The Jazz Bubble: Neoclassical Jazz in Neoliberal Culture, Dale Chapman

Abstract

For jazz musicians who came of age in the 1990s, Jazz at Lincoln Center (JALC) is a cultural touchstone as contested as the D.A.R.E. program or the Parental Advisory stickers that started appearing on album covers in the mid-1980s. As young jazz musicians grappling with the exacting pedagogy of the JALC organization, many of us sensed that there may have been something ideological behind its rigid dogmas, its conspicuous Brooks Brothers endorsement, its fancy dedicated building in midtown Manhattan, and—above all—its categorical rejection of some of the music we loved best. The polish and superhuman virtuosity of the JALC coterie simultaneously awed us, inspired us, and somehow rubbed us the wrong way. Dale Chapman’s book is a serious and probing attempt to subject that intuition to scholarly scrutiny. It asks, in other words, whether the neotraditionalism that took such hold of the jazz world in the 1990s really was “jazz for the Reagan revolution,” as David Hajdu notoriously characterized it in 2003. Readers already suspicious of the politics of neoclassical jazz will find some corroboration here, but Chapman’s more profound contribution is to remind us that the study of aesthetics can be of real value for the humanities more broadly.