African American musical avant-gardism

This dissertation will demonstrate, using the work of a number of contemporary African American artists, that the nuanced and often conflicting characteristics of avant-gardism can be used in black music criticism, especially in the field of jazz, hailed as the music of modernity.; This dissertation is divided into seven parts. The first part identifies the precursors out of which the avant-garde grew. This "historical" avant-garde period, 1945--1957, is seen as both contemporaneous with and departing from the bebop era. The chapter's by-line "this music is climate controlled," is a play on the historical uses of "hot" and "cool," terms that control the ethnic, racial, and social description of this music. The second part attempts to conceptualize a theory of African American musical avant-gardism using Renato Poggioli's classic theory in which he distinguishes four types of ideological and psychological motivation; activism, nihilism, antagonism, and agonism. Part three discusses the events and movements, especially the October Revolution in Jazz and the formation of the Jazz Composers Guild, that brought the catalysis of Black musical avant-gardism to fruition. The fourth part of the dissertation will focus on the art and experience of seven African American artists, George Russell, Yusef Lateef, Leo Smith, Bill Dixon, Marion Brown, Glenn Spearman, and William Parker through their recordings and privately published writings. Bill Dixon's work, particularly his collaboration with dancer Judith Dunn, will be considered separately in the fifth section as part of the philosophy and pedagogy of the interart inquiry into Black expressive arts.; The aesthetics that characterize these and many other writers and artists and the naming of their music and their processes are not simply semantics or epistemological musings but cultural assessments by which one can know and represent an aesthetic past and, more specifically, question how disjunctures caused by musical change inform the historical moment in African American expressive forms. These artists, events and organizations are part of a larger discourse concerning jazz criticism considered in the sixth part of this dissertation. An initial circumscription, by various people and organizations that govern the jazz art world, is shown in which black artistic enterprise, experimentation and innovation were essentialized and explained away by the term avant-garde. This attempt to contain or narrowly limit the artistic range and activity of these artists has contributed over time to the excription of the African American vanguard from the construction of a jazz tradition.; The final section of this work will consider how scores of African American artists have moved between two or more national spaces in order to continue to create and work since at least the mid-sixties. Between 1969 and 1981 over seventy-five record labels were established in Europe to document the new music.{09}This creative process of transnational and transcultural dialogue between African American and European artists and other culture producers became a separate genre created in Europe under the banner of "creative improvisational music." This dissertation will relate how American artists transmitted this new music and how it was received by European musicians using mainly Dutch musicians and producers in the Netherlands in a model of musical transculturation. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)...