The Fierce Urgency of Now: Improvisation, Rights, and the Ethics of Cocreation by Daniel Fischlin, Ajay Heble, George Lipsitz, and: People Get Ready: The Future of Jazz is Now! ed. by Ajay Heble, Rob Wallace

Abstract

Daniel Fischlin, Ajay Heble, and George Lipsitz. The Fierce Urgency of Now: Improvisation, Rights, and Ethics of Cocreation. Durham and London: Duke up, 2013. 292 pp. $23.95. Ajay Heble and Rob Wallace, eds. People Get Ready: The Future of Jazz Now! Durham and London: Duke up, 2013. 312 pp. $25.99. Since turn from past century, after completed its decades-long ascension from ribald musical novelty to what so many listeners consider soundtrack of refinement and urbanity, it has become commonplace to suggest that music isn't just a notable artform but, more broadly, a model for social organization as well. What, after all, might illustrate egalitarian, idealized set of interactions we all crave than a music that, at its very core, insists upon collective improvisation and unification of individual voices in constant democratic exchange? The ur-text for this line of thinking may be Ken Burns's mammoth nineteen-hour documentary Jazz, which first appeared on pbs in 2001. The first words we hear in film come from trumpeter (and frequent evangelist) Wynton Marsalis, who tells us jazz music objectifies America. It's an artform that can give us a painless way of understanding ourselves. Expanding on this broad claim, Marsalis explains that since group extemporization tradition's aesthetic centre, then naturally music constitutes most essential embodiment of American necessity of negotiating diverse agendas. That negotiation, Marsalis concludes triumphantly, is art. If gospel of Burns and Marsalis--as influenced by prophets Albert Murray and Stanley Crouch, both notable African American intellectuals who earlier described in this redemptive manner--is pleasing and unthreatening to many, its ameliorative tone has also earned its share of criticism, not least for self-congratulatory way it fuses music's triumph with an imaginary move toward cultural pluralism. And as many have argued, very way that Burns and Marsalis tell artistic story of amidst their democratic frame indicative of their gospel's problems. They focus conservatively, that is, on styles that primarily emphasize aesthetic qualities and blues and on those that at some point achieved commercial success, as performed by a line of artists beginning with Louis Armstrong and proceeding through Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, and Miles Davis to Marsalis himself. Those more avant-garde or hybridized styles, like free or fusion, get short shrift, discussed only briefly as less important offspring within music's genealogy. One effect of these choices to marginalize importance of those artists potentially threatening to mainstream audiences most invested in triumphant narratives of American democracy and capitalism. Note, for instance, disparity in narrative screen time Burns accords to white swing clarinetist Artie Shaw, jetsetting star of Swing Era, versus that given to politically outspoken African American bassist Charles Mingus. Or register how shamelessly film neglects legendary Chicago-based musicians' collective, Association for Advancement of Creative Musicians, a network of avant-garde artists who have successfully self-governed their activity and mentored across generations for past fifty years. Moreover, while Burns film quiets some of history's most politically incendiary figures, documentary's warped chronology--covering 1900 to 1960 in its first seventeen hours and then squeezing four decades into its final episode--also consigns the tradition primarily to past, rendering heterogeneity of music's complicated history as a stable canon rather than a lively, discordant set of practices that continues still. The two volumes under review in this essay confront these problems extensively. Together, they argue for a more complicated imagining of music's capacity for social organization and ethical interaction, as they also challenge both rigidity of Ken Burns canon and illusion of its finite status. …