Affirmation and Resistance: The Politics of the Jazz Life … by Alexander J. Beissenhirtz (2012)

Some typical settings of the jazz novel are the nightclub, the practicing room or the studio, since – as the reader assumes correctly – these places are frequented rather often by the protagonist of such novels. And very often these are, in fact, (fictional) jazz musicians. But what of the other places these artists hang out? What are their thoughts, what do they ponder about? How is family life? Do drugs play a role in the artist’s development? How do you stay in contact with friends when you travel a lot? One source of information on just these locations is the autobiography of a real jazz musician.

Rarely written entirely by the musicians themselves, most of these books were composed (or invented) with the help of ghost writers (usually a job for a journalist). These works contained some information, some jazz lore, some adventure, some coming-of-age reports and sometimes “improvisations” on the biographies of other musician’s tales and reminded some readers rather of a solo than of a real and historically correct maturation of events in a particular person’s life.

Alexander Beissenhirtz, the author of the study at hand, has taken a close look at the autobiographies of some very famous jazz musicians: Louis Armstrong’s Swing That Music (1936) and My Life in New Orleans (1954), Art Pepper’s Straight Life (1979) and Oscar Peterson’s A Jazz Odyssey (2002).

While Armstrong’s books are probably the most popular jazz musician’s autobiographies, the other two works investigated by Beissenhirtz are rather exotic, since they were published at a time when jazz music unfortunately was not popular music anymore and by the late 1960s had drifted into the fringes of both music stores and public interest. However, Oscar Peterson could enjoy both the attention of the fans of classical music and jazz fans alike.
Beissenhirtz gives us a basic overview on jazz autobiography, academic jazz appreciation and refers to the usual standard jazz literature. I will not go into too much detail here, but it is obvious that the three artists experienced entirely different jazz lives at different times. What sounded very promising at the beginning of Affirmation and Resistance, the survey of the writings (or co-writings) of the musicians and the way they developed and remember it, somehow stops in the middle of the analysis.
This may not be totally satisfactory for the reader who, nevertheless, may expect the opinion of an expert on how jazz fiction, jazz history, jazz biography, and the jazz world are separated again, once the autobiography has ended.
At times, it seems, that Beissenhirtz got slightly mixed up in telling one part from the other, meaning: what is lore, what is fact and what is the essence? Nevertheless, these autobiographies are also, to a certain extent, fictional and invented; so taking every word for a fact will not reveal what actually happened and thus may obscure our view on the life of the artist. This somewhat enthusiastic trust in the value of such information may at intervals have concealed some conclusions. So somewhere in the last third of this study one may get lost eventually.

Moreover, there are way too many apparent misinterpretations and stereotypical presumptions like “… It is generally agreed upon that jazz music was chiefly developed by African American musicians in New Orleans …” or “… for numerous black musicians of [Art] Pepper’s generation, including some of the best-known artists in the history of jazz, heroin provided a means to emotionally escape racial discrimination” in the text.
For readers with a passion for musician’s autobiographies, the first part of the book may be of interest where the theoretical approach to accounts of this sort is lined out rather well.