Guest Speaker
Scott Currie (profile)
Musicology/Ethnomusicology Lecturer
University of Minnesota
Location: Humanities 1641
Reports of the jazz avant-garde’s death have been greatly exaggerated, and calls for its interment rather premature, as over a decade of ethnographic fieldwork with a contemporary community of improvising musicians on New York City’s Lower East Side has led me to conclude. Indeed, my research indicates, rear-guard denunciations of what jazz neo-conservatives term the “so-called avant-garde,” along with high-handed dismissals from institutionally validated “serious-music” vanguardists, reveal in their attempts at effacement and exclusion a profound anxiety engendered by the survival (against all odds) of a movement that has challenged fundamental premises of the racially marked jazz and concert-music worlds. In exploring the discourses surrounding, if not always successfully containing, this black avant-garde, I thus engage what Fred Moten has identified as the defining paradox of such movements: the manner in which they appear to exist “oxymoronically—as if black, on the one hand, and avant-garde, on the other hand, each depends for its coherence upon the exclusion of the other.” Through an analysis of the aporias from which this conundrum arises, I ultimately find that the unique vantage point jazz provides upon the avant-garde not only makes possible a critical reappraisal of established theories of the phenomenon—such as those of Poggioli, Bürger, and Enzensberger—but also helps cast light upon the racial lacunae of Euro-American modernism and postmodernism.
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