The question, “what is jazz?” was famously ridiculed in the response attributed to Louis Armstrong: “If you have to ask what jazz is, you’ll never know.” The remark suggests something serious but controversial – namely, that jazz essentially is something or other. But what?
In 1938, one brilliant writer – Winthrop Sargeant – addressed the topic of jazz in book-length detail from a music-theoretic point of view while dodging the question of a jazz essence (Sargeant 1938). We owe the most pointed attempt to define the music to a French musicologist, composer, and jazz journalist, André Hodeir, who shocked many by his denial that jazz has any necessary connection with either improvisation or blues tonality (Hodeir 1956: 35, 85, 90, 155–6, 236). Against those who think that jazz is essentially tied to improvisation, he cites the Ellington trumpet “concerto” for Cootie Williams, in which improvisation plays virtually no role. Hodeir could have named countless other cases. Charlie Mingus’s work, “Half-Mast Inhibition,” for instance, lacks any musical improvisation. Against the necessity of blue tonality for jazz, Hodeir cites the famous Coleman Hawkins 1939 recording of “Body and Soul” as just one example.
Hodeir’s definition of jazz is that it consists essentially of an “inseparable but extremely variable mixture of relaxation and tension,” that is, “of swing and the hot manner of playing” (1956: 240). The idea behind the definition is a general contrast between European “classical” music and jazz with respect to the interplay between tension and relaxation. European music capitalizes upon broad alternations between these two poles – between movement and repose, for instance, or dissonance and consonance. The peculiarity of jazz, by contrast, is that tension and relaxation are deployed “at the same moment” (Hodeir 1956: 195–6). However, although Hodeir does not take pains to profile the point, it seems clear that he applies this tension–relaxation duality to jazz in two (related) ways.
First, consider the case of jazz rhythm – that is, the phenomenon of swing, which Hodeir explains in terms of a superstructure comprising notes strategically but eccentrically placed above a (relatively) steady typically two- or four-beat rhythmic infrastructure (1956: 197–9). Hodeir’s characterization of note-placement in the superstructure is, to be sure, a homely one – a matter of “getting the notes and accents in the right place” (1956: 197). The words serve as a kind of placeholder for the innumerable means, liberally illustrated by Hodeir, by which soloists, given a suitable infrastructure, judiciously place notes so as to achieve the right effect. For instance, some twenty measures of the solo Louis Armstrong plays on the Hot Five recording of “Muggles” either orbit around (or play nothing but) the tone C. Heard as a European melody, one can hardly get the point of the effort. Heard as swinging music, there is no doubt about it. Stravinsky was talking about the effect when he described the giddy sensation we register when jazz tries “persistently to stress irregular accents” but “cannot succeed in turning our ear away from the regular pulsation of the meter drummed out by the percussion” (Stravinsky 1947: 30). Put otherwise, a soloist’s notes will be felt as moving independently of the underlying pulse and then as being recaptured by it. Hodeir notes that, so understood, swing exemplifies one of the “Freudian paradoxes: an unpleasant tension which is associated with pleasure – that is . . . with a partial relaxation” (1956: 196 n. 2).
Second, the wording of the definition makes clear that at a higher level the tension–relaxation duality reappears, with swing as a whole now taken as a main source of relaxation and hot playing as a main source of tension. Hot playing is not defined but is, rather, illustrated by such features as exceptional or continually rising volume, distortions of sonority, and vital drive (Hodeir 1956: 224–33).
It is hard not to see Hodeir as hankering for an account that would analyze the concept jazz not simply in terms of a set of necessary but disconnected conditions, but in terms that would tell us what it is about the interaction of its ingredients that yields a unified effect. Thus, he looks for opportunities to show how hot playing plays a role in swing (Brown 1991: 123–5). For instance, he notes the way vibrato can serve swing by making notes dance, so to say (Hodeir 1956: 124–5). However, he has to admit that not everything about hot playing can be regarded as serving swing. Indeed, there are trade-offs between the two. Jazz that is too relaxed may lack drive, while jazz that is too hot – too driving, for instance – may leave less room for a swinging placement of notes in the superstructure (Hodeir 1956: 237–8).
The range of cases just cited is one reason Hodeir refers to the relationship between tension and relaxation as “variable.” Another is that in Hodeir’s version of essentialism the sources of tension and relaxation in the music were only gradually brought into an effective overall relationship. Hodeir’s story of jazz unfolds in three over-arching chapters – a period of growth, then of maturity (the period of classic jazz) and then, presumably, one of decline (1956: 35). From such a perspective, the essence of an art form is something toward which history moves, and from which history may eventually depart. Thus, early jazz had not fully realized the ideal balance of tension and relaxation. Indeed, it too often relied on tension alone – which could even reach “a level of [swingless] paroxysm” (Hodeir 1956: 237). (Examples would be the often frenetic performances of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band.) In fact, Hodeir grants that this kind of unbalance could be a danger even in the mature period (1956: 231–2). (Examples would include the often over-heated performances at the famous “Jazz at the Philharmonic” concerts.)
Strikingly, Hodeir notes that the overall developmental pattern exhibits one notable anomaly, namely Louis Armstrong. Given his early ability to decompose single beats into many sub-divisions, his rhythmic use of vibrato, stop-time choruses, and extensions of notes beyond their expected values, Armstrong was well ahead of the development of the music as a whole (Hodeir 1956: 34). It is as if Armstrong somehow intuitively knew the direction of the music.
Although Hodeir goes more deeply into the question of the essence of jazz than anyone else we might cite, the difficulties with his view are clear. First, it is open to the charge that it conflates the question, “Is this jazz?” with the question, “Is this good jazz?” – as judged by a set of preferred standards. The result is that remarkable “oldtime” musicians such as clarinetist Johnny Dodds are marginalized. Second, when Hodeir turns to the moderns we can see him struggling to fit them into a formula that works best for the pre-Second World War classic jazz era. However, Hodeir speaks of musicians of the so-called “cool” school – he is thinking of players such as Lee Konitz and Stan Getz – as losing touch with a sufficient degree of tension (1956: 118, 222). Even by mid-century, Hodeir noted “conflicts” breaking out that had not yet become “aggressive” as if it would be only a matter of time before they would do so (1956: 116).
Third, once we set aside Hodeir’s evolutionary view of the matter, counterexamples from the full range of jazz history litter the landscape. Ornette Coleman sought a very loose “spread” rhythm that would ideally be liberated from the kind of metric consistency required for classic swing. And it is hard to see how Hodeir’s views of “mature” jazz would apply to the rock-slanted rhythms of jazz-fusion or to twenty-first century free jazz. Nor does he have much to tell about the rhythmic complexities of Latin jazz. As already suggested, Hodeir is not blind to the problem. Toward the end of his main work, we find a section titled “Toward a Change of Essence?” But he might well have spoken of a loss of essence altogether.
Later writers who applied serious musical analysis to the explanation of how jazz works all owe something to Hodeir – as Gunther Schuller, a major scholar of the genre, grants (Schuller 1968: viii). Like Hodeir, they typically imagined something analogous to what F. R. Leavis termed “the great tradition” in English literature. (Indeed, a main work by the renowned Martin Williams is titled The Jazz Tradition.) From our perspective it is difficult to say what if anything now represents such a tradition. Against those who place their hopes on the kind of avant-gardism once represented by John Coltrane or Ornette Coleman, there are the traditionalists who see the recent neo-classicism of Wynton Marsalis at Lincoln Center as the savior of jazz. Against both stands the pop music marketplace in which jazz would seem to be either mainly lost or “saving” itself by fragmentation into pieces too small to be regarded as preserving any tradition.
If there exists an ontology of jazz, what are its works? One option would be to place jazz works in the same category as any number of familiar works for live performance – songs by Stephen Foster or symphonies by Beethoven, for example. The occurrence of improvisation in jazz performance ought to be no obstacle to the approach. (Consider Baroque ensemble works in which the continuo parts are only sparingly determined by antecedent instructions.) Such an ontology would fit the intuition that, in spite of their improvisational content and striking differences, a performance by Miles Davis and one by Thelonious Monk could both be of one piece – “Round Midnight,” let us say.
In fact, a view of this kind has been ably articulated (Young and Matheson 2000). The basic idea is derived from the view propounded in a notable philosophical study of performance art that works for audiences might be individuated by specific sets of instructions used to guide performances (Thom 1992). Two jazz performances can be instances of a common work – a jazz “standard,” say – when they share “a common starting point in a common but loose set of tacit instructions” (Young and Matheson 2000: 128–9). In jazz, such instructions are generally cast in what the authors term a canonic form, consisting of an introduction, a statement of the tune, or “head,” a set of partly improvised variations on the tune, a restatement of the head, and a conclusion. The category of jazz works, according to such a view, would include songs written specifically for jazz performance, such as “Night in Tunisia” (Dizzy Gillespie) or “Django” (John Lewis) but also popular standards such as “Body and Soul” or “How High the Moon.”
Some of the difficulties faced by the proposal are recognized by the authors themselves (Young and Matheson 2000: 130–2). First, much jazz music fails to conform to the canonic model. Consider “free” jazz of the sort first attempted by Lennie Tristano. We might treat such a performance as being of a work that can only have one performance, but this is an awkward implication surely. Part of the point of a free jazz performance after all is that it is not of a pre-existent work. Second, there exist performances – Ornette Coleman’s “Lonely Woman,” for instance – not based on any harmonic chord changes but rather on motifs. Perhaps the motific model and the harmonically based canonic model can be given a common characterization, but it is not obvious how.
A final technical problem with the Young–Matheson view is that jazz standards often have one or more “contrafacts,” that is, tunes that share the standard’s harmonic structure while going under a different title. Conversely, there exist many jazz performances that differ wildly from each other except that they are of the same song. This song-sorting problem, as one might term it, is how to articulate a criterion of performance-identification that avoids (1) performances of ostensibly different works turning out to be of the same work and (2) performances ostensibly of the same work turning out to be of different works. How the present view – or indeed any similar view – would handle such cases is not clear.
But the larger problem is that it may be incorrect that the field of jazz music really is a sphere of musical works, as was assumed by Young and Matheson, as well as by others (Hagberg 2000).
Suppose the focus of critical attention with jazz performances is in fact not an abstractum that could be instantiated in multiple instances. Suppose, as was suggested several years ago, that the focus is instead the specific act of creating this music, now, as I listen, so to say (Brown 1996: 353, 366, n. 2; Kania 2008: 12–15, forthcoming). Such an option would in turn open up the possibility that the territory of jazz may simply not be inhabited by art works. Much depends here on an agreement about the criteria governing the concept of an art work, of course. Are there reasons why an ephemeral event cannot be an art work, for instance?
Much depends too on our willingness to discount the apparent fact that jazz musicians do give performances that would appear to be of works – jazz standards, for instance. The non-work view would need to maintain that, in a jazz context, playing “Body and Soul” or “Stardust” is just an occasion for improvising. But this would be a difficult position to defend. (Should we also insist that the tunes in a symphony by Beethoven or Brahms are just occasions for sonata-allegro development?) In spite of their close harmonic similarities, a jazz standard and a bebop contrafact of it have their own individuality. Bop tunes are abstract, choppy, often whimsical or playful, when compared with the songs from which they are derived. Jazz players will tend to improvise in the spirit of the tune they are playing. Furthermore, the non-work view will have to marginalize fully fledged jazz compositions by Duke Ellington and others. This would surely be implausible.
The larger problem, however, is that the field of jazz may just be too cluttered for any single unifying ontology. The Young–Matheson view may be suitable for a great many jazz performances. But it cannot deal easily with free jazz performances. The non-work view may be well suited for the latter kind of case but is implausible for the enormous multitude of cases where it is relevant what jazz song is played. It may be possible to work out an ontology for jazz songs or for jazz compositions. But perhaps there is no single concept – whether it be of a kind of work or of a non-work – that can serve as the ontological centerpiece for jazz in general (Brown, forthcoming). Further support for the negative conclusion might be gleaned from the relationship of jazz to recording technology.
The story is that after Louis Armstrong and Earl Hines performed “Weather Bird” together on a notable occasion, they listened to it again and again, amazed at what they had created. How, in spite of the event’s ephemerality, did they manage to do this? Through the recording that Okeh Records had just made of the performance, of course. Is there not a sense then in which even ephemeral jazz performances may sometimes endure?
Recording technology and jazz music arrived on the scene at about the same time and their histories have been problematically intertwined ever since. Phonography’s potentiality for repetition has made possible substantial features of the institutions that revolve around jazz. It is no accident that classic analyses of jazz performances – by Schuller, Williams, and others – are studies of recordings. Early in his main work on jazz, Hodeir states that the words “work and record” will be “used interchangeably” throughout his study (1956: 2). The painstaking analyses of specific jazz performances that he and others provide would be inconceivable without the possibility of going over the same stretches of music again and again – by means of recording technology, of course. Much the same thing is true of jazz pedagogy. In the days of shellac 78s, jazz musicians often wore out a specific set of grooves on a recording by returning the needle again and again to the solo they were studying. The study and critical appreciation of sources and models is possible thanks only to the preservation and repeated playback that phonography makes possible.
The view has been expounded that, ontologically understood, works of rock music are not compositions for live performance, but are, rather, identical with recorded albums or perhaps tracks thereon (Gracyk 1996; Kania 2006). Rock works do not have performances but have instead playbacks – on one’s stereo or iPod. Could such a view be maintained for jazz works? It helps here to apply a distinction that has been made between two targets of attention when listening to recordings, namely, the phenomenal and the active performance (Kania 2008: 7–8, 13–14). The former refers simply to the sounds we hear when we play a CD, for instance. The latter refers to the active production of the recorded sounds by the singing or playing of musicians. Even if we would say otherwise about rock, we are surely not intended to listen to jazz recordings as sonic constructs. One’s intuition is, rather, that we are intended to listen with the expectation that the phenomenal performance heard on a recording closely reflects the active production of music by musicians.
However, given modern recording strategy, the injunction to attend to the active performance in the case of recorded jazz may be facile. Even before the digital age, the editing of recorded music by cutting and splicing tape was well established. It is common knowledge that while recording for Columbia Records, Miles Davis allowed entirely different notes to be inserted into his recorded performances. Rudy van Gelder, the most distinguished jazz engineer in the past half century, explains how, after recording sessions, musicians would “line up at the door of the control room waiting to fix their mistakes.” Jazz musicians nowadays, he says, want to “build their music track by track” with a result “that is more like painting . . . stroke by stroke, rather than performing in the moment” (Seidel 2006: 60).
One response to this situation is that such phonographic constructs nevertheless represent what musicians could have played. But as we consider further cases, this reply becomes less convincing. Consider what have been called concept albums such as Gil Evans and Miles Davis’s Sketches of Spain, in which electronic fade-out is used to give the cinematic effect of a parade moving off down the street. Indeed, with much jazz recorded nowadays the final product is very distant from anything that could have been played. With typical “smooth jazz,” for instance, a lead track by a melody-playing instrument, usually a saxophone or guitar, is laid over a backdrop, which consists of music samples and “pads” – that is, programmed rhythms and soft, barely perceptible timbres of choirs, strings, and so on. The music is not so much performed as laminated together according to a plan. In short, the injunction to attend to the active performance in recorded jazz is problematic.
Even in the absence of manipulation, phonography’s power of exact repetition poses a specific problem for recorded jazz performances that we acknowledge to be improvised. It has been suggested that “as recorded, [such jazz] may have an entirely different phenomenology from that of the living thing” (Brown 1996: 336; see also Brown 2000: 117–18). The benefits of phonographic repeatability are obvious. But for improvised jazz, this is a strange virtue. With live improvised music one is not responding simply to the structural details of the unfolding music. One is also responding to the performer’s on-the-spot choices and actions that generate those details. But our up-take of all this is surely changed with recordings. Given the repeatability of recorded performances, one soon learns to anticipate precisely how a stretch of familiar recorded improvised music is going to go at any given point. No wonder recordings have been regarded by some scholars as little more than advertisements for the living thing (DeVeaux 2006).
One response to the problem is to posit a pluralism, or at least a dualism, with further negative implications for either a unified phenomenology or ontology for jazz. With recorded improvised jazz, the focus of critical attention may be one or more kinds of things importantly different from the targets of attention in a live context. This is a somewhat paradoxical result. Precisely because jazz is not a thoroughgoing compositional form – because it depends so much on improvisational spontaneity – both leisurely appreciation of it and detailed discourse about it depend upon a medium that to some extent embalms the music.
Social criticisms of jazz could already be heard during the first decades of the music. The lurid cover of Etude Music Magazine for August 1924, for instance, announced the periodical’s intention to deal with “the jazz problem.” Late in the twentieth century, notice was taken of a new, often shrill kind of jazz writing, which gave evidence that the post-modernist culture wars had reached jazz (Brown 1999). Perhaps the most famous philosopher who profiled jazz (indeed, all American popular music) as the bête noire of high musical culture was Theodor Adorno.
Engaging Adorno on his own terms is a Sisyphean task, since his arguments are to a great extent applications of an almost insurmountable neo-Marxist sociological metaphysics. However, bits and pieces of his thinking can be separated from this massif.
Adorno argues that the jazz musician’s supposed spontaneity is a myth – indeed, that the music consists of a stereotypical recycling of basic musical patterns. He continually repeats the claim that all jazz is based on the 32-bar Broadway show tune (Adorno 1941: 17–18, 1976: 25). Adorno is apparently ignorant of the 12- bar blues form in jazz. But even if his generalization had taken that form into account, Adorno’s myopic view would still not reckon with the many exceptions to it that have been detailed (Gracyk 1996: 163–4).
Adorno builds much of his criticism of jazz upon a comparison of the musical practice of jazz by the yardstick of European concert music. Only by a priori reasoning from dubious axioms would some of his judgments be meaningful – for example, that the “bent” notes of blue tonality can only be heard as mistakes that we try to correct in our mind’s ear (Adorno 1941: 26, 1963: 126). Adorno’s often bizarre charges have been diagnosed elsewhere (Brown 1992: 25).
One might date the intramural cultural debates about jazz from 1963 when dramatist, poet, and music critic Amiri Baraka, aka LeRoi Jones, made a passionately sustained statement about the putative misappropriation of black musical sources by the white music business (Baraka 1963). The complexities of the assumptions underneath this argument have been analyzed more than once (Rudinow 1994; Gracyk 2001: 107–28; Brown 2004: 250–1; Young 2008: 34–7).
Baraka is blunt about what he regards as an inauthentic “white” jazz sound. White musicians, he says, can be “impressive” but their technical mastery is not sufficient to give them the “right” sound (Baraka and Baraka 1987: 319). There are perhaps real issues here, as one scholar’s examination of the markers of “blackness” in music indicates (Tagg 1989). But the results of such studies are open to interpretation (Brown 2004: 243). Furthermore, Baraka is not interested in the issue at this level of generality. He is clear that the “Negro” of which he speaks is not an African “Negro” but an American one (Baraka 1963: ix–xii) and, consistent or not with this qualification, he clearly regards African- American music as less authentic to the extent that it defers to features derived from European musical culture. The African American, he says, has “abandoned too much of his own musical tradition in favor of a more formalized, less spontaneous concept of music” (Baraka 1963: 90). A prime example is the music of Duke Ellington, which Baraka describes as indentured to the “considerations and responsibilities of high art” (Baraka 1963: 222).
But Baraka is in danger here of a dilemma. If he hankers for an authentic African American music, then how could European elements be excluded? They constitute much of what American music is. Otherwise he would seem to be proposing an Afro-purist version of the music that is conceptually and historically confused. As Hodeir and others have shown, such a perspective should, if consistent, advocate the elimination of all the machinery of jazz borrowed from European music, including harmonic motion – even chords themselves (Hodeir 1956: 41–4; Brown 1998: 1–3). It is almost certainly true that African Americans invented jazz. However, if we analyze the elements of the music, it is hard to deny that its character, taken as a whole, is – contrary to the Afro-purist – a vec-torial resultant, so to say, of African and European practices.
Like Baraka, Wynton Marsalis – famous not only as a brilliant jazz and classical trumpet player, but as artistic director of jazz at Lincoln Center – has been happy on occasion to speak of the putative ineptitude of white jazz players. In response to the loaded question, “Why are the best jazz musicians black?” Marsalis replied – citing jazz pundit Stanley Crouch – that people “who invent something are always the best” at doing it. If you “celebrate less accomplished musicians . . . you cheat yourself” (Marsalis and Stewart 1994: 142, 145). (The rationale is curious, given Marsalis’s classical trumpet expertise.) Critics have detected the effect of this opinion in Ken Burns’s television series Jazz, which was strongly influenced by Marsalis and his mentors, Crouch and Albert Murray.
On another matter, however, Marsalis and Baraka could not agree. In the 1950s, one writer had already tried to make the case that, given that the tradition of opera and concert music was supposedly dead, jazz would take over the role of serious-but-listenable music (Pleasants 1955). The prediction has not exactly been borne out. Nevertheless, the view has made a reappearance thanks largely to the activities of Marsalis at Lincoln Center, where, since a key concert in 1987, the theme of jazz as “America’s classical music” has been nurtured (Gourse 1999: 186, 199). The characterization would appear to be based upon a mainly hortatory use of “classical.” However, things fall partly into place if we understand that one of Marsalis’s markers of a classical musical form is that it is indigenous. He tends to see American struggles about race as definitive of Americans as an entire people. Hence, the negative conclusion: the music played on a typical “classical” radio station in the United States is not American classical music. (Even if composed and performed by Americans? – one wonders.) Jazz, however, does deserve the label. The argument is not without interest; but, as has been shown, it does put a further strain on the application of the concept of classical (Brown 2002).
See also Adorno (Chapter 36), Appropriation and hybridity (Chapter 17), Improvisation (Chapter 6), Ontology (Chapter 4), Performances and recordings (Chapter 8), and Rock (Chapter 38).
Adorno, T. (1941) “On Popular Music,” Studies in Philosophy and Social Science 9: 17–37. —— (1963) “Zeitlose Mode – Zum Jazz,” in Prismen: Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft, Frankfurt: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, pp. 118–32.
—— (1976 [1962]) Introduction to the Sociology of Music, trans. E.B. Ashton, New York: Seabury Press.
Baraka, A. (1963) Blues People: Negro Music in White America, New York: William Morrow (originally published under the name “LeRoi Jones”).
Baraka, A. and Baraka, A. (1987) The Music: Reflections on Jazz and Blues, New York: William Morrow.
Brown, L.B. (1991) “The Theory of Jazz Music: ‘It Don’t Mean a Thing . . .’” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 49: 115–27.
—— (1992) “Adorno’s Critique of Popular Culture: The Case of Jazz Music,” Journal of Aesthetic Education 26: 17–31.
—— (1996) “Musical Works, Improvisation, and the Principle of Continuity,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 54: 353–69.
—— (1998) “Jazz” in M. Kelly (ed.) Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, vol. 2, New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 1–9.
—— (1999) “Postmodernist Jazz Theory: Afrocentrism Old and New,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 57: 235–46.
—— (2000) “Phonography, Repetition and Spontaneity,” Philosophy and Literature 24: 111–25.
—— (2002) “Jazz: America’s Classical Music?” Philosophy and Literature 26: 157–72.
—— (2004) “Marsalis and Baraka: An Essay in Comparative Cultural Discourse,” Popular Music 23: 241–55.
—— (forthcoming) “Do Higher-Order Music Ontologies Rest on a Mistake?” British Journal of Aesthetics.
DeVeaux, S. (2006) “This is What I Do,” in H. Becker, R. Faulkner, and B. Kirshenblatt- Gimblett (eds) Art from Start to Finish: Jazz, Painting, Writing and Other Improvisations, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 118–25.
Gourse, L. (1999) Wynton Marsalis: Skain’s Domain – A Biography, New York: Schirmer.
Gracyk, T. (1996) Rhythm and Noise: An Aesthetics of Rock, Durham: Duke University Press.
—— (2001) I Wanna be Me: Rock Music and the Politics of Identity, Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Hagberg, G. (2000) “Improvisation in the Arts,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 58: 95–7.
Hodeir, A. (1956) Jazz: Its Evolution and Essence, trans. David Noakes, New York: Grove Press.
Kania, A. (2006) “Making Tracks: The Ontology of Rock Music,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 64: 401–14.
—— (2008) “Works, Recordings, Performances: Classical, Rock, Jazz,” in M. Dog˘antan- Dack (ed.) Recorded Music: Philosophical and Critical Reflections, Middlesex: Middlesex University Press, pp. 3–21.
—— (forthcoming) “All Play and No Work: The Ontology of Jazz,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism.
Marsalis, W. and Stewart, F. (1994) Sweet Swing Blues on the Road, New York: Norton.
Pleasants, H. (1955) The Agony of Modern Music, New York: Simon and Schuster.
Rudinow, J. (1994) “Race, Ethnicity, Expressive Authenticity: Can White People Sing the Blues?” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 52: 128–36.
Sargeant, W. (1938) Jazz, Hot and Hybrid, New York: Arrow Editions.
Schuller, G. (1968) Early Jazz: Its Roots and Musical Development, New York: Oxford University Press.
Seidel, R. (2006) “Home Studio: Original Home Recorder,” Downbeat 74/2: 56–8, 60.
Stravinsky, I. (1947) Poetics of Music, New York: Vintage Press.
Tagg, P. (1989) “Open Letter: ‘Black Music,’ ‘Afro-American Music’ and ‘European Music’,” Popular Music 8: 285–98.
Thom, P. (1992) For an Audience, Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Young, J.O. (2008) Cultural Appropriation and the Arts, Malden: Wiley-Blackwell.
Young, J.O. and Matheson, C. (2000) “The Metaphysics of Jazz,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 58: 125–34.