Outside and Inside

Race and Identity in White Jazz Autobiography

Reva Marin

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781496829986, 9781496829979
• eBook ISBN: 9781496829993
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism History & Theory

Outside and Inside: Representations of Race and Identity in White Jazz Autobiography is the first full-length study of key autobiographies of white jazz musicians. White musicians from a wide range of musical, social, and economic backgrounds looked to black music and culture as the model on which to form their personal identities and their identities as professional musicians. Their accounts illustrate the triumphs and failures of jazz interracialism. As they describe their relationships with black musicians who are their teachers and peers, white jazz autobiographers display the contradictory attitudes of reverence and entitlement, and deference and insensitivity that remain part of the white response to black culture to the present day. Outside and Inside features insights into the development of jazz styles and culture in the urban meccas of twentieth-century jazz in New Orleans, Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles. Reva Marin considers the autobiographies of sixteen white male jazz instrumentalists, including renowned swing-era bandleaders Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, and Charlie Barnet; reed instrumentalists Mezz Mezzrow, Bob Wilber, and Bud Freeman; trumpeters Max Kaminsky and Wingy Manone; guitarist Steve Jordan; pianists Art Hodes and Don Asher; saxophonist Art Pepper; guitarist and bandleader Eddie Condon; and New Orleans–style clarinetist Tom Sancton. While critical race theory informs this work, Marin argues that viewing these texts simply through the lens of white privilege does not do justice to the kind of sustained relationships with black music and culture described in the accounts of white jazz autobiographers. She both insists upon the value of insider perspectives and holds the texts to rigorous scrutiny, while embracing an expansive interpretation of white involvement in black culture. Marin opens new paths for study of race relations and racial, ethnic, and gender identity formation in jazz studies.

1

The Authenticating Collaborators of White Jazz Autobiography

In the final pages of Mezz Mezzrow’s Really the Blues (published in 1946),¹ Mezzrow describes meeting Bernard Wolfe one night at a Greenwich Village jam session, when “this young white fellow who tells me he don’t know much about music, he’s a writer, but he likes my records fine” approaches him about the idea of doing a magazine piece (Mezzrow 333). Soon, Wolfe begins spending time with “Mezz” in Harlem, convinced that his story requires more than just an article to do it justice:

“Listen Mezz,” he says, and I know there’s a hype coming. “You know you’ve got a pretty interesting story to tell—nobody could do justice to it in one lousy article, and besides, if we told the truth, no magazine in the country would dare to print it, they’d be so scared of corrupting the morals of the young. It needs a book, a hell of a long book, and you’ve got to write it. It’s more important than you think.” (334)

A similar scene is depicted in the first chapter of Eddie Condon’s autobiography, We Called It Music: A Generation of Jazz (published in 1947), as Condon describes the role of his friend, the journalist John McNulty, in convincing him to write his autobiography.² Although Thomas Sugrue received credit as Condon’s official collaborator, according to Condon it was McNulty who first coaxed from him the random memories and associations by which he would begin to capture a version of his life on paper. Initially, though, Condon was reluctant, asking McNulty, “How am I going to do it and what am I going to write about?” (Condon with Sugrue 4). McNulty asked him to produce a typewriter, into which he inserted a piece of paper before turning to Condon:

“Where and when were you born?” he said to me. I told him. On the sheet he typed: Goodland, Indiana, November 16, 1905. He spaced and wrote another line: Present address, Washington Square North, New York City. “Now all you’ve got to do,” he said, “is put down on paper what happened between those two lines. Try it. What do you remember?” (4)

It is hardly surprising to discover, as in the examples cited above, that a majority of jazz autobiographers have collaborated with a professional writer or amanuensis in the process of writing their autobiographies; most of them, after all, had little prior experience as writers.³ For this reason, most white jazz autobiographies credit at least one other author, or collaborator, in addition to the autobiographical subject.⁴ It is rare, however, to find the collaborative process explained and even dramatized as it is in the passages above; more typically, collaborators make their presence known in paratextual additions—that is, in introductory or concluding materials or through insertions in the body of the text itself.⁵

In a study that is centrally concerned with notions of authentication and identity, this chapter will consider the contributions of these additional voices to this process of authentication. How and for what purpose do these other authors—the collaborator, amanuensis, or explainer—attempt to legitimate the autobiographical subject, to convince the reader of his worthiness as a jazz musician, and also as a figure of historical, cultural, and sometimes even literary, significance? While undoubtedly one of the primary roles of all collaborators of autobiography is to vouch for the significance of the individual whose life is being represented, white jazz autobiographers presented a unique set of challenges for their collaborators, who responded to these challenges by employing particular authenticating strategies. As they did so, they established ideological positions that resembled (with variations) those drawn by the contestants of the jazz wars of the 1930s to the 1960s, those fiery debates that divided the jazz community into various ideological camps, pitting proponents of traditional New Orleans style against the bebop modernists, big band swing against small improvising ensembles, and mainstream against the so-called free jazz of the 1960s. Central to all of these ideological expressions was an extraordinary concern with race, in particular with contesting the origins, meanings, and performance of jazz along racial and ethnic lines.

In addition to their own personal enthusiasms, collaborators brought with them a wide range of professional writing credentials that help to illuminate their association with particular jazz autobiographers. Among them, only Irving Kolodin (1908–1988) and Stanley Dance (1910–1999) were prominent music critics: Kolodin was music critic for the New York Sun when he collaborated with Benny Goodman on The Kingdom of Swing (1939); at the time of their collaboration, Kolodin—known chiefly as a classical music critic—had fallen under the influence of John Hammond, who was a central influence in Goodman’s career (Kolodin, “Number One” 431–40). Dance, who collaborated with white bandleader Charlie Barnet on Those Swinging Years: The Autobiography of Charlie Barnet (1984), was an influential British jazz critic who moved to the United States in 1959 and became a key proponent of the “jazz mainstream”—a term he coined that embraced a range of jazz performance practices, from Armstrong’s small ensembles of the late 1920s to the big bands of the Swing Era, but which vehemently rejected later developments in jazz, such as bebop and the “post-bop avant garde” (Gennari 208). As we will see, Dance’s views on jazz authenticity are critical for understanding his significance as Barnet’s collaborator.

Other collaborations considered in this chapter may be understood as the result of shared regional, as well as musical, connections. Thomas Scanlan and guitarist Steve Jordan, who collaborated on Rhythm Man: Fifty Years in Jazz (1984), became acquainted as longtime residents of the Washington, DC, area; Jordan was an active member of the jazz scene there, Scanlan an avid jazz fan and amateur guitarist. Longtime Chicago radio host and oral historian Studs Terkel wrote the introduction to fellow Chicagoan Bud Freeman’s Crazeology. Former University of Illinois professor Chadwick Hansen collaborated with Chicago pianist Art Hodes on two volumes: Hodes’s autobiography, Hot Man: The Life of Art Hodes (1992), and Selections from the Gutter: Jazz Portraits from “The Jazz Record” (1977). In the latter volume, Hansen explains that his musical connection to Hodes goes back to the 1940s, when Hodes performed at his high school in Bronxville, New York (Hodes and Hansen, Selections xi).⁶

The other collaborations examined here, however, seem motivated by rather different kinds of attraction between collaborator and autobiographical subject. Thomas Sugrue, who collaborated with Eddie Condon on We Called It Music, was no authority on jazz; rather, it is likely that their mutual interest in their Irish Catholic working-class background and Sugrue’s journalistic bent for conversation and interviewing were the basis for their collaboration.⁷ Bernard Wolfe, a writer associated with the New York intellectuals, found in Mezz Mezzrow a fascinating subject through which to explore his own deepening interest in race relations in American society; in particular, his curiosity about white America’s obsession with blackness as it played out in the figure of the hipster.

While a diverse range of interests and ideological commitments guide the contributions of these various collaborators, for the most part, they seem to share the assumption that white jazz musicians are outsiders to the predominately black jazz communities in which they work and sometimes live and to the elite cultural and intellectual communities of their collaborators. Moreover, even when a collaborator challenges particular aspects of the model of black primacy in jazz—as Tom Scanlan does in his collaboration with Steve Jordan—he nonetheless shares with these other collaborators a heightened self-consciousness about the racial dynamics within jazz that leaves the white jazz musician on sometimes insecure footing. One of the key functions of these collaborators, then, is to convince the reader that autobiographical subjects who in some crucial sense do not seem to belong in the communities to which they are making claims are nonetheless deserving of recognition (and even authority) in them.

A deep cultural anxiety, in other words, underlies the efforts of collaborators to authenticate their autobiographical subjects, an anxiety that reveals itself primarily through a notable preoccupation with issues of race and ethnicity; in this way, the autobiographical subject as a racialized being becomes a dominant theme within their collaboration. Various permutations of the racialized subject are permitted, even required, by the unique circumstances of each autobiographical subject; this allows collaborators to construct portraits of white jazz musicians that stress the significance of their white or white-ethnic heritage or of their relationship to blackness through their diligent attention to African American musical and cultural forms, or various combinations of the above. Common to all of them, however, is the collaborators’ construction of a racial-ethnic consciousness that grants these autobiographical subjects access to particular kinds of knowledge and understanding, all of which contribute to their legitimacy and authenticity as white jazz musicians.

Among these various strategies, collaborators most frequently strive to legitimate their white jazz subjects by emphasizing their diligence in learning and mastering African American musical and cultural practices. By so doing, collaborators both implicitly (and often explicitly) recognize the African American origins of jazz, as well as the primacy of African American jazz musicians as teachers, composers, bandleaders, and performers. In several of these texts, however, the authenticating strategies are considerably more convoluted, as the collaborator attempts to frame the white jazz musician within both African American and Euro-American intellectual and cultural spheres. Underlying all of these strategies are ambivalence and insecurity, as the collaborator works to construct an autobiographical subject who appears to belong in many worlds at once, but who seems totally secure in none; that is, neither in the African American jazz communities nor in the literary and cultural spheres in which he has been positioned by his collaborator. It is worth asking, of course, whose ambivalence is reflected here—that of the collaborator or of his autobiographical subject? As much as it is possible to untangle collaborations that yield only glimpses of their actual workings, the discussion that follows will propose some answers to this question.

Earlier, I cited previous studies of jazz autobiography by Kenney, Ogren, and Harlos, all of which direct attention to the literary function and significance of the autobiographer’s collaborator. With few exceptions, the focus of this previous work is on autobiographies by African American jazz musicians, in which issues of authorial control are clearly central to the text’s impact and reception; for this very reason, these studies provide valuable material for comparing the role of collaborators in white jazz autobiography.⁸ An important theoretical source for these studies is Robert Stepto’s seminal 1979 text, From behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative, in which Stepto builds a model for investigating the collaborator/autobiographer relationship in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century slave narratives. Stepto describes “three phases of narration” by which the slave narratives may be grouped (5); the first phase of narration, or “eclectic narrative form,” as he designates it, provides the specific model for these previous studies of jazz autobiography:

In their most elementary form, slave narratives are full of other voices which are frequently just as responsible for articulating a narrative’s tale and strategy…. Their primary function is, of course, to authenticate the former slave’s account; in doing so, they are at least partially responsible for the narrative’s acceptance as historical evidence. (3)

In his analysis of Louis Armstrong’s autobiographies, Kenney applies Stepto’s eclectic narrative form in his analysis of four documents for which Armstrong received credit as author or coauthor in order to investigate the extent of his authorial agency (“Negotiating” 40). Kenney examines voices in addition to Armstrong’s in his earliest autobiography, Swing That Music (1936), noting that all of them are white, and that all serve to explain, translate, or vouch for the integrity of the autobiographical subject (40).⁹ In his view, Swing That Music “offers a sort of conversation between whites that frames the black jazz star’s narrative, recreating the structural characteristics of the nineteenth-century former slave narratives that were similarly surrounded by the comments of white abolitionists” (40). Kenney goes further, suggesting that the narrative structure of Swing That Music replicates “the power structures that had dominated Armstrong’s relations with the owners and customers of South Side Chicago’s black and tans” (44).

Christopher Harlos also invokes Stepto’s narrative model in his analysis of the paratextual material of a number of jazz autobiographies; his intention is to uncover the ways in which the collaborator or other textual voices serve to diminish the authority of the autobiographical subject. It is striking, of course, that both Kenney and Harlos consider the authenticating strategies of the slave narratives an appropriate model for describing the relationship between black jazz autobiographers and their white collaborators, including celebrated jazz musicians such as Louis Armstrong, Dicky Wells, and Pops Foster (Kenney, “Negotiating” 40; Harlos, “Jazz Autobiography” 151–58).

Clearly, the disparity of power and authority that they identify in these relationships finds no analogy in relationships between white jazz autobiographers and their white collaborators—relationships often characterized by mutual admiration and sometimes even friendship. In other respects, however, I would argue that there is a clear resemblance between them, a resemblance with an inversion, if you will: for just as African American jazz musicians are authenticated by their white collaborators as subjects worthy of the European literary tradition of autobiography, so too are white jazz auto-biographers authenticated by their collaborators and editors, but in a reverse way—as possessing the musical skills and cultural familiarity that grant them legitimacy within African American jazz traditions.

This “reverse authentication” is also apparent in a related theme in white jazz autobiographies, in which some collaborators invoke an extreme essentialism to authenticate their autobiographical subjects, constructing portraits of them that emphasize their natural or instinctive musicality, reminiscent of the “twenties vogue of primitivism” in jazz criticism and literature that was still discernable in later criticism (Ogren, Jazz Revolution 146).¹⁰ As these collaborators foreground their white autobiographical subjects’ gifts for rhythm (see Sugrue on Condon) or their emotional (rather than intellectual) intelligence (see Hansen on Hodes), they replicate the collaborator/autobiographical subject roles of black jazz autobiography, but, once again, with a significant twist, with white-on-white primitivism replacing the white-on-black primitivism of the latter.¹¹

My use of the term “reverse authentication” in the following discussion serves two distinct but related functions: first, it emphasizes the primacy of black music and culture in white jazz autobiography; and, second, it describes the pattern by which the collaborators of these texts attempt to demonstrate the “blackness,” and therefore the authenticity, of these white autobiographers within the black jazz worlds described in their accounts. In musical and cultural terms, African Americans are almost without exception the authorities in these autobiographies, possessing the key to authenticity that white jazz musicians try to unlock through study and emulation.

Authenticating Prefaces, Forewords, and Introductions

Earlier, I remarked on the degree to which the ideological positions of the collaborators considered in this chapter reflect those of the central participants in the jazz wars; among them, however, only British jazz critic Stanley Dance was prominent in those wars, with his views about race and jazz central to his mission to promote the careers of African American swing musicians. John Gennari names him as one “of a handful of critics” in Europe who “determined which jazz records were available to the public and hence made a critic-centered, black-dominated jazz canon a virtual fait accompli” (Gennari 94–95).

In this context, I would like to consider Dance’s collaboration with Charlie Barnet on Those Swinging Years. Before their collaboration, Dance had compiled an impressive list of publications written with or about African American jazz musicians and had overseen important recording dates featuring them for several different labels.¹² In addition, Dance’s lengthy biographical study, The World of Swing, is devoted almost entirely to the achievements of African American musicians, with Barnet receiving only parenthetical mention.

In his obituary of Dance in The Independent, Steve Voce argues that Dance’s belief in the superior musical abilities of African Americans, although never stated directly, was demonstrable in his writings and public comments. According to Voce, Dance used his term “mainstream” to distinguish jazz played by African American musicians from “swing,” which he reserved for the music played by white bandleaders such as Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw. Although mainstream and swing were similar in terms of “the music and its roots,” the racial origins of the players seemed key to the distinction he made between them, and although Dance “never spoke of the matter or engaged in racial politics, [he] felt that black players made superior music to their white counterparts” (Voce). In light of his primary interests, then, his decision to collaborate with Barnet is particularly intriguing.

Dance, in fact, begins his preface with an acknowledgment that this particular collaboration is a step in a different direction for him: “In previous books I have primarily been concerned with the big band era as viewed by black musicians. In this case the perspective is that of one of the most successful white bandleaders” (Barnet xv). Why did Barnet’s life and career warrant attention from someone who had invested so deeply in promoting African American jazz musicians? Precisely, according to Dance, because of Barnet’s significant yet overlooked role in swing as an employer of black musicians. Although Benny Goodman received accolades for his decision to integrate his ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 The Authenticating Collaborators of White Jazz Autobiography
• 2 Bob Wilber, the Westchester Kid: White Privilege and Perspectives on Jazz Belonging
• 3 Race and Place and the Construction of Jazz Authenticity: New Orleanian Autobiographers Tom Sancton and “Wingy” Manone
• 4 Representations of Identity in Jewish Jazz Autobiography
• 5 Don Asher’s Fictional-Real Jazz World
• 6 “Straight Life”: The Jazz Journey of Art Pepper
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Works Cited
• About the Author