On open peer review

Marquette University Digital Projects Librarian, and my wife, Ann Hanlon, recently sent me a link to this story from the August 24, 2010 New York Times. “See what you think,” she suggested.

Here’s what I think.

In “Scholars Test Web Alternative to Peer Review,” Patricia Cohen reports on emergent efforts to bring academic publishing into the digital age: 1) to take advantage of the kind of crowd-sourcing through which other kinds of online knowledge databases (e.g., Wikipedia), archives (e.g., Flickr), and networks (e.g., Facebook) have been built, and then 2) to rethink the nature of what kind of intellectual contributions should fall under heading of academic work that could be “counted” for things like credit, promotion, and tenure.

The immediate context of Cohen’s article is a recent attempt by the Shakespeare Quarterly, in partnership with MediaCommons, to open up their peer review process to public input:

Mixing traditional and new methods, the journal posted online four essays not yet accepted for publication, and a core group of experts — what Ms. Rowe called “our crowd sourcing” — were invited to post their signed comments on the Web site MediaCommons, a scholarly digital network. Others could add their thoughts as well, after registering with their own names. In the end 41 people made more than 350 comments, many of which elicited responses from the authors. The revised essays were then reviewed by the quarterly’s editors, who made the final decision to include them in the printed journal, due out Sept. 17.

Hey! That’s today! And though the “Shakepeare and New Media” issue doesn’t yet seem to be out (the Quarterly’s home page says it “will be out soon”), you can find a description of the project and the process, and the articles and commentary themselves, here.

OK. So there’s a couple of things we could say about this experiment, and then more generally about the brave new world it would call into being. First, it’s worth remarking that from the standpoint of the authors themselves, those who submitted work for review, the results seems to have been pretty positive. Cohen writes:

The first question that Alan Galey, a junior faculty member at the University of Toronto, asked when deciding to participate in The Shakespeare Quarterly’s experiment was whether his essay would ultimately count toward tenure. “I went straight to the dean with it,” Mr. Galey said. (It would.)

Although initially cautious, Mr. Galey said he is now “entirely won over by the open peer review model.” The comments were more extensive and more insightful, he said, than he otherwise would have received on his essay, which discusses Shakespeare in the context of information theory.

And his experience suggests a real value to the open sourcing of commentary in terms of the “review” part of peer review: of helping a writer assess and revise their own work — in the same way that academic blogs and other currently non-peer-reviewed work (and currently inadmissible for promotion review work) does. Having this aspect of the review process public would seem to work to make it a process and, not incidentally, to make academic work more broadly public: a way, that is, a) to actually find more readers for academic work and find them much more immediately than is usually the case with peer-review work, b) to deal with work on a fact checking and argument testing level, and c) to get useful feedback for revising the work on its way to publication and for thinking about directions one might take in future work.

These are all things that traditional blind peer review simply doesn’t do very well.  And as the article points out, a version of this kind of pre-publication access and feedback already works, successfully, in some academic fields, such as economics.  Kathleen Fitzpatrick of MediaCommons has similarly drafted and revised work, including chapters of her 2009 book, Planned Obsolescence, in public view through online means. (And, on a more radical scale, Lawrence Lessig put up his 2000 book, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, on a wiki platform and let readers discuss and revise it. After doing a final edit himself, Lessig published the result in 2006 as Code: Version 2.0.)

But the experiment seems less convincing to me in terms of the “peer” dimension of peer review — the dimension that is at the heart of academic freedom as Kant imagined it. And it’s important to remember that this imagining of academic freedom is about a “freedom from,” not a “freedom to.” Not the freedom to say and write whatever the hell you want, but the freedom to say and write that which you can convince your peers is worth saying and writing, free from external pressures: from the Church, from the State, and (as we would need to add for the 21st Century), from the Market.

While Cohen’s article is right to point out that blind peer review as typically practiced can often lead to impact-muting delays, intellectual sloppiness, and all-around non-accountability and unprofessionalism, blind peer review still, nevertheless, does serve the purpose of taking some of the politics out of publishing (and thus credentializing) decisions.  And, beyond the potentially distorting pressures of academics simply wanting to be popular (not entirely bad, I suppose), it’s pretty easy to imagine certain kinds of work put up for open commentary getting swamped and dragged by politicized and politically-motivated and tightly orchestrated commenting campaigns. It’s not that external comments can’t be smart, but that they inevitably are going to come with all kinds of motivations other than just the pursuit of knowledge.

But, all in all, though I’m still inclined to thing that it’s more important to make the end publication of peer-review research open access (i.e., free and accessible to anyone with an internet connection) than to open up the peer-review process itself, I think it’s an experiment worth continuing to think about.

Mutes and men

I’m belatedly getting around to reading a piece by Claudia Roth Pierpont in the May 17, 2010 issue of the New Yorker, titled “Black, Brown, and Beige: Duke Ellington’s Music and Race in America” (for now, available here).

It’s a solid introduction to the work and significance of a composer and bandleader whose viable creative career stretched across an incredible six decades, from the 1920s right up through his death in 1974. Pierpont is reviewing what sounds like an interesting book by Harvey G. Cohen, Duke Ellington’s America (University of Chicago Press, 2010 — definitely going on my to do list). And if there’s nothing particularly groundbreaking in her article for anyone who’s already waist-deep in Ellingtoniana, Pierpont makes a number of compelling points that I’m finding helpful in thinking through the stakes involved in Ellington’s early compositional work, and that of his improvising peers (such as James “Bubber” Miley), and in developments in 1920s jazz in general.

Composition and Improvisation

Pierpont writes of Ellington first bringing his D.C. band to the Big Apple in the years after the Great War, and the challenges of making themselves heard in a very different city:

As new arrivals, they had practiced the sweet, straight, “under conversation” music that had been in demand at the Washington society dances where the original group members started out, but they had quickly discovered that this sound was all wrong for New York. Not brazen enough, not rhythmically driving; not Negro enough; not jazz.

Pushed by the city, pushed by their manager, Irving Mills, and of course pushed by Ellington’s own ambition, the band began to focus on developing their own particular style and (more importantly) writing and recording primarily Ellington’s own compositions.

I like that phrase, “under conversation” music, as a way of describing what was expected of the dance bands out of which at least the New York jazz style emerged, whether you were the well-established Paul Whiteman or a new arrival like Ellington. And it strikes me that at the heart of both strains of innovation in jazz’s development through the 1920s is a simple (or not so simple) insistence on being heard. In other words: of moving jazz out of its simple role as functional background music for audiences there to do something else, and moving jazz musicians out of their service role as the musical equivalent of busboys and hatcheck girls.

This insistence drove the push toward improvisatorial competence and artistry that we associate with Louis Armstrong’s arrival on the New York scene in 1924. But this insistence also drove the push toward what in the 1920s was called “symphonic jazz”: that strain of development toward more complex arrangements and through-composed pieces for concert (as opposed to club) venues that we normally think of as the mortal enemy of improvisation — a cautionary tale of the road not taken, the pseudo-intellectual (or sometimes simply “white”) ground against which an emerging emphasis on greater freedom in improvisation had to figure itself. Yet, as Ellington’s work demonstrates — and Ellington famously described his orchestra, and its improvisers, as his instrument — developments in composition and in improvisation, in the right hands, were complementary rather than opposed modes. Both the move toward improvisation and the move toward symphonic arrangement were moves toward demanding that listeners stop their conversations and pay attention to this work as the work of professionals.

Composition/Improvisation as Explanation

Pierpont writes:

The number that caught Irving Mills’s attention at the Kentucky Club one night, as he recalled, was “Black and Tan Fantasy,” a three-minute musical drama jointly credited to Ellington and [trumpeter and plunger mute innovator James “Bubber”] Miley. It isn’t difficult to figure our which of the authors did what, as a throbbingly mournful blues gives way to a refined society tune — rough and smooth, black and tan, Miley and Ellington — or as Miley’s solos rise to a hectoring beauty that finds ease and release in the band’s response. The trumpeter’s manipulation of a simple rubber plunger cup over the bell of his horn makes for some irresistibly antic sounds […], but the piece delivers an unexpected emotional punch: a concluding riff from Chopin’s “Funeral March” is willfully absurd yet seems to seal the trumpet’s urgent message. (“I like great big ole tears,” Ellington said, teasingly, about audience reactions.) The over-all effect is at once mocking and chilling, like a funeral cortege with skeletons dancing behind.

The song was made the centerpiece of a short 1929 film by the same name directed by white avant-gardist Dudley Murphy (in 1924, a collaborator with Fernand Leger on the now canonical excercize in cinematic abstraction, Ballet Mechanique). In the clip below, you can see Arthur Whetsol filling in where Bubber Miley (by then out of the band) would have been. Note the film’s emphasis on both the Whetsol and Ellington character’s as composers at work.

Elsewhere, Pierpont describes the sounds Miley got out of his trumpet and plunger mute as “uncannily human.” But I might go a different direction. I’d suggest that what is so astounding about the sounds Miley makes (and Whetsol, and Cootie Williams after him) is that their newness — their modernism — springs in good part from not sounding like anything at all, other than a trumpet being manipulated with a rubber plunger cup.

Previously, such horn-and-mute effects in jazz recordings had been exploited primarily for their novelty, as in the Original Dixieland Jass/Jazz Band’s 1917’s breakthrough recording of the “Livery Stable Blues.” This piece — sometimes considered the first jazz recording — features Nick LaRocca’s whinnying cornet, and Eddie Edward’s growling trombone, playing the part of barnyard animals in the breaks. It’s skillful, and it’s funny, but it creates its own weirdness (as others before me have noted) in linking low-comic, primitivist, animalistic sounds produced by white musicians to a style of jazz associated with black New Orleans musicians. And while I’ve never been convinced that this is necessarily — or at least solely — what’s going on with the ODJB recordings, it does suggest the extra burden of representation under which composers/musicians like Ellington and Miley labored.

On this kind of burden, Pierpont quotes Ellington’s response to critics who questioned the logic of the NAACP in 1959 giving its highest award, the Spingarn Medal, to a bandleader who hadn’t been particularly outspoken about segregation: “They’ve not been listening to our music.” As Ellington asserted: “We have been talking for a long time about what it is to be black in this country.” Thus, Ellington makes an interesting case for what Gertrude Stein, in another context, called composition as explanation: that to compose (on paper, and on one’s horn) was to “talk about” something, and in particular, to talk about human beings being human in a specific historical and social context (“what it is to be black in this country”) — in this case, what it was like to be a black writer and performer in the U.S. during the days of Jim Crow.

Certainly white as well as black performing professionals — jazz musicians, vaudevillians, tent show evangelists — were subject to many of the same indignities of life on the road and in the crummy quarters in which such performers usually found themselves. And even in the swankiest of situations, performers were treated as hired help, not yet recognized as experts or professionals in what Martha Banta has called the “managerial ethos” increasingly reshaping the labor force and labor politics in other industries.

But there were dimensions of these indignities that we all know were impressed upon black composers and musicians even more heavily than on their non-black counterparts. Famously, the ultra-sharp and ultra-dignified Ellington experienced what must have been an especially grating form of segregation during his groundbreaking and career-making tenure at the Cotton Club, the mob-owned nightclub for which Ellington’s band played for the floor shows and for a network radio hookup, but which, despite (or due to) its location in Harlem, was off limits to non-performing African Americans. That is, without special dispensation, Ellington’s most immediate peers would have had trouble watching Ellington play. And touring often meant second-class status for the musicians themselves, especially in the South, where there was no escaping the soul-crushing work of answering basic questions that took on extra freight if you were black: where to eat, where to stop for a restroom break, where to stay overnight, which door to enter the club at which you might be performing that evening, how late would you be up performing after hours for a black audience not admitted to earlier shows.

I think this history is probably why Pierpont (and others) are at pains to emphasize the “human,” rather than “animal,” sound in Miley’s trumpet playing. And such efforts at recreating and representing  the human experience in programmatic music are not entirely absent from Ellington’s work more broadly, which aimed at evoking everything from an old man doing a broken walk (in the “East St. Louis Toodle-oo,” another early composition with Miley), to the symphonic “Black, Brown, and Beige” (1943) with its attempt to crystallize African American historical experience, to any of the many “tone poems” and suites that Ellington wrote in the later half of his career.

But on “Black and Tan Fantasy,” Miley’s varied and touch-sensitive work with a repurposed rubber plunger on the bell of his horn sounds like nothing so much as someone working a repurposed rubber plunger on the bell of his horn, an objet trouve, making sounds that could only be made with that combination of technologies and materials. In other words, as listeners to this recording, we’re let into the process of playing, and we are able to hear (and, in our mind’s eye, see) a record of the work and note-by-note thought that went into the production of these particular noises. Miley’s novelty demands that we listeners listen, and that we hear/see a performer at work — an African American performer at work, an African American performer in 20th-century America at work — thinking.

Interdisciplinarity, take 2 (and call me in the morning)

In a comment to my last post asking about some of the institutional and labor issues surrounding the fear/expectation of individualized interdisciplinarity in the humanities, Tom writes:

I think you are correct to equate “interdisciplinarity” and “flexibility,” though my own thought is that it means something far from simple in its relation to the continuing casualization of labor in academe. In this sense, I have to wonder how much the situation you outline is a consequence of the nature of interdisciplinarity. By definition, it offers a challenge to the traditional disciplinary structure of academe, which I’m sure is the source of more than one chair/dean/professor scratching their head. But by the same token, the product of interdisciplinary discourse is, from the perspective of those traditional disciplines, reified in addition to having, as so many academic disciplines do, an object abstracted from real cultural processes and artifacts. The interdisciplinary scholar is in this sense doubly burdened. How might that impact the ability of interdisciplinary studies to establish the ‘value’ of the work and effectively compete for the unfortunately scarce material support necessary to carry out the work?

Tom (and, incidentally, though I know who Tom is, his comment doesn’t include his last name, so I won’t use it here either), I guess this comes down to the question of what “the work” or “the product” of interdisciplinary discourse is.

1. Do we mean the discrete text that emerges at the end of interdisciplinary application — whether we mean the singly-authored article or monograph (a very humanities-specific model, of course!) or the collected anthology or journal?
2. Do we mean the individual “interdisciplinary scholar” who, through reading or fraternization, comes to internalize a sense of possibility afforded by his or her exposure to multiple disciplinary approaches? (And this is what I think Tom means in his comment about reification?)
3. Or, as I’m increasingly inclined to think, should we mean something more like the social network produced through the institutionally supported set of opportunities for differently disciplined scholars to meet and greet? That, like Facebook, the “work” is less any THING that is actually produced than the ACT of recognizing and constituting links and points of irreconcilable otherness among an otherwise widely dispersed collection of actors. In other words, that we’re setting ourselves up to fail (and make ourselves unemployable) if the “inter” of interdisciplinary mostly means “internalized interdisciplinarity.

No matter what sense we mean, I think Tom is right to raise the questions of value and scarcity and materiality at the end of your comment.

It doesn’t seem like we’re in a time when we can count on MORE resources being dedicated to supporting efforts that may not pay off in terms of discrete texts or even discrete scholars for 10 or 15 years. But I’m wondering if things like the movement toward open access peer reviewed publication — along with other 2.0-type initiatives — represents something like an attempt by scholars themselves to generate, on the cheap, the kind of institutional conditions for interdisciplinarity that at least some of of us crave.

My librarian spouse, Ann, just alerted me to one such initiative, the Open Humanities Press. And in a future post, I’d like to take a closer look at what kind of potentially interdisciplinary work is being “carried out” there, or even projected in their self-conceptualization. (On first blush, I noticed that a text-search for the term “interdisciplinary” turned up nothing within their description of their various journals — but I’d like to take a closer look at the marketing language to see what I can see.

Is interdisciplinarity in the humanities a labor issue?

I’m finally getting around to an anthology I should gotten to long ago: William R. Taylor’s Inventing Times Square: Commerce and Culture at the Crossroads of the World.

Taylor’s collection came out in 1991 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press). And it’s a model of the kind of interdisciplinary studies in the humanities that was really taking hold around the time I started graduate school in the following year. It features essays by Jean-Christophe Agnew, Neil Harris, Lewis Erenberg, and others whose work built on the kind of cultural history modeled by the (just then) late Warren Susman, to whom the volume is dedicated. Taylor’s introduction skilfully makes a case for the larger significance of this scholar- and labor-intensive study of what is, after all, a pretty limited thing: a particular kind of popular culture within one relatively bounded district within one city during a limited time frame (roughly, 1905 through the 1950s). In his view, the collection of essays reveal “that Times Square developed as an integral part of cultural changes taking place nationally; that it was both an indicator and a cause of those changes” — that, for example, the “Broadway style” of speech, PR, and public presentation “had somehow worked its way beneath our skin as a nation by sometime in the 1930s” (xi).

But Taylor also remarks on the slowness of cultural historians in getting to Broadway as an object of study, even given what had been a recent shift in interest to urban culture. And more than once, he emphasizes a sense of how little the participants in this project felt they knew once they got there (shades of the “Broadway Melody” ballet in Singin’ in the Rain — Gotta dance!). “Working singly,” he writes, “our perspectives have been limited. It may have required a collaborative study of this kind to mount the assault” (xii). And his introduction goes on to detail the range of historical and other scholarship involved from multiple sub-fields of history: entertainment genre studies, commerce and economics, religion, communications and advertising, leisure and tourism, visual culture, business, transportation and real estate (i.e., where the subway stops got built!), music, literature, theater, design, sexuality, prostitution, hustling, and pornography.

More than just a decision by working scholars to “be” interdisciplinarity, such efforts were, as Taylor’s acknowledgments illustrate, the result of broader institutional decisions. Specifically, the volume emerged out of a series of conferences held at New York University in 1988 through 1989 and sponsored by the New York Institute for the Humanities. The Institute had for a decade and a half before that had materially supported “the historical study of urban cultures” (ix), which included sponsoring a seminar on the Culture of Cities coordinated by Taylor and Thomas Bender from 1981 to 1984 and another seminar on Commercial Culture organized by Taylor and others from 1985 to 1987. The material support included funding and fundraising; research and other support staff; class, seminar, and conference time and space; and of course offices where scholars could keep their stuff.

It strikes me that such material support is an often overlooked key to truly, conversationally, interdisciplinary work. In other words, particular kinds of scholarship, as had been the case with Times Square istelf, have to “invented.” As Taylor writes of Times Square, “The bustling cultural scene of the 1920s and 1930s was not inevitable; it was contrived. It appears to have resulted from many different kinds of business decisions which, in turn, succeeded in giving the area its concentrated commercial energy and visual distinction.” Neither is interdisciplinary scholarship inevitable. In fact, it’s hard for me to imagine the kind of incredibly useful scholarly projects represented by Taylor’s anthology happening outside of a very specific vortex of geographical, institutional, and business-model factors and decisions.

Which, for me, raises the question of what we are asking of working scholars in the humanities when we ask them to be (or when we ask ourselves to be) interdisciplinary. Is it fair, just, or even realistic to ask such work of scholar/teachers who increasingly can’t even lay claim to a desk drawer (let alone a room) of their own at their place of employ, much less a well-funded, well-connected Institute to support their interdisciplinary efforts rather than look upon them with condescension, suspicion, or downright horror? (You want to teach WHAT? In a first-year writing course? Why would anyone want to do THAT?)

Yet ask it we do — at least I think we do. On the one hand, the perception is that, in general, it can be harder to get hired if your academic background is anything other than a cut-and-dried, no-questions-need-be-asked disciplinary background. (See, for example, this exchange on “Interdisciplinarity and Risk Aversion” from earlier this year in Inside Higher Ed.) And I think I’ve experienced some of that dynamic working in my own case: while I have a straight-up Ph.D. in English, I suspect that my recent teaching background in American Studies and an interdisciplinary University Writing program has made it harder for English departments to know exactly what they would do with me. On the other hand, I suspect that a particular scholar/teacher’s interdisciplinarity is largely seen as a plus by the faculty and department with whom they are working once they are on board. (And another article in Inside Higher Ed on “Encouraging Interdisciplinarity” suggests that such people may even have an edge in promotion and tenure decisions. ) And we most certainly ask it of ourselves, as the hundreds of cover letters of read while sitting on hiring committees can attest.

But given the institutional limitations I’ve just outlined above on interdisciplinarity as such, I suspect that the language of “interdisciplinarity” in an academic-employment context may mean something more like simple “flexibility” — and not flexibility as a researcher so much as flexibility as a teacher (someone who can teach multiple kinds of courses, preferably all at once) or a colleague (someone who might be valuable liaison to other departments within the university). And in this sense, the goal of interdisciplinarity — with all the intellectual, emotional, and financial burdens it entails, particularly for scholars who increasingly working in isolation from the contexts that might lighten such burdens — may well be another example of what Andrew Ross has described as a “sacrificial” model of mental labor that defines industries like music, or computer programming, or the academic humanities, in which a large part of the capital gets put up by the workers themselves in terms of the training and networking they are expected to amass on their own time and at their own expense.

An Experiment in Modern Vaudeville

I discovered yesterday that an article of mine long in the pipeline has finally seen the light of day.

The journal Modern Drama, published by the University of Toronto Press, announced that their Winter 2008 issue had gone online as of January 29, 2009, and with it a piece of mine titled “An Experiment in Modern Vaudeville: Archiving the Wretched Refuse in John Howard Lawson’s Processional.” Your best bet for actually viewing it online is to be affiliated with a library subscribed to the journal. Information only wants to be so free.

As you might guess from the title, the piece grew out work I’d been doing for Hepped on the impact of early jazz on modernism. Lawson’s 1925 play for the Theatre Guild was subtitled “A Jazz Symphony of American Life,” and in Hepped I explore how the future first president of the Screen Writers Guild and  “Dean” of the Hollywood 10 troped jazz as a kind of engine for organizing a cross-ethnic working class. In the article for Modern Drama, I look more specifically at its affinities with efforts like Paul Whiteman’s 1924 jazz concert, An Experiment in Modern Music (at which Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue had its premiere), in terms of trying to simultaneously harness and manage the energies of mass culture forms for high art locations. As the abstract puts it:

John Howard Lawson’s Processional: A Jazz Symphony of American Life (1925) was an experiment in putting mass cultural forms to leftist avant-garde uses. But as the play negotiates the conflict between two basic principles for organizing mass culture’s stock materials – between vaudeville and the symphony – it stages a basic tension between an item-level approach to collecting “acts” and a collection-level imposition of structure on atomized parts. Lawson’s play staggers between an impulse to present a found poem of American popular, national, and industrial culture, warts and all, and an impulse to submit that culture to the kind of focused critique that could extricate the play from the vaudeville logic of the commodity fetish. This unstable but productive archival détente would give way in Processional’s afterlife, when its vaudeville excesses, particularly its representation of stereotyped ethnic difference within the national collection, proved subject to a history of reappraisal and de-accessioning.

I’m very happy with this essay, and particularly with the way it developed as it grew, then shrunk, then grew again (at one point I had a 60-plus page “finished” essay that I had to get down to 25 pages for submission). I gave a preliminary version of this paper at the 2006 Modernist Studies Association conference in Tulsa, Oklahoma at the invitation of Sarah Wilson, who was organizing a panel on “Immigrant Archives” (at that point the paper was titled “A Story with Sax Appeal: Staging Discord, Archiving Dissonance.” I thank Modern Drama editor Alan Ackerman, who saw me give that paper and encouraged me to submit it when I was ready and all revised.

Dead Man Pratfalling

Below, is the text from a much-loved (by me!) footnote from my original dissertation version of Hepped that is about to get the axe in the revised version. It’s one of those things that I like to write that attempt to draw broad synthetic connections among various kinds of cultural artifacts and along a loonnngg timeline, but which probably doesn’t have a place in a newly tightened focus on the particularlities of race and commodification within the debates on jazz/swing going on in British music magazines on or around February 1936.

But I like it — it’s about the trouble that jazz-as-art discourse has trouble dealing with the broad humor that often defines jazz-as-actually-performed-and-recorded — and so maybe I can still find a place for it in my conclusion. It might, in fact, be perfect as a foil for my discussion of the more-or-less humorless Dorothy Baker novel Young Man with a Horn and the From Spirituals to Swing concert that John Hammond arranged at Carnegie Hall that, in 1938, signaled a major shift in how the significance of jazz was going to be understand: as a music with deep roots in African American music, and as a music that would define its art against the slings and arrows of outrageous commerce.

So here it is, describing:

…the broad fetishization of authenticity that characterizes jazz criticism and collection, a process runs into telling problems and through byzantine solutions when it encounters the “pure” and the “commercial” embodied in a single genre, performer, or even performance. Thus the musicianship and improvisational power of a Louis Armstrong or Fats Waller are praised, but their (profoundly integral) humor is written off as “clowning” (or even “tomming”) for commercial purposes. In Waller’s case, this split is reified in reissues of his material, which usually compile and release his joke-free piano solos separately from those trademark performances on which he verbally and musically tore popular songs to shreds (including his own). Canonical anthologies like The Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz consistently underplay material that features humor, vocals, or tightly structured arrangements — all troped as concessions to the great unwashed. (Need I add that Whiteman and all other examples of symphonic jazz are conspicuously absent from this collection?). The Smithsonian Collection goes so far as to simply lop off the vaudeville-style patter with which Jelly Roll Morton and his Red Hot Peppers open their 1926 recording of “Dead Man’s Blues” (the liner notes simply say “dialogue deleted”). Critics have yet to come to terms with the challenge to “agoraphobia” (fear of the marketplace) that Scott DeVeaux makes central to jazz’s aesthetic.

REFERENCES: The Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz, revised edition, selected and annotated by Martin Williams (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian, 1987), liner notes; Scott DeVeaux, The Birth of Bebop: A Social and Musical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 530.

That International Rag

It’s fascinating to read about how music listeners in Weimar Germany first experienced jazz — and the extent to which their understanding of jazz performance was shaped by one figure, the Philadelphia-born African American bandleader Sam Wooding (1895-1985) — in Jonathan Wipplinger’s article, “The Aural Shock of Modernity: Weimar’s Experience of Jazz,” from the Germanic Review (September 2007). We U.S. jazz fans don’t tend to know much about Wooding, because he and his band largely toured outside the U.S. for most of the 1920s and on into the 1930s, in Sweden, Spain, France, Switzerland, Turkey, Romania, Italy, Czechoslovakia, Holland, Belgium, the Soviet Union, and Argentina, among other places.

Their European experiences began in May, 1925 when Wooding and his group appeared with the Chocolate Kiddies revue in Berlin, anticipating by a full year the German appearance of the Paul Whiteman band that, at the time, was the name most identified with American jazz. His appearance also followed on a war-time and post-War decade when American jazz, in recorded as well as performed form, had been off the German radar (sonar?); and as Wipplinger demonstrates, convincingly, the effect of his live shows was something akin to “aural shock,” one that many German writers equated with the sounds of jackhammers, skyscraper construction, movie reel sprockets, and the other “everyday shocks of modernity” (302) that were common tropings for jazz on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1920s.

And this “shock” despite the fact that Wooding’s band, as is indicated in the sampling of his recordings for European labels such as Vox, Parlophone, and Pathé available through the Red Hot Jazz Archive, was a fairly tame, highly orchestrated outfit, not that far removed from the sound of the early Whiteman or Fletcher Henderson organizations. Indeed, Wipplinger’s account of Wooding’s program for the May 1925 performance reads very much like the program for Paul Whiteman’s Experiment in Modern Music at New York’s Aeolian Hall in February, 1924 (this is the concert at which George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue was premiered). Whiteman was known for promoting a “symphonic jazz” style, and Wooding’s program billed him as “Sam Wooding and His Orchestra in a Symphonic Jazz Concert,” with the concert itself, like Whiteman’s Experiment mixing Tin Pan alley songs, popular blues, and arrangements that interpolated bits and pieces of the work of classical composers (such as Wagner and Dvorak).

Though we don’t usually tend to think of Duke Ellington’s work in these terms, he can certainly be heard to have extended the “symphonic jazz” tradition, particularly through the extended “suites” he began to compose from the late 1930s on. Fascinatingly, his most noted such composition, 1943’s Black, Brown, and Beige — which Ellington framed as an aural history of the African American historical experience, what he called “a parallel to the story of the American Negro” — was anticipated by Wooding and the Chocolate Kiddies revue which, as Wipplinger writes, had also “professed to narrate the history of African Americans in the United States from the era of plantations and slavery to their contemporary life in Harlem and other urban centers” (308).

Indeed, in an important institutional sense, Wooding seems to represent a bridge between two eras of African American commericial music. A good many of his musicians had earlier played with the ensembles of Will Marion Cook and James Reese Europe, whose 369th U.S. Infantry band (the “Harlem Hellfighters”) had wowed Paris in the previous decade. And many of these musicians — Doc Cheatham, Willie Lewis, Tommy Ladnier, Gene Sedric among them — would return to the States to play in the bands of Cab Calloway, Sidney Bechet, Fats Waller, and other key 1930s bandleaders.

Though most of the writers I deal with in Hepped concentrate on the “Americanness” of jazz — a provincialism I seem only to happy to oblige myself — it might be worth expending more effort on understanding this national troping as it reinforced or stood in productive tension with a more broadly international modernism that would take into the way not only the way jazz functioned as an American export, but the way that jazz was in turn shaped by its imbrication within the worlds of Berlin, Paris, Buenos Aires, or Shanghai.

Über Smooth Jazz

Theodor Adorno’s 1936 essay “On Jazz” (in German, “Über Jazz”) has one of those aphoristic moments that nobody did better (makes me feel sad for the rest). “Jazz is not what it ‘is,'” Adorno writes, countering a tendency toward a-social formalism or a-historical folklorism. “Rather, it is what it is used for” (p. 472 in Richard Leppert’s anthology of Adorno’s Essays on Music)

Now, that’s a pretty good motto in general for any scholar who would flatter themselves as working in a cultural studies tradition, filling in your own blank (Barbie dolls, Harry Potter fan fiction, Spanish Civil War poetry) for “jazz.”

And I thought of it recently when I was doing a Google search to test my own site’s find-abililty, using “hepped” and “jazz” as search terms (it comes right up!), and stumbled across this entry from my dissertation advisor Michael Bérubé’s now defunct — but never de-funked — blog. (One of the responses had remarked, quoting Happy Kyne, of Happy Kyne and the Mirthmakers, that “It is a well known fact that Jazz came about because otherwise wholesome swing musicians got all hepped up by ‘toquing on refer sticks.'”)

The particular question behind this “Mister Question Man” entry was essentially a version of the “What is this s*&t?” question that Greil Marcus had once asked of Bob Dylan’s Self Portrait album (which is actually one of my favorites), in this case applied to Smooth Jazz. Bérubé writes:

Whenever I drive near or in actual cities with the car radio on – and by “actual cities” I mean “places of high population density and at least one ‘jammin’ oldies’ radio station playing Al Green’s ‘Still in Love with You'” – I find myself confronted with a question whose world-historical profundity is masked by its surface simplicity. And because I can contemplate the matter no longer, I’m turning this one over to you, my reasonably faithful and always thought-provoking readers.

Where did “smooth jazz” come from?

Everyone I’ve asked so far says, “it came from Kenny G,” which, however intriguing it may be as a possible horror-movie title, is ahistorical and undialectical and also wrong. Smooth jazz seems to have originated in the mid- to late 1970s; some scholars blame cite the work of Grover Washington Jr., some refer to Chuck Mangione’s “Feels So Good,” some point to the ubiquitous David Sanborn, and some insist that the epistemological breakthrough must be credited to George Benson’s Breezin’. All of these suggestions are plausible enough, but they displace the question of structural determinations and musical influences onto a list of “major figures,” and therefore must be rejected by a properly post-neo-Bolshevist theory of the rise of smooth jazz.

His own thinking about the question tends toward the arboreal roots-and-branches model (i.e., “musical influences”) very recongizable to anyone with any familiarity with most jazz historiography. Though about halfway through the comments, some respondents start to get at more of the “structural determinations” that ask us to consider, as Adorno does, what Smooth Jazz gets used for: for putting out lots of passable music quickly and cheaply, for filling airtime on particular big radio market station formats, for taking us up and down elevators and in and out of dentist chairs, for providing us something totally inoffensive to give as gifts to people about whose musical tastes we know (and care) nothing about, for letting us work productively without being distracted by things like lyrics or, you know, interesting music.

Interestingly, Adorno was himself talking about Smooth Jazz back in 1946, when he wrote an entry on “Jazz” for the Encyclopedia of the Arts (ed. by Dagobert D. Runes and Harry G. Schrickel; New York: Philosophical Library, 1946), in which he writes that the tendency toward “concentration and standardization” within the culture industries was matched against the desire of performers themselves to “escape this tendency.” Now, watch for Adorno’s own S-word:

The practices of the radio and recording industries have smoothed jazz more and more, have tamed its “shocking” features which [he can’t resist adding] never went very far anyway.[…] [A]ll , its “corners” are being blunted, all its “rawness” is being sacrificed to a round, mellow, often over-sweetened sound.[…] Swing was first a counter-tendency against standardization and “smoothing” and originated with the best bands aiming at a bolder and more spontaneous style of performance. It was seized, however, at once by business.

While most of Bérubé’s respondents who did focus on Smooth Jazz functionality focused on the “smooth” half of the equation — the calming, the wallpapering — it might be worth focusing on the “jazz” half as well, as a way of thinking through Adorno’s more interesting point about mass culture more generally. In other words: given all the music of various genres that is out there and would serve an equally “smoothing” purpose, why would anyone produce/promote/listen to smooth jazz?

As Adorno argues, the counter-tendency of jazz and other mass culture forms toward creating “interference” within the system of alienated, anomic commodity production and consumption — its culture jamming moments of seeming immediacy, spontaneity, and community — can itself be turned by that system into a saleable commodity. That is to say (and to say it in ways that Richard Dyer would recognize), what is being sold here is the utopian promise that the problems of commodity capitalism can be transcended through the very products of that commodity capitalism.

And in this sense, the “jazz” element of Smooth Jazz is crucial to any listener who wants the comfort of knowing that, whatever else 21st-century life may be doing to our dignity, humanity, and individuality, we’ll still take “improvised” creation, “soulful” expressiveness, and long-curled, short-sleeved-print-shirted, eyes-closed saxophonists in intimate congress with the starry dynamo wherever we can get them.

Living with Music

One of the most-quoted assessments of the cultural meaning of jazz comes from Ralph Ellison, writing in a 1955 essay titled “Living with Music.” In it, writes about listening to jazz musicians improvise while growing up in Oklahoma City:

The delicate balance struck between strong individual personality and the group during those early jam sessions was a marvel of social organization. I had learned too that the end of all this discipline and technical mastery was the desire to express an affirmative way of life through its musical tradition and that this tradition insisted that each artist achieve his creativity within its frame. He must learn the best of the past, and add to it his personal vision. (rpt. in Shadow and Act 189)

It’s a powerful, hopeful notion of community, and a trope crucial to the most authoritative line of jazz-and-America discourse that runs from Ellison through Albert Murray, Stanley Crouch, Wynton Marsalis, and Ken Burns.

But where Ellison heard the sound of democracy in action — the individual finding their place within the collective, the collective recognizing the worth and dignity of the individual — Adorno heard something more akin to “human sacrifice” (488). In his 1936 essay “On Jazz,” he described jazz performance as a ritual enactment of a social secret in which the expressively improvising subject at first “falls out of the collective,” and “does not want to be engulfed in the prescribed majority, which existed before the subject and is independent of it.” Then, as the piece inevitably finds its way back to the head, that subject “finally is received into, or, better, subordinated to the collective as it was predestined to be” — indeed finds, “as the measures grow rounder, that it was a part of it from the very beginning; that, itself a part of this society, it can never really break away from it” (488). Jazz improvisation is, in this sense, less the constant practice of democracy than the ultimate tyranny of consensus.

(So Adorno’s vision here is closer to the two-word phrase that’s stuck with me since I heard it uttered by Will Wright around a seminar table in Colorado Springs at the “Image of America” conference sponsored by the Society for the Interdisciplinary Study of Social Imagery in 1999. Responding to a paper that looked at “community” in the fiction of William Faulkner, Wright asserted that the essence of Faulkner’s social theory boiled down to: “community sucks.”)

The context of these two essays is worth noting here, of course: Adorno was writing in exile in England after seeing German jazz emerge during the Weimar Republic and then become sublimated into military marches under National Socialism while “hot jazz” itself was banned from radio broadcasts. Ellison was writing in the flush post-WWII 1950s as part of a series in Hi-Fidelity magazine in which various writers told how they learned to stop worrying and to love their expensive home audio equipment. (Adorno afflicts the afflicted while Ellison comforts the comfortable?)

In any case, I suppose the bigger question to be asked here is: what do we make of the fact that Ellison’s account has received a much wider hearing than Adorno’s? (And I suppose we could simply make of it that Ellison was right and Adorno was wrong, though I’m going to guess that that’s too simple.) Moreover, what would Adorno himself make of this fact? (And I would guess he would make of it that Ellison is telling those of us “living with late capitalism” a story that helps us swallow it and keep it down.)

Hepped v. Hep

I’ve gone back and forth in the process of writing my book on the seemingly inconsequential question of whether it should be titled Hepped or Hep. The dissertation on which I started working with this material was titled Hep. More recently in describing the project, I’ve been going with Hepped, basically as a way of emphasizing how jazz’s relationship to American culture in the years between the World Wars was a process of active and contested articulation rather than a static descriptor. (Jazz from adjective to verb, right?)

But having to give a title to this site/blog meant I was going to have to settle the matter for once and possibly for all. So I decided to do a little Google exercise to see which title was more likely to work in terms of allowing readers looking for my work or content like mine to be able to find this site.

So:

• As of June 19, 2008, “Hep” returned 73,500,000 results. And there, the jive slang meaning of the word was buried among results for Hepatitis; Heating , Electrical, and Plumbing; and High Energy Physics. Filtering for “hepatitis,” “plumbing,” and “physics” delivered a more manageable 2,760,000 results. But even with these, only a scattered few would be of any relevance to “hep” in the sense it’s being used here, and these were mostly home pages for DJs, dance instructors, and working bands in the Swing Dancing game.
• On the same date, “Hepped” returned only 26,200 results, meaning my stuff would have a better chance of bubbling to the top. This would be particularly the case for a searcher who added any keywords like “jazz” or “modernism,” since almost every other result concerned drug use — as in “hepped up on goofballs”: a phrase that seems to have re-entered the vocabulary through Chief Wiggum, from 1994 Simpsons episode 1F14 (“Homer Loves Flanders”; see http://www.snpp.com/episodes/1F14.html). Since Simpsons radio station KJAZZ features prominently in the opening to the book’s first chapter, I took this as a favorable omen.

Hence: Hepped.