Jazz Across Screen Media: Representation, Rearrangement, and Reperformance

As I sat in Washington Square Park with a friend watching dogs out for their afternoon walks on a coffee break between conference sessions, I faintly heard a familiar tune emerge from the soundscape dominated by casual conversation, traffic, and the gentle spurts and trickles of a water fountain. The music was being played by a pair of nearby street musicians. I knew the melody but was unable to immediately “name that tune” due to its “jazzy” rearrangement. After we listened a bit longer, my friend decoded that it was the opening notes of John Williams's infamous brass fanfare from the main title theme of Star Wars. However, the theme was elongated, played by an alto saxophone with drumkit accompaniment, and its rhythm had a malleable plasticity when compared to the original march. Later on that evening, I sat at the desk in my modest conference accommodations to write the introduction to this special issue of Jazz & Culture. I put on one of my go-to café music YouTube streams to transform the dorm room into a creative, cozy place with a subtle ambiance that encouraged productivity. The soundscape invited me to stay awhile as I wrote with the accompaniment of an instrumental “chill out jazz” arrangement of Taylor Swift's “cardigan.”1This isn't the only time Taylor Swift's songbook has received a jazz-inflected musical treatment. During the holiday special of the Jimmy Fallon-hosted American music game show That's My Jam, Swift's single “Blank Space” off of her album 1989 (2014) received a jazzy Christmas rearrangement.2 During the show, Fallon subjects Saturday Night Live alum Ana Gasteyer to the game “Musical Genre Challenge” where a pair of automated slot machine-like wheels—one wheel designating song titles and the other genre labels—randomly pair up a song title with a completely different genre. That evening, the wheels selected “Blank Space” paired with “holiday jazz,” leaving Gasteyer to imagine and perform what that sonic juxtaposition might sound like. In doing so, her performance draws on recognizable, but not necessarily accurate, stylistic generic markers of festive jazz. In this playful onscreen musical moment, listeners are exposed to one version of jazz. But more importantly, Gasteyer's stylistic reinterpretation exposes us to a selection of characteristics popularly associated with the performance and composition of jazz. Fallon asks Gasteyer and his house band “Do you know how to give it a nice little swing?” “Blank Space” as “jazz”—that is, “holiday jazz”—must feature a swinging drum pattern, a walking bassline, vocal back phrasing, vocal slides, rhythmic displacement, scatting, and, of course, sleigh bells.The busking duo performing a jazz cover of Star Wars, the jazz instrumental “coffee shop stream” of “cardigan,” and the cheesy holiday reimagining of “Blank Space” are all examples of Michael Rings's definition of “genre reset” covers: performances that “[present] a song in a genre different from that of the original.” Rings suggests that genre reset cover versions invite participatory and interpretive listening, asking the listener to compare and parse the stylistic and genre tropes of both the original and cover version, which thereby enriches “a listener's interpretive engagement with the song.”3These ubiquitous moments of listening to screen music beyond the screen illustrates issues of the interaction, representation, and performance of jazz across screen media. In some instances, jazz is deployed as an identifiable style and genre in the adaptation and rearrangement of preexisting musical material where referentiality is actively flaunted by the arranger and interpreter.4 In other screen media contexts, platforms such as YouTube, Twitter, Twitch, Instagram, or TikTok can become spaces where jazz performances, instructional videos, and entertaining musical memes are shared, consumed, and archived by those within and outside of the jazz community.Many forms of audiovisual screen media are characterized by forms of musical remediating, adaptation, rearrangement, or as Holly Rogers puts it: a continuous refashioning where works “acknowledge and evolve from a diverse range of predecessors.”5 Jazz tropes are encountered across screen media, as music, stylistic markers, genre connotations, performance practices, and ideas associated with jazz are adapted and rearranged for musical, narrative, and contextual functions.One such trope is jazz in/as urban space. In the case of the video game Hill Agency: PURITY/decay (Achimostawinan Games, 2023), jazz is used to signify both the setting of the game (an urban space in the future) as well as its narrative genre (a postapocalyptic detective story).6Hill Agency is a 3D, third-person, narrative-driven detective game featuring a black-and-white noir style where the player is the private investigator Meygeen Hill, who is hired to solve a murder case that reveals social divisions between the poor and the upper class. Hill Agency is set in the thriving and vibrant Indigenous metropolis of Akâmaskiy in a distant speculative future where the oppressive legacies of settler colonialism have been dismantled and diligently repaired. The synthesizer-driven electronic music of cyberpunk and the acoustic smoky jazz arrangements of the game's film noir soundtrack recontextualize the defining features of these genres when they are re-sounded in a futuristic dystopian world where Indigenous people thrive in a city they rebuilt following a catastrophically destructive disaster. By taking the iconic soundscapes and scoring of cyberpunk, film noir, and jazz, and making them their own using processes of adaptation and remediation, Achimostawinan Games is indigenizing these musical references and tropes.Considering a different corner of the screen media landscape, online video sharing and social media platforms like YouTube have become productive participatory spaces that provide wide democratic access to hundreds of thousands of jazz transcriptions, video tutorials on topics ranging from improvisation techniques to transcription methods, cover versions and rearrangements, remix video memes, and rare bootleg recordings and performances from the personal collections of fans. While there are many excellent items posted to YouTube and similar open-access sites that support amateur, vernacular, and professional musical activity, there are also videos of lesser quality, demanding that audio viewers critically evaluate the astoundingly large number of items that appear following any keyword search.7 Even though users should proceed with caution when they enter the word “jazz” into a Google or YouTube search, online streaming and social media platforms contribute in significant ways to the ongoing interpretation, codification, and diversification of global jazz.Jazz musicians productively use internet platforms, including TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter, to share and archive their performances and arrangements, sometimes even providing pedagogical demonstrations or “how-to” music videos. Jazz is used in video game, film, and television narratives and spatial world-building. The sound, style, and cultural knowledge of jazz is rearranged, adapted, and repurposed in participatory ways by user-creators online who make, share, and consume jazz memes, fan arrangements, and cover versions. Streaming services, playlist curation, and platform marketing play an important role in circulating jazz in the era of streamed media. And musicians experiment with mediated performer-audience intimacy by negotiating the synchronous, asynchronous, and quasi-synchronous digital performance spaces of TikTok and YouTube of virtual shows (e.g., the hybrid-jazz group Snarky Puppy's celebrated appearance on NPR's “Tiny Desk,” or TikTok's “JazzTok” scene). In this themed issue, James Heazlewood-Dale, Marvin McNeill, Kate Galloway, and D. Bondy Valdovinos Kaye offer complementary approaches to listening for, to, in, and with jazz across contemporary screen media. In doing so, they offer insight on how the music, performances, musicians, listeners, cultural ideas, and icons of both jazz and “jazz” as heard on screen play a sustained role in the reception, understanding, and classification of jazz as a genre and performance practice. The music, iconography, and ideas of jazz heard in screen media have diversified manyfold since film audiences first heard jazz on screen in the early days of sound-on-film motion pictures in the 1920s and 1930s. In these early uses, jazz functioned primarily as a sonic marker of spatiality, situating the narrative and its characters in place and time, such as an urban nightclub, café, club, or bar with dim lighting in the evening. There might be dangerous people around lurking in the darkness (e.g., gamblers, criminals), a trope that stems from a fundamentally racist association linking Black music with vice and criminality. These tropes of jazz have been repeatedly recycled and adapted by composers and sound designers for screen media. Take, for instance, the jazz-inflected score for the James Bond franchise, which establishes a jazz sound within the genre of the spy thriller. Or John Williams's jazz scoring for the Mos Eisley cantina on Tatooine in Star Wars, which functions as both a social space for jazz performance and also as a hub for seedy underworld activity. Williams's moments of jazz scoring, as James Heazlewood-Dale observes, “accompany and contextualize the actions of criminals, conmen, and, indeed, cantina bands in galaxies far, far away.”8The expectation of listeners in 2023 about what jazz signifies to audioviewers has diversified, and it is no longer used to exclusively represent an urban/rural divide, a specific nightlife atmosphere, or the seedy underbelly of society—although it can be, and often is, used in any and all of these contexts (and more). Many media creators and/or members of the jazz community opt to use jazz on screen or (re)present jazz using screen media in order to strategically push back against stereotypical uses of jazz and the associations that result, instead reclaiming the genre to exemplify a diverse range of spaces and contexts in which listeners encounter jazz today. The polystylism of jazz resonates with the polysemic uses of screen media itself.The articles in this special issue shed light on the ways jazz is adapted, rearranged, and reheard across contemporary screen media. Some of these screen media spaces—including video games (Heazlewood-Dale), amateur and professional content shared on YouTube (McNeill, Galloway), music videos (McNeill), and social media platforms (Galloway, Kaye)—are unconventional and unexpected yet ubiquitous venues for jazz consumption and performance. Digital and online musical formations across social media have become spaces rife with risk and reward, exposing the ways in which digital mediation has transformed and is transforming our relationships with music well beyond the scope of the music industries as previously and traditionally understood. However, even more traditional forms of noninteractive screen media have served as productive spaces for the rearrangement of jazz music as well as creative spaces to represent and negotiate ideas of jazz as a genre, its reception, and the places where it is produced.In addition, this special issue attempts to draw out some of the varied ways artists, media creators, and listeners have integrated, rearranged, and interacted with jazz as both a genre and a performance idiom. Jazz as a genre is a collection of compositional and stylistic techniques, but jazz is also a performance idiom characterized by musical creation unfolding through improvisation. The articles herein consider strategies for circulating, representing, and performing jazz in screen media and also how jazz communities have explored the affordances of these media in order to open up pathways for musician-listener interaction and content creation. Jazz's spirit of hybridity and flexibility is embraced by contemporary screen media creators. This themed issue offers a range of approaches to studying the reception, rearrangement, and rehearing of jazz and “jazz” in its diversity, while also listening to screen media in ways that place the field in dialogue with timely interdisciplinary conversations.