Beyond a Lush Life: Representation and Performativity at America's [Only] Queer Jazz Festival

Abstract

In 2014, the William Way Community Center, a nonprofit organization aimed at supporting LGBTQ+ communities in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, set about organizing a jazz festival to highlight LGBTQ+ musicians who were active throughout the United States. The event would span four days and include interactive panels, concerts, and individual interviews, which took place in different venues around the city. Organizers christened the festival OutBeat, seemingly a tip of the hat to the popular jazz publication DownBeat. The title of the event, however, would later seem secondary to its bold subtitle: “America's First Queer Jazz Festival.” After the reveal of OutBeat's subtitle in July 2014, pianist Fred Hersch wrote an open letter to Jazz Times, remarking: I do not play “gay jazz”—if there were such a thing. And I certainly do not self-identify as “queer”—I also would have preferred that I been consulted in this key marketing decision as it came as a surprise to me. It may be that “LGBT” is not well-known as a descriptive term outside of progressive circles; “gay” is not inclusive enough, but “queer” is clear to all—whether in a positive or negative connotation. At any rate, I do hope that this festival will explore the impact of LGBT influence in many aspects of the jazz world and feature some inspired music.1With the publication of Hersch's open letter, OutBeat's subtitle—considered seemingly innocuous at the time—became the site of a metaphorical battleground, dividing festival organizers against musicians and sparking critical discussions of both self and community identification and generalization. Hersch's letter raises two points of opposition to the subtitle. The first was the suggestion that there could exist a kind of queer jazz that is, in fact, different from a distinct “nonqueer” jazz. The second was that the festival's subtitle may have imposed a blanket label on both musicians and concertgoers that did not accurately represent their identities. Identifying under a queer umbrella was a point of contention that was seen as an act of erasure by some participants. These issues, raised before the beginning of OutBeat, would continue to plague the event after its conclusion and lead to many unanswered questions about the future of such festivals within the world of jazz.Subtitle aside, OutBeat went forward as planned from September 18 to September 21, 2014. Performances were given by major artists such as Hersch, Terri Lyne Carrington, Bill Stewart, and Andy Bey. Online reviews of the festival are positive, though somewhat scant. Some point to the necessity of such an event. One refers to OutBeat as a “successful experiment linking a sociocultural movement like gay rights with the performance arts.”2 Another deems the festival as “necessary” for the jazz community to be seen as a conduit for social change. Despite these positive responses, the 2014 OutBeat festival remains the only time a queer jazz festival has ever been produced in the United States. After the 2014 event, Christopher Bartlett, director of the William Way Community Center, spoke of plans to continue the festival in the coming years.3 Such plans never materialized. The sole evidence of these sentiments—and of the existence of the festival in general—remains relegated to a sparse digital footprint and firsthand accounts from artists and concertgoers who were present.OutBeat's creation highlights an important and looming issue of representation within the world of jazz. While it's true that there have been a great many self-identified LGBTQ+ musicians in the history of the genre, there is still a lack of fully formed historiographical accounts of queer musical and extramusical (social) contributions.4 OutBeat afforded jazz musicians who were members of the LGBTQ+ community the opportunity not only to showcase their talents but also to play and exist in affirming and accepting spaces. Indeed, marketing and promotion framed the OutBeat Jazz Festival as a distinct and intentional LGBTQ+ safe space that freely recognized the respective identities (musical and otherwise) of both artists and performers.In this article, I explore how LGBTQ+ jazz artists negotiate space and effectively queer performance arenas. I argue that queer jazz musicians challenge heteronormative ideals of playing jazz by creating spaces—both real and imagined—for individual and collective performances of the self. Specifically, I focus my argument on the OutBeat festival, drawing on subsequent interviews after the festival and footage from the event. By analyzing performances from headlining musicians, I consider what it might look like to queer jazz by allowing for more diversity and difference within the genre through not only spatial/temporal dimensions of performance but also through the physical selfhood enacted by the performer. Exploring these models is crucial in our ever-changing landscape, as we move toward dismantling generalizing narratives often perpetuated within the jazz canon. Considering the myriad ways in which queerness is performed can be viewed as the beginnings of reparative scholarship, in response to historiographical approaches that have oftentimes marginalized LGBTQ+ people in jazz studies.Research centering LGBTQ+ musicians remains a largely unexplored area in jazz studies. In recent years, however, there has been a large uptick, primarily in work coming out of nonmusic-centered disciplines. Although there have been a great number of queer jazz artists within the canon, earlier research largely relegated their sexualities to tokenistic descriptions, and artists rarely received the “canonization” commonly bestowed upon straight jazz performers.5 One of the most prominent examples has been the narrative surrounding Billy Strayhorn. A prolific composer and pianist best known for his collaborations with close friend and contemporary Duke Ellington, Strayhorn is one of the most oft-cited members of the LGBTQ+ community in jazz. However, Strayhorn's existence in the jazz canon seems to hinge on his relationship with a straight collaborator, all the while “straightening” his sexual identity. As Lisa Barg writes, “Strayhorn's sexual identity required that he work in the shadow of a collaborator, a distanced, but deeply empathetic and creative space within which his voice merged with and gave shape to the voices of others.”6 Here, Barg identifies the precarity of queerness. Strayhorn can only exist by association with Ellington. Remove Ellington from the narrative and historically orienting Strayhorn within the (heterosexual) canon becomes a difficult endeavor.Additionally, issues of self-identification often plague LGBTQ+ jazz artists. While nuanced discussions of artists’ gender and sexuality can provide scholars with new and interesting frameworks by which to view historic contributions, previous discussions surrounding this issue argued for less speculative models of inquiry. Notably, this tension has occurred in certain considerations of older jazz artists. As Sherrie Tucker states in her article “When Did Jazz Go Straight?”: [Attempting to construct queer histories from nonidentified queer artists reduces jazz studies to a] “Where's Waldo” school of GLBT historiography, in which “spotting the queers” becomes the object, and research becomes an exercise of historically informed “gaydar” that fails to interrogate the historicity of straightness, not to mention the historical and cultural specificity of the closet.7I do not read Tucker's argument here as an indictment of constructions of queer histories on “nonidentified queer artists” but rather a call for a more refined approach to queerness in jazz studies. For Tucker, nonnuanced accounts of musicians that go against the normative grain do not address issues of heteropatriarchy. In fact, these kinds of discussions often reinforce heteropatriarchal notions by considering straightness as a dominant force, which queerness is seen as both directly subservient and oppositional to.Many narratives of queer jazz artists have centered exclusively on men. Further, consideration of queerness in jazz studies is often measured against characteristics of Black hypermasculinity.8 This idea of hypermasculinity, however, is not simply a Black form of toxic masculinity. Indeed, Nichole Rustin-Paschal identifies this specific type of jazz hypermasculinity as Black jazzmasculinity, a cultural understanding of how Black jazz musicians expressed emotion and sense of belonging within the world.9 In describing a section of Wynton Marsalis's book To a Young Jazz Musician, Rustin-Paschal writes: “[Marsalis] teaches that jazzmasculinity is primarily the aesthetic expression of the musician's own heterosexual power and pleasure” and that he considers jazz “grounded in heteronormative experience of homosociality.”10 While I certainly do not consider Marsalis's conception of jazz and jazzmasculinity to be the only, or even the predominant, narrative on masculinity and jazz, I see Rustin-Paschal's summation of Marsalis's comments as a useful basis by which to consider how canons construct heteronormative notions of jazz performance.Along these lines, Rustin-Paschal also considers how women are realized and constructed within the framework of jazzmasculinity. Indeed, she notes that women, too, used jazzmasculinity in seemingly oppositional spaces. Rustin-Paschal asks us to consider the subversive ways women used forms of heteronormative masculinity to operate within racialized and gendered areas.11 Rustin-Paschal's usage of Halberstam's theory of female masculinity allows scholars to consider such forms of jazzmasculinity as sites of potential queer expressions. In doing so, we might begin to better understand the contributions of queer women operating within nonheteronormative spaces. Blues musicians like Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey—whose identities were important parts of their compositional outputs—can be further considered by music studies using such a lens.12 Rustin-Paschal's framework also becomes useful when constructing new narratives that address the intersectional marginalization that queer women in jazz faced throughout the creation of many jazz historiographies. Women are often acknowledged for their roles in the expansion of jazz, but at the same time, they are often overlooked as invisible in comparison to the men in the genre, unless deemed, as Tammy L. Kernodle writes, an “exceptional woman.”13 Within jazz historiography, there seems to be a clear absence in both “canon” creation and literature of the contribution of “nonexceptional” queer women. Besides leaving a tremendous scholarly gap through a reluctance to engage critically with the works of queer people, especially queer women, this omission further enforces the hegemonic structures that uplift misogyny and homophobia within the jazz arena. To this end, I examine the OutBeat festival with the intention of engaging with the historicity of “straightness” that Tucker suggests and using Rustin's construction of jazzmasculinity as a way of working through and against traditional notions of hypermasculinity in the jazz arena. In a sense, I see Rustin-Paschal's concept of jazzmasculinity as helpful to understanding baseline notions of jazz performance and audience interaction. Queering jazzmasculinity then reconfigures these performances and allows for a deeper conversation on the ways in which queer musicians express versions of the self for audiences.In what follows, I analyze two performances from the 2014 OutBeat Jazz Festival, “Happy Walk” performed by the Bill Stewart Quartet and “Norman” performed by Andrew D'Angelo's Gay Disco Trio. With these discussions, I consider how both performers operate within the confines of the jazz space, specifically the queer jazz space of the 2014 OutBeat festival. By examining both artists’ musical performances and conversational performances (set banter), I suggest that both Stewart and Norman engage in performance on multiple simultaneous levels, specifically performances of musicality, community, and selfhood that are meant to engage audience members and create a collective sense of belonging within a shared safe space. I have chosen these performances not only for their easy accessibility on online platforms, a feature that I believe expands the communal jazz space, but also for the way these clips explore both the spatial and temporal aspects of audience experience. Many of the available videos from the OutBeat festival are spliced into compilations; some seem to have been recorded on amateur video cameras, without the usage of high-quality sound recording technology. While this article does not extensively investigate the role of visual technologies in jazz community-making, I regard the filmed OutBeat sets as examples of what José Esteban Muñoz terms queer ephemera, or fleeting moments of performativity that continuously (re)construct meaning for concert viewers both inside and outside of the concert space.14Bill Stewart's performance of his chart “Happy Walk” is a compelling example of the types of intersections between jazz performance and queer performativity that were made possible at OutBeat. Stewart's choice to perform “Happy Walk” during the festival is notable. No recording of the chart existed before this festival, and to date, the OutBeat performance is the only publicly available live recording of the composition (though it did also appear on Stewart's 2015 album Space Squid). It is unknown why so few recordings of “Happy Walk” exist widely, whether due to a personal choice by Stewart or a lack of easily accessible recorded materials available online. However, we can view Stewart's performance and banter with the audience as a useful example of the hybridization of queer performativity and jazzmasculinity. He starts with a joke at the expense of his band members—who happen to all identify as straight—making fun of their “heterosexual tendencies” to the joy of the audience. By doing this, Stewart is again utilizing a kind of insider-outsider dichotomy, one that centers queer aesthetics (specifically his ribbing of heteronormative behaviors) over mainstream dominant systems. In this performance of banter enacted by Stewart, the slang of referring to members of his quintet as “the breeders” perhaps provides him with a greater amount of queer cultural currency. By using these terms and phrases more commonly used in LGBTQ+ communities, Stewart is not only able to establish rapport with his largely LGBTQ+ audience but also fashions a subversive version of the hypersexualized space; one in which queer sexualities and desire are prioritized.15After the banter, Stewart briefly introduces “Happy Walk” to the audience. He prefaces the tune by saying, “It's like you know when you're, you know, walking and you're happy.” However, when he says the word “happy,” he allows his wrist to go limp, eliciting a few scattered laughs from the audience. In my reading of this moment—whether intentional or not—some of the audience view Stewart's hand motion as being subtly coded as queer, specifically believing him to be engaging with the clichéd “limp wrist” trope.16 The limp wrist is a pejorative hand motion used to signify cismale effeminacy. It is this hand motion and the brevity of the tune's introduction that allows for a kind of liminality in the listener's perception of “Happy Walk.” Specifically, the hand motion ostensibly acts as a kind of inside joke for the audience members on what the song may (or may not) actually be about. Though there is a suggestion through Stewart's actions and linguistic cues, the audience cannot ever be wholly privy to the song's subject matter. Likely, Stewart's performance of this chart during OutBeat and his subsequent explanation can be read as his awareness of community and security within communal space. Both he and the audience are able to engage in meaningful and intimate expressions of selfhood within a geography of safety—a festival catered toward LGBTQ+ people.Notably, Stewart's performance of the chart itself does not portray any noticeable markers of musical “difference.” Indeed, Stewart's firm wrist throughout the number creates a sharp contrast to the stereotypical limp wrist he employed during the banter. The composition, which starts with Stewart maintaining a traditional slow-tempo funk pattern eventually transitions to a lively, improvised solo section. Following extended solos by saxophonist Seamus Blake and pianist Bill Carrothers, Stewart then heavily embellishes the middle section of the tune. “Happy Walk” culminates with Stewart playing fills over the main melody before returning to the original slow-funk tempo. Against the early banter established by Stewart, it is easy to consider a dichotomous nonheteronormative versus heteronormative relationship between the musical material presented by Stewart and the spoken material during the tune's introduction. However, I read this perceived dichotomy as another form of jazzmasculinity. Instead of a jazzmasculinity marked by heterosexual posturing and desire in performance aesthetic, Stewart uses a refashioned hypersexuality, in his banter on “breeders,” that then supports the aesthetic desires in his performance. Put more simply, Stewart reconstructs tenants of jazzmasculinity by fitting his banter, centered on queerness, into the previously heteronormative structure of jazz belonging. By doing this, he reaffirms jazzmasculinity by drawing on hypersexualized, homosocial interactions while at the same time challenging its aesthetic makeup by invoking queer characteristics.On first read, one may consider the stark contrast between Stewart's set banter and performance to amount to a kind of musical code-switching. While the joke and the tune's title are implied to be coded as queer, his playing style never entirely deviates from normative models of jazz-funk playing. Every hit and fill seem to be evenly placed and neatly realized within the composition, even during the improvisation. As I have suggested above, Stewart's performance suggests a queer subjectivity, but one that seems able to fit within (hetero)normative jazz asethetics, evidenced in a straight-ahead musical performance of “Happy Walk.”Saxophonist Andrew D'Angelo and his trio (here billed as Andrew D'Angelo's Gay Disco Trio) also employ a method of seemingly “insider” storytelling in their banter. D'Angelo tells an anecdote about overhearing a lesbian musician backstage proclaim herself to be “a baseball dyke” when asked about an injury she recently received. After completing the anecdote, he tells the audience: “That's what this festival's all about.” Like Stewart, D'Angelo sees this interaction as a kind of communal bonding experience, where musicians and concertgoers express common identities in both storytelling and music-making together. However, D'Angelo expresses his sexuality in more explicit and taxonomic terms than Stewart. During his set, D'Angelo also refers to himself as a “cuss-word homo.”17 In this moment, he reclaims a pejorative as a self-identifier in an effort to connect to the OutBeat audience members. The labeling that D'Angelo uses for himself shows that he recognizes the many ways that sexual orientation and gender expression coincide with other aspects of life outside of musical experience, and he also recognizes how such labels can act as both markers of division and points of connectivity.After his banter, D'Angelo chooses to play a composition written about his grandfather, titled “Norman.” This was not D'Angelo's first time performing “Norman.” There exist several performances of the chart from before 2014, and it also appears on D'Angelo's 2014 album (also titled Norman). However, none of these performances start with the kind of community-building intro that D'Angelo employs here. The piece is a medium tempo, alto-fronted composition with a mix between ethereality and groove, backed by a free, rubato-style rhythm section. The piece provides a jarring contrast to the group's name. Within the entirety of D'Angelo's set, no disco nor disco-adjacent songs are ever played. “Norman” is more reminiscent of a track off Coltrane's A Love Supreme than what would be expected from a group called the Gay Disco Trio.We can again read D'Angelo's set through the lens of jazzmasculinity, as he both subverts and affirms the aesthetic values present within this conceptualization of heteronormativity in jazz. First, his banter establishes a bonding that draws on levels of collective experience.18 Generally, performances of jazzmasculinity draw on both the audience's and the musicians’ shared values in order to further both the musical bonding experience and the sociopolitical aims associated with expressing Black masculinity. D'Angelo's version of this substitutes Black heterosexual aesthetics with LGBTQ+ aesthetics. He reclaims a labeling system that has been forcibly imposed by dominant heteronormative society. Second, D'Angelo's piece “Norman” adheres to aesthetics of jazzmasculinity in its form and genre. Free jazz's connections to heteronormativity are well documented, and the expression of homosocial relationships via brotherhood are explicit in much of the repertoire.19 In terms of rhythmic characteristics, the pulse of the piece is almost nonexistent within the drums. The bass plays a groove that rhythmically feels disconnected from the alto line (though both lines are continuously harmonically connected). The overall playing style between the three musicians almost never feels in sync throughout the performance, creating an undeniable tension and feeling of disconcertedness that is present until the conclusion of the chart. In “Norman,” a sense of normalcy is never reached, and difference reigns supreme within the framework of the piece. Though the stylistic difference between these two performances is evident, both D'Angelo and Stewart perform similarly constructed ideas of queer jazzmasculinity throughout the duration of their sets.My discussion of the OutBeat festival has presented communal experience as an integral component of understanding the aesthetics of jazzmasculinity by queer performers. Seeing as analyses of communality can often forego individuality, in this section, I consider understandings of community and audience presented by two of OutBeat's headliners, Bill Stewart and Fred Hersch. In my correspondence with both Steward and Hersch, they separately identified jazz as a genre without much draw for queer audiences. Stewart stated that he thought jazz “was a tough sell for a gay audience” and that he “didn't think [the festival] brought out gay people very much.”20 Hersch, on the other hand, stated he thought LGBTQ+ audiences were more likely to “enjoy music with words.”21 I mention these statements not as evidence of any sort of genre-based truths. Rather, I suggest that deconstructing how these two artists view community allows us to further probe enaction of jazzmasculinity and performativity by queer jazz musicians. Both Stewart's and Hersch's comments display an understanding that bonding and grouping are integral parts of belonging in jazz aesthetics. Though the comments were suppositious, as neither musician could literally poll the audience in terms of gender identity and sexual orientation in relation to jazz interest, they can act as a gateway into how queer artists may choose to connect with listeners. In a sense, Stewart's aforementioned storytelling might be read as a point of relation. Rather than rely on his audience's prior (or lack of prior) knowledge of jazz, Stewart can engage in another kind of performance: a performance of both selfhood and community that draws in queer concertgoers regardless of musical engagement. This example of engagement in queer jazz performance not only allows for an extension of jazz spaces and who is able to access them but also extends the notion of an ideal “community” of jazz listeners posited by both Hersch and Stewart.Though personal accounts of OutBeat by both Hersch and Stewart also characterize the festivalgoers as having listened rather passively, there did appear to be at least minimal engagement by audiences.22 In fact, in online footage of Stewart's performance, an audience member is heard asking Stewart about a tune title between charts. As mentioned previously, audiences also received Stewart's banter warmly, garnering—what seems to be on video—a substantial number of laughs. While I do not assume that these are indicative of a fully active and participatory audience, I question whether passivity is not indicative of a more involved process of individualized meaning-making by OutBeat audience members. With this in mind, it may be more fruitful to examine the ways in which OutBeat allows for people to imagine and create their own geographies for jazz engagement outside of socially (or physically) constructed boundaries imposed by generalization.One way that we may begin to think about how such geographies can be configured comes via the pivotal work of gender studies and performance scholar Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Sedgwick considers the ways in which performance is used in the everyday. Summarizing the work of Judith Butler, Sedgwick states performance reaches its peak when it is, in fact, at its “least explicit, most of all when it isn't even embodied in actual words.”23 Reading audience engagement as falling within a spectrum of activity and passivity provides a fruitful understanding of the ways in which performance is understood. Activity and collectivity are ways of existing in a space, but inactivity and passivity also tell us stories about being and existence. From this framework, I suggest that the OutBeat audience may have viewed the festival as using multiple modes of performance and listening to construct an ideal queer space. This is realized by performances of both tangible, verbal utterance (sound and connectivity) and what I refer to as silent utterance (nonsonic existence within space). I define silent utterance as nonauditory markers of being in the world. Though these moments are unable to be heard in a traditional sense, I suggest that body acts without the addition of speech acts can be just as powerful a mode of support and community as verbal speech. It is through this that I read Hersch's and Stewart's audiences as examples of extremely complex performance and community systems that, perhaps, resist being categorized as interested or not interested in jazz based on generalization.Further considering the creation of imagined queer geographies, I turn to OutBeat as a space for belonging for both its performers and its listeners. In response to the creation of OutBeat, Wolfram Knauer, director of Jazzinstitut Darmstadt, remarked in Jazz Times: I was curious about how it would feel to be in an environment clearly open and conscious of the importance of one's own sexuality, no matter what, for the creation but also for the perception of jazz. . . . Music, and especially jazz, after all, is about deep, intimate emotion, about the ability of the artists to express their own inner feelings as open and “out” as possible, no matter who they are.24Knauer's suggestion that music-making in a queer safe space might yield a more honest musical result from some artists is two-sided. On the one hand, his statement again suggests that jazz is not traditionally a space that takes into account different sexualities, as I have argued above. However, his statement also suggests that being in the physical space of the Outbeat festival might change how LGBTQ+ musicians create sound. Here, this statement ignores a crucial part of world-making in jazzmasculinity. One has no way of knowing whether a change in place or space affects the “openness” expressed by musicians. Though this may be true for some LGBTQ+ musicians, not all hinge constructions of identity or selfhood upon queer utopian conditions. This seems doubly true for famous musicians like Hersch and Stewart. In an interview with the New York Times, Hersch talks about his coming to terms with other people's perception of his musical style. He states: I used to think, I want them to say something else, because I felt like that was a kind of, Oh, yeah, you're gay—so of course you play lyrically and you're one of the great ballad players. Of course. But now I just don't care at all what people think. I think music should be beautiful. There's nothing wrong with beauty. I'm attracted to beauty and lyricism, but I don't play the way I do because I'm gay. I play the way I do because I'm Fred.25Hersch's ability to put aside how others interpret his musical style while also freely expressing his own musical thought suggests a level of creativity in his own mind independent from specific spatial considerations. Though performing at OutBeat might be considered empowering by some participants due to its communal experience, it may be unfair to consider it a space where any sort of “true” or “authentic” queer construction can best take place.When I interviewed Hersch in 2020, I asked about the controversy sparked by his Jazz Times letter about the OutBeat festival. Hersch remarked that his issue with the use of the word “queer” mostly had to do with a generational gap in identifying sexuality with music-making.26 Indeed, younger generations have reclaimed the formerly pejorative term as an umbrella for any person outside of the sphere of heteronormative sexuality. However, Hersch's letter highlights a point that has been raised by both Sherrie Tucker and by Hersch himself. While some members of the LGBTQ+ community tie their sexual orientation into their own musical compositions or styles of playing, others see sexual preference as a more separated concept. I later asked how he felt about his participation in the festival and his performances at