Fernando Orejuela and Stephanie Shonekan, eds. 2018. Black Lives Matter and Music: Protest, Inter... more Fernando Orejuela and Stephanie Shonekan, eds. 2018. Black Lives Matter and Music: Protest, Intervention, Reflection. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 126 pp. ISBN 9780253038425 (pbk)
In today's Manhattan, the street signs on Fifty-second Street between Fifth and Seventh Avenu... more In today's Manhattan, the street signs on Fifty-second Street between Fifth and Seventh Avenues tell passersby that they are on "Swing Street;' even though nothing about the towering skyscrapers and the moving mass of people in business suits reflect this locale. Instead, what the street signs point to is a Fifty-second Street of the past: a collection of nightclubs and other establishments that jazz critics and scholars have designated as the birthplace of bebop, one of jazz's paradigm-shifting genres. In Come In And Hear The Truth: Jazz and Race on 52nd Street, Patrick Burke argues that while this designation may be true, historical accounts of this particular time and place tend to overlook nuanced narratives of racial identity, gender identity, racial mixing, cosmopolitan nightlife, the music business, artistic integrity, moral ity and vice, the enduring debate over "authentic jazz," and the path in which the music would continue to develop-closer to ...
Teachers College Record: The Voice of Scholarship in Education
This is a response essay to an interview with George E. Lewis, the Edwin H. Case Professor of Ame... more This is a response essay to an interview with George E. Lewis, the Edwin H. Case Professor of American Music at Columbia University, conducted by Cara Furman of Teachers College. The essay explores Lewis's thoughts on quotidian creativity and the ubiquity of improvisation, their necessity in academic institutions, and their potentially life-transforming effects for all people.
Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz, little understood even today, was at the center of controversy in ea... more Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz, little understood even today, was at the center of controversy in early 1960s music journalism. Released commercially in 1961, the album—with a title that later became synonymous with the new music—contains a single 37-minute performance that is abstract and opaque. Its presumed cacophony and lack of order made Free Jazz emblematic of the “new thing,” the moniker journalists used to describe jazz’s emergent avant-garde, and links were drawn between the album’s sound and the supposed anti-traditionalism of its artists and their supporters. By the mid-1960s, the “new thing” was taken as a dissenting provocation, and some writers bemoaned the presence of radical (racial) politics and acts of protest in a music that should be devoted to universalist “colorblind” ideals.
This article does three things. It takes a close look at the most prominent reportage surrounding the album and the “new thing,” outlining the analytical shortfalls that helped to promulgate common misunderstandings about the music: that it was an attack on the universalist strivings of modern jazz, that it relied on narrow identity politics for its aesthetics, and that the music’s lack of tonal order was nihilistic. It presents a new analytical framework for understanding Free Jazz, and it explains how the performance was organized and executed by exploring the textural provenance of its abstraction: heterophony. Along the way, I consider the symbolic differences between heterophony and tonal polyphony—the prevailing musical episteme available to music writers of the time.
Heterophony, a term commonly used in ethnomusicology but with various shades of meaning, is theorized here as an opaque, more decentralized musical texture of collectivity and simultaneity. It opens up new epistemological terrain in the context of experimental improvised music by affording multiple subjectivities (i.e. different sonified identities) to be heard at the same time, interpolating the listener into a dynamic and constantly-shifting sonic mesh. The experiment that was Free Jazz, I argue, is one of collective musical agency, in which the opacity of that sonic mesh—woven by the musicians in coordinated action—subverts traditional expectations of clarity, cohesion, and order, beckoning the listener to hear more openly, or more “freely.”
Fernando Orejuela and Stephanie Shonekan, eds. 2018. Black Lives Matter and Music: Protest, Inter... more Fernando Orejuela and Stephanie Shonekan, eds. 2018. Black Lives Matter and Music: Protest, Intervention, Reflection. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 126 pp. ISBN 9780253038425 (pbk)
In today's Manhattan, the street signs on Fifty-second Street between Fifth and Seventh Avenu... more In today's Manhattan, the street signs on Fifty-second Street between Fifth and Seventh Avenues tell passersby that they are on "Swing Street;' even though nothing about the towering skyscrapers and the moving mass of people in business suits reflect this locale. Instead, what the street signs point to is a Fifty-second Street of the past: a collection of nightclubs and other establishments that jazz critics and scholars have designated as the birthplace of bebop, one of jazz's paradigm-shifting genres. In Come In And Hear The Truth: Jazz and Race on 52nd Street, Patrick Burke argues that while this designation may be true, historical accounts of this particular time and place tend to overlook nuanced narratives of racial identity, gender identity, racial mixing, cosmopolitan nightlife, the music business, artistic integrity, moral ity and vice, the enduring debate over "authentic jazz," and the path in which the music would continue to develop-closer to ...
Teachers College Record: The Voice of Scholarship in Education
This is a response essay to an interview with George E. Lewis, the Edwin H. Case Professor of Ame... more This is a response essay to an interview with George E. Lewis, the Edwin H. Case Professor of American Music at Columbia University, conducted by Cara Furman of Teachers College. The essay explores Lewis's thoughts on quotidian creativity and the ubiquity of improvisation, their necessity in academic institutions, and their potentially life-transforming effects for all people.
Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz, little understood even today, was at the center of controversy in ea... more Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz, little understood even today, was at the center of controversy in early 1960s music journalism. Released commercially in 1961, the album—with a title that later became synonymous with the new music—contains a single 37-minute performance that is abstract and opaque. Its presumed cacophony and lack of order made Free Jazz emblematic of the “new thing,” the moniker journalists used to describe jazz’s emergent avant-garde, and links were drawn between the album’s sound and the supposed anti-traditionalism of its artists and their supporters. By the mid-1960s, the “new thing” was taken as a dissenting provocation, and some writers bemoaned the presence of radical (racial) politics and acts of protest in a music that should be devoted to universalist “colorblind” ideals.
This article does three things. It takes a close look at the most prominent reportage surrounding the album and the “new thing,” outlining the analytical shortfalls that helped to promulgate common misunderstandings about the music: that it was an attack on the universalist strivings of modern jazz, that it relied on narrow identity politics for its aesthetics, and that the music’s lack of tonal order was nihilistic. It presents a new analytical framework for understanding Free Jazz, and it explains how the performance was organized and executed by exploring the textural provenance of its abstraction: heterophony. Along the way, I consider the symbolic differences between heterophony and tonal polyphony—the prevailing musical episteme available to music writers of the time.
Heterophony, a term commonly used in ethnomusicology but with various shades of meaning, is theorized here as an opaque, more decentralized musical texture of collectivity and simultaneity. It opens up new epistemological terrain in the context of experimental improvised music by affording multiple subjectivities (i.e. different sonified identities) to be heard at the same time, interpolating the listener into a dynamic and constantly-shifting sonic mesh. The experiment that was Free Jazz, I argue, is one of collective musical agency, in which the opacity of that sonic mesh—woven by the musicians in coordinated action—subverts traditional expectations of clarity, cohesion, and order, beckoning the listener to hear more openly, or more “freely.”
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Papers by Kwami Coleman
This article does three things. It takes a close look at the most prominent reportage surrounding the album and the “new thing,” outlining the analytical shortfalls that helped to promulgate common misunderstandings about the music: that it was an attack on the universalist strivings of modern jazz, that it relied on narrow identity politics for its aesthetics, and that the music’s lack of tonal order was nihilistic. It presents a new analytical framework for understanding Free Jazz, and it explains how the performance was organized and executed by exploring the textural provenance of its abstraction: heterophony. Along the way, I consider the symbolic differences between heterophony and tonal polyphony—the prevailing musical episteme available to music writers of the time.
Heterophony, a term commonly used in ethnomusicology but with various shades of meaning, is theorized here as an opaque, more decentralized musical texture of collectivity and simultaneity. It opens up new epistemological terrain in the context of experimental improvised music by affording multiple subjectivities (i.e. different sonified identities) to be heard at the same time, interpolating the listener into a dynamic and constantly-shifting sonic mesh. The experiment that was Free Jazz, I argue, is one of collective musical agency, in which the opacity of that sonic mesh—woven by the musicians in coordinated action—subverts traditional expectations of clarity, cohesion, and order, beckoning the listener to hear more openly, or more “freely.”
This article does three things. It takes a close look at the most prominent reportage surrounding the album and the “new thing,” outlining the analytical shortfalls that helped to promulgate common misunderstandings about the music: that it was an attack on the universalist strivings of modern jazz, that it relied on narrow identity politics for its aesthetics, and that the music’s lack of tonal order was nihilistic. It presents a new analytical framework for understanding Free Jazz, and it explains how the performance was organized and executed by exploring the textural provenance of its abstraction: heterophony. Along the way, I consider the symbolic differences between heterophony and tonal polyphony—the prevailing musical episteme available to music writers of the time.
Heterophony, a term commonly used in ethnomusicology but with various shades of meaning, is theorized here as an opaque, more decentralized musical texture of collectivity and simultaneity. It opens up new epistemological terrain in the context of experimental improvised music by affording multiple subjectivities (i.e. different sonified identities) to be heard at the same time, interpolating the listener into a dynamic and constantly-shifting sonic mesh. The experiment that was Free Jazz, I argue, is one of collective musical agency, in which the opacity of that sonic mesh—woven by the musicians in coordinated action—subverts traditional expectations of clarity, cohesion, and order, beckoning the listener to hear more openly, or more “freely.”