Jazz Criticism Research Articles

Breaking boundaries in festival programming

In Germany, the modern jazz festival programmer descended from earlier multifaceted roles established during the interwar and war periods as cultivated by both German and international jazz critics, record collectors, and impresarios. While impresarios historically occupied multiple roles as fans, critics, and producers; they often inhabited the quintessential cosmopolitan role of (white) male jazz critic and discoverer of Black musical creativity. This article examines the impact of the legacy of this archetype in the German context, with the case study of JazzFest Berlin. In particular, we trace the particular contours of Joachim-Ernst Berendt’s (1922–2000) embodied enactment of masculinity within the postwar German jazz festival world, beginning with the seminal founder of the JazzFest Berlin. Drawing on feminist initiatives of the first American women jazz organizers, we compare this female-centric legacy with the particular style and ideologies created by Berliner Jazztage programmer Nadin Deventer, the first female programmer of this historic festival, who brings an innovative and socially engaged approach, in part by staging less constrained gender expectations. Through interviews and an examination of publications, programme reviews, and more, we reveal how the figure of the jazz impresario has been disrupted by increased attention to the roles of professional women programmers who consciously embrace diverse competencies and seek greater recognition of the intersectional barriers for women, women of colour, and foreigners within the German jazz scene.

Definitory Characteristics of Pianistic Expression in the Contemporary Jazz

"The general fundamental approach of improvisation, of the creative moment in jazz leads succinctly to the question of whether this phenomenon is a product or a process. The jazz perception as a product assumes that the recordings accompanied by the related transcripts represent that product (final) which is used for analytical purposes by taking harmonical-melodical characteristics. It is important to remember the aspect by which these transcripts do not fully express the essence of improvised thinking and elaboration but are only a starting point in identifying key characteristic features. The possibility of representing a replica of the artistic act produced on stage, however, is not a real one. Visualizing the improvisation process as a practical way of creative performance is therefore an essential aspect of the artistic act. This should be considered together with the product, especially when synthesizing models or indicators that define the personal style of the instrumentalist. Previously, some jazz critics defined the vision of the two modes as an inseparable dichotomy, which is the basis of multi-dimensional analytical possibilities. Beginning in the ’60s, jazz is marked in the expression and elaboration of pianistics by Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, Bill Evans and later by Keith Jarrett. They implement a variety of contemporary jazz elements, melodical-harmonic expressions that will be taken over and will obviously lead to a new evolutionary stage. Keywords: jazz, pianistic improvisation, spontaneity, creativity, harmonic knowledge, contemporary"

The Victoria Spivey Collection

This "From the Archives" essay offers a critical contextualisation of the IJS's Victoria Spivey Collection, together with a supplementary bibliography of the singer's jazz criticism in the magazine Record Research and other jazz journals.

Both Directions at Once

In Both Directions at Once, an album lost for almost 40 years, John Coltrane presents a constellation of musical tradition, themes, composition and improvisation, in dialectical opposition. This article imagines Coltrane as a sonic philosopher of oppositions and the album—named after Coltrane’s quote in which he attempts ‘starting a sentence in the middle, and then going to the beginning and the end of it at the same time… both directions at once’—as his philosophical treatise. Borrowing from biographers, musicologists and jazz critics, this contribution argues that in the album, the music engages with itself rather than seeking resolution or finality. In other words, Coltrane’s dialectical aesthetic drives the aesthetic. Both Directions at Once is sound focused on sonically opposing forces. It is an attempt by a deep thinker to present contradictions and oppositions between musical polarities that may create new potentialities. What listeners hear is Coltrane, the philosopher, striving toward a multidirectional aesthetic that furnishes music unshackled from the conditions of possibility.

Archival Silence in the Collections of Dietrich Schulz-Köhn

Archival Silence in the Collections of Dietrich Schulz-Köhn

Jazz Feminism is to Soul as Purple is to Lavender

Jazz Feminism is to <i>Soul</i> as Purple is to Lavender

Jazz Diasporas: Race, Music, and Migration in Post-World War II ParisJazz Diaspora: Music and Globalisation

Jazz Diasporas: Race, Music, and Migration in Post-World War II ParisJazz Diaspora: Music and Globalisation

Bluesen i Sverige före 1960

The Blues in Sweden before 1960: varying conceptions of a genre This article presents a review of the various meanings and shapes of blues as a genre in Sweden c. 1920–1960, drawing primarily on presentations in newspapers and jazz magazines, and recordings. Blues has been construed as an African American music, rising from specific social conditions; as an American music, a source for and subgenre of jazz; and as a part of music in the international modern society in general. In 1923 blues was introduced as a new dance, and many new tunes were promoted as blues; medium tempo, chromaticism and altered chords seem to be the distinguishing traits. From the mid-thirties, blues was discussed as a predecessor to jazz as well as a jazz genre format (‘12-bar blues’). The rising interest in blues is followed through audience reactions in press, recordings, and jazz criticism. Jazz critics tended to promote country blues and Bessie Smith as authentic forms, while Josh White’s performances during his annual tours in the fifties were praised for his consummate artistry. The trad jazz boom, boogie woogie piano, skiffle and rock’n’roll all used the 12-bar format. In parallel, blues was also an occasional pop song denomination signalling melancholy. Identifying as a blues singer was not an option; this would change during the sixties. Four fields of tension are identified: blues as a specific expression for African American experience vs. blues as a genre suited for Western modernity in general; blues as a subgenre to jazz vs. blues as an autonomous sphere; blues considered as genuine folk music vs. blues as popular music; and blues as a genre of mainly historical significance vs. blues as having contemporary relevance.

Review: Songbooks: The Literature of American Popular Music, by Eric Weisbard

Review: <i>Songbooks: The Literature of American Popular Music</i>, by Eric Weisbard

Sweet Science, Sweet Thunder: Jazz, Pugilism, and the Fine Art of Criticism

ABSTRACT This article proceeds from the observation that language describing the performances of jazz musicians and prizefighters with reference to one another is common to both sports writing and jazz criticism. I take this as an invitation to explore the historical context, critical significance, and musical implications of the interrelationship of these two crafts, with particular focus on Miles Davis's score to the documentary film A Tribute to Jack Johnson (1971). This begins with an unpacking of Davis's well-documented commitment to “the sweet science” in light of discourses of race and masculinity in mid-century US jazz culture. I then offer a close reading of one of the Jack Johnson session recordings as a musical analogue of the unique boxing cadence of Muhammad Ali, a contemporary athlete who embodied the Black Power-era reimagination of Jack Johnson realized in Davis's score/album.

Old Wine, New Bottles: Record Collecting, Jazz Reissues, and the Jazz Tradition

ABSTRACT This article argues that reissues – whether in the form of repackaged and re-released recordings that have gone out of print, recordings republished in new media with the change of playback technology, or collected as historical compilation albums – form a hub of activities by jazz collectors, critics, producers, and historians – roles often filled by the same person. As curated aural texts, reissues, in recurring fashion over jazz’s recorded past, form connective tissue for the distorted historical narrative of jazz as representing a “coherent whole.” The article tracks three broad historical moments in which reissues have played a crucial role in constructing the “jazz tradition” commonly portrayed in textbooks: (1) the rise of the reissues market through Commodore Records, (2) the pairing of collected tracks on compilation albums with a flourishing jazz history book trade in the postwar era, and (3) combining nostalgia for music of past decades with the advent of new recording and playback technology, and the move to remastered, completist collectors' series exemplified by Mosaic Records at the turn of the 21st century. The article ends with speculation about how the most recent uptick in reissuing might aid in disrupting the “jazz tradition” edifice.

Heart Full of Rhythm: The Big Band Years of Louis Armstrong by Ricky Riccardi

Reviewed by: Heart Full of Rhythm: The Big Band Years of Louis Armstrong by Ricky Riccardi Vincent Pelote Heart Full of Rhythm: The Big Band Years of Louis Armstrong. By Ricky Riccardi. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. [432 p. ISBN 9780190914110 (hardcover) $34.95; ISBN9780190914127 (e-book), $47.25.] Illustrations, bibliography, index. Heart Full of Rhythm: The Big Band Years of Louis Armstrong is author Ricky Riccardi's second book on the trumpet player and vocalist affectionately known to millions as "Satchmo." It follows his award-winning and critically acclaimed earlier book, What a Wonderful World: The Magic of Louis Armstrong's Later Years (New York: Pantheon Books, 2011). That earlier book covered the last twenty-five years (1946–71) of Armstrong's life and art, while his current work covers the years 1929–47. Riccardi, director of research collections for the Louis Armstrong House Museum, relies on access to the hundreds of reel-to-reel tapes that Armstrong made during his lifetime. These tapes contain stories, reminiscences, jokes, and conversations with others and is a treasure trove of research source material for anyone writing a book on the great man. There are also scrapbooks full of newspaper clippings and other materials that Riccardi makes copious use of, along with material from other sources. In Riccardi's first book, he defended Armstrong from wrong-headed critics who consistently disparaged Armstrong's recordings and performances, mostly with his All-Stars. Once again, Riccardi takes on the critics in the jazz press as well as those in the Black and White mainstream press against criticism of Armstrong's recordings and performances from his big-band years. He was attacked by the jazz press for abandoning jazz and becoming "commercial" by leading a big band and performing pop tunes and other nonjazz material. The Black press criticized him for what they considered his racially offensive performance practices (e.g, jokes with Black stereotypes, references to "darkies" in certain songs, etc.), and the White press also took issue with Armstrong's performances, sometimes using racist language in doing so. All the while, he was generally very popular with audiences—both Black and White—who wanted to be entertained, and Armstrong knew how to do that quite well. It is Riccardi's assertion that Armstrong was more than just a jazz musician. He was a pop icon and entertainer who not only led a big dance band that showcased his playing and singing of popular songs but also was renowned as a radio and movie personality. In fact, Armstrong [End Page 231] can be credited with a number of firsts for Blacks in radio and movies. In 1937, as host of the Fleischmann's Yeast Hour, Armstrong became the first African American to host a commercial radio broadcast. The film Pennies from Heaven (1936) gave Armstrong the honor of being the first Black actor to get top billing, alongside Bing Crosby and the movie's other White stars. His popularity was such that he was the first African American jazz musician to publish his own autobiography (Swing That Music [New York: Longmans, Green, 1936]). The popular fairy tale that many jazz critics like to push is that after Armstrong's groundbreaking jazz recordings in the 1920s—starting with his early output with King Oliver, continuing with records made with Clarence Williams, and concluding with his own Hot Five and Hot Seven sessions—he had pretty much stopped creating meaningful contributions to jazz and went commercial. Nothing could be further from the truth. Riccardi chronicles Armstrong's career starting in March 1929, when he and Black musicians Happy Caldwell and Kaiser Marshall took part in the first integrated jazz recording session—with White musicians Jack Teagarden, Joe Sullivan, and Eddie Lang—that produced the jazz classic "Knockin' a Jug." The following recording session with Armstrong, accompanied by members of the Luis Russell Orchestra and White banjoist Eddie Condon, produced "I Can't Give You Anything but Love," which OKeh Records decided to issue in both the "race" records catalog (aimed at the Black buying market) as well as its popular series. Discographers should be aware that Riccardi, in his notes section (p. 344), clears up...

Tropical Riffs: Latin America and the Politics of Jazz by Jason Borge

Reviewed by: Tropical Riffs: Latin America and the Politics of Jazz by Jason Borge Carlos E. Peña Tropical Riffs: Latin America and the Politics of Jazz. By Jason Borge. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. [ix, 266 p. ISBN 9780822369875 (hardcover), $99.95; ISBN 9780822369905 (paperback), $26.95; ISBN 9780822372332 (e-book), price varies.] Illustrations, bibliography, index. Reaching a wide audience almost always comes at a price, and the cost of bringing complex art forms to the mainstream can threaten the integrity of the work and its creators. Jazz music is a powerful example. Various historiographies have enabled jazz to penetrate classrooms and collective consciousness in its country of origin. Too often, though, these sources, including standard textbooks—and especially Ken Burns's Jazz documentary—perform a disservice to the music by simplifying or even eschewing vital aspects of its history and identities. Such omissions carry strong sociopolitical implications. This is where we find the impetus for Jason Borge's Tropical Riffs. A persistent shortcoming of many jazz histories is the lack of acknowledgment of Latin American influences on jazz. Much has been written to call out the ignorance of Latin America among US jazz writers and documentarians, and Borge provides examples of such criticism at the outset of his book. But instead of asking "what Latin America meant to the US jazz establishment," Borge subsequently found himself more concerned with the question of "what jazz meant to Latin America" (p. vii). Among the current bibliography of writings on jazz in various parts of the world, Borge's work fills a surprisingly gaping lacuna, especially when one considers that Latin American music and musicians have indelibly contributed to the shape of jazz for practically an entire century of its evolution. [End Page 94] The introduction outlines the astute and compelling premises of Borge's project, setting the stage for the five lengthy chapters that follow. Even in its earliest forms, jazz penetrated the cultural imaginaries of Latin American nations, which, due to relatively close economic and geopolitical ties with the United States, were uniquely positioned to consume, imitate, and integrate jazz. The paradoxes embodied by jazz—being modern and sophisticated but widely perceived as primal, a source of national pride created by poor, disenfranchised people—are in some ways analogous to Latin American forms like samba, tango, and son. But the Latin American nations, wildly diverse in terms of political regimes and their relationships to issues of race, class, culture, and economics, nevertheless shared the circumstance of being far enough removed from US cultural discourse to ensure that their audiences, critics, and artists could forge their own relationships to jazz. From these premises emerge Borge's central questions of how and why jazz resonated with Latin American audiences and his need for a survey of jazz criticism that accounts for the entirety of the Western hemisphere. Chapter 1 describes how awareness of jazz in Latin America, beginning in the 1920s, sprouted from sporadic exposure to US media, resulting in rather warped conceptions of what jazz was and how it sounded. Local musicians were quick to adapt styles they called jazz into their repertoires, and audiences were subjected to controversies in the media and in politics about the morality (or lack thereof) of the music. Plenty of discourse surrounding jazz carried racist overtones. Still, jazz enjoyed an undeniable popularity that was initially concentrated among the more privileged classes of Latin Americans. Borge takes an in-depth look at the reception of Josephine Baker, who toured extensively in Latin America, noting how it is ironic that Baker's popularity in the region foregrounded the prominence of Parisian culture—not that of the US jazz epicenters—in South America and Mexico early in the jazz age. Borge uses journalism of the period to examine Baker's differing reception among Latin American nations, including Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, Mexico, Peru, and Uruguay. The three chapters that follow take closer looks, respectively, at Argentina, Brazil, and Cuba. A patent strength of Borge's work is his reliance on early periodical literature, including specialized jazz magazines, as a foundation. Some of these writings have been anthologized while others have not, but their inclusion gives weight...

"Your Sound Is Like Your Sweat": Miles Davis's Disembodied Sound Discourse

"Your Sound Is Like Your Sweat":Miles Davis's Disembodied Sound Discourse Kelsey A. K. Klotz (bio) In 1954, Miles Davis returned to New York after ridding himself of his heroin habit cold turkey at home in East St. Louis. With an image tarnished in the jazz press through association with the drug, a sound that had been described by Barry Ulanov as "feeble," and a career that Leonard Feather characterized as "slipping away from him," Davis sought to rebuild himself.1 Boxer Sugar Ray Robinson (1921–1989) became the "hero-image" after whom Davis fashioned his new stance.2 An amateur boxer in his own right, Davis idolized Robinson as both a fighter and a public figure: he actively began to embody Robinson's "cold" and "arrogant attitude," and he even trained at Robinson's gym (Silverman's Gym) and ate in his restaurant and bar.3 Furthermore, in interviews throughout his life, Davis frequently mapped boxing techniques onto his discussions of musical performance, comparing the importance of style, practice, and rhythm between each.4 In doing so, Davis implied a relationship between music and embodiment in which playing a musical instrument required physical engagement—and further, physical domination—like that of boxers.5 Davis's discussions of the moves and techniques of his favorite boxers went beyond those of a casual hobbyist, and his emulation of boxer Sugar Ray Robinson exceeded simple fandom. Gerald Early argues that Robinson was not simply a boxing hero to Davis, but rather played a formative role in Davis's construction of a "mythology of black masculinity" that relied on the physical embodiment of both discipline and pleasure.6 The body played an important role in Davis's form of cool in the 1950s and 1960s, which Early describes as "a kind of black male existentialism that forged a moral code from the imperatives [End Page 33] of the male body as it alternately functioned as a symbol of engagement and detachment, of punishing discipline and plush pleasure that operated cooperatively, not in conflict, if rightly understood. . . . The body was the cosmos, the root of all self-consciousness that mattered." Davis's embodiment of both Apollonian and Dionysian forms of masculinity is evident in a 1968 discussion with drummer and interviewer, Arthur Taylor. Taylor asked Davis, "Why do you go to the gymnasium so often, Miles?"7 Davis responded, "I go to the gym to keep my body in shape, so I can hold notes longer, so my stomach will be flat and so I'll look handsome." Davis's answer spans the spectrum between the musical and the physical, the professional and the sensuous, indicating his preference for a variety of modes of embodied self-presentation. However, even as Davis boxed to keep himself "together, [his] body and [his] mind," his efforts played out in complicated and contradictory ways on the lives, bodies, and careers of those women with whom he came into contact. Writers from W.E.B. Du Bois to Ta-Nehisi Coates have described the constant sense of embodiment black Americans live with. As Coates writes, "Our world is physical. Learn to play defense—ignore the head and keep your eyes on the body."8 This particular form of embodiment—itself an imprint of slavery, colonialism, and violence—is part and parcel of what Frantz Fanon called "the black experience of living."9 Likewise, cultural theorist Stuart Hall has argued that black musicians' performances necessarily include the body "as if it was, and it often was, the only cultural capital we had. We have worked on ourselves as the canvases of representation."10 Davis was well aware of the embodiment of black lived experiences; in interviews throughout his life, Davis frequently talked about race and racism, maintaining a distinction between black music and white music that frequently hinged on "authentic" performances. But no matter how much Davis's self-image was rooted in the body, Davis also promoted his music through discourses of disembodiment, complicating the notion that black masculinity may only include two dialectical categories. Though the language of jazz criticism often revolved around racial binaries that hierarchically associated the body with blackness and the mind with whiteness...

Bringing Something New: Female Jazz Instrumentalists’ Use of Imitation and Masculinity

ABSTRACTCreativity is often denied to women, and female jazz instrumentalists have been accused, openly or subtly, of lacking their own innovations. These critiques can reveal the manner in which jazz historians and critics, past and present, discuss creativity and how these ways fundamentally disadvantage historical and current jazz women. Several areas of jazz scholarship have benefited from investigations of the female and the feminine. What has previously been underplayed, though, was the manner in which women created musical spaces for themselves by using methods that were often considered uncreative. Despite feminism’s successes in reclaiming the historical value of female jazz instrumentalists such as Lil Hardin and Mary Lou Williams, these women confound modern women by insisting on describing their own playing as masculine. Some jazz women took their comparisons with men a step further, associating themselves with specific performers; for example, Valaida Snow, a trumpeter and singer, marketed herself as “Little Louis,” thus encouraging listeners to connect her performances with Louis Armstrong. This work details the reasons that women jazz instrumentalists utilized mimicry to gain access to masculine musical spaces and the successes that they experienced as a result. In reclaiming women’s imitative techniques, I recast women as creative entities.

Review of Randall Sandke. 2010. Where the Dark and Light Folks Meet: Race and the Mythology, Politics, and Business of Jazz . Lanham, Maryland: The Scarecrow Press

Randall Sandke has written a new jazz history book. But it is not the usual jazz history. Rather than offering decade-by-decade accounts of different jazz styles, Where the Dark and Light Folks Meet offers facts that differ from popular understanding of the origins of jazz styles. It presents fresh perspectives on the ways that the music industry in the United States has treated jazz. Like other jazz histories, this one addresses the origins of jazz in New Orleans, what in the music is retained from Africa, the origins of modern jazz, and recent trends in jazz styles. But this volume overturns common wisdom about these topics. Instead of recounting traditional notions about jazz history, Sandke raises crucial questions about how jazz history has been told: What are the dangers of combining the telling of history with social activism? How have both black and white jazz musicians been negatively affected by stereotypes? Are the rhythmic approaches of jazz and African music fundamentally the same? Was the music in New Orleans’ Congo Square a decisive influence on jazz? Did Jim Crow laws actually affect the creation of jazz? When did white musicians begin playing jazz in New Orleans? Did big business dominate the jazz world in the past thirty years? Where the Dark and Light Folks Meet provides behind-the-scenes glimpses into the business of the jazz world, touching on audiences and presenters, studio work, copyrights, agents and managers, and the decline of major record companies in the age of the Internet. Sandke’s history of jazz is based on voluminous research, much of which is fresh. Instead of merely repeating the accounts of the best-known jazz historians, Sandke highlights their errors. Instead of celebrating the thinking of prominent jazz journalists, he identifies their biases. Where the Dark and Light Folks Meet boldly attacks jazz critics, and, quite understandably, jazz critics have attacked the book for this.

Chroniques de ‘carrières’. Des trajectoires créatives sous fortes influences socio-économiques

Les industries culturelles se caractérisent par une forte prégnance de l’emploi ponctuel, flexible, incertain et à durée limitée. Ces conditions d’emploi et de travail sont le plus souvent justifiées par les employeurs aussi bien par la structuration de l’activité autour de projets non récurrents – un film, un jeu vidéo, une pièce de théâtre, une émission de radio, un disque ou une exposition -, que par la flexibilité que nécessiterait la haute intensité créative de l’activité. Les individus très qualifiés évoluant dans ces industries culturelles – e.g. designers, artistes, producteurs, concepteurs de jeux vidéos, critiques, cinéastes, attachés de presse, traducteurs, ingénieurs du son ou éditeurs - se trouvent ainsi dans des situations professionnelles incertaines et suivent des trajectoires a priori peu définies faute d’insertion dans des structures organisationnelles pérennes. Peut-on, au-delà de la forte incertitude, variabilité et flexibilité des emplois caractérisant ces secteurs d’activité, envisager l’identification de trajectoires idéales typiques relativement stables organisant l’évolution dans le temps de ces travailleurs ? Et la reconstitution systématique de ces carrières dans leur complétude et leur diversité n’enrichirait-elle pas notre compréhension des dynamiques constitutives de ces modes d’emploi et de travail ?Telle est l’approche originale construite dans cet article à travers l’exemple de la chronique jazz en France.

Paris Blues: African American Music and French Popular Culture, 1920–1960

In Paris Blues Andy Fry aims to puncture what he sees as the myth of “Harlem in Montmartre”: the idea that African American musicians from Josephine Baker to the saxophonist Sidney Bechet found in Paris from the 1920s to the 1950s a welcoming haven from American racism. Fry focuses on the Gallic reception of African American music, covering topics as diverse as black-themed musical theater revues, French jazz criticism, Baker's light opera performances, and the career of the guitarist Django Reinhardt in occupied France. Fry demolishes heroic French accounts of their reception of black music and reveals how narratives of musical ownership (black, American, or French) embody “the complex interplay of race, writing, and power” (p. 27). According to Fry, two discourses dominated the French reception of African American music. The first saw it as “primitive,” sometimes understood as an invigorating cure for modern artificiality and commercialism and at other times as a threat to civilization. The second feared American influence and sought to make jazz safe for French society.

Historical overview of the development of jazz in Portugal, in the first half of the twentieth century

The principal aim of this article is to give an historical overview of the development of jazz in Portugal during the first half of the twentieth century. As a matter of fact, little is known in the international jazz research community about Portuguese jazz historiography. Perhaps the best-known jazz-related episode was Charlie Haden’s arrest by the Portuguese political police in November 1971. However, the history of jazz in Portugal as musical and social practice is more complex than just the American musicians who visited the country. This article traces a broad perspective of the perceptions and attitudes of jazz held by musicians, aficionados and detractors, and the way in which those representations, perceptions and attitudes were conditioned by certain social-political conditions of the Portuguese history. It starts with the reception of the music in Portugal in the post WWI years and early jazz criticism. Statements about jazz that represent the dominant positions are analysed according to the Portuguese colonial ideology of the time. It continues with the development of jazz during both the Military Dictatorship period (1926–1932), and the Portuguese Estado Novo regime’s early years (1933–1945). It concludes in the post WWII years, with the emergence of Lisbon’s jazz scene and the foundation of Hot Club of Portugal.

Jean-Louis Comolli’s Secret Life as a Free Jazz Critic/Thinking Free Jazz as an Avant-Garde of the Masses

IntroductionThe analysis contained here was spurred by a seemingly arbitrary affiliation, and one that requires a brief historical overview if it is to be brought to light. In November of 1964, Cahiers du Cinema underwent a significant visual overhaul that replaced the now legendary yellow covers adorning the magazine's preceding issues with a color palette along with substantial changes in both format and layout. Accompanying this aesthetic revamping, the magazine's 160th edition introduced a member to the editorial team, Jean-Louis Comolli, who was anointed the title ofAssociate Editor by then Chief EditorJacques Rivette. At the start of the 1960s, many members of Cahiers' original roster were busy making their own films, and as the nouvelle vague quickly became the purveyor of aesthetic value, Rivette and his newly assembled critical team seized control of Cahiers and ushered in a critical militancy that drastically departed from the comparatively apolitical, nonconfrontational turn the magazine took while under the guidance of Rivette's predecessor, Eric Rohmer.Comolli's refusal to separate cinema from ideology is well-regarded today as a crucial turn in film analysis, and articles such as Cinema/Ideologie/Critique and Technique et Ideologie have become indispensable to film theory anthologies as a result. However, what film scholarship has failed to recognize is that during Comolli's coeditorship at Cahiers he regularly contributed to Jazz Magazine, a Paris-based publication that featured an extensive exploration of free jazz (popularly coined the new thing in France) from 1965 onward. As a result, Comolli's critical output during the 1960s has suspiciously succeeded in living out a double-life, and how exactly he managed to simultaneously serve as a coeditor at Cahiers and writer for Jazz Magazine without provoking or necessitating some degree of crosspollination is difficult to fathom. Perhaps his contemporary readership managed to identify certain links; yet, in both jazz and film scholarship today, there is, or at least there appears to be, little effort to highlight the implicitly multidisciplinary nature of Comolli's critical initiative leading up to May 1968.In turn, the research I am presenting here implicitly suggests that an investigation of Comolli's lineage as a free jazz critic allows us to identify a series of discursive points that may accommodate a reexamination of his ideas relating to cinema and the critical methodology he employed; but more explicitly, my analysis insists that the stakes are in fact much higher, and that Comolli's free jazz writings offer valuable if not entirely necessary tools pertaining to larger discussions concerning the specific relationship between aesthetics and politics.Comolli here serves as a crucial link between Cahiers and Jazz Magazine, and, by proxy, film and jazz criticism. Yet, if an overlap ofpersonnel is insufficient to feed the suspicion of a discursive correspondence, another relation is perhaps more telling: beginning in February of 1965, Jazz Magazine began running fullpage advertisements for Cahiers either directly preceding the table of contents or on the inside of the magazine's back cover. It would seem reasonable to suspect that Comolli's contribution to both publications had something to do with the advertising space that was allotted, and my investigation here seeks to build off this suspicion: notably, the aforementioned placement of the advertisements is telling, since it strategically featured Cahiers' entire front cover as if to indicate that the covers of the two magazines could be viewed as interchangeable.The task of determining the relevance of Comolli's critical duality faces a distinct set of unique challenges that have proven highly instructional in the collection of my research. Ultimately, my goal here is not to determine what exactly Comolli was thinking with his multidisciplinary project, but rather, what does his project allow us to think? …