3:16: So is it possible to give a unified definition of jazz given the historical discontinuities it contains? Can you sketch for us the difficulties in doing so and if your definitional strategy works give us the definition you’d be happy to endorse and why?
TG: This problem is parallel to the familiar problem of constructing a unified definition of art given its historical discontinuities. The history of that problem informed my recent attempt to provide a definition, in the book Jazz and the Philosophy of Art (Routledge, 2018), co-authored with Lee Brown and David Goldblatt. Let me say a bit about that book and how it came about. Lee had been working for several years to assemble a set of his essays on jazz into a monograph that would stand as his definitive word on the topic, and he and I talked and corresponded about it while he worked on it. When he became ill and then passed away before he could complete the book, David and I were invited to look at the manuscript and see if we could bring it fruition. We looked over what he’d been doing, which included alternative arrangements of chapters, and we took account of his plan to alter his past work in light of his more recent thoughts and in response to more recent developments. We could see that he’d over-hauled and polished some chapters, but had only fragments toward some others. For the chapter on defining jazz, we started from his own writings and revisions and then we proposed a definition that, we felt, reflected our conversations with Lee on this topic over the years.
Many philosophers now agree that the key to a definition of art or any of the specific arts is to regard cultural achievements as historical developments of specific cultures and to proceed accordingly. In the wake of Paul Oskar Kristeller’s 1951 article on the formation of the “modern” system of the arts, a number of philosophers—most notably Peter Kivy, Denis Dutton, Lydia Goehr, and Stephen Davies—have explored the idea that Western music’s status as fine art—think here of Beethoven and Wagner—is an offshoot of a long history of music as it developed in one small part of the planet. Once you see it that way, it opens the door to the possibility that most music is more like jazz than the ninth symphony or the Ring cycle.
So a good definition of jazz, or of country music, or heavy metal, or any other genre, is going to be complex: it should take account of what all music has in common, really thinking non-prejudicially about all music, while also treating that genre as having both continuities with and divergences from earlier music. We can debate the details, including details about which musical elements are standard and non-standard for the genre we’re defining, but a definition of any art or music genre should pursue that strategy.
3:16: You see jazz very much in relation to historical social developments, and in particular in relation to issues of race and gender, and America. Can you say something about these issues and what you think are the most salient aspects of this dimension of understanding jazz.
TG: Yes, once you start to see the arts and their boundaries as historical developments, it invites you to think more about their social dimension. With jazz, it’s not enough to say that it’s based on improvisation. You have to acknowledge that it arose as, and remains closely identified with, African-American music. This is something that Lee Brown was also very concerned with, and which he and I often discussed. I should also give a shout out to Kathleen Higgins here: I came to think much more about this both from her books and thanks to a critique of my early work at a session of the American Society for Aesthetics. And Paul C. Taylor’s published exchange with Joel Rudinow on race and blues music moved me forward, too.
Philosophically, once you’ve made the move toward a historically-aware, contextualist understanding of both aesthetic judgment and artistic value, it’s a short step to the idea that any and all aspects of the social context of production and reception might be relevant to the music’s characteristics and value. (I stress “might be” here: any and all might be, but in any given case only some will be.) Given my broader interest in how popular music differs from the Western art music, it was only natural to want to think about how American popular music might differ from Bach, Beethoven, and Schoenberg because its form and associated practices of use originated in the music of the African diaspora and as the music of Black Americans.
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