Jazz, Modernism, and the Black Creative Tradition

Abstract

In the famous opening to Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, the music-loving narrator locates jazz at the site of cultural erasure. In the acutely perceptible clamor of black music-embodied in a recording of Louis Armstrong-he discerns sound beyond white imagination, what he names a poetry out of [the] invisible.' Ellison's positioning of jazz in the realm of the unknown raises a perplexing challenge to the historian, musicologist, and critic alike. How does the academic observer, regardless of racial background, break the codes of an insider culture whose creative formations so often constitute subversive acts, what Zora Neale Hurston has called telling lies?2 Without reducing interpretive authority to cultural provincialism or simple-minded racism (to experience blackness, one must live and look the part), one might conjecture that conventional procedures simply won't do. Not only must scholars develop skills in historical research and musical analysis; they must also be sufficiently grounded in the varied and elusive meanings of cultural expressions that consistently refer to matters of racial difference. Despite the caveats of Ellison and others,3 jazz has only rarely benefited from studies matching its complexity and sophistication. Dominated by hagiographic portraits, patronizing celebrations of performative mastery, and bloodless formal analyses of a canonical repertory, jazz music has been repeatedly cast in terms that tell us more about the writers' own preoccupations than about the expressions they purport to observe. Burton W. Peretti is clearly privy to these many obstacles, and perhaps even inspired by them. For rather than carving out a narrow territory for close examination, he undertakes the formidable task of revising a broad stretch of the music's early history. As its dramatic title suggests, The Creation of Jazz proposes nothing less than to refashion our understanding of the music's emergence. That the study succumbs to many of the same pitfalls that it implicitly critiques makes