This Is Our Music

Free Jazz, the Sixties, and American Culture

Iain Anderson

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780812220032
• eBook ISBN: 9780812201123
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Amérique du Nord

This Is Our Music, declared saxophonist Ornette Coleman's 1960 album title. But whose music was it? At various times during the 1950s and 1960s, musicians, critics, fans, politicians, and entrepreneurs claimed jazz as a national art form, an Afrocentric race music, an extension of modernist innovation in other genres, a music of mass consciousness, and the preserve of a cultural elite. This original and provocative book explores who makes decisions about the value of a cultural form and on what basis, taking as its example the impact of 1960s free improvisation on the changing status of jazz.By examining the production, presentation, and reception of experimental music by Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, John Coltrane, and others, Iain Anderson traces the strange, unexpected, and at times deeply ironic intersections between free jazz, avant-garde artistic movements, Sixties politics, and patronage networks. Anderson emphasizes free improvisation's enormous impact on jazz music's institutional standing, despite ongoing resistance from some of its biggest beneficiaries. He concludes that attempts by African American artists and intellectuals to define a place for themselves in American life, structural changes in the music industry, and the rise of nonprofit sponsorship portended a significant transformation of established cultural standards. At the same time, free improvisation's growing prestige depended in part upon traditional highbrow criteria: increasingly esoteric styles, changing venues and audience behavior, European sanction, withdrawal from the marketplace, and the professionalization of criticism. Thus jazz music's performers and supporters—and potentially those in other arts—have both challenged and accommodated themselves to an ongoing process of cultural stratification.

Chapter 1

The Resurgence of Jazz in the 1950s

“Jazz Makes It Up the River,” declared a New York Times Magazine headline of August 24, 1958. “The long voyage from New Orleans barrel-house to public respectability ends in a triumph.” Gilbert Millstein, author of the accompanying article, was not alone in recognizing a dramatic improvement in the music’s fortunes during the middle and late 1950s. “Jazz Achieves Social Prestige,” marveled Leonard Feather in a Down Beat article of 1955. The same year, Life magazine’s photo-spread acknowledged a “New Life for U.S. Jazz,” and a few years later Esquire celebrated “The Golden Age of Jazz” with a twenty-page feature and photo special. Jazz music’s glowing reviews shared two common and repetitive elements. First, they characterized the music as an art form, not the folk or dance music of its past but a cultivated creative achievement that shared the spirit, and increasingly the audience of the best modern classical music. Second, reviewers identified jazz as the product of a sociopolitical environment unique to the United States. Thus numerous magazine features employed similar metaphors for jazz: Esquire’s editors dubbed it “America’s major original art form” or “America’s one indigenous art form,”Collier’s recognized it as “a true American art form,” and High Fidelity as “America’s . . . vital art form.”¹

The increasing acceptance of jazz as “America’s art form” during the 1950s appeared unlikely at the beginning of the decade. Bebop, the dominant style of the late 1940s, had capitalized upon the complex musical language of wartime jam sessions to exploit a niche market for virtuoso improvisation among urban sophisticates. Musicians such as Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, and Kenny Clarke struggled to make it pay on the fringes of a collapsing dance band economy yet failed to make the transition from popular to art status willed by their supporters in the jazz press. The difficulty lay not only in their ambivalent engagement with the legacy of western art music, although bebop’s belated exploration of chromatic harmony and unsettling rhythmic momentum (signaled by explosive bass drum bombs and double-time passages) underlined the distance between the traditions. More seriously, the music industry’s persistent institutional racism dashed expectations of meaningful professional advancement raised by the swing era’s business boom, infusing musicians’ artistic stance with a militant style that proved difficult for cultural gatekeepers to digest. Owing as much to the urban hipster as the avant-garde modernist, bebop’s code of language, behavior, and dress, and recurrent association with illegal drugs, carried the allure and the menace of a racialized nonconformity, its comedic and tragic sides modeled alternately by Gillespie and Parker. White admirers of bebop frequently mistook hip transgression as the only authentic expression of black identity, rather than as one manifestation of a diverse and contested culture. As such, they helped distill public perceptions of the musicians as deviant outsiders through a series of essential symbols such as the beret, horn-rimmed glasses, zoot suit, goatee, and hep talk. These images disturbed greatly those musicians, critics, and businessmen who had pinned their hopes on the potential for modern jazz to shepherd the music to respectability.²

Jazz music’s ability to overcome these disadvantages and emerge as a national cultural symbol owed a great deal to the convergence of interests between Washington’s foreign policy imperatives and the desire of its supporters to extend the audience for jazz in the United States and overseas. During an era in which both superpowers placed tremendous importance on the power of propaganda to win and lose potential allies abroad, State Department officials desperately sought a reply to Soviet accusations that portrayed the United States as “culturally barbarous” and “belied by racial and religious discrimination.”³ Aware of the music’s immense popularity abroad, critics such as Marshall Stearns and Ralph Ellison intervened in the Cold War debate over American exceptionalism by equating jazz with democratic individualism and cultural consensus. By subsuming bebop’s marginal identity into a vision of jazz as a representation of wider American values, they solidified Washington’s interest in the form. Indeed, the capacity of musicians to model progressive race relations precipitated government use of jazz on the Voice of America and through sponsorship of highly successful foreign tours.

The State Department’s cultural diplomacy contributed to and benefited from an impressive resurgence of jazz in America, most noticeable for its embrace by a sizeable middle-class audience that read magazines such as Esquire, Harper’s, the Saturday Review, and the New Yorker—all of which instituted regular jazz columns in the mid-1950s. During an era in which promoters of highbrow forms popularized classical music and abstract art among a white-collar audience—much as the Book-of-the-Month Club extended the readership for literary “masterpieces” between the wars—musicians, critics, and entrepreneurs mobilized jazz for respectable consumption. Jazz music’s success would have been unimaginable without the emergence of new styles that combined sophisticated and accessible devices in a way that, as W. T. Lhamon, Jr., described it, connected “congenially” with a public increasingly alienated by the “heedless autonomy” of high modernism.⁴ At a time when Clement Greenberg, Dwight Macdonald, and other defenders of a hierarchical order increased their protests against mass culture to a fever pitch, cool, West Coast, Third Stream, and arguably hard bop provided the vehicles for jazz music’s mediation with a new audience.

The success of these “modern vernacular” jazz styles hinged upon the democratic, participatory spirit of consumption that pervaded the affluent society of the 1950s and extended to the field of the arts. The tremendous renown of conductors Leonard Bernstein and Arturo Toscanini, ballet choreographers George Ballanchine and Martha Graham, painters Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, and jazz musicians Dave Brubeck and Miles Davis testified to what Jacques Barzun described in 1954 as “America’s Passion for Culture.”⁵ The Cold War environment of international rivalry heightened an awareness that a great nation ought to produce great art, an expectation confirmed by Van Cliburn’s instant popularity after winning the First International Tchaikovsky Piano Competition in the Soviet Union during 1958. New methods of presentation stirred an interest in the arts among many Americans out of touch with the museum, theater, or concert hall. Television provided an alternative exhibition space catering to audiences isolated in the growing suburbs from direct contact with modern art, classical music, jazz, and ballet. In a similar vein, jazz and classical music gained a tremendous boost from the development of Long Play records, with their unprecedented ability to approximate or reproduce live performances. Equally important for jazz, which in many ways raised its profile while established highbrow forms lowered theirs, festivals and campus concerts (with their evolving expectations of audience behavior) provided reassuring alternatives to nightclubs. Through a variety of forums and media, manufacturers and advertisers spread stylish modern images beyond the growing community of museum and concert devotees, translating modernist gestures into saleable fashions. By commodifying culture as a means of self-improvement, these developments tied the arts to a consumer ethic that everyone in the affluent society could hope to fulfill.⁶

Yet jazz music’s growing reputation depended upon an unstable concord. Predicated upon concerns with America’s international stature, government exploitation of jazz exacerbated—as it attempted to paper over—the dissonance between a projected image of equality and a domestic reality of segregation and discrimination. Television played a less important role in disseminating jazz than other art forms in part because it depended upon visual representation. Potential sponsors frequently balked at showing integrated bands on screen out of concern for the southern market, a recurring reminder that traveling musicians hardly represented the whole nation as Washington claimed. The discontent that rumbled beneath the surface of many State Department tours would eventually disrupt the music’s legitimating construct and polarize critics, artists, and audiences. In addition, growth and prosperity in jazz (as in the general population) appeared to many artists unequally distributed on the basis of race. The increasing prominence of white “star” musicians continued to frustrate many African American performers who felt themselves closer to the jazz tradition yet stymied by their comparatively difficult access to financial rewards. Thus while jazz appeared to extricate United States foreign policy from an embarrassing dilemma, and re-establish itself on a viable financial footing, consequent battles over ownership and identity politics within the jazz community soon threatened the music’s newfound status. In the early 1960s, free improvisation provided a focus for interrogating the aesthetic and ideological dimensions of “America’s art form” established during the previous decade.

Jazz music’s evolving identity as “America’s art form” was firmly grounded in the Cold War milieu. It remained linked to a popular discourse that attempted to articulate what the country stood for and to demonstrate its principles in action. Neither imposed on the music by aggressive cold warriors nor generated organically among communities of musicians and listeners, the phrase’s constant recurrence in popular and trade magazines spoke to the overlapping concerns of performers, promoters, critics, and foreign policy makers. Although stylistic changes by themselves may have inched the music toward broader recognition as an exemplar of artistic modernity, the government’s promotion of jazz as a representative American form compressed stylistic and racial divisions and solidified the music’s ideological resonance among both domestic audiences and opinion-leaders in non-aligned nations. Thus the government’s need to reach beyond its borders and engage the Soviet Union in a battle of ideas critically shaped the music’s reception at home as well as abroad.

On April 20, 1950, President Harry S. Truman stood before the American Society of Newspaper Editors and called for a “Campaign of Truth” to counter a Soviet policy of “deceit, distortion, and lies” abroad. In doing so he simultaneously confirmed the premise of United States foreign policy, which divided the world into two opposing ideological camps, and acknowledged the importance of propaganda to maintaining allies and influencing neutral countries in favor of the American way. Ever since the victors failed to agree upon peacetime settlements for Poland and Germany at Yalta, during the last months of World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union had viewed each other’s attempts to secure a European sphere of influence with increasing suspicion. Determined to check Russian power in the western continent, Truman framed his military and economic aid package to Europe as a matter of principle rather than a strictly geopolitical issue. In a speech of March 1947, the president outlined the moral dichotomy between freedom and dictatorship, democracy and totalitarianism that justified foreign policy considerations. By dividing the world into polar opposites, the Truman Doctrine supported intervention in favor of unsavory but strategically significant regimes (for example, nominally democratic Greece) and helped overcome American isolationism. By equating any victory for communism with a defeat for freedom, however, it extended America’s commitments worldwide and strengthened fears of domestic subversion whenever events turned sour.⁷

America’s new role as protector of the free world soon ran into severe problems. During 1949–50 the Soviets successfully tested a nuclear weapon, China fell to Mao, and communist North Korea attacked South Korea. The specter of open—and now potentially nuclear—warfare limited the president’s options abroad, yet inaction threatened to encourage Republican allegations that Truman tolerated communist activities.⁸ The field of ideas and information offered one of the few arenas in which the United States could act aggressively to counter perceived Soviet insurgency. With the stakes of warfare growing by the month, propaganda provided a weapon the superpowers could use to win friends and influence governments without coming to direct blows with each other. The Smith-Mundt Act of 1948 provided the initial mechanisms for combating the spread of communism by establishing committees on informational and educational exchange to advise the secretary of state. Truman’s 1950 call for a “Campaign of Truth” acknowledged that the use of culture to actively refute Soviet overtures and build consensus in Europe peacefully would represent a key weapon in the Cold War.⁹

American agencies used a variety of methods to educate allies, enemies, and neutral countries alike about the advantages a partnership with the United States could bring. Student exchange programs and overseas libraries targeted foreign decision makers, the Voice of America beamed news from an American perspective across the world, and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) even launched disposable razor blades by balloon across the Iron Curtain. Believing that the most effective propaganda occurred when its origins in the United States executive branch remained hidden, the CIA frequently concealed its authorship and funding of cultural initiatives. From 1950 to 1967, for example, covert agent Michael Josselson ran the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Its news service and magazines, musical performances and prizes, touring art exhibitions, and prestigious international conferences were designed to elicit the sympathy of West European intellectuals for an American worldview and transform the noncommunist left into a bulwark against Soviet influence.¹⁰

Each program stressed the virtues of “Americanism,” a variety of American exceptionalism that officials contrasted with an unflattering picture of the communist system. Government agencies told the world that the United States represented democracy and human rights, freedom of choice and religion, technological progress, and material abundance. Sometimes the emphasis changed in order to press home an ideological advantage or in response to a Soviet ploy. The Soviets had long ridiculed Americans as “culturally barbarous” and showed off their own artistic successes through traveling productions by the Bolshoi ballet and other performance groups.¹¹ The U.S. response had proved faltering and sporadic, despite some well-received collaborations between the State Department and the American National Theater and Academy (ANTA). By 1954, President Dwight D. Eisenhower (who shared Truman’s two-worlds vision) sought and received from Congress an Emergency Fund of five million dollars annually for musical and dramatic presentations abroad and U.S. participation in international trade fairs. Permanently established two years later, this State Department funding program drew the arts fully onto the Cold War stage. In the next ten years, ANTA—under the auspices of the State Department—sent 206 artistic groups on goodwill tours to 112 different countries. The recipients of government sponsorship included all four of America’s permanent ballet companies, two modern dance troupes, at least one symphony orchestra each year, exhibitions of American painting, school choirs, and musical shows such as My Fair Lady and Oklahoma! ¹²

The State Department’s deployment of jazz musicians as part of this program hardly resulted from a whim or fancy. Although they faced increasing interference from congressional representatives, American officials vetted carefully those cultu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. The Resurgence of Jazz in the 1950s
• 2. Free Improvisation Challenges the Jazz Canon
• 3. Free Jazz and Black Nationalism
• 4. The Musicians and Their Audience
• 5. Jazz Outside the Marketplace
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Acknowledgments