We're on the same page, more or less, till your last remark. The "less" is that there are a lot more than two souls to blackness. When Armstrong was learning from the Jews he grew up with, Jews weren't white. Neither are or were the Cajuns and Creoles he grew upo with black (by self-identification), nor, mainly are many Hispanics as such, and then are there Indians, and all these go into blackness. And whiteness too. Maybe you are right that white/black are the main polarities in the US, if that is what you mean.
The point where we part is the the idea that what's going on with Woody Herman or Joe Lovano is that they are white individuals who become fluent in a black idiom, as if they were talking ebonics when they played jazz. That's insulting to them and confused about jazz. And is Joe Lovano becoming fluent in Jewish idiom if he plays I Got Rhythm? Haven't Bix and Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw (who hired Billie Holiday when it was neither popular nor profitable to do so) done as much as anyone to make this music what it is? This is music. It has a certain history, one which roots in the US racial divide, and a range cultural meanings. The meaning depends on who's playing it, of course, but much as the compliment may be well intended, you expose the emptiness of the thesis that jazz is black music (rather than music with substantially black origins and contributions) when you say, oh, Bix is really black when he plays. Is Anita O'Day black when she sings? Well, anyway, I doubt if there's much profit in this discussion.
--- Charles Brown <charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> wrote:
>
> andie nachgeborenen
>
>
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Yes, that's fair. But maybe put it this way. When
> black people play blues, jazz, etc., it's a way to
> express that black is beautiful. And the music is of
> course, no one with any knowledge of the subject
> would
> deny this, predominantly black in origin and in much
> of its development.
>
> But of course it's black the way blackness is in
> America, which is eclectic,
>
> ^^^^
> CB: Yes, think of Black American culture in the way
> Dubois does in _The
> Souls of Black Folk_ with double-consciouness. How
> many souls do Black
> Folk have ? Two. One Black and one white. Black
> culture , and thus
> music , is both Black and white. The difference
> between Black Americans
> and white Americans is not that Blacks are Black and
> whites are white.
> It is that Blacks are Black and white ,and whites
> are only white. Black
> people must learn white ways , the predominant
> culture, to get along.
> Whites can get along only learning white culture.
> But Black people
> learn Black culture too, in a sort of national
> liberationist and
> self-pride mode ( I'm Black and I'm proud; say it
> loud) Black people are
> bi-cultural in the US. Bilingual too. Black English
> and white English
>
>
> ^^^^^^^^
>
>
> just as "black" people are
> a social group so identified by self and others
> rather
> than a biologically distinct population (a
> biological
> "race" if there is such a thing), whose social and
> biological makeup includes lots of elements adopted
> and transformed from the general background that
> influences them as they influence it, so jazz
> (blues,
> etc.) is a music, largely black in origin and
> development, that has lots of other _essential_
> elements feeding into it from other parts or aspects
> of our culture (European classical music, American
> folk and country, Broadway show tunes, pop music
> generally).
>
> ^^^^^
> CB: Sure . But think of the structuralist
> linguistic and
> anthropological definition of opposites or binary
> opposition. Opposites
> are two things which are identical in all respects
> except one. Black
> culture and white culture are opposites. They are
> all the same except
> for "one" or a relatively small difference, but a
> small difference is a
> critical difference. It's like calculus or marginal
> utility: the small
> difference that is a big difference.
>
> ^^^^
>
> And of course when white and other musicians play
> jazz
> and blues, while it can be a tribute and support to
> the idea that black is beautiful, it's not a
> self-expression of that idea or feeling. But it's no
> less really and authentically jazz (blues) for all
> that: Duke Ellington or Woody Herman, Louis
> Armstrong
> or Muggsy Spanier, Ella Fitzgerald or Anita O'Day,
> James Carter or Joe Lovano -- you can argue the
> relative merits of these artists, but what you can't
> do is argue that the white artists aren't doing
> great
> authentic jazz.
>
> ^^^^^^
>
> CB: I think Black people are accepting that some
> white individuals can
> become fluent in aspects of Black culture, become
> Black , become
> bi-cultural to some extent, especially within one
> art form. Bix B
> essentially became Black in terms of music.
>
>
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