The Jazz Bubble

Reviewed by: The Jazz Bubble: Neoclassical Jazz in Neoliberal Culture by Dale Chapman, and: Sophisticated Giant: The Life and Legacy of Dexter Gordon by Maxine Gordon Michael Borshuk Dale Chapman. The Jazz Bubble: Neoclassical Jazz in Neoliberal Culture. Berkeley: U of California P, 2018. 282 pp. $18.45. Maxine Gordon. Sophisticated Giant: The Life and Legacy of Dexter Gordon. Berkeley: U of California P, 2018. 279 pp. $29.95. One of the most invigorating turns in jazz scholarship over the past two decades has been the ever-widening frames of reference through which the music is understood. For most of the twentieth century, when jazz received its academic due at all, the form this inquiry took tended to follow musicological practice. Scholars and students paid attention to the music's sonic qualities, its idiosyncratic play with melody and timbre, rhythm or harmony. Those wishing to learn about the music focused on a canon of recorded materials, composers' lead sheets, and transcriptions of improvised solos, all in the service of making sense of jazz in chiefly aesthetic terms. There were, of course, exceptions to this approach, predominantly from African American scholars and writers as far ranging in point of view as Albert Murray or Amiri Baraka, who in varied ways impelled readers to recall the important cultural and social settings that gave birth to the music's emergence. For the most part, though, jazz music found its way into the academy under the illusion [End Page 308] of being an abstracted, platonic form—discussed too often as a musical tradition that evolved organically and unconsciously from within itself, untainted by the messy vicissitudes of race, gender, or economy. This critical orthodoxy shifted dramatically in the 1990s, amid the emergence of new approaches that scholars collectively baptized "the new jazz studies." Incorporating the much more comprehensive purview that had animated cultural studies since the 1960s, jazz scholarship was suddenly more attentive to jazz not just as music, but as discourse, culture, or commodity. As the scholar Scott DeVeaux, an important representative of the new jazz studies, argued presciently in his now-canonical 1991 essay "Constructing a Jazz Tradition": "Whether conceived of as art music, or folk music, jazz is consistently seen as something separate from the popular music industry. The stigmatization of 'commercialism' as a disruptive or corrupting influence, and in any case as something external to the tradition, has a long history in writings on jazz." As DeVeaux advised us, how might our view of the music and its history change if we were to put jazz back into the marketplace from which it was born? In The Jazz Bubble—which cites DeVeaux early on—Dale Chapman takes these critical imperatives through to a very satisfying conclusion, by looking at contemporary jazz in juxtaposition with the dramatic rise of neoliberalism as the prevailing standard for our global economy. Chapman is particularly interested in the neoclassical turn that the jazz mainstream appeared to take from the late 1970s through the 1990s, when the music's most visible performers tended to be acoustic practitioners working out of earlier styles, rather than the plugged-in fusion artists who drew the most attention (and sold many records) in the 1970s. As DeVeaux told us in 1991, within the older scholarly logic of jazz as organic tradition, this neoclassical shift might be read merely as a natural return, a welcome redress to the selling-out that jazz artists had done by fusing the music with rock and funk in that dark decade of crass commercialism. On the other hand, as Chapman argues, we might read the shift less as pure, and just as motivated by the messy intersection of culture and market exigencies. Historically, as Chapman points out, the acoustic revival in jazz led by Wynton Marsalis and the countless "young lions" that followed his early success, coincided with major shifts in global capitalism, like comprehensive deregulation and a shift in prioritizing the investment security of companies' shareholders over the well-being of their stakeholders. And interestingly, the language of jazz sometimes informed the narrative of this neoliberal economic turn, enabling these big changes to appear more benevolent than the effects on disenfranchised populations might otherwise

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Jazz · Literature · Scholarship · Sociology · History · Law · Music History and Culture · Musicology and Musical Analysis · Race, History, and American Society