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Music Classroom Building, Room 102 - FreeVarun Chandrasekhar, PhD student in Music Theory at Washington University in St. Louis
Title
"Jazz and Coolness: An Existential Analysis"
Abstract
In this paper, I seek to provide an existential analysis of coolness to understand how discourses of coolness limited the emotional expression of the mid-century jazz musician. Jazz musicians are cool. However, like Sartre’s (1993) ashamed peeping Tom, they are only cool in the presence of the Other. As noted by scholars of cool (Dinerstein 2017, Pountain and Roberts 2001, Ross 1989), urban Blacks viewed cool as a measured and calculated response to the horrors of American racism, while white hipsters (most famously Norman Mailer 1957) viewed coolness as a primitive parody of Black urban life. While Black cool was an aesthetic companion to the Civil Rights movement, white cool reinscribed the racist stereotypes associated with Black cultures. Given the white consumption of Black jazz, this statement means that jazz’s coolness is as much a reflection of Black self-identification as it is a product of the white gaze (Yancy 2008), which functions as an a priori limitation on the freedom of the jazz musician. Thus, jazz cool is a contested discourse, raising questions about who is claiming who is cool. The question then becomes, what does coolness do for white fans who attempt to label Black jazz musicians cool?
I read cool through Sara Ahmed’s (2004) theories of emotion. To Ahmed, emotions structure the subject-Other binary central to Sartrean existentialism. To Ahmed, emotions become sticky; if I feel a certain emotion, all of the people I surround myself with eventually feel the same way. They become markers of insider/outsider status. Within Sartre’s terminology, we can say that emotions structure both the non-ontological “We-Subject” and the ontological “Us-Object.” I argue that white hipster fans needed jazz musicians to perform as “cool” subjects so that the cool emotions of jazz musicians would stick to themselves. By treating Black jazz musicians as a primitivized us-object, these white hipster fans hoped to form “We-subjects” with the jazz musician.
I then provide a materialist analysis of the fetishization of coolness. As Thomas Frank (1997) argues, the notion that “coolness” and “consumerist” were antithetical is ahistorical. Instead, Frank notes how marketing companies in the post-war era strived to be cool in order to sell products. In this sense, Mailer’s hipster ideology was not nearly as revolutionary as his rhetoric may imply (Pountain and Roberts, 76). Instead, they are just examples of what bell hooks terms “eating the Other” (1992). hooks uses this term to describe how white audience members want to engage with Black culture but only on the condition that Black artists willingly perform while accepting the hegemonic white gaze.
By noting the racist expectations that come about from the racialized gaze of coolness, I describe how their gaze becomes an a priori limitation on the jazz musician’s freedom. Like Sartre’s famous waiter, jazz musicians must perform cool to be hired. Non-cool jazz musicians don’t work. I then apply these theories to Charles Mingus, building upon Mingus’s frustration with how his complex emotional works were reduced down by his fetishistic audience (Rustin Paschal 2017).
BiographyVarun’s research, building on his history as a guitarist, focuses on the existential condition of the jazz musician. Heeding Sartre’s mantra that “existence precedes essence,” Varun wonders how starting with the complex, racially marked, urban reality of the jazz musician can guide our understanding of the music. In simpler terms, how does the fact that the jazz musician is thrown into the world influence our musical intuitions, and are these properties then theoretically quantifiable? In his dissertation “Being and Jazz: An Existential Analysis of Charles Mingus,” Varun considers these questions in relationship to the life and music of jazz bassist Charles Mingus. Varun’s research engages with a wide range of literature, including but not limited to: musicology/music theory, Black studies, existential and feminist philosophy, performance studies, and post-colonial theory.
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Music Classroom Building, 2104 Engineering Classroom Bldg, College Park, MD 20742-3002, United States,College Park, Maryland
