American political history seems to be curiously devoid of musical sub-currents. The resolute practicality and legalistic nature of the U. S. political tradition seems to drive out any clear association with the nation’s expressive culture. Ulysses S. Grant’s alleged comment, “I know only two tunes—one is ‘Yankee Doodle’ and the other isn’t,” epitomizes the general situation. Upon closer inspection, of course, one can detect scattered evidence of interaction between the two fields. Among presidents, for example, Thomas Jefferson played the violin, Harry Truman and Richard Nixon the piano; young Warren Harding dabbled in all of the brass instruments in the Marion, Ohio town band; and Bill Clinton blows riffs on his saxophone. The White House, furthermore, has been a notable venue for music for at least a century and a half, and far-flung martial and ceremonial events have inspired a rich tradition of performances.1 Is it possible, though, for historians to make the leap from these incidental musical trends to an understanding of intellectual and ideological connections between American political and music history?
As a historian of jazz, I have tried to connect the music’s history with general trends in American history, including race relations, economics, class divisions, and urbanization. Other historians have begun to connect jazz with general political ideologies. In recent social histories of 1930s swing music, especially, David Stowe and Paul Lopes have pioneered the exploration of jazz history’s interaction with partisan politics, with a particular focus on the pro-New Deal and Democratic orientation of many swing musicians in the 1930s and early 1940s.2 These promising findings suggested that jazz might have evolved a basic political identity in its big-band swing years, and that relationships between partisan ideologies and the ideological content of jazz musicians’ and listeners’ activities might have been established.
In looking for such relationships, one might think that because jazz is such a notably biracial music, and because beginning in the 1930s it brought unprecedented prominence to important African American musicians, that jazz’s political profile would be particularly evident in the evolution of civil rights policy. Certainly many black musicians, such as Duke Ellington and Teddy Wilson, were active crusaders for racial equality, and the white jazz promoter John Hammond consciously wedded his musical activities with his NAACP work.3 Some black musicians, such as Wilson, even championed a socialist critique of American racial oppression.
However, for the most part, as Paul Lopes has shown in his recent study The Rise of a Jazz Art World, jazz’s New Deal partisans were much more cautious. Like Franklin Roosevelt’s Democratic party itself, big-band Democrats such as Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw largely endorsed the New Deal as a vehicle for the assimilation of working-class Americans of recent immigrant stock into the mainstream of U. S. society and economy. The more radical notion of racial equality was hotly debated by the mostly white critics who publicized swing, but only as it pertained to conditions within the jazz world itself. Thus, the elimination of Jim Crow in society did not become a rallying cry among jazz aficionados, but critics eagerly explored the issue of whether black musicians “naturally” played jazz better than whites.4
In the 1940s, again, while far-left jazz writers such as Sidney Finkelstein found radical implications in the music’s development, the vast majority of commentators in jazz either endorsed Roosevelt’s mildly left-wing New Deal and wartime agendas or remained silent. World War II and the ensuing Cold War, of course, dampened even this moderate liberalism throughout the United States, and the cautious politics of the jazz world in the late 1940s and 1950s fully conformed to this. Critics such as André Hodeir and Marshall Steams set about to define the safe “mainstream” of jazz history and filed off any of the sharp ideological edges that the history of the music might have exhibited.5 Young bebop artists such as Dizzy Gillespie did express an aggressive black nationalism, but at midcentury these views—like socialism and communism—were outside the mainstream political spectrum and won jazz no general political cachet. By contrast, though, the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s brought black liberationist traditions and undercurrents of the left-wing political tradition into the mainstream discourse. Jazz artists such as Abbey Lincoln, Jackie McLean, and Charles Mingus put their music to the service of the cause of equality and racial pride. Much of the 1960s jazz avant-garde became associated with a cultural politics that were far more radical than the welfare-state liberalism of Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society agenda.
This background serves as a preface to this essay, an initial and tentative inquiry into the possible existence of a historical relationship between jazz and the most important post-1960s political trend in the United States: the conservative revival. By “conservative” I mean specifically the “New Right” ideology that has overtaken the Republican Party since the early 1970s. This ideology, opposed to the welfare state and social tolerance and in favor of aggressive military action and so-called “traditional” social and religious values, was prophesied in 1964 by Barry Goldwater in his losing presidential campaign, honed by Richard Nixon’s “Southern strategy” designed to win over conservative white Democrats, and reached increasingly definitive forms in the presidencies of Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush. Their ascendency to the White House, of course, attests to the electoral success of the New Right in the late twentieth century.
One avenue into the history of this relationship would be to explore the political conservatism of certain jazz musicians themselves. For this purpose, an obvious example would be Lionel Hampton, the great swing vibraphonist and bandleader. While he is best remembered for his role in that signal event in the chronicle of jazz liberalism—the creation in 1936 of the first publicly integrated jazz combo, the Benny Goodman Quartet—Hampton was a life-long Republican. Inheriting his parents’ Reconstruction-style loyalty to the party of Lincoln, he scorned Democrats for “us[ing] blacks just to get their vote” and for “picking my pocket” every year at income tax time. In the 1940s Hampton campaigned for Richard Nixon in California during his first race for the House of Representatives and for Prescott Bush during his successful quest for a Senate seat from Connecticut, and he became a lifelong acquaintance of Nixon, Bush, and the latter’s son George H. W. Bush. His orchestra played at inaugural galas for Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan (as well as for Democrat Harry S. Truman). In 1981 Reagan held a White House concert featuring and honoring Hampton, who then received a Kennedy Center Honor the next evening.
Off of the bandstand Hampton was not shy about exploiting his government connections to advance a second career in real estate. His particular area was the development of public housing projects, a Great Society-era initiative which he easily reconciled with his conservative dedication to self-help in the black community. In the 1960s New York’s Republican governor Nelson A. Rockefeller (for whom Hampton also campaigned) assisted the bandleader’s first effort, the Lionel Hampton Houses in Harlem, and the state also helped to build the Gladys Hampton Houses (named after his late wife) in the same region. Again in the 1980s, Hampton frankly recalled, “with a Republican administration in the White House, I was hoping to get some federal money.” He succeeded, and built the Hampton Hills housing project in Newark, New Jersey. Hampton served as a delegate to a few Republican national conventions as well.6
Among black jazz musicians, though, Lionel Hampton’s story is striking in its uniqueness. From a very early age, Hampton’s life moved forward on parallel sets of tracks, involving music and ideologically informed entrepreneurialism. While Hampton is certainly representative of a small black bourgeoisie that has remained loyal to Republican conservatism, he cannot be considered a politically influential force within jazz circles.
As we look at the issue of jazz and conservatism from the perspective of the early twenty-first century, it may seem that an ideological trend in jazz of more recent vintage may be detected in the assertion of “traditional” personal and professional values by some musicians and cultural critics, notably trumpeter/composer Wynton Marsalis and drummer/critic Stanley Crouch. Marsalis, for example, finds it “racist” when a European journalist asks him, “why don’t you rap?” and describes his music as “an alternative reality to the prevalent stereotype.” The musician also saw his sextet (now disbanded) as an alternative to the avant-garde and fusion movements in jazz. He sympathizes with fusion musicians who in the 1970s had to “accommodate” to the popularity of rock music, but laments their criticisms of his sextet. These musicians and other “social critics,” in Marsalis’s view, “were even threatened because we dressed up when we played, we tried to be clean.” While the trumpeter is fully conscious of the legacy and persistence of racism, he accentuates the positive in American society: “there is a sense of struggle and energy, the energy of possibility, the energy of improvement and ascension.” Crouch, similarly, argued in 1994 that antiracism has reached a critical mass of sorts in contemporary America, paving the way for positive African American role models in the ranks of new jazz musicians barely out of their teens:
Nicholas Payton, Abraham Burton, Ali Jackson, and Kevin Hays don’t walk around with their shoes untied, their pants falling off, caps sideways. Karen Farmer, Vanessa Rubin, and Renee Rosnes never give the impression they’re turning tricks on the side. They represent a movement of young people who aren’t trying to emulate the bad taste of pop stars and gangster rappers.
“They suffer no feeling of a generation gap” with older musicians—nor, Crouch implies, do they suffer from any of the restrictions imposed on other young black people in the Reagan-Bush era.7
Marsalis’s and Crouch’s scorn for post-1960 experimental jazz and its political messages and their championing of what they consider to be jazz’s traditional bedrock values of self-discipline, respect for tradition, and dedication to professionalism have been associated by some commentators with political conservatives’ calls for personal responsibility and individualism and their rejection of identity politics and of collective social action. The jazz traditionalism of the 1980s and 1990s has met with vociferous criticism from veterans of the 1950s and 1960s jazz scene. Avant-garde musicians complain strenuously that Marsalis and his colleagues have coopted all of the public attention and commercial opportunities from them. One critic of jazz traditionalism, the saxophonist Michael Zilber, goes as far as to label Stanley Crouch “the David Horowitz of jazz criticism” and Wynton Marsalis “the Ronald Reagan of jazz.” The latter’s tight control over Jazz at Lincoln Center, now the most prominent stage for jazz music in the nation, alienates partisans of “post-Coltrane” improvisation. One such partisan calls Marsalis a member “of the jazz world’s right wing” and laments his “angry defen-siveness” in response to critics, a posture which masks his power to deny avant-garde musicians access to the Lincoln Center stage.8
Neoconservative style and attitudes in jazz, of course, have a direct relevance to our topic. The association of jazz with particular social values, for better or worse, makes it a political tool. I will return to the content of these recent musical and social ideologies at the conclusion of this essay. First, though, it is necessary to explore the uses to which post-1960s politicians associated with the New Right—rather than musicians who happen to be politically or socially conservative—have put jazz, as both a symbol and as a beneficiary of their government policies.
First, the symbolism. The place to start is on 29 April 1969, during one of the most paradoxical evenings ever to transpire at the White House. On that night president Richard M. Nixon threw a lavish and joyous party for Duke Ellington, celebrating the composer and bandleader’s seventieth birthday and awarding him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. For the first time, an all-star roster of jazz greats appeared at the nation’s house: Earl Hines, J. J. Johnson, Clark Terry, Louie Bellson, Dave Brubeck, Gerry Mulligan, Paul Desmond, Billy Taylor, Jim Hall, and others. Willie the Lion Smith and Dizzy Gillespie were guests who later joined in jam sessions. Anecdotes of this evening abound: Ellington kissing the president four times, explaining that he was planting “one [kiss] for each cheek”; Vice President Spiro T. Agnew playing “Sophisticated Lady” on the piano; Ellington dancing with Nixon’s secretary Rose Mary Woods, later of Watergate fame; Fatha Hines joining the president after the party in the upstairs quarters and swapping tales about boyhood piano lessons.9
The inspiration of the evening has been contested by historians and participants. Conventional chronicles of the Nixon years have labeled it an early, atypical, and characteristically cynical effort by the administration to feign Republican interest in African Americans. Nixon’s actual disinterest, this version goes, was reflected in his alleged remark to H. R. Haldeman that all of the jazz greats should be invited—“like Guy Lombardo.” In a scathing study of race and the presidency which he titled Nixon’s Piano, Kenneth O’Reilly contrasts the Ellington evening with another White House social event less than a year later, the 1970 edition of the annual dinner held by the Gridiron Club (a Washington correspondents’ group). On this night Nixon and Agnew, seated at baby grand pianos, played “Dixie” and engaged in southern-drawl banter (many thought it was mocking black dialect, a la Amos ’n’Andy) about a currently hot Beltway topic, the Administration’s “Southern Strategy” for wooing white conservative voters away from the Democratic party.10 Even before the Ellington evening, as O’Reilly and many others have shown, Nixon regarded average urban blacks with contempt and used code words in his speeches that stoked white voters’ hostility to ghetto uprisings and the demands of civil rights activists. Nixon’s main contact with African Americans, in fact, seemed to have been during White House soireés, when celebrity supporters such as Pearl Bailey, Sammy Davis Jr., Lionel Hampton, and James Brown hugged and traded kind words with the president. In this analysis, then, the Ellington evening is viewed negatively, as a damning exception to the general course of Nixon’s (and conservatives’) relationship with jazz and with African Americans in general.
However, alternative interpretations of the evening have been presented. One black musician in attendance exulted the next day that “Nixon did something no one else has ever done—this is the first time an American black man was honored in the White House.” The most thoroughgoing and positive interpretation of Nixon’s cultural politics has been presented by Leonard Garment, who variously served as the president’s law partner, aide, and personal attorney. Garment, a Brooklyn native and Democrat who had dabbled in socialism as a youth and had once pursued a career as a reed musician—briefly playing with Woody Herman’s orchestra in 1944—became a successful Manhattan attorney. In the mid-1960s he became Nixon’s law partner and confidant. In early 1969, at the president-elect’s request, Garment came to Washington as an informal advisor. In this capacity, as he recalls in his delightful autobiography, Crazy Rhythm, he was encouraged by Willis Conover, the jazz-loving music director of the Voice of America, to propose a birthday dinner for Ellington at the White House.11
Garment’s recollections of the evening’s planning and execution feature none of the cynicism and opportunism that other chroniclers have highlighted. Instead, he accentuates the positive: “it was one of the happiest, most relaxed public occasions of Richard Nixon’s life.” Garment’s view of his own role as a Nixon advisor, though, is not free of cynicism; he called it “a job out of … the distant swamplands of Republican politics, such as civil rights, Jews, and cultural affairs, activities that no sane and reasonably ambitious person in my position would have touched in 1969.” He became an official White House aide a few weeks after the Ellington evening, acting as a counselor and fix-it man on a variety of issues. Later the president’s personal attorney during Watergate, Garment saw plenty of the administration’s dark side (and though his memoirs do not make the connection, the desperate unhappiness and eventual suicide of his wife of thirty-five years must have been exacerbated by the pressures of the Nixon era).12
Revealingly, though, Garment notes that Nixon largely showed him “his more admirable qualities, his resourcefulness, his flexibility, his curiosity and willingness to explore multiple perspectives of a situation.” (Would that other Americans, even other members of the White House staff, had been able to witness these admirable qualities more often.) In Garment’s view, the Ellington evening was a chapter in his own ongoing effort to stimulate the president’s interest in jazz and in the other arts. In this pursuit he was strongly motivated by his perception that Nixon, in fact, “was a closet aesthete [who] had strong, traditional views about what was good or bad in painting, music, architecture, and writing.”13
True as that may have been, a full study of Nixon’s motives would undoubtedly show a wider array of influences that led him to endorse an unprecedented government promotion of jazz and other arts. Nixon certainly was familiar with precedents such as the State Department-sponsored international goodwill tours by the Dizzy Gillespie, Benny Goodman, and Louis Armstrong bands, which took place during the Eisenhower Administration, in which he served as vice president. In addition, Nixon’s main Republican presidential rival in the 1960s, Nelson Rockefeller, had pioneered support of the arts in New York state by setting up a council and a budget for grants and arts promotion. Arts policy was one of a number of areas in which Nixon coopted Rockefeller’s free-spending approach to problem-solving under the guise of a conservative “new federalism.” The governor’s chief arts administrator (and erstwhile mistress), Nancy Hanks, would also work in Washington for Nixon. Nixon’s approach to arts policy reflected his unique brand of political deviousness. An activist by nature, eager to coopt initiatives and control from the largely liberal northeastern economic and cultural elites whom he despised, Nixon expanded and diversified the mission of the National Endowment of the Arts (NEA).14 Leonard Garment was entrusted with the early stages of the task.
The NEA had been founded in 1965 as a minor appendage of Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society. LBJ—whom no one ever accused of being a closet aesthete—ignored this particular creation of his, and the NEA grants program struggled along on tiny annual budgets of about $6 million. Beginning in 1969, Garment—guided by his well-connected fellow arts advocates, Michael Straight and Nancy Hanks—persuaded Nixon to double the NEA’s budget, and then to double it again, and again—and again. Nixon’s last budget, for fiscal year 1975, proposed $90 million in grants to artists, institutions, and promoters of the lively and stationary arts. By then Hanks, director of the NEA under Nixon and Gerald R. Ford, ruled over a small empire that dispersed over 5,000 grants a year. As Alice Goldfarb Marquis and other observers have argued, this ballooning government commitment to the arts had several roots: Nixon’s desire to coopt and outmaneuver the left-leaning arts establishment and the Democrat-led Congress; Garment’s lobbying abilities; and also the wild popularity of the grants in communities across the American “heartland,” where enjoyable artistic byproducts especially gave the more affluent Republican voters in those areas a rosier view of government planning and spending. Nixon probably also earned some gratitude in the inner cities through his patronage of community arts, dance, and music in those areas (even though he made no use of that gratitude, and apparently learned nothing from it).15
Jazz’s place in this rising tide of arts funding was not especially prominent, but it was secure. In a reversal of the usual practice in Washington (especially regarding the arts), the hard cash and Beltway influence Nixon bestowed on jazz far exceeded the lip service he paid to it (via such gestures as the Ellington evening). In 1969, at the behest of Leonard Garment and Willis Conover, a panel of critics and musicians (including Bill Evans and Milt Hinton) began to formulate an NEA jazz program. The result was a 1970 pilot project that awarded 30 grants—to individuals and school—totaling $20,050. This was a minuscule portion of the $2.5 million music program, which spent forty times as much on large grants to opera companies and even more on aid to symphony orchestras. (This fact may have demonstrated that Nixon’s tastes were traditional indeed.) By 1972, though, the annual jazz program was dispensing over a hundred grants costing $242,925, ranging from small awards to composers and students to large ones for Antioch College’s jazz department ($21,500) and the service organization Jazz Interactions ($21,300, much of which went to an oral history project that paid older musicians to tell their life stories).16
In the early 1970s, while Nixon publicly ignored jazz, the music’s future in the federal government was largely determined by struggles for influence among the growing legions of NEA advisors and bureaucrats. In 1973 jazz lost a battle, when all of the arts were lumped into a single grants program that classified awards by recipient types (artists, universities, students, and organizations). The next year, though, the arts’ distinct identities were reasserted. Jazz, “folk,” and “ethnic” music were given their own program, largely due to the lobbying efforts of the composer and academician Gunther Schuller and the jazz pianist and composer Billy Taylor. Taylor, meanwhile, was becoming jazz’s most visible lobbyist in Washington, as well as the promoter of the image of jazz as “America’s classical music.”17
Bureaucratic momentum, rather than ideology, further advanced jazz’s fortunes at the NEA into the late 1970s, beyond the Republican administrations of Nixon and Ford and into the Democratic era of Jimmy Carter. In 1981, in Carter’s last budget, jazz grant monies reached a new high of nearly $1.5 million ($1,493,000, to be exact). In that year performers received up to $15,000 in stipends, and the National Jazz Foundation—a Washington-based promotion groups largely formed to serve as a secondary, grass-roots dispenser of jazz grants—received $121,000. The general explosion of government jobs programs in the seventies provided other support for jazz musicians and other artists. As Steven Dubin has shown, by the end of the decade the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA, which became law in 1973) supplied $200 million annually—nearly double the NEA’s total grant funding—for the training and employment of all kinds of artists.18
As Garment (who continued to advise the NEA), Alice Goldfarb Marquis, and others have noted, the explosion in arts funding contained the seeds of its own demise, as the sheer number of grants made the selection process increasingly indiscriminate. While the NEA’s eclectic patronage of the arts scene won it wide grass-roots support, it also resulted in grants to frivolous or intentionally shocking avant-garde projects that, when publicized, threatened to undo the consensus for federal arts support. Thus, when Joan Mondale, wife of Carter’s vice president, lobbied for an even more comprehensive federal arts policy, she actually compelled NEA administrators and interested members of Congress to admit that the existing policy was already too intrusive, pouring money annually into the pockets of increasingly regular beneficiaries and encouraging grant-application gamesmanship among artists and community groups. “Joan of Arts” (as one journalist dubbed Mondale) was stymied, and generally, an ideological argument against arts funding—later a key conservative weapon in the “culture wars”—began to form.19
No jazz grants particularly hurt the NEA’s image, but it could also be argued, as Alice Marquis has put it, that it “appears questionable … whether the endowment’s grants … have [particularly] enhanced the art form [either].” NEA leaders interviewed by Marquis apparently told her (she has no footnote to substantiate this paragraph) that the well-established “dense professional network” of jazz musicians and promoters functioned just fine without federal guidance and aid.20 This conclusion begs the question of whether better government assistance would have helped jazz—which, despite Marquis’s claim, has always been harmed by economic exigencies and public apathy and could have used some patronage, especially in the stagflation-wracked 1970s (which also saw much critical hand-wringing about the possible demise of jazz as an art form). More specifically, the highly inconclusive results of that decade’s heavy funding of jazz suggest that no political faction—conservative, liberal, or otherwise—had been able to enlist jazz or to ally it with a larger ideological movement.
In the 1980s conservative politics triumphed, as Ronald Reagan was elected to two presidential terms and succeeded in implementing large components of the New Right agenda. While social and welfare programs suffered deep cuts early in his term in office, though, federal arts funding remained surprisingly steady. While the huge increases of the 1970s were halted, neither did conservatives’ calls for the termination of the NEA become a reality. Its new director, Frank Hodsoll, did announce that the endowment’s main role now would be to stimulate greater private patronage of the arts. Hodsoll also hoped to use it as a bully pulpit to exhort Americans to reduce their weekly television viewing and to visit museums and concert halls. While jazz in particular did not incur the wrath of conservatives in the early Reagan era, various NEA initiatives showed that the music was viewed as particularly problematic, and that it was a target for reevaluation. In 1983 the endowment spent $50,000 for special “on-site evaluation activity” of its own jazz program.
This evaluation resulted in some curious new trends. Funding for some longtime projects, such as the Jazz Oral History Project, was discontinued, while service organizations (which had many private contacts) received even greater support. In fact, monies for jazz actually kept growing, reaching an all-time annual high in 1984 of $1.777 million. Two new initiatives, though, gave hints of an imminent end to this generosity. First, Hodsoll (with Reagan’s blessing) began to emphasize celebratory rituals, such as the annual honors bestowed on legendary performers by the American Film Institute and the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the new National Medal of the Arts—and, beginning in 1983, “Jazz Masters” grants of $20,000 apiece to notable elders in the field. In this sense the Reagan administration was taking its cue from Nixon’s Ellington evening, using the arts as a platform for celebrity homage and medal ceremonies. Second, Hodsoll revived the practice of reassigning elements of the jazz program into general categories that put it in direct competition with other genres, for example by putting jazz concert grants into the “festivals” category. In 1985 overall NEA funding began to decline for the first time, suggesting an ideological sea change. The next year Hodsoll sponsored a conference “to examine the field of jazz and consider its future,” which resulted in a study that found an enormous and willing potential future audience for the music. Hodsoll’s ultimate purpose became clearer, though, in the 1986 NEA annual report, in which he boasted that his recent jazz initiatives “[have] already resulted in new linkages between the commercial and not-for-profit sectors of the jazz world and [have] brought fresh media coverage to the field.” In short, he argued that jazz would be able to win over its future mass audience without NEA funding.21
By this time almost all of the major jazz names that had helped guide NEA policy in the 1970s were no longer playing advisory roles. (By the end of the decade, Roscoe Mitchell could be considered the only significant jazz musician on the advisory panel, which was dominated by college-level jazz educators.) The jazz program was funded annually at about half a million dollars but seemed utterly adrift; the Jazz Masters program ambled on, seemingly as a sop to older African American musicians (and as of 2004, the awards have never been increased above their initial amount of $20,000).
The George H. W. Bush administration ushered in the troubled tenure of NEA director John Frohnmayer, who was staggered politically by the Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano art-show controversies and never recovered. For conservative opponents of government support for the arts, the cultural battle over funding for avant-garde art dovetailed nicely with the tremendous success of Frank Hodsoll’s privatization initiative for arts funding. The right-wing assault on the NEA reached its climax in 1995, after Republicans seized control of both houses of Congress for the first time in forty years. The Newt Gingrich-led congressional leadership slashed the endowment’s budget by more than forty percent. Since then the NEA’s jazz program has limped along, continuing to bestow $20,000 Masters grants with little publicity and aiding the music (as well as the other arts) through block grants to state arts agencies (which made specific federal support for jazz invisible). The present system is a manifestation of Richard Nixon’s “new federalism” in classic form, displaying a blend of ideological commitment to ineffectively low funding22 and pointless symbolic gestures that neither Nixon nor Reagan had dared to attempt in earlier decades. The saxophone-playing Bill Clinton, politically cautious and plagued by scandal, did not effectively reverse this conservative trend. In 1997 congressman John Conyers effected the passage of House Concurrent Resolution 57, which labeled jazz a “national treasure” and encouraged NEA funding that would provide jazz instruction in the nation’s schools, but the resolution had no practical effect. The official neglect of jazz continues today under the administration of George W. Bush.23
As I mentioned at the outset, this diminution of jazz’s governmental profile since the mid-1980s has been accompanied by the rise of a more general cultural assertion of a neoconservative approach to jazz history and performance. Stanley Crouch’s celebration of tradition-minded, well-behaved young black musicians such as Wynton Marsalis, Marcus Roberts, and Christian McBride, along with Marsalis’s homilies in favor of classic jazz and against avant-garde hip-hop and Ken Burns’s heavily hyped traditionalist PBS jazz documentary, have seemed to suggest that America’s quintessential outsider music has been coopted into a culture of private patronage, in which social criticism and protest have been muted and tradition-worshiping passivity has been encouraged. Crouch and Marsalis espouse no political affiliation, and the Republican party’s continuing inability to win over black voters suggests that black cultural neoconservatism (of any kind) has not inspired an embrace by many blacks toward political conservatism. If anything, neoconservatism in jazz seems like yet another opening to black voters that Republicans have failed to exploit. No jazz factions have surrendered themselves fully to the conservative political agenda, and conservatives have not especially embraced jazz as provocatively as Richard Nixon embraced Duke Ellington on that April evening in 1969.
At the same time, though, the current total neglect of jazz in the arts policy debate and its neutral position in the public sphere also indicates the success of the privatization of jazz. The dominance of private funding is symbolized by Marsalis’s sumptuous fiefdom, Jazz at Lincoln Center, which will soon be ensconced in a palatial new home in the AOL/Time Warner complex on Columbus Circle in Manhattan. Privatization, though, has had little impact to date on the public as a whole, which remains woefully ignorant of jazz traditions (despite even the impact of Ken Burns’s well-intentioned boosterism) and disdainful of jazz CDs and radio broadcasts. The lack of any counterweight to the cruel effect on jazz of the mass-oriented private marketplace, as well as the neutralization of any public forum for socially conscious jazz artists, represents what is, for now, the true triumph of conservative arts policy.
1. See Elise K. Kirk, Music at the White House: a History of the American Spirit (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986).
2. David Stowe, Swing Changes: Big-Band Jazz in New Deal America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994); Paul Lopes, The Rise of a Jazz Art World (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
3. On Wilson see James Lincoln Collier, Duke Ellington (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 139–42; see also John Hammond with Irving Townsend, John Hammond on Record (New York: Ridge Press, 1977).
4. Lopes, The Rise of a Jazz Art World, 123–25; see also Stowe, Swing Changes, introduction, and Lewis A. Erenberg, Swingin the Dream: Big Band Jazz and the Rebirth of American Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), especially chapter 5.
5. Sidney W. Finkelstein, Jazz: A People’s Music (New York: Citadel Press, 1948); André Hodeir, Jazz: Its Evolution and Essence, trans. David Noakes (1956; reprint, New York: Da Capo, 1975); Marshall W. Steams, The Story of Jazz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956).
6. For the preceding two paragraphs: Lionel Hampton and James Haskins, Hamp: An Autobiography (New York: Warner Books, 1989), 156, 167, 169 passim.
7. Wynton Marsalis and Carl Vigeland, Jazz in the Bittersweet Blues of Life (New York: Da Capo, 2001), 151–52, 181–82, 236; Stanley Crouch, The All-American Skin Game, or, The Decoy of Race (New York: Pantheon, 1995), 191.
8. Michael Zilber, “J’Accuse, Burns and Marsalis,” [2002] <www.allaboutjazz.com/birdlives/bl-94.htm> (visited 29 March 2003); “Rant: Lincoln Center Redux,” [1995] <junior.apk.net/~hoon/8cMuso.html> (visited 25 February 2004).
9. Leonard Garment, Crazy Rhythm (New York: Times Books, 1997), 171–73. In 1931 Ellington had visited the Hoover White House as part of a delegation of black celebrities, and during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations assorted jazz combos had performed at the mansion. In 2002 the soundtrack recording of the 1969 White House concert was finally released by Blue Note, #35249. See also Leonard Garment, “A New Revelation From the Nixon White House,” New York Times, 25 August 2002, II: 23, 25.
10. Kenneth O’Reilly, Nixon’s Piano: Presidents and Racial Politics from Washington to Clinton (New York: Free Press, 1995), 3–7, 322; H. R. Haldeman, The Haldeman Diaries: Inside the Nixon White House (New York: Putnam’s, 1994), 31.
11. Washington Post, 1 May 1969, quoted in Stephen E. Ambrose, Nixon: The Triumph of a Politician, 1962–1972 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989), 247; Garment, Crazy Rhythm, 146–49, 171; Garment, “A New Revelation,” 23.
12. Garment, Crazy Rhythm, 151, 171, 325–33.
13. Garment, Crazy Rhythm, 163.
14. On jazz and 1950s cultural diplomacy see Alyn Shipton, Groovin’ High: The Life of Dizzy Gillespie (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 266, 280–85, and Walter L. Hixson, Parting the Curtain: Propaganda, Culture, and the Cold War, 1945–1961 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1997), 115–19; Alice Goldfarb Marquis, Art Lessons: Learning From the Rise and Fall of Public Arts Funding (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 42–43; Bruce J. Schulman, The Seventies (New York: Da Capo, 2001), 27–29.
15. Marquis, Art Lessons, chapters 2–3; Garment, Crazy Rhythm, 164–169, 213–16.
16. National Endowment for the Arts, Annual Report (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office) (henceforth NEA Report): 1970, 1972, n.p.; on the Smithsonian Jazz Oral History Project see Ron Welburn, “Toward Theory and Method with the Jazz Oral History Project,” Black Music Research Journal 7 (Spring 1986): 79–95.
17. 1973 NEA Report, n.p.; on Billy Taylor see Michael Mooney, The Ministry of Culture: Connections Among Art, Money, and Politics (New York: Wyndham, 1980), 77, 250.
18. 1981 NEA Report, n.p.; Steven C. Dubin, Bureaucratizing the Muse: Public Funds and the Cultural Worker (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 17–18, 52–54.
19. Marquis, Art Lessons, 106–30; Garment, Crazy Rhythm, 169; Mooney, The Ministry of Culture, chapter 2.
20. Marquis, Art Lessons, 122.
21. For the preceding two paragraphs: NEA Reports, 1983–1986, n.p.; 1986 NEA Report, 3; Harold Horowitz, The American Jazz Music Audience (Washington: National Jazz Service Organization, 1986).
22. Total arts-agency spending by the fifty states peaked in 2001 at $447 million, but by 2003 appropriation had declined to $354 million, or average spending of $1.22 per capita. “State Arts Agency Legislative Appropriations Down,” National Association of State Arts Agencies <http://www.nasaaarts.org/nasaanews/approp_down.shtml> (visited 9 April 2003).
23. John Frohnmayer, Leaving Town Alive: Confessions of an Arts Warrior (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1993); on the Clinton-Gingrich years see Jane Alexander, Command Performance: An Actress in the Theater of Politics (New York: Public Affairs, 2000). Conyer’s resolution proposal, House of Representatives, 12 March 1997, is reprinted on <www.thomas.loc.gov> (visited 24 April 2004). In 2004 President George W. Bush proposed a 20 percent increase in the 2005 NEA budget to fund a carefully defined “American Masterpieces” initiative, “arts presentations and educational programming to introduce citizens to great works of art of all forms, including paintings, music, dance, and literature.” Anne Marie Borrego, “Arts and Humanities Endowments Would Get Big Increases,” Chronicle of Higher Education (13 February 2004), 5.