Over twenty years ago, Janet Wolff wrote that, ‘On the whole the ideology of autonomy still rules the study of music’ (Wolff Reference Wolff, McClary and Leppert1987, p. 9). I still find that musicology and popular music studies often overlook the collaborative process: the influence of producers, engineers, film directors, arrangers, ghost-writers, other cultural intermediaries, not to mention other genres and past styles. It is simply easier to write about seemingly autonomous figures, the Bob Dylans, Brian Wilsons, and Bernard Hermanns of musical culture. Jazz history, for example, is often told as the history of great men/innovators/improvisers. Steven Pond has made the point that jazz transcription focuses on one musician's improvisation, rather than his or her interactions with the other members of the group (Pond Reference Pond2005, p. 189). Recent academic scholarship, while canvassing the social contexts of creation, tends to oscillate between acknowledging the complexities of reality, and single agency as the Weberian ‘ideal type’ which expresses concepts most effectively.

Is there an effective way to write about music as collaborative process? Ethnomusicologist and musician Paul Austerlitz has provided intriguing models of such a method. His book Jazz Consciousness provides numerous cases of jazz's interaction with and appropriation by a number of cultures and musics. ‘Jazz consciousness’ is a term Austerlitz derived from W.E.B. Du Bois's concept of ‘double consciousness’, the dual identity of African-Americans as both American and Negro. He explores jazz consciousness as ‘an active agent in our culture’ (p. xiii), the ability of jazz to be appropriated and inflected by numerous contexts and cultures. Though he does not define what that exactly is – trying to discover what makes jazz ‘jazz’ would easily fill another book – he uses jazz's inclusivity and ability to be easily appropriated as the catalyst for his study. Jazz, at once, can represent America, African-American culture, universality, improvisation (broadly defined), and even class. Most importantly, for Austerlitz, jazz has become a transnational discourse (he avoids the term ‘globalism’), and he suggests that jazz consciousness may create a virtual space to ‘heal’ the contradictions of social rupture.

What follows in his study are a number of ways that jazz consciousness shapes other styles and cultures. Austerlitz investigates the role of jazz in the national identity of the United States (Ch. 1); jazz in relation to African-influenced forms (Ch. 2); the meeting of African American and Afro-Cuban musical cultures in 1930s/40s New York City (Ch. 3); jazz in the Dominican Republic as a mix of jazz and their national music of merengue (Ch. 4); jazz consciousness in Finland (Ch. 5); and jazz as part of a ‘human music’ that begins to explore internal/biological sounds (Ch. 6).

A few examples will highlight Austerlitz's attention to normally neglected agents in music. In chapter 2, he presents ‘Kente notation’, an adaptation of the ‘Time Unit Box Notation System’ (TUBS), a way to notate sound events using colours to apply to different sounds which resembles the box-like patterns of a kente cloth. The system includes a grid of boxes, with different instruments in the y-axis and sound events (including silence) on the x-axis without having to use metre as a reference. He includes the ‘Dancer's motor beat’, the movement of the dancer which is integral of the music, but would never appear on a conventional score. To the musicians, the dancer is part of the music, their rhythm is implied, but not played on the musical instruments – the dancer fills the gap implied by the players. While the notation system could have useful application to other groove-based musics, it is problematic. Since each sound corresponds to a different colour, the system only works best with the simplest examples. Potential pitfalls aside, acknowledging the dancer as part of the music, as the musicians do, is crucial to African-based forms.

The narrative involving the rise of Machito and his Afro-Cubans in 1930s' and 1940s' New York City is particularly compelling. Austerlitz recounts trumpeter Mario Bauzá's lesson with drummer Chick Webb, where Webb taught Bauzá jazz phrasing, and Bauzá later teaching jazz musicians to play to the clave of Latin music. Austerlitz also emphasises the roll of the jazz arranger and of the ‘ghost-writer’, two figures who do not receive enough scholarly attention. He highlights the roles of Chico O'Farill and René Hernandez as arrangers for Machito and his Afro-Cubans and other bands, and points out how Duke Ellington and Mario Bauzá would adapt numerous ideas from their sidemen for their compositions. His fourth chapter provides a compelling history of jazz in Finland, weaving social context with the multi-faceted musical and national influences. It is a well-crafted case study of how a transnational style and ethos collaborates with notions of national identity.

Lastly, in the collaborative spirit, his final chapter is written by percussionist/Professor/polymath Milford Graves. Graves' chapter is impressively provocative, from a unique perspective of music that transcends classification in search of what is ‘human’, what is biological about music. His research into the tones, timbre, frequency, harmonics, and rhythm of the human heartbeat can be seen as symbolic of a search for that which is beyond race, beyond genre. The music of the heart is something that everyone creates, albeit differently. He believes that the origin of the drum is in the human heart, and that in order to understand sound, we need to look at ‘how we create sound within ourselves’ (p. 182). ‘Human music’ is only one of many topics Graves communicates in his chapter, part of his exploration of a pan-humanistic sphere, approaches to sound rarely encountered in musicology.

As Austerlitz considers himself a ‘scholar-musician’, his own experience as a Finnish-born musician playing ‘black music’ in America informs his writing, as ethnomusicologists often highlight the importance of self-knowledge in research. With an engaging writing style, he has fused his own observations, his ‘personal journey’ (p. xvi), and other research such that his methodology is barely conspicuous. The book is in the spirit of the hybrid akin to the music with which he engages, weaving interviews, social and political context, narratives, anecdotes, his own experience, and theories from multiple disciplines. He creates a space where ideas from Johann Gottfried Herder, Charles Keil, Amiri Baraka, Paul Gilroy, Melville Herskovits, and Juan Flores interact; he uses ideas from anthropology, ethnomusicology, Latino studies, black studies, and earlier writings on nationalism to break down disciplinary boundaries. Rather than choose one academic trend over another, he embraces what is useful, no matter what label it comes with (like the Finnish jazz musicians that he discusses). Austerlitz's autobiographical anecdotes highlight the importance of his own experiences and feelings, which may be off-putting for those who desire ‘critical distance’ in academic writing, but this is precisely his point: experience is always shaped by overlapping consciousnesses, the ‘multiple voices’ that bell hooks has heard in jazz (p. 17). His writing is the epitome of a way to write about jazz (and music) as process rather than as a text.

All musical experience involves collaboration, and any music scholar has to contend with the complexities of agency carefully and intelligently. In this aim, and many others, Jazz Consciousness succeeds brilliantly.