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Jazz and the Possessive Investment in Western Art Music: An Antiracist Argument for Sociopolitical Context in Jazz History Textbooks
Tanksley, Michael Antonio
Tanksley, Michael Antonio
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2024-05
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Music History
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http://dx.doi.org/10.34944/dspace/10574
Abstract
Musicologist Loren Kajikawa (2019, 156) asserts that U.S. music schools demonstrate a possessive investment in Western art music, tacitly reinforcing white supremacy as a dominant ideology. Jazz musician and philosophy scholar Lee Caplan (2021, 93) connects this possessive investment to jazz historicism, suggesting that conventional jazz history narratives substitute jazz’s racialized developmental context with a Eurocentric developmental logic. This project aims to demonstrate how conventional jazz history narratives express a Eurocentric bias that harmfully distorts jazz history, undermines the agency of jazz musicians, and obstructs its antiracist potential. Using Caplan’s proposed methodology, this project examines four notable stylistic periods in what standard college textbooks depict as conventional jazz history to pinpoint and analyze the gaps created by overlooking the racialized tensions intrinsic to jazz’s stylistic development. This dissertation argues that jazz history textbooks that target the college market contribute to the possessive investment in Western art music. Minimizing jazz musicians’ social realities constructs inaccurate and incomplete historical narratives that inadequately account for stylistic developments that undermine or deconstruct the Eurocentric logic within the conventional jazz history narrative.
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