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1 results

  • 4 - How to Watch Jazz

  • from Part I - Elements of Sound and Style
  • Edited by Michael Borshuk, Texas Tech University
  • Book:
    Jazz and American Culture
    Published online:
    09 November 2023
    Print publication:
    30 November 2023, pp 64-78

  • Summary

    While academic reactions to jazz were long dominated by a methodology drawn from musicology, attentive to composition and transcribed solos as forms, scholarship over the past few decades– amid the interdisciplinary shift of “the new jazz studies”– has articulated in ever more assertive terms that “meaning” in jazz depends not only on what is played, but how. This chapter responds to this interdisciplinary shift by thinking through the importance of performance to a comprehensive understanding of jazz expression, and the usefulness of African American studies and performance studies in conceptualizing the various theatrical and gestural vocabularies at work in jazz. Using examples from Thelonious Monk, Wynton Marsalis, and Ornette Coleman, this chapter examines in detail how we might understand jazz not just as music but as an extension of historical Afro-diasporic expressive practice, a construction of individual musical personae, and an ongoing aesthetic response to the persistent malice of white supremacy.