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Abstract
This essay examines the shifts and recalibrations in the Latin Americanist musical production at stake in the relation between Jazz at Lincoln Center and the Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra, institutions sharing an abiding commitment to the past but differing in how they conceive and enact time, space, and place. I identify a set of figures consistently and constantly invoked by contemporary actors to create symbolic and material economies grounded less in a tradition than in the differing relations that the living held with their specters, past, present, and future.
Notes
1. This appeared in a 2012 video now offline from the Afro Latin Jazz Alliance (ALJA), since 2007 the umbrella organization for O’Farrill’s Orchestra.
2. Only Walsh and McIntyre appeared in the ALJO’s original line-up.
3. From the ALJA mission statement: ‘The Afro Latin Jazz Alliance (ALJA) is dedicated to preserving the music and heritage of big band Latin jazz’ (CitationALJA b).
4. Despite its literal emphasis on beginnings, Carter’s wonderful solipsism does not regard them as foundational events in the sense of origins. Rather, it implies a certain melancholy demand that, when sound is at stake, beginnings be reenacted constantly, that is, in the time to come. This pairs well with Derrida’s notion of the archive as the anxious will to hold and withhold time, ‘a question of the future, the question of the future itself, the question of a response, of a promise and of a responsibility or tomorrow. The archive: if we want to know what that will have meant, we will only know in times to come’, which is to say never (Derrida Citation1996, 36).
5. Composition is not meant here in a musical sense but rather in its broader ontological connotations of putting together or placing together, or of world-making.
6. Three important qualifications are in order. First, I use variously distributed source materials. They include public statements and unpublished personal interviews I conducted with musicians from the O’Farrill organization; unpublished interviews I conducted with people associated with ALJO management during its time at JALC; and Marsalis’s public statements on record. Second, the deployment of these sources, particularly interviews and public statements, forms part of a broader analysis of the histories and politics at stake in the economies of Afro-Latin jazz, including but irreducible to the idea that this is how O’Farrill and/or Marsalis ‘see things’. Third, there is no attempt to present in full the trajectory of O’Farrill’s organization up to the present day or to investigate the still contested administrative and managerial reasons why his orchestra parted ways with JALC.
7. See Resolution 57, U.S. House of Representatives, passed September 23, 1987, approved by the U.S. Senate on December 3, 1987, declaring jazz ‘a national treasure’. In 1991, Lincoln Center began a department dedicated to jazz, with seed money from the Lila Wallace–Reader’s Digest Fund ($3.4 million) to support a national performing network for jazz. By 1996, Jazz at Lincoln Center became a full-fledged institution dedicated to the archiving, dissemination, education, and performance of jazz. In 2004, doors opened at its multi-hall center at the Time Warner Center at Columbus Circle, in New York City (cost: $131 million). As of 2014, its annual budget was $43 million.
8. O’Farrill released two other recordings with his Afro-Cuban Orchestra: Heart of a Legend (1999), featuring distinguished guests such as Paquito D’Rivera, Arturo Sandoval, Israel ‘Cachao’ Lopez, and Gato Barbieri and featuring ‘Trumpet Fantasy’, a piece composed for Wynton Marsalis, and Carambola (2000).
9. Asked about the emphasis on dance music of this record, O’Farrill (Citation2011a) commented, ‘If you listen to the Tito Rodriguez records, some of that stuff is really jazz. It’s really unabashedly big band jazz. Even though it’s set to a danceable rhythm, it exemplifies the very best of what we call harmony, big band writing, and brass writing’.
10. Thirteen out of fifteen musicians in the foundational Afro-Cuban ensemble, Machito and his Afro-Cubans, for example, were in fact Puerto Ricans (Flores Citation2009, 63).
11. ‘Introducing the Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra,’ interview with Arturo O’Farrill.
12. Whether as an exchange process and/or as an artifact that retains certain fluidity due to the process by which it is forged, Washburne’s logic of interculturality obeys US ideas of cultural alteration. Different historical and indeed theoretical pressures attend to the Caribbean and Latin American context where coloniality, first, and postcoloniality and imperialism, next, have made of interculturality a constitutive constant of socio-political order. These are important for understanding Chico O’Farrill’s musical experimentation in Cuba, the basis for his subsequent work in the US. Contact and relationality, as Alejandro Grimson notes, have taken the form of ‘contact, alliance, subjugation, conflict, and extermination’, in the context of which a strictly intercultural understanding as ‘exchange’ or ‘fluidity’ is less effective than one focused on ‘communication’ and on multiple challenges to establish a common across varying social scales, from the quotidian to the most abstract notions of ‘culture’ (Grimson Citation2000, 14, 15). Other recent approaches focus on interculturality as a dispositive for indigenous decolonial practices in which, again, notions of exchange and fluidity constitute a minor aspect of intercultural practices (Walsh Citation2008), or as part of globalization processes (García Canclini Citation2007). All these engage but go beyond discourses of cultural alteration.
13. Space does not permit elaboration of the role of publics in these operations of management.
14. ‘Most jazz musicians look upon Cuban music with great interest. They put on their lab coats and remark on how exotic those crazy rhythms are. Latin musicians put jazz on a marble pedestal and venerate the mighty gringos and their spang-a-lang [sic]. Neither side is fully accepting of the other; neither side understands that we are coinheritors of a mighty river that flows from the richness of Africa’ (O’Farrill Citation2015).
15. The question here does not mean the usual colloquial “‘what is happening?”’ It suggests an inquiry into what does the giving in the case under discussion.
16. In Strathern’s classic formulation: ‘Far from being regarded as unique entities, Melanesian persons are as dividually as they are individually conceived. They contain a generalized sociality within. Indeed, persons are frequently constructed as the plural and composite site of the relationships that produce them’ (Strathern Citation1988, 13).
17. Radano (Citation2016) offers an excellent account of this problematic.
18. Elaborating the immanent relationality of credit and debt, Peebles uses the expression credit/debt, which I adopt.
19. Ingrid Monson points out that white jazz musicians too call upon the notion of ancestors, but in order to legitimate their own place within the jazz tradition. For Monson, this is undercut by the fact that any such ancestry is grounded in some kind of appropriation of African-American musicking (swing and the blues) itself part of a ‘recursive cultural exchange’, that is, that African-American musicking appropriates from white musicking notions of harmony. There processes are recursive and not reciprocal, in Monson’s analysis, because of the unequal power relations that inform these processes of exchange: ‘while localization of the blues and swing was not as frequently borrowed back into African-American musical practice at a later point in time’ (Citation2007, 106).
Deborah Kapchan (Citation2007, 218–19) discusses Moroccan Gnawa musicians who regard African-American jazz musicians such as Randy Weston, Dexter Gordon, and others, as their ancestors.
20. As Derrida (Citation1994, 166) notes, use-value is not mysterious for Marx: if one keeps to use-value, the properties (Eigenschaften) of the thing (and it is going to be a question of property) are always very human, at bottom, reassuring for this very reason. They always relate to what is proper to man, to the properties of man: either they respond to men’s needs, and that is precisely their use-value, or else they are the product of a human activity that seems to intend them for those needs.
21. Jazz From Lincoln Center, Con Alma, NPR broadcast. Written by Paul Chuffo. Transcript of final draft, November 14, 1998, line 32.
22. Music, and particularly jazz, which demands for its reproduction a constant restaging of its conditions of possibility (real-time, live improvisation) seems eminently suited for this process—and let’s not forget both the material condition of ephemerality compared to other media and its spectral nature as sound.
23. ‘The truth of the matter is that some of the best music in jazz is being created by pan-Americans. If you really just limit yourself to Cuba and Brazil, and maybe Puerto Rico, you’re doing a tremendous disservice to this music. There’s some unbelievable Peruvian music, Colombian music’ (O’Farrill Citation2011b). ‘Jazz is a Pan-American art form, refined in the US and in Cuba, but it really comes from the Americas’ (O’Farrill Citation2013).
24. This is not to disregard that in some cases the geopolitical outcomes of the Cuban Revolution and in all cases the imperial dissemination of US cultural forms plays a key role. Much of O’Farrill’s thinking about continuing conversations began by Pozo and Gillespie in the 1940s and his father’s contributions in the 1950s have to do with the radical breach caused by the Cuban Revolution of 1959. Here the idea that bodies with credit are less bound in their spatial displacement (Munn Citation1986) is complicated by the debt acquired precisely in the movement across nations and political systems.