Interpret jazz

Jean Jamin’s book and Patrick Williams is part of the fruitful and already old tradition of trials on jazz in France. From André Shaeffner’s jazz In 1926, French authors – journalists, writers and academics – were among the most prolific to deal with this “ artistic and social phenomenon (P. 9), Jazzistic literature even becoming practically a full literary and intellectual current with André Hodeir, Lucien Malson or Alain Gerber. The authors rightly notice that, if the academic works hold a good place in this rather lush landscape, the different scientific disciplines having taken jazz for object for a century have been faced with the difficulty of characterizing and identifying this object According to the criteria usually mobilized by musicology, history or sociology. Marked by the permanent instability of its musical forms, its cultural, ethnic or geographic anchoring, jazz is a fleeting object. Jean Jamin and Patrick Williams have nevertheless attached themselves for years to note the “ epistemological challenge “(P. 59) that jazz offers anthropology, in particular thanks to the seminar” Jazz and anthropology “That they animated at theEhess From 2001 to 2009 and which obviously provided the authors with part of the material of this fascinating work.

Jazz anthropology is the compilation of eight articles published between 2001 and 2008 mainly in Man (for six of them), anthropology review with global influence led by Jean Jamin. However, the texts have been redesigned, updated and, if you can say, harmonized to form a coherent whole even if their diversity does not allow the work to be considered as a unique research from which we could easily isolate the conclusions. After an introductory article written in both hands, the authors operate on three parts an enlargement of the spectrum of the anthropological investigation: of the first part which deals with the individual “ jazz musician And his music, articulating a text by Williams and another from Jamin, we then go to the examination of what makes community, the repertoire, the collectives, the tradition with three texts from Williams, to finish with two texts as Jamin concerning jazz out of its American bases, its reception in France and its influence on French artists from the 1920s (Darius Milhaud in particular).

We will not stop on the regret menus that can arouse reading the work, linked to the somewhat surprising presence of some approximations (Giant Steps With its sixteen measures and its harmonic grid is definitely not a blues contrary to what is asserted in a whole part of the third chapter, for example) as well as the relative discretion of references to the plethoric corpus of American scientific literature, To take an interest in the ambitious intellectual project nourished by the authors.

The different texts composing the work proceed from a common characteristic which founds, so to speak, the anthropology of Jamin and Williams and which could be identified as the science of the viewer, or the “ lover According to Antoine Hennion’s expression. Thus, Patrick Williams immediately enrolled in the dialogue as equals with “ the amateur “, The admirer of David Murray:” When I talk about my admiration for David Murray, he never misses an amateur to oppose the argument of the overabundance of his production (P. 203). The authors are not only aware of this state of affairs, but they explicitly claim it in the last lines of the conclusion (p. 336). What are the implications of this regime of knowledge and apprehension of the object, which combines without solution of continuity the points of view of the amateur, the collector (with his classic discographic reviews), the historiographer, of the researcher ?

Happy marriage of anthropology andafición

Of course, it is the apprehension of the object itself, “ jazz “, Which is problematic. The authors thus engage in a work of characterization, of definition in the proper sense of the term, particularly driven in the first text of introduction to the work, but which we will find more or less in all chapters, and which is probably the heart of their business. For all actors and observers, together to which they therefore belong to different titles, Jamin and Williams underline the difficulty of identifying and building the object “ jazz “:” Isn’t there in jazz, in his musicians, amateurs and criticisms, something-perhaps specific to what is theafición – which resists any study, therefore to any objectification ? (P. 26). The authors will therefore seek to bring out what one might call an irreducible form of anthropological truth, which leads them to regularly rub shoulders with the essentialist temptation, but the requirement of reflexivity to which they are stretched to never give in to it. The balance is however precarious: sometimes the amateur appears behind the researcher, for example to keep the borders of jazz by excluding the “ improvised music European (p. 149), in an approach which one wonders how it differs from that of the spectators-sectors who excommunicated the Be-Bop in the 1940s, then the Free Jazz twenty years later. It is probably in the nuance that the reflexive point of view and the acute consciousness of the inevitable (and necessary) commitment of a subjectivity in the matter that the authors manage to hold their bet. If they quickly establish a few lines of force to characterize their object (musical expressionism, interculturalism, urban environment, aesthetic of the gap), Jamin and Williams show how much this jazz that they are trying to identify, capture, is first and clear More than any other music a phenomenon of the moment, made up of all the devices in which it is embedded HIC and NUNC.

This determination by instantaneousness, led the authors to a set of critical reflections on the uses and misuses of the explanatory arsenal usually mobilized to approach the object (intrinsic incapacity of the support recorded to return the musical fact, teleological bias of the biography , etc.), some of which reach a rare finesse between the rigor of the academic analyst and freedom of tone of theAFICIONADO. It is precisely because the authors engage their own amateur subjectivity, that they manage to grasp, or to offer a way of grasping the musical material. For example, the causal relationship between biography and work being a little too short to explain the way of singing by Billie Holiday (second chapter), anthropological discourse can leave its place to what is called, as in jazz, theinterpretation : the authors thus manage, in amateurs-researchers, to refute the naturalization of a reputable Billie “ Poor little thing to ask for help from words and notes “(P. 140) to bring a virtuoso musician to light, making” sound words like notes (P. 143), that is to say until abstraction.

Amateurs, researchers, musicians: interpret jazz

Reading this Jazz anthropology still leads to the question of the status of the object “ jazz “, This time in its embodied form: the” jazz musician “, Even the” jazzman “, Which is largely questioned at least in the first half of the work, and which remains excluded from the coherent continuum which goes from the amateur to the researcher. The authors are always in a position of exteriority vis-à-vis the first actors, the musicians, then finding the distance which founds the French tradition of anthropology inherited from Claude Lévi-Strauss. This posture is quite different, for example, from the approach of “ Dance musicians »Initiated by Howard Becker in the context of interactionist sociology and which proceeds by field survey, if possible by participating observation with musicians. Building against all essentialism, this perspective involves taking the discourse of the actors seriously. In light of the empirical material collected, it is then clear that in the Chicago of the 1940s, as in France of the 2000s, musicians for whom “ jazz »Constitutes a specific identity resource, or even a coherent and regularly mobilized cognitive and discursive category are quite rare. In other words, by observing and questioning the musicians themselves, we can ask ourselves the question of the effectiveness of the category “ jazz musician Apart from its totemic dimension for the public. However, we will be careful not to play in a caricatural way on these oppositions (sociology of field against anthropology of the symbolism, vision of the musician against vision of the spectator) producing in little cost of the effects of legitimacy of discourse. In fact, musicians, especially the most ordinary of them, are spectators themselves. These musicians have often come to practice quite late (compared to those who populate the symphonic orchestras), after having built themselves as spectators, great amateurs themselves readers of the “ jazz press “, And spectators of critical discourse, even university analysis. We would therefore be good in the presence of a common symbolic space bringing together public, criticism and actors. Thus, in a way, the discourse of the authors holds a symmetrical position to that of the musician, in the sense that it is also here “ interpret jazz ».

Roland Barthes considered that all semiology is a semioclasty: by revealing the thing, we break social magic. Jamin and Williams, largely dismantling the socio-aesthetic systems and the symbolic mechanisms which give life to the object “ jazz “, However, managed not to destroy this one. They managed to expose the tenuous sons who, despite everything, weave this musical phenomenon. Between on the one hand, patient, meticulous and rigorous constructivism, removing in front of any of the great challenges posed by jazz to anthropological analysis, and on the other hand defense and illustration (against Boulez and Adorno among others) of an object of which The authors are great amateurs, Jean Jamin and Patrick Williams composed a work which, let’s bet, will quickly find his place among the few big books of jazz in France but also constitutes, and perhaps above all, a beautiful business of cultural anthropology.