Abstract
How should we understand the relationship between music, race, and the city? Scholars have long recognized important connections between urban culture and musical innovation. Over a century ago, for example, sociologist Max Weber linked the standardization of tuned instruments (a precondition for most Western art music) to the rise of performers’ guilds and instrument-making shops in early modern capitalist cities. 1 Yet the connection of music making to social identity seems either obvious or elusive, and urban historians have only recently attempted to devote much attention to how musical performance and reception as social practices might illuminate issues of race and power in the city.
This historical work is increasingly influenced by debates among musicologists and cultural theorists over how music produces—or is heard as articulating—conceptions of the world that are inflected by race, class, gender, and other social distinctions. Much twentieth-century musicology and music theory understood music, particularly Western art music, as nonreferential and therefore unrelated to the social world. In recent decades, however, a “new musicology” has argued that musical expression, like any other cultural practice, is deeply connected to social context and thus profoundly implicated in particular political and historical projects. New musicologists have examined, among other topics, how the formal characteristics or other elements (tonality, rhythm, timbre [tone color], etc.) of a piece of music may be related to important tensions within social conditions or subjectivities. The tonal relationships within a composition by Bach, for instance, can be understood as the expression of contradictions within Enlightenment national identities, or the structure of a Beethoven sonata might embody a paradox within early nineteenth-century notions of individualism. 2
Vernacular musics, by contrast, have long been interpreted as deeply embedded in the social worlds of their makers. Yet if traditional ethnomusicologists spent much useful time investigating the social purposes of everyday musical practices as folk culture, they too often understood musical meaning as the rather straightforward expression of an undifferentiated folk. More recently, new musicologists and ethnomusicologists alike (along with music sociologists, geographers, and cultural studies scholars) have reexamined the complex purposes and impacts of music within particular social contexts. The complicity of music with hegemonic projects of class, race, gender, and sexual identity is now a staple of many such analyses, though others argue that music also can enable audiences to resist dominant power structures, imagine alternative social arrangements, and experience new forms of community. 3
Scholars in many disciplines are exploring the role of music in everyday experience as well as within the social imagination. Musicologists, for instance, are engaging in the kind of archival research that situates musical performers and performances within the “communities” (producers, journalists, promoters, audiences, schools, corporations, government agencies, and others) that materially and discursively shape how music is produced and received in a modern society. Meanwhile, urban and cultural historians, who have developed an important body of work on popular music and the city, increasingly discover within musicology useful interpretive tools for exploring how cities produce not merely innovative musical and social practices but also particular musical meanings and identities. Black music, jazz in particular, has been an especially rewarding site for study from both intellectual traditions. 4 Thus, a multidisciplinary historical literature on music and the city now exists that offers fresh insight into complicated issues involving race: how racial divisions within cities shape musical production and reception; how the racial meanings attributed to music are influenced by urban markets, places, cultural hierarchies, and political projects; and how particular racial and urban identities may be constructed—or deconstructed—through music.
The books examined here focus on various sites of musical production and dissemination at different moments of history. By investigating music festivals in Atlanta, a record company in Detroit, a radio station in Nashville, and a musicians’ collective in Chicago, these authors explore the meaning of music as a social and historical practice. Although several are concerned primarily with reconstructing nuts-and-bolts efforts to build a successful musical enterprise, most of these accounts demonstrate that commercial opportunity, musical style, cultural appeal, and urban image are shaped by resources and representational practices that invariably intertwine with race.
Burton W. Peretti’s Lift Every Voice provides a broad introduction to the history of African American music. Although Peretti does not attempt to view the subject through a specifically urban lens, this synthetic survey, intended primarily for undergraduate classroom use, offers a compelling story of the persistent creativity of black musicians, the recurring cooptation of black music by whites, and, more intermittently, the conflicts within black America over the meaning and priority of black music. Important interconnections between African American musical development and cities also become apparent in this history, even early on. For example, it was in the autonomous black churches in early-nineteenth-century cities such as Philadelphia, New York, and Baltimore that worshippers first began to incorporate melisma (vocal slurring), call-and-response forms, and other musical characteristics inherited from Africa and the Caribbean into their singing of sacred texts adopted from white Methodists. As for commercial music, the efforts of early black stage performers in U.S. cities were soon overwhelmed by the enormous popularity of blackface minstrelsy. This formulaic show, centered on the grotesque caricature of black singing and dancing by white performers, became a staple of urban working-class entertainment after 1830. Peretti follows recent interpretive trends (particularly those first developed in Eric Lott’s Love and Theft) by taking the genre’s uneasy mix of racial repulsion and possession as a pioneering example of the conflicted ways in which popular musical performance can simultaneously recognize, exploit, and revel in the racial (and other) divisions of a democratic society. 5 The ambivalent motives exhibited within blackface minstrelsy—its strange mixture of desire and appropriation—are discernible in subsequent conflicts over the racial meanings of musical forms, from the erasure of an entire genre’s African American legacy by self-professed “King of Jazz” Paul Whiteman in the 1920s to the perceived authenticity of urban blues for white “rock ‘n’ roll” musicians and their audiences many decades later. Clearly, complex racial dynamics are often implicated in musical ownership, performance, and interpretation. Yet how these dynamics are intertwined with commercial interests and with the public images of particular cities is clarified in case studies of the emergence of certain musical styles.
The relationship between a city and its “sound” is given parallel treatments in two books by journalists that focus on notable music-related enterprises. Craig Havighurst’s Air Castle of the South recounts the history of WSM radio, a Nashville station that shaped the development of country music as well as the economy and cultural image of its hometown. Nelson George’s Where Did Our Love Go?, first published a quarter-century ago but recently reissued by the University of Illinois Press, remains a compelling account of Berry Gordy’s Motown Records in Detroit. The two books are useful foils when read together, examining different corporate musical ventures rooted in 1920s commercial culture that reached full flower during the 1960s. In contrasting ways, both authors offer productive insights into the music business, urban racial identity, and the notion of a particular city sound.
Nashville’s WSM radio was first launched by the National Life and Accident Insurance Company in 1925. An acronym of the firm’s business slogan (“We Shield Millions”) became the station’s call letters, and WSM radio was developed to build a white consumer base in the region’s untapped rural markets. From the beginning, the station drew on local musical talent, and programs such as the Grand Ole Opry Show, by attracting a growing pool of musical artists and entrepreneurs, contributed to the surprising survival of Nashville as a major American music capital (alongside behemoths such as New York and Los Angeles) into the late twentieth century. Havighurst is a careful biographer, not only in his determination to get the facts right, but also in his treading somewhat lightly upon the less flattering aspects of WSM’s celebrated musical legacy. Even though the station’s inaugural broadcast included a performance by the legendary Fisk Jubilee Singers, it was an early “hillbilly music” concert featuring white banjo player Uncle Dave Macon that most directly anticipated the musical and racial boundaries of the station’s subsequent Opry broadcasts. Commercial appeal and racial identity were powerfully intertwined in WSM’s construction of this emerging genre, as a descendant of the station’s first corporate director frankly acknowledges: “The Grand Ole Opry was put on the air to try to get into the white [insurance] business” (26). Perhaps for this reason, blackface comedy remained a WSM programming staple throughout the 1930s, and the station determinedly kept jazz and blues music “at a distance” (51), as Havighurst delicately puts it.
WSM’s music broadcasts sold Nashville to its rural white market as a southern “dreamland” (64) full of adventure. By the 1930s, these listeners flocked to the city’s live-audience Opry broadcasts, where station image makers were already recostuming professional performers as “authentic” hillbillies with floppy hats and overalls. The station’s glory years in the 1940s and early 1950s were fueled by the rise of the Roy Acuff–Fred Rose songwriting and publishing team, the breakout stardom of Hank Williams, and the success of bluegrass innovator Bill Monroe. These decades were also marked by major corporate expansions into the recording and record-selling business. A relatively unknown Elvis Presley, though, was turned down by WSM’s recording executives; their deep roots in segregated southern culture blinded them, Havighurst observes, to the performer’s cross-racial appeal. During the late 1950s, recording sessions replaced fiddles with the lush orchestrations, pop music gloss, and background vocals that soon came to be known as the Nashville sound.
Air Castle of the South provides a useful window onto WSM’s considerable economic contributions to its city, particularly during the flush decades of the 1960s and 1970s. Yet many potentially interesting issues related to music, race, and city image remain underexplored, and even the musical characteristics of the fabled Nashville sound could benefit from a richer, fuller treatment.
Music journalist and producer Nelson George’s account of Motown Records focuses centrally on the rise and achievements of founder Berry Gordy, who became one of the most successful black businessmen in American history. Gordy’s father, a farmer and shrewd entrepreneur in Oconee County, Georgia, took the family north to Detroit in 1922. Here he opened the Booker T. Washington Grocery Store as well as a plastering company and printing business, while Berry’s mother became cofounder of a small life insurance firm. Gordy himself, after an unsuccessful boxing career and a stint on a Ford auto assembly line, began writing songs in hopes of an easier path to getting ahead. In 1957, he persuaded rising rhythm and blues star Jackie Wilson (whom he had also boxed against ten years earlier) to record his song “Reet Petite,” which hit number 11 on the R&B charts. Based on his work with Wilson and his writing partnership with a talented seventeen-year-old named William Robinson, Gordy became one of Detroit’s most sought-after songwriters and producers. Yet Gordy and “Smokey” Robinson recognized that the real money was being made by record companies and publishers, and in 1959 Gordy formed Motown Record Corporation (the name was a contraction of Motor Town) to issue records under a variety of labels; he also set up a recording studio, a music publishing company, and a talent management firm to shepherd the careers of his artists. Motown established innovative, highly controlling corporate policies that succeeded in building and profiting from a large stable of talented songwriters and performers. Equally important to the firm’s success, suggests George, was the Gordy family’s prominence and connections in Detroit’s black community, which enabled Motown to sign up little-known local musical talent right out of high school (or even earlier) and to mold its performers development to fit the label’s emerging sound. Beginning with Robinson’s “Shop Around” in 1961, Motown launched a remarkable series of hit songs by groups such as the Miracles, the Temptations, the Four Tops, and the Supremes, along with individual performers, such as Marvin Gaye, Diana Ross, and Stevie Wonder.
Gordy’s success rested in part on his ability to take advantage of black R&B’s economic status as a “bastard child” (51). Although young white Americans of the late 1950s and early 1960s were growing increasingly attached to this kind of music, major corporate record companies continued to leave its production to white-owned “indie” labels that treated black songwriters and performers largely as one-hit wonders. Motown enveloped its musical artists in a new kind of black corporate paternalism (Gordy liked to describe it as a “family atmosphere”), and the company’s assembly-line approach to talent grooming led to long-term employee loyalty and, for some performers at least, a career-long stream of hits. By 1965, those hits projected a certain Motown sound, which, in one of the book’s best passages, George attempts to delineate: “Drumbeats pounded the skins on every beat, a beat accentuated by tambourine, guitar, and often vibes, [as] the bass rolled forward like a speeding locomotive” and “blustery horn charts and weirdly arranged strings lingered in the background” (102). The result was a slick, driving, danceable pop music that appealed to black and white young people alike. For many listeners, including Gordy himself, this commercial music seemed to embody both a new Detroit and the confident yet unthreatening striving of a newly ascendant black middle class.
Where Did Our Love Go? emphasizes the powerful connection between musical entrepreneurship and black communal aspiration. In this regard, the book offers an interesting counterpoint to recent scholarly accounts, such as Adam Green’s Selling the Race and Ingrid Monson’s Freedom Sounds, that explore how musicians shaped the civil rights–era national community. 6 What is most striking about Berry Gordy as a black entrepreneur was his music’s phenomenal popularity with white and black audiences alike, even from its moment of emergence. Even a Motown executive would later characterize the label’s music, improbably, as the sound of “the ghetto” (199), the comment nevertheless highlights the unique historical conjuncture that gave rise to the Motown sound, along with a likely reason for the music’s continually recyclable appeal. Consider, for example, Martha Reeves and the Vandellas’ “Dancing in the Street,” one of the company’s biggest hits of 1964. This track’s pounding, liberating, yet wholesomely inclusive carnival of “the street” could have been put together only in Gordy’s Motown music factory, with its relentlessly cross-racial-sounding production palette. Yet the song also channeled an urban moment—what might be called a preriot urban imaginary—that would soon be swallowed up by quite different visions and sounds of the city.
These issues are complicated in useful ways in highly accomplished scholarly works by Gavin James Campbell and George E. Lewis. Campbell’s fine historical monograph, Music and the Making of a New South, combines the interpretive disposition of the new musicology with richly observed archival research to render in sharp relief the intricate relationship between music, commerce, race, and urban identity at a key historical turning point. The entry point to his story is the determined effort by early-twentieth-century Atlanta businessmen to replace the post–Civil War cultural symbolism of the “sleepy” South with a more advantageous image of their city as an urban dynamo. This campaign aimed to reposition Atlanta not only as a bustling center of railroads, factories, and commercial trade but also as an enlightened mecca of modern culture and sophistication. Yet local elites fashioned their new image of the cosmopolitan metropolis out of reconfigured regional traditions, such as white supremacy, virile masculinity, and sectional pride, and the city’s innovative culture-building efforts actually helped to reinstitutionalize and even deepen many of the savage inequalities bequeathed by the Old South. These cultural experiments also became, for city leaders, an important mechanism for managing their own social anxieties as well as the inevitable tensions that emerged between a rigid social hierarchy and destabilizing economic change.
Campbell focuses in detail on three annual music festivals that dominated Atlanta’s cultural life between 1909 and 1925: the Metropolitan Opera season, the Colored Music Festival, and the Georgia Old-Time Fiddlers’ Convention. Each musical event operated as an important vehicle for local boosterism as well as a complex site for struggles over social power and urban identity. Campbell’s account draws effectively on a broad range of historical scholarship (especially that on culture, gender, race, and the South) as well as the social approaches to musical interpretation developed by new musicologists and sociologists. The result is a rich investigation of musical practices—the ritual activities surrounding musical expression, audience response, and popular discussions of music in cultural media and everyday life—for what such practices tell us about various social actors of the period and the meanings they ascribed to “their” music. In an analysis of the enormous outpouring of local attention devoted each year to Atlanta’s opera week, for example, Campbell discerns within newspaper coverage, club writings, scrapbooks, and advertisements a consistently business-led project of civic redefinition that nevertheless was forced to work through some unsettling social disharmonies, particularly between elite men and women.
Yet if opera week sharpened gender tensions, the festival’s contribution to a renovated, more systematic regime of racial apartheid was more straightforwardly effective. As Campbell puts it succinctly, “opera patrolled whiteness without resorting to the kinds of physical intimidation that ensured northern censure and southern defensiveness” (64). Thus, while interested middle-class blacks were denied the opportunity to purchase tickets for the event, the city’s poor black neighborhoods were promoted as a tourist attraction so that northern performers and visitors could witness directly the unreadiness of the race for the highest fruits of civilization. As extravagant compliments made about the city by visiting New York opera officials were excitedly recycled in Atlanta newspapers, the opera festival took on the appearance of a cultural pageant of American sectional reconciliation.
The racial dynamics of the Colored Music Festival were somewhat more complicated. Music’s power, notes Campbell (drawing on musicologist Lawrence Kramer), comes not from its ability to break down barriers but from its capacity to simultaneously mean numerous things—even though the listeners who hear those different things often consider music a universal language, transparent and immutable. Launched by a leading black minister partly in response to the racial exclusions of opera week, the Colored Music Festival was intended to “celebrate the musical, financial, and social accomplishments of blacks” (67) through the presentation of spirituals arranged for the concert stage by black composers and performed by renowned black musicians. For Atlanta’s black middle class, the festival at first was a heady vehicle for the demonstration of race pride. Yet, perhaps surprisingly, white elites also celebrated the event as the worthy fruit of a New South paternalism under which blacks did best in a segregated society.
Campbell shows effectively how the spiritual, as a musical genre, projected a complex set of social meanings “at precisely [this] moment when efforts at legally sanctifying racial segregation [were reaching] a fever pitch” (76). For upper-class whites, the effort to revive the older Negro folksong was assuming almost messianic proportions. Their passion was not simply an exercise in antebellum nostalgia; now that a new system of white supremacy was being constructed, it was driven by a frantic sense of urgency to somehow disentangle the region’s cultural traditions from their messily biracial legacy. Black leaders, meanwhile, were increasingly divided over the social implications of what W. E. B. Du Bois called the “sorrow songs.” On one hand, the ability of spirituals to cultivate white sympathies was undeniable; on the other, the servile attitude this music conveyed to white listeners threatened to undermine more forward-looking black aspirations. Yet the reality was that whites and blacks who attended the festival’s performances often “heard,” in effect, two different programs. Black audiences applauded the musicians for their great artistic skill and repertorial breadth; white listeners had little interest in anything except spirituals, demanding in repeated encores that performers sing these old “plantation melodies” again and again. Not surprisingly, Campbell concludes that the support of black concertgoers for the annual festival soon waned: in such a context, “their efforts to use music as a cudgel against prejudice” (98) seemed doomed.
In their different ways, then, Atlanta’s festivals presented the music of the day with fixed public meanings that were powerfully marked by racial, class, and gender projects. Music, like culture more generally, indeed became a battleground, yet musical conflicts were no more fairly matched than those in any other social realm of the day. While subordinate groups clearly emerged as key protagonists in early twentieth-century Atlanta’s battles over musical meaning, these cultural struggles ultimately helped to secure a New South vision of the city where wealthy white businessmen remained firmly in charge.
A considerably different musical struggle is explored in A Power Stronger Than Itself. George E. Lewis’s magisterial study examines the history of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), the remarkable collective founded by African American experimentalists in Chicago in 1965. Since its inception, AACM-spawned groups such as the Art Ensemble of Chicago have been enormously influential across the long-separate realms of jazz and concert music, not to mention within more recently devised categories such as world music. Lewis provides abundant evidence of the collective’s musical contributions, which have included new ideas about “timbre, sound, collectivity, extended technique and instrumentation, performance practice, intermedia, the relationship of improvisation to composition, form, scores, computer music technologies, invented acoustic instruments, installations, and kinetic sculptures” (ix). Yet Lewis is equally determined to focus on the individual musicians, communal bonds, and shared vision that account for the organization’s enduring success (the AACM continues to this day) as a black working-class self-help association. The aesthetic ambitions and heterodox musical accomplishments of the various AACM members have confounded shopworn conceptions of the black jazz musician (inspired yet untutored), along with similarly ingrained profiles of the (implicitly white) composer/performer of avant-garde concert music. In the process, the collective has developed musical production and performance strategies that challenge racialized limitations on venues and infrastructure and reframe the relationship between artistic creation and the business of music.
Lewis recognizes that the AACM built on multiple traditions of musical self-organization. Antecedents included not only James Reese Europe’s Clef Club in Harlem but also Arnold Schoenberg’s Society for Private Music Performance in early-twentieth-century Vienna; the latter, like the AACM in its own fashion, sought “to present contemporary music in circumstances conducive to its proper appreciation” (99). Lewis’s most powerful chapters, however, investigate the emergence of the collective within the very particular social conditions of post–World War II Chicago: the city’s dramatic remaking by the second Great Migration; the role of the South Side as a cultural magnet and incubator for black musicians; the community’s economic hollowing out by job loss, redlining, and urban renewal; and the gradual deterioration of a musically rich but professionally exploitative—and highly segregated—club scene. Lewis tracks in rich detail the efforts by founders Muhal Richard Abrams, Kelan Phil Cohran, Steve McCall, and Jodie Christian, along with many other early members, to invent a new kind of organizational infrastructure that might better serve the professional and cultural aspirations of the city’s black musicians.
A Power Stronger Than Itself provides an exceptionally vivid historical treatment of the familial origins, early lives, and developing careers of the AACM’s first-generation members. One insight that emerges is that so many of these future experimentalists grew up listening to, studying, and playing all different kinds of music. Anthony Braxton names doo-wop and the blues, along with white bebop musicians Jackie McLean and Warne Marsh, as his earliest influences growing up in Chicago. Amina Claudine Myers, who spent her earliest years in a rural village fifty miles from Little Rock, Arkansas, grew up listening to local church music, gospel quartets, and Hank Williams recordings. Like many other future AACM experimentalists, Henry Threadgill studied classical music and composition in various institutional settings, but he also played with Dixieland groups, polka bands, marching bands, R&B outfits, gospel troupes, and military ensembles. Lewis’s portrait of black Chicago during the 1950s and early 1960s, when many of these musicians came of age, adds significantly to our understanding of the city. Material hardship and harsh racial strictures were formative, along with visible pockets of economic vitality and a vibrant community culture. Perhaps most striking is how the institutional thickness of the community’s musical life (including school programs, churches, music societies, nightclubs, junior colleges, conservatory training opportunities, apprenticeships, and more) forged not only an extraordinarily talented cohort of young musicians but also a searching, confident, and even combative set of cultural and political sensibilities. In this sense, Lewis’s early chapters need to be read alongside the quite different (yet in certain ways complementary) studies of black community politics by Heather Ann Thompson, Joe William Trotter and Jared Day, Thomas Sugrue, and other scholars of the post–World War II era. 7
Lewis himself—an innovative musician and composer, a highly respected academic musicologist, and a second-generation leader of the AACM—blends his formidable talents into a writing style that integrates personal, communal, and intellectual authority. His enormous erudition, when combined with acute observation and an impressive array of interview and archival resources, enable him to fashion a many-voiced chronicle that nevertheless is guided, at every step, by an ambitious and insistently argued intellectual agenda. Lewis’s claim is that post-1960s black experimental music, as both creative practice and object of study, challenged an overlapping set of binary conceptions about music, race, and history that shaped prevailing cultural boundaries and practices: Music is universal, or it is the singular expression of a people; the wellsprings of black culture must be Afrological or Eurological; late-twentieth-century history is linear and progressive, or it is postmodern and eclectic; these sorts of binaries, when selectively applied and given institutional power, tended to racialize the distribution of resources, performance platforms, and interpretive standards in ways that influenced how cultural authority was conferred. AACM members created music that revealed and continually “put pressure on” (in Lewis’s felicitious phrase) these racial and cultural boundaries, even while the larger musical organization sought to create the internal conditions for the pursuit of individualism within a collectivist, egalitarian framework.
Lewis is most compelling when exploring the intraorganizational challenges that this agenda encountered. At the collective’s very earliest meetings (which Lewis remarkably reconstructs in detail through access to extant tape recordings), the founders can be heard debating a series of difficult questions. If the collective was to be centrally committed to supporting “creative” and “original” music, what about the musicians among them who simply liked to play traditional standards or spirituals? Could the collective remain devoted to the creative and professional advancement of black musicians if white musicians were allowed to join? How might the organization remain committed to its members—to the professional interests of musicians—while also prioritizing activities that served the broader community? These questions concern what kind of musical organization the AACM will be, of course, but they are also musical variations on fundamentally political questions, wrestling in important ways with difficult issues of membership, agency, and community accountability.
In subsequent chapters, Lewis reveals how such questions became more complicated as the social and political context changed. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, nationalist writers demanded exclusively black sources for black creativity even as many AACM members sought to draw on various musical traditions. Musicians’ migrations to France meanwhile brought about new levels of acclaim, along with mismatched encounters with French cultural expectations. Such experiences encouraged many AACM musicians to broaden their activist agendas, intervening in how their music was received and (mis)interpreted by critics, supporters, record companies, and scholars. Rampant misunderstandings by white music journalists, Lewis makes clear, were in part a problem of cultural competence. Few classical or jazz writers in the 1970s were capable of fully engaging with music that ranged so freely across so many cultural fields of reference, from jazz, classical, experimental, and non-Western traditions to rhythm and blues, funk, gospel, and rock ‘n’ roll. Yet Lewis makes a persuasive case that most critics of the period, intentionally or not, were also patrolling the whiteness of certain genres by reasserting the boundaries between them. The stakes in all this boundary work were not immaterial: AACM members, labeled “jazz musicians” whose work was rarely commercial enough to merit major record label support, were also denied the government grants and university professorships that went to white “new music” composers.
In response, AACM musicians became determined to articulate their own goals in written and spoken commentary. Many also engaged in the long march through the institutions (the grant-making agencies, publications, and curatorial positions) that controlled resources and bestowed cultural authority within the music world. Of course, this effort has now reached a culmination of sorts in Lewis’s own book, which does not simply present the claim that creative artists are cogent interpreters of their own work but actively embodies it. A Power Stronger Than Itself accomplishes this feat, for the most part, without relying on subjective intent (“We’re the musicians so we decide what the music means”) as an interpretive trump card. Instead, there is a sustained flow of wide-ranging, insightful, and amusingly abrasive reflections from Lewis and so many of his fellow musician interlocutors. As a result, AACM members emerge from this account not merely as creative musicians and determined activists but as disputatious organic intellectuals, discoursing learnedly across a range of interesting subjects—music, race, history, Chicago—if sometimes within a vernacular register. The Art Ensemble of Chicago’s Lester Bowie, for example, offers this pungent observation on the relationship among culture, power, and history:
I mean most Europeans’ background is one of wars and colonization of Africa. I mean really, they’ve dogged a lot of people. And they have this kind of presumed intelligence, they presume they’re really cultured. And they are in a certain sense, but in other ways they’re really barbaric, crude. Most western nations are like that. They didn’t get to be big western nations walking on roses or no shit like that. I mean they became France by cutting off motherfuckers’ heads. (369)
Efforts to correct the historical record are not often this effectively delivered. 8
For urban historians, one of the more interesting threads within the AACM story is the collective’s complicated relationship with Chicago and, then, New York. Postwar Chicago’s failure to develop an integrated musical subculture (along the lines of Fifty-second Street and Greenwich Village) constrained the commercial opportunities for black jazz musicians of the period, ensuring a steady outflow of talent that migrated to the east. These conditions also fostered communal solidarity and a unique sensibility—both musically reflective and politically uncompromising—among those who stayed behind. The disappearance of any South Side commercial infrastructure for music in the early 1960s played a catalytic role in the formation of the collective, and the association’s subsequent relationship to Chicago’s African American community was musically and culturally influential, in both directions. Yet prominent members continued to migrate to the greater opportunities offered in New York, and eventually, by the late 1970s, these “émigrés” formed their own AACM chapter, leading to tensions over organizational identity and governance. Though rivalries clearly fueled these tensions, conflict and dispersion were probably inevitable for a collective built simultaneously on local community ties and aesthetic principles of fearless exploration. In any event, by the late 1970s the resettled Chicagoans were taking the New York “downtown” music scene by storm.
The collective’s new visibility encouraged New York critics to take up what would become a much-debated question: Was there an AACM sound? Lewis navigates cautiously around this topic, a touchy one for individualistic musicians. His basic position seems to be that the collective’s rejection of “closed stylistic parameters” (338) tended to cut against any codified musical identity. Yet he does note that musicians and critics alike began to perceive certain recurring musical characteristics (an extremely broad instrumental palette, the juxtaposition of sound with silence, and, perhaps surprisingly, an enduring affection for melody) as hallmarks of the collective’s influence on improvisation and experimental composition. In the meantime, the music of New York–based AACM members evolved, perhaps in part because of its distinctive urban environment. Abrams, who moved to New York in 1977, reflects on one consequence of organizational resettlement:
We had removed ourselves from the black community in terms of presence, because we didn’t come here and go to Harlem. We came to Manhattan . . . because the center of the business was in Manhattan. . . . [But] the black content of the audience diminished because of the location where we performed. (335)
For AACM members, the question of audience remained a sensitive one, and this relationship of music to local and translocal communities of reception offers an important window for further historical exploration.
The AACM musicians in Lewis’s account reflect on these and other issues in thoughtful and provocative ways. Their own boundary-crossing approach to musical practice was neither an exercise in indiscriminate absorption nor a facile commitment to newness or experimentation per se. Instead, we see a shared aesthetic and political commitment to engaging with the extraordinary mix of traditions—the “complexity and catholicity”—that compose the full history of black music, not to mention “the complexity of experience that characterizes multiple, contemporary black lives” (368). Indeed, the slogan “Great Black Music—Ancient to the Future,” seen as contentiously nationalistic when first adopted by AACM members in the 1970s, eventually came to convey a concept of musical tradition so capacious that nonjazz music and nonblack musicians could be comfortably enveloped within its folds. As Bowie puts it, “Mahalia, Aretha, Woody Herman, Stan Kenton, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, all of them are playing Great Black Music, they all have their roots in Great Black Music” (448-49).
In the end, Lewis’s book, like Campbell’s study of the New South, opens up large intellectual vistas by unpacking the social and political import of particular musical enterprises. In spite of the great differences between the two works, their authors, each pushing outward from a singular disciplinary starting point, chart out a shared analytical space where issues of musical expression, community identity, and social power converge. Campbell’s historical study of Atlanta brings new musicological sensibilities to the close analysis of a range of discursive cultural materials. Lewis’s expansive musicological agenda in turn remaps great swathes of the cultural historian’s thematic terrain in ways that also deeply situate the production of music within particular cities. In both studies, the technical analysis of particular pieces of music is highly—perhaps even overly—restrained. Yet this restraint may also facilitate the further development of a musically informed line of inquiry for urban history. Taken together, these works speak to both sides of urban history’s cultural agenda: on the one side, providing a research model that examines musical culture in relation to dominant metropolitan interests and, on the other, exemplifying the study of cultural production as a vehicle for community self-determination. These two scholarly studies, along with the other books reviewed here, contribute to a valuable repositioning of historical issues related to music, race, and the city. The question is no longer whether music gets raced but how, where, and with what implications.