was] the only female . . . with Wynton’s band, I had the luxury my
own dressing room . . . I’m usually down the hall, so all the guys are together in
one room and I’m on my own. That was interesting to navigate, because on one
hand, I loved having my own dressing room . . . But it is easy to isolate yourself
in that situation. I made a point of not spending all my time in my dressing
room and choosing to socialize with the guys in the hallway and backstage. I
was so grateful that they were all warm, welcoming, and respectful to me.
Conversely, when touring with all women, Tarantino says: “It almost feels like I’m
going on a vacation with my girlfriends. . . . When I started touring with DIVA, I
realized, ‘Wow! I’m so excited to go to this gig this weekend!’ . . . And I was think-
ing . . . this is what the guys feel like all the time when they realize that they’re going
to go out with their friends like one big hang.” For Tarantino, there is an ease and
comfort in working in all-female ensembles that she does not experience in work-

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ing with primarily male bands. “I feel a lot of collaboration in [female bands]. It’s
not to say that I don’t feel that in situations where it’s mostly male, but . . . it can
be kind of a boy’s club. I don’t mind being one of the guys. I like being one of the
guys, but something about being in the more female atmosphere is just kind of like
a breath of fresh air.” While Tarantino described the other band members in the Jazz
at Lincoln Center Orchestra as “all very warm and welcoming and inclusive,” gender
dynamics do have a noteworthy impact on how she experiences social interactions in
work situations, as can be seen in the way she describes going out of her way to be
sure to socialize with her all-male coworkers and feeling gratitude that they accept
her—inclusion and acceptance is worthy of remark, not assumed.
Finzer’s descriptions of working with all-male versus gender-integrated groups
echoes Tarantino’s in pointing out that both men and women find themselves mak-
ing a conscious effort to accommodate each other: “When it’s all guys . . . they edit
themselves less when they’re speaking. . . . They don’t think about what they’re saying
as much. But then it seems like a lot of women kind of . . . try to adopt that type
of [more explicit] language . . . to try to make [the men] more comfortable or just
to try to . . . fit in. . . . Maybe they adapt their way of being to reflect men around
[them].” Tarantino describes some of the effort of trying to fit in without causing a
disruption when discussing her experiences playing with groups in which she is the
only woman or one of very few.
A lot of people sometimes try to treat me like a “lady,” which is like nice, I
guess, but they really don’t need to, because I can swear too, and I can talk
about sex, too. I don’t care. I’m not easily offended, I don’t think. And I don’t
think that they should have to censor themselves. . . . Sometimes I find that I
have to assure people that I’m okay with conversation, but I respect that that’s
their default mode, that obviously they don’t want to offend. But sometimes I
wish that, I don’t know—I don’t know which way I want it. Like, I don’t know
if I would just rather have them openly say this nasty stuff, or dirty stuff, and
I’m cool with it, either way, cause it’s just a conversation. Or, I can’t decide if I
would want them to say like, “Oh, I don’t know if I should say this out loud.”
You know? Because I don’t want to be the person that inconveniences the con-
versation. I don’t like that.
Tarantino describes here a situation in which she must make effort of one kind or
another to navigate the social world of her workplace. She can either choose to pro-
actively assure her colleagues that their language and behavior is something she can
join despite gender stereotypes that suggest otherwise, or she will be, as she phrases
it, “the person that inconveniences the conversation.” As Ahmed writes of these types
of moments when a person is noted as not fitting in one way or another within the
dominant culture of their profession, “There is a labor in having to respond to a
situation that others are protected from, a situation that does not come up for those

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whose residence is assumed. Do you point it out? Do you say anything? Will you
cause a problem by describing a problem? Past experience tells you that to make a
such a point is to become a sore point.”67 While Tarantino describes herself as “not
easily offended,” women who find themselves unwilling to accept a culture in pre-
dominantly male jazz groups that includes sexually explicit or gendered language
in musical conversations like the one between Glasper and Iverson may find that
they do, as Ahmed writes, “become sore points” or “feminist killjoys.” When I asked
Finzer if he had noticed any female colleagues experience professional challenges as
a result of critiquing existing gender dynamics in jazz, he said, “I can definitely see
it playing out in kind of a negative way for a few people. . . . I definitely think that
some people don’t want to express their opinions because they’re afraid of ramifica-
tions.” While male jazz musicians may choose to make an extra effort to make their
professional situations more gender inclusive, female musicians must choose between
different types of added effort, either that of fitting in or that of critiquing the status
quo (and also accepting any additional challenges and effort that might result from
that critique).
The importance of interpersonal relationships in shaping who enters and suc-
ceeds in the jazz scene begins long before young players reach the professional level.
Finzer noted that all of the faculty members he had studied with in the jazz depart-
ments of the two universities were male, and Tarantino commented, “I’m not sure
that women always get the same education that men do in the jazz field.” To further
explain, she continued:
People take students under their wings or whatever, and with everything going
on as far as sexual harassment and all these movements, I can understand that
educators would possibly be walking on eggshells with their female students.
Like wanting to do the right thing and make sure they’re being respectful and
appropriate, but then there’s the flip side of it, like some female students may be
at a disadvantage because maybe that teacher doesn’t feel comfortable spending
an hour after school giving private lessons one-on-one. Or maybe it’s not that
they feel uncomfortable, but maybe they’re more inclined to do those things . . .
for male students.
In explaining why she believes the attrition rate for female jazz students is so high,
Tarantino stated, “I think it’s hard for young women to see themselves moving for-
ward because of the lack of female role models.”
While Mary Lou Williams as culture hero is in some ways being employed
to fill this gap, a historical figure like Williams may not be who young female jazz
students most need in the early stages of their education. McKeage noted in her
study of undergraduate participation in jazz ensembles that students have varied
and complex relationships to female role models. “The impact of role models on
women’s decisions produced conflicting results. While there was a moderate associa-

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tion between the studio teacher’s encouragement and participation in jazz, there was
no association identified between jazz influences and participation.”68 While studio
teachers are often the most important role models for college music students and
provide direct connection and mentorship, a historical artist held up to prove that
women can play jazz may have less of an impact on the success of young women
who need guidance and support as they navigate a challenging music with the added
challenges of their outsider status. Indeed, when asked about her own role models,
Tarantino named fellow saxophonist Erica von Kleist. Tarantino first heard then-
teenage von Kleist when they were students in the same Connecticut school system,
and Tarantino is currently pursuing a master’s degree at Juilliard, where von Kleist
was in the first-ever class of jazz students. Tarantino remembers seeing von Kleist
play and saying, “I want to do that!” Conversely, of Williams, she commented, “I
don’t feel this connection to her. I mean, maybe if she was a saxophonist, I would
feel differently . . . I respect her and her work.” Tarantino described getting to know
Williams’s history and music with enthusiasm, but not seeing herself or her possible
future career through Williams in the same way she could through contemporary
players of her own instrument and background.
Just as having common ground with a role model helps an aspiring player
connect with jazz as a possible profession, connections within professional jazz per-
formance can often come more easily between players who share significant ele-
ments of their identities. In addition to noting the relative social ease of working
in gender-segregated groups, both Tarantino and Finzer also discussed the tension
they feel between wanting to consider racial and gender diversity in putting together
bands they lead while also hiring musicians with whom they feel a musical affinity.
As Finzer asked, “What happens when you start to say that you have to have these
types of people in the group, and when does that interfere with the musical choices
you make in terms of musical personalities?” Tarantino described a concrete example
of this situation with regard to a recent gig at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Dizzy’s Club
in which she originally attempted to put together a group that included both gender
and racial diversity in the side people she hired: “I thought about who I could hire.
I wanted to get a woman in the band, and [with] people’s schedules and everything,
it just didn’t work out. And the band that I got was incredible, and I want to use
them moving forward, but now I’m kind of like, wow, should I have a woman? Am
I being a hypocrite for not having a female or an African American person in my
band?” Due to scheduling constraints, Tarantino ended up working with a group of
all white men, and she now expresses conflicting feelings on who she wants to play
with in the future, as the group was particularly musically satisfying to perform with
but does not represent the diversity she would like to see in the jazz world. To favor
diversity over repeating a successful musical experience from her past, Tarantino
would have to make a decision to make a change that comes with risk, less comfort,
and more work. As can be seen in the careful way she navigates difficult gender

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dynamics while building a career in a challenging and competitive field, Tarantino

is already doing an awful lot of work.
Conclusion
The way we talk about Mary Lou Williams today shows us not a jazz culture that is
genuinely gender diverse, but one that is beginning to grapple with a lack of diver-
sity. As Ahmed writes, “The reproduction of a category can happen at the moment
in which it is imagined as overcome or undone. This is why the very promise of
inclusion can be the concealment and thus extension of exclusion.”69 I by no means
intend to say that this is a moment to stop talking about Mary Lou Williams, or
even to stop talking about her as a woman, but I believe it is a moment to take stock
of how and why we talk about her, noticing when she is used as an instrument of
diversity public relations and understanding that this use of her reframes a problem
rather than solving it. The fact that we have begun to discuss jazz and gender more
frequently could make this an opportune time to do some of the risky, labor-intensive,
and uncomfortable work of pursuing the change that Williams as culture hero ap-
pears to represent. Indeed, since the #MeToo movement ignited during the fall of
2017—only a few months after the release of the Iverson-Glasper interview and a
few weeks after Sasha Berliner’s open letter to Iverson—conversations on gender
within the jazz community have taken on new urgency, as can be seen through the
founding of the We Have Voice collective and the growing publicity surrounding
it. While this group of female and nonbinary-identifying musicians are certainly
not the first to speak out on issues of gender discrimination or sexual harassment
in jazz or to seek to proactively change the culture, the timing of their project to
improve working conditions in the performing arts in alignment with widespread
discussions of similar issues in a much broader cultural space has likely aided in the
dissemination of their message. The collective’s open letter issued in December 2017
has gained more than one thousand signatures in less than a year’s time, and the code
of conduct for performing arts presenters and organizations released in May 2018 has
been adopted by approximately fifty organizations. Their letter cites #MeToo and
the coverage of sexual assault and harassment of female jazz students at the Berklee
School of Music by male professors that had come out in the Boston Globe a month
prior as motivation for speaking out. It states:
We are compelled to act, not only out of solidarity with the survivors of abuse,
but also to expose and eliminate a systemic structure that normalizes harassment
and discrimination, allowing abusers and complicit bystanders to perpetuate
these behaviors without being held accountable for their negative actions. Fur-
thermore, we recognize that our present culture is the same one that minimizes
and/or excludes artists of marginalized genders, ethnicities, sexual orientations,
and so forth from venues, festivals, teaching jobs, newspaper and magazine re-

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views. When we bring awareness to sexual violence, we are also bringing aware-
ness to this inequity and invisibility.70
Rather than looking for the women of jazz, in its history and its present, who thrived
or thrive despite a male-dominated culture, the collective here seeks to identify the
barriers that still exist, doing diversity work in Ahmed’s terms by pointing out the walls
that those from nondominant groups run into while more privileged members of the
culture may pass through without noticing. Rather than looking for the relatively few
female jazz musicians who have been seen and heard, a Mary Lou Williams or “next”
Mary Lou Williams who can check a diversity box, they raise the question of those
who remain invisible and inaudible, offering a model for promoting cultural change
based on a broad concept of inclusivity that puts less pressure on a handful of token
individuals and moves away from binary constructions of gender and racial identity.
Instead of building diversity by letting people in one at a time, the collective asks what
the music would look and sound like if no one was kept out in the first place.
We can’t have jazz that is the same now as it was and ever shall be but for the
participation of a more diverse collection of players. The participation of more women
and others from traditionally marginalized groups both will change and will require
change in the ways jazz is conceptualized, talked about, performed, and consumed.
Wanting jazz without institutionalized sexism and other forms of discrimination
means wanting jazz—the music and the culture—to be different than it is. This will
require work, imagination, and a willingness to see faults in, and let go of, parts of
the history and soundscape that currently define the music. If this work is left ex-
clusively to the relatively small number of already overburdened female or otherwise
marginalized players, both historical and contemporary, we cannot expect change
to happen swiftly. Although she has become a women-in-jazz culture hero, Mary
Lou Williams alone cannot solve jazz’s gender diversity problem. What she can do
is give us a status report on the present, as her current place in the discourse points
to work that remains to be done.
Notes
An earlier version of this project was presented at the Society for American Music’s annu-
al conference in 2018. I would like to thank Alexa Tarantino and Nick Finzer for sharing
their time and their experiences, and I am also grateful for valuable feedback from Sherrie
Tucker, Stephanie Doktor, Michael Heller, and the journal’s anonymous reviewers.
1. Ethan Iverson, “Interview with Robert Glasper,” Do the Math, accessed June 1, 2018, https://
ethaniverson.com/glasper-interview/. This interview has been removed from the blog.
2. As of this writing, Iverson has since interviewed two women, contemporary classical vio-
linist Miranda Cuckson and jazz vocalist Cecile McLorin Salvant. He also profiled pianist
Geri Allen, but he has yet to publish an interview with a female jazz instrumentalist.
3. Linda Dahl, Morning Glory: A Biography of Mary Lou Williams (New York: Pantheon,
1999); Tammy Kernodle, Soul on Soul: The Life and Music of Mary Lou Williams (Boston:
Northeastern University Press, 2004).

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4. Wyn Wachhorst, Thomas Alva Edison: An American Myth (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1981).
5. Wachhorst, Thomas Alva Edison, 3.
6. Wachhorst, Thomas Alva Edison, 3–4.
9. Sara Ahmed, On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2012), 142.
10. Ahmed, On Being Included, 143.
11. Ethan Iverson, “In Every Generation There Is a Chosen One,” Do the Math, accessed
June 1, 2018, via https://web.archive.org/web/20170311180508/https://ethaniverson.
com/2017/03/10/in-every-generation-there-is-a-chosen-one/.
12. Nichole T. Rustin, “‘Mary Lou Williams Plays Like a Man!’: Gender, Genius, and Differ-
ence in Black Music Discourse,” South Atlantic Quarterly 104, no. 3 (Summer 2005): 459.
See also Nichole Rustin-Paschal, The Kind of Man I Am: Jazzmasculinity and the World of
Charles Mingus Jr. (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2017).
13. Iverson, “In Every Generation.”
14. Caroline Davis (@caroenildavis), “Thank you @ethan_iverson I know you were saving
it!!” Twitter, March 10, 2017. Davis’s tweet and other social media posts at the time sug-
gest that Iverson’s intention to write about Williams in an upcoming book may have been
the motivation for later deleting the Williams post.
15. Sasha Berliner, “An Open Letter to Ethan Iverson (And the Rest of the Jazz Patriarchy),”
Sasha Berliner, September 21, 2017, http://www.sashaberlinermusic.com/political-and-social
-commentary-1/2017/9/21/an-open-letter-to-ethan-iverson-and-the-rest-of-jazz-patriarchy.
16. Giovanni Russonello, “For Women in Jazz, a Year of Reckoning and Recognition,” New
York Times, December 1, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/01/arts/music/year-in
-jazz-women-musicians.html.
17. Giovanni Russonello, “Women Fighting Sexism in Jazz Have a Voice. And Now, a Code
of Conduct,” New York Times, April 30, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/30/arts/
music/we-have-voice-jazz-women-metoo.html.
18. Franklin Frank, “Things Theatrical,” Capitol Plaindealer, October 4, 1936, 6; “Gloster
Current and Nightingales Make 1st Columbus Appearance,” Chicago Defender, December
12, 1936, 2.
19. Pittsburgh Courier, April 3, 1937, 22; Franklin, “Things Theatrical,” 6; “Mary Lou Wil-
liams Makes Big Musical Hit,” Plaindealer (Kansas City, KS), June 16, 1944, 5; Forriebelle
Brooks, “On the Air and In It,” Kansas American, August 27, 1937, 5.
20. “Mary Lou Williams, ‘Tom Boy’ of Piano Pickers, Called the Best,” Chicago Defender (na-
tional edition), April 28, 1945, 17.
21. “Things Theatrical,” Plaindealer (Kansas City, KS), April 9, 1937, 3.
22. Kimberly Hannon Teal, “Posthumously Live: Canon Formation at Jazz at Lincoln Center
through the Case of Mary Lou Williams,” American Music 32, no. 4 (2014): 400–22.
23. “Family Concert: Who Is Mary Lou Williams?,” Jazz at Lincoln Center, accessed February
13, 2018, http://www.jazz.org/events/t-6241/Family-Concert-Who-is-Mary-Lou-Williams/.
24. “Footlight Flickers,” Plaindealer (Kansas City, KS), October 7, 1938, 6; “Uncrowned Pia-
nist Queen,” Chicago Defender (national edition), January 23, 1937, 11.

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25. Lee Mergner, “Jazz at Lincoln Center Celebrates Mary Lou Williams Centennial,” Jazz
Times, September 23, 2009, https://jazztimes.com/news/jazz-at-lincoln-center-celebrates
-mary-lou-williams-centennial/.
26. Critics of Jazz at Lincoln Center have at times even accused the organization and, in
particular, Artistic Director Wynton Marsalis of reverse racism. See Herman S. Gray, Cul-
tural Moves: African Americans and the Politics of Representation (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2005), 40–44.
27. Maria José Botelho and Masha Kabakow Rudman, Critical Multicultural Analysis of Chil-
dren’s Literature: Mirrors, Windows, and Doors (New York: Routledge, 2009), 78–79. These
figures are drawn primarily from annual summaries by the Cooperative Children’s Book
Center at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, based mostly on titles from US publishers.
28. Janice McCabe et al., “Gender in Twentieth-Century Children’s Books: Patterns of
Disparity in Titles and Central Characters,” Gender and Society 25, no. 2 (April 2011):
197–226.
29. Ann Ingalls and Maryann Macdonald, The Little Piano Girl (Boston: Houghton Mifflin
Books for Children, 2010); Sarah Bruce Kelly, Jazz Girl (n.p.: Bel Canto Press, 2010).
30. Kelly, Jazz Girl, 194.
31. Ingalls and Macdonald, Little Piano Girl.
32. In the early years of her professional career that are framed in these children’s books as
an uncomplicated victory, Williams was subjected to intimate partner violence, sexual
assault, and attempted sexual assault on more than one occasion. See Rustin, “Mary Lou
Williams,” 456, and Dahl, Morning Glory, 36–37, 47, and 75–76.
33. Katherine M. McKeage, “Gender and Participation in High School and College Instru-
mental Jazz Ensembles,” Journal of Research in Music Education 52, no. 4 (Winter 2004):
353.
34. Erin Wehr-Flowers, “Differences between Male and Female Students’ Confidence, Anxi-
ety, and Attitude toward Learning Jazz Improvisation,” Journal of Research in Music Edu-
cation 54, no. 4 (Winter 2006): 345–47.
35. McKeage, “Gender and Participation,” 147.
36. Kalia Vandever, “Token Girl,” Medium, March 16, 2018, https://medium.com/@kalia-
mariev/token-girl-564457c86f13.
37. Berliner, “An Open Letter.”
38. Yoko Suzuki, “Gendering Musical Sound in Jazz Saxophone Performance,” in Gender and
Identity in Jazz, ed. Wolfram Knauer, Darmstadt Studies in Jazz Research 14 (Darmstadt,
Germany: Jazzinstitut Darmstadt 2016), 91.
39. Suzuki, “Gendering Musical Sound,” 92.
40. Suzuki, “Gendering Musical Sound,” 92.
41. Suzuki, “Gendering Musical Sound,” 92. Italics in original.
42. Rustin-Paschal, Kind of Man, 18.
43. Sherrie Tucker, “A Conundrum Is a Woman-in-Jazz: Enduring Improvisations on the
Categorical Exclusion of Being Included,” in Gender and Identity in Jazz, ed. Wolfram
Knauer, Darmstadt Studies in Jazz Research 14 (Darmstadt, Germany: Jazzinstitut Darm-
stadt 2016), 242. Italics in original.
44. Tucker, “Conundrum Is a Woman-in-Jazz,” 251.

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47. Judith Long Laws, “The Psychology of Tokenism: An Analysis,” Sex Roles 1 no. 1 (1975): 51.
48. Lynn Zimmer, “Tokenism and Women in the Workplace: The Limits of Gender-Neutral
Theory,” Social Problems 35, no. 1 (Feb. 1988): 64.
49. Agnes Gereben et al., “Insights on Critical Mass” in Implications of Integrating Women into
the Marine Corps Infantry (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation 2015), 35.
50. Catherine J. Turco, “Cultural Foundations of Tokenism: Evidence from the Leveraged
Buyout Industry” American Sociological Review 76, no. 6 (December 2010): 895.
51. Turco, “Cultural Foundations of Tokenism,” 908.
52. Linda Dahl, Stormy Weather: The Music and Lives of a Century of Jazzwomen (New York:
Limelight Editions, 1984), x.
53. Rustin, “‘Mary Lou Williams,’” 445.
54. Turco, “Cultural Foundations of Tokenism,” 902.
55. Dahl, Morning Glory, 77.
56. For a detailed analysis on Williams and masculinity, see Rustin, “‘Mary Lou Williams.’”
Drawing on Judith Halberstam, Rustin writes, “Mary Lou Williams embodies ‘female
masculinity’ in that she ‘refuses the authentication of masculinity through maleness and
maleness alone, and . . . names a deliberately counterfeit masculinity that undermines the
currency of masculinity’” (448–49).
58. Benoît Monin and Dale T. Miller, “Moral Credentials and the Expression of Prejudice,”
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 81, no. 1 (July 2001): 34.
59. Ethan Iverson, “One of the Reasons to Play,” March 7, 2017, https://web.archive.org/
web/20170307093132/https://ethaniverson.com/2017/03/06/one-of-the-reasons-to-play/.
60. Robert Glasper, “I’m Not Much of a Writer,” Facebook, March 18, 2017, http://www
.facebook.com/robertglasper/posts/10154647660178040.
61. Travis Jackson, Blowin’ the Blues Away: Performance and Meaning on the New York Jazz
Scene (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 73.
62. Jackson, Blowin’ the Blues Away.
64. Alexa Tarantino, phone interview with the author, January 31, 2018. All quotations of Tar-
antino are from this interview.
65. Nick Finzer, phone interview with the author, February 6, 2018. All quotations of Taran-
tino are from this interview.
66. Tracy McMullen, “Identity for Sale: Glenn Miller, Wynton Marsalis, and Cultural Replay
in Music,” in Big Ears: Listening for Gender in Jazz Studies, ed. Nichole T. Rustin and
Sherrie Tucker, 129–54 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008).
67. Ahmed, On Being Included, 176–77.
68. McKeage, “Gender and Participation,” 353.
70. “Open Letter,” We Have Voice, December 20, 2017, https://too-many.org/open-letter/.
Works Cited
Ahmed, Sara. On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2012.

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Botelho, Maria José, and Masha Kabakow Rudman. Critical Multicultural Analysis of Children’s
Literature: Mirrors, Windows, and Doors. New York: Routledge, 2009.
Dahl, Linda. Morning Glory: A Biography of Mary Lou Williams. New York: Pantheon, 1999.
———. Stormy Weather: The Music and Lives of a Century of Jazzwomen. New York: Limelight
Editions, 1984.
Gereben Schaefer, Agnes, Jennie W. Wenger, Jennifer Kavanagh, Johnathan P. Wong, Gilliam S.
Oak, Thomas E. Trail, and Todd Nichols. Implications of Integrating Women into the Ma-
rine Corps Infantry. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2015.
Gray, Herman S. Cultural Moves: African Americans and the Politics of Representation. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2005.
Ingalls, Ann, and Maryann Macdonald. The Little Piano Girl. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Books
for Children, 2010.
Hannon Teal, Kimberly. “Posthumously Live: Canon Formation at Jazz at Lincoln Center
through the Case of Mary Lou Williams.” American Music 32, no. 4 (2014): 400–22.
Jackson, Travis. Blowin’ the Blues Away: Performance and Meaning on the New York Jazz Scene.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012.
Kelly, Sarah Bruce. Jazz Girl. N.p.: Bel Canto Press, 2010.
Kernodle, Tammy. Soul on Soul: The Life and Music of Mary Lou Williams. Boston: Northeastern
Laws, Judith Long. “The Psychology of Tokenism: An Analysis.” Sex Roles 1, no. 1 (1975): 51–67.
McCabe, Janice, Emily Fairchild, Liz Grauerholz, Bernice A. Pescosolido, and Daniel Tope.
“Gender in Twentieth-Century Children’s Books: Patterns of Disparity in Titles and Cen-
tral Characters.” Gender and Society 25, no. 2 (April 2011): 197–226.
McKeage, Katherine M. “Gender and Participation in High School and College Instrumental
Jazz Ensembles.” Journal of Research in Music Education 52, no. 4 (Winter 2004): 343–56.
McMullen, Tracy. “Identity for Sale: Glenn Miller, Wynton Marsalis, and Cultural Replay in
Music.” In Big Ears: Listening for Gender in Jazz Studies, edited by Nichole T. Rustin and
Sherrie Tucker, 129–54. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008.
Mergner, Lee. “Jazz at Lincoln Center Celebrates Mary Lou Williams Centennial.” Jazz Times,
September 23, 2009.
Monin, Benoît, and Dale T. Miller. “Moral Credentials and the Expression of Prejudice.” Journal
of Personality and Social Psychology 81, no. 1 (July 2001): 33–43.
Russonello, Giovanni. “For Women in Jazz, a Year of Reckoning and Recognition.” New York
Times, December 1, 2017.
Rustin, Nichole T. “‘Mary Lou Williams Plays Like a Man!’: Gender, Genius, and Difference in
Black Music Discourse.” South Atlantic Quarterly 104, no. 3 (Summer 2005): 445–62.
Rustin-Paschal, Nichole. The Kind of Man I Am: Jazzmasculinity and the World of Charles Mingus
Jr. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2017.
Suzuki, Yoko. “Gendering Musical Sound in Jazz Saxophone Performance.” In Gender and Iden-
tity in Jazz, edited by Wolfram Knauer, 85–96. Darmstadt Studies in Jazz Research 14.
Darmstadt, Germany: Jazzinstitut Darmstadt, 2016.
Tucker, Sherrie. “A Conundrum is a Woman-in-Jazz: Enduring Improvisations on the Categori-
cal Exclusion of Being Included.” In Gender and Identity in Jazz, edited by Wolfram
Knauer, 241–61. Darmstadt Studies in Jazz Research 14. Darmstadt, Germany: Jazzinstitut
Darmstadt, 2016.
Turco, Catherine J. “Cultural Foundations of Tokenism: Evidence from the Leveraged Buyout
Industry.” American Sociological Review 76, no. 6 (December 2010): 894–913.

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Wachhorst, Wyn. Thomas Alva Edison: An American Myth. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981.
Wehr-Flowers, Erin. “Differences between Male and Female Students’ Confidence, Anxiety, and
Attitude toward Learning Jazz Improvisation.” Journal of Research in Music Education 54,
no. 4 (Winter 2006): 337–49.
Zimmer, Lynn. “Tokenism and Women in the Workplace: The Limits of Gender-Neutral Theo-
ry.” Social Problems 35, no. 1 (Feb. 1988): 64–77.

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Risk, Creative Labor, and the
Integrative Jazz-Film: Producing
the Improvised Soundtracks of
Birdman and Afterglow
Gretchen Carlson
Improvised film soundtracks—in which musicians improvise to a film (or script)—

are rare.1 Despite improvisation’s central role in silent film soundtracks in the early
twentieth century, its presence in synchronized-sound film scores has been quite
limited. Historically, one of the earliest-known examples is Miles Davis’s improvised
score for Louis Malle’s Ascenseur pour l’échafaud (1957)—a cinematic harbinger of
the French New Wave movement.2 The New Wave was an aesthetic reaction against
Hollywood’s domination of the postwar film industry and its commercial film con-
ventions—as well as against the classic “tradition of quality” in French cinema.3 Along
with those involved in the Italian neorealist movement and American independent
cinema, New Wave filmmakers sought to introduce new ways of creating movies that
challenged the studio-determined, script-driven commercialism of mainstream film-
making trends.4 They pursued alternatives to traditional narrative style, emphasizing
fragmentation, abstraction, and improvisation over fixed rigidity and overdetermined
production. These critical practices resonated with mid-century modernist trends
in art, literature, and music—including abstract expressionism, Beat literature, and
bebop jazz—all of which emphasized personal creativity, spontaneity (improvisation),
and subjective interpretation.
It was in this milieu during the late 1950s and early 1960s that improvisation
enjoyed a brief moment of prominence among independent filmmakers. Several
New Wave and independent American directors utilized jazz soundtracks in their
films—many featuring improvisation. In addition to Davis’s score for Ascenseur pour
l’échafaud, examples included John Lewis’s score for Roger Vadim’s Sait-on jamais
(1957), Martial Solal’s score for Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1959), and Thelonious


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28 Risk, Creative Labor, and the Integrative Jazz-Film Gretchen Carlson
Monk and Art Blakey’s collaborative score for Roger Vadim’s Les liaisons dangereuses
(1960). In America, a proliferation of jazz-influenced film scores was spearheaded by
Alex North’s innovative soundtrack for Elia Kazan’s A Streetcar Named Desire (1951)
and expanded through Elmer Bernstein’s scores for The Man with the Golden Arm
(1955) and The Sweet Smell of Success (1957), Duke Ellington’s score for Otto Prem-
inger’s Anatomy of a Murder (1959), and Charles Mingus’s score for John Cassavetes’s
Shadows (1960).
Yet New Wave filmmaking, abstract expressionism, Beat poetry, and bebop
are now all historic movements—they no longer represent the contemporary artis-
tic milieu and cultural criticism in the United States and Europe the way they did
during the immediate postwar era. The impetus to use improvised scores now no
longer aligns with the ideological and aesthetic motivations evinced by late 1950s
independent filmmakers. At present, films featuring improvised scores are virtually
nonexistent.
I argue that in the contemporary Hollywood film industry, the rarity of these
soundtracks results from institutional attitudes and policies concerning “risk,” gov-
erned by film companies’ commercial impetuses. With economic profit as the end
goal, filmmaking decisions are primarily informed by conventional beliefs about what
will (or will not) be successful among consuming audiences. Potential sources of risk
can include any form of production uncertainty that might negatively influence the
expected financial success of the film. Risk itself is not a concrete phenomenon,
but an institutional narrative constructed within the film industry that discursively
influences conventions, production processes, biases, and fears.5
For many contemporary Hollywood filmmaking executives, improvised
soundtracks are perceived as risky production ventures. Since such soundtracks are
not prescored before recording, they pose a greater risk for “error” in meeting musical
expectations during limited (and expensive) recording sessions. Jazz pianist and film
composer Dick Hyman—who has extensive experience working in film and media
industry recording settings—spoke to this phenomenon from his own experience.
He stated, “You don’t improvise much in films. It has to be precisely the length to
match the scene, or it has to be of such a length that it can be edited into the scene
for ambience, and it has to be carefully planned. And more and more, it has to be
put together in some form in advance, so that people can make judgments about
whether it’s suitable.”6 If not approved, the soundtrack must be rerecorded in order
to meet expectations. Filmmakers do not want to deplete their limited budgets with
rerecordings or waste time (and thus money) requiring composers to redo their
scores. They expect the music department to work quickly and productively and to
achieve “the sound” they are looking for without much ado. As such, these potential
complications have made filmmakers’ utilizations of improvised scores a risk many
are not willing to take.

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Risk, Creative Labor, and the Integrative Jazz-Film Gretchen Carlson 29
The Present Study
I utilize the relationship between the rarity and perceived risk of improvised
soundtracks as a framework for investigating the unique ways in which such rare
soundtracks complicate the seemingly disparate boundaries between conventional
film production and improvised performance. Specifically, I examine the production
of two of the very few improvised film soundtracks created in the last thirty years—
Antonio Sánchez’s improvised percussion score for Alejandro González Iñárritu’s
Birdman (2014) and jazz trumpeter Mark Isham’s soundtrack for Alan Rudolph’s
Afterglow (1997). Each case study focuses on the films’ unconventional production
methods, which were significantly influenced by jazz improvisation.7 In investigating
these soundtracks and their production, I draw on personal interviews with involved
musicians and production personnel, as well as recorded and printed interviews.
Additionally, I provide close readings of the soundtracks themselves, examined in
dialogue with specific film scenes and their production.
Two primary phenomena undergird each of these case studies. The first is the
notion of the auteur filmmaker, and his8 critical role in facilitating opportunities for
improvised soundtrack production. The term “auteur”—or author—is a designation
for distinguished film directors who are recognized for having a distinct originality
and artistic authorial signature that manifests in their cinematic works. Auteur theory
was primarily employed in the discourse surrounding the 1960s French New Wave
cinematic movement and later became influential in U.S. film criticism through the
writings of Andrew Sarris.9 The theory remains present in film scholarship today—
even as its history among film critics has been one riddled with controversy and
polemical debate.10 What auteur theory usefully highlights is the hierarchical social
distinction that results in such filmmakers being “set apart” from others. In the film
industry, auteurs are recognized as the determiners of cultural capital and (often)
the leaders of the vanguard in establishing new, “artistic” directions for the field. In
many cases, they are not integrated studio professionals. Rather, they are independent
filmmakers who retain artistic control of their projects through self-production and
independent financing.11 Yet due to their cultural status and recognition as “innova-
tors” in the field, they also can become profitable entities who benefit from additional
financing and distribution from major studios and financiers. Auteur status thus
allows them to maintain both cultural and economic capital within the film industry.
Auteurs are also frequently believed to push against established filmmaking
conventions in new, experimental ways, thus paving the path for future cinematic
development. The term “maverick” has been used to draw attention to certain au-
teurs’ unconventionality.12 Sociologist Howard Becker utilized maverick to broadly
distinguish artistic individuals who “propose innovations outside the limits of what
their art world [e.g., the film industry] conventionally produces.13 Film scholar Geoff

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Andrew employed Becker’s concept within the context of the film industry, under-
standing maverick as describing an “attitude or achievement” and identifying “those
film-makers who, for some or all of their directing careers, have made movies which
in one way or another stand outside the commercial mainstream.”14
Both Alejandro González Iñárritu and Alan Rudolph can be understood as
operating in the auteur tradition. Both have distinctive independent filmmaking
styles that have challenged mainstream conventions and considerable film oeuvres
that distinguish them within the contemporary film industry. Additionally, these
directors have demonstrated a unique openness to production risk and creative ex-
perimentation. This context provides a crucial backdrop for analyses of their unique
treatments of music—specifically improvised soundtracks.
The second concept addressed in these case studies is the notion of “creative
labor”—musical creation that is determined by structural and executive expectations
but also facilitates experimentation and personal musical development. 15 Creative
agency is a necessary component of effective film scoring. Indeed, film composers
are hired for their creative abilities. As several sociologists have contended, workers
in culture industries experience greater autonomy over their work than industry
laborers, given the importance of original and creative products in market success.16
As Robert Faulkner claims, “Hollywood demands both working according to con-
ventions and working according to one’s top expertise.”17 These demands extend to
all members of the production team—from the director to the costume designer to
the film composer.
I employ the term creative labor to theorize this balance of creative agency and
subservient labor inherent in soundtrack production. Matt Stahl’s Unfree Masters:
Recording Artists and the Politics of Work is a particularly useful framework for thinking
about this balance. Stahl uses the term “creative worker” to conceptualize the posi-
tions of recording artists in our present-day working neoliberal society, examining
the tensions between their relative autonomy as artists and their subordination as
the objects of industry control.18 This approach is equally applicable to the creative
work of (jazz) film composers, allowing us to examine their individual creativity and
artistic agency within the contexts and contradictions of film industry hierarchies
and structures.
So what is creativity in these contexts? “Creative,” or “creativity,” refers to an
individual’s self-directed transformation of available ideas and materials into a unique
artistic product. Jason Toynbee’s theorization of musical creativity among popular
musicians parallels this conceptualization.19 Toynbee reads creativity through the lens
of Bourdieuian concepts of habitus, field, and positionality—arguing that musicians
make creative decisions based on a number of structured “possibles.”20 Their own
authorial voices shape musical products within the structures of the social field at
large—a formula Toynbee identifies as “social authorship.” Toynbee states, “The social

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author stands at the center of a radius of creativity, but the range and scale of voices
available to him/her/them will always be strongly determined by the compass and
position of the radius on the musical field.”21 Therefore, musicians’ creative work
is shaped by both the individual and the social and/or institutional structures that
they are working within. Accordingly, Toynbee avers that popular musicians retain
“institutional autonomy”—the space for creative production within institutional
structures.
This notion of institutional autonomy can equally be applied to Antonio Sán-
chez’s and Mark Isham’s improvised soundtrack work. In their relative soundtrack
productions, both artists had the opportunity to experiment and improvise within
the context of the film’s production structures and the filmmaker’s expectations.
Iñárritu’s and Rudolph’s unique openness to risk and experimentation played a sig-
nificant role in facilitating these opportunities. Furthermore, these collaborations
led to reexaminations and disruptions of conventional film production structures
and formats, integrating musical creativity and filmmaking in new, unique ways.
“DRUUUMMMMMSSS! Eureka!” Antonio Sánchez’s

Improvised Percussion Score for Birdman22
Alejandro González Iñárritu is a Mexican filmmaker lauded for his innovative film-
making techniques. As of this writing, he has directed six feature films; five of them
were nominated for Academy Awards for Best Picture or Best Foreign Language
Film.23 He holds the distinction of being the first Mexican director to be nominated
for the Academy Award for Best Director—which he won in back-to-back years for
Birdman (in 2015) and The Revenant (in 2016). Beyond the Academy Awards, he has
received manifold nominations and honors from the Director’s Guild of America, the
Producer’s Guild of America, the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, the
Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts Awards, the Golden Globes, and
the Cannes Film Festival, among others. And while Iñárritu is certainly recognized
within the film industry as an accepted member, he produces his films independently
from the Hollywood mainstream. He is actively involved in writing and producing
his own films, and—although he often partners with industry studios for funding
and distribution—seeks to maintain independent creative control over his work. In
an interview with Lorraine Ali of the Los Angeles Times, Iñárritu asserted:
The only way I know how to [make films] is with absolute freedom. I can’t un-
derstand the conditions of a corporate budget being designed and getting mil-
lions. I admire it, it’s great, but I don’t know how to do that. I have to have the
wheel. It’s given me an opportunity to experience and explore things. If I had
been at an assembly line for films, I don’t know if I would be the best driver. I
think I would have crashed the car.24

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Iñárritu’s current recognition as a critically acclaimed and commercially successful

auteur contributes to his distinction within the film industry, through which he ac-
cesses substantial industry support and funding while also retaining creative control
over his projects. He is acclaimed for his nontraditional approaches to filmmaking,
which have included nonlinear mosaic narratives, graphic realism, remote global
location shooting, long film takes, and, recently, a virtual reality film documenting
the experiences of migrants crossing the border into America. The critical acclaim he
has garnered generates industry support and enables him to continue to successfully
push the boundaries of film production with significant financial backing.25
Released in 2014, Birdman received numerous accolades, including four Acad-
emy Awards for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, and Best
Cinematography. There are two primary features of the film’s production that have
drawn significant acclaim. The first is Iñárritu’s groundbreaking method of recording
and editing the film so that the narrative is experienced as one singular, uninter-
rupted shot. There are no cuts, fades, or breaks that take the audience away from
the immediate action. Instead, the camera follows the characters throughout their
daily lives, continually moving with them into new spaces and interactions. Iñár-
ritu described his conception of this form in a conversation with Elvis Mitchell for
Interview magazine:
When I conceived it, I knew the form of it. I had a discussion with Walter
Murch, the editor, about whether our life is experienced as a handheld [shot],
or if it’s experienced as Steadicam, the fluidity of it. And I realized that, at 50
years old, our life, everybody’s lives, is a continuous Steadicam shot. From the
time we open our eyes in the morning, we are navigating our lives without edit-
ing. Only when there’s urgency are we in hand held mode. Editing time and
space comes only when we talk about our life, or the way we remember our life.
I wanted to slowly put myself in the continuous experience of somebody else
without escaping.26
Iñárritu therefore developed the film’s form to reflect how humans perceive their lives
while they are living them—moving from room to room, place to place, experience
to experience.
The soundtrack has also garnered significant critical attention. Antonio Sán-
chez’s original percussion soundtrack differs substantially from traditional mainstream
soundtracks.27
First, the soundtrack is improvised. Second, in featuring predominantly
nonpitched percussion, it foregoes melody and harmony, which are conventionally
featured in the majority of film scores. Third, the soundtrack was recorded in the
preproduction stages of the film’s development, rather than in postproduction. I will
examine all three of these unique aspects momentarily.

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Sánchez is not a film composer by trade. Although his prolific career boasts
more than one hundred albums; collaborations with such artists as Pat Metheny, Chick
Corea, and Michael Brecker; and an immense repertoire of jazz performance styles, film
soundtrack work remained outside of his purview until he collaborated with Iñárritu.
Iñárritu’s admiration of Sánchez’s work as a jazz percussionist—and a fellow resident
of Mexico City—led to this collaboration. Iñárritu described this admiration in the
Birdman liner notes, along with the circumstances of their first meeting:
I met Antonio Sánchez [in 2004] at a sublime Pat Metheny concert in Los An-
geles. Like me, Antonio is a Chilango.28 Unlike me, Antonio is one of the best
drummers in the world. I became a fan and luckily a friend. At that concert,
Antonio, like a human octopus, played a solo that made me wonder how just
four extensions of a human body could propel so many beats, emotions, sounds,
ideas, and extraordinary rhythms.29
As Iñárritu developed his concepts for Birdman’s narrative and form, he also concep-
tualized a soundtrack that conveyed its central themes of emotion, frenzy, spontaneity,
and artistic experimentation. Accordingly, he regarded Sánchez’s percussion impro-
visations as an integral part of the story. Sánchez’s unfamiliarity with film scoring
was largely irrelevant, for it was his experience and skill as an improviser that drew
Iñárritu’s attention. Iñárritu stated to Sánchez, “I want something that’s not scripted,
something jazzy. You’re a jazz musician. That’s what I want.”30 Despite the complex
polysemy of the term “jazzy,” Iñárritu revealed that he meant “improvisation.” The
resulting soundtrack is a fascinating demonstration of Sánchez’s ability to channel his
improvisational aptitude and command of stylistic and timbral percussion possibilities
into an emotional narrative that sonically embodies the themes of Birdman itself.
The film’s plot documents the struggles of washed-up superhero actor Rig-
gan Thomson (played by Michael Keaton31), who attempts to shed his commercial
reputation and establish himself as a “true” (read: noncommercial) artist late in his
career by producing a Broadway adaptation of Raymond Carver’s What We Talk
About When We Talk About Love. The film’s central themes address Thomson’s ego,
his career anxiety, and his growing insanity, as well as his complicated relationships
with others—including his drug-addicted daughter, his girlfriend, his acting rival,
and a powerful, antagonistic theater critic. Sánchez’s score sonically represents
these themes. The frenzied aesthetic of his percussive grooves musically evinces
Thomson’s anxiety, disillusionment with his career, chaotic life status, and descent
into madness. The drums simulate corporeality—heartbeats racing, neurons firing,
palms sweating—as well as psychological states of mind, explicitly functioning as
the musical embodiment of the characters’ emotions. Iñárritu averred, “Sánchez’s
score . . . was absolutely key and irreplaceable. The intensity of the drum cues
almost became a separate character in the film, and an indispensable part of it.”32

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Preproduction Development
The uniqueness of the Birdman soundtrack lies not only in its improvised creation,
but in its development during the preproduction stage of filming. Conventionally,
film composers record scores during postproduction, after the film has been shot
and is in the editing stage.33 In the hierarchical structure of film production, scoring
is largely subservient to the visual aspects of the film.34
Unconventionally, Iñárritu asked Sánchez to score the film before the scenes
themselves were filmed. His reasoning? He wanted to find and establish a rhythm
for the actors’ movement that would facilitate his ability to shoot the film in long
takes, to create the perception of one singular shot. In the soundtrack liner notes,
Iñárritu claims: “I attempted Birdman to be experienced in one continuous and
uninterrupted shot. Very much as we live our lives. But not having the possibility to
fragment time and space, it is almost a contradiction to the nature of cinema itself.
DRUUUMMMMMSSS! Eureka! I thought the drums would help me to find the
internal rhythm of the film and the audience [would] flow with it.”35 Using Sánchez’s
improvised recordings, Iñárritu worked with cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki to
design and block the scenes—calculating each movement and location transition so
that it could be rehearsed and performed by the actors with exact precision. Lubezki
described the production as a “major choreography with the whole cast and crew.”36
But how did Sánchez score something he couldn’t see? Prior to production,
Iñárritu and Sánchez went into a studio, where Iñárritu described the scenes based
on the scripted screenplay, addressing the action and the energy, setting the thematic/
emotional tone, and giving Sánchez verbalized cues.37 Sánchez guided him in his
direction, suggesting, “Sit in front of me, and when you feel like [the character] is
opening the door, raise your hand. When you feel that he’s turning the corner of the
hallway, raise it again. When he’s getting to the stage door, do it again.”38 Each time
Iñárritu raised his hand, Sánchez would alter the beat and intensity he was playing to
reflect the subtext of the scene. He recorded approximately sixty to seventy takes of
those improvised segments, which Iñárritu then used for timing during production.39
The recordings helped determine the pacing for the actors as filming commenced.
The music editor then selected and edited the takes into the rough cut of the film
as “temp tracks.”40 In a later production stage, Sánchez improvised another version
of each track—this time watching the movie as he was drumming—and made the
cuts for the final release of the film.41
In a large way, the editing of the film itself revolved around Sánchez’s playing.
Lubezki, the film’s cinematographer, described this unconventional approach as “like
an upside-down movie where you do post-production before production.”42 This
hierarchical fracturing was echoed in Iñárritu and Sánchez’s collaborative relation-
ship on this project; while Iñárritu certainly gave narrative direction (and reserved

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the right to demand edits or redos from Sánchez), he granted Sánchez a significant
amount of creative liberty in the score production. He asked Sánchez to create the
score spontaneously based on his improvisational expertise and creative instinct. This
is a unique opportunity that film composers rarely experience.
Structure/Movement/Pacing
Iñárritu employed a unique cinematic approach that demanded rethinking the tra-
ditional usage of a musical score. The movie was filmed as a single continuous,
uninterrupted shot, in which scenes were connected through the movement of the
characters from location to location.43 One of the most challenging aspects of such a
technique—aside from the intricate editing challenges in threading the takes together
in a manner that appeared seamless and continuous—was discovering a way to aes-
thetically evoke the transitional nature of the movement. Sánchez’s preproduction
improvisations provided the sonic threadwork that linked these mobile, transitional
moments together.
An example from the film can help illustrate this approach.44 In the opening
scene, Riggan Thomson floats in the middle of a dirty, dim dressing room in the
St. James Theater—backlit by faded afternoon sunlight creeping underneath a half-
blinded window facing the New York streets. As he meditates, the voice of his past
superhero role, Birdman, haunts him. “How did we end up here?” Birdman taunts.
“This place is horrible.” Birdman’s monologue is interrupted when Riggan’s computer
rings; his daughter, Sam (played by Emma Stone), angrily appears on his video chat,
demanding to know what flowers he wants for his dressing room. The conversation
abruptly ends as Sam yells “I hate doing this job!” and hangs up. Riggan wearily sits
down and sighs. As he does, we hear a sharp, invasive drum hit, soon layered with a
syncopated, militant-sounding drum groove and triplet-heavy ride cymbal overlay.
The camera pans to a close-up of Riggan’s face—exhausted, disappointed, both?—as
he stares at himself in the mirror with a poster image of Birdman looking on. Sánchez’s
shimmering, hissing cymbal figure symbolically reflects the psychological tremor of
anxiety that permeates Riggan’s inner thoughts as he thinks about the status of his
career, family, and life.
The texture of the improvisation shifts as we hear a voice on the loudspeaker
saying “Riggan, they’re ready for you [onstage].” The groove is at once propulsive,
yet stationary through repetition—sounding as though it is “prepping” to go some-
where, much as a car does when the engine is revved. The groove’s tension is soon
released after a second encouragement from the loudspeaker, when Riggan visibly jolts
out of his contemplative daze, rises quickly, and puts on his pants. The percussion
soundtrack remains viscerally present through this dressing scene—a solid 4/4 groove
interpolated with polyrhythmic, full drum set improvisations. Tight hits on the snare

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and bass drum pierce loudly through the scene, the high-hat clasps the off-beats, the
ride cymbal shimmers in and out of the rhythm. Syncopation is rampant; rhythmic
motives shift and turn inward and outward on each other, but the groove—with or
without the downbeats—is omnipresent.
Following a sharp drum hit that corresponds to Riggan opening his dressing
room door, the groove shifts again when he steps into the hallway. The pacing is
slightly quicker—more decisive—paralleling the speed with which Riggan moves
through the theater corridors. The soundtrack is a syncopated march, reflecting Rig-
gan’s pace as he progresses through the hallways toward the St. James stage as well as
the tempo of the inner voices of Birdman and Sam inaudibly beating in his mind.
Sánchez’s change in groove not only marks the shift in momentum but sonically alerts
us to the changes in scenery that are happening on screen. Even without the visuals,
an astute listener can identify where these changes occur. As this example illustrates,
Sánchez’s improvisations assist in both narrative and structural clarity in the film,
making Riggan’s internal anxiety more sonically perceptible while simultaneously
supporting the continuity of Iñárritu’s single-shot cinematic approach.
Semiotic Meanings
An analysis of the Birdman soundtrack is incomplete without consideration of the
score’s semiotic significations. Specifically, in its recognizable associations with im-
provisation and jazz, the soundtrack takes on layers of meaning rooted in cultural
and social perceptions of what these concepts represent. Improvisation, for instance,
is generally associated with spontaneity, experimentation, and freedom. The frenzied
improvised aesthetic of Sánchez’s performances therefore reflects Riggan’s own im-
pulsive, reactive, and unpredictable approaches to pursuing his creative dreams and
establishing a new artistic identity, as well as his efforts to escape the structure and
associations of his mainstream persona and personal ghosts.
The soundtrack’s semiotic meanings through its relationship to jazz are also
worth considering. Jazz is an idiom that has largely developed around the art of
improvisation.45 Jazz culture lauds individual, creative autonomy and experimenta-
tion and has therefore come to represent the notions of freedom and spontaneity
that are associated with improvisational performance. However, jazz’s significations
in popular culture also abound. Whether functioning as a musical synecdoche for
crime/urban decay, sexuality, blackness, or white urban sophistication, jazz styles
have held a variety of specific meanings for filmmakers, advertisers, and consumers
throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.46 Simon Frith describes such
generic conventions as “musical shorthand”—cultural codes that inform the semiotic
dimensions of the musical work. Examples include bluesy saxophone as denoting
a “fallen woman” or “femme fatale,” lush, soaring strings representing romance,
bagpipes indicating Scotland, and so on.47

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The way the soundtrack reflects Riggan’s internal anxiety, fear, and purported
madness draws heavily on discursive formations of jazz as representative of mental
psychoses and neuroticism. This relationship’s earliest manifestations in film were
arguably initiated by Alex North’s raunchy, jazz-inflected score for A Streetcar Named
Desire (1951), reflecting the psychological instability and anxiety exhibited by the
tragic Blanche Dubois. North’s score drew heavily on a legacy of jazz’s codification in
cinema as a racialized, sexualized, and exoticized sonic force, representative of erotic
desire, immorality, and decadence—adapting these connotations to reflect internal
decadence in state of mind.48 These sonic tropes continued to develop throughout
the 1950s in a bout of film noir and social problem films and manifested in the
emergence of the Mancini-esque “crime jazz” soundtracks that proliferated in film
and television throughout the 1960s.49
Another semiotic consideration is the percussion-based instrumentation of the
soundtrack. Percussion—drums specifically—hold their own associational mean-
ings in the media industry. Drums, like jazz, have been racialized, exoticized, and
sexualized, problematically employed as sonic markers of primitivity, impulsivity,
corporeality, and sexuality.50 In late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American
popular culture (minstrel shows, cartoons, films, vaudeville floor shows), drums were
largely used to represent “exotic Africa”—sonic signifiers of the racist ideology that
perceived black Americans as primitive, emotional, physically aggressive “Others.”51
Furthermore, drums’ associations with militancy and war reinforce their connection
to the notion of aggression. In the context of Birdman, the percussion soundtrack
reflects these associations, sonically embodying Riggan’s impulsivity and irrationality.
In addition, it simulates corporeal passion, reflecting the physical aggression that he
both inflicts and experiences as a manifestation of his own psychological frustration.
He anxiously runs through hallways, slams doors, violently throws objects around his
dressing room, clenches his hands in frustration and desperation, screams profani-
ties, and even aggressively attacks one of his costars. Throughout the film, Sánchez
effectively employs drums and auxiliary percussion to capture these physical displays
of emotion through gritty drum rolls, surging crescendos, explosive drum hits and
cymbal crashes, and shifting tempos and rhythmic directions. Ultimately, therefore,
Sánchez’s percussion-based soundtrack both draws on and reinforces the associations
between drums and impulsive corporeality, while also establishing the rhythm of the
characters and the film itself.
Sánchez’s Creative Labor

Sánchez has revealed that working on Birdman’s score pushed him into new creative
territory. It required him to improvise according to unique narrative and visual
structures and gave him the experience of working in a film-production environ-
ment. In an interview with Steve Pond, Sánchez stated, “It was an amazingly fun

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challenge. Being a jazz drummer, I am used to improvising, but I usually don’t do

it with imagery.”52 Throughout the soundtrack, Sánchez incorporated a variety of
grooves and tempos to capture the themes and emotions represented on screen. He
also experimented with his drum set’s timbral and textural capabilities, utilizing a
variety of mallets and sticks (including his hands) and playing in both traditional
and nontraditional ways (i.e., hitting the rims, playing on the sides of the drums,
etc.).53 Even in the absence of the film itself, Sánchez’s improvisations sonically reflect
the themes of anxiety, internal conflict, and frustration that permeate the characters’
emotional states.
One of Iñárritu’s primary aesthetic desires for Birdman was to present the film
with a perceptible liveness and seemingly authentic realness that reflects “[how] we
live our lives.”54 Visually, Iñárritu captures Riggan’s day-to-day experiences as he
maneuvers through the St. James Theater, battles his own anxiety within the confines
of his dressing room, hurries (undressed) through Times Square, and interacts with
others in narrow corridors, hallways, and dimly lit bars. Iñárritu expected Sánchez’s
soundtrack to enhance this “gritty, live aesthetic of the film,”55 which informed his
desire to have Sánchez improvise the score. The act of improvisation itself corresponds
to the notion of living “in the moment” and evokes the rawness and unexpected
spontaneity of everyday life. Beyond improvising, Sánchez attempted to portray this
live aesthetic through performance techniques. He contorted his conventional percus-
sion setup—putting tape on his drumheads, detuning them, stacking his cymbals
to make them sound more broken-in—ultimately giving the recordings a quality of
grainy realism that contrasted with typical clean, smooth soundtrack recordings.56
The end result is a gritty-sounding score that achieves a sonic “liveness”; for audi-
ences, the performance sounds like it is in the room.57
Another example of Sánchez’s creative approach is how he navigates and sup-
ports the narrative dialogue. Dialogue has often been a point of contention for many
film scorers. Many have found their scores being edited/rearranged/cut (sometimes
inartistically so) in order to prioritize the dialogue. Yet Sánchez’s soundtrack is not
only featured clearly during the dialogue, but also seems to be a critical part of it. A
specific illustrative example is the scene “Just Chatting.” Riggan walks through the
theater corridors, arguing with his producer/lawyer Jake that the first preview of the
play must be cancelled due to the inadequate talent of one of the lead actors, Ralph,
who has recently been injured by falling overhead equipment. Jake fights back that
they would have to refund a full house, and that Ralph would also have the right to
file a lawsuit. Sánchez’s percussive, clipped phrases and hits effectively simulate the
fast-paced, energy-laden and quarrelsome dialogue between the two characters; the
call-and-response interaction between the lower-pitched, syncopated snare and bass
groove and the interruptive cymbal and tambourine hits illustrates the dialogic, yet
combative nature of the conversation.

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The music begins with a syncopated drum roll on brushes, capped by a high-
hat hit that sets off a dynamic conservational interchange between bass drum, snare,
and cymbals. The quarter note approximates 120 bpm, but a relentless, sixteenth-note
subdivision stimulates an internal, anxious propulsion—reflecting Riggan’s own
nervousness after “causing” Ralph’s injury. His nervous energy belies his attempts
to casually leave the scene. In spite of his large, rhythmic strides, everything inside
him—from his brain to his heartbeat—is rushing. This anxious hurriedness is mir-
rored by producer Jake (played by Zach Galifianakis), who immediately thinks of the
potential lawsuit that Ralph could bring against them. Together, the paced rhythm
of their intentional, long strides down the hallway and the quicker, more syncopated
palpitations of their internal concerns are manifest in Sánchez’s multilayered percus-
sive dialogue.
Sánchez’s improvisations sonically and structurally capture the nuances of
Riggan and Jake’s argument as they hurry through the theater hallways to Riggan’s
dressing room. This is a segment from the beginning of their dialogue:
Jake [after Ralph has been hit by the falling equipment]: That’s going to be a fucking
lawsuit. [To Riggan:] Ok, where are you going? They’re starting to be ready [for re-
hearsal] in less than five minutes.
Riggan: . . . We’re going to have to cancel the first preview.
Jake: But it’s a full house! We would have to refund the entire—
Riggan: Just do it. Just do it.
Jake: Fucking wait! [as Riggan continues to hurry down the hallway]
Riggan: Listen to me. It was going to be a disaster. That guy’s the worst actor I’ve ever
seen in my life. The blood coming out of his ear is the most honest thing he’s done
so far.
Jake: He’s not that bad. [Pause, Riggan turns back to look at him incredulously.] Ok, he’s
fucking terrible.
Despite the worry on his face, Riggan’s replies to Jake are direct, pragmatic, and rela-
tively nonemotional. His voice is low and monotonic; he does not employ emotion-
laden pitch/range changes or inflections. Instead he keeps repeating his primary
argument, albeit with different support: “We have to cancel the first preview.” “Just
do it.” “It was going to be a disaster.” “He’s the worst actor I’ve seen my life.” Riggan’s
mind is made up, and he remains consistent—both in content and expression—
throughout the conversation. Jake, in contrast, is highly emotional and reactive.
His voice is much higher in range, further exaggerated through the high-pitched
screechiness that accompanies emotional speech. His phrases are clipped and abrupt,
reacting both incredulously and pleadingly against Riggan’s forceful assertions that
the preview be cancelled (and, later, that Ralph be replaced).
Sánchez supports this dialogue through timbral choices as well as the cyclic,
yet varied structure of his improvised performance. Riggan’s low-pitched, repetitive

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arguments are represented by the lower-range drums—the snare and bass drum.
Jake’s high-pitched, emotional pleas are reflected in the abrupt, shimmering splashes
of higher-range auxiliary percussion—various cymbals, high-hat, and tambourine.
These separate voices engage in a cyclical call-and-response with one another. Riggan’s
“drums” are fundamentally repetitive within each cycle—reflecting the consistency of
his responses to Jake’s cries. Yet the rhythm/syncopation within each cycle is slightly
varied, indicating Riggan’s own variations and reassertions throughout the dialogue.
Jake’s “cymbals” are much more irruptive; each figure is different from the one before
it, representing Jake’s desperate efforts to say anything that will make Riggan change
his mind.
All the while, the groove pulsing through the improvisation aligns with the pac-
ing of Riggan’s and Jake’s movement throughout the St. James Theater corridors. The
rate of exchange in the percussive call-and-response impressively reflects the pacing of
the dialogic interchange between the two characters—at times even directly aligning
with their voices in the film soundtrack. The end of the percussion track poignantly
corresponds to the movement of the on-screen action. Right after Riggan argues that
Ralph is the worst actor he’s ever seen in his life, Jake exasperatedly argues that “He’s
not that bad!” Riggan stops abruptly—turning to stare at Jake as though he can’t
believe he said it aloud. Sánchez, who had been solidly improvising Riggan’s groove
on drums, cuts to a short, syncopated tambourine figure, which abruptly cuts into
silence. The tambourine figure represents Jake’s pathetic attempt to argue for Ralph’s
talent—resulting in the cessation of not only sound but on-screen movement—in an
awkward moment of incredulity. Sánchez’s music does not “Mickey Mouse,”58 but rather
compliments the dialogue, operating as yet another essential voice in the conversation,
providing more depth to our understanding of Riggan’s internal state of mind.
In this example, Sánchez employs his own expertise as an improviser in a
creative negotiation with the programmatic demands of film—structure, theme,
emotion, dialogue, and the director’s narrative vision. By utilizing sonic metaphors,
varied percussion timbres and rhythms, and developing unique, movement- and
dialogue-inspired structures and forms, Sánchez innovatively explores and pushes
the boundaries of jazz improvisation (and his own creativity) at this intersection with
cinematic production. Interestingly, Birdman continues to provide a platform for
Sánchez’s creative development. Since the movie was released, Sánchez has toured
the world accompanying the film live. In an interview with Jazz Times, he claimed:
“Iñárritu wanted the score to be improvised and very organic, so that’s what I do
live. I try to maintain the dramatic effect that was achieved originally, but every
performance is completely different.”59
Holistically, the significance of Sánchez and Iñárritu’s unique collaboration
on this production is that Birdman is a movie that is built on the foundation of
improvisation. Sánchez’s score was the sonic framework that both informed and

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underpinned a film developed around the concept of liveness and improvising one’s
way through life in reaction to both internal and external circumstances. Birdman’s
production itself was a dialogue rooted in improvisation. Sánchez improvised in reac-
tion to Iñárritu’s spoken (and motioned) ideas in the studio. The actors’ movements
and pacing responded to Sánchez’s recorded improvisations. The filming—in order
to generate a “live aesthetic,” followed the actors in their movements throughout
the set. The actors themselves—a formidable core cast of Michael Keaton, Emma
Stone, Edward Norton, Naomi Watts, and Andrea Riseborough—brought their own
improvisational acumen to their characters. In an interview with National Public
Radio, Ed Norton compared the production to a choreographed dance that left room
for individual improvisation:
Once people have gotten the dance—and it’s a dance—it’s like a complex cho-
reography with a lot of people—but once it has been built as a foundation, I
think that’s the enormous pleasure of working with people like Michael Keaton
and Zach Galifianakis, people with an astonishing ability to, even within a set
choreography, do a blackflip that you weren’t expecting.60
Finally, Sánchez’s rerecorded improvisations to the finalized film brought the creative
dialogue full circle. The effective permeation of improvisational technique through-
out this film’s production illustrates how the collaborative intersections of jazz and
film—albeit complex—can lead to new developments and artistic directions in both
mediums.
“No Way, Shape, or Form That This Isn’t a Jazz Score:”

Improvised Soundtrack Production in Afterglow
Alan Rudolph’s unique career as an independent filmmaker has earned him such
descriptors as “pioneer,” “iconoclastic,” and “unconventional.” Distinguishing himself
from the Hollywood mainstream, Rudolph has called himself “Captain Autonomous-
Anonymous,” highlighting his outsider status and independent production method-
ology.61 His films—which have never reached significant mainstream success—often
feature melodramatic romances focused on quirky, isolated characters; elements of
fantasy and artifice; and underlying philosophies on topics of love, chance, culture,
and paradox. This former protégé of director Robert Altman has become a text unto
himself, known for his unconventionality and commitment—despite a lack of com-
mercial success—to his own artistic visions. Even now, fifteen-plus years after his
last film, The Secret Lives of Dentists (2002), he has reemerged with a new romantic
drama production, Helen and Ray.
In 1996, film composer Mark Isham, who had already established a successful
career as a jazz trumpeter and genre-crossing electronic and improvisational artist,

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Table 1: Mark Isham soundtracks

for Alan Rudolph films
Film Year
Trouble in Mind 1985
Made in Heaven 1987
The Moderns 1988
Love at Large 1990
Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle 1994
Afterglow 1997
Breakfast of Champions 1999
Trixie 2000
recorded the score for Rudolph’s emotional relationship drama Afterglow, produced
by Robert Altman. Rudolph and Isham collaborated together quite frequently prior
to the release of this film and have made eight films together throughout their careers.
The origin of their collaboration offers insight into their unique relationship.
Rudolph is highly involved in the music selection process for his films. He has stated,
“I like to know the music before I shoot a film, because to me the music is the most
influential part of any film, except for maybe the actors.”62 He has further claimed:
“Music to me is like the hub of the wheel. It’s visible, it works in your senses and
emotions, and that seems to be where I reside. To me, music and emotional responses
are twins, and if you want to establish emotional tone in a film then music is the
number one way to do it.”63
In a documentary about the development of Trouble in Mind (Rudolph and
Isham’s first collaboration), Rudolph revealed that he went to the record store looking
for music that would fit the emotional themes of the narrative. He came across Isham’s
Vapor Drawings cassette on the Wyndham Hill label and noticed on the back cover
that Isham recorded all of the instruments himself. Rudolph purportedly recognized
the financial value of Isham’s self-sufficiency, stating, “This guy is my guy—he plays
all the instruments! We can afford him!”64 Isham himself had expressed interest in
working with Rudolph and was soon hired to score the film.
Regarding his inspiration for filmmaking, Rudolph has contended that he’s
“more influenced by John Coltrane than John Ford.”65 He is fascinated by jazz and
its fluidity and resonances with emotion. He is interested in tonal color and spon-
taneous performance and how these elements evoke life and human relationships.
In his words: “There’s something about jazz—you know it when you hear it, or you
feel it.”66 He has further revealed that one of the largest sources of inspiration for his
filmmaking was Miles Davis’s album Kind of Blue. In a recent interview, he stated:
“I’d walk around Manhattan [with a Walkman] and watch a movie unfold on the
sidewalks listening to how it was scored in my head. But it’s funny, the number-one

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album was always Kind of Blue. Without that album, I’m not sure I would have been
able to make films. Kind of Blue was my film school.”67
Accordingly, Rudolph enjoys working with Isham, whose trumpet playing
has often reminded him of Davis.68 Isham’s experiences as a jazz trumpet player and
electronic composer have informed his unique improvisational, emotion-driven
approach to film composition, which made him particularly attractive to Rudolph.
Isham stated that his discussions with Rudolph about soundtrack production were
frequently permeated with such terms as jazz and improvisation—reflecting Rudolph’s
desire to incorporate these elements into his works. Isham has further revealed that
of all his film credits, Rudolph’s films are the only ones in which he never views
the movie as he is creating the music.69 Instead, he develops his scores solely based
off Rudolph’s description of emotion and thematic content.70 This method of film
composition is truly novel, as it disrupts the conventional hierarchy of the visual
image and on-screen narrative in favor of musical authority.
Afterglow
Isham’s most comprehensively improvised film score was for Rudolph’s Afterglow.
Interestingly, Rudolph claims that he conceived Afterglow’s script while listening to
Isham’s Blue Sun, a quintet album with a predominantly “cool jazz,” Miles-esque
flavor. Rudolph sent the script to Isham, telling him, “Blue Sun is the accompaniment
to this—that’s [the kind of music that] I want for the score.”71
Afterglow’s narrative follows the relationships of two couples: an older couple
Lucky (Nick Nolte) and Phyllis (Julie Christie) and a younger couple Jeffrey (Jonny
Lee Miller) and Marianne (Lara Flynn Boyle). Their marriages are unhappy, character-
ized by betrayal, loss, emotional incompatibility, neediness, jealousy, and callousness,
leading them to seek comfort and/or satisfaction through adultery with the spouse
in the other relationship (they don’t find out until later that they are all intercon-
nected). The narrative is rife with emotion—love, lust, distress, and pain—which
is enhanced by the underscoring. As in Blue Sun, the soundtrack features a range of
jazz styles, including slow, minor modal ballads and up-tempo, frenetic bop tunes.
This diversity corresponds to the array of emotions experienced by the four primary
characters. Frantic bebop improvisations channel Jeffrey’s inner rage and jealousy
when he discovers that his wife is cheating on him. Manifold scenes characterized
by seductive romance and somber loss echo the longing minor melodies heard on
tracks such as “Lazy Afternoon” and “In More Than Love” from Blue Sun—featuring
Isham’s self-described “mournful trumpet sound.”72
As an example, let us consider a specific scene. The first time we are introduced
to Phyllis, we see her at home with Lucky at the end of the workday. Their relation-
ship is strained, for reasons that we discover throughout the course of the film. In
this particular scene, Phyllis has just heard about the death of a former costar (Phyllis

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is a former B-movie actress). She is also aware that Lucky has just returned from
a home-repair job that likely included more than appliance maintenance. Lucky
is a philanderer, and she knows it. Lucky tries to flirt with her, but she is not fully
receptive, deflecting with passive-aggressive statements such as, “How was work
today—unclog a few tubes?”
The music effectively underscores and reflects the dynamic unfolding onscreen.
We first hear it when Lucky and Phyllis come together physically—when he sits with
her on the couch and begins massaging her foot. The tune establishes a 3/4 waltz groove.
Two solo instruments represent the two characters—muted trumpet for Lucky, and
violin for Phyllis. Characterized by languid, minor melodies, the two instruments con-
trapuntally interact in an ebb and flow that reflects the back-and-forth of the couple’s
conversation. Periodically the two lines come together in homophonic harmony but
consistently break apart once again. The intertwining melodic lines evoke a sense of
longing while the rhythm section maintains the slow waltz groove—an ever-circling,
melancholy dance that sonically embodies the characters’ strained relationship.
While this particular scene might appear to be a conventional application of
soundtrack techniques (i.e., establishing mood, accompanying individual characters,
representing jazz’s established semiotic associations), in reality, it is significantly more
unique. The script was inspired by Isham’s Blue Sun, which in turn influenced the
film soundtrack, which was composed without Isham viewing the film footage. The
film was centered on the music, not the other way around.
Regarding the development of the soundtrack as a whole, Isham averred,
“There’s no way, shape, or form that [this score] isn’t a jazz score by pretty much any
definition.”73 He described the score’s conception and development as follows:
I took a look at the script and picked the five basic emotions that were hit—be-
trayal, distress, whatever they were—and charted a jazz lead sheet that exem-
plified those emotions. And then I assigned every character—because it was
a small ensemble cast—an instrument. For example, we have Nick Nolte and
Julie Christie and betrayal—so the violin and the [trumpet] have to play that
piece for that scene. And [I] literally just made a little chart for every scene, and
what the emotion was, the subject, and the characters—and lined it up.74
Isham played demos of a few of the charts for Rudolph to confirm that the music
captured the emotional aesthetic Rudolph wanted. When the demos were approved,
Isham determined which musicians he wanted to hire. Drawing on his jazz networks,
he assembled a small group featuring Charles Lloyd on saxophone, Geri Allen on
piano, Billy Higgins on drums, Gary Burton on vibes, Jeff Littleton on bass, and
Sid Page on violin.
Isham was confident in the musicians’ abilities to successfully create the music
without strict regulation of notation or timing. He stated, “I mean, you don’t give
these guys a click track. . . . And you don’t give them the picture [film]. You just say,

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‘Alright, I’m going to trust that they’re going to give me great material.’”75 Isham
distributed lead sheets, set the tempo for each tune, then started recording the per-
formance. The arrangement was sparsely notated, and the majority of the choruses
were improvised. Isham revealed, “There were a couple of [pieces] where I did some
arrangements because I knew we had to build, but I really didn’t limit the number
of choruses that anybody would play. . . . I just went out, played the click through
the microphone so everybody heard it, and I said, ‘Billy, count it off.’ I turned the
metronome off. And his time was so great—I mean, everything was spot on where I
had figured out that it would hit.”76 The soundtrack was completed in one recording
session. Isham stated, “That’s a jazz score, because . . . it was done like a jazz record.
And that’s the only time I’ve ever really done that.”77
Once the recording was completed, Isham worked directly with music edi-
tor Steve Borne to take the recordings and edit them into a score for the final film
release. “We did the [recording] session two weeks before we had to mix, so that we
could cut. And it just became a big editing job. I just sat down with a music editor
for two weeks, and took all the material that we created, and cut it into a score.”78
This work was primarily done without supervision from the director or a producer;
Rudolph left these preliminary decisions to Isham—although he reserved the right to
require changes once Isham gave him the preliminary cut.79 Here, it is interesting to
consider how the process of editing the improvised score affected its improvisational
nature. One might argue that Isham and Borne’s editing process diminished it. Yet
the improvised quality of the recordings remained intact. While portions were cut
in order to accommodate the film, the performances themselves were unaltered,
maintaining their improvised essence.
In a highly unconventional move, Rudolph also allowed Isham to make sug-
gestions about how the film itself might be edited in relation to the score. Isham
recalls that at least twice during postproduction, he called Rudolph and asked if
the visual scenes could be edited to fit the length of a musical cue that he thought
worked best. He stated, “I think twice I called up Alan and I said, ‘Look, I’m going
to send something—can you move the picture two seconds later here?’ And he said,
‘Sure!’”80 This is also not the first time that Rudolph has edited a film in service to
music. His thriller Remember My Name (1978) prominently featured music by blues/
jazz singer Alberta Hunter. Rudolph claims that after listening to her sing in New
York and deciding to incorporate her music in the film soundtrack, “The first thing
that I did was eliminate at least a third of the dialogue and even entire scenes because
she’s more articulate than I could ever be.”81
Overall, the unique conceptualization and production of this score challenged
traditional conventions of film soundtrack development. Like Birdman, this case
study illustrates the significance of auteur directors with both economic resources and
a determined interest in featuring improvised music in facilitating such unique jazz-
film collaborations. Afterglow’s producer—Robert Altman—also shared Rudolph’s

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interest in utilizing an improvised jazz soundtrack for the film.82 Isham expressed
awareness that without Rudolph’s and Altman’s enthusiasm, the perceived risk of
the project may have prevented it from coming to fruition. He stated, “[This project
was] something I’d never done before—or may never do again—not because it wasn’t
successful, but just because it’s risky, and not a lot of people would go for that. But
Robert Altman producing, Alan Rudolph—they were totally game.”83
Theorizing the Case Studies: Conclusions
My goal in this article was to examine the rare phenomenon of improvisation in

film from both a sociological and methodological perspective, situating these two
soundtracks’ development at the interfaces of the distinct cultural mediums of impro-
vised jazz performance and film production. The Birdman and Afterglow case studies
illustrate unique disruptions of the conventional relationship between soundtrack and
film, in which the productions are developed on a foundation of improvised music.
A core feature of each of these collaborations is the personal relationships
between the directors and the jazz composers. Each of these auteurs envisioned im-
provised music as a fundamental element of their film. And not just any improvised
music; they specifically chose Antonio Sánchez and Mark Isham based on their
previous performances and improvisational aptitudes. Both Iñárritu and Rudolph
sought to evince onscreen “authenticity” (e.g., emotion, liveness, realism) in their
films, supported through the spontaneity of the improvised score—albeit through
different methods. On a broader level, these directors were improvising themselves,
carving out new territory through innovative approaches to filmmaking. By “risk-
ily” building their films around the aesthetic of improvised music, they arguably
transformed them into a more integrative jazz-film medium.
These directors’ liberal attitudes toward risk and receptiveness to improvisation
opened up spaces for Sánchez and Isham to experiment more freely with their own
creative production. The level of collaboration between the musicians and the direc-
tors was highly reciprocal. Rudolph rewrote portions of the script to accommodate
Isham’s compositions. Iñárritu required Birdman’s actors to time their movements
to fit the tempo and feel of Sánchez’s recorded improvisations. The films themselves
were edited to prominently feature the soundtracks. These types of reciprocal col-
laborations rarely happen in other film productions.
Tensions certainly exist. The artists in these case studies had to negotiate their
own independent creativity and personal artistic goals within the hierarchical struc-
tures and regulations of the film production process. Certainly, Sánchez and Iñárritu
and Isham and Rudolph did not agree on every creative decision, and ultimately, the
directors had the authority to make the final call. Jazz artists’ self-identification as
part of a musical culture that highly values improvisation, individuality, and creative

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agency makes their navigation of these tensions especially rich for analysis. Yet, as
these case studies reveal, the relationships between the jazz artists and film execu-
tives are not always “clashes.” To the contrary, both examples display high levels of
collaboration and creative freedom between composer and director. Therefore, this
study contributes to the critical dialogue regarding the potentials of musical free-
dom within the labor expectations involved in culture industry work. Accordingly,
it examines how these musicians’ work in film provides opportunities for them to
bring their creativity into contact with new mediums, technologies, and modes of
production.
Such jazz-film production opportunities have also furthered several jazz artists
in their own creative development. A prime example of this can be seen once again
in Miles Davis’s soundtrack work on Malle’s Ascenseur pour l’échafaud. As scholars
such as Gary Giddins have noted, the modal experimentations that Davis employed
in this soundtrack are the first recorded examples of the modal style that would later
be featured on Kind of Blue (1959).84 Antonio Sánchez has claimed that his work on
Birdman’s score was a significant learning experience for him as well—not only in
terms of learning how to create music that can be integrated into a film medium, but
also experimenting with the programmatic potential of solo percussion improvisa-
tions as part of a narrative, capturing emotions, themes, and movements. Sánchez
has also continued to work on other film soundtrack projects, including Iñárritu’s The
Revenant (2015), Don Cheadle’s Miles Ahead (2015), The Hippopotamus (2017), and
the Epix television series Get Shorty (2018). In his work on the Afterglow soundtrack,
Mark Isham explored the possibilities of developing jazz lead sheets and leading a
small-group “jam session” based on a film script, allowing opportunities for individual
improvisation and creative collaboration. This experience continued to inform his
own artistic development as both a jazz musician and a full-time Hollywood film
composer.
Overall, these case studies allow us to envision new creative collaborations
between jazz and film that are aesthetically influenced by both mediums. The dif-
fering critical receptions of Birdman and Afterglow don’t necessarily provide an in-
dication of improvised soundtracks’ potential future. Birdman was a hit, and based
on critical responses, the unique timbral and rhythmic elements of the soundtrack
had a lot to do with it. Afterglow, in contrast, was not nearly as popular, and there
is very little critical discussion (or even awareness) of the improvised nature of its
soundtrack. But the significance of these productions is less about whether or not
they are harbingers of an improvised film soundtrack movement and more about
what they have accomplished artistically. Both Iñárritu and Rudolph used improvised
soundtracks because improvisation was central to their films’ concepts. While we may
not see a proliferation of improvised soundtracks in mainstream Hollywood, these
examples highlight the potential of an integrative jazz-film medium that is rooted

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in jazz aesthetics, as well as lay a foundation for what such integrations might look
and sound like.85
Notes
1. Specifically, I am referring to synchronized-sound film scores that are predominately
created in an improvised format, not scores that feature improvised passages over primar-
ily prewritten arrangements. Aside from the case studies considered in this article, the
few examples of predominantly improvised scores within the last fifty years include Bill
Kirchner and Marc Copeland’s improvised score for Marlyn Mason’s short film The Right
Regrets (2013), Mattias Bärjed and Jonas Kullhammar’s score for Swedish filmmakers Klas
Ostergren and Mikael Marcimain’s Gentlemen (2014), (arguably) Howard Shore and
Ornette Coleman’s score for David Cronenberg’s The Naked Lunch (1991), and several of
guitarist Marc Ribot’s silent film and experimental film soundtracks.
2.
Ascenseur pour l’echafaud, directed by Louis Malle (1957; Irvington, NY: The Criterion
Collection, 2006), DVD.
3. For comprehensive scholarly texts addressing the French New Wave film movement, see
Richard Neupert, A History of the French New Wave Cinema, 2nd ed. (Madison: Universi-
ty of Wisconsin Press, 2007), and Michel Marie, The French New Wave: An Artistic School,
trans. Richard Neupert (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2003). Also see Peter Graham, ed.,
The New Wave: Critical Landmarks (New York, Doubleday & Company, 1968) for a col-
lection of seminal film criticism texts written by prominent New Wave filmmakers such
as André Bazin, François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, and Jean-Luc Godard.
4. Neupert, A History; Marie, French New Wave; and Graham, New Wave.
5. Recommended literature on this topic includes: John Caldwell, Production Culture: Indus-
trial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and Media (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2008); Vicki Mayer, Miranda J. Banks, and John Caldwell, eds., Production Studies:
Cultural Studies of Media Industries (New York: Routledge, 2009); and Petr Szczerpanik
and Patrick Vonderau, eds., Behind the Screen: Inside European Production Cultures (New
York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013). For two useful resources on risk and risk management
in the film industry, see Mette Hjort, ed., Film and Risk (Detroit: Wayne State University
Press, 2012), and John Sedgwick and Michael Pokorny, eds., An Economic History of Film
(New York: Routledge, 2005).
6. Dick Hyman, interview with the author, March 10, 2015, Venice, FL.
7. By using the term “jazz improvisation,” I do not imply that only jazz musicians impro-
vise—or that jazz musicians must improvise (e.g., Billie Holiday). Rather, I use it because
both Sánchez and Isham self-identify as jazz musicians and have expressed that these
soundtracks were rooted in jazz. Additionally, as improvisation is often regarded as a
primary element of jazz performance (although not exclusively), I interpret its usage in
these film scores as representative of production methods that are influenced by jazz per-
formance techniques and aesthetic approaches.
8. I use the pronoun “his” here but want to draw attention to the history of gender dis-
crepancy among film industry directors (and executives in general). Gendered discourse
permeates theories of auteurism, directorial power, and creativity—contributing to film
directing being a highly male-dominated field. My own case studies reflect this phenome-
non—in which all of the pertinent directors discussed are men. For two texts that address
how specific female filmmakers negotiate their own careers and identities within the gen-
dered structures of filmmaking and the patriarchal model of auteurism, see Julia Dobson,
Negotiating the Auteur: Dominique Cabrera, Noémie Lvovksy, Laetitia Masson and Marion
Vernoux (New York: Manchester University Press, 2012), and Sandy Flitterman-Lewis,

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To Desire Differently: Feminism and the French Cinema (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1996). For a broader look at gendered discourses of creativity and “genius,” see
Christine Battersby, Gender and Genius: Toward a Feminist Aesthetics (London: Women’s
Press, 1989).
9. Andrew Sarris, “Notes on Auteur Theory in 1962,” in Film Theory and Criticism: Intro-
ductory Readings, ed. Leo Braudy, Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press,
2009); Andrew Sarris, The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929–1968 (New
York: Da Capo Press, 1996).
10. A range of criticisms of auteur theory have challenged the privileging of the director over
other cinematic producers, including screenwriters, cinematographers, and studio execu-
tives and producers at large—as well as the inherent fallacies of developing cults of per-
sonalities that risk marginalizing a number of potentially valuable film works. Examples
of pertinent literature, among others, include Pauline Kael, “Raising Kane—Parts I and
II,” New Yorker, February 1971; Aljean Harmetz, Round Up the Usual Suspects: The Mak-
ing of Casablanca: Bogart, Bergman, and World War II (New York: Hyperion, 1992); and
David Kipen, The Schreiber Theory: A Radical Rewrite of American Film History (Hoboken,
NJ: Melville House, 2006).
11. For an interesting ethnographic study of contemporary American independent film
production, see Sherry B. Ortner, Not Hollywood: Independent Film at the Twilight of the
American Dream (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013).
12. This term originally defined unbranded calves who strayed from the herd (named for
Texas pioneer Samuel A. Maverick, known for leaving his cows unbranded) and has
since been used to describe people who are considered to be unorthodox, original, in-
dividualist, nonconformist, and/or free spirited (or, more pejoratively, loose cannons).
Throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the term has designated a family of
card sharks in the 1950s television series Maverick (and a 1994 film adaptation of the same
name); a 1960s-70s stylish, youth-oriented Ford vehicle; Tom Cruise’s egotistical, hyper-
masculine Navy fighter pilot character in the film Top Gun (1986), an NBA basketball
team, and Senator John McCain during his presidential bid in the late 2000s.
13. Howard S. Becker, Art Worlds (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 232.
14. Geoff Andrew, Stranger than Paradise: Maverick Film-Makers in Recent American Cinema
(New York: Limelight, 1999), 6.
15. I borrow the term from David Hesmondhalgh and Sarah Baker, as used in their work
Creative Labor: Media Work in Three Cultural Industries (New York: Routledge, 2011).
16. Such scholars include David Hesmondhalgh, The Cultural Industries, 2nd ed. (London:
Sage, 2007), 199; Hesmondhalgh and Baker, Creative Labor; Bill Ryan, Making Capital
From Culture: The Corporate Form of Capitalist Cultural Production (Berlin: Walter de
Gruyter, 1992); Robert Faulkner, Hollywood Studio Musicians: Their Work and Careers in
the Recording Industry (Chicago: Aldine-Atherton, 1971); Faulkner, “Dilemmas in Com-
mercial Work: Hollywood Film Composers and Their Clients,” Urban Life 5, no. 1 (1976):
3–32; Faulkner, Music on Demand; John L. Sullivan, “Leo C. Rosten’s Hollywood: Power,
Status, and the Primacy of Economic and Social Networks in Cultural Production,”
in Production Studies: Cultural Studies of Media Industries, ed. Vicki Mayer, Miranda J.
Banks, and John Caldwell. (New York: Routledge, 2009), 39–53.
17. Faulkner, Music on Demand, 97.
18. Matt Stahl, Unfree Masters: Recording Artists and the Politics of Work (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2013).
19. Jason Toynbee, Making Popular Music: Musicians, Creativity, and Institutions (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2000).

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20. For more on Bourdieu’s theories, see Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the
Judgment of Taste (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984); Pierre Bourdieu, The
Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1993).
21. Toynbee, Making Popular Music, 46.
22. This section includes excerpts published in Gretchen Carlson, “Antonio Sanchez, Bird-
man (or the Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) Original Motion Picture Soundtrack,” Journal
of the Society of American Music 10, no. 2 (May 2016): 229–33.
23. Babel (2006), Birdman (won in 2015), and The Revenant (2016) were all nominated for
Best Picture, while Amores Perros (2000) and Biutiful (2010) were nominated for Best For-
eign Language Film.
24. Lorraine Ali, “Alejandro G. Iñárritu on Directing His Own Career,” Los Angeles Times,
February 3, 2015, http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/moviesnow/la-et-mn
-alejandro-gonzalez-inarritu-retrospective-20150203-story.html.
25. As an illustration, Iñárritu’s recent film The Revenant was ultimately granted a production
budget of $135 million, which ballooned from its initial $60 million budget projection. New
Regency production company covered a significant portion of the costs, which were supple-
mented with funds from RatPac, Alpha Pictures, and Empyre. For more information, see
Mike Fleming Jr., “No. 19 The Revenant—2015 Most Valuable Movie Blockbuster Tourna-
ment,” Deadline Hollywood, March 18, 2016, http://deadline.com/2016/03/the-revenant
-profit-box-office-2015-1201721740/; and Kim Masters, “How Leonardo DiCaprio’s The Rev-
enant Shoot Became ‘A Living Hell,’” Hollywood Reporter, July 22, 2015, http://www
.hollywoodreporter.com/news/how-leonardo-dicaprios-revenant-shoot-810290.
26. Elvis Mitchell, “Alejandro González Iñárritu,” Interview, October 8, 2014, https://www
.interviewmagazine.com/film/alejandro-gonzalez-inarritu.
27. My discussion here focuses on the original, improvised percussion music in the film,
which comprises the vast majority of the soundtrack. While six prerecorded works by
Mahler, Tchaikovsky, Ravel, Adams, and Rachmaninov also appear, they are featured as
source music in the film, and—according to Iñárritu—are ancillary elements. Interest-
ingly, the Birdman soundtrack was deemed ineligible for an Academy Award nomination
for Best Original Score, with the Academy’s arguing that the ratio of original music to
precomposed music was not sufficient to be considered. The dismissal itself is ripe for
consideration through the present notion of “risk”—but that is for another time. Regard-
less, Sánchez’s soundtrack has still received much critical acclaim, including a nomination
from the Golden Globes and the Grammy Award for Best Score Soundtrack for Visual
Media. Pete Hammond, “Birdman Score Drummed Out of Oscars as Academy Rejects
Filmmakers’ Appeal,” Deadline Hollywood, December 22, 2014, http://deadline.com/
2014/12/birdman-out-oscars-academy-rejects-appeal-1201332029/.
28. The term “Chilango” is slang for a resident of Mexico City. Iñárritu’s and Sánchez’s racial
and cultural affiliation is worth considering in more detail, particularly with regard to col-
laboration and opportunity within the highly Euro-dominated film industry.
29. Alejandro González Iñárritu, liner notes to Birdman: or (The Unexpected Virtue of Igno-
rance): Original Motion Picture Soundtrack, Milan M2–36689 (2014), CD.
30. Quoted in Lorraine Ali, “Antonio Sánchez’s Soaring Beat Takes Flight in Birdman,” Los
Angeles Times, December 9, 2014, http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/envelope/la-et
-mn-birdman-antonio-sanchez-20141209-story.html.
31. Michael Keaton’s own roster of film roles contributed to Riggan’s intertextuality. Keaton’s
acting career began with several miniseries and comedies (e.g., Mr. Mom [1983], Beetle-
juice [1988]), followed by his eponymous role as Batman (1989), after which he acted in a
series of “tough guy” roles (e.g., One Good Cop [1991], Jackie Brown [1997]), and finally to
a mix of comedies, children’s movies, and action thrillers. He was therefore an ideal figure

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to portray an intense, anxious actor struggling to move beyond his commercial back-
ground and establish a new reputation as an artist.
32. Quoted in Ali, “Antonio Sánchez’s Soaring Beat.”
33. There are cases where film composers work closely with filmmakers from the inception of
the project—including John Williams with Stephen Spielberg, Terence Blanchard with
Spike Lee, and Ennio Morricone with Sergio Leone. In some of these cases, the music is
prepared for scenes prior to filming. However, such circumstances remain rare and are
generally in cases where the director and composer have an ongoing and successful working
relationship. See Garrett Tiedemann, “Which Comes First, the Movie or the Music?” Classi-
cal MPR, April 5, 2015, https://www.classicalmpr.org/story/2014/11/05/film-score-picture.
34. See Faulkner, Music on Demand, and Fred Karlin and Rayburn Wright, On the Track: A
Guide to Contemporary Film Scoring (New York: Routledge, 2004) for excellent resources
on conventional film-music production methods and expectations.
35. Iñárritu, liner notes to Birdman.
36. “Emmanuel Lubezki ASC, AMC on Birdman,” ARRI News, accessed October 2017,
http://www.arri.com/news/news/emmanuel-lubezki-asc-amc-on-birdman/.
37. Lesley Mahoney, “Antonio Sánchez ’97: The Making of the Birdman Score,” Berklee, No-
vember 5, 2014, https://www.berklee.edu/news/antonio-sanchez-97-making-birdman
-score.
38. Quoted in Janowitz, “Drumming Out.”
39. Ivan Radford, “Birdman, Whiplash, and the Sound of Drums,” Den of Geek, February 23,
2015, http://www.denofgeek.com/us/movies/whiplash/243978/birdman-whiplash-and-the-
sound-of-drums.
40. Temp tracks are music recordings that are edited into a rough cut of a film so that the
filmmakers can get an idea of music placement in relation to the timing of the edited vi-
suals. Temp tracks may also be utilized to establish an idea for the mood or emotional feel
of a given scene.
41. Janowitz, “Drumming Out.”
42. Kristopher Tapley, “Oscar-winning Cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki Details the
‘Dance’ of Filming Birdman,” HitFix, Dec 20, 2014, http://uproxx.com/hitfix/oscar-
winning-cinematographer-emmanuel-lubezki-details-the-dance-of-filming-birdman/.
43. Emmanuel Lubezki was the award-winning cinematographer responsible for execut-
ing this innovative filming approach. He has received three Academy Awards for Best
Cinematography within the last five years, for Gravity (2013), Birdman (2014), and The
Revenant (2015).
44. This performance is identified in both the film credits and film soundtrack as “Dirty
Walk.” It appears in Birdman: Or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), directed by Alejan-
dro González Iñárritu (2014; Beverly Hills, CA: 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment,
2015), DVD.
45. For valuable ethnographic works on improvisation’s centrality to jazz performance, see
Ingrid Monson, Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1996), and Paul Berliner, Thinking in Jazz, the Infinite Art of Improvisa-
tion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). See also Scott Deveaux’s sociological
treatment of improvisation in bebop in Scott Deveaux, Bebop: A Social and Musical His-
tory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).
46. For studies on jazz’s semiotic significations in film, see Krin Gabbard, Jammin’ at the Mar-
gins: Jazz and the American Cinema (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), Krin
Gabbard, Black Magic: White Hollywood and African-American Culture (New Brunswick,
NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004), and Peter Stanfield, Body and Soul: Jazz and Blues in

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American Film, 1927–63 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005). For considerations of
jazz’s semiotic dimensions in advertising, see Mark Laver, Jazz Sells: Music, Marketing, and
Meaning (New York: Routledge, 2015).
47. Simon Frith, Performing Rites: Evaluating Popular Music (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 1996), 120. Another useful scholarly work on the semiotic dimensions of
conventional (or “classical”) Hollywood film scores is Anahid Kassabian’s Hearing Film:
Tracking Identifications in Contemporary Hollywood Film Music (New York: Routledge,
2001).
48. David Butler, Jazz Noir: Listening to Music from Phantom Lady to The Last Seduction
(Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002). Prior to Streetcar, jazz had primarily appeared in film as
source music—not underscore. As source music, it appeared in association with moments
of sexual promiscuity, aggression, erotic desire, and so on. North’s “jazzy” underscore draws
on these previous semiotic associations to reflect Blanche DuBois’s internal mental state.
49. Butler, Jazz Noir.
50. Butler, Jazz Noir.
51. For a useful consideration of this topic, see Johannes Brusila, “Jungle Drums Striking the
World Beat: Africa as an Image Factor in Popular Music, in Encounter Images in the Meet-
ings Between Africa and Europe (Uppsala, Sweden: Nordic Africa Institute, 2001), 146–61.
For a more specific look at these associations in early twentieth-century cartoons, see
Daniel Goldmark, Tunes for ’Toons: Music and the Hollywood Cartoon (Berkeley: Univer-
sity of California Press, 2005).
52. Steve Pond, “How Birdman Composer Improvised the Year’s Most Audacious Film
Score,” The Wrap, October 19, 2014, http://www.thewrap.com/how-birdman-composer-
improvised-the-years-most-audacious-film-score/.
53. Julie Miller, “How Jazz Drummer Antonio Sanchez Improvised the Birdman Score,” Van-
ity Fair Hollywood, November 7, 2014, https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2014/11/
birdman-score-antonio-sanchez.
54. Iñárritu, liner notes to Birdman.
55. Matt Collar, “Birdman (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack),” AllMusic, October 14,
2014, http://www.allmusic.com/album/birdman-original-motion-picture-soundtrack
-mw0002796520.
56. Janowitz, “Drumming Out.”
57. In fact, at two points in the film, the music itself becomes “live,” shifting from nondieget-
ic to diegetic status—and then back again—within the confines of a single piece. In both
cases, the music becomes diegetic when Riggan approaches and moves past an on-screen
drummer (played by drummer Nate Smith), who appears to be performing the precise
soundtrack.
58. Mickey Mousing is a film technique referring to synchronized, mirrored, or parallel scor-
ing—in which the music is synced to directly accompany or mimic actions on screen. It
was commonly used in early Walt Disney films, including Mickey Mouse films, hence its
name.
59. Shaun Brady, “Chops: Marc Ribot and Antonio Sanchez on the Art of Improvising to
Film,” Jazz Times, June 2018, https://jazztimes.com/columns/chops/marc-ribot-antonio-
sanchez-film/.
60. “Ed Norton on ‘Birdman,’ Wes Anderson, and Why $40 Makes Him Proud,” National
Public Radio, October 21, 2014, https://www.npr.org/2014/10/21/357637203/ed-norton
-on-birdman-wes-anderson-and-why-40-makes-him-proud.
61. John Patterson, “Alan Rudolph: ‘People Just Don’t Surrender to My Movies, Ever,”
Guardian, April 30, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/apr/30/alan-rudolph
-film-robert-altman-interview.

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62. Quoted in “Halves of a Dream: Making Trouble in Mind,” directed by Greg Carson, in
Trouble in Mind, 25th Anniversary Special Edition, directed by Alan Rudolph (1985, Los
Angeles, CA: Shout! Factory, 2010), DVD.
63. Quoted in Margaret Barton-Fumo, “Interview: Alan Rudolph,” Film Comment, May 2,
2018, https://www.filmcomment.com/blog/interview-alan-rudolph/.
64. Quoted in “Halves of a Dream.”
67. Quoted in Barton-Fumo, “Interview.”
68. Barton-Fumo, “Interview.”
69. “Halves of a Dream.”
70. “Halves of a Dream.”
71. Mark Isham, interview with the author, December 17, 2014, Los Angeles, CA.
72. Isham, interview.
81. Quoted in Barton-Fumo, “Interview.”
82. Altman (1925–2006) was considered a distinctive maverick director himself, receiv-
ing significant critical acclaim for his unique and influential filmmaking style. He was
nominated five times for the Academy Award for Best Director. Altman expressed a love
for jazz, which manifested in his 1996 film Kansas City. This film exhibited visual and
soundtrack recordings of improvised jam sessions featuring a number of contemporary
jazz artists (e.g., Joshua Redman, Cyrus Chestnut, Ron Carter, Geri Allen), who por-
trayed historic jazz figures such as Lester Young, Basie, and so forth in the film itself. The
Kansas City soundtrack has since become an iconic jazz film soundtrack as well. For more
consideration of Altman’s relationship to music in his films, see Gayle Sherwood Magee,
Robert Altman’s Soundtracks: Film, Music, and Sound from M*A*S*H to A Prairie Home
Companion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). Also see Krin Gabbard, “Robert
Altman’s Jazz History Lesson,” in Black Magic, 235–50.
84. Gary Giddins and John Faddis, “Special Features,” in Malle, Ascenseur pour l’echafaud,
disc 2.
85. Don Cheadle’s Miles Ahead (2016) may be worth considering in this discussion of jazz-
film production. The film prominently features prerecorded jazz improvisation (primarily
Miles Davis recordings), but it also experiments with narrative form. Don Cheadle, who
produced, directed, and acted in the film, intentionally edited the scenes in a nonlinear
manner, intending to make them visually “spontaneous” and “improvisational.” Cheadle’s
reasoning for this production method was that Davis’s life and art was “so mercurial and
spontaneous and not dedicated to any sort of form that he had done before . . . [so] I
thought it would really be totally anathema to him to do something that felt standard, so

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to speak.” Quoted in Kervyn Cloete, “It’s All About Improvisation in This First Trailer for
Don Cheadle’s Miles Ahead,” Critical Hit Entertainment, February 5, 2016, https://www
.criticalhit.net/entertainment/its-all-about-improvisation-in-this-first-trailer-for-don
-cheadles-miles-ahead/.
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Discography
Davis, Miles. Ascenseur pour l’échafaud: Complete Recordings. Recorded December 4–5, 1957. Fon-
tana 836 305–2, CD (1988).
Isham, Mark. Blue Sun. Columbia CK-67227, CD (1995).
Isham, Mark, featuring Charles Lloyd, Gary Burton, Geri Allen, and Sid Page. Afterglow: Music
from the Motion Picture. Columbia CK-67929, CD (1998).
Sánchez, Antonio. Birdman: Or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance): Original Motion Picture
Soundtrack. Milan M2–36689, CD (2014).
Filmography
Ascenseur pour l’échafaud. Directed by Louis Malle. 1957. Irvington, NY: The Criterion Collec-
tion, 2006. DVD.
Afterglow. Directed by Alan Rudolph. 1997. Culver City, CA: Sony Pictures, 2003. DVD.
Birdman: Or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance). Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu. Bev-
erly Hills, CA: 20th Century Fox, 2015. DVD.
Gentlemen. Directed by Mikael Marcimain. Stockholm, Sweden: B-Reel Films, 2014.
“Halves of a Dream: Making Trouble in Mind.” Directed by Greg Carson. In Trouble in Mind,
25th Anniversary Special Edition, directed by Alan Rudolph. Los Angeles, CA: Shout!
Factory, 2010. DVD.
The Naked Lunch. Directed by David Cronenberg. Beverly Hills, CA: 20th Century Fox, 1991.
The Right Regrets. Directed by Ralph Senensky. Written and produced by Marlyn Mason. Filmed
2013. YouTube video, 38:01. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zeDCE8EJD9M&feature
=youtu.be

129.126.218.66 on Sun, 14 Jun 2020 15:12:04 UTC
“Where You Are Accepted,
You Blossom”: Toward Care Ethics
in Jazz Historiography
In the commemorative booklet of a ceremony organized in the wake of jazz pianist

Geri Allen’s passing at the 2017 meeting of Feminist Theory and Music, there appeared
a picture that had made a strong impression on me back when I was an undergraduate.
In this picture, Allen plays the piano at the 1997 JVC (Newport) Jazz Festival while
her toddler son rests in a baby carrier on her back. Focused and calm, a confident
half-smile tying together the corner of her right lip and eye, her arms relaxed in spite
of the shoulder straps, Allen balances the toddler’s weight between her slightly angled
trunk and upper thighs resting on the lower keyboard. When I first saw this picture,
it epitomized the (for lack of a better word) badasses I really wanted to study (and
perhaps also be—don’t we all): formidable, self-reliant, and caring.1
Among the statements that the organizing committee collected in her memory,
an excerpt from A. J. Johnson’s read as such:
Geri seldom talked about being a woman in jazz, but continually acted upon it.
First and foremost, she addressed it existentially just by being a “bad mother”
(e.g., a giant, master, or heavyweight at what they do) on the piano. . . . A won-
derful mother indeed, Geri attained the highest levels of musical accomplishment
while raising three children into adulthood. I can’t count the number of times our
meetings were scheduled around their needs. Yet her accomplishments provide
evidence that motherhood is not contrary to excellence, in any field, nor contrary
to parenthood for anyone willing to take it as seriously as their work.2
Without a doubt, Johnson’s eulogy is a much-deserved celebration of Allen’s formi-

dable lifetime of achievements. Still, it left me wondering why it remains necessary


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60 “Where You Are Accepted,You Blossom” Vanessa Blais-Tremblay
to provide evidence that excellence and motherhood are not contrary, and that there
are indeed some who take jazz and motherhood equally seriously. Is the figure of the
mother-in-jazz really just “emerging”? And if not, who are those who didn’t take the
jazz—or the mothering—quite seriously enough, making such evidence welcome?
The intersections between motherhood and jazz continue to be undertheo-
rized, which partly explains why assumptions of mutual exclusivity may continue to
prevail. In a 2016 monograph, Andrea O’Reilly suggests that motherhood has been
marginalized within contemporary intersectional feminist scholarship for a number of
reasons, central of which include a wariness to essentialize womanhood to biological
and reproductive functions and a related suspicion of conservative agendas. As she
writes:
The current disappearance of motherhood in academic feminism is the result
of a larger and pervasive feminist discomfort with all things maternal and more
specifically as a result of confusing the institution of motherhood with the ex-
perience of mothering. Much of second-wave feminism—in particular that of
liberal and radical-libertarian feminism—views motherhood as a significant, if
not the determining, cause of women’s oppression under patriarchy. . . . Many
contemporary feminists have reviled both mothers and babies. Some feminists
rage at babies; others trivialize them. Very few have attempted to integrate them
into the fabric of a full and equal life.3
A number of women in jazz have stressed the significant costs that becoming a pri-
mary caregiver had on their professional careers. In her recent ethnography of jazz-
women instrumentalists in France for instance, sociologist Marie Buscatto accounts
for an overwhelming majority of professional jazzwomen who do not have children
under their primary care. She also highlights that for the few who do, a six-month
maternity leave had sufficed to make them disappear from their colleagues’ “list of
hirables.”4 Only the “bad” mothers—in the sense of mothers who don’t mother, or
don’t mother properly—seem to “make it.” In this sense, feminist jazz scholars such
as Buscatto and others may have wanted to steer clear of the topic of motherhood if
their interviewees themselves framed children as making them partners in their own
oppression. If, as O’Reilly suggests, liberal feminists have argued that “only by secur-
ing time away from children and creating a life outside of motherhood will women be
able to maintain an autonomous identity separate from that of mother,” positioning
professional jazzwomanhood outside the realm of reproduction has been an impor-
tant and a necessary step to counter their initial invisibility in the historical record.
Until recent years, strategic positionings of women instrumentalists in jazz have
tended to emphasize the ways in which they “fitted-in” a dominant narrative articu-
lated around the gendered masculine figures of the genius, intellectual, or artist—what
Sherrie Tucker has called “one-of-the-boys” narratives.5 In other words, aspects of a

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“Where You Are Accepted,You Blossom” Vanessa Blais-Tremblay 61
jazzwoman’s life that are coded as feminine—among others the impact of collaboration,
of teaching, of mothering, and of other forms of gendered care-work on her artistic
development—have taken on a secondary role in historical narratives. Meanwhile,
elements that can be more easily accommodated into accounts of jazz as a masculine
acoustic and discursive space—iconic descriptions of Mary Lou Williams’s performance
style as “masculine” come to mind—have been emphasized.6
While useful as a strategic entry point into dominant narratives for both
feminist jazz historiographers and for jazzwomen as storytellers, a central issue with
one-of-the-boys narratives, as Monica Hairston O’Connell and Tucker and have
argued, is that it makes the notion of proper jazzwomanship rest on the assumption
of gender deviance. Such narratives make it difficult to imagine women walking in
and out of jazz scenes otherwise than according to how (well) they are able to “man-
age” their gender.7 As a result, two tropes have prevailed in accounts of women jazz
instrumentalists: the jazzwoman who remains on the margins of historical narratives
because of her inability or unwillingness to overcome the gendered obstacles along
her path, and the exceptional woman who “passed” as masculine, in a space always-
already defined as male.8
The invisibility-exceptionalism paradigm for women jazz instrumentalists
(one might also call it a “pass”-or-fail) is directly related to assumptions of mutual
exclusivity between motherhood and jazz. If jazzwomen are primarily included in
the narrative through their passing as one-of-the-boys, they can hardly be shown
to have taken feminine-coded activities such as childcare just as seriously as their
work. Mothers-in-jazz are thus rendered invisible, unimaginable even in the histori-
cal record—which is why Allen could “emerge,” in 2017, as such a welcome sight.
Ultimately, while the celebration of Allen’s joint accomplishments may at first seem
to problematize the lack of stories of about motherhood in dominant jazz narra-
tives, the figure of the exceptional mother-in-jazz functions much like the trope of
the exceptional woman-in-jazz, in that it predetermines its membership to only a
selected few and reinforces the assumption that jazz and motherhood are, for most,
an either/or. Ultimately, the gendered “pass” or-fail discourses directly impede the
normalization of care-work in the historical record.
A number of black feminist theorists, notably Patricia Hill Collins and bell hooks,
have written about motherhood in a much different light. Rather than as an activity
that women wish to disarticulate from in order to be taken seriously, from an African
American maternal standpoint, motherhood provides a base for self-actualization,
empowerment, centrality, and authority in urban black communities.9 Collins fore-
grounds mothering as work—and therefore “motherwork”—in order to call attention
to the ways in which it has historically transcended the boundaries between public and
private that articulate hegemonic notions of professionalism, as well as to emphasize its
social and political motivations. “In contrast to the cult of ‘true womanhood’ associated

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with the traditional family ideal,” she writes, “in which paid work is defined as being
in opposition to and incompatible with motherhood, work for black women has been
an important and valued dimension of motherhood.”10 From an African American
maternal standpoint, care-work is a valuable activity to be integrated into, rather than
separated from, the realm of the professional; motherhood is not an activity that may
or may not be taken just as seriously as work—it is work.
Following Collins’s cues, this article takes issue with the figure of the “emerg-
ing mother-in-jazz” by exploring intersections between care-work and parameters of
jazz participantship in the oral histories of jazzwomen who were active in Montreal’s
jazz scene in the early twentieth century.11 Are jazz excellence and motherwork as
mutually exclusive in the archive as in published historical texts? How do women in
jazz, in particular the ones currently absent or invisible from dominant discourses,
negotiate historiographical “failure” when asked to position themselves in relation
to Montreal’s jazz scene? More jazz was made in Montreal than anywhere else in
Canada in the first half of the twentieth century, yet institutional archives cur-
rently attest to just a single woman instrumentalist who made a living playing jazz
professionally through her entire adult life in Montreal in this time period—this
was pianist Ilene Bourne. Beyond that, the city hosted a number of what one could
call “invisibles” and “ephemera” from a historiographical standpoint: a handful of
black nightclub and theater pianists who left nearly no historical documentation
beyond their names (Gertrude Waters, Gladys Spencer, Nina Brown), a number
of women who played jazz exclusively in the private space of the home parlor (in-
cluding May Peterson, one of jazz pianist Oscar Peterson’s two sisters), and a trio
of not-even-real sisters (the Spencer Sisters Trio), who played most of their jazz
overseas and found themselves out of work upon returning to Montreal. Clearly,
gendered obstacles in terms of access—to knowledge, spaces, networks, groups—
negatively affected the numbers of professional black women jazz musicians in
Montreal. Do these women speak of their turn away from jazz performance as a
failure of skill? As a failure to overcome gendered obstacles (including expectations
that they become primary caregivers)? If they didn’t “pass,” what other strategies do
those who “failed” from a historiographical standpoint draw upon to articulate an
autobiographical narrative, and why is this important when thinking more broadly
about jazz historiography?12
Invisibles and Ephemera
Olga Spencer Foderingham enjoyed a thriving early career as a professional theatri-

cal dancer. Born in Montreal in the late 1900s, Spencer was trained as a dancer and
chorus girl in Harlem in the late 1920s, where she also worked before returning to
Canada.13 Through the 1930s, she danced in a number of nightclubs in Montreal

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and formed a group called the Spencer Sisters Trio with her sister Thelma Spencer
and niece Natalie Ramirez. Reminiscing upon this time period in a later interview,
Ramirez described the group as “just an ordinary nightclub act, twenty, twenty-five
minutes, yeah. . . . We went as sisters, and this way it eliminated a lot of, ah, explain-
ing.”14 By 1935, the trio was advertised in Le Nouvelliste as “remarkable dancers who
need no introduction anymore to Canadian and American publics.”15 In addition to
tap and jazz dance routines, the trio sang and played popular songs of the day, with
Ramirez on trumpet, Olga on accordion, and Thelma on guitar. They were featured
on radio station CKAC, and they performed in Montreal’s East-end nightclubs
such as the Pagoda, the Café Louis, the Val d’Or, as well as in clubs in Quebec City,
rural Quebec, and in Ottawa. During the Second World War, the trio joined with
torch singer and dancer Lora Pierre, comedy team Freddy and Flo Robinson, and
Kansas City jazz pianist Lawrence “88 Keys” Keyes, touring as the “Lucky Seven”
to entertain the American troops in United Service Organizations’ (USO) camps
around the South Pacific.16 The Chicago Defender introduced them as an “all-star
cast of musicians and dancers,” one of “three sensationally successful musical units,
featuring artists of jive and swing . . . [who] swung their way around bases in the
Philippines, Okinawa, Japan and the Dutch East Indies, bringing joy to the hearts
of lonely GI hep-cats.”17 Spencer also remembers performing in Hawaii and Philippe
Island in Australia. The Lucky Seven ended their journey with an almost eight-week
tour of Japan, which took them “from the southernmost island of Kyushu to the
northernmost, Hokkaido,” including “half a dozen performances . . . in the Octagon
Theater which stands alone in a bombed-out Yokohama block.” Vincent Tubbs for the
Afro-American reported that Flo Robinson was “the first colored American woman
to shop along the remains of Tokyo’s Fifth Avenue, the Ginza,” that the group had
“transformed” the Kyoto theatre and the Sixth Army Recreation Center into the
“Street of Swing,” and that Keyes “made ancient Japanese pianos do things oriental
pianos never did before.” By December 1945, more than five hundred thousand
service members had seen their show.18
In the camps, the Lucky Seven presented sometimes as many as three shows
a day. According to Ramirez:
We played all the music . . . mostly all the current things that you’d hear on
the radio . . . the music that the people in the army liked, you know, the ones
that they were used to. . . . Sometimes operettas, Thelma sang that. . . . We did
a little bit of everything, you know? The classical, and . . . the modern. Mostly
modern. Whatever was the going song at the time, that’s what we would learn.
Because we did a lot of rehearsing, so . . . we kept up.19
They danced Latin dances, Afro-Cuban dances, Italian dances, even Irish jigs depend-
ing on the act they put together. For the finale, Olga Spencer “improvised something

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for the seven of us together, one of the popular songs.” One such piece was “(We) May
be Wrong but (We) Think You’re Wonderful,” a song composed by Henry Sullivan
with lyrics by Harry Ruskin originally published in 1929 that made a comeback in
the mid-forties after Judy Garland performed it in 1944 on the Armed Forces Radio
Network.20 During the shows, the Spencer Sisters joined with Keyes to accompany
the other performers, and they danced, sang, and played their own numbers in be-
tween. “Sometimes it was so hot, we had to practice under the wings of the planes!”
remembers Spencer. In Wajaboela, Indonesia, “The unit was playing just back of
the front lines and we often had shows interrupted by the air-warning sirens.”21
The Spencer Sisters ate “spam and baloney and powdered eggs every day,” though
sometimes the navy brought them fresh eggs. In the Philippines, a big dragonfly flew
inside Ramirez’s dress during the performance. And as she refused to wear army boots
in lieu of her preferred sandals, on one occasion she was bit by a centipede: “I still
had to work! My foot was swollen up and I had to dance with this swollen foot and
everything. But I kept my boots on from then after. I didn’t take a chance! (laughs).”
The group “marveled at the way the Philippine people took the constant rain.” And
as Freddie Robinson told a correspondent for the Afro-American: “Tell the folks back
home we are in Manila, a city in which there is hardly a building undamaged.”22 The
Spencer Sisters received several marriage proposals and love letters from servicemen.
Ramirez also recalled that the group had a code word, “Spencer Tackle,” for when
“one of the guys were getting fresh. We would leave our companions and we would
go help them out. One time, Olga called it, we went over and we beat the heck out
of the guy (laughs). I don’t know to this day what happened, but I’d know when
she hollered [that] she needed help . . . the other girls would come to the rescue of
whoever had gotten into a scramble.”23 “[My sisters] locked the doors,” continues
Ramirez, “I didn’t. I was always getting into trouble.”24
The oral histories of the Spencer Sisters move seamlessly between (only-funny-
after-the-fact) touring anecdotes, tropes of travelogue exotica, and tales of resistance
to daily threats of abuse. They were celebrated everywhere they went, they “kept up”
with the repertoire that service members enjoyed, and they excelled as singers, dancers,
choreographers, and instrumentalists in the face of such difficult work conditions as
seasickness, injury, extreme weather, war-ridden locales, and unfamiliar audiences.
Missing from the archive, unfortunately, is the opportunity to listen critically to the
music that they made and compare it to other music made in USO camps during
the Second World War which has been less contested in dominant jazz historical
narratives.
When the trio returned from the South Pacific in January or February 1946,
they found themselves out of work.25 Sherrie Tucker has pointed to the many chal-
lenges that all-women bands who worked in USO camps faced when they returned
home. Among others was the sudden lack of job opportunities for women as men

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Image 1: “Spencer Sisters Trio, Famous

Studio Montreal, WWII.” Meilan Lam
Fonds (P135), Box HA01736, Concordia
University Library, Special Collections.
Used with permission.
claimed their prewar positions.26 Clearly, the changing landscape of gendered labor
during the Second World War had a positive impact on the trio’s career. In publicity
photos, as well as in the few pictures that remain from their performances overseas,
the Spencer Sisters look fabulous, appearing in glamorous gowns, wearing fluffy suits
or peau-de-soie shirts and skirts, and accessorizing with jewelry and with flowers
and pearls in their hair. They consciously and successfully marketed themselves as
“novelties,” a strategy that functioned well for women musicians looking for work
abroad during the Second World War. But at home, it made the trio register as
entertainment rather than as artistry, and in Montreal, the Spencer Sisters would
thereafter only be hired to work as theatrical dancers and singers, never as members
of a house band.27
Yet in Spencer’s narrative, such gendered obstacles in looking for work upon
her return do not take on a primary role as a structuring device.
Thelma and Natalie decided they wanted to go back to the States, and I did too,
but since I had gotten married, I didn’t want to leave my husband that soon!
I’d only been married three or four weeks to a month when they decided they
wanted to go back to the States. So I did go back with them, but it didn’t work
out. We were thinking of building a home. So I left them there and I came back
to Montreal. . . . After being married, I’d say two or three years, we got settled

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into our new home, and (hesitates) I felt lost! I wasn’t dancing, I wasn’t singing,
I had to have something to do, so I decided on starting a group for the GIs and
the camps here, that were still here. In about six months I had a show together,
and we called it the Rainbow Revue. And we started entertaining in camps and
places like that.28
For three years, Spencer performed in spaces that maintained political economies of
wartime entertainment. The Rainbow Revue included twenty-seven musicians, danc-
ers, and singers, including both black and white performers, “aged four to seventy
years,” and they performed for disabled war veterans and to aid charitable causes.29
Yet by 1949, Spencer continued to feel dissatisfied:
I still didn’t feel that I (hesitates). I still didn’t want to sit home and do nothing
and (hesitates). The Negro Community Center became known, and (hesitates). I
got to know about it and (hesitates). I went to a couple of meetings, and [they]
said, “I understand you’re a dance teacher” and I says, “Well I have been.” They
said, “Well how would you like to give lessons here?” and I said, “Oh I think I’d
love it.” They said, “We have a lot of young members,” and I was actually crazy
about children, and, ah (hesitates, then pauses). “We’d love if you would teach the
children here.” So, after a few months I got together with them and I opened my
classes down there and I stayed and taught there for about eighteen years! Mostly
children between five years old and fifteen or sixteen . . . who were in school.30
In Spencer’s narrative, the story of how she came to teach at the Negro Community
Center flows seamlessly from the earlier-quoted reminiscences of feeling lost upon
her return from the South Pacific. The recurrent silences and hesitations, as she
weaves together her narrative, make evident the process of navigating between what
she is willing to discuss with her interviewer and the unvoiced thoughts that seem
to interrupt her pace. Spencer’s storytelling is in general rather matter-of-fact and
descriptive—cheerful, moderately paced, and demure. These excerpts are one of the
few times she discusses her personal feelings, with an emotional peak occurring as
she describes her sense of feeling lost at home and how “crazy about children” she
was. It is only her involvement with the children at Montreal’s Negro Community
Center that fills the void that she was experiencing: “[My husband] said [to my
students]: ‘We don’t call seniors by their first names! If you want to say Olga you
gotta say Auntie Olga.’ . . . All the children started calling me Auntie Olga. And their
parents too. Even the grandparents started calling me Auntie Olga. That’s how I got
the name.”31 Teaching is the pursuit that heals her overwhelming sense of feeling
lost at home, after having married, settled, sung, and danced, yet still “with nothing
to do.” The reference to Spencer’s status as “Auntie” in Montreal’s black community
in her 2008 obituary in the Montreal Gazette stands as a clear reminder of the sense
of kinship between Spencer and her students at the Negro Community Center.32

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Daisy Peterson Sweeney was a similarly celebrated figure in Montreal’s black

community: a piano teacher who taught several generations of children between 1928
and 1988, another “great” who sadly passed away in the summer of 2017.33 Discussed
primarily as “the sister of Oscar Peterson” and “the first piano teacher of Oliver
Jones,” Sweeney has been interviewed first and foremost to discuss the paradox that
although she only taught classical piano, her students went on to international fame
as jazz artists. A 1999 interview between Sweeney and French-Canadian journalist
Clodine Galipeau (conducted for a documentary about the history of Montreal’s
International Jazz Festival) begins as such:
Clodine Galipeau: We hear your name because, I mean, with the jazz music, like Oli-
ver [Jones] (hesitates).
Daisy Peterson Sweeney: I don’t play jazz (laughs).
CG: How come, Mrs. Sweeney, we know you in the jazz scene?
DS: I don’t teach it. No, I don’t teach it. I think I’m going to have to interrupt, because
of my cough. Do you mind?
[Galipeau tells Sweeney that she doesn’t quite know where to start.]
DS: At the beginning.
CG: Where’s the beginning? Tell me.
DS: When he was a boy.
CG: Who?
DS: Oscar. Dad made us all do piano. All five of us. My dad taught us. When he wasn’t
in town, my mother checked. Oscar, of course, he showed right away his interest in
music and his love in music.34
Sweeney’s very first speech act, “I don’t play jazz,” is telling of how often she has had
to play her part in this ritual. Galipeau seems to be looking for something specific,
likely a curtain-opening story about the Petersons’ musical training (“Where’s the
beginning?” she asks, coyly, “Tell me.”). The interviewer is also obviously not getting
what she wants: Sweeney’s cough, her insistence to answer questions about Peterson
by talking about herself (“I don’t play jazz. . . . I don’t teach it. . . . Dad made us all
do piano. All five of us.”) all seem to be getting in the way of the interviewer’s agenda.
Throughout the interview, Sweeney is frequently “redirected” when she discusses her
own musical tastes, career, and positionality in relation to Montreal’s jazz scene. “I
liked blues,” starts Sweeney at a certain point:
I didn’t play it, but I really liked it. And I remember saying to [my brother],
“I like the blues.” He said, “Sis . . . if you went down there, you wouldn’t like
it . . . (sings) la—la ré—ré do” (laughs). . . . This is a drag, [it] pulls you down!”
You know! I said, “Well, it’s blues!” But I liked them. . . . You see, as a female, I
wasn’t allowed to (laughs). I wouldn’t say exactly I wasn’t allowed, because I was
old enough to, but I know it wasn’t acceptable, so I didn’t.35

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Certainly, the idea that the nightclub was not a proper place for respectable black
women had a direct impact on the number of those who moved from the amateur
to the professional stage. “My brothers Oscar and Charles played jazz,” Sweeney
confided in a more recent interview: “At that time the jazz scene was mainly for
males . . . mostly it was the men who went . . . girls didn’t go. Girls didn’t go for jazz
as much. Girls were not encouraged to go to jazz clubs . . . so it was more a male
thing.”36 According to Oliver Jones, Sweeney’s sister, May Peterson, “liked to play jazz,
but her father wouldn’t allow her to play in the clubs” either.37 For upward-looking
black women, gendered notions of respectability intersected with musical ability to
keep a large majority of capable players at the door.
After this anecdote, Galipeau once again redirects Sweeney to comment on
the missing link between Peterson’s classical training and his professional career as a
jazz musician. “You wonder where the jazz came in,” interrupts Sweeney, as though
she had not precisely been answering this very question: “One thing, I think, is the
freedom, the acceptance (her face glows, she smiles). They could get together. If Oscar
wanted to go to McGill, they didn’t accept his jazz. Even to play at the Ritz-Carlton
when he was with Johnny Holmes [a white dance band leader], it was a no-no. So,
you see, where you’re accepted, you blossom. But where you’re not accepted, they
don’t even know you.”38 One is left to wonder whose acceptance Sweeney is com-
menting upon here. The possibility to blossom in a tight space of acceptance seems
first offered as a justification for Peterson’s success in jazz. Yet whose nonacceptance
is it that has led to not even being known? The dynamic between Galipeau and
Sweeney gets so tense at this point that Galipeau eventually drops the English:
CG: C’est toujours un peu, (hesitates) je [ne] sais pas comment [le] dire en anglais, ‘délicat,’
ou,39 because you are the sister of Oscar and I’m not here to know about your career
but your brother’s career you know, and it’s like, I don’t feel very comfortable with
that, I wanted to tell you.
DS: Why?
CG: Well, because—
DS: If he deserves it, he deserves it.
CG: Yes. Well. That’s true. Maybe it’s the reason why I don’t know exactly how—
DS: How to put the questions. Well as long as you don’t ask me my age (laughs).40
Following this exchange, Sweeney volunteers a handful of documentary-friendly clips

(“He put Canada on the map”), yet remains visibly uncomfortable, particularly in
the way she avoids looking straight at the camera or at the interviewer. Eventually,
Sweeney sits at the piano and starts to play Chopin’s Fantaisie-Impromptu in C-sharp
minor, Op. 66. “Where’s the envelope?” she asks, after a while, likely asking for a
previously agreed-upon monetary compensation for the interview. “What envelope?”
answers Galipeau. “Oh,” intervenes a man in the background, likely the cameraman.

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“Does it have her name on it?” he asks. “Est-ce qu’il y a une photo de Oscar ici?” asks
Galipeau, in closing.41 “Oh,” answers Sweeney after seeing the one hung on her living
room wall that the cameraman has started to film: “I didn’t even remember it was
there. That was when I got my doctorate.”42
This interview stands as a particularly rich repository of the kinds of hesita-
tions, strategies, and refusals that surface in the process of navigating a gendered,
racialized, classed, ethnicized, and linguistic relationship between interviewer and
interviewee. As Hairston and Tucker have argued, oral histories—once we listen to
them less “for the solos” but for their dynamic interactions—bear witness to how
much knowledge production interacts with parameters of identity and processes
of cultural legitimization.43 One does not require very big ears to notice Sweeney’s
repeated attempts—and failures—to be heard in this interview. The fact that “girls
were not encouraged to go to jazz clubs”—including her father’s pointed refusal
to let his two daughters play in jazz clubs while allowing Oscar and Charles to do
so—and the fact that “it wasn’t acceptable,” as her brother’s patronization of her
interest in blues made clear, are crucial elements that allow us to understand why
Oscar Peterson could transfer his classical training to jazz while Sweeney didn’t.
Perhaps even more revealing is Sweeney’s strong-footed resistance to give in to what
Galipeau is after—that curtain-opening account of music-making in the Petersons’
home, where Sweeney is doomed to place herself in her brother’s shadow, as the one
left behind, the one who failed. “Where you are accepted, you blossom. But where
you’re not accepted, they don’t even know you.”44
Arlene Campbell’s more recent interviews with Sweeney feature a much more
comfortable interviewee. Campbell, once a piano student of Sweeney and the daugh-
ter of one of her friends, visited her at her nursing home over several months as
part of her doctoral research in education. In this context, Sweeney encountered
less resistance in developing and structuring her own story. Contrary to the tense
atmosphere of her interview with Galipeau, her discussion with Campbell pivots
around issues of care:
I must say—you have to have a purpose in life. And I loved children. I love
children. What’s a home without children? The best mothering experience was
everything. A house full of children is like a garden with flowers. . . . I wasn’t sure
I was going to have children because I lost one. My husband said, “No children.”
I didn’t pay attention. That was no problem. My husband said that. I said if he
left me alone—I couldn’t have them on my own (laughs). I couldn’t see my home
without children. There are many problems when they’re small, but if I could
have children I wanted to. A garden without flowers, not natural to me. So, my
husband at first, he didn’t want to, but I went ahead. Not by myself (laughs), but
he liked them. When he brought for one, he brought for all. I think sometimes
people are influenced by other people. I am influenced by myself.45

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Sweeney’s house would indeed grow full of children. In addition to biological chil-
dren, Sweeney adopted and fostered several children, and she taught music in her
home on weekdays, at the Negro Community Center on Saturdays, and at church
for Sunday school. Sweeney’s daughter Sylvia explains what it was like to grow up
with her mother’s students in their home: “She was kind of like a surrogate mother.
She would tell a kid not to come back if not clean, and by the end of the year the
kid got a scholarship [for private lessons]. . . . Daisy thought all children should
have music in their lives. She was a teacher, a social worker of music. Kids turned
around their lives on her piano bench. She kept kids off the streets. I saw stories one
after the other.”46
The theme of teaching as mother surrogacy, or of social work through music,
is crucial to Daisy Sweeney’s storytelling and to her legacy in Montreal’s black com-
munity. When she discusses teaching, Sweeney regularly blurs a number of assumed
boundaries between teaching and motherwork: “I taught music from eight years
old onwards. I played a major role in raising my younger siblings and teaching
them piano.”47 Similarly, when she discusses her work with her private students: “I
demanded perfection for the recitals and discipline. So that made them sit properly,
walk properly, dress properly and when you tell this to a child they become very
stiff, but I wanted them to realize that they had to have discipline, dress properly,
act properly.”48 Sweeney also explained the pedagogical function of the hymn “Dare
to Be a Daniel,” which she taught at Sunday school: “Dare to be a Daniel. Dare to
stand alone. Dare to have a purpose. Dare to make it known. . . There was a time when
all the hymns and scriptures were the best way I could teach, and most of the time
they got the message.”49 The hymn, a four-part homorhythmic setting of Daniel
1:8 composed by Philip P. Bliss, describes the years of Jewish exile in Babylon, and
more specifically the importance of “standing by a purpose true,” a recurrent theme
in Sweeney’s oral history in connection to care-work. It occurred earlier in relation
to the centrality of children in her life (“I must say—you have to have a purpose in
life. And I loved children. I love children”), and it returns when she discusses her
relationship to her students later on:
[In private lessons,] you have a chance to know the child better. They’d tell me
their problems. . . . Sometimes I can talk to the parents. . . . You can’t expect
everything to be perfect, but you do the best you can and that’s what makes it
perfect. You also want the best for people, from each child . . . you have to get
the best out of everybody if you can, but you do the best you can and you get
the best from everybody . . . You learn to meet different kinds of people and
each has their own agenda, but you have to have a firm purpose.50
At the risk of stating the obvious, Sweeney also taught musicianship. Oliver
Jones spoke often about the way Sweeney’s teaching impacted his playing. He saw

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the discipline and the hand independence she taught as necessary to “reach that
level, for jazz pianists to reach a certain level. . . . Daisy used to say that Oscar and I
were her only two students who had that attack.”51 But as the series of quotes above
makes clear, Sweeney also introduced her students to the importance of having a
sense of purpose, to notions of self-care, to respectability politics. In Jones’s habile
wording: “She had an ear for what you needed to do to elevate your condition.”52
Sweeney also provided her students with an opportunity to talk, to make mistakes,
to set realistic expectations for themselves. As such, musicianship seems to have been
only one element among a broader understanding of a politically and socially moti-
vated childcare, one which positioned Sweeney as a mother-like figure in Montreal’s
black community. Sweeney’s race- and class-aware pedagogy encouraged students
to develop the tools required to become wage-earning musicians and to attain the
economic self-reliance and independence essential for survival in a discriminating
society. She introduced respectability politics as a way to resist pervasive racial ste-
reotypes in a system that did, and that would continue to, oppress them. She also
helped some of the most vulnerable members of her community develop internal
survival mechanisms, including the nurturing of creativity, artistic self-expression,
and the development of one’s sense of purpose. Such teachings provided tools for her
students to face the chronic external harm they encountered in a racially oppressive
society without having their self-esteem eroded. For Sweeney, music was at the center
of a multifaceted pedagogy of survival, a politically and socially motivated kind of
mother-surrogacy, a form of social work whose central practice was musicking.
Patricia Hill Collins has written about the “fluid and changing boundaries”
between mothering one’s biological and nonbiological children in early twentieth-
century urban black communities in North America as such: “Biological mothers, or
bloodmothers, are expected to care for their children. But African and African Ameri-
can communities have also recognized that vesting one person with full responsibility
for mothering a child may not be wise or possible. As a result, othermothers—women
who assist bloodmothers by sharing mothering responsibilities—traditionally have
been central to the institution of black motherhood.”53 Collins also foregrounds the
importance of othermothers as catalysts for social activism: “Community othermoth-
ers have made important contributions in building a different type of community
in often hostile political and economic surroundings. Community othermothers’
participation in activist mothering demonstrates a clear rejection of separateness
and individual interest as the basis for either community organization or individual
self-actualization. Instead, the connectedness with others and common interest ex-
pressed by community othermothers model a very different value system, one whereby
ethics of caring and personal accountability move communities forward.”54 It is in
this sense that I understand Spencer’s and Sweeney’s turn to teaching as occurring
at the nexus between jazz, motherwork, and othermothering. The lack of definitive

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boundaries between Sweeney’s care-work for her biological, adopted, fostered, and
student children, and the ways in which teaching for Spencer came to stand in for
her will to mother both challenge hegemonic views of mothering as a private, nur-
turing occupation reserved for biological mothers. As Campbell argues, “As a piano
teacher, [Sweeney] could provide the family with her constant presence and child
rearing and also supplement the family income.”55 In both Spencer’s and Sweeney’s
oral histories, the will to care through teaching and the will to care through mother-
ing are closely linked. The theme of mother surrogacy in the case of Sweeney, and of
“auntying” in the case of Spencer, also remain the primary way in which members
of Montreal’s black community account for these women’s roles and impact, at once
problematizing hegemonic understandings of mothering as belonging exclusively to
the realm of reproduction while allowing for alternative forms of maternal kinship.
Ralph Whims, the son of black woman performer Bernice Jordan, speaks of the
importance of Spencer and Sweeney in Montreal’s black community:
Tap dancing was a prerequisite for practically every black child who grew up in
the black community. We were all, I was taught [dance] by Olga Spencer, my
piano lessons [were] taught to me by Oscar Peterson’s sister Daisy Peterson, and
we all had to take [music and dance lessons] at the Negro Community Center:
tap, ballet, and piano. . . . We grew up having to get rhythm I guess! . . . Music
was a way out for us. Sports hadn’t arrived in Canada as being an outlet for a lot
of us. At that time, music was it.56
As Collins has argued, community othermothers such as Spencer and Sweeney played
a fundamental role in the fostering of children in urban black neighborhoods toward
economic self-reliance.57
Yet care-work is not simply the main frame through which these women’s
legacies are celebrated by Montreal’s black community; it is also the element that
drives and that legitimizes these women’s turn away from performance in their own
autobiographical narratives. The turn to teaching comes off as a willful orientation
toward care-work, rather than as a failure of musicianship, a failure of gender man-
agement, or a failure to overcome race- and class-based oppression.58 When Spencer
and Sweeney discuss the point at which, or the reasons why, they forwent careers
as jazz performers, they do not position themselves as victims of identity-based
obstacles despite the fact that, as their oral histories demonstrate, they understood
how the fields of gender, race, and class related to issues of jazz participantship in
early twentieth-century Montreal. Their turn away from jazz performance is driven
instead by a care ethics rationale: they wanted to care for children, and for this reason
(rather than as a consequence of the racialized and gendered engineering of the North
American precariat) they looked for alternative ways to participate in Montreal’s jazz
scene.

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Therefore, their turn to teaching can not be discarded as a result of lack of

skill (as in the infamous saying, “those who can’t play teach,” as in “those who are
unskilled to play”). Nor can it be regarded solely as a result of overwhelming gen-
dered, racialized, and class-based obstacles (“those who can’t play” as in “those who
are discouraged, disallowed, disabled to play”).59 Spencer and Sweeney did not move
away from careers in jazz performance because they failed to play well enough, failed
to manage their gender, failed to “pass” as one of the boys. Rather, at the particular
moment when they transitioned to adulthood, and more specifically when the will
to care gained particular salience in their worldviews, these women’s social identities
in relation to Montreal’s jazz scene changed. The parameters that articulated gender,
race, and class remained the same: despite the fact that Canada did not adopt the
legally sanctioned racism of Jim Crow laws in this time period, black women were
expected to serve as primary or supplementary wage earners for most of their lifetime.
Yet the particular value that Spencer and Sweeney placed on caregiving—surely a
feminine-coded activity though one that spreads more evenly on the field of gender
than professional jazz instrumentalism in the early twentieth century—is the primary
structuring device in their narrative. Their willful orientation toward care-work, not
their failure to manage gender, or to overcome race- or class-based oppression, is
the central factor that precipitated their turn to teaching, and that in turn serves to
legitimize their contribution both to their community and to themselves.
Broadening the Lens
Not all Montreal-based black women in jazz reconciled a willful desire to care through
teaching. The majority of Montreal-based variety-stage dancers and singers would
in fact biologically mother, and they negotiated childcare and jazz performance in
ways that greatly problematize the public versus private dichotomy imposed on jazz
participation and care-work in the current historical record. Professional singer and
variety-stage dancer Bernice Jordan for instance speaks evocatively of the strategies
she developed to negotiate jazz performance and motherwork. She took time out
from the chorus line at the Café St-Michel to have her son (Ralph Whims), but
“I tried to work as long as I could. When the costumes wouldn’t fit, I’d just sing
in the bandstand.”60 Whims would accompany her backstage when he was young,
sometimes bringing her lunch on Sundays, other times staying backstage with her
and the other women. He helped her find her lipstick, advised her on her singing,
and figured out that he couldn’t quite stand on his mother’s “two-inches in the front,
seven-inches in the back” high heels. He became a sort of “jack-of-all-trades” and
did “what [I] had to do to help mom and her job. . . . My grandmother and aunt
replaced my mother, up until [I was] five or six years old. I understood. She was out
there, for the family. I never suffered.”61

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The seamlessness with which variety-stage dancers Mary Brown and Ethel
Bruneau similarly discuss performance and motherwork is striking: “I danced with
an umbrella, with a cane sometimes,” begins Brown upon answering a question about
whether she used props on stage.
I danced also with a tambourine. I danced with maracas and finger cymbals,
you know when I did the oriental dance. I have the castanets here, on the wall.
There’s my maracas, I can still play them. I let the kids play with them until
they make too much noise, and then I put them up there because they like it
too much, you know? (laughs) It used to be a rattle with my grandchild. A hat,
big skirts in the back, and you know when you have skirts like that, you can do
less dancing and look like you’re doing a lot, you know? When I did oriental
dancing I used veils, you know, in all forms. When I took my skirt off, that was
the end, and I put it off like this and I’d walk off the stage.62
Similarly, when Bruneau describes one cycle of twenty-four hours as a tap dancer
and mother, it’s not clear where the professional begins and where the domestic ends:
I did three shows a night. The first show would be like, go on around 10:30
[p.m.]. The second show would go on around 11:30 [p.m.], and the third show
[would be] going around 2:30 [a.m.]. So I [would work] the three shows [and]
come home, of course. When I got married [and] had my daughter I would
get up at seven in the morning, and (pauses) I’d have to take care of her, do the
house work, clean, wash. I didn’t have a washing machine, so I’d take the clothes
to the laundromat, cook dinner, get my husband ready for work, get ready for
work and go back to work! Some of the clubs I worked in had nice dressing
rooms that were comfortable. Other clubs that I worked in they just gave you
the basement where the beer bottles was and told you to get dressed down there!
Some of the places were very damp and (pauses) they didn’t clean the dress-
ing rooms very [well]. Some dressing rooms when I went in, I used to go with
my broom and my mop and my bucket, and clean it up before I could get in
there.63
In these excerpts, Brown and Bruneau move between public and private spaces in
their accounts of jazz performance and between the professional and the domestic
sphere in their understanding of labor with a striking fluidity.
More broadly, these women position themselves as part of extended networks
of teaching, learning, and sharing practices that had maternal figures at their core.
Spencer, Brown, and Jordan all learned their skill first in the family’s home kitchen,
by putting their hands on the hips of their mothers and aunts. “I was the first to
do what my mother taught me,” explains Jordan: “Good old West Indian dancing
. . . my mother taught me those routines from a record she owned of good old
‘West Indian Blues.’ And I learned to dance from that. My mother could dance! . . .

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Nobody understood what it was. She was a good old shaker. My mother taught
me the first steps, how to move around, in the kitchen. She used the chairs for
public, and I’m back there and she went: ‘Always flash, smile, and be happy even
if you feel sick.’”64 The home was therefore an important space for gendered forms
of jazz apprenticeship, in this case the learning of skills related to black woman
performance. In addition, it is striking to hear how many lessons are embedded
into this single story. As Jordan’s mother teaches her daughter to shake dance, she
also advises her on strategies to survive in a system that will oppress her, as well
as to remain economically viable and safe as a professional black citizen living in
a racially tense society. The boundary between teaching and motherwork is once
again blurry: jazz dance is embedded into a larger pedagogy of survival transmitted
by mothers and by mother-like figures.
Mothers-in-jazz are therefore far from “emerging.” Professional/domestic
boundaries and public/private spaces have long been blurred in order to foster gen-
dered forms of jazz apprenticeship and participantship. Variety-stage dancers and
singers like Bernice Jordan, Mary Brown, and Ethel Bruneau provided evidence a
long time ago that excellence and motherhood in jazz performance were not contrary.
In their oral histories, they do not present dependent children (both biological and
nonbiological) as making them partners in their own oppression. Rather, by main-
taining careers while raising children, these women cared in ways that problematize
gendered narratives of music and professionalism, in particular assumptions between
public and private in jazz narratives, and they challenged hegemonic understandings
of the family as nuclear unit. Clearly, when issues of care gained particular salience
in their worldviews, it changed those worldviews. But it did not preclude them from
taking their work—neither kind of “work”—seriously. For such gendered forms of
jazz apprenticeship and participantship as variety-stage dance and song, motherwork
has long been seen as an integral part of the jazz community.
Other women like Spencer and Sweeney, whose performance practice was
gendered masculine through a number of apparatuses—as Jayna Brown has quipped
about Valaida Snow, “instrumentalism was male territory” 65—willfully turned toward
teaching in order to articulate their lives around care-work. In both Spencer’s and
Sweeney’s oral histories, teaching is presented as an extension of motherwork, and
moving away from performance is articulated less in terms of gender-, race-, or class-
based obstacles than as a deliberate move to position themselves at the center of a
care-giving network. Their roles and legacies as community othermothers continue
to challenge hegemonic views of motherwork as an apolitical activity that belongs
exclusively to the reproductive and private sphere. Clearly, the blossoming of jazz in
a place like Montreal was heavily dependent on extended networks of mothers and
othermothers. Bernice Jordan speaks of her own eventual turn to teaching in the
following:

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[The younger generation of chorus girls] had to break in at the Starland to

know if they could dance in a nightclub or dance for a nightclub audience.
Little Oscar Peterson used to play down at our church basement for all our little
concerts. We’d take him out of his mother’s kitchen to play for us girls when
we used to rehearse in the UNIA [Universal Negro Improvement Association]
hall . . . It was before the war. We were learning a lot of routines for concerts,
and he’d come and rehearse, just a little kid, playing chords. . . . Oscar Peterson
played for all of our youngsters before he became famous.66
Ultimately, community othermothers like Spencer and Sweeney, the mothers and
aunts who taught variety-stage dance and song from their home kitchen, and the
mother-performers like Jordan, Brown, and Bruneau sustained gendered forms of jazz
participantship without which jazz would simply not have blossomed in Montreal.
Why then have activities like motherwork, othermothering, and teaching
yet to make a significant dent in dominant discourses of jazz? What are the power
dynamics at play in maintaining motherwork and other forms care-work at the
margins of jazz history?67 All of the women I documented above, the invisibles and
ephemera of Montreal jazz history—those who “failed” from a historiographical
standpoint—articulated their lives along an ethic of care and prioritized issues of care
in their autobiographical framings. What does it say about the dominant discourse
that it continues to prioritize the worldviews of those who did not articulate their
lives around care ethics? Why is the will to care translated as a failure to manage
gender?
“So, you see,” said Sweeney, “where you’re accepted, you blossom. But where
you’re not accepted, they don’t even know you.” In foregrounding intersections be-
tween care-work and jazz participantship, enough women can be allowed into the
narrative to effectively break open the invisibility-exceptionalism paradigm. Suddenly,
the past can be imagined as a lot more gender-balanced. In addition, the discourse
of the “pass”-or-fail, which primarily welcomes jazzwomen only if they can fit an
always-already masculine space, has to contend with the “mysterious and elusive”
ways, to borrow the words of Lara Pellegrinelli, in which jazz knowledges are trans-
mitted and reared across generations.68 A greater focus on care-work in jazz scenes
may inspire us to reconsider masculinities that are less concerned with jazz as an art
standing apart from domestic concerns than with the more lucrative forms, often
derided as “commercial,” that fathers chose to play in order to provide—to care—for
their families. Surely, the feminized spaces of jazz history don’t belong exclusively
to women any more than the masculinized spaces belong only to men. Focusing on
care ethics in jazz might also prompt the writing of histories that emphasize relat-
edness rather than egoism, connection rather than competition, and relations that
are maintained across long periods of time rather than narratives of victory of those
who fit best. Jazz in Montreal was sustained by an extended matricentric network of

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women who assisted the most vulnerable members of their community to grow into
formidable, self-reliant, caring adults. It is my hope that a greater focus on care-work
may uncover hundreds—thousands—of such motherships across the jazz diaspora.
Notes
1.
Remembering Geri Allen (1957–2017) (memorial booklet collected by Courtney Bryan, El-
lie Hisama, Yoko Suzuki, and Sherrie Tucker, presented at the 14th Feminist Theory and
Music conference, San Francisco State University, San Francisco, CA, July 29, 2017). Jazz
historian Mark Miller, who was the photographer, gave his permission for the picture to
be published in the booklet. The picture and booklet are currently available at https://
projects.iq.harvard.edu/files/geri-allen-symposium/files/geri_allen_tributes_booklet_ftm
_july_2017.pdf.
2. A. J. Johnson, “Her Singular Vison,” in Remembering Geri Allen.
3. Andrea O’Reilly, Matricentric Feminism: Theory, Activism, and Practice (Bradford, ON:
Demeter Press, 2016), 186, 200.
4. Marie Buscatto, “‘Tenter, Rentrer, Rester’: Les Trois Défis des Femmes Instrumentistes de
Jazz,” Travail, Genre et Sociétés 1, no. 19 (2008): 87–108 (translation mine). See also Marie
Buscatto, Femmes du Jazz: Musicalités, Féminités, Marginalités (Paris: CNRS, 2007).
5. Sherrie Tucker, “Big Ears: Listening for Gender in Jazz Studies,” Current Musicology 73
(2002): 375–408. For recent scholarship that works against this tendency, see in particular
Farah Jasmine Griffin, If You Can’t Be Free, Be a Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday (New
York: Ballantine Books, 2002); Kristin A. McGee, Some Liked It Hot: Jazz Women in Film
and Television, 1928–1959 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2009); Melba
Liston Research Collective, “Special Issue on Melba Liston,” special issue, Black Music
Research Journal 34, no. 1, (Spring 2014); and Sherrie Tucker, Swing Shift: All-Girl Bands of
the 1940s (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000).
6. Nichole T. Rustin for instance engages the primacy of “work” in Melba Liston’s and Mary
Lou Williams’s accounts of jazzwomanhood. She quotes Liston as such: “All the time, I
don’t think about being the only—Because I had my work to do, you dig? I don’t ever
talk about being the only female.” And in Williams’s words: “People ask me how it is to
be a woman musician. I don’t think about it so much, and I guess that is because I am
first of all a musician. . . . If you get carried away in your work you really don’t know if
you are a woman or a man.” Nichole T. Rustin, “‘Mary Lou Williams Plays Like a Man!’:
Gender, Genius, and Difference in Black Music Discourse,” South Atlantic Quarterly 104,
no. 3, (2005): 448–49.
7. See Monica Hairston O’Connell and Sherrie Tucker, “‘Not One to Toot Her Own
Horn(?)’: Melba Liston’s Oral Histories and Classroom Presentations,” Black Music Re-
search Journal 34, no. 1 (Spring, 2014): 144–45.
8. Sherrie Tucker, “Big Ears.”
9. Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of
Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 2000), 191.
10. Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 199.
11. Despite the scarcity of scholarship to date that contextualizes the relationship between
motherhood and jazz, I am using the word “emerging” here to account for the fact
that the theme of motherhood surfaces regularly in the oral histories collected and
transcribed in the scholarship of Marie Buscatto, Wayne Entice, Alyn Shipton, and
Janis Stockhouse. It is my view that the growing scholarly interest in jazzwomen’s oral
histories, inspired notably by Sherrie Tucker’s work, has resulted in greater historical

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visibility for mothers-in-jazz. See Wayne Entice and Janis Stockhouse, Jazzwomen: Con-
versations with Twenty-One Musicians (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004);
Wayne Entice, Jazzwomen Speak (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013); and
Alyn Shipton, Handful of Keys: Conversations with Thirty Jazz Pianists (London: Equi-
nox, 2004).
12. For more on Ilene Bourne, on Montreal’s jazz scene, or on the relationship between jazz
and race in French Canada in the early twentieth century, see Vanessa Blais-Tremblay,
“Jazz, Gender, Historiography: A Case Study of the ‘Golden Age’ of Jazz in Montreal
(1925–1955)” (PhD diss., McGill University, 2018). As I discuss in chapter 3, the very
neighborhood where Montreal jazz developed was engineered by racist economies that
channeled black men’s lives toward railroad work. “The Corner,” where the two most
famous jazz clubs were located, was situated at the heart of Montreal’s black commu-
nity, around the Windsor train station, then the headquarters of the Canadian Pacific
Railway. And as I explore in chapter 2, the black variety stage—where most black
women in jazz were hired as variety-stage dancers and singers—activated racist and
sexist technologies that had impacted black women’s lives and performance practices in
significant ways. As variety-stage dancer Bernice Jordan explains it in her oral history,
“In Canada we don’t have those segregation signs, that’s one sure thing, but they do it
in a, whaddya call it, diplomatic way?” See Bernice Jordan (Whims), “Interview with
Bernice [moving images],” interview with Meilan Lam, 1993–94, Concordia University
Records and Archives, Meilan Lam Fonds, P0135–09–0002 [7109], VHS. For scholar-
ship that documents the specificities of Montreal’s race relations in this time period,
see in particular Dorothy Williams, The Road to Now: A History of Blacks in Montreal
(Montreal: Véhicule Press, 1997).
13. Olga Spencer (Foderingham), “Interview with Olga [moving images],” interview with
Meilan Lam, 1993–94, Concordia University Records and Archives, Meilan Lam Fonds,
P0135-09-0006 [7115], VHS.
14. Natalie Ramirez, “Interview with Natalie [moving images],” interview with Meilan Lam,
1993–94, Concordia University Records and Archives, Meilan Lam Fonds, P0135–09–
0007 [7116], VHS. Italics are mine to account for Ramirez’s emphasis.
15. “Le théâtre Impérial présente les ‘Patterson Minstrels’ aujourd’hui,” Le Nouvelliste, De-
cember 6, 1935, 7. Translation mine.
16. Photo Standalone, New Journal and Guide, August 18, 1945, A14. Lora Pierre is also
sometimes spelled Laura, for example in “Five New USO Shows Alerted for Travel,” Afro
American, May 26, 1945, 6. Freddy and Flo were advertised in Montreal in 1942 at the
Café St-Michel. See Freddy and Flo performance at the café St-Michel advertisement,
Standard, October 3, 1942.
17. “GIs Laud ‘Freddy and Flo: Unit Quits Japan for European Theatre,” Chicago Defender,
January 12, 1946, 14.
18. Vincent Tubbs, “Flo Robinson Shops on Tokyo’s Fifth Avenue: Prefers Sidewalk Shop-
ping Tour in Rickshaw to Visiting Palace,” Afro-American, December 22, 1945, 8.
19. Ramirez, “Interview with Natalie.”
20. Ramirez, “Interview with Natalie.” It is my understanding that by “improvised” Ramirez
means “loosely arranged.”
21. “Jive Units Back from USO Shows Tour,” Chicago Defender, March 23, 1946, 17.
22. “USO Unit Passes Manila,” Afro-American, August 25, 1945.
23. Ramirez, “Interview with Natalie.”
24. For a detailed analysis of the changing ways in which the Spencer Sisters experienced
gender, race, and class in Montreal, New York, and the South Pacific, see Blais-Tremblay,
“Jazz, Gender, Historiography.”

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25. “Billy Rowe’s Notebook,” Pittsburgh Courier, February 9, 1946, 18.

26. Tucker, Swing Shift.
27. Sherrie Tucker and Kristin McGee have written extensively about advertisement of
all-women ensembles, in particular on the ways in which the discourses of “novelty” de-
creased their credibility as jazz artists, even in cases when what they played sounded simi-
lar to what men played. While the term itself, as McGee explains, did not imply musical
amateurism (the very point of a specialty number was to emphasize a particular skill), the
insistence on the performative in so-called novelty acts made all-women groups appear
superficial or inauthentic. She summarizes: “Female novelties were often conceived of
as innovative and adventurous short acts that consisted of female performers exhibiting
skills not often associated with femininity.” Novelty therefore becomes a particularly dis-
criminating label in cases where it stands for “women-only acts,” playing as they did on
the perceived lack of correspondence between the performers’ persona and their assumed
biological sex. How can jazzwomen be viewed as authentic when, under the novelty tag,
they are expected to riff precisely on the assumption that they aren’t supposed to be doing
what they do? See McGee, Some Liked It Hot, 41. See also Tucker, Swing Shift.
28. Spencer (Foderingham), “Interview with Olga.”
29. “Montreal’s Rainbow Revue a Democratic Arts Group,” Afro-American, November 19, 1949.
32. “Olga (Spencer) Foderingham, Obituary,” Montreal Gazette, March 22, 2008.
33. Arlene Campbell, “Othermothering and Life Notations of Daisy Sweeney,” (PhD diss.,
York University, 2012), 17, 22.
34. Daisy Peterson Sweeney, “20 ans de jazz. Entrevue avec Daisy Peterson Sweeney,” inter-
view with Clodine Galipeau, November 23, 1999, Amérimage Spectra, BAnQ Vieux-
Montreal, P945, S1, PXX00-026 and P945, S1, PXX00-027, VHS. This video footage is an
archival source. The final documentary, “20 ans de jazz. Montreal et son festival,” traces
the history of Montreal’s International Jazz Festival between 1980 and 2000 and includes
edited excerpts from similar interviews conducted with a number of jazz artists such as
Oliver Jones and Diana Krall.
35. Sweeney, “20 ans de jazz.” Sweeney explains later in that interview that she went to jazz
clubs a few times, including at least once at Rockhead’s Paradise. She mentions that Ru-
fus Rockhead, the owner of the club, brought in
not only jazz, or swing, or whatever, he brought in classical acts. . . . And there’s one person
that I remember came here, she had a voice like a violin. Beautiful, beautiful voice. . . . That
one stands out in my mind in particular. One of my brothers, my brother Chuck, said to
me, “Go and hear,” because I didn’t go to clubs, it wasn’t proper for (laughs) us to go, but he
said, “Go and hear it . . . I’ll take you there.” . . . I went [only] if there was something spe-
cial, like this particular singer, I’d go to hear. Ironical that the time that I did go, the police
raided the place. I wasn’t included.
36. Campbell, “Othermothering and Life Notations,” 69. Later in this source, Sweeney ex-
plains:
Frederick [the oldest of the five children] played the trumpet. We used to play duets to-
gether very much. Frederick died at 15 years of age from tuberculosis. After that, my brother
Charles [Chuck] . . . we played a lot of home music together. . . . We had a house band and
had fun doing that. He was in the brass band. I would play the piano and trombone by ear
and Oscar would copy me. Oscar played the trumpet and the piano. I helped him learn the
piano, but he was a natural. Charles played the trumpet and later played jazz in the Mon-
treal nightclubs. . . . May taught piano and later worked with Oscar doing secretarial work.
Campbell, “Othermothering and Life Notations of Daisy Sweeney,” 166.

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37. Jones, interview.

38. Sweeney, “20 ans de jazz.”
39. “It’s always a little bit (hesitates), I don’t know how to say it in English, ‘touchy’ or per-
haps . . .”
40. Sweeney, “20 ans de jazz.”
41. “Is there a picture of Oscar here?”
42. Sweeney, “20 ans de jazz.” Sweeney was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Lauren-
tian University (Sudbury, ON), in 1987.
43. Hairston and Tucker, “Not One to Toot,” 131.
44. In other sources, Sweeney expands on another significant aspect of that “missing link,”
namely, her father’s gendered use of the strap. “His father used to beat them with his
belt,” explained Lillie Fraser, Oscar Peterson’s first wife, in an interview with Maclean’s
Magazine from 1958: “His sister Daisy used to get it worse than Oscar. She told me about
a time when their father was going out on the railroad and he assigned them both a very
complicated concerto to learn. They knew they would have to play it without a mistake
before he got back. Well, Daisy practiced for three, four hours every day, just terrified.
Oscar didn’t touch the piano, lolled around and read comic books or something. The day
before their dad was due home, he went over to the piano and played the whole thing
through perfectly. His ear is fabulous.” See “Famous Families at Home: The Oscar Peter-
sons,” Maclean’s Magazine, October 25, 1958, 75. The account of Sweeney’s daughter Sylvia
is slightly different: “She was terrorized by her father . . . He beat her, but not Oscar.”
Whether their father used more corporeal punishment on Sweeney than on Peterson, or
used corporeal punishment only on Sweeney and not on Peterson, the impact of domestic
violence is far more visible in Sweeney’s career trajectory. As a result of her father’s abuse,
she developed severe performance anxiety. “That’s why she had stage fright,” Sylvia ex-
plained. Sylvia Sweeney, interview with author, September 29, 2016, Montreal. See also
Daisy Sweeney’s similar account in the oral history transcribed by Campbell in “Other-
mothering and Life Notations,” 165–68.
45. Quoted in Campbell, “Othermothering and Life Notations,” 175–76.
46. Sylvia Sweeney, interview.
48. Quoted in Campbell, “Othermothering and Life Notations,” 179.
49. Quoted in Campbell, “Othermothering and Life Notations,” 178.
53. Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 192.
54. Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 205–7.
55. Campbell, “Othermothering and Life Notations,” 92.
56. Ralph Whims, “Interview with Ralph [moving images],” interview with Meilan Lam,
1993–94, Concordia University Records and Archives, Meilan Lam Fonds, P0135-09-0003
[7110], VHS.
57. Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 205–7.
58. I am using the terms “orienting” and “willful” here as contextualized by Sara Ahmed in
Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham: Duke University Press,
2006) and Willful Subjects (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014).

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59. As I discussed above, the domestic violence that Sweeney experienced—a form of abuse
that her father generated unevenly across the field of gender—and the subsequent de-
velopment of performance anxiety played an undeniable part in this turn. Similarly, the
fact that Sweeney was told by one of the teachers at the Universal Negro Improvement
Association (UNIA) that she “had two left feet” likely contributed to the fact that she did
not wish to become a dancer like the many girls who were involved as such in Montreal’s
black jazz scene. “They had a boys’ band at the UNIA,” Sweeney explains. “No girl’s band
(laughs)—it started way back then. [The girls] would learn to date, sing, do plays, and
dance.” The all-“boy” band at UNIA was called the “Colored Modernistic Band,” where
jazz musicians like Allan Wellman and Joe Sealy learned to play before transferring their
skill in the nightclub. Quoted in Campbell, “Othermothering and Life Notations,” 168.
60. Jordan (Whims), “Interview with Bernice.”
61. Whims, “Interview with Ralph.”
62. Mary Brown, “Interview with Mary [moving images],” interview with Meilan Lam,
1993–94, Concordia University Records and Archives, Meilan Lam Fonds, P0135-09-0004
[7111], VHS. This excerpt is unedited in order to reflect Brown’s stream of consciousness.
63. Ethel Bruneau, “Interview with Mrs. Swing [moving images],” interview with Meilan
Lam, 1993–94, Concordia University Records and Archives, Meilan Lam Fonds, P0135-
09-0005 [7112], VHS. Bruneau provides a number of similar accounts in this interview as
she moves between public and private spaces and between the realms of the professional
and the domestic in her understanding of labor: “I used to bring [my kids] with me when
I went out of town. I used to bring the diapers, the bottles, the playpen, and everything
in the car. And when I was going to teach dancing, the playpen was in the corner, and
I taught my classes. I took them everywhere with me”; “I wouldn’t go to places where I
knew I couldn’t be with my kids. I remember going to Val d’Or and I got worried wheth-
er [my daughter] was alright or not, and I took a bus and came home. I told the boss,
“Tonight I’m not doing the show, I’m going home.” And I brought her back”; “Every
time I took gigs at a hotel, I would put furniture in front of the door to make sure I was
safe. . . . [Once, t]he boss didn’t know that I had the kids so he, he had a pass key and he
came through the door, and I took the baby bottle and knocked him in his head.”
65. Jayna Brown, Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern (Dur-
ham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 265.
67. On care ethics and musicology as an academic discipline, see William Cheng, Just Vibra-
tions: The Purpose of Sounding Good (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016).
68. Lara Pellegrinelli, “Separated at ‘Birth’: Singing and the History of Jazz,” in Rustin and
Tucker, Big Ears, 31–47.
Works Cited
Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham, NC: Duke Univer-
sity Press, 2006.
———. Willful Subjects. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014.
Blais-Tremblay, Vanessa. “Jazz, Gender, Historiography: A Case Study of the ‘Golden Age’ of
Jazz in Montreal (1925–1955).” PhD diss., McGill University, 2018.
Buscatto, Marie. Femmes du Jazz: Musicalités, Féminités, Marginalités. Paris: CNRS, 2007.
———. “‘Tenter, Rentrer, Rester:’ Les Trois Défis des Femmes Instrumentistes de Jazz,” Travail,
Genre et Sociétés 1, no. 19 (2008): 87–108.

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Brown, Jayna. Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern. Durham:
Duke University Press, 2008.
Campbell, Arlene. “Othermothering and Life Notations of Daisy Sweeney.” PhD diss., York
University, 2012.
Cheng, William. Just Vibrations: The Purpose of Sounding Good. Ann Arbor: University of Michi-
gan Press, 2016.
Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Em-
powerment. New York: Routledge, 2000.
Entice, Wayne, and Janis Stockhouse. Jazzwomen: Conversations with Twenty-One Musicians.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004.
Entice, Wayne. Jazzwomen Speak. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013.
Griffin, Farah Jasmine. If You Can’t Be Free, Be a Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday. New York:
Ballantine Books, 2002.
Hairston O’Connell, Monica, and Sherrie Tucker. “‘Not One to Toot Her Own Horn(?)’: Melba
Liston’s Oral Histories and Classroom Presentations,” Black Music Research Journal 34, no.
1 (Spring 2014): 121–58.
McGee, Kristin. Some Liked It Hot: Jazz Women in Film and Television, 1928–1959. Middletown,
CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2009.
Melba Liston Research Collective. “Special Issue on Melba Liston.” Special issue, Black Music
Research Journal 34, no. 1 (Spring 2014).
O’Reilly, Andrea. Matricentric Feminism: Theory, Activism, and Practice. Bradford, ON: Demeter
Press, 2016.
Pellegrinelli, Lara. “Separated at ‘Birth:’ Singing and the History of Jazz.” In Big Ears: Listening
for Gender in Jazz Studies, edited by Nichole T. Rustin and Sherrie Tucker, 31–47. Dur-
ham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008.
Remembering Geri Allen (1957–2017). Memorial booklet collected by Courtney Bryan, Ellie Hisa-
ma, Yoko Suzuki, and Sherrie Tucker, presented at the 14th Feminist Theory and Music
conference, San Francisco State University, San Francisco, CA, July 29, 2017.
Rustin, Nichole T., and Sherrie Tucker, eds. Big Ears: Listening for Gender in Jazz Studies. Dur-
ham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008.
Rustin, Nichole T. “‘Mary Lou Williams Plays Like a Man!’: Gender, Genius, and Difference in
Black Music Discourse.” South Atlantic Quarterly 104, no. 3, (2005): 445–62.
Shipton, Alyn. Handful of Keys: Conversations with Thirty Jazz Pianists. London: Equinox, 2004.
Tucker, Sherrie. “Big Ears: Listening for Gender in Jazz Studies,” Current Musicology 73 (2002):
375–408.
———. Swing Shift: All-Girl Bands of the 1940s. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000.
Williams, Dorothy. The Road to Now: A History of Blacks in Montreal. Montreal: Véhicule Press,
1997.
Oral Histories
Brown, Mary. “Interview with Mary [moving images].” Interview with Meilan Lam. 1993–94.
Concordia University Records and Archives, Meilan Lam Fonds, P0135-09-0004 [7111].
VHS.
Bruneau, Ethel. “Interview with Mrs. Swing [moving images].” Interview with Meilan Lam.
1993–94. Concordia University Records and Archives, Meilan Lam Fonds, P0135-09-0005
[7112]. VHS.

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Jones, Oliver. Interview with author. September 29, 2016. Montreal.

Jordan (Whims), Bernice. “Interview with Bernice [moving images].” Interview with Meilan
Lam. 1993–94. Concordia University Records and Archives, Meilan Lam Fonds, P0135-
09-0002 [7109]. VHS.
Ramirez, Natalie. “Interview with Natalie [moving images].” Interview with Meilan Lam.
1993–94. Concordia University Records and Archives, Meilan Lam Fonds, P0135-09-0007
[7116]. VHS.
Spencer (Foderingham), Olga. “Interview with Olga [moving images].” Interview with Meilan
Lam. 1993–94. Concordia University Records and Archives, Meilan Lam Fonds, P0135-
09-0006 [7115]. VHS.
Sweeney, Daisy Peterson. “20 ans de jazz. Entrevue avec Daisy Peterson Sweeney.” Interview
with Clodine Galipeau. November 23, 1999. Amérimage Spectra. BAnQ Vieux-Montreal,
P945, S1, PXX00-026 and P945, S1, PXX00-027. VHS.
———. “Daisy Sweeney’s Narration.” In “Othermothering and Life Notations of Daisy Swee-
ney,” by Arlene Cambell, 165–83. PhD diss., York University, 2012.
Sweeney, Sylvia. Interview with author. September 29, 2016. Montreal.
Whims, Ralph. “Interview with Ralph [moving images].” Interview with Meilan Lam. 1993–94.
Concordia University Records and Archives, Meilan Lam Fonds, P0135-09-0003 [7110].
VHS.

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Oral Histories
“Music Is No More Than a

Reflection of Its Times”: Max Roach
and Marion Brown on Jazz and
Politics in the 1960s and Beyond
Drummer Max Roach and saxophonist Marion Brown were both, in different ways,
important figures in the rebellious jazz of the 1960s. Roach’s We Insist! Max Roach’s
Freedom Now Suite (1960) chronicled black experience from American slavery to
contemporary movements against apartheid in South Africa, featuring powerful
vocals by Abbey Lincoln and a band spanning jazz history from Coleman Hawkins
to Booker Little. Brown played on Coltrane’s seminal free jazz album Ascension (1965)
and, beginning in 1966, released a series of influential albums of his own.
The interviews transcribed below came out of research for my first book,
Democratic Artworks: Politics and the Arts from Trilling to Dylan (Albany: SUNY
Press, 1998). In it, I discuss two kinds of political engagement by jazz musicians in the
1960s. The first was overt political jazz like Roach’s album. The second encompassed
purely instrumental works like Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz that, I argue, in rejecting
previous rules and attempting to create spontaneous structures out of a group of
equals, mirrored political ideas of the era about freedom and equality.
Part of what I was doing in the interview was getting each artist’s reaction to my
ideas about their music and the music of others during the era. (Brown had read my
chapter on free jazz before we spoke.) They both, to their credit, pushed back against
many of my formulations. Each seemed reluctant to endorse the view, which they
attributed to wrongheaded critics, that jazz was political in a narrow sense, insisting
on its primarily artistic nature. At the same time, they both acknowledged that jazz,
like any other music, reflected its time, including the decade’s ideas about freedom
and equality.


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Max Roach and Marion Brown Charles Hersch 85
Both interviews took place in the vicinity of Northampton, Massachusetts,

where I resided at the time. I interviewed Roach while he was teaching at the Univer-
sity of Massachusetts, Amherst, and that was the only occasion I had to talk to him.
Brown I got to know a little better, because I took weekly saxophone lessons from
him for a time. In contrast to other teachers with whom I had studied, Brown was
less interested in teaching me harmonic devices and other standard fare than with
imparting a particular attitude toward music-making. I remember him imploring
me to play with more “braggadocio” as well as his admonition, in order to achieve
a fuller tone, to “bow, not blow,” as if imitating the action of a violinist. His belief
that everyone has musical ability, stated in the interview, was manifested when he
gave a concert at a club in the area. Instead of simply holding forth with his band,
he invited each of his students (including me) to play first alone and then with the
rhythm section; we were then joined by Brown himself, who would trade phrases
with the student. Although perhaps disappointing to the audience, this approach
reflected his philosophy of music, which one could, broadly speaking, call democratic.
◊ ◊ ◊
Max Roach
July 17, 1991, Lord Jeffrey Inn, Amherst, MA

Charles Hersch: . . . I’m particularly interested in the arts as a vehicle for political ed-
ucation. What do they communicate to people? How do people understand them?
It just seems to me that people talk a lot about politics or the arts being political,
but I’d like to maybe try to figure out a little better than people have, how exactly
it is political or what are the limits of art as communicating a political message
or imparting political ideas. . . . I was particularly interested in the Freedom Now
Suite. . . .
Max Roach: Well the Freedom Now Suite was the result of a commission that Oscar
Brown Jr. and myself got from the NAACP [National Association for the Advance-
ment of Colored People] during the one-hundred-year celebration of the Emancipa-
tion Proclamation for the youth organizations in the NAACP. And we never could
finish it. . . . As I’m traveling all over, we’d phone each other and talk about it, until
we got to a certain level of the piece. The “Freedom Day” poem that he wrote, we
never could really resolve that because in our hearts and in our minds, and what we
knew physically that was going on out here; black folks were not free in 1960, so we
never could finish it, so we just kind of ended it on an upbeat, you know, “whisper
listen / whisper say we’re free / slave no longer / slave no longer / can it really be?”
was the poem. In any case, we did present it for the NAACP convention in Phila-
delphia, and it was a multimedia piece. We used film, we used narration. Ralph
Peters was one of the people that was in it—a very fine actor. We used [a] chorus,
and of course we used Abbey Lincoln. And we used dances, and of course the band,

129.126.218.66 on Sun, 14 Jun 2020 15:14:15 UTC
86 Max Roach and Marion Brown Charles Hersch
and so forth. So it was a big piece. Well, Nat Hentoff came down to that conven-
tion; at that time he was a critic and of course he is a political writer himself . . . and
he was at one time an A&R [artists and repertoire] man for Candid Records. Well
he came down and . . . he asked us . . . would we record it. So I knew nothing about
recording it because it wasn’t finished as far as we were concerned. But then, Nat
was really a good friend to the music, and his attitude toward the whole sociopoliti-
cal thing [and] the things that he wrote I really got a lot out of. So then when he
became A&R person for Candid Records, we said yes. We said, “OK, we’ll do it.”
That’s how we did the first recording and I asked Coleman Hawkins to be a part of
it, because he meant so much to the music. . . . So we recorded it. That’s how we
recorded the Freedom Now Suite. But it’s like an unfinished piece, and we haven’t
worked on any of it since we recorded it, Oscar Brown Jr. and myself. And that
wasn’t the original title for it. There was another title we had for it, but we named it
that, Freedom Now Suite, because, I think Nat had something to do with that. And
then the record itself, some students just told me today, this morning, that they
have some old copies in a record shop in New York that they’re selling for $85 a shot,
the original.
CH: I think I’ve seen some. I didn’t know they were worth that much.
MR: And then of course Columbia Records [got involved]. It’s a funny story about this
piece. When one of the great singers . . . [who] was with Candid Records signed
with Columbia, part of his contract was that Columbia had to buy up Candid and
buy up all the records and masters that he had made so that they would never go
into a cutout bin and be sold for less. . . . It might have been Andy Williams. But
in any case, that’s how it got to CBS. CBS carried the line for about two years, kind
of farmed it out and then everybody got a piece of it and so it was on several labels.
But it was an attempt, during a time [around] 1960, ’61, ’62, during that period.
I think all of us were caught up in the hope that the country would change and
racism would go down the drain, and everybody seemed to be aware [of ] the war.
Just all kinds of things were happening—[like] the incident at Kent State—and all
of the musicians, the artists, from Joan Baez [got involved]. White as well as black
artists, even the pop groups, were singing songs like “Keep On Pushing” and ev-
erybody seemed to be involved in it. I don’t know what happened, [but] in 1970 or
’72 things just radically changed and we started going backwards to where we are
today, seemingly. But as far as an artist is concerned, really making an imprint on
changing society, I think the artist can only suggest. It’s the artists, it’s the writers, I
think, that deal with the word, that effect real change. But when you deal with ab-
stract things like music you can only suggest, like Beethoven did with his Ninth or
even like Picasso did with his [CH: Guernica]. Yeah. OK, it’s a painting, but words
change people; they make people go out and do something because it’s much more
direct, and [in] music we can just suggest. Although I have seen [music’s impact] in
the height of the civil rights movement. I’ve heard Aretha Franklin give a concert
in Harlem, New York City, and at the end of that concert, if she had said to those
thousands of people, “March!” we would have marched, because she had us in the
palm of her hand.

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CH: . . . I agree with what you’re saying about the word versus music, but I also wonder
if music has certain advantages, in terms of its connection with the emotions. . . .
MR: I heard that sometimes, because I heard that, my father told me that during the
First World War, they would march through town with an army band playing
Sousa, and guys would just get right on the line. That’s how they’d join the army,
because of that music. . . .
But when you get right into the core of what’s happening politically, in our
country, and I guess it’s in other countries as well—it’s very deep, you know. . . . It’s
just funny, we’re debating loaning Russia billions of dollars so these kinds of con-
tradictions are there, and you’re watching how we are being cut to the bone as far
as education is concerned, and you listen to all this, and of course we’ve been going
through this ever since I can remember. It’s always this contradiction that happens
in our country politically. But whenever we, when the people kind of rise up and
flex their muscles or protest in some even mild way, we get slapped down, leaders
get killed [for] even suggesting at the moment that there should be real change. As
far as the musician is concerned, me myself personally, I think that everything is
political. I think that popular music is political because it takes people’s minds off
issues, real issues. If we can keep young people dancing, and boogying, and doing
things, you know [CH: anaesthetized]. Yeah, it does, it keeps people, you know,
[saying], “Well, who cares if the banks are failing. So what? What does it mean?
Everything is nothing.” And to me, that’s political. Because coming out of the six-
ties, into the seventies, there was a radical change in our programming, as far as
our radio was concerned . . . and everything else. You did not hear the politicized
music, if you will, or the poets. . . . Now in the earlier days, people like Bessie Smith
and that crowd were much more motivated as far as creating protest songs were
concerned than we are today. Once in awhile, you know, you hear somebody say
something. And then the Guthrie family and all these folks were doing things. It
was just a different period. Now, I’m sorry to say now, everything is really placid;
everybody wants to get rich. . . . I want to sell platinum records, and platinum rec-
ords is “dance with the music, dance with the music, and dance some more with the
music.” And you get rich, and that’s what it’s all about. Now that is political to me.
CH: To get back for a moment to the stuff in the sixties, let me ask you what might
even sound like an obvious question, but [in] the Freedom Now Suite, what do you
think freedom meant? Because I think, obviously it was freedom for blacks on one
level but that could mean a lot of different things, and that I guess is the first part
of the question. And the second part is, what connection if any do you see between
that kind of freedom and musical freedom? It seems to me a lot of jazz musicians
were sort of making that connection.
MR: Well then there was the so-called free jazz music. But most of the free jazz musi-
cians that I knew were apolitical. They weren’t political.
CH: But I wonder still if there was some connection, if it wasn’t just a coincidence that
it arose at the same time.
MR: Well, if anything, most of it had almost a sound of anarchy about it. It said, “OK,
let’s just play at random.”

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CH: You think so? Some of it . . .

MR: Some did have lines and things like that, I mean, but the point of view of all the
musicians including Ornette Coleman and the crowd, they never dealt with pure
politics. It wasn’t say, even the songs, the titles of the song. You know it’s amazing
that Charlie Parker did. His titles dealt with it.
CH: “Now’s the Time.”
MR: “Now’s the Time,” and things like that. It dealt with certain aspects [CH: “Pass-
port”] of the movement of the day. . . . In order to really deal with anything in the
world, as you know, you gotta spend time, and you’ve gotta give it serious consider-
ation to master an instrument like you have to do with anything else. You’ve worked
your butt off to . . . get a doctorate in political science. . . . That’s hard, it’s work.
Now, you could go out and just make speeches and just rap and things like that
if you wanted to, about any subject, but oftentimes that kind of freedom was an
excuse for guys who didn’t want to work. Did not want to work. There were some
who were really creative and of course Ornette Coleman was one and Cecil Taylor,
especially. Cause when I heard Cecil Taylor I felt like you said about the music. I
heard Cecil during the sixties, and he was playing the way he’s playing now. Now
he’s really . . . not only accepted at certain quarters of the world but it feels like it’s
maturing, if I can say that. But when I first heard him, he personified the times.
And the way he personified the times for me was his playing mirrored the confusion
that existed, and all the contradictions. It wasn’t confusion, a better word is the con-
tradictions that existed during that time and that exist now in our country.
Like last night when I turned on the news, there it was. People don’t have this, they
don’t have this, the government’s in trouble, the state of California’s workers are not
getting paid because they can’t figure out a budget, that’s too much money. . . . Yet
we’re having a meeting of the richest countries in the world that we are spearheading
or seemingly are an integral part of it, and we’re talking about loaning people billions
of dollars and we’re dying here in a sense. Those kinds of contradictions, Cecil Taylor
seems to, seemed to spell out on the piano. And he still does that for me. His playing
was really fraught with the frustrations that I could hear and feel in the society. So his
music did do that to me, for me, more than any of the other so-called free musicians.
CH: I read a quote from Ellington where he plays a dissonant chord and he says,
“That’s us. That’s the Negro in America. Part of it, yet apart at the same time.” I
thought that was a good connection between dissonance and some [social] tension.
MR: Well he was on it because he was writing. He was being literal years ago when he
wrote [CH: “Black, Brown, and Beige”], yeah, “Black, Brown, and Beige.”
CH: Because I think of Coleman as trying to get people together and trying to sort of
create structure spontaneously and to see if structure will evolve. . . . I think there’s
this way in which we think of individual freedom and group freedom as sort of op-
posed. . . . Whereas I think what people like Coleman perhaps were trying to say is
that a group can enhance individuality or you can, on the record, let’s say, Free Jazz,
when it’s working you can get people who are expressing themselves yet listening
to one another, having empathy and creating a kind of a coherence and a kind of
solidarity . . .

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MR: I’m learning [laughs].

CH: But to get back to your own music, what kind of freedom were you thinking of?
MR: Well mine was a bit—well, what can I say?—it was literal, much more literal,
mine was. I used the Freedom Now Suite to talk about man’s oppression upon man
but using the black experience in America as the vehicle for the piece itself. So the
poetry and everything led to that. What I know about. And it’s very literal. The
only abstract thing that I did was the “Prayer, Protest, and Peace” thing, and that
was based on another kind of premise, where it was a prayer not of supplication,
but a prayer of preparation. And the protest section followed the preparation sec-
tion, which meant that then you went out, and you, if you will, you screamed. You
organized but you—it was like saying “Ouch!” Your pain, you just expressed your
pain in the protest thing. And then the peace wasn’t a peace that you got that was
any peace; there was no peace. It was a peace that you get from just exhausting
yourself. So, “Prayer, Protest, and Peace.” And [you had to] explain it too, because
you couldn’t write those sounds out. So in explaining it to Abbey, I would say, well,
this is a prayer, but it’s a prayer of preparation. It means, like when you get up in the
morning you take your toilet, and then you bathe or whatever, then you get yourself
ready to go to work, and then you go to work. And when you come home you’re ex-
hausted. Alright, so that’s “Prayer, Protest, and Peace.” You prepare yourself to work
and do something, and you work until you get tired. And peace is the exhaustion
you get from knowing, well I did everything I possibly could. Then you wake up the
next day and do the same thing over and over again. [Interrupted by a phone call.]
CH: Do you think Charlie Parker thought of his music as political? . . .
MR: Well, it’s a funny thing. All that music from “John Henry” [forward], all that
protest music that spoke about conditions that exist. . . . The USA does have an
early music that is, [and] a large portion of it comes out of the black experience.
For example, the Negro spirituals, which they called “sorrow songs.” . . . If you
want to hear the testimony of the slave, the slave narratives come out of the songs.
“Go Down Moses,” “Keep Your Lamps Trimmed and Burning,” and it was kind of
couched in double entendres, but it expresses how they felt during that period. So
the Negro spirituals are the earliest . . . [Interrupted by phone call.]
CH: Well let me give some ideas I was thinking about the Freedom Now Suite and then
feel completely free to tell me they’re wrong or whatever. The way I was thinking
about it was that, in a way it’s trying to achieve some sort of unity, both geographi-
cally with the stuff about Africa and America, and historically, as a historical narra-
tive of the black experience say from slavery to the present. And then that’s sort of
reproduced in the group which has Coleman Hawkins on the one hand and then
Booker Little or whoever on the other. So in these three ways it creates this sort of
unity. Is that . . . ? [MR: That’s correct.] . . . When I said “What kind of freedom”
and you said “literal freedom” . . .
MR: No I said that instead of dealing with it in an abstract form like the so-called “free
jazz” musicians, mine was much more literal. It talked about exactly what you just
said. It kind of covered it from a very literal point of view rather than the kind of
figurative or abstract version that you had to say, “Well does it really mean so and

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so?” There was no doubt that the driva’ man was a bastard and the driva’ man often
times [was] black and he got a little bit more from the slave owners than the guys
who were in the field, and so he watched over everybody. And that’s an age-old cus-
tom when it comes down to oppression. In fact it exists now in South Africa. There
are black police who contain blacks.
CH: So by freedom you meant elimination of racism or. . . .
MR: Absolutely, yeah. Equal opportunity, education. I don’t think freedom means that
you should give everybody something who doesn’t do anything. I think we all have
to work for whatever we get, but the chance to work is what this freedom is about,
the freedoms we’re talking about, the chance to get an education. That’s what Martin
Luther King talked about, Fred Douglass talked about it, Paul Robeson, and we’re
still talking about it.
CH: Not enough. So you thought of your music primarily communicating that
through the words, rather than the music itself having some sort of meaning.
MR: Yeah, we communicated with the words and music; it’s all tied up together. To say
something about what happens in our times. The painters and the musicians, writ-
ers as well, document what is going on, and maybe we try to point to the future.
Which is anybody’s guess. It’s up to the imagination of the person. I mean these are
just everyday things. To be able to go anyplace anybody else goes, to live—and I’m
talking about the USA now—to live anyplace anybody else goes. To be able to get a
job anyplace that anyone else does. That’s all. To me, that freedom I’m talking about
is not a great big thing. It’s just something that I see, I see the majority of people in
America have it. And I’d like for me and my folks to enjoy it as well—the opportu-
nity to serve and work and do whatever there is. . . .
Marion Brown
August 6, 1990, Northampton, MA

Charles Hersch: I’m, as you know, interested in the sixties and the so-called free jazz
movement. . . . How do you feel that music was political? Or do you think it was
political?
Marion Brown: I mean, what is politics? We have to first start with the definition of
politics. If we have arrived at a definition of politics, then we can apply that defini-
tion to the music and see what we come up with. . . . What is something that is
political? . . .
CH: OK, let’s step back from that large question of what is politics because I think that
is too broad for right now. . . . Let’s just start with a narrower contention, which is
that . . . jazz musicians in the sixties connected musical freedom and political free-
dom and saw the music in some way as a way of bringing about or communicating
about political freedom. So the freedom to create new musical rules—[producing]
new sounds—in some way I saw as an opposition to some of the conventions, rules,
[and] racist practices of American society. Did you see a connection between musi-
cal freedom and political freedom?

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MB: I’ve always seen that. Even before this period you’re talking about, because music
and art has always been associated with breaking rules and with a kind of a freedom
of choice, [more] than our daily political lives. And so in that sense, many people who
looked at this thing saw it all wrong. Because, I mean, the notes of any song or any
kind of music, they have no literal meaning. The only meaning that any notes could
have, or titles could have, are within the minds of the composers. You can’t draw in-
ferences from the outside to say that this meant that because it had this title or that
because of the choice of notes and forms in which this music occurred, or indicate
anything political, or anything free, having to do with freedom. Artists throughout
time immemorial have always had what they call artistic license, and so the definition,
and the looking at this music, at this time, from that point of view, was something
that the French would say, en retard, it was late. Because music and art, as I said before
this, has always been associated with that, and also a common mistake that many peo-
ple have made, either in ignorance, or in connivance, about this music was that it was
revolutionary. Art is never revolutionary. Politics is. Art is evolutionary. . . . What hap-
pens in one period of art comes from periods that preceded it, and art never attempts
to rearrange (or music, I’m using art as a larger word), never attempts to change the
way people live. Maybe [they] think about something, sure, but not the way they live.
In politics when the change occurs, this change is usually described as being revolu-
tionary, because the means by which revolution occurs causes upheavals in the lives of
people whereas the evolution of an art form doesn’t necessarily cause upheavals but it
does cause some small or large degrees of dissatisfaction.
Now this music that you’re speaking of cannot be separated from the times in
which it became known. And this time that it became known was a time in the his-
tory . . . when all forms of social change were being effected, in the United States
and all other places, you understand? And so music evolves in society, sometimes
parallel to the society itself. Music is no more than a part of the time, part of the
period. Also, the other thing is this. One of the things that many people miss about
Afro-American music in particular, is this: it’s that as Afro-American people became
greater masters of the English language or American language, the music became
more and more complex. And also, as the music progressed, as jazz evolved, the
concept of time or rhythm became more and more complex.
But these things have all been from how I’ve studied this. I’ve studied the history
of music and things like that, not so much from a political standpoint but from an
anthropological standpoint, which tends to look at some other things, other than
politics is what I’m saying. . . . I think that a lot of people in their willingness to de-
fine this music from a nonmusical standpoint saw things about it, read things into
it, and presented it to the public in such a way that it frightened the public as much
as the music did itself. . . . Now as far as the free jazz movement goes, the word “free
jazz” was a word that was given to it by somebody, but what the musicians seemed
to be more concerned about to me, as one of them, wasn’t so much politics as it
was to create a more understanding human being as a musician and a person whose
spiritual knowledge connection was greater than those that preceded the era.

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So, the problem is, is that most of these studies of the free jazz movement, ac-
cording to the way I see them, are incomplete. They only deal with one aspect of
it. And at that time people were so much into politics, and this sort of thing, that
everything had to have a political basis, a political meaning, and starting from po-
litical ends. Is it political to want to be better paid? That’s economic. Is it political to
want to get farther away from the pitfalls that your ancestors went through such as
alcohol and drugs and things like that? Is it political to want to put more emphasis
into family life than night life? So, you see, whereas this music got a lot of publicity
and caused a lot of people to write and think about it, most people approached it all
from that same perspective. . . . Do you know Frank Kofsky?
CH: I actually don’t like his stuff that much.
MB: It wasn’t really well-thought-out stuff. But Frank Kofsky was one of many indi-
viduals who popped up during that time professing a great love for the music and
the musicians and some form of insight into the political black-white aspect of it.
Frank Kofsky was around long enough to write his book, and after that he disap-
peared. . . . Nothing else was heard from him in terms of a continuation . . . of
historical interest in the music. Who was he? I asked myself. As opposed to, let’s
say, the book that was written in French by Philippe Carles . . . and [Jean-Louis]
Comolli . . . which had a title, Free Jazz, Black Power. . . . Now they were interested
in jazz music from a historical perspective before that time, and they still are. There
were a number of people who came into that community at that time who were
armed with grants and with zealous love for the music and encouraging people to
do this and do that and say this and say that. I have always had a problem with
those people simply because I’ve always had a certain type of awareness of people.
I never deal with anyone on any level that’s serious without considering, “Who are
they? What do they want? And what are they going to do with this information?”
So . . . because the music sounded the way that it did, there was an echo of the soci-
ety, that’s all it was.
I mean at the time this music came about the society was in chaos with regards
to black people, white people who were like—what do you call it?—the flower
generation and all these people [CH: the counterculture]. The counterculture,
exactly, that’s what is happening, and so they tried to just see this whole thing as
some form of aberration, as something that wanted to . . . turn the country around
and set it up on its heels or something or knock it down or something like that and
I never got that impression at all. All I saw was people trying to improve the im-
age of musicians and also going to a natural form of evolution. One of the things
about the evolution of free jazz that many people don’t know about—if they know
about it they haven’t thought about it—is this: Most other periods in jazz where
jazz has evolved from one form to the next had a center of activity that provided it
the places, and the people, and the audience by which it could be known, like New
York City for bebop, Kansas City for swing, New Orleans for that music. And when
it came to the free jazz music, all the musicians who came together in New York
eventually were all living in different parts of the country, scattered about, develop-

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ing their music as people who were thought of as being some kind of musical freaks.
So then you have a development of something that becomes identified by a group
or under the group aegis that’s developing, the people who are doing it are develop-
ing it exclusive of each other and apart from each other, then that should be looked
at and studied more than what became.
In other words, if you’re not familiar [with] what led up to something when you
look at something from the point of view of anthropology—this was what my grad-
uate work was in—you tend to look much deeper for your meaning. I mean instead
of looking at the tip of the iceberg, I mean, it’s not anthropology to take a shovel
and dig in the interior, the finances. And so . . . seriously believe, that aside from
the business of music itself I find it’s unacceptable that many people who wrote
about this music as proponents of the music and stuff like that did a great disservice
because it put into the minds of people fears that were there already but not on the
basis of the music itself but purely on the basis of people evolving or something like
that. So I look, am still looking for studies that are more complete than the political
studies and things like that. That this is not a criticism of you in particular, but this
is a criticism of the entire spectrum of people who sought to define this music from
a distance. You understand?
CH: Yeah, I agree with you about much of what was written about the music at that
time. I think a lot of the studies are very narrow and don’t look at the broader pic-
ture. I would say they both have a very narrow view of music and a very narrow
view of politics. Like Frank Kofsky in this interview he does with Coltrane, he tries
to twist him into some sort of revolutionary in some very narrow sense of the word
and it just doesn’t work at all. So I agree with you there and I guess I want to, I do
see so-called free jazz as continuous with what came before. I do see it as evolution-
ary.
MB: I mean I hope with our experiences we’ve had as student-teacher you can see that I
have roots. What I know about music goes much deeper than just making extrane-
ous sounds and things like that. We all do.
CH: But see I want to use the word “political” in the broadest sense of the word here.
[MB: That’s OK.] I was interested in what you said, you said that music during this
time was reflecting what was going on in the society. That’s . . . what I’m interested
in understanding. I wouldn’t claim that jazz was meant to overthrow the existing
order or that you could listen to an album and somehow that would be the same
as reading a political pamphlet or something. I think you’re right that music is so
much broader than that; it can’t be classified or reduced to those narrow political
purposes. Yet I was in that [dissertation] chapter trying to understand the music as
a reflection of some of the aspirations of American blacks during that time, which
of course were connected to earlier aspirations too. . . . See, I would say, in a sense
all art is about freedom. It’s about breaking the rules; it’s about creating something
new.
MB: Even Robert Mapplethorpe?
CH: Sure. . . .

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MB: Robert Mapplethorpe’s work is a reflection of these times. When there’s a great
population in Europe and the United States of people who are gay, so to speak, and
we have, even now a whole new phenomenon called gay politics. That’s political.
Now, it’s even more political than free jazz was, because we never staged marches,
we never marched, we never tried to have a day of pride, we never marched, we
never had any form of legislation.
CH: Well, black people did.
MB: Well, I’m talking about free jazz, . . . jazz musicians themselves. The most they ever
did that was political was to say they wanted to be better paid, they wanted to have
more respect as human beings, and that’s about all.
CH: So you sort of disagree with my contention. . . .
MB: I don’t disagree with it, but as I said, being a part of what we’re talking about and
having personally suffered from it, and great suffering, too, when I look at it, I’m
forced to look at it, because people ask me about it. I’m forced to look at it in such
a way that I try to enlighten people about what it really was and try to broaden their
view of it and show them things they might have missed about the whole thing.
And so titles of pieces, [Sonny Rollins’s] Freedom Suite, [Max Roach’s] We Insist!,
whatever, those titles, I mean, they mean something, but if you were to look at my
discography and you would look at the titles of my songs or my compositions, or
whatever they may be, you won’t see such titles but the music sounded the same as
those songs that had those titles. So can you judge a book by a cover? Can a piece
of music or musicians be defined by the titles of their songs? I mean when I was
getting my degree in music and in anthropology of music and things like that, my
instructors just would not let me escape the overall meaning of a thing so I’ve never
looked at anything from one perspective. I look at everything from every possible
angle there is with the hopes that I can get a better picture of what it is. And so, I
agree with you, and I agree with all the others who wrote about this music, about
the implications of music but I disagree with the studies only on one basis. They fail
to look at all the other aspects. . . . Many people who wrote these long books . . .
they failed to do that.
CH: See what I’m trying to do is, I’m saying let’s take this one aspect of it but under-
stand it more thoroughly and carefully—that is, the political meaning of jazz in the
sixties—than other people have. Because I think, like you’re saying, other people,
they’ve done it in an almost cavalier way. Oh, jazz is political, Frank Kofsky, like
“Malcolm X is Coltrane,” sort of all, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
MB: If there was an interchange in the personalities, Coltrane wouldn’t be Malcolm X,
he’d be Dr. King. . . . OK, well we have gone past free jazz. Free jazz has been killed,
laid to rest, mostly in this country. It still lives and it’s very healthy in Europe. And
Europeans especially in Germany, Holland, and the Scandinavian countries are
still very much involved with it. To a great extent the new Lower East Side crowd
of people like John Zorn, Elliott Sharp, and those people they have it, they are the
beneficiaries of this, but at the same time we’re going through another type of evo-
lution in jazz music with the coming of musicians like the Marsalis brothers and all
of those musicians who play jazz in that particular manner, like . . . that Blue Note

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sound. And musicians who want to get back to certain kinds of other values. They’re
wearing suits, all of them, and ties, rather than Dashikis and Afros. Is that political?
CH: I’d say so. I’d say it’s very much a reflection of our own time. . . .
MB: And what would you say the political . . . meaning of that would be? How would
you fit them as left, right, conservatives, liberals, or what?
CH: Well, I’m not really liking those labels too much but. . . .
MB: We have to live with these things, that’s all we have [laughs].
CH: I would say in a sense conservative.
MB: I would say you were right. . . . But to get back to my original premises, music,
jazz music and all music, is no more than a reflection of its times. [CH: I agree.] We
came too soon, and Mapplethorpe came too late. You understand me?
CH: Not exactly.
MB: I mean [chuckles], I guess we came too soon in terms of effecting the fact of change
in music that we did, because it was at a time when the public was just not ready for
us because they were dealing with all these other forms of social change. And Map-
plethorpe came too late. . . . If Mapplethorpe had come along in the sixties with his
particular kind of art he probably would have had more acceptance for it than it
did in the eighties. That is when things had gone back to a more conservative view
of things happening. And as far as people at the National Endowment, though,
who award money to artists and things like that, pornography is just another way
of singling out something that people don’t like about music. I mean, the sight of
Mapplethorpe’s photographs to most people, the sight affected them visually, thus
mentally, the same way that our music affected people aurally, thus mentally. It was
disturbing. And anything that’s disturbing to people, what they try to do is to cur-
tail it or get it out of the way.
CH: Do you think people, musicians in the sixties, meant it to be disturbing in any way?
MB: No one meant anything. I mean, the only time you can be sure someone means
something is when they say it. Then you can say yes. But if someone is just playing
loud it doesn’t mean that he intends to disturb. But if someone tells you in some
type of way, either directly or through innuendo, that they want to upset you,
then you can believe them. But I can’t believe that someone is trying to disturb me
because they play their music real loud. I have a son who was once a punk rocker.
I used to go to his concerts and all the music and stuff back there was very, very
loud. It was disturbing music, but I don’t think they were trying to disturb anyone.
[CH: Really?] No, not consciously. I mean, if that’s what it takes, if it takes a high
level of amplitude to get your music out of your instruments, out into the air, into
people’s heads, then their purpose is not to disturb. . . . In jazz we don’t need that
type of transduction, all we need is just some microphone and some sort of balance
and we go from there. . . . Free jazz didn’t cause as much harm to people as some of
the other music did of that same time. I’m sure some free jazz musicians and some
people might have flipped out or gone crazy, but because the music was nonliteral,
it didn’t send out any messages to people to do strange things to themselves or to
others. I mean, when you look back to the Sharon Tate murders, and to Manson
and his crew in California in those years, they were violent hands of the music of

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their times. And this music . . . inspired them in many ways, and when it came out
in many of the trials and things, many people had been inspired by it, many people
who did horrible things, had been avid fans of the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, and
of all of those people of that period of time.
CH: Although they may have done something anyway. I mean, I’m not sure the music
was what really caused them. . . .
MB: There you have a good point. That’s my point. I’m not sure that the music caused
America to suffer, caused anyone to suffer, or that it was political. Everything was
just political at the time. . . . It was just one of the most political times in United
States history and especially, and for sure, in my life. And so therefore I cannot
separate the music on a purely political basis or a social connection to society in
general. I mean, I enjoy reading history, especially the history of music . . . but as I
said before, so much that was written really did a lot of harm to the music, and . . .
there were these people who had grants and commissions from publishing houses
or people like that to write about the music, and during that time that you were
talking about, black women weren’t publishing, it was only black men. I mean, they
published the wildest stuff that anybody ever thought of. And people were passing
out bucks, “Here, you want to write a book, go ahead, say whatever you want to
say.” “Well, what about answers?” “Well don’t worry about that, we gonna say it just
like you want it.” And then we come to a point in that time . . . where books aren’t
being published by black men, it’s all published by black women. . . . So we live in
a world where we are shaped by whatever the larger society wants to know about us.
They just simply give you the money to talk about it. Because these things provide
people with the information they need to draw certain inferences, conclusions, and
things like that about people who are thinking about art lives, subculture lives, and
things like this. One of the greatest things about the United States Constitution
[is] the freedoms that it gives, freedom of speech, the press, all that stuff. I mean
that’s one of the most ingenious government devices there is because by so doing we
don’t have to have a repressive society. When you let people say what they want to
say, no matter how crazy it is, and do what they want to do, it makes it much easier
to control the society than when people have to go underground and you have to
listen through all kinds of devices and things like that. That’s not to say that there is
no surreptitious thinking and communicating in our society. But if the constitution
and the freedoms in the constitution mean what they say, then isn’t jazz free too? I
mean, I can’t separate music from society or I can’t isolate it from society. We have
in this society all those freedoms of choice, which hardly any other constitutions
have. If we have all those freedoms, and even the right to bear arms, if that stuff is
true, well then why can’t you play your saxophone as loud as you want to?
CH: Some of what you’ve been saying is that it’s hard to say what the meaning of music
is. Like, you play it loud, what does that mean? It may just mean that you’re bad. I
mean, like a five-year-old, maybe they’ll play sax and it’s like, “Bleeah!” It sounds hor-
rible, that doesn’t mean it’s political or anything. But on the other hand, you have to
understand a meaning by the context in which it occurs. That is, let’s say I scream. You
can’t say that’s meaningless . . . but the meaning depends on the context.

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MB: What I would do, if I couldn’t find an immediate context, for a person’s behavior,
then I would think of it maybe as some primal thing, as just an urge.
CH: But I think free jazz, even though it didn’t have words, did have a context . . . of
black Americans trying to better their conditions and fight oppression; the context
illuminates some of the meaning of those wordless musical notes in the sixties. . . .
MB: That’s what we’ve already laid that down, as I said before. You cannot exclude mu-
sic and art forms from the times in which they come forth. That is the context.
CH: Well, what about the stuff like I was saying about creating a kind of group equal-
ity? Like [in] free jazz, the bass and the drummer—the drummer doesn’t have to
keep time necessarily. And I kind of connected that with equality in the political
sense.
MB: It’s true. Leo Smith, he articulated that better than anybody that I know. And
when he wrote music and when he played he always spoke of the equality of all
instruments so that the bass and the drums don’t have to keep sitting there, going
1–2–3–4–5–6 all the time, and it could assume a role equal to the horns. He could
solo. A drum, a bass could be taking a solo at the same time as anyone else. The
roles were broadened rather than narrowed out. That’s right, equality of instru-
ments. No one instrument was thought to be the one that should have everything
to say like the saxophone or the trumpet or the piano. Leadership became some-
thing, but to put it well about free music and free jazz is this: the music business at
large was afraid of that, and the society too, because it had one implication, and it
was a large implication, and . . . it implied that anybody who wanted to play music
could. And so you can’t have the music business that controls all the musicians and
everyone in society as one. . . .
CH: They couldn’t protect their own little turf or something. . . .
MB: To have a star system, and out of a whole pool of let’s say one thousand wonderful
and excellent musicians you take five or ten, and say: “OK, you get the money.”
CH: . . . It’s like art isn’t only something for this special group of people, that lots of
other people can participate. It seems to me, though, from interviews I’ve read with
some musicians, they really resented that in the sixties. They felt like anyone could
just get up there, and that quality wasn’t being appreciated anymore.
MB: But there was something they found out. I don’t think they thought about that in
the beginning. But there again, anybody could be a musician, but not everyone could
be excellent. So that there was really no danger of us having a society of musicians.
But what it would have meant is that many more people could have shared in the
pleasure of making some sort of music that would sell without having to go through
a lot of academics and studies like that but just like create their own devices. . . . That
was the reason why ECM records in Germany refused to record me again. Because
I used that concept on an album, Afternoon of a Georgia Fawn, and I had people on
there that I called “assistants,” and I explained what these “assistants” were. I knew
what I was talking about because in the full ensemble idea of music, like in the
black community and in African music, everyone who’s there takes some part in it
if it means nothing but hand clapping or foot stomping. And you don’t have to be
a musician to keep a beat or to do something, somebody asks you, “Just do this one

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thing.” . . . Like that record that I made for them was a record that was very important
in establishing what their company became. They wouldn’t touch me again. I kept
asking them why but they never would give me an answer. I had to find the answer
for myself. . . . If I hadn’t put my ideas in writing, on the back of that cover, then let
it go as it was, then I wouldn’t have had probably more of a future with them, because
I created the sound that made the company.1 I created it, with Afternoon of a Georgia
Fawn. My records sold as well as anybody’s, as well as Chick Corea and Keith Jarrett. I
created it, I delivered them, Chick Corea, to a new market, and Anthony Braxton.
CH: But that idea that somehow everyone can participate or the people who weren’t
necessarily highly trained musicians, that was threatening to them?
MB: . . . Like you said the musicians in [the] sixties realized at a certain point that many
people would just pick up horns and start calling themselves “playing free.” Sun Ra
told me a story once that he played a concert and a man came up to him afterwards
and said, “My little boy can do this, what you were doing.” And Sun Ra said, “But
he can’t write it down.” [Laughs.]
CH: What was that like working with Sun Ra?
MB: Oh, I enjoyed it. I mean, it was great.
CH: He seemed to have a whole philosophy to go along with his music, almost a reli-
gion or something.
MB: Well it certainly is philosophical, and it’s very spiritual, because he’s a man for
whom, you can find no dirt on him. He doesn’t smoke, he doesn’t drink, he doesn’t
use drugs. He’s never been married and, I mean, he has no connection to the female
gender or the male gender, except through music.
CH: Isn’t it true that a lot of his musicians live with him?
MB: Yeah, that’s true. But all gurus, that’s a part of it. And the charm, and part of what
makes gurus who they are, is that their strongest believers always live in close prox-
imity to where they are. That’s been true throughout, with Jesus.
CH: It’s funny because in some ways Sun Ra has been around for a long time, but
sometimes he’s classified with the free jazz movement to some degree but yet. . . .
MB: He was there before the movement.
CH: But then that idea of him as this focal point for the whole thing, as this guru, in
some ways that contradicts the whole idea. . . .
MB: People never thought of him as a focal point for all things. What they did was they
thought of him as some kind of oddball. The [most common] thought of the focal
point for the whole free jazz thing [was] Ornette Coleman.
CH: No, I meant him as the focal point of his own orchestra. . . . So in some ways [it]
goes against other ideas of equality of the group and everything, since he was clearly
the leader of the group.
MB: Uh-huh. But it certainly doesn’t go against the way they played the music. It defi-
nitely deals with the equality of all the instruments and things like this. But there’s
nothing wrong with even that, because his influence is such that the people who
stick close to him, they remain in good health, mentally, emotionally, and musically.
CH: Did you see that movie? There’s a movie about him, “A Joyful Noise.” . . . He’s a
funny guy.

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MB: He is. He has a great sense of humor. He’s one of the funniest people I know. . . .
He’s a great one. I like him.
CH: How long were you with him?
MB: Oh, I’m still with him in heart, but in reality I guess about a year and a half on a
daily basis. . . .
CH: He seems to be going more back to playing standards now.
MB: Well, what he’s doing is he’s doing everything that he’s capable of doing. He’s do-
ing it, he remains. When I was with him there was hardly any work, but now he’s all
over the globe. I mean he goes to places, he plays in Alabama, in Florida, all kinds of
places.
CH: I like his piano playing a lot.
MB: Me, too. I like everything that he does because he’s an original thinker; he’s got so
many ideas. I mean I don’t know of anybody who has as many ideas. And he’s in the
same tradition as Ellington and Basie. And at the moment, as far as the black big band
goes, he’s the only person who’s got a band that’s been together that long. He kept
them together with this strong thing that he has, that makes people really love being
around him and with him. Everyone knows how Ellington and Count Basie were able
to keep their musicians because they had all of the work. So he’s a successor to all of
that.
CH: . . . In the sixties, can you say something about the role of white musicians in
groups at the time? Was there a tension or what was their relationship to this music
which was [part of ] . . . this whole black cultural movement?
MB: [Chuckles.] I’ve been reading a lot of Sherlock Holmes, so . . . I would say your
contention is elementary, even unfounded. A lot of people thought about this black-
white thing. But Ornette Coleman was considered to be the father of this whole
thing. Who was his bass player? [CH: Charlie Haden.] All right. Archie Shepp was
thought of a long time ago, not now, as being [CH: Roswell Rudd]. OK. And we
could go on and on. We don’t have time. There has always been in this movement
a place for the white musician playing along with black musicians and not in any
inferior and sniveling way. Now there have been some periods of jazz that have been
more racist than others. But I won’t name them. I will leave that to your intelligence
and to your knowledge of the history of jazz to determine for yourself what they
were.
CH: You didn’t see any role differentiation?
MB: No, no, no. The only thing I saw was the reluctance of many white musicians who
wanted to play among us and with us, and in sympathy with us, to come forward,
because of this thing that exists, not just from jazz but from time immemorial be-
tween master and slave. There’s a guilt. There’s some feelings that are there between
black and white people that have just been there from the beginning. They have
nothing to do with music. They have to do purely with exploitation of groups of
people. It was their choice. But there was never anything said by anyone. They were
just simply afraid. Because they had these feelings, and their fear was what defined
them as being not so sure of whether or not they could relate to black musicians.
But . . . you’ll see that the doors were always open. . . . And for many of the people

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who were playing music, Albert Ayler for instance, Joel Friedman, cello player, Bill
Folwell, bass player, played with Albert.
CH: This is sort of a technical question, but what did Coltrane tell you in the album
Ascension? What were his instructions to the group? . . .
MB: He had written music and he simply explained to us the way he wanted this music
to be played.
CH: You had a whole line to play, or certain notes? [MB: Oh yeah.] It wasn’t just a
range or something like that, it was actually. . . .
MB: Notes. It had a series of notes that constituted the melody, then he had a series of
notes that constituted the tone rows for the collectives in between. . . . We had the
standard score, so to speak, in front of us.
CH: But you could play whatever rhythm you wanted over that tone row. [MB: Yeah,
yeah.] What was that session like?
MB: It was long and it was hard. . . .
CH: What was hard about it? You said it was difficult?
MB: Oh, it was just hard. Because there was two camps of people. There were those musi-
cians whose roots lay in free jazz and the others whose roots lay in the more, for [lack
of ] a better word, more in the conventional music—like Freddie Hubbard, Elvin
Jones, McCoy Tyner, and people like that. I had the feeling they didn’t really enjoy
what they were doing, didn’t like it. And sometimes when people don’t say how they
feel but just sort of vibe it out, it’s even worse than when you say it. Because when you
just say something, you get it out and it’s quite clear how somebody feels. But that
was a kind of tension there. But all of us had one thing in common: that’s the love for
John Coltrane, no matter what he was doing. So that’s what made it come off but as
far as the love for each other, the different camps, that’s a whole different story.
CH: What was he like as a person?
MB: He was quiet, unobtrusive, gentlemanly, caring, loving, considerate, fatherly,
brotherly, and friendly.
CH: Well, anything else you care to add? . . .
MB: Well I’m not a person to add too much to things. I respond. My thing is counter-
punching.
CH: Any of your albums in the sixties that you care to mention as achieving what you
thought were the heights. . . .
MB: My greatest . . . achievement in terms of free music, for me, was Afternoon of a
Georgia Fawn, but it was also my death. [CH: Because of the record company?] Be-
cause they never dealt with me anymore. I had an experience of being punished for
doing a masterwork and for me that was all they ever did for me. I dealt with ABC/
Impulse for quite a few years, made a lot of records for them, and I don’t think I
ever once did the album that I wanted to do with them . . . the way I did Afternoon
of a Georgia Fawn. Afterwards, I said, “Holy smoke. I did what I wanted to do.”
Note
1. From the surrounding context, Brown likely misspoke here and intended to say “would
have had . . . ,” but I have chosen to leave it as spoken in the moment.

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Without Qualification: Bill Dixon
on Black Music and Pedagogy
Bill Dixon (1925–2010) was a composer, trumpeter, educator, and visual artist whose
work spanned many disciplinary and stylistic boundaries, and which is not easily
categorized. As I have written elsewhere, “I do not use ‘jazz’ to limit [Dixon’s] work
to a single frame, but as one of many frames that could, and should, be used (in any
number of overlapping configurations) to discuss his [work]. In Dixon’s case, it is a
relevant frame, not because of the ‘one-drop rule of jazz’ for black experimentalists
that George Lewis has critiqued, but because Dixon’s mature compositional work
began within that aesthetic framework and tradition.”1
In addition to his path-breaking work as a composer and performer, Dixon
was a fiercely committed organizer and educator, beginning with his work as a civil
servant at the United Nations in the mid-1950s, where he formed the UN Jazz So-
ciety to educate and share this music with UN colleagues and the public. In 1964,
he organized the germinal “October Revolution in Jazz” concerts, followed shortly
thereafter by the formation of the Jazz Composer’s Guild. He helped develop the Free
Conservatory of the Streets in 1967 in New York City, then spent decades teaching
at Bennington College in Vermont, beginning in 1968. At Bennington, he founded
and chaired the school’s Black Music Division for a decade, before retiring in 1996.
This text comes from a September 28, 2003, conversation at his home in North
Bennington, Vermont. Our discussion took place under the auspices of my research
on Dixon’s work for my master’s thesis, which includes a chapter that covers his
evolving conception of “black music” over the course of his career.2 This conversa-
tion includes Dixon’s thoughts on black music at the time, as well as how he went


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102 Bill Dixon Andrew Raffo Dewar
about teaching that concept throughout his career, and his relationship to the jazz
tradition in his late period. I have only edited for clarity and removed one segment
where we watched and discussed video footage of his teaching. That said, with Mr.
Dixon, delivery was everything (in both his elocution and his music), so some of the
richness of these words is lost in transcription, much like a frozen improvisation.
◊ ◊ ◊
Bill Dixon
September 28, 2003, Dixon’s Home, North Bennington,VT

Bill Dixon: The problem we continue to have in the West is that we talk about clas-
sical music (and there is no such thing), we talk about popular music . . . creative
music . . . world music, and there is only music. The stamp that you put on it is
something else. Every area of music . . . the foundation of how the overtone series
works, the basic laws of acoustics and physics, whatever the instrument is, how it is
set up and how it responds to these things, then you do something with it.
Teaching black music, which is an aesthetic, a concern, a cultural thing, that
arises out of certain circumstances . . . someone said to me once why I didn’t write
more orchestra pieces. I said, “How would I get them played?” Why should I waste
my time doing this? Since time is of the essence, I should do things that I can do.
So when you find black musicians, you’d find black musicians who played the
trumpet in a certain kind of way. . . . I am convinced that from the time I was a kid
and I saw a trumpet . . . if I [had seen] a black trumpet player in all kinds of situ-
ations, we would not have compressed ourselves into the thing where we only saw
black musicians. . . . [What] you learned to do, and your whole cultural thing, and
your technical thing, is shaped by what it is you’re going to be able to do, what is
accessible to you, and what you’re interested in.
Of course there are always the exceptions, you know. Someone says, “I’m going
to do this thing,” and they do it. So when you get ready to teach black music, black
music vis-à-vis jazz, well, first of all, if you’re going to teach it, you’ve got to make
sure that people know by hearing (on some level) what the hell you mean. A lot of
people want to discuss these things, and they can’t tell the difference. This guy can’t
tell the difference between the trumpet player that’s taking a solo with Lawrence
Welk and the guy that’s taking one with Duke Ellington, he’s a hopeless case. What
can you do with that person? But that person will become more verbal about the
dynamic of the intellectual thing, the theoretical thing, the canon, than anyone
else . . . that illiterate. . . . If you don’t know what it sounds like, how can you do
anything about defining it?
With us, music comes first. It’s a sound. So, in the beginning, I had to be avail-
able and accessible to discuss the music when it was jazz music. Miles Davis played
jazz music. Count Basie played jazz music. They weren’t playing black music. In the
big picture, they were playing black music, because they’re not white in America, I

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Bill Dixon Andrew Raffo Dewar 103
mean, if you want to deal with that. You know, one thought heaps upon another,
but you have to have a foundational way of thinking.
At Bennington College, it was a very special school at one time. Very elitist, very
racist, in Northern terms; no one is going to call you a bad name, but they don’t
think blacks ever did anything. . . . But they don’t think they’re racists. They’re ex-
clusionary, which is the prerogative, first amendment rights and stuff like that. . . .
So, I got to Bennington, people wanted to write pieces within this framework . . .
they knew nothing. What could you do? In the music division, they used to have
people come in, and in the first week they’re writing pieces of music . . . they knew
nothing! Well, we know what that means. . . .
You know, a person comes in, they’ve heard John Coltrane, Miles Davis, and I
say, “No, you can’t do that. You’ve got to know a little something.” So, I sat down,
took a few weeks, and I assembled a course based upon the lead sheet, because
that was going to be our frame of reference. It was very simple. In one term, you
could learn enough to negotiate major [and] minor, [with somewhat less focus
on] the diminished and augmented chords, because they’re sort of transitory
chords anyway. You can do a whole lot of music without even using any one of
those . . . but major, minor, dominant 7th, OK. . . . And I made a series of exer-
cises to teach people the names of certain things, and stuff like that. . . . Within
one fourteen-week term, people could play a lead sheet—sit down, play, and har-
monize the lead sheet.
With one hand they could establish the chord, either a two-note or three-note
voicing, and with the right hand they could play the melody and get the harmony.
Then [I would teach] the foundation of what is the so-called blues. God knows
how many [variants exist], but we’d do I-IV-V, that’s what we’d do . . . [plus] minor
blues, things like that. But in one term it got so that people could halfway be intel-
ligent about what they were doing. And we used the standard literature: Ellington
tunes, the Porter tunes, the Gershwin things, which are very accessible, [a] common
language, all using this thing. . . . If you wanted to take the second term, I taught
people all the substitute chords . . . the add-on chords. . . . Some people took key-
board harmony with me. . . . They would take it, and then at a certain point they
could go to the music division, and they already knew something about the piano
and they could work out pretty well studying the other music.
But I always had to be insistent that as a beginner, because your facility with the
instrument is very pedestrian, you have to forget about expressing yourself. You
don’t have the tools to express. But what you can do is learn so that if you continue,
you’ll have the materials.
The other thing I made people do is . . . I had an incredible library. We had a
black music library up there, and I wouldn’t let the records out of the room, so
the records were always in tip-top shape. . . . I had about five or six turntables in
there, studio monitors, and all that stuff . . . so people could come in, and say for
my beginning keyboard harmony class, I’ve got half a dozen piano players all play-
ing the same tunes, so they could see the variation. . . . “This one, he’s leaving the

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root off, he’s doing this, or that.” . . . I had no problem after a while—people didn’t
become that confused. I remember once . . . one of the teachers was playing Bix
Beiderbecke[’s] . . . “In a Mist.” I had a transcription of that and everything, and I
heard it and I said “You’re playing it wrong, man.” Because it’s a series of ninths . . .
[but] he did like a lot of jazz musicians [and] played the stretch of his fingers and
what fell in like that . . . I brought the manuscript down, and the guy freaked, you
know. And I said, “Don’t look down on this music. This music has its own thing
here, and what you were playing, everyone would know that that wasn’t the thing,
and you didn’t really know it.”
My God, I must have six or seven hundred pages of stuff that I wrote myself
for keyboard harmony. I would take different things from different books and put
them together, and every term I would give out a packet, so they didn’t have to go
through all this stuff. . . . I was very conversant with a thing that I still think is very
helpful: the Schillinger system. I used that a lot in my early [training]. . . . I studied
that very extensively. I knew Schoenberg’s thing [also], and the way those people
did it. I’m a sort of system person. I wouldn’t sit down and do a piece like that, but
to find . . . how do you move from one thing to another, how does this relate to
that . . . I had hundreds of pages of this stuff.
Over a period of time, if people came to take a class with me, they [wouldn’t
confuse my approach] with taking a class down the hall—that’s the way I did it. But
I was also very thorough, and I played a lot then, so I could demonstrate, and show
people how these things work. But I would talk to them just like that. I spent a lot
of time with people. So a person might come in for a lesson, and the lesson might
go on for two or three hours. I also allowed other people to come into another per-
son’s lesson, because I’ve always felt that the one-on-one is very advanced. Students
don’t learn as much one-on-one in the beginning as they do when maybe a half a
dozen are in there, and each one has his own concept—all throwing out things. This
one may have picked up on something that you were thinking of, but this one for-
mulated [something else] . . . so, that’s the way I did it.
It was very effective. Heads rolled. A lot of people, man, dropped my classes. . . .
And I kicked out a lot of people. . . .
Andrew Raffo Dewar: So what are some of the things you learned about black music
by teaching it?
BD: The most significant thing I learned—which I couldn’t have [learned] with the
musicians I was hanging around with, because they didn’t know how to express
themselves . . . it has to do with how you use or do not use the same material that’s
accessible to everybody else. Which [is] to say, when people used to talk about the
black experience, there IS a black experience.
In other words, the black experience means to say, how you go through life,
what’s available to you, your perceptions. . . . Someone will say to you, “Well, no
man, that’s not really so.” . . . The person is telling you that what you think is so
[isn’t]. They’re negating what you’ve gone through in life to come up with this. It’s
great for someone to tell you that, but they have to be sensitive: “Well, why does

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Bill say that?” “Well, he must have gone through that [inaudible] . . . ” So, there is
that experience, which also transcends music.
Someone might say, with black musicians, someone’s always questioning: “Is that
written?” They’re always questioning your, what I call, “Western literacy.” If some-
one tells you something, if you’re dealing in a society where the things are passed
on, that’s written. It’s written through “the word,” you understand—an oral tradi-
tion. And I’m not talking about the pseudo guys that want to claim . . . in those
cultures where things are passed down [orally], they are just as dynamic, and long
lasting and as significant as any “written” (by writing) literature.
But in the West, people, to this day, say to me, “Was that written?” What’s the
difference? When you hear any piece of music, you assume it’s written, because [of ]
the written literature. . . . How did we arrive at some cultures [have] people calling
them “primitive?” And not meaning primitive from “prime,” being first, but they
meant being a stage below a “sophisticated” culture. [I once had a discussion with
someone who argued that] the reason we never spoke of the Chinese culture as
primitive is because they always had a “written literature”—whereas in most of the
African situations, there was an oral tradition. As far as I’m concerned, there is only
one kind of history. History is history.
I don’t like the term “oral history,” because it means to say it’s a stage lower than
history. . . . No one tells you that history really should be the documentation of an
event. They talk about the “interpretation” of history, which makes it even worse
than oral history, as far as I’m concerned. There’s no interpretation of oral history.
This one passed it on to you, and [you] passed it on, and that’s the way it is. So, the
Chinese had a written literature, and Africans, as far as we know, didn’t—so that
put them a stage below. And people carry that to this day.
When I did that piece Index, people are looking to see—they want to see—[that]
I know what I’m doing.3 Writing for me is much too slow anyway. I’ve all kinds of
notational things I’ve done. The black experience covers so much of that. Wynton
Marsalis is considered a good trumpet player because he’s very good with the tradi-
tional Western literature, so he then has been . . . allowed to be a jazz person. You
know what I mean. . . .
You really play into LeRoi Jones’s hem when you say, “Well, white critics don’t
have a right to criticize black music.” I don’t think any music should be criticized
anyway. I hate that word. You can make observations about it, you can analyze
it. . . . Criticism simply means to say that you’re waiting for something that’s wrong,
that’s not quite right. It’s so negative, it’s not the proper word. But, a person who is
not able to know fully and understand what it is you do—the social circumstances
that have provided you the format for that—doesn’t have the right to even be dis-
cussing the music you do; they’re foreigners to it.
With black music now, “jazz” music was a term, and it wasn’t necessarily an endear-
ing term. Although at the same time, [even though] jazz never escapes its history of
being a whorehouse music—all music was whorehouse music. Debussy and Ravel and
all those pieces, string quartets, were played in those bordellos—not bordellos—those

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houses of pleasure in Europe, because people of culture have always wanted music
around them. You know what I mean! [Laughs.]
But jazz, and [the question] what does the word “jazz” mean? It means this, and
all that kind of stuff. As far as I was concerned, the music of the ’60s, well, we have
a paradox about it. The music of the ’60s, with its divorcing itself from the one
thing that really made it cling to certain things, getting rid of those tunes, and stuff
like that—how can you have a thing that’s yours if it’s so dependent upon a thing
that is not yours?
In my opinion, the music of the ’60s was the first [example of ]—from the very
beginning days—everything you do, you make up. That was the beginning of the
“completeness” of the language, the way I see it. So . . . you didn’t have to do these
songs, you didn’t have to play a song, and do it all slick and everything, and take so-
los. You didn’t have to do that now. But you do have to recognize that if you are go-
ing to be authentic in any area of music, you have to speak as much as you can with
the voice of a person who is conversant with the language. You can’t speak Chinese
too well with a Russian accent, you know what I mean?
The idea of black music—or as it was called at one time “negro music”— . . .
Blacks have a problem deciding what they want to be called. Oh, it’s now “African-
American” music. If I could be so bold, I would say I consider myself American.
I’ve never been to Africa—never been. You take one look at me and the map, you
say, “Well, I guess his ancestors are from Africa, he certainly doesn’t look Chinese,”
or something like that. So it seems to me the hyphenated thing is sort of a waste of
time.
I consider myself an American. Americans don’t consider me that. I consider the
music that I do American music, because it’s born here. So how are you going to
get that one out? See, that’s maybe like at least one hundred years away before it be-
comes a thing.
I remember when what I was doing no longer had any allegiance to jazz, because
I called myself for many years a jazz musician. I wasn’t a concert musician; I wasn’t
allowed to play in the orchestra if I was good enough. What was I? I played jazz. I
wasn’t a blues musician, I never played blues. I wasn’t a street musician. . . . The idea
of “world music” does not enthrall me at all—I don’t like putting everything into
a thing and doing that, I think it cheapens everything. But the term black music
seemed to satisfy. There is [a] problem with my work with that now, even.
Because, all I am really is an American original. That’s what I am. And they’re not
ready for that kind of stuff yet. So, I have to be satisfied. . . . I would say my music
is American music, certainly coming out of an American experience, buddy. And no
one could debate that one—someone’s going to negate my experience here? That’s
the way one cannot teach it without (as much as people don’t want to hear about it)
the social thing out of what it comes up.
A lot of musicians, unfortunately though, belie the validity of the term black mu-
sic because, again, a lot of guys who were in agreement in the ’60s that it was black
music are back to calling it jazz and stuff like that. You know, we don’t have that

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kind of . . . what should I call it . . . we don’t have the ability to live by what we. . . .
Musicians are very weak. They’re very weak. And they don’t have the ability all the
time to do things that [are] on a parallel line with the nature of the best that they’ve
done in music. They don’t always have that. . . . Does that answer your question?
ARD: The way you speak about it, it almost sounds like you believe black music devel-
oped (in your experience anyway) out of jazz. . . .
BD: . . . No question about it.
ARD: . . . And it was almost as if it was a culmination of jazz such that: OK, jazz kept
developing, we get to the bebop revolution, this increasing complexity, within the
tunes, and then [musicians realized] that to really do “your thing,” to get to the es-
sence of what you wanted to express, you needed to leave the tunes. . . .
BD: But it’s such an oversimplification. The only way you could really do justice to
that would be to play various pieces, at certain pivotal points in time. . . . Listen to
those pieces, see what they’re doing, and play the other pieces that had some kind of
relationship . . . and show how, in order for you to maintain both your identity, and
your being authentic as an honest person, why you had to distance yourself from
certain things. . . .
For example, the developments in music were never as completely cut and dried
as we have been prone to write about them. You had the original jazz musicians—
I’ve had a great difficulty sometimes differentiating between the old spirituals, the
old blues, barrelhouse music, ragtime, and early jazz. . . . I haven’t been able to cut
them out and put them in compartments the way some other people have been able
to do, as if that’s the way they sprang out; everyone was linked in some kind of way,
but the reason things tend to get colized [sic] out, was because the concerns went
someplace else. Then you had to deal with what was going to enforce those con-
cerns.
So, early jazz music, say in the ’20s and the ’30s [includes people talking about]
the small group music in New Orleans. I happen to be one that doesn’t believe
that all the players were in New Orleans, and everyone else was standing around
waiting—I just don’t believe that, never have believed it. Any place you had black
people, they were trying to do some kind of music in some kind of way.
But, when you got to what they called the “swing era” [with] the large bands, do-
ing a different kind of [thing from] the small groups, you had then the partisans for
the small groups say, “Well that’s not jazz, that’s swing.” Then you had the territory
bands that adhered to a certain thing because of who they were playing for. And
you had the white bands and black bands, and the small groups, the entertaining
groups.
Then when you get to Charlie Parker, the boppers, it’s very interesting because
it’s my feeling (I can’t prove it) no matter what the idiom is there’s always someone
fooling around trying to do something else. Some people get tired of the same old
routine. And before you know it, they’re doing something that’s sort of been incor-
porated. . . . But Charlie Parker and those people, their thing was so dynamic at the
time. Especially with World War II and all that nonsense. You can’t get away from

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the fact that when a lot of those musicians (black ones) came back to the United
States after having been in Europe, and here’s the “same old, same old” going on
here, and them wanting to do better music. A lot of these musicians all of the sud-
den decide[d] they wanted to know more about music from the standpoint of the
formalisms, schooling and stuff like that.
All these things have something to do with . . . musicians deciding. Like when
guys began to convert to being Muslims, which is something that’s downplayed a
lot. These guys decided they don’t want to be entertaining people anymore. . . .
A lot of black writers have said, “Once you took the beat away from the music,
once you stopped playing what black people wanted to hear. . . . ” Well, that may be
true, OK. No art has existed in any area or any era that I know of because you were
satisfied with what people wanted. Art has existed because people did certain things
because they did those things. Some of the things became monuments for some-
thing else.
My feeling is we’ve always had that with certain people. That restless thing that
once they’ve gotten a thing together, “Oh I want to do something else.” They’re just
restless. An innovator is a very restless person. You might call the innovator a per-
son who is more cursed than anything else, because he can’t escape from changing
things, which is the only thing that we have that documents our society.
So, with the changes you were imagining . . . when I was playing, at first the best
compliment you could get was, “Aw man, it sounds just like Miles.” That’s a good
technical achievement. You’ve aimed towards learning how to do something, the
models are there. You cannot escape the models, but you cannot continue to walk
in someone else’s path. . . . I know for myself I was advised once, by a musician,
“You know, you’re trying to do so much with that, you might as well do your own
music!” which made a lot of sense. I think a lot of improvising musicians, once they
play the thing they go so far [to learn] . . . do your own! Why waste your time with
this other thing here, unless you feel that your thing is so much lesser that you have
to [do] something that sort of shores it up. “Well, I’m really playing . . . well, it’s re-
ally based on. . . . ”
I know for myself I began to become [my own artist when I realized] from an
adult standpoint, who wants to play “My Funny Valentine”? The model, its highest
point of being recognized as a piece of music has been done. And almost all of those
pieces have their highest models. It had been done! Quite frustrating. Although,
there are some people who play those pieces, who continue to find something in
them, which I have no quarrel with. I couldn’t find any more. I didn’t want to find
any more. I had some things I thought I wanted to do, and like anybody else, didn’t
know really how to do them.
It’s like if you’re working for someone, and you’ve been there for a while and they
tell you you’ll get a raise, and you don’t get one, and you’re trying to find a way.
And one day you just blurt out, “I want a raise!” I had these feelings about this stuff
coming up. It’s like, “I gotta get out of here!” I think then, that tradition . . . you
can’t escape tradition, I don’t give a damn what you do. So you don’t even have to
worry about it. You don’t have to cling to it, it’s there.

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I was playing something the other day and Sharon [Bill’s spouse] bust out laugh-
ing. I was just practicing something, and fell right into some intervals of one of
those tunes. I don’t practice that shit, you know what I mean? But there it was,
it was there someplace, and just fell in line . . . because I played this thing and
dropped to a pedal, and she bust out laughing. She said, “Well, no one’s ever heard
it done that way!” and I said, “Isn’t that funny? Because I wasn’t even thinking about
that!”
You know, [I’m] always working on the things that I would like to be able to play
with still more ease. That’s what: still more ease. I want to be able to pick up the
horn and just speak, you know, rather than tighten my embouchure. . . . You know,
you’re trying to make it so that it’s as flexible as your voice, built into you. And it
never can be, because you have to put it there like that [gestures over mouth].
The pursuit becomes just as exciting as the catch, for some musicians. Certainly
for me it has. I had to make a tape for a woman the other day, and I was playing
some things. I said to Sharon, “You know, some of my music is really quite remark-
able”—because I never listen to it. I have tried as much as possible [that] once I’ve
done something, I don’t want to do that anymore. I don’t even remember [them].
If someone said, “Bill, can you play ‘Sisyphus’?” I’d have to listen to it and say, OK,
now I can do that. Because “Sisyphus” is done. Go get the record, you know?4
I’m speaking though, as if the music is an art. Now, if it’s only entertainment,
then you’ve got to forget everything I’m saying, and a lot of musicians are confused
by that. If it’s only popular, and if it’s only entertainment [that’s something else]
(and I don’t think I’m being pejorative, but I’m saying “only”). If it’s art, in order
for it to survive, so that other people can take from it those things that they want to
make popular, it’s got to continue going forward. If it’s an art. If it’s not an art, then
the problem is solved.
ARD: So, I’m just trying to get a handle on how you’re using the term black music
or how you see it. . . . So Bechet, Armstrong, what these guys were doing, in the
way that you’re using black music, was it black music? Or was it the way the music
changed in the ’60s, these different directions that it took, is that the point where
you are beginning this use of the term black music?
BD: You can use it in exactly the way you can use the social structure. Sidney Bechet
was a negro. Louis Armstrong was a negro. Miles Davis was a negro, and became a
black man. The ’60s ushered all of that. The social thing—it became. We were no
longer “colored.” When I was a kid we were colored—colored people.
The best example, I think, is you can look at any of those old Hollywood films.
Look at those Hollywood films, man, and how black people are depicted. Even in
the best ones there’s always a kind of deferring to the white person. Now, that’s not
the way one’s manliness, or one’s citizenship, or one’s contributions to society are
elevated, or recognized.
So, I think you would have to say that Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, were
playing black music, because they certainly had more horrendous experiences than
I had. But it was called jazz music. Now, who called it that? Who was the first one
to call it that? I don’t think the musicians themselves were the ones to do that. I

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know Jelly Roll Morton, what did he call it? He had another name for it, because he
claims he invented it anyway [laughs] . . . you know. But he had another name for
it. If it had anything to do with the experience that you had, or put it this way—
Nick LaRocca and them, the Original Dixieland Jazz Band [had], and they were the
first ones to record, right? They didn’t start to play that music without hearing the
black ones play it. So as far as I know, the white ones didn’t come up, didn’t have ex-
periences, no matter what, to the degree that they started to play this music initially,
without an amalgamation with black musicians—either hanging out with them, go-
ing over to the other side of the tracks, or whatever the hell it was.
So, while it was jazz music (or whatever you want to call it) based upon the expe-
riences that Louis Armstrong had, and the fact that some of those experiences blacks
can have to this day, and it would have to be an experience. . . . Driving while black
certainly would make you . . . [laughs] walking while black, in the wrong neighbor-
hood, you know. . . . So, it would have to then, in that instance, if you really wanted
to define it, you would have to call it black music, which at certain points in its his-
tory has been called other things, you know. And that would be, if I were pursuing
something about that, that would be the way I would try to go about it. . . . I don’t
think people have explained this thing adequately.
If you explained it, I think, to a sensible audience . . . if you explained to them what
a “black experience” could be—and unless people wanted to [interrupts himself]. . . .
It’s just like there are some people who would deny the Holocaust. They just say, “It
didn’t happen.” And the thing about it is, there’s nothing you can do with people like
that. You’re a fool to do anything. People will tell you, “Well, music has no color.” I
don’t talk to them anymore—of course music doesn’t have any color!
One could do it in a way, and I think the best way of course would be to make
sure people heard the music. I remember back in the late ’40s, when Chet Baker
was winning polls over Miles Davis. There’s nothing wrong with people preferring
Chet Baker, that has nothing to do with it. But there’d have been no Chet Baker
without a Miles Davis. So white people say, “Well, we would prefer the white boy
who plays like that, you know what I mean?” Which is contributing to the black
experience, you know what I mean? [Laughs.]
ARD: Well, in some of our other conversations about this, and about teaching “this
thing,” you talk about it as a language—speaking with the black voice. . . .
BD: . . . With a black voice. . . .
ARD: So, this is something that is a holistic experience, the social aspect, the music
is coming out of the social aspect, the culture . . . so this language is . . . I guess
what I’m trying to get to is the tricky question, for example, does Wynton Marsalis
play black music? How do you view that situation? I know it’s complex and tricky,
but. . . .
BD: It’s only complex if we want to act as though only some things are complex . . .
you know what I mean?
When you get to him, his situation would be less tenuous if he himself hadn’t
adopted the stance that society has laid, where he has decided [on how he defines]

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“this music.” And he doesn’t use the term black music—he’s talking about “jazz.”
And he’s deciding, if it doesn’t do this, [snaps fingers] if it doesn’t swing, if it doesn’t
have this, if it doesn’t have that . . . it’s not this music.
In fact, I was going through the Internet—there’s a man named Ted Panken,
and he does radio programs for WKCR [radio in New York]. A lot of my music has
been played by KCR, a lot of it over the years. And so people, a lot of musicians
complain, “Why are you playing all that Bill Dixon music?” They did an interview
with [Marsalis]. . . . Ted Panken asks Marsalis something about my work—and then
Wynton Marsalis rips off a phrase and says it was “typical Bill Dixon.” . . . Marsalis
is certainly no fool. He knows what this music is, and if he’s going to whip off a
phrase of mine, he’s had to study it. But he’s doing it as a pejorative: “Well, all he’s
doing is. . . . ” It’s not “well, all I’m doing . . . .” That’s what I do.
You won’t find me whipping off any phrases like him—and the few times we’ve
been in each other’s company, he’s always been . . . Sharon will tell you. She was
with me the day someone brought him over to introduce me. With him, you have
to say, he is a remarkable musician. Evidently he has a good ear, remarkable facil-
ity, his knowledge of the instrument, blah blah blah. He becomes a case where . . .
I think he plays the jazz music that he talks about, that’s what I think. Because he
has, in his playing, not allowed certain things to be there. Because, at his age, and
with what he knows, and with what has been done, I would have certain questions,
about like say, not even wanting to be around certain kinds of music—the people
that they’ve presented. Gradually, you know, they’ve [Jazz at Lincoln Center] had
Sam Rivers do some stuff. [But] does Wynton Marsalis play black music? By his
own testimony, he’s a jazz musician. So, if we are to believe a person is what that
person says, he has the same rights that I have. I say I don’t play jazz and so people
say, “Well, you’re not playing concert music,” and I say, “No, I play music.”
I say I play music. White people say I play jazz. Black people say: “Not jazz, not
enough. . . . ” [Marsalis] says he plays [jazz], he has defined jazz in a certain way,
and I would say he is a jazz musician. I don’t think anyone has ever asked him as
didactically that way. They interview him certain kinds of ways, he’s allowed to es-
cape certain kinds of things. [Interviewers ask him about] his involvement with El-
lington’s music, which he studied very assiduously—and I don’t believe he heard the
Ellington band live—and his involvement with formal concert music of a certain
persuasion. . . .
I’m just surprised that he very dutifully allows himself to be put in that kind of a
box, because he should know that when Dizzy and those people started to play, the
guy that they loved so much, Louis Armstrong, said exactly the same thing about
Dizzy Gillespie. He didn’t say it so much about Diz, but [he did about the] bop-
pers, and you can go read all of the negative things that Louis Armstrong had to say
about bebop music. “These guys, they couldn’t hold a note, and that’s why they’re
playing all those notes and that funny stuff, and they’re ruining music. . . . ”
The things Louis Armstrong said are really quite based on his magnificence as a
trumpet player. It was just beneath him . . . and we have a similar situation. I’ll say

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this, and I can be criticized: I don’t believe . . . the hip-hop movement, I don’t see it
so much as—it’s a popularized thing of something. I don’t have a problem with it.
I have a problem when someone is trying to elevate it beyond what it is. So I don’t
care now if all of a sudden people like Ron Carter and them are doing bass lines
[for that music], and stuff like that. That’s their prerogative. But we know that that
is also, at this particular point, a commercial music that maybe the guys who first
started doing that were unlettered, untutored, played what they could, did what
they could . . . which is how these things start.
But let’s face it, it’s the sound of a certain kind of pop music today. If I have any
kind of weakness, I can tell you this: if too many people are digging it, I can’t put
too much stock in it based upon my experience. I remember when Duke Elling-
ton couldn’t get a record in the ’50s and ’60s and stuff, and couldn’t get work for
that band, and was working with a sextet out there on Long Island at some place
there. . . .
But, you would have to say, is there such a thing as black music? I would say,
definitely yes. Is there such a thing as white music? Well, white music is such [that]
we don’t have to call it anything but music. It doesn’t need the adjective. [Laughs.]
Isn’t that rather remarkable?
Notes
1. Andrew Raffo Dewar, “Searching for the Center of Sound: Bill Dixon’s Webern, the Un-
accompanied Solo, and Compositional Ontology in Post-Songform Jazz,” Jazz Perspectives
4, no. 1 (April 2010): 61.
2. Andrew Raffo Dewar, “This Is an American Music: Aesthetics, Music, and Visual Art of
Bill Dixon” (master’s thesis, Wesleyan University, 2004).
3. Dixon’s Index (2000) was one of his major late period large ensemble works, commis-
sioned by the Sound Vision Orchestra with funding from the Mary Flagler Cary Chari-
table Trust for the 2000 Vision Festival in New York City.
4. Bill Dixon, Son of Sisyphus, recorded June 28–29, 1988, Soul Note 121138 (1990).

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Poetry
The Human Tornado

(after Etheridge Knight)
When they shoot the white woman,
He says, O shit, then leaps, all ass
And elbows out the window, tumbles
Down some ivy leafed hillside
In Burbank, Tarzana, or Encino, then
Dolemite rolls on, Dolemite is on.
Black filament, flash of genitalia
And the room goes dark, eats like
An elephant, could choke a whale
And knock the teeth out a shark.
He tells his compatriots to take
The damn Continental out of park,
Then Dolemite rolls on, Dolemite is
On. Natural nappy, lips ashy as hell,
He says it’s better than being dead
Or finding my black ass in jail, so
Can speak Kiswahili, his Jiu Jitsu
Is pretty mean, says he’s the baddest
Motherfucker west of Idi Amin,
Would give the evil eye back
To Evillene, then Dolemite rolls on,
Dolemite is on. Deep in a cypress
Swamp, born nearly 6’3”, slapped
The doctor, grabbed his keys
And said why the fuck are you
Staring at me, then Dolemite rolls
On, Dolemite is on. Acquired his
First taste of pussy when leaving
The womb, said German, Swiss
A delicatessen, this diet will kill
Me soon, he said that someone
Will kill me soon, that sounds like
Someone outside your room, but


129.126.218.66 on Sun, 14 Jun 2020 15:15:49 UTC
114 Poetry Amaud Jamaul Johnson
“Young Hearts, Run Free” (’76)

“Days, years misspent, O what a hell of woe!
Hers the worst tortures that our souls can know.”
—“On Recollection,” Phillis Wheatley, 1773
“What’s your biggest disappointment?

‘Choosing the wrong mate.’”
—Candi Staton
How could you not picture Phillis

On roller skates with some Senegalese
Twist or blowout, rocking that same
Faux fox & feather halter as Candi Staton,
Star-dusted, drifting elliptically
In a way that could only be described
By Ptolemy around the rink. John
Peters in his one good suit. John Peters
Flipping a cinnamon flavored toothpick
Like a razorblade on his tongue, steady
Teasing his natural, Afro-Sheen crusting
His pink collar & lapels. Saying: Shorty,
Say. Then Phillis: Look Negro, please.
Ain’t nobody even trying to study you.

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Poetry Amaud Jamaul Johnson 115
DeBarge
marigold is just a dirty shade
of yellow, but what right do
I have to judge another family.
and bunny was so forthcoming
about their cycle of abuse. and
you can’t say they weren’t pretty,
but they stayed high or got mostly
pissy drunk. not one of them
could hold any weight, and damn
what little money, and they struggled
just keeping their teeth. my father
had a record that went nowhere.
my mother, some nights, would
stand in my doorway, saying:
boy, I sure wish you could sing.

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Reviews
The Jazz Bubble: Neoclassical Jazz in Neoliberal Culture. By Dale Chapman. Oak-
land: University of California Press, 2018.
In December 2017, a federal grand jury indicted jazz musicians Irvin Mayfield and
Ronald Markham on charges of wire fraud, conspiracy, and money laundering. Pros-
ecutors charged that the men used their positions on the board of the New Orleans
Public Library Foundation to unlawfully divert hundreds of thousands of dollars of
donated money to the New Orleans Jazz Orchestra, an ensemble that they also led.
These funds were allegedly used in order to finance in part construction of a new
permanent venue—the Peoples Health New Orleans Jazz Market—and to purchase
upscale travel accommodations and expensive instruments for themselves.1 The indict-
ment is a significant development in a story that musicologist Dale Chapman uses to
introduce the major themes in his excellent book The Jazz Bubble: Neoclassical Jazz in
Neoliberal Culture. While the book went to press before the details of the indictment
were made public, for Chapman, the evolution of the Jazz Market project was already
a noteworthy story. Behind the seemingly widespread enthusiasm for a venture aimed
at revitalizing New Orleans music culture and public institutions after the destruc-
tion wrought by Hurricane Katrina, the development plan pit the interests of global
financial institutions (the investment bank Goldman Sachs, which contributed ten
million dollars through a “social impact bond”), local, underprivileged communi-
ties (the Central City neighborhood in which the building would be located), and
cultural and government leaders brokering the deal (Mayfield, Markham, and local
politicians) against one another.
The tangled web of competing interests in the Jazz Market project represents
the complex relationship between neoliberal capitalism and neoclassical jazz as it has
evolved since the 1970s. Investigating other instances of this relationship, how they
developed and to what effect, and what they can teach us about the broader impacts of
political economy and cultural practice is the primary aim of The Jazz Bubble. Chapman
offers fresh interpretations of some iconic moments in jazz history—Dexter Gordon’s
famous return to New York in 1976 and the ascendency of the “young lions” in the
1980s and 1990s—as well as meticulously researched local histories that are likely to
be new to many readers, namely those of institutional reorganization at Verve Records
and of urban redevelopment in San Francisco’s Fillmore District. Taken together, these
case studies and Chapman’s sharp analyses make for a compelling argument that jazz
neoclassicism is a uniquely productive lens through which to view the workings of


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Reviews 117
neoliberalism as it has evolved as both a political economy and an ideology of selfhood.

These insights further allow us to understand neoliberalism’s often disruptive effects
on local communities and expressive cultures.
The book’s six chapters can be usefully organized into three pairs. Chapters 1
and 2 are the most theoretically rich, assessing neoliberalism and neoclassicism pri-
marily as ideologies that entail expectations about appropriate economic and musical
behaviors. In chapter 1, Chapman is primarily concerned with the concept of “risk” as
a pervasive trope in both neoclassical jazz and management theory discourses. In the
former, talk of “taking risks” often indexes an approach to jazz group improvisation
modeled after what Herbie Hancock once called “controlled freedom,” a bebop-
derived “aesthetic logic” that emphasizes harmonic and rhythmic independence
within a shared formal structure (49). It is this logic that management consultants
typically appeal to when using jazz as a model for economic risk-taking: in playing
the stock market or investing in a small business, for instance, there are structures
to adhere to and rules to play by, of course, but those who act with flexibility, in-
ventiveness, and boldness are likely to have the greatest financial success. Chapman
argues, however, that the concept of risk employed by these constituencies is an
“ostensibly neutral and transhistorical abstraction” that fails to distinguish between
“ordinary” risk and what economist Frank Knight famously called “uncertainty” (41).
In contexts of ordinary risk, actors are afforded resources that allow them to assess
the probability of certain outcomes and thus to make reasonable predictions about
the consequences of their actions. By contrast, in contexts of uncertainty, actors
are not afforded those resources, either because there is an overwhelming number
of variables that undermines any straightforward assessment of possible outcomes,
or, more importantly, because they lack access to the information or institutions
that would allow them to make informed decisions and act on them. Chapman
maintains that Knightian uncertainty—rather than ordinary risk—has been a core
condition of the black American experience, precipitated by blacks’ exclusion from
basic mechanisms of economic self-determination, beginning with the denial of
complete control over their own bodies and continuing through various regimes of
exploitation, disenfranchisement, and marginalization.
Establishing this genealogy of risk and uncertainty allows Chapman to read
an important difference between the approaches to controlled freedom championed
by neoclassical figures like Wynton Marsalis and Stanley Crouch and the approaches
from which they ostensibly derive, those innovated by Hancock and his associates
in Miles Davis’s second quintet. Analyzing a wide range of performance dynamics
in the Davis quintet, Chapman suggests that its approach emphasizes communal
negotiation of harmonic, metrical, and formal ambiguities and thus resonates with
improvised social responses to conditions of uncertainty, or, to put it differently,
“radical unpredictability” (63). The neoclassicist approach, by contrast, tends to treat

129.126.218.66 on Sun, 14 Jun 2020 15:16:32 UTC
118 Reviews
postbop musical language as a set of rigorous standards that performances are judged
to have met or fallen short. In this way, it reproduces the dehistoricized concept of
risk that attributes individual achievement to virtuosic prediction and execution.
Further, it echoes contemporaneous neoliberal attitudes about the economic health
of African American communities, in which it is assumed—fatally, according to
Chapman—that all actors are participating in the market economy on a level playing
field, and therefore that poverty and other economic disadvantages are the result of
individual failures of mastery rather than of inequitable structural conditions.
Chapter 2 takes up this issue in the context of Dexter Gordon’s celebrated return
to New York during a decade of socioeconomic crisis. A common conservative narrative
about “urban decay” during the 1970s attributed it to years of overzealous public spend-
ing compounded by moral decline within poor, black, brown, and queer communities.
As Chapman asserts, this narrative ignores the role of the city’s persistent kowtowing
to private interests, such as when it tried to entice corporations by borrowing money
to build office towers and devaluing commercial real estate to create tax incentives,
eventually cutting social services and raiding the pension funds of public-sector unions
in order to cover the subsequent budget shortfalls. The nostalgia for straight-ahead jazz
surrounding Gordon’s famous engagements at Storyville and the Village Vanguard,
Chapman argues, reinforced broader conservative anxieties about cultural rather than
structural changes in the city. In addition to Gordon’s pedigree as a swing and bebop
musician, commentators tended to fixate on his “mature” and “masculine” image,
his charismatic demeanor, and his distinctive but “rooted” sound, figuring them as
welcome antidotes to the performative and commercial excesses of punk, funk, disco,
and “crossover” jazz. Expanding beyond Gordon, Chapman analyzes the editorial treat-
ment of and reader responses to these latter genres in the pages of Down Beat as well
as the Heath brothers’ criticisms of commercially oriented jazz. Once again, Chapman
effectively shows that neoclassical discourses about jazz are of a piece with narratives
about urban decay that mask the wildly unequal material conditions produced by
ascendant finance capitalism by fixating on the supposed cultural shortcomings of the
constituencies most disadvantaged by those conditions.
The remainder of The Jazz Bubble attends to the more concrete impacts of
neoliberal capitalism on jazz cultures. Chapman’s first case study, spanning chapters 3
and 4, considers changes in the corporate structure of Verve over several decades, from
its origins as an independent label to its integration as a subsidiary of MGM, Poly-
Gram, and Universal. Chapman astutely shows how stylistic and aesthetic changes
within Verve’s portfolio were as likely to have been caused by shifts in institutional
organization as they were by trends in musician or consumer taste. For instance,
producer Creed Taylor’s interest in covering film songs was due in part to Verve’s
“vertical integration” under MGM in 1961. Later, under artists and repertoire direc-
tor Richard Seidel in the 1980s, Verve aggressively pursued a CD reissue program
that benefited from the dominance of Phillips, PolyGram’s parent company, in the

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Reviews 119
sound technologies industry; Verve’s extensive and prestigious back catalog could
be synergistically marketed to an audience looking to replace vinyl records and cas-
settes with the more durable new medium. The success of the reissue program, in
part, catalyzed the growth of the titular “jazz bubble,” when Verve and other record
companies overinvested in the so-called “young lions,” whom they deemed highly
marketable as modern torchbearers of the (temporarily, it turns out) reinvigorated
traditionalist aesthetic. Chapman concludes this saga with an account of the rather
notorious leadership of Seagram magnate Edgar Bronfman Jr., who oversaw the
merger between PolyGram and Universal in 1998. Bronfman took on massive debt
in order to finance the merger, which subsequently required efforts to make the
company appear “leaner” and more “flexible” to anxious investors. Verve slashed its
support staff and artist roster, jettisoning mostly instrumental musicians so that the
label could focus on a few artists, mostly singers, who promised greater mainstream
success. This was part of the proverbial “bursting” of the jazz bubble.
Verve’s evolution represents broader trends in corporate America since the
mid-twentieth century, namely the transition from a pre-1970s “managerial” model
of corporate organization, in which businesses worked in the best interests of various
stakeholders, including its workers, to a post-1970s finance model, in which businesses
operate almost exclusively with the goal of maximizing value for its shareholders, that
is, private or public investors. Chapters 5 and 6 show the effects of this transition in
a different context: the activities of so-called “community redevelopment agencies”
(CRAs). Chapman’s focus is on the Fillmore District of San Francisco, which had
blossomed during the 1940s and ’50s into a diverse community of Asian and African
Americans and boasted a vibrant jazz scene. A series of traumatic disruptions—the
internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, a postwar decline in the
shipping industry that had employed many African Americans, and “white flight”
precipitated in part by racist housing policies—caused a serious economic down-
turn, giving local government the pretext it needed for wholesale “redevelopment”
of the district. Over the course of several project phases, thousands of low-income
and minority residents were displaced—many provided with inadequate housing
alternatives (or none at all)—and local business owners watched as their properties
were appropriated for compensation well below market value. Needless to say, the
Fillmore’s thriving music scene was decimated. Chapman notes that a key policy
change in the 1970s was a shift in thinking about “blight” to thinking about “ob-
solescence,” the latter attending only to the exchange value of a piece of property to
investors rather than its use value to existing communities. If the CRA determined
that a piece of real estate was performing below its market value, it used a variety
of tools such as eminent domain to seize control of the property and redevelop it.
Ultimately, despite having a mandate to work on behalf of existing communities
(stakeholders), the CRA instead worked to benefit real estate speculators, developers,
and corporate franchises (shareholders).

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The Jazz Bubble closes with Chapman’s analysis of the debate over what to do
with a small piece of land called Parcel 732. Attempting to remedy the disaster of the
previous redevelopment projects, the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency pursued
a strategy of establishing an “urban destination,” a “flagship” or “anchor” business
aimed at increasing foot traffic in the area (including from tourists), accelerating the
growth of other local businesses, and, ultimately, reestablishing a lively jazz scene
(198). But the chosen businesses—a satellite of the Blue Note nightclub and an AMC
theater—were international franchises with no particular attachments to the area,
and when the project was met with various political and economic roadblocks, they
withdrew. An outpost of the Oakland-based club Yoshi’s was launched in 2007 as part
of a more locally conceived Fillmore Heritage project, but the club’s management
struggled to establish a booking strategy that could generate sufficient revenues while
both complementing its Oakland counterpart and responding to the specific needs
of the surrounding community, including its working musicians. In the meantime,
many of the area’s small businesses and community institutions were undermined by
severe lending policies and other economic hurdles. Ultimately, Chapman persua-
sively argues, the Fillmore saga evinces neoliberal capitalism’s tendency to eviscerate
local communities’ “right to the city,” the “claim to a built environment given over to
use values that are not wholly reducible to commodification or market logic” (206).
There are few missteps in this impressive book. The strong argument of chapters
3 and 4 may have been even more persuasive were it supported by additional testi-
mony from the jazz musicians who were directly impacted by the changes at Verve.
Chapman argues that institutional reshuffling had a top-down impact on creative
opportunities for the label’s artists, but we do not get very many perspectives from
those who felt the brunt of this impact, the so-called “Verve diaspora” (145). Some
insightful quotes from keyboardist and bandleader Jason Lindner are taken from
existing interviews, but perhaps Chapman could have reached out directly to Lindner,
who remains highly active. Lindner’s voice could have been especially potent in light
of the fact that he has recorded (as a leader) exclusively for independent labels since
being dropped by Verve. The book also would have benefitted from a conclusion.
There are strong symmetries between each of Chapman’s six main chapters: chapters
1, 3, and 4 are concerned with corporate strategies in the music industry and their
effects on recording artists, while chapters 2, 5, and 6 address urban redevelopment
and its consequences for local music scenes and the communities that support them.
Chapman does draw various connections throughout the book, but a conclusion
that consolidates the themes of his individual case studies into a clear, overarching
narrative would have been productive. Perhaps more importantly, some discussion
about the implications of his brilliant work for future studies of music and political
economy would have been quite useful to fellow scholars.
Even so, Chapman’s book nicely complements recent studies of jazz and capi-
talism, and it contributes strongly to a growing literature on jazz since 1970. In par-

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Reviews 121
ticular, his chapters on Verve are essential reading for scholars writing about the jazz
recording industry, especially those investigating recent relationships between jazz
and commercial popular music. They help us understand in clear and concrete terms
why jazz faded from mainstream music markets near the end of the twentieth century.
Its commercial failures are often attributed (especially in much journalistic writing
on jazz) rather amorphously to a loss of public interest or to the rise of streaming
music, but Chapman’s account of the financialization of a major record company
makes these failures seem as if they were practically inevitable. The chapters on the
Fillmore saga will provide an excellent methodological and theoretical model for
scholars working on histories of local jazz scenes. And while the field of jazz studies
has rightly set its sights beyond major cities as centers of jazz culture, the metropolis’s
outsized role in global finance and its appeal as a cultural pied-à-terre to wealthy elites
makes Chapman’s work especially useful to scholars working in cities like New York,
London, and Beijing. In New York, for instance, the “right to the city” of poor, black,
and brown communities is being systematically eroded at a historic pace.2
Finally, Chapman’s book should be read outside of jazz studies and, indeed,
music studies. It is a book as much about neoliberal political economy as seen through
jazz as it is about jazz as seen through neoliberal political economy. The accessibility
of music is uniquely helpful in unpacking the machinations of finance capitalism,
and the short, technical analyses of music performances in chapter 1 are written in
such a way that they will not discourage readers unfamiliar with music theory. Chap-
man’s notes and bibliography are expansive and aptly detailed, encouraging readers
from various disciplines to pursue any of the many threads that he elegantly teases
apart. This includes, given Chapman’s expert analysis of relevant legal and policy
documents, readers interested in cultural policy and economic justice (scholars and
nonscholars alike).
It is these policy implications that led me to introduce this review with the
Mayfield and Markham indictments, even though they were handed down after
Chapman’s writing. They appear to represent yet another case in which relatively
minor financial crimes—relative, that is, to those routinely committed by the world’s
largest financial institutions—are the only ones prosecuted in criminal court. One
is reminded of the case of the family-owned Abacus Federal Savings Bank in New
York, whose Chinese American proprietors were the only U.S. banking executives to
face criminal charges in the wake of the 2007–08 financial crisis. This is not at all to
accuse Goldman Sachs of any improprieties with respect to the Jazz Market project,
nor is it to excuse Mayfield and Markham of theirs. Still, the investment banking
giant has become a prominent symbol of the “too big to fail” ideology of modern
finance capitalism. This ideology has allowed the wealthiest financial institutions
(and their executives) to act recklessly, illegally, and with near impunity, even as
the devastating costs of such actions are borne almost entirely by middle- and low-
income communities. In the meantime, folks more deeply embedded within these

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122 Reviews
communities remain, to borrow the title of the award-winning documentary about

Abacus, “small enough to jail.”3 Chapman’s book helps us to identify such structural
inequalities more clearly and, hopefully, to devise strategies to combat them.
Dean S. Reynolds
Notes
1. Alison Fensterstock, “Irvin Mayfield, New Orleans Jazz Pillar, Indicted for Laundering Li-
brary Funds,” The Record: Music News from NPR, December 18, 2017, https://www.npr
.org/sections/therecord/2017/12/18/571718936/irvin-mayfield-new-orleans-jazz-pillar-indicted
-for-laundering-library-funds.
2. See Kevin Baker, “The Death of a Once Great City: The Fall of New York and the Urban
Crisis of Affluence,” Harper’s Magazine, July 2018, 25–47.
3.
Abacus: Small Enough to Jail, directed by Steve James (Chicago, IL: Kartemquin Films,
2016).
The Kind of Man I Am: Jazzmasculinity and the World of Charles Mingus, Jr. By
Nichole Rustin-Paschal. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2017.
Better Git It in Your Soul: An Interpretive Biography of Charles Mingus. By Krin Gab-
bard. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016.
Charles Mingus (1922–78) was one of the great composers and performers of the mid
to late twentieth century and perhaps the most important composer/improviser to
emerge from Los Angeles during that time. His compositional approach, which drew
on a wide variety of materials, from African American folklore to the avant-garde,
and combined improvisation and composition in novel and sophisticated ways was
a clear precursor to the Art Ensemble of Chicago’s “Ancient to Future” aesthetic,
and his music has been a wellspring of inspiration for generations of creative artists.
Like his music, his writing is evocative and fantastical, mixing fact and fiction in the
same ingenious manner that he was able to combine improvisation and composition
within his pieces.
Michael Heller, the editor of this journal, in his review of Gabriel Solis’s Monk’s
Music, writes that the “great man” approach is both dead and alive within jazz studies,
often in the same monograph, noting that “historical jazz studies is a deeply para-
doxical practice in which the right hand builds canons even as the left hand attempts
to deconstruct them.”1 As a historical figure, Mingus is, in many ways, impossible
to extricate from that narrative as well. In addition to identifying as male, he pos-
sessed a larger-than-life personality and was a singular (albeit tripartite) character.2
Much more outspoken than Monk, Mingus was a prolific writer and potent orator.
As Clifford Allen points out, he has largely spoken for himself through his writings

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122 Reviews
communities remain, to borrow the title of the award-winning documentary about

Abacus, “small enough to jail.”3 Chapman’s book helps us to identify such structural
inequalities more clearly and, hopefully, to devise strategies to combat them.
Dean S. Reynolds
Notes
1. Alison Fensterstock, “Irvin Mayfield, New Orleans Jazz Pillar, Indicted for Laundering Li-
brary Funds,” The Record: Music News from NPR, December 18, 2017, https://www.npr
.org/sections/therecord/2017/12/18/571718936/irvin-mayfield-new-orleans-jazz-pillar-indicted
-for-laundering-library-funds.
2. See Kevin Baker, “The Death of a Once Great City: The Fall of New York and the Urban
Crisis of Affluence,” Harper’s Magazine, July 2018, 25–47.
3.
Abacus: Small Enough to Jail, directed by Steve James (Chicago, IL: Kartemquin Films,
2016).
The Kind of Man I Am: Jazzmasculinity and the World of Charles Mingus, Jr. By
Nichole Rustin-Paschal. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2017.
Better Git It in Your Soul: An Interpretive Biography of Charles Mingus. By Krin Gab-
bard. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016.
Charles Mingus (1922–78) was one of the great composers and performers of the mid
to late twentieth century and perhaps the most important composer/improviser to
emerge from Los Angeles during that time. His compositional approach, which drew
on a wide variety of materials, from African American folklore to the avant-garde,
and combined improvisation and composition in novel and sophisticated ways was
a clear precursor to the Art Ensemble of Chicago’s “Ancient to Future” aesthetic,
and his music has been a wellspring of inspiration for generations of creative artists.
Like his music, his writing is evocative and fantastical, mixing fact and fiction in the
same ingenious manner that he was able to combine improvisation and composition
within his pieces.
Michael Heller, the editor of this journal, in his review of Gabriel Solis’s Monk’s
Music, writes that the “great man” approach is both dead and alive within jazz studies,
often in the same monograph, noting that “historical jazz studies is a deeply para-
doxical practice in which the right hand builds canons even as the left hand attempts
to deconstruct them.”1 As a historical figure, Mingus is, in many ways, impossible
to extricate from that narrative as well. In addition to identifying as male, he pos-
sessed a larger-than-life personality and was a singular (albeit tripartite) character.2
Much more outspoken than Monk, Mingus was a prolific writer and potent orator.
As Clifford Allen points out, he has largely spoken for himself through his writings

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Reviews 123
and recordings.3 Yet two recent books—Nichole Rustin-Paschal’s The Kind of Man
I Am and Krin Gabbard’s Better Git It in Your Soul—shine new light on his legacy
through interpretations of his music, biography, and his work as a writer (particularly
through analysis of his autobiography Beneath the Underdog). These books, in their
own ways, necessarily tread the line between older great man tendencies and new
jazz studies approaches.
For Rustin-Paschal, Mingus provides a case study through which to explore
issues of what the author calls “jazzmasculinity.” His many business, musical, and
romantic relationships with strong women provide a counternarrative to great man
approaches, which tend to celebrate the image of the solitary musical genius. This
focus also allows us to examine the ways in which the women in Mingus’s orbit
navigated a traditionally masculine domain and how they themselves also performed
jazzmasculinity. Gabbard’s Better Git It in Your Soul, on the other hand, offers an
“interpretive biography,” presenting a comprehensive look at Mingus’s legacy from
a variety of angles in an attempt to make sense of his complex musical and personal
history. He also examines several of Mingus’s collaborators in order to draw more
attention to some of the musicians who were integral to the sound of Mingus’s music.
Rustin-Paschal and Gabbard each start with reflections on their early exposure
to jazz, an appropriately self-reflexive move for books addressing an artist who took
a profoundly analytical approach to exploring his own identity and psyche. They
both express genuine affection for Mingus and relate how their exposure to his music
and life story were important influences on their respective journeys into jazz stud-
ies. Rustin-Paschal writes, “I was in love with Mingus. . . . He seduced me with his
jive talk. . . . He had me at hello, or rather, that unforgettable line which begins his
narrative, ‘I am three’” (12). Gabbard recalls a similar fascination with Mingus that
began with his exposure to The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady, writing that hearing
that record was his “road to Damascus moment. I was hardly literate in Mingus’s
‘language for emotions’ but that did not stop me from deciding then and there that
I did not belong in Charleston, Illinois” (4).
Rustin-Paschal uses Mingus and his legacy to examine important issues of
gender, race, and performativity. She cogently explores a constellation of issues
central to Mingus’s enduring mythology and his creative work as a composer,
improviser, writer, and thinker. Rustin-Paschal draws on Ruth Feldstein’s asser-
tion that “African American musical virtuosity . . . implicitly equated creativity
with masculinity,” and that “gendered meanings of jazz infused the music with an
avant-garde radicalism and with associations to a modernist universal high culture
in ways that seemed to preclude women” (18). The book then proceeds to look at
the ways that both men and women inhabit this paradigm. While jazzmasculinity
seems to be rather loosely defined and applied at times, she cites artists assimilating
different aspects of the concept, including, “aggression, competition, arrogance,
discipline and creativity” (18).

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124 Reviews
The Kind of Man I Am can be separated roughly into four sections. The first
section, broken into two chapters, focuses on Mingus’s life and legacy. The second
examines the role that Celia Mingus, Charles Mingus’s wife and business partner
in Debut Records, played in his life, writing that her story presents a “window
onto how women shaped jazz in their image” (117). The third looks at Hazel Scott’s
musical relationship with Charles Mingus and the issues that gender, race, and tradi-
tional ideas about musical virtuosity played in her biography and critical reception.
Rustin-Paschal closely examines Scott’s relationship with Adam Clayton Powell, the
prominent pastor and politician, and addresses “the Hazel Scott Incident,” in which
the Daughters of the American Revolution refused to let her play at Constitution
Hall. She finishes with a chapter examining “The Sway of Charles Mingus’s Black
Jazzmasculinity” that considers Mingus’s enduring influence on a range of artists.
Gabbard’s book is also broken into four parts. The first addresses both the
specifics and broad strokes of Mingus’s life and music. The second looks at Mingus’s
writings, with a particular focus on Beneath the Underdog (hereafter referred to as
BTU). The third looks at Mingus’s involvement with the Third Stream movement
and tries to make sense of his hybrid aesthetic, which drew widely from jazz, classical,
and traditional/folk musics. The final section discusses the biographies and musi-
cal aesthetics of some of Mingus’s most important collaborators, including Dannie
Richmond, Eric Dolphy, and Jimmy Knepper. The book then concludes with a brief
examination on Mingus’s music in cinema.
Both authors address Mingus’s autobiography in depth. Placing BTU within
the pantheon of important jazz autobiographies, Gabbard provides a helpful literature
review for the uninitiated, describing the specific thrust and purpose of many of the
canonical examples of the genre. He also explains the process of creating many of
these autobiographies and highlights the collaborations required between artists and
their editors/cowriters. Gabbard‘s research into the process that brought Mingus’s
masterpiece to fruition is easily among the most important and revelatory aspects
of the book, and his background in literary analysis serves him well in this section.
This chapter should be required reading for anyone interested in jazz biography/
autobiography.
Rustin-Paschal is less interested in the process of writing BTU and more in
the document itself as a reflection of Mingus’s complex personality, as well as how it
displays his roles within the different worlds that he traversed. She considers the text
in dialogue with a wide range of prominent African American artists and thinkers.
At one point, for example, she links Mingus’s writing to the work of Audre Lorde
and Samuel Delany who “both use autobiography to explore their creative desires
through the lenses of psychoanalysis and confession, to interrogate their sense of
self as racialized and sexualized subjects” (46). She also analyzes contemporaneous
reviews to problematize the critical response to the book, arguing that the numerous
negative reactions reflected the attitudes of the white critical establishment during

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the 1960s more than they spoke to the actual value of the book. She draws attention
to the fact that many (primarily white) reviewers of Mingus’s work demonstrated
an “inability to conceptualize a musician questioning his blackness as an authorita-
tive interrogation of jazz culture” (49). Echoing the complaints that many black
artists began to write about at length in the 1960s and ’70s,4 she writes, “The critics
substituted their self-professed ‘expert’ knowledge of jazz and jazz autobiography as
a literary form for Mingus’s expert knowledge about his own experience” (49).
I attended a release party for Better Git Hit in Your Soul, and one of the excerpts
that Gabbard read concerned the three separate accounts of Mingus’s fight with Juan
Tizol, which led to his firing from Duke Ellington’s orchestra. Gabbard is at his
best, and seems most in his element, in storytelling mode, and this section provides
a perfect example. Elsewhere, he explores the resonance of quotes that musicians
inserted during the 1964 performance of “Fables of Faubus,” expanding upon themes
from Gabbard’s 1991 article “The Quoter and His Culture.”5 He explores how by
quoting songs associated with the South and minstrel performance, as well as songs
associated with the civil rights movement and progressive African American culture,
the group lent new and deeper shades of meaning to the compositions. His brief
analysis of “Parkeriana,” the proto-postmodernist exercise that allows the band to
quote extemporaneously from any musical excerpt associated with Charlie Parker is
also illuminating.
As a native Angeleno, I took great pleasure in reading how both authors consid-
ered Mingus’s relationship with the city of Los Angeles. Admittedly, my own musical
background in the city influenced my reading in these sections. When I was eleven
years old, growing up in Los Angeles, I was first exposed to free improvisation by
Mingus’s friend and collaborator Buddy Collette at an elementary school in East Hol-
lywood. Needless to say, this was a seminal experience for me as an improviser. I have
also spent a considerable amount of time at the Watts Towers, the proto-assemblage
art complex designed and constructed from 1921–54 by Italian immigrant Simon
Rodia. The towers (named “Nuestro Pueblo” by Rodia) are a truly monumental work
and are central to the artistic and musical history of South Los Angeles. I appreci-
ated Gabbard making the connection between Mingus’s childhood experiences with
Rodia and the towers and the development of his musical aesthetic. Rodia’s artistic
process—both in his assemblage style of working with disparate materials and the
way his work employed improvisation and constant, ongoing revision—were key
influences on Mingus’s music, as Gabbard argues convincingly.
However, despite the author’s importance to the “new jazz studies,” Gabbard’s
description of Simon Rodia in this section (in which he proclaims that “Rodia was
not merely illiterate; he could not even do simple arithmetic” [19]), and his preoc-
cupation throughout the book with literacy and virtuosity sometimes tie him to an
earlier era of jazz studies and musicology. For example, Gabbard writes that Ornette
Coleman “was capable of talking in vaguely- and naively-musicological terms about

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126 Reviews
his ‘harmolodic’ theory of musical improvisation” and that he managed “to bypass
much of the preparation that Mingus insisted an avant-garde musician should ac-
quire” (180). He also characterizes Quincy Troupe’s embellishment of Miles Davis’s
speech to reflect African American Vernacular English speech patterns, as making
Davis sound “illiterate” (134).
Rustin-Paschal also devotes a great deal of time to exploring Mingus’s rela-
tionship with Los Angeles. In the chapter “West Coast Ghost,” she concentrates on
Mingus’s upbringing and outlines the city’s significance to his musical and personal
development. She also focuses on his nostalgia for Los Angeles and the ways that he
was torn between the necessity of living on the East Coast in order to be situated in
the middle of the contemporary jazz scene and his longing for the Los Angeles of
his youth. Although he lived in New York and was often considered an “East Coast”
musician and composer, Mingus was clear that he thought of himself as being “‘west
coast,’ in that it was my home since I was three months old and did a lot of my learn-
ing there” (55). A particularly incisive moment comes when Rustin-Paschal reminds
us that one of Mingus’s lovers in BTU, Lee-Marie, “functions as a reminder of ‘west
coast’ values and their fragility in the face of debauched ‘east coast’ influences” (61).
Gabbard and Rustin-Paschal necessarily cover much of the same material,
but often from completely different angles, coming to separate conclusions. One
of the most telling comparisons stems from their interpretations of Mingus’s 1978
(released in 1979) collaboration with Joni Mitchell, Mingus. Gabbard seems to dis-
like the album on aesthetic grounds and writes that “there are no instrumental solos
on the LP, and the band played exactly the kind of bland fusion music that Mingus
regularly denounced” (104). Personally, I have always loved Mingus and find that
Gabbard missed an important point of connection between the aesthetic of the album
and Mingus’s contribution to African American music. While the album is light on
individual “solos” (though Wayne Shorter does take an almost one-minute solo on
“The Dry Cleaner from Des Moines”), the telepathic group interplay and improvisa-
tion is, to my ears, an extension of Mingus’s foregrounding of group improvisation. I
see the exchange between the musicians as a signal point of connection between the
collective improvisation that Mingus reintroduced into the music in the 1950s and
’60s and the conversational dynamic that Shorter and Hancock (both featured on the
record) had developed since their time together in the Miles Davis Quintet. There
is also a special quality to the record that draws on the egalitarian group aesthetic
that Mingus participants Shorter, Peter Erskine, and Jaco Pastorius were still in the
midst of developing in their band Weather Report during this same period.
While Gabbard lambastes the album for its slickness and hints at its inauthen-
ticity, Rustin-Paschal echoes Kevin Fellesz’s assertion that Mitchell’s “inauthenticity”
was at the heart of her persona as an artist and functioned as an important source of
creativity. Drawing an important parallel between Mitchell’s performance of multiple
selves and Mingus’s, she calls attention to the fact that many reviews that criticized

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Mitchell’s aesthetic echoed the criticism of “some reviewers of Beneath the Underdog,
who believed that Mingus’ multiple personas and sexual confessions were a literal sign
of excess, of uncontrollable sexuality, masking an ability to express a genuine interior
landscape” (163). She also notes perceptively that Joni Mitchell inhabited Mingus’s voice
“precisely when his body and his ability to perform begin to fail him, attempting to
represent the fractured subjectivity Mingus staged in Beneath the Underdog” (161).
Because the two authors speak from very different perspectives and have their
own particular objectives, the two books work very well in dialogue with one another.
Rustin-Paschal’s highly analytical take on Mingus’s life and work is crucial for anyone
who wishes to understand the proper context in which to make sense of Mingus’s
work. Gabbard, meanwhile, addresses Mingus’s music and legacy in comprehensive
fashion and is full of impassioned and well-reasoned arguments. Perhaps most im-
portantly, both authors provide ample arguments that BTU is an important work of
literature, with a great deal left to dissect and interpret. Whatever its perceived flaws,
Mingus’s autobiography is an important record of a major African American artist
talking frankly about mental illness, toxic masculinity, colorism, and the pernicious
effects of living in a white supremacist society. Looking at it from today’s perspective,
it is especially striking to read it in dialogue with recent opinion pieces featuring
African American musical artists speaking openly about mental illness, which have
been popping up regularly in recent years.6 Mingus’s conflation of fact and fiction
also connects his work to the magic realist tradition associated with Los Angeles that
speaks to its character as a city inextricably linked with Mexico and Latin America.
Indeed, Octavio Paz’s description of Los Angeles could easily be applied to Mingus’s
work: “It creeps, it wrinkles, it expands and contracts; it sleeps or dreams; it is ragged
but beautiful. It floats, never quite existing, never quite vanishing.”7
Sean Sonderegger
Notes
1. Michael Heller, review of Monk’s Music: Thelonious Monk and Jazz History in the Mak-
ing, by Gabriel Solis, Jazz Perspectives 3, no. 2 (2009): 177–81.
2. Mingus memorably begins Beneath the Underdog with the quote “In other words, I am
three.”
3. Clifford Allen, “Better Git It in Your Soul: An Interpretive Biography of Charles Min-
gus,” NYC Jazz Record, March 2016, 35.
4. See Leo Smith, Notes (8 Pieces) Source a New World Music: Creative Music (Self-pub.,
1973), and Max Roach, “What ‘Jazz’ Means to Me,” Black Scholar 3, no. 10 (1972): 2–6.
5. Krin Gabbard, “The Quoter and His Culture,” in Jazz In Mind: Essays on the History and
Meanings of Jazz, ed. Reginald T. Buckner and Steven Weiland (Detroit: Wayne State
University Press, 1991), 92–111.
6. At least one author has picked up on this, comparing Kanye West’s recent musings and
escapades to Mingus’s work. Mark Reynolds, “Kanye and Mingus: Gifted, Complicated
and Proud of It.” PopMatters, February 24, 2018. See also Sheldon Pearce, “Therapy Is

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128 Reviews
Gangsta: Hip-Hop’s Views on Mental Health Are Evolving,” Pitchfork, September 5, 2017,
and Natelegé Whaley, “How Kanye West Is Disrupting—and Advancing—the Mental
Health Conversation in Rap,” Mic, June 6, 2018, for a small sample.
7. Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude and Other Writings. (New York: Grove 1985), 13.
The Improvisation Studies Reader: Spontaneous Acts. Edited by Rebecca Caines

and Ajay Heble. New York: Routledge, 2015.
Given the recent proliferation of scholarship on improvisation—and the expansion

of critical studies in improvisation, or CSI, as an emergent field—the divides among
scholarly disciplines and between theory and practice that CSI has aimed to overcome
have reemerged. A diverse range of academics, practitioners, and scholarly organiza-
tions have all begun to stake their claim on improvisation studies, compelled in part
by institutional trends that promote many of the ideals traditionally associated with
improvisatory practices, such as adaptability, collaboration, empathy, and mobility.
Due in part to language conventions, research methodologies, and lack of infrastruc-
ture to support work that transcends siloed approaches to producing and disseminat-
ing art and scholarship within higher education, this rapidly multiplying research on
improvisation is further replicating disciplinary divides through limited circulation
within—but not necessarily between—each population of scholars. Rebecca Caines
and Ajay Heble, editors of The Improvisation Studies Reader: Spontaneous Acts (2015),
aim to redress these divisions by curating a multimedia and intersectional collection
unified around core concepts rather than individual practices or areas of study.
The volume is divided into eight sections: “Listening,” “Trust/Risk,” “Flow,”
“Dissonance,” “Responsibility,” “Liveness,” “Surprise,” and “Hope.” Each includes
an introductory essay that helps to contextualize the section’s contents, which, in
addition to excerpted academic articles and monographs, include artist statements,
graphic scores, poems, song lyrics, and visual art. In this way, more so than any other
printed resource, The Reader creates a compelling juxtaposition of media as well as
works that span scholarly and practice-based explorations of improvisation. In ad-
dition to their curatorial goals, its editors intend the volume to act as a resource for
both scholars and educators and, beyond academia, as “a tool-kit, and a source of
critical and creative inspiration . . . in order to respect difference and cultivate the
urgently needed ability to listen and to adapt to unprecedented change” (4).
Contributors to The Reader span the arts, including theater, the visual arts, and
dance. The largest set of contributions come from music studies, but, more so than
any similar volume, the authors are well balanced between those who are primar-
ily known as artist/performers and those known as academics. Of the latter group,
many—such as Ellen Waterman, Jesse Stewart, Rob Wallace, Julie Dawn Smith, and
Daniel Fischlin—are associated with the ongoing International Institute of Critical

129.126.218.66 on Sun, 14 Jun 2020 15:17:18 UTC
128 Reviews
Gangsta: Hip-Hop’s Views on Mental Health Are Evolving,” Pitchfork, September 5, 2017,
and Natelegé Whaley, “How Kanye West Is Disrupting—and Advancing—the Mental
Health Conversation in Rap,” Mic, June 6, 2018, for a small sample.
7. Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude and Other Writings. (New York: Grove 1985), 13.
The Improvisation Studies Reader: Spontaneous Acts. Edited by Rebecca Caines

and Ajay Heble. New York: Routledge, 2015.
Given the recent proliferation of scholarship on improvisation—and the expansion

of critical studies in improvisation, or CSI, as an emergent field—the divides among
scholarly disciplines and between theory and practice that CSI has aimed to overcome
have reemerged. A diverse range of academics, practitioners, and scholarly organiza-
tions have all begun to stake their claim on improvisation studies, compelled in part
by institutional trends that promote many of the ideals traditionally associated with
improvisatory practices, such as adaptability, collaboration, empathy, and mobility.
Due in part to language conventions, research methodologies, and lack of infrastruc-
ture to support work that transcends siloed approaches to producing and disseminat-
ing art and scholarship within higher education, this rapidly multiplying research on
improvisation is further replicating disciplinary divides through limited circulation
within—but not necessarily between—each population of scholars. Rebecca Caines
and Ajay Heble, editors of The Improvisation Studies Reader: Spontaneous Acts (2015),
aim to redress these divisions by curating a multimedia and intersectional collection
unified around core concepts rather than individual practices or areas of study.
The volume is divided into eight sections: “Listening,” “Trust/Risk,” “Flow,”
“Dissonance,” “Responsibility,” “Liveness,” “Surprise,” and “Hope.” Each includes
an introductory essay that helps to contextualize the section’s contents, which, in
addition to excerpted academic articles and monographs, include artist statements,
graphic scores, poems, song lyrics, and visual art. In this way, more so than any other
printed resource, The Reader creates a compelling juxtaposition of media as well as
works that span scholarly and practice-based explorations of improvisation. In ad-
dition to their curatorial goals, its editors intend the volume to act as a resource for
both scholars and educators and, beyond academia, as “a tool-kit, and a source of
critical and creative inspiration . . . in order to respect difference and cultivate the
urgently needed ability to listen and to adapt to unprecedented change” (4).
Contributors to The Reader span the arts, including theater, the visual arts, and
dance. The largest set of contributions come from music studies, but, more so than
any similar volume, the authors are well balanced between those who are primar-
ily known as artist/performers and those known as academics. Of the latter group,
many—such as Ellen Waterman, Jesse Stewart, Rob Wallace, Julie Dawn Smith, and
Daniel Fischlin—are associated with the ongoing International Institute of Critical

129.126.218.66 on Sun, 14 Jun 2020 15:17:55 UTC
Reviews 129
Studies in Improvisation, based at the University of Guelph. Music subdisciplines

include: ethnomusicology, performance studies, jazz studies, music perception, and
popular music studies. From the artist/performers, The Reader features several different
types of contributions—such as graphic scores, lyrics, and essays—while contribu-
tions from Amiri Baraka, George Lewis, and Nathaniel Mackey trouble the line
between theorist and practitioner. The cumulative effect of this vibrant diversity is
to reflect the intersectional and multimodal nature of improvisation—and, by as-
sociation, improvisation studies. In doing so, the text answers Lewis’s broader call to
“articulat[e] a multicultural, multi-ethnic”—and I would add “interdisciplinary”—
“base for histories of experiment in improvised music” (316).
Similarly, by opening the book with the section “Listening,” Caines and Heble
implore their readers to remain open to the volume’s wide range of contributions and
formats. The latter consideration may strike readers as more difficult than the former:
connections between prose, visual art, and unrealized, graphic musical notation may
prove neither readily apparent nor easily discernible. However, George Lipsitz, who
wrote the newly commissioned opening for this section, encourages us “to engage
in improvisation in order to discern the hidden possibilities disguised in proximate
appearances” (9). The Reader’s final section, “Hope,” is comprised only of bassist
William Parker’s essay, “Hope and Improvisation,” in which he reminds readers that
while “hope is at the center of all positive and negative action, . . . improvisation
is the key to eternal beauty of tomorrow” (450–51). Parker—and by extension, The
Reader’s editors—chooses not to paint either hope or improvisation as necessarily or
wholly emancipatory, but rather ends with another call to action that, in willfully
exercising our individual and collective potential for achieving positive expressions
of hope, we come to learn that “we are the answer” (452).
I came to this volume as an instructor in search of a foundational text for an
interdisciplinary seminar on improvisation and the arts. The volume’s organizational
paradigm proved evocative for my students, whose academic and artistic backgrounds
were even more diverse than the seminar’s curriculum. In addition, its portability and
price made it accessible to them in important ways. While not as comprehensive or
exhaustive (nor as expensive) as George Lewis and Benjamin Piekut’s recent Oxford
Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies,1 this attention to utility in crafting the
volume as an aesthetic object, as well as a compelling and diverse collection of essays,
proved engaging and effective in the classroom. Students expressed these positive com-
ments on the volume-as-object during a class session on browsing library collections.
In light of my current institution’s contested move to digitize some library holdings
and relocate other underutilized sources off-site, we held this class meeting amid the
library stacks as an example of exploratory and emergent research as improvisational
interaction with archives.
Those familiar with improvisation studies will undoubtedly find familiar pieces
among The Reader’s contents, but they will most likely also encounter many new

129.126.218.66 on Sun, 14 Jun 2020 15:17:55 UTC
130 Reviews
contributions for the first time. This volume is less about its individual contributions,
though, and much more about the sum total of its parts: through a compelling mix of
perspectives, artfully arranged within and across resonant themes, The Reader exceeds
its contents in the imaginative and unanticipated work that it will inspire. These can
range from dedicated study in a course such as mine to coffee shop conversations
that glimpses of its cover can evince (and, indeed, did evince while I was drafting
this review).
In assembling The Reader, the volume’s editors have exercised care and in-
tentionality, realizing through their work an aesthetic politics that resonates with
many of the perspectives articulated by the contributors. In such a burgeoning and
wide-ranging field as CSI, attempts at comprehensive coverage of all relevant material
would necessarily fall short either in breadth or depth. Instead, applying what David
Gunkel writes of collage to task of editing, Caines and Heble employ “a calculated
and deliberately subversive strategy that seeks, by way of the juxtaposition of diverse
elements, to produce conceptual frictions and illegitimate fusions that are simulta-
neously unexpected and insightful.”2 That is, The Reader’s editors treated their task
as composition that leaves space for improvisation. The text demands that readers
engage in thoughtful work in order to bridge the many gaps—the breaks—among its
contributors’ disciplinary foci (performance practices, artistic media, historical eras,
sociopolitical ideologies, etc.). In turn, it engenders similarly articulated and diverse
understandings of how improvisation suffuses many aspects of our lives and, more
importantly, how interpersonal collaboration appreciative of and empathetic toward
those differences can affect and enact positive social action. Start with listening; end
with hope.
Mark Lomanno
Notes
1. George E. Lewis and Benjamin Piekut, The Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation
Studies, 2 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). In addition to other distinc-
tions, the aims of these two works are admittedly different: whereas the Lewis/Piekut vol-
umes are entirely comprised of new contributions, the Reader compiles an engaging cross
section of (mostly) previously published pieces that provide a strong sense of CSI as it has
developed thus far.
2. David J. Gunkel, Of Remixology: Ethics and Aesthetics After Remix (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2016), 6.

fff:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff on Thu, 01 Jan 1976 12:34:56 UTC
Contributors to This Issue
VANESSA BLAIS-TREMBLAYholds a PhD in musicology and a specialization in gender

and women’s studies from McGill University. She is a lecturer at the Institute for
Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at McGill. Her research centers on women’s
music and musical lives, specifically on the relationship between identity, musical
aesthetics, musical genre, processes of cultural legitimization, and historiography.
Several articles are forthcoming in peer-reviewed journals, notably an article on
novelty pianist Vera Guilaroff in Women and Music (2019). She has received fellow-
ships from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and
the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation. In addition to her
teaching and research, she maintains a career as a violinist and improviser.
GRETCHEN CARLSONis an adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Music
at Towson University. Her research investigates musical creation and production in
contemporary popular culture, examining how musicians negotiate the tensions of
their own creativity and personal artistic goals when working within the hierarchical
structures and regulations of media industries such as film, television, and advertis-
ing. She has been published in the Journal of the Society for American Music and has
presented her research at both national and international conferences. She is cur-
rently preparing a book that focuses specifically on contemporary jazz musicians’
experiences working in film.
ANDREW RAFFO DEWAR is a composer, musician, and ethnomusicologist. He is
an associate professor in New College and the School of Music at the University
of Alabama. Dewar’s research explores experimentalism in the arts, improvisation,


129.126.218.66 on Sun, 14 Jun 2020 15:18:38 UTC
132 Contributors
music technologies, and 1960s intermedia arts. His writing has been published in the
Journal of the Society for American Music, Leonardo Music Journal, Jazz Perspectives,
MusikTexte, Jazz Research Journal, The New Grove Dictionary of American Music and
in edited volumes by Duke University Press and Oxford University Press. In addi-
tion, he is a well-regarded composer and performer whose work appears on nearly
two dozen recordings.
KIMBERLY HANNON TEALis an assistant professor of musicology at the University
of Arkansas. Her research addresses contemporary jazz, and she is interested in how
live performance contexts contribute to musical experiences and meaning. She is
currently working on a book tentatively titled “Jazz Places: How Performance Spaces
Shape Jazz History,” and her research has appeared in American Music, Jazz Perspec-
tives, and the Journal of the Society for American Music.
CHARLES HERSCH is professor of political science at Cleveland State University,
where he teaches political theory and American constitutional law. He is the author
of Democratic Artworks: Politics and the Arts from Trilling to Dylan (State University
of New York Press, 1998), Subversive Sounds: Race and the Birth of Jazz in New Or-
leans (University of Chicago Press, 2007), and Jews and Jazz: Improvising Ethnicity
(Routledge, 2017). His recent essays have explored, via Bakhtin, dialogic elements
of jazz in the work of John Zorn, Charlie Haden, and others.
AMAUD JAMAUL JOHNSONwas born and raised in Compton, California, and edu-
cated at Howard University and Cornell University. He is the author of two poetry
collections, Darktown Follies and Red Summer. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow
in Poetry at Stanford University and Cave Canem Fellow, his honors include The
Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, The Dorset Prize, a MacDowell Colony Fellow-
ship, and a Pushcart Prize. His work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Best
American Poetry, Callaloo, Kenyon Review, Narrative Magazine, the Southern Review,
and elsewhere. He is the Halls-Bascom Professor of English at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison.
MARK LOMANNO, visiting assistant professor of music at Northeastern University
and former Consortium for Faculty Diversity/Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, is an eth-
nomusicologist and jazz pianist who specializes in the music of the Atlantic world.
His current projects include ethnographic and archival work in the Canary Islands
and a monograph on intercultural jazz collaborations. Lomanno is the former chair
of the Society for Ethnomusicology’s Improvisation Section and is currently editing
a volume on improvisational approaches to interdisciplinary pedagogy. Other peer-
reviewed publications are forthcoming in Jazz Research Journal and Playing for Keeps:
Improvisation in the Aftermath of Crisis (Duke University Press).

129.126.218.66 on Sun, 14 Jun 2020 15:18:38 UTC
Contributors 133
DEAN S. REYNOLDS is an ethnomusicologist in New York. He earned a PhD in

music from The Graduate Center, City University of New York, after completing his
dissertation, “Jazz and Recording in the Digital Age: Technology, New Media, and
Performance in New York and Online.” He has also researched popular and religious
music of Jamaica and has taught courses in global music cultures, jazz history, Latin
American and Caribbean music, and “bass” music at The New School, City College
of New York, Princeton University, and other institutions.
SEAN SONDEREGGERis a composer, woodwind multi-instrumentalist, and educa-
tor. Recently receiving his PhD in ethnomusicology from Wesleyan University, his
scholarly work focuses on the music of the African diaspora in the Americas, with a
particular concentration on experimentalism. He has performed with Butch Mor-
ris’s NuBlu Orchestra, Adam Rudolph’s Go Organic Orchestra, Yusef Lateef, Curtis
Fowlkes’s Catfish Corner, The Jazz Passengers, Karl Berger, and many others.

129.126.218.66 on Sun, 14 Jun 2020 15:18:38 UTC
129.126.218.66 on Sun, 14 Jun 2020 15:19:16 UTC

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ARTICLES

Mary Lou Williams as Apology: Jazz, History,

Risk, Creative Labor, and the Integrative Jazz-Film:

“Where You Are Accepted,You Blossom”:Toward

JAZZ & Culture

Without Qualification: Bill Dixon

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1 Mary Lou Williams as Apology: Jazz, History, and Institutional

27 Risk, Creative Labor, and the Integrative Jazz-Film:

59 “Where You Are Accepted,You Blossom”:Toward Care Ethics

84 “Music Is No More Than a Reflection of Its Times”: Max Roach

101 Without Qualification: Bill Dixon on Black Music and Pedagogy

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116 The Jazz Bubble: Neoclassical Jazz in Neoliberal Culture,

122 The Kind of Man I Am: Jazzmasculinity and the World

128 The Improvisation Studies Reader: Spontaneous Acts,

131 Contributors to This Issue

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Jazz & Culture Volume 2 2019

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Williams As Culture Hero

Although Iverson expressed a desire to write about Williams without reference to

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Following the Women-in-Jazz Pioneer?

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Gender in the Jazz Workplace

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dynamics while building a career in a challenging and competitive field, Tarantino

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46. Tucker, “Conundrum Is a Woman-in-Jazz,” 247.

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Improvised film soundtracks—in which musicians improvise to a film (or script)—

Jazz & Culture Volume 2 2019

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The Present Study

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“DRUUUMMMMMSSS! Eureka!” Antonio Sánchez’s

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Iñárritu’s current recognition as a critically acclaimed and commercially successful

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