Table Of ContentPeoPle Get Ready
Improvisation, Community, and Social Practice
A new series edited by Daniel Fischlin
Books in this new series advocate musical improvisation as a crucial model
for political, cultural, and ethical dialogue and action—for imagining and
creating alternative ways of knowing and being in the world. The books are
collaborations among performers, scholars, and activists from a wide range
of disciplines. They study the creative risk-taking imbued with the sense
of movement and momentum that makes improvisation an exciting,
unpredictable, ubiquitous, and necessary endeavor.
PeoPle
Get Ready
the future of jazz is now!
ajay Heble and Rob Wallace,
editoRs
Duke University Press Durham and London
2013
© 2013 Duke University Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
on acid- free paper ♾
Designed by C. H. Westmoreland
Typeset in Charis with Block display by
Tseng Information Systems, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging- in-
Publication Data
People get ready : the future of jazz is
now! / Ajay Heble and Rob Wallace, eds.
pages cm—(Improvisation, community,
and social practice)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-8223-5408-6 (cloth : alk. paper)
isbn 978-0-8223-5425-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Jazz—History and criticism. 2. Improvisation
(Music) i. Heble, Ajay. ii. Wallace, Rob, 1976.
iii. Series: Improvisation, community, and
social practice.
ml3506.p46 2013
781.65′5—dc23
2013003139
In memoriam
Dr. Madhav Heble
(1925–2012)
and
Bernice Wallace
(1933–2012)
contents
Acknowledgments ix
introduction “People Get Ready”: The Future of Jazz Is Now!
by Ajay Heble and Rob Wallace 1
PaRt i.
Beyond Categories: Histories and Mysteries
chApter 1. “Now Is the Time”: Voicing against the Grain of Orality
by Aldon Lynn Nielsen 31
chApter 2. The Antiquity of the Avant- Garde:
A Meditation on a Comment by Duke Ellington
by John Szwed 44
chApter 3. Listening Trust: The Everyday Politics of
George Lewis’s “Dream Team”
by Julie Dawn Smith and Ellen Waterman 59
chApter 4. Jeanne Lee’s Voice
by Eric Porter 88
chApter 5. Kick Out the Jazz!
by Rob Wallace 111
PaRt ii.
Crisis in New Music? Vanishing Venues and the Future
of Experimentalism
chApter 6. Days of Bread and Roses
by Marc Ribot 141
chApter 7. Subsidy, Advocacy, Theory: Experimental Music in
the Academy, in New York City, and Beyond
by Tamar Barzel 153
chApter 8. Subsidizing the Experimental Muse:
Rereading Ribot
by John Brackett 166
chApter 9. One Musician Writes about Creative-
Music Venues in Toronto
by Scott Thomson 175
chApter 10. Somewhere There: Contemporary
Music, Performance Spaces, and Cultural Policy
by Alan Stanbridge 184
PaRt iii.
Sound Check
The Jazz Photography of Thomas King
PaRt iv.
Get Ready: Jazz Futures
chApter 11. Black Jazz in the Digital Age
by Greg Tate 217
chApter 12. Improvising Digital Culture
by dj Spooky and Vijay Iyer 225
chApter 13. Ancient to the Future:
Celebrating Forty Years of the AAcm
by Douglas Ewart, Nicole Mitchell, Roscoe Mitchell,
Famoudou Don Moye, Matana Roberts, Jaribu Shahid,
Wadada Leo Smith, and Corey Wilkes 244
chApter 14. People, Don’t Get Ready:
Improvisation, Democracy, and Hope
by Tracy McMullen 265
works cited 281
contributors 295
index 301
acknoWledGments
The inspiration for this book comes in large measure from the Guelph Jazz
Festival Colloquium, an annual international conference that for seven-
teen years running has continued to bring together scholars and creative
practitioners for engaging dialogue and critical exchange. It’s a place
where vital, new, and timely research issues get put on the table, and
where we’ve been privileged to work actively in a rich, collaborative envi-
ronment fueled by motivating interactions between leading practitioners
and scholars in the field. Many of the pieces included in this book were first
presented at the colloquium.
We’d also like to acknowledge the extraordinary support of the Impro-
visation, Community, and Social Practice (icAsp) research project, cen-
tered at the University of Guelph. This large-s cale multi- institutional col-
laborative project focuses on the social implications of improvised music
and brings together a dynamic international research team of thirty-fi ve
researchers from twenty different institutions. Special thanks to icAsp’s
project manager Kim Thorne, and to our research team members, espe-
cially our dear friends and colleagues Frédérique Arroyas, Daniel Fisch-
lin, Ric Knowles, Eric Lewis, and Ellen Waterman. Huge thanks also to
the many research assistants who’ve worked with us, either directly on
this book or on related projects, including the colloquium and icAsp’s
peer- reviewed journal, Critical Studies in Improvisation / Études critiques
en improvisation: Maureen Cannon, Stephanie Cheung, Karl Coulthard,
Paul Danyluk, Greg Fenton, Elizabeth Groeneveld, Cory Lavender, Natalie
Onuška, Michelle Peek, Rachel Shoup, Hanna Smith, Melissa Walker, Ben
Walsh, and Claire Whitehead.
Christie Menzo deserves special mention here. As a mainstay of the
project, Christie worked as our research assistant for several semesters,
and she gave the book extraordinary care through the various stages of its
