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JAZZ STUDIES Jazz Consciousness: Music, Race, and Humanity. By Paul Austerlitz. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2005. [xxii, 260 p. ISBN 08195-6781-7. $24.95.] Videography, discography, bibliography, index.
We ask a lot from jazz. To some commentators, jazz is definitive of twentieth-century Americanness, with Ralph Ellison characterizing American life as "jazz-based." To others, jazz is the epitome of the musical avant-garde, indeed central to "the great modernist tradition in the arts" (Alfred Appel, Jazz Modernism: From Ellington and Armstrong to Matisse and Joyce [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002], 7). During the Cold War, jazz was the United States' "secret sonic weapon," as touring musicians helped proselytize Third World domino countries to counter perceptions of American racism (Penny von Eschen, Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004]). And in the music's early decades, jazz was at once, to many young white Americans, a marker of earthy, streetwise hipness, and, to some cosmopolitan urbanites in other parts of the Americas, emblematic of sophisticated North American savoir faire.
Paul Austerlitz seeks to thicken this well-seasoned stew further with Jazz. Consciousness: Music, Race, and Humanity, which takes jazz's multivalence as a foundational premise. The book's somewhat portentous title accords with Austerlitz's ambitious aims. The theoretical touchstone of his project is the often-cited passage from W. E. B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk that casts African Americans as gifted with "double consciousness," born of their status as both black and American. As Austerlitz deploys the concept, however, Du Boisian doubleness is actually tripleness: jazz is African American, American, and transnational. These discrete but overlapping layers of identity are brought into dialogue through the concept of "consciousness," which Austerlitz introduces as something like a Weltanschauung, or as he puts it, an "awareness, mind-set, worldview" (p. xiii). "Jazz consciousness," he argues in his introduction, "creates a virtual space where we can confront, learn from, and even heal the contradictions resulting from social rupture" (p. xvi).
The book's odyssey very much tracks the author's own, which he describes as "a scholar-musician's journey." At a very early age, the Finnish-born Austerlitz moved to the United States, where he grew up listening to both European- and African American-influenced musics. He later became active as...