Tom Perchard

How did French musicians and critics interpret jazz—that quintessentially American music—in the mid-twentieth century? How far did players reshape what they learned from records and visitors into more local jazz forms, and how did the music figure in those angry debates that so often suffused French cultural and political life? After Django begins with the famous interwar triumphs of Josephine Baker and Django Reinhardt, but, for the first time, the focus here falls on the French jazz practices of the postwar era. The work of important but neglected French musicians such as André Hodeir and Barney Wilen is examined in depth, as are native responses to Americans such as Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk. The book provides an original intertwining of musical and historical narrative, supported by extensive archival work: in clear and compelling prose, Perchard describes the problematic efforts towards aesthetic assimilation and transformation made by those concerned with jazz in fact and in idea, listening to the music as it sounded in discourses around national identity, the nature of art, 1968 radicalism, social democracy, and post-colonial politics.

The essays contained in this volume address some of the most visible, durable and influential of African American musical styles as they developed from the mid-1960s into the 21st-century. Soul, funk, pop, R&B and hip hop practices are explored both singly and in their many convergences, and in writings that have often become regarded as landmarks in black musical scholarship. These works employ a wide range of methodologies, and taken together they show the themes and concerns of academic black musical study developing over three decades. While much of the writing here is focused on music and musicians in the United States, the book also documents important and emergent trends in the study of these styles as they have spread across the world. The volume maintains the original publication format and pagination of each essay, making for easy and accurate cross-reference and citation. Tom Perchard’s introduction gives a detailed overview of the book’s contents, and of the field as a whole, situating the present essays in a longer and wider tradition of African American music studies. In bringing together and contextualising works that are always valuable but sometimes difficult to access, the volume forms an excellent introductory resource for university music students and researchers.

This is the first biography of the jazz trumpeter Lee Morgan (1938-72). He was a prodigy: recruited to Dizzy Gillespie’s big band while still a teenager, joining Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers not much after, by his early-20s Morgan had played on four continents and dozens of albums. The trumpeter would go on to cultivate a personal and highly influential style, and to make records – most notably The Sidewinder – which would sell amounts almost unheard of in jazz. While what should have been Morgan’s most successful years were hampered by a heroin addiction, the ascendant black liberation movement of the late-60s gave the musician a new, political impulse, and he returned to the jazz scene to become a vociferous campaigner for black musicians’ rights and representation. But Morgan’s personal life remained troubled, and during a fight with his girlfriend at a New York club, he was shot and killed, aged 33. The events of Morgan’s life are presented here not just as items of biography, but also as points of departure for wider historical investigations that aim to situate the musician and his contemporaries in changing aesthetic, social and economic contexts. This book draws on many original interviews with Morgan’s colleagues and friends, as well as extensive archival research and critical engagement with the music itself.

This article explores the ways that audio in the home was figured in (and helped shape) changing consumer and gender roles in postwar Britain. It looks at the ways that innovations in home furnishing and audio equipment design and manufacture created an environment with new tactile as well as sonic qualities; it examines the ways that changing music styles helped develop new markets for audio equipment, and new meanings for audio discourse. But before it does so, the article sets out some arguments on cultural-historical method. Extant academic writing on postwar home audio tends to privilege the study of media representation – and the critique of ideology constructed therein – at the expense of other kinds of enquiry and source work. In making use of a broader range of sources and interpretive approaches, this piece aims for a thick reading of the ‘social’ along with the ‘cultural’.

This article takes an imagined, transnational living room as its setting, examining jazz’s place in representations of the ‘modern’ middle-class home across the post-war West, and exploring the domestic uses that listeners both casual and committed made of the music in recorded form. In magazines as apparently diverse as Ideal Home in the UK and Playboy in the US, a certain kind of jazz helped mark a new middlebrow connoisseurship in the 1950s and 60s. But rather than simply locating the style in a historical sociology of taste, this piece attempts to describe its role in what was an emergent middle-class sensorium. Jazz’s sonic characteristics were frequently called upon to complement the newly sleek visual and tactile experiences – of furniture, fabrics, plastics, the light and space of modern domestic architecture – then coming to define the aspirational bourgeois home; an international modern visual aesthetic was reflected back in jazz album cover art. To describe experience or ambience represents a challenge to historical method. As much as history proper, then, it’s through a kind of experimental criticism of both music and visual culture that this piece attempts to capture the textures and moods that jazz brought to the postwar home.

Contemporary music historians have shown how taxonomic divisions of humanity—constructed in earnest by European anthropologies and philosophies from the Enlightenment on—were reflected in 18th and 19th-century theories of musical-cultural evolution, with complex and intellectualized art music forms always transcending base and bodily rhythm, just as light skin supposedly transcended dark. The errors of old and now disreputable scholarly approaches have been given much attention. Yet scientifically oriented 21st-century studies of putatively Afro-diasporic and, especially, African American rhythmic practices seem often to stumble over similarly racialized faultlines, the relationship between “sensory” music and its “intelligent” comprehension and analysis still procedurally and politically fraught. Individual musical sympathies are seen to be undermined by methods and assumptions common to the field in which theorists operate. They operate, too, in North American and European university departments overwhelmingly populated by white scholars, so this article draws upon and tests concepts from critical race and whiteness theory, and asks whether, in taking “black rhythm” as its subject, some contemporary music studies reinscribe what the sociologists Tukufu Zuberi and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva have called “white logic”: a set of intellectual attitudes, prerogatives and methods that, whatever the intentions of the musicologists concerned, might in some way restage those division practices now widely recognized as central to early musicology.

As Walter Benjamin, domiciled in Paris, wrote and then in 1936 published his famous essay on the revolutionary potential of mechanically reproduced art, the right-wing French jazz critic Hugues Panassié – Europe’s foremost authority on the music before WWII – was theorizing the new black American form as an agent of “traditional,” sacralized social re-organization. Resituating these writers’ works in the volatile French and European political contexts of the 1930s, and then going on to examine Panassié’s post-war organization of the Hot-club de France, this article examines the question posed mid-century by these radicals of the right and left: how could the relationship between individual and society be transformed both practically and politically in front of art’s mechanical reproduction?

Academic work on hip hop published in the mid-1990s by Tricia Rose, William Eric Perkins, Kyra D. Gaunt and others tended to consider sampling as a historically significant practice, one through which producers memorialized and continued the traditions of earlier African American musical styles. More recently this view has been challenged: in his Making Beats (2004) Joseph Schloss contends that musical pragmatics have always been more important to producers than such cultural-historical projects. This article seeks to explore these issues by way of an examination of hip hop in the early-1990s, and specifically the uses that many groups – most notably Gang Starr and A Tribe Called Quest – began to utilize jazz samples around that time. Making extensive reference to contemporary interview material not previously examined in the scholarly literature, this article aims to establish the ways that, between the traditionary/pragmatic binarism, hip hop artists variously, and often simultaneously, described and enacted both continuations of and wariness towards an African American musical heritage.

By the late-1950s, Thelonious Monk had become a figure of veneration in French modern jazz circles. But in the first years of the following decade, the pianist’s French critics – like those in other parts of the world – began to censure Monk for having ceased to “evolve”; this trend reached something of an apotheosis in a 1964 Jazz magazine article, in which Michel-Claude Jalard condemned Monk for having presented the mere “simulacra” of former improvisations in his then-recent Paris performances. Focussing on Jalard’s argument, the article puts this French critical trend in context, showing how issues widely occurring in Monk’s 1960s reception were re-voiced by French writers in the language, and to the ends, of a specific and local debate between jazz writers – one which centered on oppositions of modernity and tradition, art and entertainment, and the political left and right. The piece goes on to further explore some of these “French” arguments by way of a musical analysis of several live performances of the standard Lulu’s Back in Town, as given by Monk’s quartet during its European tour of 1966. In taking a somewhat unfamiliar theoretical literature as its interpretive starting point, this analysis aims to give new and newly precise answers to questions the French writers – and many commentators after them – would ask of the pianist, and which recent scholarly work concerned above all else with dialogue and interaction has only partly equipped us to answer: where in Monk’s music is the line between improvisation and composition, between improviser’s art and entertainer’s act, and why have critics thought it mattered?

Before WWII, Hugues Panassié (1912-74) was Europe’s leading critical authority on jazz, and by the time of his death he had published a dozen books on the music and been President of the Hot-club de France for over 40 years. Yet despite this life’s-worth of efforts made in jazz’s name, Panassié’s reputation is no longer a good one: pointing to the fantasies of black exceptionalism and Noble Savagery present in his work, historians have tended to dismiss the critic as a racist primitivist, one in thrall to that contemporary negrophilie most familiar today from early-century Parisian visual art. Indeed Panassié used the term ‘primitive’ himself, and positively. But this article traces the ultra-conservative writer’s intellectual and religious formation to show that, rather than contemporary negrophilie, it was a religious and cultural heritage quite distant from the modern European encounter with blackness that first informed Panassié’s primitivism. Though this re-reading does not aim to ‘rehabilitate’ someone who remains a troublesome and reactionary figure, the article nevertheless goes on to explore how, in his primitivist rejection of European modernism, Panassié sometimes pre-empts important arguments made by the post-modern jazz scholarship that would seem to marginalise the critic’s historical contributions.

The historical biography has come to be viewed with suspicion by those who recognise that the genre’s literary emplotment and narrative demands can waylay the scholarly search for objective historical “truth”. This article explores these biographical narrative conventions and applications – and proposes new approaches to researching and writing within the biographical format – in the context of historical jazz studies. The piece begins by considering, with reference to several biographies of the saxophonist John Coltrane, both the ways that biographical narratives are constituted from disparate source materials and the ideological agendas and political problems that attend this creative act. The article argues that, in the course of doing biographical work, these issues might begin to be accounted for and dealt with by rethinking of the nature of historical-biographical “research”, and by way of hermeneutic, historical-dialogical method of the kind outlined by Hans-Georg Gadamer; with a theoretical approach delineated (and with reference to the author’s own experiences as a jazz biographer), the article goes on to engage with the processes and politics of this research stage, discussing oral history fieldwork and its textual representation, placing special emphasis on encounters of race so often inherent to jazz research and writing. Finally, the piece returns to the act of biographical writing itself, and outlines what, in light of the foregoing discussion, might be considered as new aims, values and strategies for the jazz biographical narrative, and perhaps for biography more generally.