“If You Have to Ask, You’ll Never Know”: RIPM Jazz Beyond Jazzbros

When RIPM Jazz (Le Répertoire international de la presse musicale, Jazz Periodicals) was released in 2019, there was great rejoicing in the jazz studies community. Finally! At long last, jazz periodicals would be accessible and searchable! Since the return to in-person conferences, my conversations with fellow jazz scholars have inevitably included the RIPM Jazz inquiry: “So, do you have it?”1 Our excitement is palpable.RIPM Jazz partnered with the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University–Newark (the world’s largest jazz archive) to offer a searchable database of 168 twentieth-century jazz periodicals.2 It is available on its own platform (https://ripmjazz.org), as well as through EBSCOhost.3 Since its release in 2019, the database has been updated almost yearly, adding further periodicals and citations. However, interest in the database has thus far been largely confined to jazz scholars. This makes some sense, given that crossover between jazz studies and other musicological areas has often been limited. But artists and composers, past and present, have not been similarly confined in terms of style or career. (Industry designations, which determine what genre an artist is sold under or what category of awards they are nominated for, are another matter.) Scholars should be equipped with tools to similarly bypass genre-based boundaries, and RIPM Jazz is well suited to this task.Other reviews have focused on how to access RIPM materials, shared tips and tricks on using the platform, and offered critiques of the platform itself, which is fairly typical of EBSCOhost platforms.4 Rather than replicate those authors’ useful instructions and guides or reproduce the substantial RIPM Jazz “Help” section (complete with videos!), the rest of this review focuses primarily on the impact RIPM Jazz can have on music and culture studies methodologies across genre and discipline. This platform not only serves preexisting needs within jazz studies but also has the potential to productively support research and education in twentieth-century classical, popular, and rock music, as well as US-American cultural studies more broadly. Put simply, while RIPM Jazz is an absolute game changer for jazz scholars, its potential extends far beyond the jazz genre.5Jazz historiography in the United States began with the mostly good intentions of mid-century white male jazz critics, many of whom shared two goals: (1) to expand the appreciation and study of jazz as an art; and (2) to promote Black musicians and jazz as Black music in the context of a racist society.6 Their books and columns in jazz periodicals defined jazz history and provided part of the rationale for colleges and universities to eventually incorporate jazz studies into their curricula in the 1960–80s.7 The result: a particularly well-entrenched and exclusive jazz narrative and canon mired in race-, gender-, sex-, and class-coded descriptions, which relied just as much on distinguishing jazz from European classical and American popular musics as on establishing its own definitions and values.8Since the late twentieth-century emergence of “New Jazz Studies,” jazz scholars, especially in the United States, have overwhelmingly worked toward a common goal—deconstructing typical historical narratives in an attempt to develop both a more inclusive and a more accurate picture of jazz and what it has meant to a wider array of audiences.9 Disciplinary and personal perspectives diversified the field and further established a common methodological standard. In order to construct new jazz histories, “New Jazz Studies” has incorporated deep archival work, finally treating primary sources as primary sources rather than historical truths. With RIPM Jazz, researchers can browse and search 168 jazz periodicals published throughout the twentieth century, which could contribute to a still much-needed primary source–based overhaul of stereotypical jazz narratives.I recently used RIPM Jazz to scour Down Beat, which is available from 1934 to 1963.10 My goal was to understand how gender, and more specifically patriarchy, was written into the magazine. I began by searching words like “girl,” “woman,” and “masculine”; the results led me to identify and search for more era-specific gender-coded terms, like “aggressive,” “effete,” and “lush.” One particularly prominent search result was “virile,” which the database tracked at least 316 times across the thirty-year period available to search. While the count is not entirely accurate (I noted a couple of occasions in which my search term had not been highlighted on a page), the spread suggests interesting parallels between the increase in critics’ use of the word “virile”; a broader 1950s, post–World War II, early–Cold War white masculine anxiety; and jazz historiography in the pre–civil rights era (figure 1).It is possible that a big part of the reason scholars outside jazz haven’t been excited about this resource is the name. This is a version of RIPM (already a database used almost exclusively by music scholars) that at first glance seems to be only about jazz. Louis Armstrong was once asked to define jazz, and his oft-cited response, “If you have to ask, you’ll never know,” suggests an ongoing impenetrability and refusal of outsiders that I see frequently replicated in students’ and colleagues’ anxieties about their lack of jazz knowledge. Importantly, such obfuscation was historically a method for protecting Black Americans’ unique musical contributions from commercial theft (often by white musicians and industry executives). It later became key to attaining entrance into academic institutions in the second half of the twentieth century, which required a specialized canon of knowledge and experts to teach an unknowing public. As a result, jazz history can now be taught as an over one-hundred-year-old musical tradition with its own canon of performers, compositions, and records—a daunting canon to those outside the jazz bubble, to say the least. This canon and its boundaries are most prominently policed by jazzbros, who jazz critic Nate Chinen defines as typically male jazz aficionados who demonstrate a certain musical elitism combined with “irrefutable dudeness,” and jazz nerds, defined by jazz and film scholar Krin Gabbard as white male record collectors “so devoted to collecting the music, to the bohemian rejection of mass culture, and to a hipster aesthetic that they do not attend to their personal appearance or the social graces.”11 While jazzbros and jazz nerds are almost certainly guided by a protective love of jazz, nothing quells a conversation about jazz faster than their ritualistic recitation of albums and sidemen. Fact-based disruptions of the canons reiterated in these conversations are crucial to understanding jazz beyond jazzbros and connecting with the experiences of a broader range of students and colleagues.Within schools and departments of music, jazz studies has existed as an optional add-on, receiving less funding and fewer tenure-track lines, while simultaneously providing what is often the only non-European art/white music curriculum in the department.12 Many music students graduate having spent little more than one week on jazz (usually in a Western music history survey). Jazz is framed as something separate, Other, or additional in the context of a Western art music curriculum. Similarly, within the context of a college or university, music studies are often framed as something separate from—and even incomprehensible to—broader fields of humanities scholarship, which often seem to consider music as concerned primarily with performance, and not as a field of cultural study. However, my own use of RIPM Jazz has repeatedly demonstrated the opposite: These periodicals give clear evidence of (1) the integral relationships between and among artists of different musical genres; and (2) jazz’s undeniable connection to and reflection of broader twentieth-century cultural currents. In what follows, I explore a few of the possibilities RIPM Jazz offers for scholars of twentieth-century popular and Western classical music in the United States as examples of the platform’s potential for music research and teaching outside of jazz.Jazz critics and musicians have struggled to understand the genre’s relationship to popular culture across the twentieth century. While most feel comfortable describing jazz as “America’s popular music” of the 1930s, critics and musicians understood the late-1940s and 1950s growth of bebop as either part of an evolutionary narrative (in which jazz had evolved to an advanced and complicated art form worthy of respect and study) or a revolutionary narrative (in which jazz musicians self-consciously distanced themselves from commercial music).13 In the 1960s and 1970s, many jazz periodicals were forced to deal with the public’s acceptance of and shift of interest toward rock music. Critics, readers, and musicians all debated the benefits and drawbacks of aligning jazz with rock and popular music in print. Artists like the Beatles, Blood, Sweat she dismissed the term ‘rock ‘n’ roll’ as a mere ‘cliché.’”14 The description goes on to provide other relevant tidbits of information, such as a list of the regular contributors and features, and provides details about the periodical’s editors, all of whom were women, making Jazz there was no seamless transition). This provided fascinating insights. The March 1970 issue, for example, places an interview with French jazz violinist and composer Jean-Luc Ponty beside one with John Lennon and Yoko Ono and a feature on drummer Elvin Jones beside a feature on the “Paul is dead” controversy (which questioned if Paul McCartney had died in 1966 and been replaced by a body double). It also contained reviews of recent releases by James Moody, John Coltrane, the Modern Jazz Quartet, Big Mama Thornton, Cher, Jefferson Airplane, and Bob Dylan, among others. The cover of the September 1967 issue displays an image of Frank Zappa and Archie Shepp looking at one another. Zappa, wearing a dark tank top, bare arms crossed and face shadowed by a mop of curly hair, and Shepp, in a full suit, knitted hat, and with cigarette in hand, could not have espoused more different presentational modes, yet there they sit. Such juxtapositions have often been viewed by jazz scholars as evidence of the disintegration of a broader jazz community amid stylistic fracture or as proof of jazz’s disconnection from a popular audience (and certainly, this resource invites much more work on the 1960s and 1970s, an understudied period in jazz history). However, pop/rock scholars might offer additional perspectives on this moment in terms of the relationship between these artists, their music, and the social and cultural milieu they shared.The titles included in RIPM Jazz span a wide range of United States–based locales, including small, regional periodicals like Baltimore Jazz Scene (1967–76), The Wheel (1948, Kannapolis, North Carolina), Good Diggin’ (1947–49, Portland, Oregon), and Rhythm and Blues: Covering the Jazz and Blues Scene (1952–64, Derby, Connecticut), to name just a few. Such smaller periodicals not only give a sense of jazz in a particular place and time period, creating opportunities to expand on the place-based examinations of Andrew Berish and Kimberly Hannon Teal, but also grant insights into the broader cultural and sonic worlds of musicking in spaces that are not often central to the histories of music of any genre.15Within Western classical music, educators and scholars interested in expanding the canon, whether in terms of artists or compositions, would likewise benefit from RIPM Jazz. Attempts by instructors to diversify conventional surveys of Western music history and music theory have, in the past, centered on the rare Black composers who “made it” in classical music (like William Grant Still and Florence Price), a tendency that ignores the fact that segregated music industries and academic spheres meant that Black composers were far more likely to be relegated to jazz and popular musics throughout the twentieth century, regardless of their preferences. (Still’s first music jobs were to write for Black bandleaders like W. C. Handy and Fletcher Henderson, who are often studied in jazz classes, but not Western music history surveys.) Educators and scholars can use RIPM Jazz to craft more inclusive understandings of Western classical music in a number of ways, including: (1) expanding the canon of composers to include artists who created Western classical–tinged works, like Duke Ellington, Mary Lou Williams, John Lewis, and Nina Simone; (2) expanding the canon of musical techniques to include skills not usually emphasized in Western classical music (i.e., polyrhythmic complexity, communal music making, timbral range, and textural experimentation); or (3) destabilizing traditional genre boundaries by emphasizing styles, conversations, and techniques that took place across multiple genres.In his On Music Theory, and Making Music More Welcoming for Everyone, Philip Ewell highlights the work of theorist and composer George Russell (alongside other Black composers and theorists relegated to “jazz” and subsequently left understudied, like Mary Lou Williams, Anthony Braxton, Muhal Richard Abrams, Quincy Jones, Geri Allen, and many more).16 A simple search for “George Russell” in RIPM Jazz presently results in 1,402 hits—a significant archive of materials with which to better understand Russell as a working musician and composer, as well as a theorist. Using primary sources to contextualize Russell and other Black composers and theorists whose careers have been categorized as jazz would not only, as Ewell writes, “rectify a historic wrong” in which Black composers’ work and theories are overlooked in comparison with their white Western classical counterparts, but would also invite further exploration into the study of jazz composers as theorists worth studying in their own right.17Another opportunity for crafting a more inclusive Western classical canon is to examine the connections between canonic figures across genres. For example, Igor Stravinsky served as a source of inspiration for jazz musicians with styles as diverse as Charlie Parker (a founder of bebop) and Paul Desmond (whose smooth timbre quickly became one of the defining sounds of cool jazz), and a search of “Stravinsky” in the database returns 1,460 hits. What does Stravinsky’s influence do for jazz musicians, and how is it different/the same as in classical realms? How did jazz musicians’ interest in Stravinsky manifest, and how might their interest in Stravinsky shape historians’ understandings of Stravinsky’s audiences and impact? Does this knowledge shift how we hear and understand Stravinsky today? How does it reflect and/or complicate theoretical approaches like George Lewis’s “Afrological” and “Eurological”?18 RIPM Jazz is a useful tool to reveal these types of connections that span genres and show the story of music in the United States—and especially Black music in the United States—to be more complicated than our segregated music industry and academic structures would suggest.Among the foremost critiques of the platform is that its periodicals represent, at present, only five countries (US, UK, France, Italy, and Spain). RIPM Jazz clearly states that its goal is to broaden this list, and to do so is an absolutely essential next step. Its current American and European focus reifies what scholars around the world have persistently critiqued as the jazz field’s woeful US- and Western-centricity. The forthcoming periodicals page (https://ripmjazz.org/forthcoming-periodicals) suggests that updates addressing this issue are coming soon; RIPM Jazz is working on adding a number of from and the as well as a from and these magazines (and and would be particularly in my are crucial of and Black music narratives be more available to scholars are also in or but no more than one might in a The image is better than the and that I used primary with RIPM Jazz is It is not included in a RIPM with one source between and on are but if are with an RIPM is to offer one as it would with their goal of in In an era of are both and I have from they to ongoing In this that many of the with access to RIPM Jazz are would be for RIPM Jazz to an for RIPM or for RIPM Jazz to to scholars. I would also and (and to consider the broader of this resource as they their own the of While its name is (and should RIPM Jazz, this database is useful beyond genre and This is what Jazz Studies has for The academic study of jazz is and be and Jazz in conversation with popular and European art This review has focused largely on how scholars of music might use this platform, but the study of jazz also a that has been by the jazz scholars whose or primary are outside music This platform of access to a wide of periodicals across the United States (and it around the RIPM Jazz offers a primary source–based resource that can conversations and often from one another by of designations, especially if beyond jazz. Such are as we craft inclusive historical narratives that are more less mired in and more reflective of our students’