American Musicological Society

Review: [untitled]Author(s): Christopher SmithReviewed work(s):

Jazz Cultures by David AkeGoing for Jazz: Musical Practices and American Ideology by Nicholas Gebhardt

Source: Journal of the American Musicological Society, Vol. 58, No. 2 (Summer, 2005), pp. 476-488Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the American Musicological SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4138485Accessed: 18/08/2009 22:14

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If the focus on the pronouncements of journalists and musicians is a legiti- mate source of the discourses that define the aesthetics of popular culture, then there is a need to do two things. The first is to establish why these partic- ular journalists, among the many writing on music, come to assume a putative "authority"; and the second is to treat the magazines and papers for which

they write as institutions, as products of a particular political economy of the media. There are cultural, political, and economic histories to be told about the way in which rock came to earn a space in newspapers and came to be the principal topic for commercially viable magazines. Gendron's arguments and method might have engaged more directly with Simon Frith and Howard Home's Art into Pop, which, while dealing with other times and places, does link institutions (the British art school), the aesthetic discourses (e.g., situa- tionism), and the academic discourses (e.g., Dick Hebdige's Subculture) that constituted British popular music.1

It would be wrong, however, to end on a negative note. This is an impor- tant book, not just because of the detail of its research, or the innovations of its method, but most crucially for the way it reminds us of how music's affec- tive power and its meanings are the product of ideas and institutions, as much as notes and sounds.

JOHN STREET

1. Simon Frith and Howard Home, Art into Pop (London and New York: Methuen, 1987); Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning ofStyle (London and New York: Routledge, 1979).

Jazz Cultures, by David Ake. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2002. xiii, 223 pp.

Going for Jazz: Musical Practices and American Ideology, by Nicholas Gebhardt. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2001. x, 231

PP.

Two recent books, David Ake's Jazz Cultures and Nicholas Gebhardt's Going for Jazz: Musical Practices and American Ideology, seek to move jazz scholar- ship beyond biography, discography, and technical analysis; they succeed vari-

ously. Both seek to draw upon perspectives and analytical tools from other

disciplines. Ake refers to semiotics and cultural historiography, in an approach pioneered in this field by Scott DeVeaux and Ingrid Monson,' while Gebhardt

1. Scott DeVeaux, The Birth of Bebop: A Social and Musical History (Berkeley and London:

University of California Press, 1997); Ingrid Monson, Saying Something:Jazz Improvisation and Interaction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

Reviews 477

cites Marxist criticism and literary historiography. Ake succeeds, developing a sensitive analysis of several jazz artists (including some neglected or considered

"non-jazz"), while Gebhardt's procedures and conclusions are more problem- atic. Their contrasting results argue for the validity of a multidisciplinary ap- proach to understanding jazz as cultural history, but also for the importance of

appropriate tools and perspectives. Ake's Jazz Cultures is a clearly argued synthesis of ideas regarding the way

that jazz has presented itself within the framework of American cultural life. The book provides useful correction of oversimplifications and distortions in the received history, offers insights into the "academicization" of jazz and the resultant impact upon how the music is perceived, and ventures an alternate set of methodologies for understanding how musicians' personae have been constructed in the marketplace. In addition, it provides welcome and very fresh rereadings of crucial but sometimes misunderstood players, including Sidney Bechet, Louis Jordan, Ornette Coleman, Bill Evans, Keith Jarrett, John Coltrane, Wynton Marsalis, and Bill Frisell.

In clear, thoughtful, and jargon-free prose, Ake demonstrates a willingness to weave together evidence from different media (recordings, album covers, liner notes, interviews, even players' wardrobes or the iconography of their newsletters). At the same time, he refrains from ambitious claims for the impli- cations of his insights and displays a remarkable fearlessness about eschewing the apparatus of conventional jazz studies. He presumes that the reader need not be bludgeoned with either complex terminology or abstruse theoretical systems but is yet capable of following fairly subtle and complex conclusions. The book is organized as a series of chapter-by-chapter case studies, and could be cited for scholarly purposes by specialists while remaining readable to a

general public. It is free of obvious agendas, and embodies a sort of relaxed re- alization that the relatively narrow and rigid categories of jazz scholarship might no longer be necessary or adequate. Jazz scholarship, a phenomenon that, defined broadly, is nearly as old as the genre itself, has tended to focus on

just a few different areas of activity, mostly either quantitative (discography, bi-

ography, technical analysis, and chronological history) or critical (the extensive literature of style criticism and journalistic interpretation). In its own under- stated, matter-of-fact way, Ake's book presents a new perspective which moves

past technical analysis or discussions of style toward more context-sensitive in-

sights into the music's changing, contested semiotic meanings. His emphasis is not so much on technical specifics-turning the life-history or the impro- vised solo from a context-sensitive process into an analytical object-but rather upon the cultural situations and impact of the music as it has been per- ceived, packaged, and reconceived.

Of moderate length, with a few illustrations, modest notes, and not a single transcribed musical example, the book is a rather courageous disavowal of the elaborate, sometimes tortuous symbols of seriousness by which jazz scholars have sometimes sought to legitimize their subject. In other jazz literature, as

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to an extent in Nicholas Gebhardt's book discussed below, such "markers of scholarship," while serving to convey the expertise of their authors, have sometimes made the topic overly abstruse. As a professional musician and a scholar, Ake has all the credentials he needs, but to his credit he seeks a more immediate, less turgid prose style and a more straightforward analysis than has recently been preferred in jazz studies. It is not an exaggeration to say that Ake's willingness to eschew technical analysis, philosophical complexity, or ter- minological obscurity parallels the "opening up" of scholarly perspectives he proposes in the text.

Ake describes the text as a "revision and expansion" of his PhD dissertation from UCLA (p. xi), several chapters of which first appeared as independent es- says. Its topical nature is not in itself a flaw: the myth of comprehensivity has undercut jazz scholars before this, whereas focusing upon key, under- or mis- interpreted figures is defensible in terms of both detail and method. Ake ac- knowledges that method's indebtedness to the UCLA musicologists Robert Walser, Susan McClary, and Roger Savage, whose thoughtful, innovative, and cross-disciplinary analyses of various musics have employed ideas synthesized from culture studies, semiotics, anthropology, and musicology. Ake's scholarly perspective thus owes more to Walser's work on Miles Davis and Public Enemy, to McClary's on Madonna and Laurie Anderson, or for that matter to Richard Leppert's on musical iconography, than it does to more traditional

jazz history or analysis.2 Like his mentors, Ake tries to get at the cultural pre- sumptions and implications that the music has embodied or contradicted. Like them, he is dependent in such work upon a sophisticated, free-ranging blend of evidence and methodologies.

Clear thematic, perspectival, and methodological threads tie together the chapters of Jazz Cultures with a satisfying continuity. Ake chooses logical test cases for his cultural criticism, and one mark of his persuasive ability is the reader's sense that other test cases subjected to this approach might yield equally interesting results. He employs an easygoing, free-flowing movement between various genres, time periods, and data with accompanying method- ological shifts. This is quite different from Gebhardt's more theory-driven study, encumbered as it is with complex terminology, analytical superstruc- ture, and extramusical emphasis.

Ake's first chapter, " 'Blue Horizon': Creole Culture and Early New Orleans Jazz," is a wonderful analysis synthesizing social demographics (the

2. See Robert Walser, "Out of Notes: Signification, Interpretation, and the Problem of Miles Davis," Musical Quarterly 77 (1993): 343-65; idem, "Rhythm, Rhyme, and Rhetoric in the Music of Public Enemy," Ethnomusicology 39, no. 2 (1995): 193-217; Susan McClary, "Living to Tell: Madonna's Resurrection of the Fleshly," Genders 7 (1990): 1-21; idem, " 'This Is Not a Story My People Tell': Musical Time and Space According to Laurie Anderson," Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture 12, no. 1 (1989-90): 104-28; Richard

Leppert, "Concert in a House: Musical Iconography and Musical Thought," Early Music 7, no. 1

(1979): 3-17.

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tricultural, black-Creole-white society of about 1900 New Orleans), musical style (black and Creole elements and synthesis in the solos of Sidney Bechet), and cultural constructions of identity (as articulated by a range of musicians) to "show the multiplicity, interaction, interdependence, and fluidity-and not mere biology--of cultural and music identity" (p. 41). Chapter 2, "Jazz Historiography and the Problem of Louis Jordan," posits a more straightfor- ward historiographic critique, to suggest that jazz scholarship's reification of facets of certain musicians (John Coltrane, Charlie Parker) and dismissal of others (Jordan, other sides of Coltrane) results from simplistic, rather aca- demic definitions of "serious" versus "popular," "art" versus "commercial," or "blues" versus "jazz" music. Chapter 3, "Regendering Jazz: Ornette Cole- man and the New York Scene in the Late 1950s," is a succinct and logical ar- gument suggesting that Coleman's contentious reception by many jazz musicians results from a contest over which tropes of masculinity, power, and art the music would accept, support, or reject. Chapter 4, "Body and Soul: Performing Deep Jazz," an analysis of the physical/visual symbolism em- ployed by pianists Bill Evans and Keith Jarrett, is one of the strongest essays. It provides an insightful reading of their impact, weaving together kinesics, iconography, titles, and linguistic and musical analysis. With chapters 1 and 6 it serves as the most complete demonstration of the capacities of Ake's synthesis. Chapter 5, "Jazz 'Traning: John Coltrane and the Conservatory," provides, in addition to an effective title pun, a good critique of the impact of shifting ap- propriations as jazz moved from "the street" into the conservatory. Ake's analysis of the ways that not only descriptive language but actual style and con- tent changed is effective, his choice of noted educator David Baker is appro- priate, and his critique is well founded. However, the chapter would be stronger were it not based solely on Baker's pedagogical materials. Also, this is not the first time that scholars have identified losses, as well as gains, for jazz as it entered the academy; as a result, this chapter is effective but does not break new ground.3 Chapter 6, "Jazz Traditioning: Setting Standards at Century's Close," which focuses upon Wynton Marsalis's and Bill Frisell's very different realizations of jazz "standards" (standard songs, but also criteria for excel- lence), is a strong closing chapter. Ake provides fresh insights through a subtle reading of the interplay between visual and sonic data employed by both artists, and, without explicitly referring to chapter 5, makes a powerful argu- ment that the "centering" of Marsalis and the "marginalization" of Frisell are direct outgrowths ofjazz's academicization. Also very effective, though unfor- tunately left implicit, are connections between Frisell's highly "contemporary"

3. See, for example: Christopher Smith and Austin B. Caswell, "Into the Ivory Tower: Vernacular Musics and the American Academy," Contemporary Music Review 19, part 1 (2000): 89-111; Michael Bernard-Donals, "Jazz, Rock 'n' Roll, Rap and Politics," Journal of Popular Culture 28, no. 2 (1994): 127-38; and Mark Tucker, "Post-Canonical Ellington," Institute for Studies in American Music: Newsletter 28, no. 2 (Spring 1999): 4-5, 15.

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conception and realization of jazz tradition, and those of Bechet, with whom Ake began the book.

A more detailed discussion of chapter 4, on Evans and Jarrett, will provide a sense of Jazz Culture's strengths. The essay begins with an apposite epigraph from Ives's Memos, recalling his father's comments about watching the face of a stonemason who sang out of tune (p. 83). This provides context for a discussion of two American musicians who, in Ake's formulation, carved out semiotic space for themselves by manipulating listeners' sonic and visual per- ceptions. The subtitle of the chapter, "Performing Deep Jazz," borrows a title phrase from one of his principal mentors, Robert Walser, and refers to music that consciously seeks an aura of spiritual "depth."4 The essay suggests that both pianists "communicate a sense of artistic and personal depth (profiundity, sensitivity, seriousness) to audiences through a variety of means, not the least of which is their physical demeanor while performing" (p. 83). Ake argues that Evans and Jarrett enjoy reputations as musicians of unusually high moral and musical standards precisely because they understood the commercial im- plications of nurturing the image of "artist," and did so intentionally. The rest of the chapter is taken up with "the pivotal role the body-its posture, move- ment, and even shape-plays for both of these musicians in communicating the distinctive types and degrees of depth upon which their formidable reputa- tions are founded" (p. 84).

Ake acknowledges that a simple score-based analysis cannot convey all the significant information about an improvisation, but goes on to provide a wel- come critique of the received ethnomusicological presumption that sound (e.g., in a recording) is automatically more revealing than sight, when, in fact, "sound does not 'mean' in and of itself any more than does a score" (p. 85). He emphasizes instead analysis based upon a "common ... semantic field" (p. 85), and reminds us that a sight/sound split has only been possible since the advent of recording (p. 86). While it employs a full range of analytical tools, Ake's methodology draws most heavily on Richard Leppert's ap- proaches to musical iconography.5 This enables Ake to articulate compelling, if unprovable, interpretations of semantic meaning, trusting that they are clear and accessible to the reader:

Even at the height of his professional career, Bill Evans seemed to eschew the public spotlight. The thin, pale face, greasy hair, and black-framed eyeglasses reproduced on dozens of album covers and magazine photographs lent him an inconspicuous, even dour look.

But if Evans's visage appeared more reminiscent of a "nerdy" eighth-grade science teacher than of a professional musician, the seriousness of his endeavors

4. Robert Walser, "Deep Jazz: Notes on Interiority, Race, and Criticism," in Inventing the

Psychological: Toward a Cultural History of Emotional Life in America, ed. Joel Pfister and Nancy Schnog, 271-96 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 272.

5. Especially Richard Leppert, The Sight of Sound: Music, Representation, and the History of the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

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remained unquestionable. It seemed as if a private world inside him housed both a profound intellectuality and an exquisite loneliness. (p. 89)

A few pages later, he provides an excellent, very Leppertian analysis of Evans's physical posture at the piano-and the way it was read as conveying a similar "exquisite loneliness" (pp. 96-99)-and links this with prior commen- tary on Evans's piano sound (pp. 93-95), which was dependent upon har- monic sophistication, textural sparseness, and fluid, free-flowing rhythm. Ake makes the salient point that such rhythmic atypicality--a bone of contention for earlier critics who faulted Evans's "un-jazz" approach--does not reveal a lack of concern for rhythm; rather, by abandoning normative approaches, Evans emphasized his stylistic and semiotic differentness. Ake recognizes that such interiority was not a rejection but a conscious reconfiguration of the physical, one that helped Evans carve out a viable identity in both artistic and mercantile spheres.

The corollary section, "Keith Jarrett: The Pianist as Mystic," demonstrates the self-conscious, verbal, and visual construction of Jarrett's public persona as a "spiritual" artist. Jarrett has worked with a range of approaches and ensem- bles, but Ake argues that his concerts of spontaneous solo piano improvisa- tions were the foundation of his persona as a "deep jazz" artist, and of his record company's financial success: "It is the aura that surrounded these con- certs that led, ultimately, to Jarrett's considerable acclaim throughout the world. And it is this same aura that connects us to the topics of jazz depth and the body, configuring ... a type of sensual-sacred music ritual" (p. 102).6 Ake

provides a good clarification of the actual interplay between spontaneously versus previously composed material, effective verbal descriptions of the improvisational strategies by which Jarrett generated musical material (pp. 102-3), and an apt adjectival phrase-"excruciatingly sensual"-to discuss the facial, verbal, and bodily ballet Jarrett enacted during the spontaneous- composition concerts (p. 105).

Drawing on Leppert's discussions of iconography, Ake argues that "musi- cal meanings remain very much bound up with performance and [that] a type of eroticism ... offers musicians a way of communicating to listeners their

'profound inner being' " (p. 106). He suggests that a close reading of conduct and verbal descriptions reveals the constructed nature and spiritual associa- tions intended by Jarrett's "sensual sacrality" (pp. 105, 107). Ake makes the

point that though Evans and Jarrett employ "almost diametrically opposed approaches to the piano," nevertheless "these two also share much common

ground. Most notably, they each view the jazz musician as 'artist,' unsullied

by commercialism. They promote such a stance even while they both also

enjoyed the fruits of unusually lucrative careers" (p. 110). Left implicit but nevertheless evident is that these, like other jazz identities, are constructed, in

6. Including The Kiln Concert(1975: ECM 1064/5) and the massive The Sun Bear Concerts

(1977: ECM 1100).

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order to clear commercial space in the marketplace and artistic space within the tradition.7

Chapter 5, on John Coltrane and the conservatory's adaptation of jazz as a

pedagogical topic is effective but offers insights that are not so unique. It is a good analysis of ways in which an influential figure's music was abstracted and compartmentalized so that more "teachable" aspects could be presented while others were ignored, but there are some flaws or, more accurately, problems of omission. Ake bases his critique on the teaching materials of David Baker, a noted pedagogue and architect of a network of teaching methods through publication and his classes at Indiana University, and of his student Jamey Aebersold (creator of the ubiquitous Music Minus One "play-along" record-

ings). Ake does not take into account, however, the direct thread of oral tradi- tion that goes on in Baker's classes. He must certainly realize that it would be difficult to assess the effectiveness of the face-to-face methods Baker has devel- oped to teach the building blocks of jazz improvisation.8 Ake does accurately identify the selectivity, codification, reification, and standardization that results from most academic pedagogical philosophies. This is a bigger problem, and this chapter could, but does not, thereby link to the discussion of Wynton Marsalis in chapter 6.

Part 2 of chapter 5, "Coltranes," which surveys the academic applications to which John Coltrane's music has been put, is highly effective, perhaps be- cause it is no longer tied to a specific critique of one teacher's conservatory approach. The final section on free jazz, entitled "The New Thing in the Classroom," is the crux of the chapter's argument, and in Ake's typically cogent and thoughtful fashion, articulates the strength of his analysis:

Much can be gained by fostering professional individual skills in jazz students as they prepare for life as working musicians. Yet by ignoring the collective musics of Coltrane and the other avant-gardists (as well as the early New Orleans play- ers), jazz pedagogy marginalizes other skills and traditions that have circulated in various guises since the genre's earliest days, resulting in a skewed view of jazz history, practices, and ideal. Ultimately, the issue boils down to knowledge: what sorts of knowledge will be esteemed in a given setting, how will that knowledge be transmitted, by whom, and to whom? (p. 144)

Ake argues persuasively that transmission of types of knowledge is a crucial consideration in understanding jazz as a field of contested meanings. A fifth

7. Ake also comments, aptly, on both musicians' use of "acoustic piano to convey a sense of artistic integrity" (pp. 110-11), but this feels like an underdeveloped afterthought and occupies less than one page at the end of the chapter.

8. As an alumnus of Baker's graduate jazz program (1987-90), I can think of no other classroom teacher-certainly not one with Baker's credentials as player, composer, and arranger himself-who can so successfully take a roomful of student musicians and, in a sixteen-week semester, give them both a capsule history and the basic players' vocabulary--if not stylistic individuality-of bebop, to say nothing of his masterful ear-training and composition pedagogy.

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implicit question left unstated in the quote above, but which Ake, as a histo- rian, would do well to articulate, is "for what purpose is knowledge transmit- ted?" and it forms the principal theme of chapter 6. In "Jazz Traditioning: Setting Standards on Century's Close," Ake makes it clear that various "sorts of jazz knowledge" continue to be appropriated and their semiotics manipu- lated. This is a sensitive discussion of the appropriations implicated (in a jazz context) with the term "standards," and the ways that various musicians, espe- cially Wynton Marsalis and his representative, the journalist Stanley Crouch, have manipulated those associations.9 Both Ake's chapter title and Marsalis's album title (Standard Time: Intimacy Calling) play on the semantic associa- tions of the word, and Ake provides a good critique of the heroic and hierar- chizing impulses implicit in Marsalis's semiotics, while citing his own indebtedness to Robert Walser's work on "signification" (pp. 148-56) and making good use of Scott DeVeaux's critique of Marsalis's "classicizing" im-

pulse (p. 163). More significant and original are Ake's subtle, poetic, and persuasive in-

sights about Bill Frisell's Have a Little Faith, which includes improvisational performances on pieces by Copland (from Billy the Kid), as well as Charles Ives, Bob Dylan, Muddy Waters, Sonny Rollins, and John Philip Sousa. Ake provides a great reading of the interplay between visual and sonic data (pp. 171-72); at the same time, as with the discussions of Bechet, Coleman, and Coltrane, he eschews transcriptions of musical material, while still devel- oping accurate, detailed, yet approachable verbal descriptions of the sound of group music-making (pp. 157-59, 168-71). Finally, Ake males a powerful, though implicit, argument about the "centering" of Marsalis versus the "mar-

ginalization" of Frisell: it is clear-both from the parallelisms of chapters 1 and 6, the discussion of musicians' choices, and the implicit relationships between artists and the jazz traditions-that Frisell's ensemble conception, catholic sonic approach, and flexibility of repertoire hearken back to Bechet's wide- open roots of jazz music, while Marsalis's classicism, semantic rigidity, and ap- propriation of "high art" hierarchies all connect him much more strongly to the ethos of classical music.

The closing of this same chapter, "Conclusions: Traditioning," includes a wonderful created verb form, but the entire section is only three pages (pp. 174-76). As such, it is slightly unclear whether these "Conclusions" are intended to stand for the chapter alone or for the book as a whole. In either case, I would like to have heard from Ake at greater length regarding future possibilities resulting from his approach. His analysis is workable, effective, and

impressively multidisciplinary; his insights are solid, imaginative, and fresh; the

9. In the tradition, the noun "standard" is usually taken to refer to the body of harmonically sophisticated, thirty-two-bar popular songs, many drawn from Broadway shows or Hollywood film scores, which with the blues have been the principle vehicle for "mainstream" jazz improvis- ers ever since the 1930s.

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implications for more work following his models, perhaps on other periods or key figures in jazz, are exciting. In this light, the brevity and modest scope of the conclusions are somewhat disappointing. Perhaps here, too, Ake's cred- itable simplicity of style and modesty of language are at play. Nevertheless, the quality of his insights and the freshness of his approach provide convincing evidence that context-sensitive analysis of "signification" can point toward new, post-positivist approaches to jazz studies. This flexibility is to be desired, for as Ake himself says: "Tradition is not an artifact left from the past-a listing of previous players and styles-but a continuously shifting enactment of what and who counts, for whom, and why" (p. 175).

Nicholas Gebhardt's Going for Jazz: Musical Practices and American Ideology is a densely argued, theoretically rigorous work of literary historiography that seeks to "articulate and qualify the practical logic of the jazz act" (p. 167) but ultimately reveals more about American ideology than about jazz practices or their meaning to participants. As Gebhardt himself says, his book "is not... a history of jazz in the usual sense. Nor is it a strictly musical analysis. Rather, it is positioned between the two" (p. 1). In fact, it is hardly "positioned between the two"; rather, it is a complex historiographic "reading" of several literary works on jazz topics and hence is positioned at some distance from either jazz history or from musical analysis. Gebhardt allows other texts'0 to provide the raw materials for his historical and musical analysis, and occupies himself, through readings of Sidney Bechet's Treat It Gentle, David Sudnow's Ways of the Hand, Leroi Jones's Blues People, and works by Ralph Ellison and Max Harrison," with constructing a theoretical argument about "the social struc- tures in the context of which such creative acts [as improvisation] are made" (p. 1).

This approach strikes even the informed reader as both heavily freighted with and focused upon literary history and criticism more than upon its titular topic. Gebhardt's own stated goal is to "to suggest a fundamental relation among the jazz act, American historical consciousness, and the state [which] requires a critical appraisal of black music in terms of industrial modes of pro- duction and the dynamics of American social life since 1865" (p. 31). As au- thors like David Ake have shown, jazz is a productive arena in which to analyze signification, and Going for Jazz provides good insights into jazz as a mirror for "American ideology." But, truly, this is a study of American literary

10. These other texts include historical, musicological, sociological, or literary works by Lawrence Levine, Eugene Genovese, Erving Goffman, Bruce Kapferer, Eileen Southern, David Stowe, John Litweiler, and Scott DeVeaux, among dozens of others.

11. Gebhardt cites Sidney Bechet, Treat It Gentle (New York: Da Capo Press, 1978); David Sudnow, Ways of the Hand: The Organization of Improvised Conduct (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1978; reprint 1995); Leroi Jones, Blues People (New York: William Morrow, 1963); Max Harrison, A Jazz Retrospect (London: David & Charles, 1976); and Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

(London: Penguin, 1965), among others.

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conceptions of "the social struggles that centered on slavery, the frontier, and freedom [which] formed the existential horizon for jazz acts and oriented the musical ways of jazz musicians" (p. 26). Actual musical "practices" are discussed primarily through reference to other scholars' analyses.

Gebhardt's hefty Introduction, "But Play, You Must," lays out the theoret- ical basis for the historiographic analyses that will follow. Both theory and terminology in Going for Jazz are very specific: in the following passage, for example, "virtuosity," "construction," "illusion," and "speed"-crucial concepts throughout the book-must all be understood according to unique definitions:

In Bechet's New Orleans hot jazz, the virtuosity of speed and that of illusion are subsumed into a radical virtuosity of construction; in Parker's bebop, the acts of construction and illusion depend on the virtuosity of speed; and finally, in the free jazz of Ornette Coleman, the construction and speed of the act are re- made through the virtuosity of illusion. This triad of construction, speed, and illusion informs not only the structure of this book, but operates within the in- terior structure of the jazz act itself. (p. 16)

What Gebhardt seems to be saying in the above passage is that Bechet's vir- tuoso genius lay in the realm of melodic conception (e.g., the content of his solos), that Parker's lay in the realm of technique (e.g., the speed of his solos), and that Coleman's lay in the realm of ensemble conception. If this is so, then Gebhardt's insights are not new. Gebhardt goes on to analyze not musical

procedures, but rather literary commentary upon these three artists. Em-

ploying each saxophonist as a test case, he suggests that Bechet's improvisa- tional procedures, Parker's technical innovation, and Coleman's ensemble

conception help reveal these changing American cultural attitudes as responses to changing cultural contexts. The stated goal is to "proceed dialectically be- tween the making of a given musical act and its ideological-symbolic frame"

(p. 27)-in short, to employ the musical content of jazz improvisation as a tool for understanding the music's cultural context, and vice versa. Gebhardt is right in saying that "this kind of analysis requires consideration of the process of mediation, a process that is usually ignored in formal musicological analysis or suppressed in more descriptive musical history" (p. 27). However, his is

hardly the first study to have corrected this problem: a number of other scholars have developed analytical approaches to precisely this "process of mediation."l2

12. To mention only a sampling: Paul Berliner, Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Ingrid Monson, Saying Something, Scott DeVeaux, The Birth ofBebop. Of these major works, Gebhardt cites the first two extensively, borrowing from their analyses and then arguing their limitations, while citations from DeVeaux and from Carl Woideck's Charlie Parker: His Music and His Life (Ann Arbor: University of

Michigan Press, 1996) supply the pith of his musical analysis of bebop.

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The presumption here seems to be that the analysis, because it is closely ar- gued and theoretically rigorous, must therefore be "persuasive," but that it does not matter whether the study reveals anything about how musicians, listeners, or other "insiders" perceived the activities under consideration. Musicians in Going for Jazz, like the "proletariat" in a Marxist analysis, are im- plicitly conceived as purely reactive, driven by cultural or symbolic forces and a socioeconomic model that are inevitable and comprehensive. Perhaps this is why Gebhardt's book feels "cold," and unreflective of the complexity, subjec- tivity, and individual human agency that make jazz work (and upon which Ake's analysis appropriately focuses).

Gebhardt's first chapter, "Sidney Bechet: The Virtuosity of Construction," uses as principal source Bechet's autobiography Treat It Gentle, viewing it as a "narrative about the making of a black consciousness" (p. 33). Treating a primary document in this fashion is, of course, a valid critical strategy, particu- larly for a historian of ideas, but it does suggest that virtually any post- Reconstruction African-American autobiography might serve as well, whether authored by a musician or not. The fact that Gebhardt is able convincingly to locate complex mythic-symbolic constructions in the memoir exemplifies his insights into the period. But despite Gebhardt's statement that the "virtuosity of the [jazz] act is constructive in that it establishes the most basic logic of relations-the dynamic-between the elements of a musical practice (pitch, tone, and accent) and the act's ideological conditions of production" (p. 38), he does not tell us very much regarding how Bechet himself either thought about or was understood to embody his own music. This lack is particularly obvious in comparison to Ake's subtle and persuasive analysis of the same artist, in which biography, demographics, musical description, and citations of the musician's own words are woven together. Unlike Ake, however, Geb- hardt seems in this chapter to be interested primarily in the literary, not the cultural, communal artistic, or sociological realities from which Bechet emerged.

Chapter 2, "Charlie Parker: The Virtuosity of Speed," is described as "an analysis of the underlying 'progressivism' of American exceptionalist ideology" and seeks to demonstrate "the relevance of ideological criticism to the study of the jazz act" (p. 77). Gebhardt cites Parker's "illusive character" and the "multitude of arguments concerning the identity of black Americans, the significance of jazz, and the value of creative action in American society" (p. 77) as difficulties in the formulation of this essay. He quotes from a tragic/ romantic portrait of Parker by Stanley Crouch (pp. 77 and 79) to articulate the valuable realization that the "progressivism" of Parker's musical philoso- phy and impact both served, and conflicted with, the Cold War cultural con- texts in which he operated. Gebhardt also makes a telling admission: "Throughout this chapter, therefore, Parker is an absent presence, a contra- dictory space, into which all the promise and failure of progressive desire is

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projected and through which the manifest powers of the individual are affirmed and valued" (p. 78).

This is a skillfully articulated but ultimately disingenuous statement: to Gebhardt, Parker is more important as a symbol-and a symbol of tragedy, romance, or "farce" (p. 78) at that-than he is as a creative artist responding to and shaping his cultural context through individual agency.13 As further ev- idence of this "absent presence," the core of chapter 2 is "Progress, the Frontier, and American Ideology," a disquisition on Frederick Jackson Turner's "frontier thesis" (pp. 90-102) in which Parker's name makes a single passing appearance (p. 91). Gebhardt seems more comfortable with the analy- sis of American history and the literature on jazz topics than with the music's content, processes, or contexts. His approach is defensible, but it weakens his overall argument: Gebhardt is excessively dependent upon other scholars' musical analyses and thus upon the insights those other analyses reveal. This propensity also leads him to prioritize literary sources at the expense of other types of evidence that might either complicate his analysis or contradict the totality of his conclusions.

Chapter 3, "Ornette Coleman: The Virtuosity of Illusion," is presented as the capstone to Gebhardt's thesis:

It is Coleman who enables us to understand, more fully, the achievements of Bechet and Parker. Only by understanding Coleman's decomposition of the jazz act into the illusion of a pure melody is it possible to grasp not only the vir- tuosic construction of hot jazz and the virtuosic speed of bebop, but the social conditions of their interpenetration. The logic of this decomposition of the act turns most fully on the question of human freedom and its meaning for the jazz musician. (p. 123)

Unfortunately, in this same chapter, the terminological density, theoretical complexity, and extramusical emphases come to a head, presenting a complex explanation of what is a fairly simple insight: "Coleman and his colleagues aimed to bring a renewed meaning to the jazz act by 'liberating' jazz melody from the objective harmonic and rhythmic conditions of the blues or the jazz standards" (p. 127).14 In other words, Coleman's bands sought to create a new template that provided freedom from normative expectations about pitch, repertoire, and the behavior of instruments and ensembles. In Jazz

13. Gebhardt's exploitation of Parker as such a symbol is especially grating because he cri-

tiques other narratives (including the film Bird and Ross Russell's book Bird Lives!) for precisely such "mystification," while ignoring more balanced studies that have consciously redressed such distortion; see especially Gary Giddins, Celebrating Bird: The Triumph of Charlie Parker (New York: Da Capo Press, 1998).

14. In this chapter, Gebhardt cites the following, among many others: Fredric Jameson, Paul

Boyer, Noam Chomsky, Elaine Scarry, Pierre Bourdieu, Karl Marx, Jean Baudrillard, Paolo Virno, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Susan Langer, Erving Goffinan, and Gilles Deleuze.

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Cultures's "Regendering Jazz: Ornette Coleman and the New York Scene in the Late 1950s," David Ake demonstrates this much more clearly and with more far-reaching insight. Were Gebhardt to omit an elaborate superstructure of extramusical reference, he would add little to our understanding of how, or even why, Coleman himself, as an independent artist not solely controlled by the forces of production, made the choices that he did.

"Epilogue: A Tune beyond Ourselves" pulls back from some of the knotti- est complexities that precede it; had Gebhardt employed throughout the

clarity and brevity found here, Going for Jazz would be much stronger- if much briefer. But his emphasis upon critique of important recent studies

(pp. 168-70), his drastic oversimplification of the role of Wynton Marsalis (p. 171), and his questionable assertion that other studies "place too little em- phasis on the social relations among and the various traits and values brought by the musicians to any jazz performance" (p. 173) distract us from his in-

sights into the relationship between American cultural symbols and percep- tions and the literary associations of jazz.

Goingfor Jazz is a closely argued, theoretically rigorous work of literary his- toriography about jazz as a symbol of American ideology, but it does not ulti- mately reveal very much about jazz practice, creative artistry, or meaning for its participants. It finds apt and intriguing connections between the cultural

perspectives expressed in writings about jazz and in the autobiographical nar- ratives that jazz musicians constructed. But it does not speak to the musicians' own philosophies, procedures, or perceptions, and it does not have much to say about the music. Its shortcomings are especially evident in contrast to Jazz Cultures, an imaginative study which combines a player's expressive insight and a scholar's analytical rigor. David Ake has given us here a text whose clear prose, methodological flexibility, historical acuity, and innovative synthesis provide a model with great possibilities for future jazz scholarship.

CHRISTOPHER SMITH

Tonal Pitch Space, by Fred Lerdahl. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. xvii, 411 pp.

In Tonal Pitch Space (henceforth TPS), Fred Lerdahl continues a project he

began with the highly regarded linguist Ray Jackendoff almost thirty years ago, a collaboration that led to the publication in 1983 of A Generative Theory of Tonal Music (henceforth GTTM).1 The work carried out in GTTM was characterized by a number of different themes, many of which were adap-

1. Fred Lerdahl and Ray Jackendoff, A Generative Theory of Tonal Music (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983).