Deconstructing the Jazz Tradition

The 'Subjectless Subject' of New Jazz Studies

Authors

  • Sherrie Tucker University of Kansas

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1558/source.v2i1.31

Keywords:

jazz, jazz musicians, history of jazz, modern jazz

Abstract

From its first publication in Black Literature Forum in 1991, through and beyond its reprinting in Robert O’Meally’s edited volume The Jazz Cadence of American Culture in 1998, Scott DeVeaux’s ‘Constructing the Jazz Tradition’ remains one of the most influential essays in academic jazz studies. So frequently do jazz studies scholars jumpstart their journal articles, book introductions, and dissertations with gestures toward DeVeaux’s analysis of the ‘Jazz Tradition’ as an interested narrative - rather than an objective account of a linear jazz past - that one could characterize much current work in New Jazz Studies under the rubric: ‘Deconstructing the Jazz Tradition’.

Author Biography

  • Sherrie Tucker, University of Kansas

    Sherrie Tucker is Associate Professor of American Studies at University of Kansas. She is the author of Swing Shift: “All-Girl” Bands of the 1940s (Duke, 2000). She has published articles in many edited volumes and in journals. She is currently co-editing, with Nichole Rustin, an edited volume on gender and jazz studies, and is writing her second book, an oral history of the dance floor at the Hollywood Canteen during the 1940s, tentatively entitled, Dance Floor Democracy: The Social Geography of Memory at the Hollywood Canteen. She was the 2004-2005 Louis Armstrong Visiting Professor at the Center for Jazz Studies, Columbia University.

References

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Published

2005-03-01

Issue

Section

Articles

How to Cite

Tucker, S. (2005). Deconstructing the Jazz Tradition: The ’Subjectless Subject’ of New Jazz Studies. Jazz Research Journal, 2(1), 31-46. https://doi.org/10.1558/source.v2i1.31