Although novelists, film-makers and photographers are likely to rely upon familiar myths when they create images of jazz, they can also bring new life to a music that can be opaque, even to the initiated. As David Yaffe has argued, a novelist such as Ralph Ellison can surpass both musicologists and critics when, for example, he links Louis Armstrong's music with his metaphor of invisibility: ‘Sometimes you're ahead and sometimes behind. Instead of the swift and imperceptible flowing of time, you are aware of its nodes, those points where time stands still or from which it leaps ahead. And you slip into the breaks and look around’ (Ellison 1952, 8). In Ellison's metaphors, Yaffe hears a definition of swing more convincing than one based on empirical data or formal analysis. At their best, fiction, cinema and photography produce illuminating, often startling representations of jazz through different sets of metaphors appropriate to the history and aesthetics of each medium. In hopes of identifying these metaphors and how they function, I devote special attention to ‘tutor texts’ that facilitate a long view of jazz within specific art forms. Although these texts may not be the most canonical, they may be the most representative. I begin with a book that sums up how images of jazz were presented during the twentieth century.

Among the many historical accounts of jazz, it is above all the discographies that convey most graphically and emphatically just how extensively performed and how diverse jazz has been since it arrived on the public scene in 1916–17. But it is beyond the brief of a discography to do much more than list, and so the nearest thing we have to a record of the sheer scale of jazz diversity and inventiveness is silent on many other questions. Thus, while many discographies take for granted that the diversity they chronicle represents a collective body of music – even if they appear to have built into them particular views of what is and is not ‘jazz’ – they do not see it as their task to identify what, if anything, might connect the music together (and how and why), even less to consider the question of how the achievements they enumerate belong in, reflect and respond to a wider world. And there is no particular reason why they should. But if we seek to go beyond diversity and extent and look for what made jazz distinctive, we need to ask questions such as: how did jazz acquire its identity in the twentieth century, how was that identity constructed, and what role was played in the formation of identity by the ways in which the music was connected to processes and histories both close to and beyond its immediate environment?

Jazz is a construct. Nothing can be called jazz simply because of its ‘nature’. Musical genres such as the military march, opera and reggae are relatively homogeneous and easy to identify. By contrast, the term jazz is routinely applied to musics that have as little in common as an improvisation by Marilyn Crispell and a 1923 recording by King Oliver and his Creole Jazz Band. Developed well outside the more carefully regulated institutions of American culture, early jazz, proto-jazz or Ur-jazz was performed by people from an extremely wide variety of backgrounds. Many styles of playing were mixed together and others were split off and acquired different names. If today we call something jazz, it has much more to do with the utterances of critics, journalists, record companies and club owners than with the music itself.

Those who have been most devoted to defining the music and to discriminating between true jazz and false jazz often rely upon tautologies and ad hominem arguments. The esteemed poet and jazz writer Philip Larkin, for example, once wrote:

A family dinner

The sound of trumpets ushers in the dinner guests. Dressed as a cook, an old soldier brings in the food. He greets the Emperor Saturninus and his wife with courtesy and encourages them to begin. The former Roman general's costume elicits a question, but since the guests already suspect that Titus Andronicus is not in his right mind, they do not press the point.

Over dinner, Titus turns the conversation to an episode in Roman history, when Virginius killed his daughter because she had been raped. Was this right, he wonders? Decidedly, the emperor assures him: she should not outlive the deed that shamed her. The old man takes this for authority, rounds on his own daughter and kills her then and there.

Self-evidently, this is not how families are expected to behave, and Saturninus says as much. However patriarchal Shakespeare’s culture, or ancient Rome, come to that, this is ‘unnatural and unkind’ (5.3.4). But Lavinia too was raped, Titus explains, and begs his guests not to interrupt their meal, as if the summary execution of his daughter were no more than incidental.

This chapter offers a sketch in broad strokes of some of the main trends in critical reaction to and theories about Shakespeare's tragedies since the late seventeenth century. By this time the culture of Shakespeare's age had come to seem crude and barbarous to educated Londoners, distanced as it was by the restoration of Charles II in 1660, the influence of French drama, the introduction of actresses playing female parts, and the restrictive licensing of only two indoor theatres that targeted moneyed patrons. The first critical writings on Shakespeare's works began to appear before the end of the century, though as an industry Shakespearean criticism developed during the eighteenth century, fostered by the spate of editions of the plays that followed that of Nicholas Rowe, published in 1709. For almost a century after Thomas Rymer’s A Short View of Tragedy was published in 1693, editors and critics felt obliged to consider Shakespeare in relation to what were called the ‘Rules of Art’, rules derived from the French and from Horace, though often ascribed to Aristotle, especially the three unities of time, place, and action. Shakespeare was regarded as a prodigy, whose ‘wild and extravagant’ works possessed genius but lacked refinement, the ‘Turn and Polishing of what the French call a Bel Esprit’.

‘Improvisation’, wrote Gunther Schuller in his groundbreaking study, Early Jazz, ‘is the heart and soul of jazz’ (1968, 58). Yet, as Bruce Johnson points out elsewhere (see Chapter 6), improvisation is only one of the distinctive elements of the music, and indeed Schuller immediately qualifies his assertion by pointing out that improvisation is also an essential ingredient of other folk and popular musical traditions. Even more to the point, improvisation is not a major ingredient in many celebrated jazz recordings. Louis Armstrong's classic ‘Cornet Chop Suey’ of 1926 was copyrighted almost as recorded (and in the trumpeter's own hand) more than two years earlier (Gushee in Nettl and Russell 1998, 298–9). Duke Ellington's ‘Concerto for Cootie’ of 1940 was described as a ‘masterpiece’ by another pioneering analyst, André Hodeir, yet one of the characteristics of the piece is ‘the elimination of improvisation’ (Hodeir 1956, 77). As the recorded evidence shows, other renowned soloists can be heard to repeat familiar solos in all essential respects, and over considerable periods of time (Berliner 1994, 240). As Armstrong himself put it: ‘always, once you get a certain solo that fit in the tune, and that's it, you keep it. Only vary it two or three notes every time you play it’ (quoted by Gushee in Nettl and Russell 1998, 313). Across the stylistic spectrum, too, performances have been praised mainly because they achieve the elusive quality of ‘swing’ (see Keil 1995), or when melodies are simply embellished but where the player's instrumental tone – as on Clifford Brown with Strings (1955) – is judged to be particularly expressive. Only the pedantic, however, would disqualify these and many other pieces from acceptance as jazz on the grounds that they lack a substantially improvised component.

The idea for this chapter came from Mervyn Cooke's suggestion that we jointly organise a seminar – on jazz in 1959 – at the University of Nottingham. As soon as I began I found the choice of year felicitous both as a decisive cultural moment in establishing an autonomous art-form and as a year for musical landmarks recorded in every style of jazz (from mainstream to avant-garde). Nineteen fifty-nine was the year when jazz, as it is now, began. Jazz before this time is now largely regarded as historic, as music usually identified by regional (e.g., Harlem school, Chicago style) and temporal (early jazz, Swing Era) associations. From 1959 onwards, it more strongly resembles universal current practice, indicating – and without condescension to pre-1959 jazz – that this is the beginning of contemporary jazz. This is easily demonstrated by the still pervasive familiarity of certain of the recordings made in that year. Kind of Blue (Miles Davis), Time Out (Dave Brubeck), Giant Steps (John Coltrane) and Ornette Coleman's The Shape of Jazz to Come are albums that can scarcely be unknown or un-owned by jazz aficionados – and the 1960s had not even officially begun. Perhaps they began when John F. Kennedy was elected to the US Presidency and Robert Frost read his poetry at the Inauguration ceremony. In his speech, the young president raised the image of a relay in which ‘the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans’. This was turnover time in American culture and politics, as it was in jazz.

Revenge and ambition, past and present

Revenge and ambition had meanings in Shakespeare's world significantly different from what they mean now. Yet we can still easily recognize them in Shakespeare's plays, allowing us both an emotional connection to the human past, and an intellectual perspective on it.

Shakespeare's brilliant contemporary, Francis Bacon, called revenge 'a kind of wild justice', and it must have been an important supplement to official justice in an era of very limited police powers and severely enforced social hierarchy. The Tudor monarchies made some progress in controlling lawlessness, but there must have been some basis for the persistent jokes about incompetent constables and watches in Elizabethan comedy. With so many crimes unsolved, so many criminals immune to punishment, and so many outrages (against women, the poor, and ethnic and religious minorities) not even considered crimes, it is hardly surprising that the public developed an appetite for revenge stories.

Though Waller (if he actually made that remark) was speaking to a neophyte jazz fan, had he lived to see scholars ‘messing’ with jazz he probably would have disapproved of that activity as well. They spend lengthy amounts of time listening to it, reading and thinking about it, for they find the music fascinating, irresistible and sometimes mysterious. Ever curious, they examine it, using a variety of skills and approaches. Then they write about it in their spare time (no one makes a living analysing music), hoping to reach an interested audience with their insights into the music. Readership and book sales are minuscule by popular-press standards. But if the readership is small, jazz analysts still may take pride in providing informed alternatives to the pseudo-intellectual verbiage and scrambled terminology that sometimes characterises jazz writing for the general reader.

Music analysts strive to describe or explain musical phenomena with some combination of words, musical notation and graphic representation. But while a jazz piece, like any other piece of music, may be a fixed object – an audio recording or written score – analyses may be dramatically different, as John Brownell has pointed out (1994, 23), depending upon what each analyst listens for and finds in a piece.

Jazz is often presented as a musical art form, which is fine for musical connoisseurship. But any serious inquiry into the nature, history, aesthetics and even future of jazz needs to examine the unique relation between music making and dancing that existed at its origin and was mutually nourishing for decades. The severing of this relation brought about tremendous changes in both the music and the dance.

Popular dancing is an extremely important cultural activity, for bodily movement is a kind of repository for social and individual identity. The dancing body engages the cultural inscripting of self and the pursuit of pleasure, and dancing events are key sites in the working and reworking of racial, class and gender boundaries. For this reason Linda Tomko has argued that dancing is ‘a social and cultural process operating in the midst, and not at the margins, of American life – indeed, as American life’ (1999, xiii). Particularly significant are moments of transformation, when conventional forms of popular dancing are no longer sufficiently expressive, leading to experimentation with and development of new forms of bodily identity. New music emerges whose kinetic power reflects and reinforces the new bodily identity; the music and dance resonate with each other. These episodes of transformation inevitably generate alarm about the release of unbridled sexuality and trigger efforts to repress and supervise dancing and the places where it occurs.

The purpose of this chapter is to contribute towards a systematic study of those ‘economic circumstances’ by suggesting two frameworks within which jazz can be situated as part of the wider music business.

The three music markets

The first framework is a ‘horizontal’ dimension which allows jazz to be viewed in relation to the three general types of music market to be found in the twentieth century: those of traditional (or folk) music, of popular music and of art (or classical) music. At different times jazz has been part of each of these markets.

The principal characteristic of a traditional music market is the close relationship of music to social ritual: the main occasions for music are such events as weddings, funerals, carnivals and festivals. Early jazz activity in New Orleans – the parades, picnics and funerals – included elements of this music culture (see Buerkle and Barker 1973).

In societies subject to such processes as urbanisation and industrialisation, traditional music markets give way to the popular music market that supplies entertainment as a commodity to be consumed within leisure time (see Laing 1969). And from the beginning in New Orleans, the musical elements of a traditional culture were interwoven with the dance jobs, the mobile advertising jobs and other elements of a de-ritualised and commercialised leisure and entertainment economy.

The poet John Dryden, writing near the end of the seventeenth century, criticized Shakespeare for failing to respect the unity of character in his tragedies: 'The last property of manners is, that they be constant, and equall, that is, maintain'd the same through the whole design: thus when Virgil had once given the name of Pious to Aeneas, he was bound to show him such, in all his words and actions through the whole Poem.' According to Dryden, the playwright is bound by the canons of realism – rules that characters as represented in literary works ought to manifest a high degree of psychological and behavioural consistency. Thus for Aeneas to be himself – to have the identity of Aeneas – he should be pious in mind as in deed. For Dryden, this artistic requirement is grounded in a conviction that real human beings are psychologically consistent and, as such, the autonomous source of their meanings. Self-sameness in a person's behaviours flows from an invisible self-identity. This inner identity is the product of a disembodied consciousness that sees the world as the objectified instrument of its own willed designs. The ‘I’ with which an individual represents him- or herself to the world is fully present to itself and thus can be held accountable for its words and deeds.

Throughout the twentieth century critical and popular opinion regarded Shakespeare's tragedies as his highest achievement; there is no sign that their pre-eminence will be modified in the twenty-first. In a largely secular world they have been invested with the status of secular scripture, often treated with reverence as spiritual masterpieces of transcendent literary art rather than as great plays written about four hundred years ago. The texts have sometimes appeared like sacred objects, especially in collected editions. Certainly the discussion of individual plays (sympathetic or hostile) has often been conducted as if the text of each were definitively established, canonically determined, and available for exegesis.

However, such is not the case. The notion of a single authentic text belongs to the tradition of reading plays rather than that of performing them in the playhouse, where performance admits variation. The texts of Shakespeare’s tragedies, as of all of his plays, are unstable. The modern editions that we study are derived from documents of doubtful origin and imperfect execution about which there is less external evidence than we desire. Those early documents are constantly re-edited in the light of new knowledge, new theoretical concerns, and new hypotheses.

In one sense, Shakespeare wrote tragedies throughout his career. To be sure, among the plays classified as tragedies in the great Folio edition of 1623, only Titus Andronicus (c. 1589-92) and Romeo and Juliet (1594-6) were written before 1599. Yet Shakespeare certainly pursued tragic themes and consequences in his early historical plays. The title page of The First Part of the Contention betwixt the Two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster, published in 1594 as a somewhat shortened version of what was to appear in the 1623 Folio as The Second Part of Henry the Sixth, announces among its subjects 'the death of the good Duke Humphrey', the 'banishment and death of the Duke of Suffolk', and 'the tragical end of the proud Cardinal of Winchester'. The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York, and the Death of Good King Henry the Sixth, published in 1595 as a version of what was to appear in the 1623 Folio as The Third Part of Henry the Sixth, describes itself as a tragedy in that quarto title. So does The Tragedy of Richard III, registered and published in 1597 after having been written in about 1592–4. The Life and Death of King John (written in about 1594–6 and first published in the 1623 Folio) and The Tragedy of Richard the Second (registered and published in 1597) are similarly characterized as tragedies on their title pages, at least (in the case of King John) by the implications of tragedy in the King’s ‘death’.

Speaking to himself – and heard by an offstage audience – Hamlet decides to have the visiting troupe of actors 'play something like the murder of my father': 'the play's the thing', he concludes, 'Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king'. Hamlet imagines theatrical enactment as a persuasive intervention which will provoke his uncle to reveal his guilt. Implicitly, he also affirms that his words – and those of the already 'extant' play in the troupe's repertoire – will tell only part of the story and that the acted and felt play will be the 'real' thing. Real, and also material, for performance not only reimagines 'the play' but invites us to think concretely about how words – and silences – do theatrical work. How do particular actors' bodies, their physical and gestural languages, make meanings; how do theatrical set design, lighting, and costume discipline and enhance those bodies? How do particular spaces and stage images arrest attention, remain etched in memory? Tracing a range of performances of a play such as Antony and Cleopatra – once considered by literary critics to be, like King Lear, unperformable – opens a window on to a flexible, shape-shifting theatrical literacy and legacy, revealing how changes in theatrical spaces and fashions, in critical and cultural histories, have shaped and reshaped both the imaginative and material contours of Cleopatra’s ‘infinite variety’ as well as those of the play.