Jazz and the Political Imagination

Author: 

Columbia University

Spring 2002

How has the music we call "jazz" come to symbolize so many different political tendencies--freedom and democratic values, a threat to order and civil society, the possibility of integration and racial harmony, Black liberation and nationalism, conservatism, surrealism, socialism, etc., throughout the 20th century? What is it about jazz that enables people to read their political aspirations and hopes in what is primarily instrumental, improvised music? The purpose of this course is to explore the history of ideas about jazz, specifically how writers, activists, movements, and musicians themselves understood the "politics" of jazz.

We are not suggesting that there is a discrete, self-evident politics intrinsic to the music; rather, this course explores political imaginations-here and abroad. In particular, we are interested in jazz and the question of freedom-social freedom, political freedom, cultural and artistic freedom. The specific themes we will cover are listed below. In addition to required and suggested readings, we will supplement course lectures with selected films and musical selections. Please note that the week's readings do not always correspond with the lecture topic, and in some cases there are no corresponding readings. Therefore, you must make an effort to attend every lecture or find someone willing to share her notes.

Assignments

Students are responsible for keeping up with the reading assignments and showing up for lecture. The final grade will be based on two essay assignments, a group research/creative project, and class participation. The project will be worth 30% of your grade, the two papers combined account for 50%, and class participation will make up the remaining 20% of your final grade. I do not tolerate late papers without a plausible excuse. Late papers will be docked one-half of a grade for each day it is late. In order to participate fully in class discussions you must keep abreast of the reading assignments.

I encourage all students to read beyond the assigned readings (particularly from works on the suggested reading list) and contribute any additional insights or information to class discussion.

Required Readings

Eric Porter, What is this Thing Called Jazz?: African American Musicians and their Ideas (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001)

Sherrie Tucker, Swing Shift: All Girl Bands of the 1940s (Durham: Duke University Press ).

Graham Lock, Blutopia: Visions of the Future and Revisions of the Past in the Work of Sun Ra, Duke Ellington, and Anthony Braxton (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999).

Farah Griffin, If You Can't be Free, Be a Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday (New York: The Free Press, 2001)

Horace Tapscott, Songs of the Unsung: The Musical and Social Journey of Horace Tapscott (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001).

Reader

1. Dizzy Gillespie, "Chano Pozo, Afro-Cuban"

2. Hans Massaquoi, from The Good War

3. "Melba Liston"

4. "Clora Bryant"

5. Dizzy Gillespie, "World Statesman"

6. Penny Von Eschen, "The Real Ambassadors"

7. Albert Murray, "Improvisation and the Creative Process"

8. Stanley Crouch, "Blues to Be Constitutional"

9. Robin D.G. Kelley, "Dig They Freedom: Meditations on History and the Black Avant-Garde"

10. Valerie Wilmer, "Back to the African Heartbeat"

11. Hugh Masekela, Still Grazing [excerpt, 63-110]

12. Amiri Baraka, "The Changing Same"

13. Fred Ho, "Jazz, Kreolization and Revolutionary Music for the 21st Century"

14. George Lewis, "Improvised Music after 1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspectives."

15. George Lewis, "Experimental Music in Black and White"

NOTE: Suggested readings are included under each lecture topic. For general background on the history of this music, you might want to consult Amiri Baraka, Blues People (1963); Samuel Floyd, The Power of Black Music (1998); Eileen Southern, The Music of Black Americans (3rd ed., 1997); John Szwed, Jazz 101 (2000); Robert O'Meally, ed. The Jazz Cadence of American Culture (1998); Robert G. O'Meally, Brent Hayes Edwards, and Farah Jasmine Griffin, eds., Uptown Conversations: The New Jazz Studies (2004); Christopher Small, Music of the Common Tongue (1987); Art Taylor, Notes and Tones: Musician to Musician Interviews (1971); Alyn Shipton, A New History of Jazz (2001); Krin Gabbard, ed., Jazz Among the Discourses (1995); Krin Gabbard, ed., Representing Jazz (1995 ); Ingrid Monson, Saying Something (1996); Paul Berliner, Thinking in Jazz (1994).

WEEKLY TOPICS

Week 1: Introduction

FILM: The Cry of Jazz!

Week 2: The Problem with Music and Politics

Porter, What is this Thing Called Jazz, Intro.

Tucker, Swing Shift, Intro.

Lock, Blutopia, Intro.

SUGGESTED READING:

Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music (1985)

Lawrence Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness (1977)

David Ake, Jazz Cultures (2002)

Finkelstein, Sidney. Jazz: A People's Music (1948).

Week 3: Policing Race and Sex: The Roots (and Branches) of the Jazz/Vice Nexus

Porter, What is this Thing Called Jazz, 1-11.

SUGGESTED READING:

Louis Armstrong, Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans (1954)

Danny Barker, A Life in Jazz (1986)

Kevin Mumford, Interzones: Black/White Sex Districts in Chicago and New York in the Early 20th Century (1997)

Angela Davis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism (1998).

Hazel Carby, "'It Jus Be's Dat Way Sometime': The Sexual Politics of Women's Blues," Radical America 20, no. 4 (1987).

Ronald Morris, Wait Until Dark: Jazz and the Underworld, 1880-1940 (1980)

Paula Fass, The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the Twenties (1977).

Week 4: New Negroes or Primitives?: Jazz, Race, and the Cultural Renaissance

Porter, What is this Thing Called Jazz, 11-39

SUGGESTED READING:

Nathan Huggins, The Harlem Renaissance (1971)

Ann Douglass, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (1995)

Ted Vincent, Keep Cool: The Black Activists Who Built the Jazz Age (1995).

David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue (1981).

Angela Davis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism (1998).

Hazel Carby, "'It Jus Be's Dat Way Sometime': The Sexual Politics of Women's Blues," Radical America 20, no. 4 (1987).

Reid Badger, A Life in Ragtime: A Biography of James Reese Europe (1995).

Week 5: "A People's Music": Radical Dreams in Depression America

Porter, What is this Thing Called Jazz, 39-53.

Tucker, Swing Shift, chs. 1-2

Tapscott, Songs of the Unsung, chap. 1

SUGGESTED READING:

David Stowe, Swing Changes: Big Band Jazz and New Deal America (1994).

Michael Denning, The Cultural Front (1996)

Lewis Erenberg, Swingin' the Dream: Big Band Jazz and the Re-Birth of American Culture (1998)

Mark Naison, Communists in Harlem During the Depression (1983).

Barry Singer, Black and Blue: The Life and Lyrics of Andy Razaf (1992)

Week 6: Double V, Double Time: War-time Jazz and the Political Imagination

Porter, What is this Thing Called Jazz, chap. 2.

Gillespie, "Chano Pozo, Afro-Cuban"

Hans Massaquoi, from The Good War

Tucker, Swing Shift, chs. 3-5

Tapscott, Songs of the Unsung, chaps. 2 and 3

SUGGESTED READING:

Scott DeVeaux, The Birth of Bebop: A Social and Musical History (1997).

Ira Gitler, Swing to Bop: An Oral History of the Transition in Jazz in the 1940's (1985).

George Lipsitz A Rainbow at Midnight: Labor and Culture in the 1940s (1994).

Guthrie Ramsey, Race Music (2003)

John Storm Roberts, Latin Jazz (1999).

Michael H. Kater, Different Drummers: Jazz in the Culture of Nazi Germany (1992).

Ben Sidran, Black Talk (1971).

Week 7: Black, Brown and Beige: Ellington's Historical Vision

Lock, Blutopia, chapters 3 and 4

SUGGESTED READING:

Mark Tucker, ed., The Duke Ellington Reader (1993)

Duke Ellington, Music is My Mistress (1976)

Samuel L. Floyd, ed., Black Music in the Harlem Renaissance (1990).

David Hadju, Lush Life: A Biography of Billy Strayhorn (1996).

Week 8: "But Can She Play?": Women Musicians and the Politics of Race and Gender

Tucker, Swing Shift, 6-8

"Melba Liston"

"Clora Bryant"

SUGGESTED READING:

Linda Dahl, Stormy Weather: The Music and Lives of a Century of Jazzwomen (1984).

Tammy Kernodle, Soul on Soul: The Life and Music of Mary Lou Williams (2004)

Sally Placksin, Jazzwomen, 1900 to the Present: Their Words, Lives, and Music (1985).

Susan Cavin. "Missing Women: On the Voodoo Trail to Jazz," Journal of Jazz Studies 3, no. 1 (Autumn 1975).

Angela Davis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism (1998).

FILM: International Sweethearts of Rhythm

Tucker, Swing Shift, 9 and Conclusion

FIRST WRITING ASSIGNMENT DUE ONE WEEK LATER

Week 19: Jazz, Cold War Politics, and Cultural Imperialism

Dizzy Gillespie, "World Statesman"

Penny Von Eschen, "The Real Ambassadors"

Tapscott, Songs of the Unsung, chaps. 4-5

SUGGESTED READING:

Frank Kofsky, Black Nationalism and the Revolution in Music (1970).

Penny M. Von Eschen, Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937-1957 (1996).

Plummer, Brenda Gayle. Rising Wind: Black Americans and U.S. Foreign Affairs, 1935-1960 (1996).

Week 10: Twelve Bars that Shook the World: Jazz and Modern Africa

Hugh Masekela, Still Grazing [excerpt, 63-110]

Valerie Wilmer, "Back to the African Heartbeat"

Tapscott, Songs of the Unsung, chaps. 6-7

SUGGESTED READING:

Christopher Ballantine, Marabi Nights: Early South African Jazz and Vaudeville (Johannesburg, 1993)

Chief Bassey Ita, Jazz in Nigeria: An Outline Cultural History (Lagos: A Radical House Publication, 1984)

Gerhard Kubik, Africa and the Blues (1999)

Timothy R. Mangin, "Notes on Jazz in Senegal," in Uptown Conversations: The New Jazz Studies (2004)

Norman Weinstein, A Night in Tunisia (1993)

Week 11: Billie Holiday: The Politics of Authenticity in the Mythic World of Jazz

Griffin, If You Can't Be Free, Be A Mystery, 1-160

SUGGESTED READING:

Robert O'Meally, Lady Day: The Many Faces of Billie Holiday (1991).

Angela Davis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism (1998).

Billie Holiday, with William Dufty, Lady Sings the Blues (1956).

Week 12: Abbey Lincoln: The Price of Freedom

Griffin, If You Can't Be Free, Be a Mystery, 161-200

Porter, What is this Thing Called Jazz, chap. 4

Week 13: Manhood and the Politics of Art in Charles Mingus

Porter, What is This thing Called Jazz?, chap. 3

SUGGESTED READING:

Charles Mingus, Beneath the Underdog (1971)

Brian Priestley, Mingus: A Critical Biography (1982)

David Ake, "Regendering Jazz: Ornette Coleman and the New York Scene in the Late 1950s," in Jazz Cultures (2002)

Ingrid Monson, "The Problem with White Hipness: Race, Gender, and Cultural Conceptions in Jazz Historical Discourse," Journal of American Musicological Society, 18, no. 3 (Fall 1995), 396-422.

FILM: Mingus 1968

Week 14: Old and New Utopias: Africa-Modern, Ancient, and Interstellar

Lock, Blutopia, chaps. 1 and 2, Coda

Tapscott, Songs of the Unsung, chaps. 8-10

SUGGESTED READING:

John Szwed. Space is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra. (1997).

Norman Weinstein, A Night in Tunisia (1993)

John Corbett, Extended Play: Sounding Off from John Cage to Dr. Funkenstein (1994).

FILM: "Space is the Place"

Week 15: Free Jazz!: Music and Black Liberation

Porter, What is this Thing Called Jazz?, chaps. 5 and 6

Tapscott, Songs of the Unsung, chaps 11-14

Robin D.G. Kelley, "Dig They Freedom: Meditations on History and the Black Avant-Garde"

SUGGESTED READING:

A.B. Spellman, Four Lives in the Bebop Business (1985).

Amiri Baraka, Black Music (1967).

Frank Kofsky, Black Nationalism and the Revolution in Music (1970).

John Litweiler, The Freedom Principle: Jazz After 1958 (1984)

Valerie Wilmer, As Serious as Your Life: The Story of the New Jazz (1977).

Philippe Carles and Jean-Louis Comolli. Free Jazz/Black Power (1971).

Komozi Woodard, A Nation Within a Nation (1998).

James Hall, Mercy, Mercy Me: African American Culture and the American Sixties (2001).

Week 16: Red, White, and Blues: Racial Dignity and the Democratic Impulse

Porter, What is this Thing Called Jazz?, chap. 7

Albert Murray, "Improvisation and the Creative Process"

Stanley Crouch, "Blues to Be Constitutional"

SUGGESTED READING:

Robert O'Meally, ed., Ralph Ellison: Living with Music (2001)

Stanley Crouch, Notes of a Hanging Judge (1990)

Albert Murray, The Omni-Americans: Perspectives on Black Experience and American Culture

(1970)

Week 17: Jazz Cultures in Japan

E. Taylor Atkins, Blue Nippon [excerpts from book]

FILM: "Jazz is My Native Language"

GROUP PROJECT PRESENTATIONS

FINAL WRITING ASSIGNMENT

Week 18: The Changing Name: The Politics of Race and the Problem of "Black Music"

Lock, Blutopia, chaps. 5 and 6

Amiri Baraka, "The Changing Same"

George Lewis, "Improvised Music after 1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspectives"

George Lewis, "Experimental Music in Black and White"

Fred Ho, "Jazz, Kreolization and Revolutionary Music for the 21st Century"

SUGGESTED READING:

Samuel Floyd, The Power of Black Music (1995).

Ronald Radano, New Musical Figurations: Anthony Braxton's Cultural Critique (1993).

Ronald Radano and Philip V. Bohlman, eds., Music and the Racial Imagination (2000).

George Lipsitz, Dangerous Crossroads (1994)

Ortiz Walton, Music: Black, White and Blue (1972)

Aldon Neilsen, Black Chant: Language of African American Postmodernism (1997)

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artistic freedom, bibliographies, Black liberation, cultural freedom, democracy, free jazz, gender, Japanese Jazz, jazz political aspects, Modern Africa, political freedom, race, sex, social freedom, syllabi