Jazz

Abstract

The study of autobiographies and biographies of jazz musicians is complicated by one’s definition of the music, including the extent to which jazz is primarily an African American practice. In addition, the autobiographies of prominent artists such as Louis Armstrong were heavily edited, or in the case of Duke Ellington, written from within a carefully constructed and frequently unreliable persona. More disturbingly, much of what appeared in the autobiography of Miles Davis was neither written nor approved by Davis. Similar problems accrue to important books attributed to Billie Holiday, Charles Mingus, Sidney Bechet, and Art Pepper. As for biographies of jazz artists, an important trend has been the recent “academicization” of the project. Thoughtful, culturally informed biographies are increasingly being written by university professors from within their primary discipline, jazz studies. At the cinema, jazz biopics have always been highly inflected by rapidly changing attitudes about race. In earlier films, white artists supposedly surpassed their black influencers, while in later films, brilliant black artists were confronted with institutionalized racism. More recently, jazz heroes have had to confront their own pathologies.