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His wife Lil often played piano.
Ken Burns's Jazz, on Lil Hardin Armstrong.
". . . are they his third or fourth wives, or two new members of the brass section?"
Cartoon caption, Down Beat, August 15, 1943.
My ears were like antennae and my brain was like a sponge.
Clora Bryant, trumpet player, on her first encounters with bebop.
In jazz, the term "big ears" refers to the ability to hear and make meaning out of complex music. One needs "big ears" to make sense of improvisatory negotiations of tricky changes and multiple simultaneous lines and rhythms. "Big ears" are needed to hear dissonances and silences. They are needed to follow nuanced conversations between soloists; between soloists and rhythm sections; between music and other social realms; between multiply situated performers and audiences and institutions; and between the jazz at hand and jazz in history. If jazz was just about hitting the right notes, surviving the chord changes, and letting out the stops, jazz scholars, listeners, and even musicians would not need "big ears."
Yet, jazz historiography has historically suffered from a reliance on predictable riffs. Great-man epics, sudden genre changes timed by decade, and colorful anecdotes about eccentric individuals mark the comfortable beats. Jazz-quite undeservedly, and all too often-has been subjected to easy listening histories. The familiar construction of jazz history as a logical sequence in which one style folds into another, one eccentric genius passes the torch to the next-what Scott DeVeaux (1991) calls "the jazz tradition"-has dominated popular and critical writing about jazz, even the ways our "Survey of Jazz" classes are taught in universities. I call this progression "dominant jazz discourse" because of the powerful ways it manages to move through and shape jazz narratives that see themselves as distinct from one another. It is not just one discourse among others, but one with a great deal of institutional, social, and political power owed to other discourses about progress, modernism, primitivism, individualism, American exceptionalism, essentialist notions of race and gender, etc. These powerful discourses are, of course, not just about jazz, but move through the ways jazz is talked about, marketed, and understood, even as they move through the ways other histories are narrated (westward expansion, for example).
This is not...