Music colloquia provide a weekly forum for presentation and discussion of recent research by distinguished visitors and CWRU faculty and graduate students in musicology, historical performance practice, and music education.
All talks happen on Fridays at 4:00 PM in Harkness Classroom and are open to the public.
About the Talk
鈥淲hat is this Revenant called Jazz?: Nostalgia, Value, and Racialized Listening鈥�
Jazz hasn鈥檛 been 鈥減opular music鈥� for sixty years and a growing series of movements assert that jazz is, in fact, dead. Yet, something called 鈥渏azz鈥� still stalks. Have rumors of jazz鈥檚 death been exaggerated? Is this zombie jazz? Something else? Evidently, something called 鈥渏azz鈥� persists as a problematic and unresolved category upon whose ostensive grave some artists, communities of cultural expression, and related markets are productively dancing. This paper鈥攑art of a developing monograph鈥攁ddresses some of the why, how, and 鈥渟o what鈥� of that 鈥渄ance cadaverous.鈥�
I鈥檒l review some of what we already know: the historical refusal of 鈥渏azz鈥� as a limiting category; criticisms of neoclassical jazz鈥檚 demands to establish musical aesthetics and strategies around which to secure institutional support and stockpile economic and cultural capital; the institutionalization of jazz education that has enshrined jazz in a gate-kept and dominantly white academic space supported by problematic historical narratives and colorblind politics that obscure the music鈥檚 racialized history.
Looking beyond these I consider how, through the growth of a record label and performance series in Los Angeles, international music festivals, and the music and rhetoric of Nicholas Payton, Theo Croker, and Kassa Overall, the assertion that 鈥淛azz Is Dead鈥� is becoming an aesthetic and a brand. This paper investigates what kind of work those demands to divest-from or refigure a relationship to 鈥渏azz鈥� might do for musicians and communities of cultural production.
About the Speaker
AJ Kluth is a musicologist with interdisciplinary interests in music and philosophy. Primarily concerned with music after 1950, his teaching and research focus on experimentalisms, popular music, and aesthetics. His publications appear in the Journal of Jazz Studies, The International Journal of New Media, Technology, and the Arts, and DownBeat Magazine and he has presented research at conferences throughout the United States, UK, and Europe. As a saxophonist, he has worked in American and European scenes and has been a teaching artist for the Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz.
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