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Jazz Places: How Performance Spaces Shape Jazz History

2022; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 40; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5406/19452349.40.2.06

1945-2349

Pierpaolo Polzonetti,

Sport and Mega-Event Impacts

Sharing the same space with musicians and listeners during a performance is an irreplaceable experience. During the last pandemic, the prolonged lockdown of public venues for live music has been a powerful reminder that, notwithstanding the heroic efforts to keep music alive through online platforms, nothing can compare to what we can feel during a live performance. This is especially true in legendary spaces with a tradition of the continual presence of competent patrons and great artists, which endows such venues with the aura of history.Jazz Places is an agile and well-thought-out book offering a wealth of evidence on the power of sites in music-making, music consumption, and production of narratives about music history. K. Teal selects specific spaces as case studies to discuss the role of venues in shaping the history of jazz. Still today, these venues continue to exert the power of canon formation through management's decisions, informed by the cultural politics of investing in the value of American music legacies. Some of these spaces are renowned sanctuaries of jazz, such as The Village Vanguard, Jazz at Lincoln Center, and Preservation Hall in New Orleans; others are perhaps less known but still influential, such as John Zorn's The Stone; yet others are controversial venues in the perception of jazz history, as in the case of university campuses across the nation, which are often branded as outside the “authentic” tradition of jazz. Absent from this study are jazz festivals, outdoor spaces, virtual venues, and recording studios, like Van Gelder Studio in New Jersey, where many jazz giants recorded albums that made history.1 All the spaces examined in this book are in the United States and, as such, the focus is on the idea of heritage and innovation within the tradition of African-rooted culture in American music, confronting a controversial yet heroic past and looking forward to a hopeful future.The importance of the spaces that shape music history has been the subject of important sociological studies of high-brow European-rooted music, where the formation of canon and structured rituals of listening happened in venues consecrated by the collective experience of music, such as churches, concert halls, and opera houses. James Johnson has documented the post-French revolution formation of the silent mode of listening, which rapidly became the only acceptable way to listen in most venues where classical music or opera is performed live.2 Compared to this tradition, jazz venues present less homogeneity and a much wider variety of admissible rituals and modes of listening that range from absorption to casual listening while chatting and dining. Even though the venues selected in Jazz Places are all informed by a lofty idea of jazz as a form of high-brow art that has the power to educate citizens, the author records a variety of audience behaviors that, even when they appear spontaneous, are in fact site-specific, shaped by the tradition of each performing location. An original aspect of this book is that it presents spaces as having the power of agency, as acting forces in the production of music and the discourse about it.In the first chapter, Teal focuses on small jazz clubs, with special focus on New York's most iconic one, the Village Vanguard, where, as in other similar venues, food and drinks are served regularly, unlike comparable shrines of music performance in high-brow music venues. Moreover, at the Village, the sounds of eating and drinking are protected sound traces, valued as part of the tradition of this location (the Village Vanguard sound). As such, they have been preserved in live recordings where the listener can hear “Village Vanguard glasses,” which, as Teal writes, are “not just any background noise but audible traces of the specific physical space in which the record originated” (28). This produces what Gumbrecht would call a presence effect, or the production of the impression of presence in which the bodies of the performers coexist with the bodies of the audience.3 The value of presence is related to the cultural politics of this small but powerful venue. Yet it is not easy to define the Village's cultural politics with one label. In fact, Teal describes the history of the club as “a moving target” (17); it has shifted geographically—from periphery to center, as the city's demographics are affected by increasing gentrification—and switched from promoting edgy or avant-garde artists in the 1950s and 1960s (such as John Coltrane during his free-jazz period) to the more recent pervasiveness of mainstream jazz. The most recent identification of the Village with mainstream jazz (to be understood as following a form where solos happened on chord sequences, as opposed to open-ended and unpredictable styles of improvisation [26]), guarantees, in Teal's assessment, a predictable product in terms of quality while promising to keep an eye always on the latest and greatest artists promoted by influential magazines like DownBeat (35). In trying to explain the club's cultural agenda, Teal reconstructs the history of the club's management under Max, Lorraine, and (most recently) Deborah Gordon. Teal offers an illuminating account of the case of pianist Fred Hersch, showing how playing at the Vanguard is the product of strenuously climbing a difficult career ladder, which happens both through merit and networking. Playing at the Vanguard is not lucrative, but it confers high status on musicians, or, to quote Figaro's description of military compensation in Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro, “molto onor, poco contante” (“lots of honor, little cash”).Teal combines the history of the venue based on secondary literature and an ethnographic approach grounded in observation and interviews with artists and staff. Unfortunately, the audience members are absent as this study has not recorded their voices. The only audience member whose voice can be heard in the book is that of the author, who describes live events vividly, in a sort of modern-age musical travelogue à la Charles Burney. Music analysis is therefore descriptive without recurring to music transcriptions. The analytical prose is evocative and pleasant to read, but at times it is hard to get a precise idea of the music itself. This approach works better for cases in which the author discloses accessible recorded versions of the analyzed music. Particularly compelling is the comparative analysis of Fred Hersch's trio performance of “Stuttering” and the performance of the same tune recorded by Hersch at the Jazz Standard with the Pocket Orchestra (both accessible on YouTube), which notes how both Hersch's solo and arrangement at the Jazz Standard are more daring and disorienting than the mainstream version at the Village (40–41).In the second chapter, the author explores large-scale public venues, such as the monumental Kennedy Center in Washington D.C., Jazz at Lincoln Center (JALC) in New York, and the SFJazz Center in San Francisco. Together with the academic venues studied in chapter 3, these heavily institutionalized official locations pursue a clear educational agenda while also promising entertainment. Teal is careful not to make excessive generalizations about each typology of location, trying instead to sort out different approaches. The Kennedy Center locates jazz as one of the genres that defines America musically along with hip-hop and other vernacular styles. Instead, Wynton Marsalis maintains a conservative agenda at JALC, investing in the preservation of a classical American tradition with a strong educational program aimed at presenting jazz as a music with a social function. This approach, in Platonic terms, can form good citizens living in a democracy, producing a “type of musical discourse that ought to be a model for other forms of human interaction,” and promoting “listening to jazz as democratic responsibility” (59). Teal then examines the canon formation in JALC's Hall of Fame not only in terms of music but also in the construction of the jazz artists’ image, where the bodies of the artists (both the physical bodies and the sound they produce) reflect a political-aesthetical agenda. In this context, Teal offers a compelling and thought-provoking comparison of Fats Waller, Mary Lou Williams, and Bill Evans. The study of the SFJazz Center presents important reflections on the architecture of the building as a signifier that evokes accessibility and inclusion (86), even though it is located in an exclusive area, and it offers a luxury experience designed to draw attention to and confer value on marginalized Americans (especially Black and Latino/a/x populations). The author's position when dealing with controversial issues (such as JALC's museal conservatism) remains balanced, trying to present opposing views with equal respect and weight. In the case of collegiate jazz (chapter 3), however, Teal defends the presence and value of jazz pedagogy on American campuses, without hiding how and why this mode of learning has been criticized for a lack of authenticity and an excess of uniformity. Teal argues that collegiate jazz can be connected to the outside world, as long as we conceive of “universities as permeable and outwardly connected places rather than free-standing ivory towers” (96).Teal's direct experiences as a musical tourist are rendered vividly in chapter 4, describing two consecutive performances that took place in June 2017 in New York, the first at The Stone, a secretive underground little venue managed by John Zorn, and the second at the new venue of the same establishment, Arnhold Hall of the New School (an academic setting at a university in Greenwich Village). The Stone presents all the parameters and rituals of avant-garde music directed toward a public of devotees, ready to suffer extreme heat, uncomfortable seats, and a lack of food and drinks, as happens in other radical modernistic music venues. Teal uses Peggy Phelan's theory on the power of invisibility in Unmarked: The Politics of Performance to argue that the old Stone's invisibility was pursued as a desideratum,4 because it confers elitist power rather than marginalization.Along with collegiate jazz and JALC, another place where jazz heritage is monumentalized and preserved as fresh as possible is Preservation Hall, located in the French quarter of New Orleans (chapter 5). Here, the author merges with other “sweaty tourists” (147), visiting the city at the worst moment (during the summer, when academics usually conduct field work), attending an event in a hall without air conditioning, where the only cooling system consisted of ceiling fans and cold beer. Teal reconstructs this venue's creation by a wealthy white couple from the Northwest who fell in love with African American jazz records, describing the culture or cult of record collectors, including a legendary and mysterious collection of 84,000 78-rpm records that only a few initiated adepts are allowed to consult.5 Here, too, one can appreciate the power of hiding and seclusion, of putting jazz out of reach. Far from being secluded and hidden, however, Preservation Hall is accessible to all visitors, offering another example (along with JALC) of “historically informed performance practice with a desire to simultaneously cultivate experiential accuracy through the cultivation of an entertaining atmosphere that evokes the excitement of the Jazz Age” (160). Preservation Hall, unlike the clubs on Frenchman Street, tends to hire and cast Black musicians (170). At this point, though, the reader may wonder whether invisibility equals power, as in Phelan's theory, or whether it equals disempowerment, as in Ralph Ellison's classic novel Invisible Man.6 At the very end, Teal concludes that the spaces examined in this book all have a pedagogical function, and that through the decades jazz spaces have developed a common goal and a common cultural shift: “to teach people what jazz is, why it is important, and how to play it has become a larger and larger part of the operation of a typical jazz venue, a shift that frames the music not as entertainment but instead as personal and societal enrichment” (174). This sends the powerful message that, in order to solve the equation of visibility and power, we need to study the triangulation of space, artists, and audience more closely.