Book description
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.
"An excellent study of the heyday of one of the most
problematic bodies of work in the history of jazz music. . . . Essential."-Choice
Iain Anderson teaches History at Nebraska Wesleyan University.
