When Kevin K. Gaines left Cleveland and went off to college, he maintained a tradition time-honored among jazz devotees.
“I absconded with a lot of my father’s records,” says the associate professor of history and African-American studies at the University of Texas at Austin.
The recordings -- by Louis Armstrong, Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Charles Mingus, and many others -- would become the basis of an educational mission that Mr. Gaines took on while studying American history in graduate school at Brown University. As volunteer director of jazz programming at the campus radio station, he attempted to infuse its offerings with the jazz tradition that his father’s albums had helped to teach him.
He set about influencing younger programmers -- with his own shows, and with the compilation of detailed discographies of seminal jazz figures, from Armstrong and his contemporaries to a host of modern players who had advanced “the tradition.”
He was suspected, he says, of a black-musicians-only agenda, of “coming from this wild cultural-nationalist thing.” He chuckles but sounds pained: “It was weird how people perceived it.”
Weird because, to state the obvious, the vast majority of important jazz figures have been black Americans.
Mr. Gaines has since begun writing about some of the social and political dimensions of African-American music. His work resembles that of many researchers who are now using popular music as a way to examine cultural issues like racial politics in America.
His publishing career started with a roar. His 1991 doctoral dissertation was about “uplift,” a philosophy that has varied over time but has always advocated such goals as education, thrift, and temperance for blacks as a way to improve their standing and reduce white racism.
He wrote so convincingly of the complications and contradictions of uplift philosophy that the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill published his dissertation in 1996 as Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century. Last year it won the American Studies Association’s best-book award, the John Hope Franklin Publication Prize.
One phenomenon he addressed was minstrel shows, which since the 1980s have become a compelling subject for historians. Eric Lott’s 1993 study, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (Oxford University Press), suggested that whites, in donning blackface, were engaging in a liberating form of transgression that expressed simultaneous attraction and aversion to black culture. Mr. Gaines fixes on black attitudes towards, and occasional accommodations of, the practice. In sum, he considers minstrelsy simply “fundamental hostility to equality.”
Minstrelsy was just one of many cultural forms dealt with in Uplifting the Race. After all, writing at first about the history and interpretation of popular culture and music might be an unwise debut for a 20th-century American historian; there are very few job listings in popular-music studies. But win a Franklin award, of course, and you can then write about whatever you please.
Mr. Gaines’s two projects-in-progress are again about black culture and politics. In one, he is doing research for a book about intellectuals who, during the civil-rights era, evaded racism in the United States by settling in Africa.
Much current African-American interest in Africa is nostalgic and romantic, he argues. By contrast, the 1960s expatriates actually sought to help build independent nations. In addition, he says, “they were trying to create a level of freedom and opportunity unavailable to them in the U.S.”
Therein lies a link to his other main interest -- jazz. Many black jazz artists resorted to expatriation, usually in Europe, to gain recognition. But many black jazz musicians, expatriate or not, harked to Africa. “They insisted on the importance of solidarity between African Americans and Africans. They were interested in cultivating those ties and strengthening them,” Mr. Gaines says.
Both expatriation and allegiance to Africa amounted to political acts, he argues. It is to politics in jazz that he has gravitated.
Almost all jazz writing, he notes, has “perpetuated the myth that jazz musicians are not political.” That has been the case both in the popular press and in scholarly writing about jazz.
For inspiration, Mr. Gaines looks to a few important exceptions. One is Valerie Wilmer, the British chronicler of the avant-garde jazz movement of the 1960s, the “New Thing.” Another is the radical black poet and essayist Amiri Baraka, whose writing about jazz mimicked bold improvisation.
A third is Nathaniel Mackey, a professor of literature at the University of California at Santa Cruz. He suggests that jazz musicians perform an inherently political “artistic act of othering” when they simultaneously evade the “otherness” of marginalization, and advance cultural health and diversity. They do this, he suggests, when they innovate in ways that cannot be reduced to Western languages, including musical notation.
Mr. Gaines notes that, in the 1960s, spurred by both the early civil-rights movement and debates about African independence and decolonization, jazz musicians challenged the view that they should be entertaining audiences rather than expressing political views.
That rising social consciousness, led by such musicians as the singer Abbie Lincoln, the drummer Max Roach, and the bassist and bandleader Charles Mingus, “disturbed expectations of some white liberal critics that music primarily existed for their own gratification, to meet their desire for leisure,” Mr. Gaines says.
He and a growing number of others argue that the political element in jazz is extensive, though mostly overlooked. “Jazz musicians’ lives are suffused with political questions, from their struggle to make a living, their control of their own art, to their creative working lives,” he says.
He addresses such issues in an essay on Duke Ellington that will appear this year in Music and the Racial Imagination (University of Chicago Press), a book edited by Ronald M. Radano and Philip Bohlman. As the title suggests, the collection of essays will place race at the center of attention. In the bulk of writing on jazz, Mr. Gaines observes, “that is something people have gone out of their way to avoid.”
To most jazz fans, Ellington, the great composer and bandleader, who lived from 1899 to 1974, would be a surprising choice of subject with whom to fashion a remedy.
Look more closely, says Mr. Gaines. For example, what was Ellington doing in the 1930s and 1940s by composing such extended-form compositions as Black, Brown and Beige?
Reactions to that suite have been “ultimately insulting,” Mr. Gaines argues. “He was criticized by critics whose main affinity was classical music, for even attempting to compose extended-form works. Then he was criticized by some jazz-oriented critics for somehow betraying their sense of what authentic Negro music ought to be.”
He suggests that both reactions betray critics’ desire to restrict black cultural figures to the role of providing leisure and fun rather than serious thought.
Ellington was, in fact, intent on a jazz/classical-music hybrid -- a music “beyond category” -- that he explicitly identified with a progressive, integrationist agenda.
Recent books on Ellington by Mark Tucker and John Edward Hasse -- addressing Ellington’s extraordinary musical accomplishments and his everyday work life and musical practice -- have added to the already extensive literature on the bandleader. But Ellington’s political dimension has been played down so thoroughly, Mr. Gaines argues, that he is justified in producing a new biography. That is his other major project-in-progress.
From Mr. Gaines’s point of view, the multifaceted composer makes his own case for another study.
“Ellington embodied the struggles of African-American intellectuals to defend African Americans against racist slanders,” he says, “but also to articulate a particular black cultural identity that is at the heart of American democratic values and aspirations.”