What a pleasure to read a book by a writer whose life is so thoroughly steeped in his subject. Krin Gabbard's Jammin' at the Margins: Jazz and the American Cinema is just such a book, a must-read for anyone interested in jazz, in music in the movies or in their intersection. Like jazz itself, Gabbard's book flares out from its central focus on jazz and the American cinema with interesting and unpredictable 'riffs' on a variety of ancillary subjects. Do not expect a conventional structure. What Jammin' at the Margins delivers is a bit more complicated and a lot more illuminating.
Armed with the discourses of contemporary cultural studies and psychoanalysis, Gabbard argues that jazz is a cultural product, constructed within a particular nexus of ideological assumptions about race, gender and sexuality. This leads Gabbard to his stunning opening assertion: 'Most jazz films aren't really about jazz. But then, most jazz isn't really about jazz, at least not in terms of how it is actually consumed' (p. 1). What jazz is and has become in contemporary culture becomes the subject of Gabbard's text, with the construction of jazz in American films the primary focus.
Although not a history of jazz in the movies, the book begins by situating its subject both historically and rhetorically: first by attacking the cultural notion, long held in jazz histories, that jazz is a 'pure' and autonomous musical form and, second, by questioning the very definition and boundaries of what we typically call jazz. Gabbard has a way of forcing the reader to confront his or her own, largely unconscious, assumptions about jazz in the process and it is at moments such as these that Gabbard really shines: devoting an entire chapter, for instance, to a film most aficionados would hardly consider jazz at all, Al Jolson's 1927 The Jazz Singer or analyzing the boundaries of jazz with detailed analysis of (gasp!) Kay Kayser and his band. That the insights Gabbard draws from these analyses seem completely obvious by the time he is through with them is a mark of the intelligence and conviction that Gabbard brings to this work.
Gabbard then tackles the Hollywood subgenre central to the representation of jazz on film: the biopic. Here Gabbard returns to the analysis of The Jazz Singer as 'the basic narrative for the lives of jazz and popular musicians in the movies' (p. 66) and asks how this might apply to black musicians. Not surprisingly, the answer is that the narrative for black musicians is very different indeed. Their 'story' revolves around failure, particularly the failure to bring their musical genius to fruition and an accompanying descent into madness, addiction, destruction and even death. Gabbard traces this narrative pattern through a number of (sometimes surprising) sources including Bird and Round Midnight. Ultimately, Gabbard argues, '[f]or African American jazz musicians the only success is the kind that leads to self-annihilation' (p. 100).
'Signifyin(g) the Phallus: Representations of the Jazz Trumpet', is for me, the most fascinating chapter in an already fascinating book. Extending the analysis of sexuality's connection to jazz made earlier in the introduction, Gabbard here expounds specifically on black masculinity, a construction fraught with contradictions in a culture defined by whiteness. For Gabbard, the jazz trumpet 'provided its practitioners with wide latitude for expressing masculinity while avoiding the less mediated assertions of phallic power that were regularly punished by white culture' (p. 140). 'Trickster' figures such as Louis Armstrong, become much more complicated cultural icons when viewed from this perspective.
Other chapters traverse the careers of Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Nat King Cole and Hoagy Carmichael. There is also an interesting chapter on the relationship between art and jazz. Gabbard's conclusion looks in depth at two contemporary films, Martin Scorsese's New York, New York and Robert Altman's Short Cuts, to chart changing ideologies about jazz since the 1970s.
Krin Gabbard's Jammin' at the Margins is a wonderful book: well-researched, cogently argued and highly readable. That it accomplishes its goals in an area previously neglected in film (and music) scholarship clearly establishes it as the standard in the field.
Kathryn Kalinak写的书评
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