Out of the blue: Black creative musicians and the challenge of jazz, 1940-1995.

This dissertation is an intellectual history of African-American jazz musicians. Although the jazz community has devoted the majority of its intellectual energy toward the creation and performance of the music itself, musicians have publicly engaged ideas about music and other subjects. This history of musical and extramusical ideas has parallelled musicians' changing relationships with various audiences, communities, and culture producing institutions. Therefore, a fundamental concern of this study is to examine musicians' social positions as artists and thinkers. By charting major trends in this intellectual history, this dissertation seeks to broaden our understanding of jazz history and the role of jazz musicians as intellectuals in American life and culture. Recent studies of the intellectual history of jazz have focused on the thoughts of white critics and other commentators. While important to understanding the contours of the discourse about jazz and the power relationships that they reflect, such work obviates the story of how black musicians have voiced their own ideas about music, participated in the creation of the jazz mythology, and generally been immersed in the institutions that produce modern thought and culture. By exploring musicians' ideas, this dissertation also seeks to augment scholarship in African-American and American cultural studies that has theorized jazz musicians as intellectuals but has not systematically explored their ideas and concerns. An interdisciplinary analysis informs the dissertation. The study draws from recent work in jazz history, African American history, cultural studies, and musicology in order to create a synthetic understanding of how the relationship between modernity and African American intellectual and cultural life has been manifested in the jazz community. It pays particular attention to the intersections of race, gender, and class positionalities and how power relationships impact the production of music and ideas about it. Primary sources include recordings, interviews, liner notes, autobiographical materials, and the limited but significant body of writings by jazz musicians.PhDAmerican historyAmerican studiesBlack historyCommunication and the ArtsMusicSocial SciencesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/130565/2/9732163.pd