Instead of thinking of jazz in the hackneyed vocabulary of canon-building, I explore jazz as a technological construction very much built to reshape spatial and temporal boundaries across the African Diaspora. Jazz technê, a techno-fusion of art and craft, comes out of a tension and distance between notated music in the classical genre and music played by ear, usually hymns, folk songs, and the blues. I trace this tension through the development of a fictional ragtime pianist in James Weldon Johnsons Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man and the education of Thelonious Monk, the high priest of bebop. With this technology converted to language, a poet like Barbadian Kamau Brathwaite is able to collapse distance to create a space for the articulation of both particular identity (for him, Afro-Caribbean) and broader identity (and Afro-Diasporic).
Jazz technê enables the creation of a unique space that is akin to the imaginary space of the Black underground, where the narrator of Ellisons Invisible Man uses it to create an emancipatory invisibility, evading the racializing gaze above. Yet, Ellisons essay Living with Music and the visual representations of jazz album covers suggest a potentially destructive alternative to this emancipation, especially when the performance of jazz is mediated by the music industry and sound reproduction technologiesjazz is as integral, essential, and at times submerged as Lucius Brockway is as the machine inside the machine.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VANDERBILT/oai:VANDERBILTETD:etd-06132011-171339 |
| Date | 30 June 2011 |
| Creators | Hines, Andrew J |
| Contributors | Houston A. Baker Jr. |
| Publisher | VANDERBILT |
| Source Sets | Vanderbilt University Theses |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.library.vanderbilt.edu/available/etd-06132011-171339/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to Vanderbilt University or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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