Differing Roots, Unpopular Histories: Radicalism as Meeting of Minds in Jazz-Classical Aesthetics

20th-century models of jazz historiography have principally been beholden to the evolutionary, work-orientated narratives that had long been applied to classical music. According to such models, jazz reached its apogee of commercial success in the swing era, a time when jazz and popular music were considered synonymous, but curiously a time when the music’s quantity of fixed, notated content—and therefore the degree of its adherence to a classical work aesthetic—was also at its height. This paradox is symptomatic of hitherto largely submerged historical patterns of shifting alliances and oppositions between the two cultural forms, whose creative merging is only cursorily addressed, for example, in Alyn Shipton’s recent revisionist jazz history (New York, 2007). Seen through the lens of a non-hierarchical, rhizomatic approach to critical-historical representation, of the sort developed by Gilles Deleuze, this relationship can be seen to comprise a dense network of intersecting qualities of style, structure, notational content, context, function, performance practice, reception and so on. In exploring these possibilities, this paper seeks to rehabilitate what is currently perceived to be the least fruitful avenue of approach to understanding jazz – that associated with a ‘classical’-music aesthetic