[JRJ 11.

2 (2017) 109-110] (print) ISSN 1753-8637

https://doi.org/10.1558/jazz.37172 (online) ISSN 1753-8645

Editorial
Catherine Tackley and Tony Whyton
[O]ne of the great wonders of the music today is that the scope of its
reach—geographically, culturally, stylistically—is too wide to contain
within any single, supposedly all-encompassing, narrative.1

In making the case for why jazz matters, David Ake comments on the
significant growth of jazz scholarship over the last twenty years and the
plurality of meanings that surround the music today. Ake challenges any
claims of a unifying history and suggests that the multitude of meanings,
uses and values that surround jazz should be understood as a particular
strength and not as a problem. Indeed, jazz remains culturally relevant pre-
cisely because of its adaptability and its resilience through time, and also
because of its power to inspire the imagination and generate new mean-
ings and cultural narratives.
This issue provides examples of this adaptability and power through
a range of studies that span different disciplinary interests, geographical
contexts, and historical periods. Alan Ainsworth draws on photographic
representations of jazz to examine the changing relationship between
instrument makers, artists and the media in the 1930s. Drawing on a
survey of c.1,300 advertisements in Down Beat between 1938–48, Ain-
sworth raises important questions about the jazz industry and the values
and assumptions that are constructed through the mediation of jazz. Jon
De Lucia examines the development of Lester Young’s innovative impro-
visatory style through an examination of Young’s famous solo on Lester
Leaps In. De Lucia uses transcription and analysis to explore the creative
aspects of Young’s solos that inspired subsequent generations of musi-
cians. Andrew Robson interrogates the biography of musician Bernie
McGann to explore the narrativisation of jazz in Australia and the emer-
gence of what he describes as an Austral jazz scene. Robson seeks to
add complexity to common narratives about jazz in Australia and inter-
rogates several myths associated with McGann’s creative output. For our
Extended Play section, Matthias Heyman moves away from the creation
of jazz as sound to explore the bricolage creations of Louis Armstrong,

1. David Ake, Jazz Matters (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), p. 12.

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2018, Office 415, The Workstation, 15 Paternoster Row, Sheffield S1 2BX.
110 Jazz Research Journal

often assembled through found objects. In particular, Heyman examines

the creative context and artistic motivations behind Louis Armstrong’s cre-
ative collage of Brussels, and considers different ways of interpreting such
an abstract work of art.
Together, these contributions illustrate the breadth of work being under-
taken in jazz studies today and demonstrate the potential of the field to offer
new insights into both familiar and unfamiliar subjects.

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2018.

[JRJ 11.2 (2017) 211-215] (print) ISSN 1753-8637
https://doi.org/10.1558/jazz.33861 (online) ISSN 1753-8645

Review

Christopher Coady, John Lewis and the Challenge of

‘Real’ Black Music. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 2016. x + 241pp. 24 tables, 18 music examples.
ISBN 978-0-472-05320-9 (pbk). US$39.95.

Alexandre Gagatsis
Department of Music, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, NG7 2RD
alexandre.gagatsis1@nottingham.ac.uk

This volume responds to a question with regards to John Lewis’ work: did
his music pose a threat to ‘real black music’ or was it an attempt to bridge
the gap between the reception of jazz in the ‘classical community’ and
to rescue it from its own stereotypes? Following Scott DeVeaux’s work in
tackling issues of jazz historiography, Christopher Coady proposes a simi-
lar paradigm shift that permits an examination of Lewis’ oeuvre by link-
ing it to an African American experience closely linked to social class (3).
The author examines class-based ideological differences between African
American communities, demonstrating how Lewis’ embrace of European
musical literacy does not cast him beyond the parameters of black music.
Rather, Coady highlights the fact that Lewis’ oeuvre has received divergent
interpretations. Building on scholarly work on composers Robert Nathan-
iel Dett and William Grant Still and considering seminal thinkers Houston
Baker and Henry Louis Gates, Coady argues that Lewis’ work celebrated
African American musical production systems in a variety of ways (5).
This idea of highlighting class differences is not new to music scholar-
ship: in Urban Blues, Charles Keil famously critiqued Amiri Baraka’s ‘ethnic
pose’ arguing that Baraka’s middle-class background and his lack of famil-
iarity with the ‘real’ poor and urban African American world were the rea-
sons for Baraka’s relative neglect of the urban blues scene (1966: 41). More
recently, Marc Hertzman’s Making Samba: A New History of Race and Music
in Brazil examined the lives of those who made samba music a marketable
reality, providing a fine example of social history that studies the move of
samba music from the periphery of Brazilian musical life to the centre of
attention. In so doing, Hertzman works under the banner of a ‘new’ cultural
history, offering a holistic view of history that brings together politics, eco-
nomics and quantifiable data together with culture, race and gender. As

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212 Jazz Research Journal

Ingrid Monson notes, Pierre Bourdieu and Mikhail Bakhtin have highlighted
the importance of considering dialogic and multivocal perspectives, advo-
cating the consideration of the historically situated character of our topics
under scrutiny (1994: 284). In this respect, it is fair to say that an attempt to
situate Lewis’ work permeates this volume from beginning to end.
The title seems rather odd at first, partly because of the indirect refer-
ence to Samuel Floyd’s work (3). Coady, however, explains that his title may
be understood as ‘speaking to the difficulty involved in telling a story about
an artist’s involvement with something that many people experience as a
very real thing, but conceive differently’ (6). He returns to this issue in the
last chapter: ‘one’s understanding of musical significance is always unique’
(174). Throughout the volume Coady explores notions of what it means to
produce African American music, challenging ideas about what that might
be in the first place, stressing the need to accept that multiple conceptions
of ‘real’ black music may be at play simultaneously. To do so the author
interprets a range of resources: interviews by commentators of the time,
contemporaneous record reviews, transcriptions of music performed by
the Modern Jazz Quartet (MJQ)—the chamber jazz ensemble Lewis led for
more than two decades—as well as a wealth of appropriate data.
Following a well-crafted introduction in which the author situates ideo-
logically both his own examination of Lewis’ work and the composer’s
musical outputs, in chapter 1 Coady uses the work of Duke Ellington,
Charles Mingus and Claude Thornhill among others, offering us a snap-
shot on how the music industry, race and class influenced Lewis’ work.
Here Coady articulates the ways in which complex socioeconomic circum-
stances forced jazz artists to adopt a survivalist aesthetic, pressing them to
pursue projects outside contemporaneous jazz venues and to broaden the
jazz market by expanding audience demographics. In this respect, Coady’s
interpretation of Charles Mingus’s compositional strategies with respect to
a Signifyin(g) analysis is especially instructing (39–46).
The author also engages with Samuel Floyd’s criticism of Lewis’ work,
considering Floyd’s argument about the intention of syncretic jazz strate-
gies in the 1950s (56–58). In this respect, given the author’s previous work
in examining the MJQ’s fugal pieces (2009), it is a shame that Gates’s
Signifyin(g) concept was not explored further in the group’s repertoire, to
demonstrate how Lewis produced Western art music sonorities whilst
simultaneously deploying jazz vernacular devices.
In chapter 2 Coady exposes ugly racial stereotypes that permeated the
reception of jazz at the time and which played a crucial role in portraying the

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Review 213

manners of MJQ members, their leader’s most notably, as ‘white’ behav-

iour. Building on Ronald Radano’s research, Coady evinces an understand-
ing of linguistic and ideological clichés that were rooted in early jazz writing
and influenced the way Lewis was portrayed in the press. In so doing, he
explores the recently demythologized ideas about the supposed rhyth-
mic superiority of African American musicians, exposing critical trends that
essentialized their rhythmic ability whilst tackling the ‘feeling versus organ-
isation force’ debate that permeated the reception of Lewis’ music. Here
Coady also considers the dress code of the MJQ, comparing it with that
of other jazz musicians. The sartorial style of the band was often critiqued
by commentators of the time; for example Ralph Ellison noted that ‘there is
even a morbid entertainment value in watching the funeral posturing of the
Modern Jazz Quartet’ (1962: 49).
In chapter 3, Coady explains some of the reasons why Lewis’ work
was received rather differently across diverse groups of the African Ameri-
can population. He reminds us of the heterogeneity of the African Amer-
ican experience and engages with issues of sonic essentialism in black
musical discourse. To do so he considers ‘uplifting strategies’ by mem-
bers of the African American community that endorsed a model of ‘suc-
cessful adulthood’ and included tertiary training together with respectable
musical taste. He notes that ‘Western art music and tertiary education were
woven together in the minds of some African American communities as
marks of ideal social advancement’ (97). Although the author acknowl-
edges the flow of power in the way that African American identities were
forged, noting the transformation of the African American upper class into
forms of white bourgeoisie, he proposes that Lewis’ music appears to fuse
versions of African American identities rather than assimilating a European
cultural aesthetic. In this respect, Coady’s examination of Lewis’ biography,
the conflicts within the African American community and the heterogeneity
of black music, as well as the elements that are supposed to constitute ‘the
jazz sound’, seems to be in the mould of Foucauldian genealogy, under-
scoring the fragmentary and inconsistent nature of discourses and power
relations.
In the fourth chapter, Coady puts Lewis’ compositions in context and
examines a range of issues: organizational structures of the MJQ reper-
toire, the group’s reception in Europe, Lewis’ compositions during his
teaching tenure at the Lenox School of Jazz and what was labelled as his
‘third stream’ work. The author identifies syncretic strategies in the MJQ
repertoire, demonstrating how Lewis’ work was rooted in jazz musical

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214 Jazz Research Journal

tropes but was simultaneously more expansive. He develops his case that
Lewis reshaped ideas about African American music in accordance with
middle- and upper-class uplifting strategies by exploring Lewis’ composi-
tions for film.
To return to the overarching argument, in introducing this book Coady
reminds us that the work of notable figures such as Duke Ellington, Miles
Davis and Charles Mingus had also been misread at various times of this
music’s history, often being accused of ‘straying too far from the ingre-
dients perceived as essential to the jazz sound’ (2). In this respect—and
given Coady’s interest ‘in undertaking arguments that challenge the idea
that Lewis’ music somehow evinced an abdication of African American iden-
tity’ (6)—the absence of situating the debate within the context of the MJQ
is notable. Lewis and the group’s vibraphonist, Milt Jackson, were often
seen as uncomfortable bedfellows due to what was labelled as the under-
statement of the African Americanness of jazz as portrayed by the quartet.
Although both Lewis and Jackson advocated for ‘politics of respectabil-
ity’, challenging assumptions about how African Americans should act and
what their music should be, elevating jazz music and the African Ameri-
can arts, they did so from different points of departure. Jackson, for exam-
ple—a devout bebopper—often communicated his disappointment at the
‘Baroque type music’ of the quartet (Page 1970: 18).1 Eventually observers
saw their interaction as symbolic for it was central to the historical issues
of the era and the quartet came to represent a circumstance where behav-
ioural and moral matters were contested in the African American commu-
nity (see Palmer 1986 and 2010).
How, then, does Coady’s argument for rooting Lewis’ musical aspira-
tions in his upbringing manifest itself in the context of the quartet? In con-
trast to Lewis’ upbringing in New Mexico, for example, Detroit offered the
vibist a rather different experience.2 Equally, the role of music in the ‘black
church’, which Coady outlines in detail (83–104), is important to consider.
Jackson was a member of the Church of God in Christ—‘I went until I was
full grown’, he noted—where cultural expressions were known to be more
locked into the realms of demonstrative performativity. Jackson referred
to the importance of gospel music in his upbringing on several occasions

1. There has been much speculation as to whether Jackson was being constrained
in the context of the MJQ, but there is no prevailing attitude with regards to his position as
the vibist often gave contrasting interviews.
2. For more information on Jackson’s upbringing see Gagatsis (2015: 137–71).

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2018.

Review 215

(Hentoff 1957), and an examination/comparison of their musical outputs

can also be made with regards to this experience.
Overall, this is a magnificent and rather overdue critical assessment
of Lewis’ often misread work in which Coady establishes a remarkably
wide frame for weaving the matters that occupy Lewis’ work. It is this all-
encompassing study, examining the jazz world ‘as a whole’ whilst allowing
the voices of those who do not fit ‘easily into a single mould’ to speak out
(182) that has been missing from jazz scholarship and for which I celebrate
the author’s work here. This volume is a strong addition to the Jazz Per-
spectives series from Michigan University Press.

References
Coady, Christopher (2009) ‘Eliington in the Third Stream: A New Perspective on the
Fugal Works of the Modern Jazz Quartet’. Jazzforschung 41/1: 65–82.
Ellison, Ralph (1962) ‘On Bird, Bird-Watching and Jazz’. The Saturday Review, avail-
able online at http://www.unz.org/Pub/SaturdayRev-1962jul28-00047 (accessed
7 April 2017). Reprinted in Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act, 221–32. New York:
Vintage Books, 1995.
Gagatsis, Alexander (2015) ‘Bags Still Grooves: Performance Strategies in Milt Jack-
son’s Improvisations’. Jazz Perspectives 9/2: 137–71. https://doi.org/10.1080/
17494060.2016.1202306
Hentoff, Nat (1957) ‘Liner notes’. Plenty, Plenty Soul. Atlantic 1269, LP.
Hertzman, Marc A. (2013) Making Samba: A New History of Race and Music in Brazil.
Durham and London: Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/978082​
2391906
Keil, Charles (1966) Urban Blues. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.
Monson, Ingrid (1994) ‘Doubleness and Jazz Improvisation: Irony, Parody, and Eth-
nomusicology’. Critical Inquiry 20/2: 283–313. https://doi.org/10.1086/448712
Page, Ben (1970) ‘Open Bags: An Interview with Milt Jackson’. Downbeat (30 April):
18–20.
Palmer, Richard (1986) ‘Milt Jackson Revisited Part I’. Jazz Journal International 39/5:
8–10.
—(2010) ‘Milt Jackson Reconsidered, Part III’. Jazz Journal 63/3 (March): 10–12.

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2018.