Cultural Dialogics and Jazz: A White Historian Signifies

1. Cultural Dialogics and Jazz: A White Historian Signifies Article by: Gary Tomlinson

2. Gary Tomlinson • Specialist in music of the late Renaissance and early Baroque, opera, music and cross-cultural contact, and cultural history and historiography. Alfred Einstein prize of the American Musicological Society, 1982. Guggenheim fellowship, 1982. MacArthur fellowship, 1988-93. Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar, 1997-98. Tomlinson publishes in a number of fields. In his book Monteverdi and the End of the Renaissance he deals with the impact of literary forces on changing musical styles around 1600. His work on opera, especially in Metaphysical Song: An Essay on Opera, treats the connections of music drama to changing models of European subjectivity. His book Music in Renaissance Magic: Toward a Historiography of Others brings poststructuralist historical approaches to bear on sixteenth-century musical magic. His current work concerns New World song and theories of European colonialism.

3. African American Canon • The ideal of the African American Canon, Tomlinson takes a look at how other authors perceive what should be in “the canon” • Tomlinson uses Henry Louis Gates Jr. “The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism”

4. African American Canon (cont.) • Gates sheds some light to allow us to alter our views of African American traditions

5. Tropology and Archaeology • Houston A. Baker talks about tropology, which is taking the “norm” and creating something new. (ex. Miles Davis, Bitches Brew) • Doing this we get to experience stuff other than what we know. • In relation to archaeology, tropology is what cause leverage to pry people to think of new ideas.

6. Difference in Dialogue • Jacques Derrida- “we must learn to speak the other’s language without renouncing our own…it is likewise imperative that we learn our own language without in the process renouncing others.”(pg.72) • Knowledge comes from dialogue of all different vantage and view points (pg.74)

7. Monologue, Canons, and the case of Jazz. • Baraka- “Negro music first expresses attitude, than second the music” (pg.75) • Baraka warns us that we have institutionalized jazz, evaluated its works, and enshrined those judged to be in the best in a glass case of cultural admirabilia. The jazz canon has been forged and maintained according to old strategies- (pg. 75)

8. Miles Davis, Musical Dialogician • There are four authors that have their own views on the canon, they felt Davis’s music was too far from tradition to be apart of the “canon” (pg. 81) • “The rich dialogue of musical voices from outside as well as inside the walls of “pure” jazz that went into the musical making of Davis’s new styles around 1970 seems to carry no musical/cultural excitement for these writers. Far from it. Instead they hear only a departure of the canonized jazz tradition of their own making. (pg. 81)

9. Greg Tate on Miles • Miles is significant due to new styles and pop elements. • He also was a nonacademic advocate of black vernacular.

10. Racism Issues • “White musicians are overtrained and black musicians are undertrained. You got to mix the two. A black musician has his own sound, but if you want it played straight, mix in a white musician and the piece will still be straight, only you’ll get feeling and texture -up, down, around, silly, wrong, slow, fast-you got more to work with. There’s funky white musicians. But after classical training you have to learn to play social music.” Miles Davis quoted by Baraka (pg.84)

11. Racism Issues (cont.) • What makes Miles Different? He came to New York to go to Julliard, and got a good allowance from his father. • That makes him different from other black musicians because he featured white musicians in his music. He was a more well rounded/educated black male. • Miles got a lot criticism for this.

12. Fusion Music • Fusion Music is a melting pot of his ingredients from his (Davis) environment. • Some of Davis’s music mixed as well as oil and water, while other made an effective brew. The older ingredients were never discarded, they were just altered. (pg. 87) • Dialogues of Fusion are numerous

13. Furthering Jazz • Solo Jazz- included minimalism (pg. 88) • Jazz purists were sore to this new style • Acid Jazz • White Rockers wanted to try these styles

14. Concluding Thought • “Dialogical Knowledge, is the building of precarious discourse that never fully displaces the other discourses around it. It is unsettling precisely it works against our natural impulse to be settled in the complacency of our own rules and term. It threatens because it relinquishes the comforting idea of mastering a fully cleared space with open horizons in order instead to scrutinize uneasily the mysterious others crowding in on it. Mastery is no doubt the easy route to follow. But the path of mystery, if steeper will surely lead to more humane rewards.” (pg. 93)