This Is Our Music, declared saxophonist Ornette Coleman's 1960 album
title. But whose music was it? At various times during the 1950s and
1960s, musicians, critics, fans, politicians, and entrepreneurs claimed
jazz as a national art form, an Afrocentric race music, an extension of
modernist innovation in other genres, a music of mass consciousness, and
the preserve of a cultural elite. This original and provocative book
explores who makes decisions about the value of a cultural form and on
what basis, taking as its example the impact of 1960s free improvisation
on the changing status of jazz.
By examining the production, presentation, and reception of experimental
music by Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, John Coltrane, and others, Iain
Anderson traces the strange, unexpected, and at times deeply ironic
intersections between free jazz, avant-garde artistic movements, Sixties
politics, and patronage networks. Anderson emphasizes free
improvisation's enormous impact on jazz music's institutional standing,
despite ongoing resistance from some of its biggest beneficiaries. He
concludes that attempts by African American artists and intellectuals to
define a place for themselves in American life, structural changes in
the music industry, and the rise of nonprofit sponsorship portended a
significant transformation of established cultural standards. At the
same time, free improvisation's growing prestige depended in part upon
traditional highbrow criteria: increasingly esoteric styles, changing
venues and audience behavior, European sanction, withdrawal from the
marketplace, and the professionalization of criticism. Thus jazz music's
performers and supporters--and potentially those in other arts--have
both challenged and accommodated themselves to an ongoing process of
cultural stratification.
