What does racial identity mean in twenty-first-century America? Some say we live in a “postracial” world, and increasing numbers of Americans have multiethnic backgrounds. We academics recognize that race is a social construction, yet Americans remain attached to traditional racial categories. In 2008, approximately 15% of all marriages in the United States were interracial, and beginning with the 2000 census, Americans have been allowed to check more than one racial category.Footnote ¹ Yet 97% of Americans in 2010 reported only one race.Footnote ² We are proud of electing our first “black president” even though his mother was white and he grew up barely knowing his African father.

Yet few of the alternative models for thinking about race seem attractive. The melting pot model destroys ethnicity altogether and ultimately assimilates The Other into The Same. While the concept of “hybridity” holds more promise, it does not necessarily tell us how and in what sense racial boundary crossings occur. More importantly, the notion of hybridity is only useful if applied to a particular time and place. There are only hybridities, each of which must be understood in its larger social context. Only by examining such applications can we hope to learn something about racial identity more generally.

One rich context for understanding racial boundary crossings is music, for music is one of the means by which many people construct their identities. In the words of Martin Stokes, music “provides means by which people recognize identities and places, and the boundaries that separate them…. Musical performance, as well as the acts of listening, dancing, arguing, discussing, thinking and writing about music, provide the means by which ethnicities and identities are constructed and mobilized.”Footnote ³

In particular, American popular music since the late nineteenth century has provided fertile ground for racial boundary crossings. Indeed, popular music's racial mixing has outpaced the rest of society. Despite America's sorry history of segregation and discrimination, popular music, beginning with ragtime if not earlier, has been saturated with the melodies, harmonies, and themes of African Americans. Because of this, many whites have engaged with popular music in a way that has troubled their racial identities. If anything, this trend is accelerating. Listening to pop music today, I am constantly struck by the way in which white popular singers like Adele and countless “American Idol” contestants use vocal inflections that a few decades ago would have been considered “black.” What today seems unremarkable would then have been seen as mimicry or even minstrelsy. Examining the integration of black-derived musical forms into American popular culture, then, might help us think about contemporary racial identity.

The three books under review consider jazz, and more specifically historical narratives about jazz, through the lens of racial identity. Jazz's racial identity, as it were, has been contested from the music's inception. Jazz has been seen as “black music” in various narratives, from that of the 1940s New Orleans revivalists that Bruce Raeburn chronicles to black nationalist critics like Amiri Baraka (then LeRoi Jones). Many Americans early on saw the music as white, a process encouraged by the success of bandleaders like Paul Whiteman, known by the title “The King of Jazz.” (Indeed, Henry Ford famously called jazz “a Jewish creation,” though given his own anti-Semitism, it is doubtful that he meant by this that jazz was a product of the white mainstream to be welcomed).Footnote ⁴

Bruce Boyd Raeburn, Randall Sandke, and David Ake each cast a critical eye on jazz histories and how they have portrayed the music's racial identity. They analyze some of the ways in which jazz and its reception have been influenced by American racial ideologies and practices. These authors also examine jazz's relationship to national identities, as what has been seen as an American art form expands throughout the increasingly globalized world. Each author criticizes what he sees as oversimplified understandings of the role of racial and national identities in jazz and suggests alternative narratives.

In Where the Dark and the Light Folks Meet, the perspective is very clear: Sandke believes that a focus on racial identity has distorted the telling of jazz's story. He targets what he calls the “exclusionary” view of jazz history, which sees jazz as “the expression of a distinct and independent African-American culture” (p. 1). According to this mistaken perspective, jazz was a black invention and remains an African American art form; while whites can become competent musicians, they can never achieve greatness. As a white jazz trumpeter and composer, he draws on personal experience but constructs his case from the historical record.

Sandke details the expression of this point of view in the writings of prominent jazz critics since the music's inception. Thus in 1946, Rudi Blesh argued that jazz creates “difficulties almost insurmountable for the white player.” He spoke of the “pure Negroid influence” and saw in earlier jazz “primitive, exciting goodness” (p. 22). Famed French critic Hugues Panassié similarly said that “[s]ince jazz is a music created by the black race, it is very difficult, almost impossible for a white man to get to the heart of it at first shot” (p. 22). Important later (white) critics like Marshall Stearns and Martin Williams gave short shrift to white musicians in their histories and (in the case of Williams) in an influential record anthology (p. 27). In Sandke's view, African American writers like Amiri Baraka, Albert Murray, and Stanley Crouch have at best ignored and at worst denigrated white jazz musicians. Thus, seminal critic Albert Murray, an intellectual godfather to Crouch and Wynton Marsalis, lambasted white critics who “legitimize[d] the idiomatic authenticity of certain white musicians, whose very accents indicate that they are not native to the idiom but nonetheless enjoy reputations (and earnings) as great performers” and dared to “intrud[e] the name of [white trumpeter] Bix Beiderbecke” alongside of African American greats like King Oliver and Louis Armstrong (p. 31).

Sandke disputes the exclusionary view of jazz history. He effectively debunks myths about the role of race in early New Orleans jazz. Sandke shows the error of tracing jazz back to musical accompaniment of African dances in the city's Congo Square because any music there ceased decades before jazz began; oft-quoted late-nineteenth-century accounts were fabricated or borrowed from earlier, questionable sources.

The author also shows that from the beginning, jazz was an interracial affair. Demand for jazz was huge among both black and white audiences. Black, Creole, and white musicians listened to and influenced one another and occasionally played together. Rather than being confined to specific black or white styles of playing, musicians developed a versatile stylistic repertory that allowed them to play whatever a particular audience desired. Sanke also points out the slipperiness of racial categories in the Crescent City and the importance of racially ambiguous figures like trombonist and music teacher Dave Perkins.

Sandke disputes the idea that jazz is “African” in some unmediated way. As opposed to those who tie jazz's characteristic syncopation to Africa, he convincingly points out that there can be no syncopation per se in West African music because of the lack of an underlying meter. He also quotes African American jazz greats Art Blakey and Marylou Williams and others who also reject the view of jazz as an African-based music. Sandke acknowledges that there are West African influences on jazz, but is vague (and, I think, incorrect) when he says that African “retentions are numerous and significant, but often have more to do with musical attitude and nuance than any specific technique” (p. 44). In response to the claim that blacks have a special affinity for jazz rhythms and the blues, he points out that Duke Ellington had many white drummers, and African American saxophone giant Coleman Hawkins had to make a concerted effort to master the blues.

Sandke rejects another distortion in the exclusionary narrative as well: the idea that black musicians were inevitably exploited in the music business and were underpaid in relation to their white colleagues. He points out that black musicians have often earned the same as whites for the same work, and more than a few major black jazz musicians have become wealthy. In addition, white musicians have been exploited; jazz musicians of all races have stolen the tunes of others and recorded them as their own: “Exploitative behavior has been color-blind” (p. 216). While managers like Armstrong's Joe Glaser have made what some feel to be excessive profits, they were often respected by their clients, and in the case of Armstrong, made the client rich. In addition, jazz would never have advanced without the support of white audiences.

Much of Sandke's analysis is persuasive, backed up with historical evidence. Yet some of his assertions lack support. Thus, he claims that influential critic Gary Giddins espouses the exclusionary view based on the fact that (in Sandke's opinion) he does not write enough about white musicians; in the author's view, saxophonist Michael Brecker is particularly slighted. This is flimsy evidence and ignores the fact that Giddins wrote an entire book about Bing Crosby, making the case for the singer as a serious artist and huge influence on American popular music. Giddins has written important articles about white musicians Art Pepper, Red Rodney, and others.Footnote ⁵

Sandke errs more seriously when he attributes the dominance of the exclusionary view of jazz history to the supposed pervasiveness of liberal and Marxist ideology in American society. He is correct that some early manifestations of exclusionary criticism were clearly influenced by the Popular Front Marxism of the 1930s, as Raeburn details in his own book. And Sandke is right that some of the simplistic analysis of Baraka and others was influenced by the black nationalism of the 1960s. However, in his attack on more recent critics, he buys into an ideological view of the 1960s and beyond that is a caricature of reality. According to Sandke, since the 1960s, America has been taken over by a mind-set characterized by “political correctness, multiculturalism, attacks on notions of individuality, attacks on ‘Westernized’ standards of excellence, identity politics, and appeals to historical victimization” (p. 116). He traces this back to what he sees as the cultural relativism of anthropologist Melville Herskovits, with contributions ranging from the 1960s Kerner Commission to Michel Foucault. In the process, he favorably cites a who's who of neoconservatives: Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom, Shelby Steele, Dinesh D'Souza, Norman Podhoretz, and Thomas Sowell, among others. This leads him to make hyperbolic pronouncements, such as the assertion that after 9/11 the United States “spent billions upon billions of dollars to defeat sectarian tribalism abroad [Afghanistan and Iraq] while ethnic sectarianism was being widely promoted and encouraged at home” (p. 242).

This neoconservative scaffolding is unnecessary to and detracts from the many insights in the book. Even if such debatable propositions were true, Sandke does not show how this philosophy influenced jazz critics and audiences. Indeed, “exclusionary” critic Albert Murray has attacked black radicalism as a kind of minstrel show for whites.Footnote ⁶ One of the most recent critics attacked by Sandke, Stanley Crouch, decades ago renounced his sixties black nationalism and has become a conservative, albeit an iconoclastic one, who has criticized the Civil Rights establishment, the “Afrocentric hustle,” “the decoy of race,” and the use of the “race card.”Footnote ⁷

Sandke's counternarrative is problematic as well. His antidote to the exclusionary philosophy is one of “color blindness” and musical meritocracy. He longs for the days in which jazz was a “beacon for achieving interracial respect and understanding” and “the dream of a color-blind society was within reach in the jazz world, where musicians were judged on merit and not skin color” (p. 7). While he is right that jazz has encouraged some interracial interactions, his picture of the music as a realm of racial harmony is vastly overdrawn. African American musicians faced many of the same discriminatory obstacles encountered by their nonmusician counterparts.

Sandke also goes astray when he argues that jazz should be “music qua music, free of ideology” (p. 246). He dichotomizes jazz criticism concerned with the “realm of music” and what he sees as illegitimate treatment of “social concerns” (p. 34). This rejection of the importance of historical context contradicts his own detailed social analysis of jazz history. Given America's history of racial hierarchy and the fact that such conditions are unlikely to disappear in the near future, race will continue to play a role in jazz.

Like Sandke, Raeburn sees jazz history as distorted, particularly that of New Orleans jazz. In New Orleans Style and the Writing of American Jazz History, he focuses his attack on what he calls “purism.” Purist critics of the 1930s and 1940s saw early New Orleans jazz as a folk art produced by unschooled, intuitive black musicians. For them, New Orleans jazz was a privileged style that needed to be preserved in its pristine state and protected from change, which they saw as inevitably a form of degeneration.

Raeburn disputes the purist narrative. In his view, the purist vision of jazz as African American had a positive aspect—it gained recognition for African American musicians and helped jazz be seen as an art form (p. 214). This was no small accomplishment. Yet it did not do justice to the reality of New Orleans and its music: Like Sandke, Raeburn asserts that New Orleans jazz was never a purely black art form. Indeed, the dichotomous view of race as black and white was not yet fully developed in New Orleans at the time jazz emerged. Creoles of Color, whose heritage is usually seen as Afro-French but could also draw on Italian or other nationalities, complicated the notion of race in the Crescent City. For some Creoles and mulattoes, race was a choice, and such individuals could sometimes play in both black and white bands. It is true that Creoles were being increasingly seen as black, but this was not as developed or as clear-cut as has often been portrayed.Footnote ⁸

Furthermore, individuals of all races heard and played the music. Because of the open-air nature of much music in New Orleans (parades, ballyhoos, lakefront picnics, lawn parties), the music could not be completely segregated, for it could be heard by all. Jazz appealed to Americans of all races and, thus, in subtle ways it loosened racial boundaries among individuals and within the self. The purists' racial essentialism “failed to fully grasp the ways in which the music had cut across racial, ethnic, class, and gender boundaries in impelling young Americans to become advocates for jazz” (p. 215).

The purist framework straitjacketed the music in other ways. One such restriction was the idea that jazz was a noncommercial art or folk music. In particular, purists saw “hot” New Orleans jazz as “natural,” while “sweet” music was artificial and commercial. As opposed to those purists who saw the appeal to the public as “selling out,” Raeburn argues that musicians have always been eager to please the public in order to make a living. New Orleans jazz musicians by necessity played a huge variety of styles that different audiences demanded, cultivating what Ingrid Monson has called “polymusicality.”Footnote ⁹ Bands played pop music for whites, traditional dances (mazurkas, polkas, quadrilles) for Creoles, and blusier music for black audiences, particularly members of the lower-class “good time people.”Footnote ¹⁰

The stylistic pluralism of jazz meant that the music transcended rigid genre categories. The Crescent City's “performance practices [were] grounded in experimentation and variegation…. Trying to apply a stylistic code of ethics to New Orleans music ignored its very essence” (p. 9). In effect, New Orleans jazz came from a “supremely eclectic” vernacular culture that “borrowed at will from folk, art, and popular genres, creating unity from diversity and transgressing the boundaries set up by the Custodians” (p. 12). This boundary-bursting nature is what made early jazz threatening to both its purist supporters and its elitist opponents. For Raeburn, this means that the music had, in a sense, revolutionary potential, calling into question rigid cultural boundaries.

More importantly, purists mistakenly saw New Orleans jazz as timeless and divorced from its environment. Musicians who wished to update their style, like Sidney Bechet, were criticized as heretics. Bunk Johnson, the early New Orleans jazz trumpeter who was rediscovered in the late thirties by jazz critics and given a new trumpet and a set of teeth, was presented as an icon of New Orleans purity, a stance which did not do him justice and took the focus away from other worthy, more contemporary, New Orleans musicians.

Whereas the purists (like Sandke) wished to place jazz in a timeless realm sealed off from the flux of sociopolitical reality, Raeburn insists on jazz's role in the life of a community. Most of all, New Orleans jazz was (and is) “participatory” (p. 14). This aspect of the music is epitomized by the “second line”—the crowd that follows alongside a parade, dancing, capering, and twirling parasols. The participatory nature of New Orleans jazz differentiates it from classical music, in which participation, except for applause at the end of a piece, is forbidden.Footnote ¹¹ The participatory nature of the music also gives the audience a kind of power, a freedom that makes them, in a sense, cocreators of the music.

Such joyous participation in jazz was a part of the Crescent City's dedication to the pursuit of pleasure. In their quest to enshrine jazz as an art, the purists neglected the way jazz is, in Raeburn's words, “fun.” In their “intellectualization” of the music, purists forgot that jazz is an emotional expression and release for both the musicians and the audience: “What members of the old guard knew, and what was often lost on more recent theorists, was that when you felt ‘blue,’ you sought refuge in jazz and were duly comforted” (p. 206). Johnson's message was one of “the celebration of life as an antidote to oppression”: “Be happy today, and tomorrow will take care of itself” (p. 138). Johnson taught, and his handlers/celebrators sometimes forgot, that jazz was an “attitude” and a “way of living” (p. 213).

Raeburn urges us to understand the music within its full and accurate historical and geographical context, calling for, in effect, a situated listening. Like Sandke, Raeburn rejects jazz as black, but while Sandke's alternative is a view of jazz as “pure music,” Raeburn insists that jazz is never just music but is bound up with the location in which it is performed, potentially serving as a kind of emancipatory force within the community. While Sandke sees jazz as rooted in a melting pot “American culture,” Raeburn wants us to understand it in terms of the whole life of a community, in the context of a variety of groups that have a complex relationship but do not “melt” together.

Part of this more accurate understanding involves taking into account the music's adaptation and change as it traveled. The mistake of the purists was to try to freeze the music in time (and place) even though New Orleans itself was changing, as was the larger United States. Indeed, adaptation is one of the things that kept the music going. Musicians adapted to be able to make a living, and out of that tree grew many branches. Raeburn ends the book by urging readers to embrace what New Orleans jazz has become today, telling us that “New Orleans-style jazz still matters” (p. 259). New Orleans is still a vital city with living music.

As insightful as Raeburn's analysis is, I have some criticisms. Although he is right that purists underestimated the diversity of New Orleans music, and tried to squelch it when they did see it, Raeburn does not tell us what held it together. What was the “unity” of the “unity within diversity”? When Raeburn says that the music “embrac[ed] an unbounded pluralism that ultimately included the full spectrum of world traditions,” he overstates the case. Jazz was informed by a huge spectrum of musical forms, but it surely had (and has) boundaries of its own, even if far less rigid than the purists believed.Footnote ¹² The idea that in New Orleans jazz “there were no rules” is an exaggeration (p. 7). A Mozart string quartet would not be part of a jazz funeral, and the absence of a steady beat in a parade would not have been acceptable.

Raeburn, like Sandke, is right to stress the ability of musicians to evade racial boundaries. As he so nicely puts it, “Jim Crow had long been resident in the Crescent City, but everybody knew that he took frequent vacations” (p. 189). However, a vacation by definition is only a temporary absence. Although there were evasions, racial constraints were very real and did influence the music and its practices. Yet the music facilitated richer and more complex racial identities.

While the other two authors focus mostly on jazz history, David Ake shows how race matters in the post-1960s jazz world that is still with us. He is particularly interested in the way the music gets connected with identities, racial and otherwise. As he puts it in Jazz Matters, jazz “serves as a crowded, even contentious, forum for what are widely called issues of identity” (p. 3). Audiences construct meaning for jazz based on their personal histories, but more importantly their personal histories as lived in a particular time and place. Listeners are attracted to music because they see in it an affirmation of a particular picture of their identity. Ake investigates the kind of racial meanings that get attached to jazz in contemporary society, where jazz performance is taught in colleges and a huge part of the music's audience consists of white suburbanites. To explore this issue, he looks at contemporary narratives told about jazz by musicians, music industry figures, critics, and listeners through public statements, reviews, liner notes, and album covers.

Like those of Sandke and Raeburn, one of Ake's goals is to debunk myths concerning jazz and race. One example concerns the negative image of college jazz education programs. The myth is that jazz is always a serious, urban music performed in small groups by inspired artists who are black or self-identified as black, somehow scraping a living in the marketplace (“paying dues”), yet ultimately disdainful of popularity or audience reaction. The paradigmatic image is one of an ultrahip Miles Davis turning his back to the audience while performing. College jazz programs often take place well away from urban centers, performing big band music by primarily white musicians in large institutions set apart from the marketplace. College big bands often exude a sense of unabashed enjoyment that further challenges the image of jazz as a life-and-death struggle. Ake shows how, contrary to the myth, major jazz musicians of all races have graduated from these programs and produced innovative music. He even produces, as an appendix, a list of about 150 prominent contemporary musicians and the college programs from which they emerged.

Ake describes instances in which musicians counter predominant myths about jazz by creating their own narratives about their music. Thus, in one chapter he shows how the avant-garde band Sex Mob, through music, song titles, and album covers, projects an image of carnivalesque play that values “revelry over veneration, and guileless laughter over glib hipness” (p. 55). Through these means, the band presents a narrative that “celebrates this life, this day, this moment” and “foregrounds the body in all its sexy, smelly, temporary glory” (p. 70). In Ake's view, bands like Sex Mob help revive the jazz tradition's dormant sense of play and display a refreshing irreverence toward tradition. Like those who opposed the New Orleans jazz purists, these bands challenge constricting narratives of jazz and its accompanying rigid identities. Although this view is intriguing, there is very little social analysis in this chapter. One wonders how the band's narrative interacts with listeners' identities and how it fits into the larger culture.

The book's best chapter describes both musicians' attempts to create identities through their music and the ways in which they are influenced by and reinforce social reality. Ake discusses the emergence of what he calls “pastoral jazz” in the 1970s, exemplified by Keith Jarrett, Pat Metheny, and the German-owned ECM record label. While bebop evoked a “crowded cityscape,” some of the music of Jarrett and Metheny calls up a rural setting. These performances create such an image through extramusical features like album covers and song titles. Song titles like “Two Folk Songs,” “New Chautauqua,” and “Open” (Metheny) and “Country” (Jarrett) conjure up a countryside with sun-drenched hills and rolling fields of grain. The album cover of Metheny's New Chautauqua album (1979) shows him in jeans and a T-shirt, barefoot, creating a new image of the jazz musician—white and small-town (p. 94). The music itself reinforces these images, featuring strumming on open strings with a pick on an acoustic guitar (Metheny) or serene, tranquil, acoustic performances with folklike melodies (Jarrett).

Metheny's album American Garage appeals to a different identity. Album cover photographs feature camper trailers, a baseball glove, and the musicians rehearsing next to a station wagon in a garage. The music features a kind of defanged tribute to the suburban “garage band,” with gestures to rock and roll within the context of smooth “quasi-funk” (p. 96). The world evoked by the album cover is neither urban nor rural but suburban.

Ake places pastoral jazz within its social context: the flight by white Americans in the 1970s from troubled, decaying urban centers: “In contrast to these hardened realities pastoral jazz offered a vision of a clean and secure America.” This music appealed to “white, post-Watergate-era youth … raised on rock music but now slightly ‘above’ it; long-haired but not chronically alienated; and almost certainly college bound” (p. 99). “Pastoral jazz openly reflected the hopes and fears of this country's young, white middle class in the 1970s and 1980s” (p. 101). This audience flocked to the music, ultimately, he says, spurring the growth of college jazz programs.

One could interpret the attraction of white suburbanites to pastoral jazz as a racist retreat from diversity, like the “white flight” it seems to mirror. Yet this perspective is complicated by two factors. First, those white suburbanites knew that jazz has a large connection to black culture. Second, African American drummer Jack DeJohnette played on some of the Metheny albums and ultimately ended up a long-standing member of Jarrett's Standards Trio.

At times, Ake does see pastoral jazz as an unconsciously racist retreat into whiteness: Metheny's music, he says, “offered some of the hipster cachet associated with jazz but without the dangers” (pp. 99–100). Yet he later expresses doubt about this assertion without fully rejecting it: “In the end the emergence of an idyllic jazz in the 1970s can be understood alternatively as a reawakening of a long ruralist tradition, a newly found respect for an imperiled planet, a return for some to musical and cultural ‘roots,’ or a nostalgic fear and rejection of degraded urban centers” (p. 101). This rejection of simplistic explanations is admirable. Undoubtedly, for some listeners pastoral jazz was a racist retreat, while for others it was an opening up of identity. But Ake's refusal to commit to the analysis he introduces is unsatisfying.

The author extends the discussion of jazz and identity beyond its racial aspects when he investigates the growing disputes over jazz's national identity. For many years, jazz was seen as an incontrovertibly American form, and the Stanley Crouch/Wynton Marsalis neoconservative group still puts forward this perspective, seen most prominently in Ken Burns's Jazz television series. However, as jazz has become more established across the Atlantic, Europeans have increasingly rejected the notion of its fundamental Americanness, seeking to claim jazz for their own identities.

Ake explores this issue by looking at American jazz musicians living in Paris, investigating how they “display, discard, or otherwise represent ‘Americanness’ in terms of musical style, subjective identity, and professional strategy” (p. 122). Although at one time American jazz musicians, particularly African Americans, were valued as the “real” jazz players, many in Europe now see American jazz as stale and old-fashioned. These Europeans resent American hegemony and have sought to liberate jazz from many traditional conventions (standards, swing rhythms, the blues, certain chord progressions). Many European jazz musicians draw on classical modernism rather than on African American musical devices.Footnote ¹³

In this environment, some white musicians in Paris feel a sense of liberation from the assumption that authentic jazz musicians are black (p. 131). But at times, this European nationalist attitude about jazz has become less a celebration of diversity than a kind of hegemony of its own. One American saxophonist found that Europeans tried to eliminate conventional jazz elements from their playing “as if it were something cancerous to be cut out. It started to seem driven by a misguided sense of purity, a kind of negative absolutism and ultimately an intentionally created separation whose only goal was to serve some kind of strange nationalism or continentalism, and in its worst manifestations, racism” (p. 131). As trombonist George Lewis has explained, some Europeans frame jazz in a way that denies the contributions of African Americans, in a kind of reverse Afrocentrism, though itself modeled on the very same kind of nationalist ideology.Footnote ¹⁴

In the face of European musical nationalism, American jazz musicians have to make choices about how to present (and perhaps experience) their national identities. According to Ake, American musicians in Paris choose one of two routes: “Americanism” or “assimilationism.” Americanists highlight their national origin, hoping to capitalize on whatever remains of the cachet of being American. They deliberately speak English on the bandstand and avoid playing too often in Paris, even if in fact they live there, to maintain the mystique of outsiderness. Their playing reflects a use of more traditional jazz devices. Assimilationists, on the other hand, speak French on the bandstand and are more likely to incorporate musical devices from outside the mainstream jazz tradition in their playing.

African American musicians often identify with the Americanists, perhaps because of the potential racism inherent in the European nationalist perspective. (Ake even mentions an “African Americanist” subgroup.) However, according to the author, they sometimes embrace Americanism for a less benign reason: to differentiate themselves from immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa. Sometimes they deliberately speak English for this purpose, especially if they sensed anti-African sentiments. In general, however, the Americanists of all races tend to identify as Americans, leading to more interracial music making than was common in the sometimes segregated jazz scene of New York City (p. 134).

What is most striking about these Americans in Paris is their attempts to find flexible identities within the confines of a constricting environment. Like musicians everywhere, many musicians in Paris go where the work is and assume the identity required by the job. In that respect they are like New Orleans Creoles of Color, who pursued racial fluidity in the context of Jim Crow.

Indeed, the theme that unites all three books is the way musicians strive to construct identities, racial and otherwise, in the face of social constrictions. These authors are not the first to celebrate such racial and national fluidity in jazz.Footnote ¹⁵ George Lewis, in his study of encounters between African American and European musicians, calls for a “fluidity that … produces complex, mobile identities” not tied to rigid musical practices or identities.Footnote ¹⁶ Indeed, the books' authors seek to liberate jazz history itself from the sociopolitical straitjackets that have been imposed upon it.

As appealing as such a model of fluidity is, however, racial-national fluidity in music always occurs in a particular social-historical context and can only be understood as such. As Ake puts it, “while jazz may be a global musical phenomenon, in many ways it still operates locally” (p. 139). Jazz in any given locale and culture produces its own identities, fluid but having their own parameters. Each of these books contributes to our understanding of racial and national musical identities within particular social contexts.

Musicians by necessity have had to cross racial boundaries by adopting varied musical styles, playing in mixed groups, or even passing as a member of another race. White listeners from the beginning have used the music to try on different racial identities, often in rebellion against what they have seen as the stifling conformism of mainstream society.Footnote ¹⁷ Such boundary crossings create moments of what I have called “racial intersubjectivity.”Footnote ¹⁸

Yet it is important to remember that such crossings are inevitably shaped and constrained by their context. In the words of Ian Haney López, one's racial identity is “highly contingent, specific to times, places, and situations. Whiteness, or the state of being White, thus turns on where one is, Watts or Westchester, Stanford University or San Jose State; on when one is there, two in the afternoon or three in the morning, 1878 or 1995; on the immediate context, applying to rent an apartment, seeking entrance into an exclusive club, or talking with a police officer.”Footnote ¹⁹

Thus, the history of jazz suggests a racial identity that is neither rigidly essentialist nor infinitely malleable. In the words of Paul Gilroy, “music is especially important in breaking the inertia which arises in the unhappy polar opposition between a squeamish, nationalist essentialism and a sceptical, saturnalian pluralism which makes the impure world of politics literally unthinkable.”Footnote ²⁰ Some musicians in New Orleans, New York, and Paris have been able to help shape their racial identities, but only within the boundaries of a given time and place.

This dialectic of racial identity can be seen in the life of pianist and composer Jelly Roll Morton. Born Ferdinand Lamothe in late-nineteenth-century New Orleans, Morton with his Afro-French ancestry was neither black nor white but a Creole of Color. Though at times violently racist, the Crescent City had islands of relative tolerance, and Morton played at interracial clubs like The Frenchman's. Yet such racial complexity and tolerance did not extend to the rest of the United States. When Morton took his musical talents to Biloxi, Mississippi, for example, he was nearly lynched for befriending a white woman.

As Morton got older, he and others like him were considered black musicians wherever they went, his hometown of New Orleans included. His response was sometimes defensive. He denied any African ancestry, insisting that “my folks was all Frenchmans … directly from the shores of France,” and at times disparaged “coal black, blue gummed Negroes.”Footnote ²¹ Yet at other times he stood up for African American musicians. In the end, though, he became a “black” musician whether he wanted to be or not.

Morton's music reflected the racial dynamics of the times and places in which he lived. He grew up going to the French opera, listening to and playing “European” music. He was a master at “signifying” on such European and classically American sources. Morton took tunes from John Philip Sousa's “The Stars and Stripes Forever” to Verdi's “Miserere” and used blue notes, syncopation, and call and response to transform them into jazz. Even as times changed and black musicians were increasingly pushed into playing blues material exclusively, Morton continued to produce music that was sui generis. However, neither record companies nor the public were interested in such unclassifiable works, and he died in near poverty.

Although Morton helped invent a music that itself embodied racial flexibility, he increasingly ran up against musical and personal barriers to such ethnic interchanges. His life thus illustrates the possibilities of racial fluidity and the way society limits and shapes, in a variety of particular situations, racial boundaries.