“There is a revolution underway in jazz that lies not in any internal crisis of style,” argued Scott DeVeaux in 1991, “but in the debate over the looming new orthodoxy: jazz as ‘America's classical music.’” The idea imposed “a kind of deadening uniformity of cultural meaning on the music.” Its narratives were suffocating, its nationalism sickly. In 1987, the US Congress passed the Jazz Preservation Act, which declared the music “a rare and valuable national American treasure.” Footnote 2 And, in 1993, Bill Clinton told a White House gathering that “jazz is really America's classical music.” Footnote 3 From the mid-1980s, many critics and musicians presented affirmative, elevating, and tradition-conscious ideas of jazz, which were so conspicuous that it has become usual to periodize the years since as a “jazz renaissance.” Preeminent in this era are the trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, his mentors Albert Murray and Stanley Crouch, and their founding of Jazz at Lincoln Center. Sales saw jazz as a “miraculous cathedral” for all Americans, which “served as a fulcrum to overturn centuries-old fears and misunderstandings between white and black America that poisoned our national life.” Footnote 1 In this upbeat story, appealing narratives of art and nation subsumed sticky questions of race. In 1984, the critic Grover Sales published Jazz: America's Classical Music, which portrayed a grand artistic heritage. It challenges the drugs-and-brothels imagery that has long lingered around the music, and it rejects, perhaps too confidently, the notion that jazz is essentially enigmatic. “America's classical music” has been a prominent answer to the persistent question of what jazz is. The idea's disintegration into clichéd ubiquity in the mid-1980s then provides a critical perspective on the idea of the “jazz renaissance,” and an opportunity to consider the role of the jazz ambassador in the context of debates about African American intellectuals. It suggests that Taylor initially made the idea work inventively and productively in a variety of contexts, especially through his community arts project Jazzmobile, but that these contexts diverged as his public profile was stretched thin across and beyond the United States. It argues that the idea was not a neoclassical and conservative product of the 1980s, but had important roots in the Black Arts imperatives of the later 1960s and early 1970s.
The present article provides a history of this idea through a close analysis of its primary theorist and most visible spokesperson, Dr. The idea of jazz as “America's classical music” has become a powerful way of defining the music, asserting its national and artistic value, and shaping its scholarly study.
0 kommentar(er)
