Browsing by Author "Berliner, Paul"

In jazz circles, someone with "big ears" is an expert listener, one who hears the complexity and nuance of jazz music. Listening, then, figures prominently in the imaginations of jazz musicians and aficionados. While jazz scholarship has acknowledged the discourse on listening within various jazz cultures, to date the actual listening practices of jazz musicians and listeners remain under-theorized. This dissertation investigates listening and aural experience in a New York City community devoted to avant-garde jazz. I situate this community within the local history of Manhattan's Lower East Side, discuss the effects of changing neighborhood politics on music performance venues, and analyze social interactions in this scene, to give an exposition of "listening to music" as a practice deeply tied into other aspects of my interlocutors' lives. I engage with cultural anthropology, urban sociology, and media studies, applying insights from those fields while engaging perennial concerns and topics of jazz scholarship: the nature of musical improvisation, and relatedly, the dynamics of listening and aural perception, as well as the complex, changing, but continuing relationship between African American cultural practices and jazz.

This project makes several contributions to the ethnomusicology of listening and to jazz studies. First, I argue for and demonstrate an ethnographically-informed mode of music analysis: I use ethnographic data on participants' aural experience as the basis for

fine-grained sound analysis. Second, in attending to the processes that produce alternative, parallel, and sometimes intersecting canons, I locate the work of canon formation in the everyday lives of listeners and reveal its political and ideological implications. Finally, building on the previous two arguments, I propose that listening, though often experienced as subjective and private, takes place in networks of social relationships that listeners constitute both through real-time interaction and through engagements with history. Although scene participants vary widely in their theories of how to listen, it is through interactions around shared aural experiences that they carry on the ethos of the 1960s countercultural and Civil Rights movements and reproduce their investments in the ideas of social and musical marginality in the post-Fordist New York of the early 21st century.

Miles Davis, never one for self-effacing humility, took his boasting to new heights when he proclaimed in a Rolling Stone interview from December 1969, "I could put together the greatest rock and roll band you ever heard." Most critics agree that A Tribute to Jack Johnson, recorded between February and April of 1970, was his attempt to do just that. The album featured an ensemble that was closer to a rock power trio than a jazz quintet, musicians who were as schooled in rock and R&B as in jazz, and a prominent use of emerging instrument and studio technologies previously unheard in Davis's music. In highlighting these stylistic markers, A Tribute to Jack Johnson made definitive the musical transition that Davis's immediately preceding works had set in motion.

Though few fans of the era would have been surprised by Davis's invocation of the value-laden vocabulary of "greatness" in describing his music, many were taken aback by his desire to associate with rock and roll. For a musician trained in the jazz tradition and revered as a master of the genre, the intentional incorporation of influences from popular music was viewed by many jazz listeners as nothing short of heretical. What did it mean, then, for Davis to make such a claim - and such an album - at the particular time that he did?

To address these two questions, I investigate in my dissertation the production, circulation, and reception of both the stand-alone album A Tribute to Jack Johnson and the documentary film for which parts of the album were initially the soundtrack. Combining my training in music with scholarly perspectives on identity politics, technology studies, film studies, and African American social and political history, I demonstrate how this recording comprises both a signal incursion into accepted jazz practice, and a unique window onto vital debates around jazz, popular culture, and identity constructions in the U.S. in the early 1970s. This dissertation thereby offers one approach for continuing the critical re-evaluation of fusion jazz that has prominently been in progress since the late 1990s.