Rethinking the Apotheosis of Jazz - Book Report/Review Example

Jazz was a great musical form, full of great musical geniuses and creativity, but largely it has already happened. Under this paradigm, contemporary consumers of Jazz should act as archaeologists rather than as music lovers. We are urged to purchase the greatest hits collection of long-ago artists or pay tribute to them by attending lectures on the stylistic particularities of past-greats like Parker, Davis, or Lester Young. What we are not encouraged to do, much to the chagrin of Lipsitz, is we are not encouraged to actively support new jazz ventures or support the building of jazz communities in local neighborhoods.

According to Lipsitz, this is because most jazz narratives fail to take into account the communal and local aspects of the form, rather those narratives preference the nationalistic and singular aspects of the music. However, as Lipsitz points out so many of those greats were appreciative and recognized the local and communal aspects of the art. He rallies the biographies of Horace Tapscott, Sun Ra, and others to explicate this point. This sort of revisionist project has been undertaken in a number of fields of academic endeavor.

It is particularly reminiscent of the work of Howard Zinn, in his People's History of the United States. Historians and jazz lovers alike conflate the history of jazz or the history of the country with the history of great men. Lipsitz also mentions the dismissive tone that many jazz histories treat the great women of Jazz as somehow tangential or otherwise separate from the trajectory of Jazz as an art form. So it is the case in many histories that minimize the role that women and ordinary citizens had to play in the making of anything great, whether it be the United States or Jazz music.

Lipsitz attributes this partly to the emphasis on the created product in Jazz.