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May 23
, 2003
Paul
Lopes and All that Jazz
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Photo
by Fred LeBlanc
Paul
Lopes |
When Paul Lopes, visiting
assistant professor of sociology, talks about jazz, he speaks
with the familiarity of a performer. A saxophonist, he played
in jazz, reggae, and rock groups for almost two decades. Eventually,
the demands of scholarship and teaching won out over music. But
in 1992, Lopes began a project that not only brought him back
to jazz but also became his first book. The Rise of a Jazz Art
World, published by Cambridge University Press in 2002, has been
hailed as presenting a unique sociological vision of the evolution
of jazz in the twentieth century.
"I had an intuitive sense that the rebirth of jazz as a
high-art movement in the 1950s said something significant about
American culture in the twentieth century," Lopes explains.
"Overall, it's the issue of race that most motivated
the music's transformation, although class played an important
role too. And that's really what the book is about. It's
about popular musicians saying 'We don't accept the
idea that classical music is superior to popular music, and classical
musicians are superior to popular musicians or white musicians
are superior to black musicians. We don't accept that. And
through jazz, we're going to challenge these dominant conceptions.'
"
Among the book's themes is how individuals engage in the
meaning and practice of cultural production. Toward this end,
Lopes studied jazz musicians who challenged the cultural hierarchy,
such as Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Miles Davis. "Many
of these musicians played in swing bands, which to us would be
like the rock bands or rap groups of today. They were popular
musicians. And here they were making it clear that they expected
a higher appreciation among audiences. They were approaching performance
in a more high-art fashion, and in their interviews with jazz
critics they discussed jazz as a high-art music, as serious music."
In order to trace the rise of a jazz art world, Lopes immersed
himself in its history. "As a cultural sociologist, I believe
that you need to know the historical context of any contemporary
cultural phenomenon," says Lopes. "I was well versed
in swing and modern jazz, but not the earlier music. So I went
back to the late nineteenth century and studied jazz's outward
migration from the American South into the first jazz craze of
1917, through the Jazz Age of the 1920s, and into the swing big-band
era of the 1930s and 1940s."
His research included reviewing every issue of the era's
two major musicians' magazines: Metronome, which
was published from 1885 until 1961, and Down Beat, which
was first published in 1934 and remains a major jazz magazine
to this day. Lopes also studied the general press, as well as
any books written by music critics, autobiographies and biographies
of musicians, and looked at album covers to see how they presented
the music. "My approach was not to assume anything. I didn't
want to stake a judgment claim," he says.
Lopes's next project is on comic books, a topic he describes
as having a very interesting resonance with jazz. "People
who make comic books and people who read them fear that the form
is not appreciated—a feeling shared by the early jazz musicians
and enthusiasts that I studied. Likewise, they fear that the form
is not appreciated and that it's stigmatized. And so they're
struggling against these distinctions in American culture and
trying to transform perceptions. I'm seeing many of the
same tensions that existed with jazz."
Lopes again is immersing himself in the historical context of
his subject. He's studying the history of comic books from
the mid-1930s to the present, trying to understand their reception,
how people understood what comic books were about, and how comic
books evolved over the twentieth century. He credits his jazz
research with giving him an understanding of how art worlds work,
including how distinctions are engaged by individuals.
"What I always appreciate is how people who supposedly shouldn't
be doing this are attempting to legitimate an art form. What is
driving them to say, 'I don't accept this hierarchy;
I don't accept these distinctions'? Often it's
about race, about class, about gender." As for his long-term
scholarly interest, Lopes says it's cultural politics. "I
feel strongly that to understand cultural politics, you have to
understand the contradictory nature of how people engage it. There's
no pure cultural politics. What always has interested me is how
that plays out in any particular art form. I want to know how
both artists and audiences attempt to construct and transform
culture. I'm not alone—the field of cultural studies
is very interested in this dynamic."
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