Transcript Cultural Dialogics and Jazz: A White Historian Signifies

Cultural Dialogics and Jazz:
A White Historian Signifies
Article by: Gary Tomlinson
Gary Tomlinson
•
Specialist in music of the late Renaissance and early Baroque, opera,
music and cross-cultural contact, and cultural history and
historiography. Alfred Einstein prize of the American Musicological
Society, 1982. Guggenheim fellowship, 1982. MacArthur fellowship,
1988-93. Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar, 1997-98. Tomlinson publishes
in a number of fields. In his book Monteverdi and the End of the
Renaissance he deals with the impact of literary forces on changing
musical styles around 1600. His work on opera, especially in
Metaphysical Song: An Essay on Opera, treats the connections of music
drama to changing models of European subjectivity. His book Music in
Renaissance Magic: Toward a Historiography of Others brings
poststructuralist historical approaches to bear on sixteenth-century
musical magic. His current work concerns New World song and theories
of European colonialism.
African American Canon
• The ideal of the African American
Canon, Tomlinson takes a look at how
other authors perceive what should be
in “the canon”
• Tomlinson uses Henry Louis Gates Jr.
“The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of
African American Literary Criticism”
African American Canon
(cont.)
• Gates sheds some light to allow us to
alter our views of African American
traditions
Tropology and Archaeology
• Houston A. Baker talks about tropology, which
is taking the “norm” and creating something
new. (ex. Miles Davis, Bitches Brew)
• Doing this we get to experience stuff other
than what we know.
• In relation to archaeology, tropology is what
cause leverage to pry people to think of new
ideas.
Difference in Dialogue
• Jacques Derrida- “we must learn to
speak the other’s language without
renouncing our own…it is likewise
imperative that we learn our own
language without in the process
renouncing others.”(pg.72)
• Knowledge comes from dialogue of all
different vantage and view points
(pg.74)
Monologue, Canons, and the
case of Jazz.
• Baraka- “Negro music first expresses attitude,
than second the music” (pg.75)
• Baraka warns us that we have
institutionalized jazz, evaluated its works, and
enshrined those judged to be in the best in a
glass case of cultural admirabilia. The jazz
canon has been forged and maintained
according to old strategies- (pg. 75)
Miles Davis, Musical
Dialogician
• There are four authors that have their own
views on the canon, they felt Davis’s music
was too far from tradition to be apart of the
“canon” (pg. 81)
• “The rich dialogue of musical voices from outside
as well as inside the walls of “pure” jazz that went
into the musical making of Davis’s new styles
around 1970 seems to carry no musical/cultural
excitement for these writers. Far from it. Instead
they hear only a departure of the canonized jazz
tradition of their own making. (pg. 81)
Greg Tate on Miles
• Miles is significant due to new styles
and pop elements.
• He also was a nonacademic advocate
of black vernacular.
Racism Issues
• “White musicians are overtrained and black
musicians are undertrained. You got to mix
the two. A black musician has his own sound,
but if you want it played straight, mix in a
white musician and the piece will still be
straight, only you’ll get feeling and texture up, down, around, silly, wrong, slow, fast-you
got more to work with. There’s funky white
musicians. But after classical training you
have to learn to play social music.” Miles
Davis quoted by Baraka (pg.84)
Racism Issues (cont.)
• What makes Miles Different?
He came to New York to go to Julliard, and got
a good allowance from his father.
• That makes him different from other black
musicians because he featured white
musicians in his music. He was a more well
rounded/educated black male.
• Miles got a lot criticism for this.
Fusion Music
• Fusion Music is a melting pot of his
ingredients from his (Davis) environment.
• Some of Davis’s music mixed as well as oil
and water, while other made an effective
brew. The older ingredients were never
discarded, they were just altered. (pg. 87)
• Dialogues of Fusion are numerous
Furthering Jazz
• Solo Jazz- included minimalism (pg.
88)
• Jazz purists were sore to this new style
• Acid Jazz
• White Rockers wanted to try these
styles
Concluding Thought
• “Dialogical Knowledge, is the building of precarious
discourse that never fully displaces the other
discourses around it. It is unsettling precisely it
works against our natural impulse to be settled in the
complacency of our own rules and term. It threatens
because it relinquishes the comforting idea of
mastering a fully cleared space with open horizons in
order instead to scrutinize uneasily the mysterious
others crowding in on it. Mastery is no doubt the
easy route to follow. But the path of mystery, if
steeper will surely lead to more humane rewards.”
(pg. 93)