Civic Jazz

Book excerpt: Greg Clark welcomes his readers by asking them to accompany him on a trip to a New Orleans club, where the warmth of the music and the warmth of the audience instill a special feeling of communion, of getting along. Clark s book treats the idea that jazz demands from those who make it as well as those who listen a form of life that substantiates the seemingly impossible American value that is "e pluribus unum." The process of getting along (in communication, in community) is something the great student of culture and rhetoric, Kenneth Burke, spent his life trying to describe. Clark has found that jazz, as an activity and a cultural form, goes a long way toward illustrating that process. Jazz is often described as democratic. Burke s rhetorical and aesthetic ideas explain how this is so. Working with others to address immediate problems they share can align for a time individuals who are otherwise very different. That is what jazz does: it enables people who are different and even in conflict with each other to combine in cooperation toward an end that matters to all of them just now. And this, too, is what civic life in democratic cultures demands. In chapters that deal with such issues as what jazz does and how jazz works, Clark uses examples from jazz history (from Louis Armstrong and Earl Hines to Miles Davis and Bill Evans), but also from contemporary jazz, both recorded and live, e.g., pianist Jonathan Batiste and his Social Music, drummer Terri Lyne Carrington and her collaborative Mosaic Project, or the newly emergent vocalist, Cecile Mclorin Salvant, all of this in the service of making improvisation and ensemble work yield the experience of transcendence that results from intense engagement with jazz as aesthetic form (for players and listeners alike). The resulting book is a study of jazz in the context of American aspirations toward democratic interaction "and" a study of Kenneth Burke s democratic rhetorical theory and practice as essentially aesthetic in function and effect. Marcus Roberts, the much-lionized neoclassical pianist, crafts a Foreword that points to practical ways these ideas can work to improve and inspire both musicians and citizens."