Nicholas Gebhardt - The Routledge Companion to Jazz Studies

Over the past thirty years, the development of New Jazz Studies has led to the creation of new, cross-disciplinary perspectives on jazz history, where naturalized presentations of the past have been replaced with complex cultural readings of history and historiography. Indeed, as this Companion demonstrates, jazz research now features a plurality of methods that have sought to disrupt ever-popular canonical, linear, and causal narratives (Whyton 2010). In his influential essay, Constructing the Jazz Tradition: Jazz Historiography, Scott DeVeaux demonstrated how what we come to understand as jazz history is often shaped by ideological choices, mediating influences, and the constantly changing values of particular cultural groups (DeVeaux 1991). In constructing a tradition, decisions about what is included and excluded from history often fall to institutions charged with creating and preserving a sense of shared cultural heritage, or to influential gatekeepers who seek to celebrate and champion certain cultural forms over others. Within a jazz context, one only needs to consider the output of Martin Williamswhose books and work on the Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz attempted to define the jazz traditionto get a clear idea of the way in which the history is both narrated and often invented. For example, DeVeaux describes the way in which Williams truncated Louis Armstrongs 1926 recording Big Butter and Egg Man for the Smithsonian collection in order to construct an idealized view of jazz history:

What was left out? The first thing removed was a full chorus by the other star performer, the vaudeville singer May Alix. Relatively little is recorded in jazz history about Alix. We know that she worked at the Sunset Caf, and that she used to do splits on stage. But such vague information about vaudeville performers is typical in jazz history, despite the fact that some of them (like Butterbeans and Susie) occasionally crop up on early jazz recordings. Alixs presenceand ultimately, her absence from the Smithsoniantells us a good deal about boundaries. Eliminating her from the recording helps to separate jazz from two things simultaneously: gender and commerce.

(DeVeaux 2005, 24)

This example offers a simple demonstration of how jazz history can be written and rewritten to support particular ideological constructions of the past. Somewhat problematically, the constructed nature of traditions is often overlooked or downplayed, as a sense of the past becomes naturalized and history is presented as fixed and unchanging. Here, it is important to remember that all histories are written in retrospect and are often fraught with contradiction; what jazz means is very much dependent on cultural perspective, or the values that are expressed in different times and places.

Within this context, studying hidden or local histories can offer jazz scholars a powerful means of addressing these issues; hidden histories not only offer an alternative to dominant narratives about the past but also provide added layers of complexity to the historicizing process. Published at a similar time to a number of seminal New Jazz Studies texts, Ruth Finnegans book The Hidden Musicians offered a challenge to traditional representations and modes of understanding music through an ethnographic study of local music scenes in Milton Keynes. Her influential work highlighted the importance of amateur music making in everyday life and unveiled the overlapping infrastructures, dynamics, and organizational characteristics of local musical networks that, until that time, had frequently remained hidden to participants and audiences alike. In her introduction to the revised 2007 edition of the book, Finnegan also highlighted a range of areas where the concept of the The Hidden Musician could be expanded and developed in future, for example, to include studies of professional contexts for music making, the impact of mass media and technology on changing representations and understandings of music, or on the contribution of minority groups to the development of local scenes (Finnegan 2007, xixv). These issues have as much relevance to jazz studies today as they did thirty years ago. For example, understanding the role musicians play in everyday life, what jazz means to people in different contexts, and how the music has been invented, adapted, and transformed across time and place are pressing issues for jazz researchers today. Equally, it is important to understand why certain musicians and minority groups have been excluded from popular histories of the music.