Is playing jazz a feminist method(ology)?

: On historical anthropological method, racialized masculinity, and jazz nationalism in British Gibraltar Bryce Peake School of Journalism & Communication University of Oregon It was a warm Thursday evening in the British overseas territory of Gibraltar, and I had just finished playing what turned out to be an unsuccessful bass solo with the Gibraltar Jazz Society house trio. My lack of success was not a technical failure, but a failure to know and yield to Gibraltarian jazz aesthetics and norms. Having played a bebop-influenced solo, borrowing from various conventional chord substitutions popular in jazz, and not unbeknownst to Gibraltarian jazz musicians, I had met a great deal of resistance from the jazz musicians with whom I was playing attempts on the part of the drummer to open up space within the solo, and the pianist emphasizing the standard chord progression in a way that reduced my ability to spread out. During the intermission that followed my solo debut, I walked outside with George, the founder of the Gibraltar Jazz Society and the usual bassist for the trio. Asking what he thought, he confided in me, Gibraltarians dont like [bebop], its too mechanical. A robot could play it. They want to come and hear things they know and happy melodies. That old stuff, its too dissonant for all of them. As he would later suggest, bebop is like working in a factory. All technique and no soul. This essay explores the historical interconnections between industrial metaphors, labor, masculinity, and bebop in Gibraltar, arguing through Bourdieu (1972) that taste in music the aversion of bebop sound is an articulation of Gibraltarian jazz musicians particular position within systems of gender, race, color, and imperialism. Drawing from two years of ethnographic field research with Gibraltarian jazz musicians, and countless hours of jam sessions and gigs, I present a conjunctural analysis that places past and present side by side, revealing the historical moment that listening became a negotiation of race and color, as well as 1

masculinity. In this sense, I understand the contemporary dislike of bebop to be rooted in doxa, aesthetic taste that goes without saying because it comes without saying (169), which is articulated through the practice of listening. The aversion of bebop is, I argue, the product of an implicit racial logic that is tied to an early encoding of, and consequent regimentation, of bebop as Spanish and associated with Brown-ness as opposed to British white-ness an undesirable association for Gibraltarian jazz musicians located in a liminal space in the racial and color hierarchies of contemporary British [white] Gibraltar. Also important to my narrative, this history is, in its totality, a history of negotiation racial and colored forms of masculinity, and all Gibraltarian jazz musicians are men with British loyalties. In the contemporary moment, then, bebop is a marker of taste and distinction within an economy of racialized masculinity. Not only does listening turn Gibraltarian jazz musicians against bebop, but listening also overdetermines who can be imagined as a jazz musician in terms of gender, race, and color. The examination of an implicit musical policing of a sonic colorline, and the exclusion of women in the Gibraltarian jazz scene, is pressing at a time when Gibraltar becomes a space on the international jazz circuit, and brings jazz into discourses regarding national and cultural citizenship. While the topic of analysis is Gibraltarian jazz listening and jazz musicians, the title of this essay is derived from a second focus on what constitutes feminist methodology in the historical anthropology. I frame playing jazz as an experimental method that reveals empirical information beyond the evidentiary, moving beyond some of the androcentric pitfalls (e.g., phallogocentrism) of traditional ethnographic and historical methods. Playing jazz was crucial for understanding the unwritten, unspoken, and sometimes unquestioned politico-aesthetic systems that underlie Gibraltarian jazz the doxa of jazz listening. While this method is arguably edgy for cultural anthropology, ethnomusicologists have long participated musically

in the cultures they have studied. Unlike ethno/musicologists, however, my playing was not solely a way of generating rapport with my community, nor about coming to understand the musical logic of Gibraltarian jazz, but instead a data collection method used to tease out the underlying cultural, racial, gendered, perhaps imperial logic of listening what Feld (2012) calls the acoustemology that is embedded in the ways Gibraltarian musicians hear and thus play jazz. This research expands cultural anthropological literature in some significant ways. First, it continues a growing discussion of jazz in the field of cultural anthropology (Wilf 2012, Feld 2012), elaborating on the historical nature of jazz as a global art form and noting that this conversation requires an evaluation of the interconnections between gender, race, and colori politics a perspective lacking in jazz studies, anthropological or otherwise. By doing so, it also moves the anthropology of sound (Feld & Brennis 2004, Samuels et al. 2011) beyond the Benjaminian project of mapping the sensorium (Hirschkind 2006, Helmreich 2008), towards the Adorno-ian (Horkheimer & Adorno 2002) project of placing the sensorium within the networks of power in and through which listening is deployed. Secondly, understanding that jazz must be situated within particular histories of culture and politics, I continue a trend in historical anthropology of examining the symbolic mediation of colonialism (Sahlins 1993, Taussig 1991, Comaroff 1991) within the so-called culture industry(s). I take my inspiration from Stoller (2010), and pursue a course of study that analyzes the role of the sensorium in mediating relations of power in Gibraltar. Finally, this essay expands the literature written about feminist methods in cultural anthropology by adding a new approach to experimental ethnographic methods broadly, while also addressing the trend of male researchers employing feminist methods in cultural anthropology.

I begin by addressing methodology and methods, considering the gender politics of empiricism and the musician-turned-historical anthropologists methodological toolkit. I then construct an ethnographic vignette through which to understand Gibraltarian jazz aesthetics as thought through by Gibraltarian jazz musicians, who are themselves mostly men. Establishing these conditions, I then turn to history to show the ways in which mens domination of the jazz performance scene is overdetermined by a history of gender, color, and racial labor hierarchies in the context of British colonialism. I conclude by returning to the ethnographic present to discuss the growing connections between jazz and nationalism in Gibraltar, in the midst of the first International Gibraltar Jazz Festival, and the political effects of womens exclusion from Gibraltarian jazz has in definitions of who and where Gibraltar is located musically. I end this essay suggesting the political possibilities opened up by understanding, and reacting accordingly to, the history of Gibraltarian jazz as one tied to a patriarchal structure in the context of the first International Gibraltar Jazz Festival. Methodology, jazz, and methods I start here by framing my study within the realm of historical anthropology, which has concerned itself with the dialectic of history as cultural and culture as historical (Sahlins 2004). Typically, historical anthropology involves using ethnographic fieldwork as an hermeneutic lens to read archival documents, with the goal of revealing the hidden transcripts of everyday relations of power (Scott 1987, Nakano Glenn 2004). However, the interrogation of the archive measured against the interrogation of people presents a quintessential methodological problem to feminist researchers: these methods, as argued by Derrida (1983), constitute traditionally phallogcentric productions of knowledge. By phallogocentrism, Derrida means to point to the history of logos as a universal formation of rationality handed down by the Greek Fathers of western society, which knowingly or otherwise reproduces hierarchal relationships between the masculine and the feminine. Phallogocentrism is thought that emphasizes a kind of male 4

thinking (phallus) that insists on telling absolute truths about singular realities (logos), themselves constructed by those in power (the phallus) (Cixous 1976, Irigary 1985). Both anthropology and history are derivatives of this, whether it be the cultural anthropologists emphasis on delineating the Aristotlian categories of same for all and not same for all (von Fritz 1981), historys commitment to the truth of narrative and narrativ-ization of truth championed by Thucydides (Sahlins 2004), or both as Socratic social sciences that necessitate a clear, objective, well argued narrative that unfolds in a particular logical order. In the case of historical anthropology, it would appear that unquestioned phallogocentrism can yield tautological arguments: if phallogocentrism dictates what is to be found should reveal y in a particular manner, then only x will count as reliable data in that it is what will prove y. In anthropology, this was articulated in the early dismissal of womens lives: culture was public, and womens lives (according to ethnocentric understandings of gender) were private, therefore rendering them of no interest to anthropologists interested in the public qua culture (see Lewin 2006). Historical anthropologys reliance on phallogocentric methodologies, then, could render it a purely phallogocentric endeavor that reproduces male forms of domination at both the levels of form and argument. Feminist historical anthropologists like di Leonardo (1993) and Leacock (1978), however, have managed to short circuit this tautological phallogocentrism by bringing particular feminist politics to their work. Feminist, here, is defined as a political concern for womens liberation from the oppression of patriarchal structures of domination through the undermining and overthrowing of those very structures.ii While phallogocentrism still haunts the underlying fields of analysis of these anthropologists whether strategically adopted or not being irrelevant , their concern for womens liberation defuses and disarms the

androcentric bias of logical, and thus makes strategic use of phallogocentric inquiry using the masters tools to disassemble the masters houses. Although feminists have managed to use classical methods to subvert the patriarchal structures of inquiry, these structures still dictate what methods can be used i.e., those tools for collecting data. Traditional methodological forms of inquiry have been repeatedly interrogated, yet little has been gained in terms of legitimacy for alternative ethnographic and historical methods. We, we must ask, are alternative methods fully absent from the primary methodological manuals of anthropology (i.e. Bernard 2011). A whole host of methods lie beyond the participant-observation, interviews, and document analysis traditionally employed by historical anthropologists. Ethnodrama, consciousness raising, and imagework are all types of methods that have successfully been used by feminists to conduct research in ethnographic and historical settings. I argue here that their underutilization is the product of a form of the androcentric, phallogocentric definition of validity. Experimental ethnographic methods are often gendered in particular ways that reflect the gendering of the humanities in relation to the hard sciences, as weaker forms of knowledge production; itself homologous to a wider system in which the right hand of the militarized state science is gendered male and dominates, defunds, and delegitimizes the feminized left hand of the cultural state under the auspices of neoliberal reform (Bourdieu 2010). Further, amidst transformations in the American Anthropological Association mission statement, jokes were often used to discuss the field as moving to a place where students could dance a dissertation and get a PhD putting experimental methods in a weaker, and illegitimate, position in relation to real scientific inquiry with real data. As this implicit comparison relies on popular gender stereotypes of dance vs. science, the framing of experimental methods as feminine and thus inferior reflects hegemonic conditions of gender

hierarchy in a way that obscures the materiality of said hierarchy, i.e. women and feminine ways of knowing as unscientific. In parallel, real men do science via logically-defined rules and objective relations, and it is real men who will receive the funding.iii, iv Recalling the right hand and the left hand of the state, and anthropologys precarious and complicated history as the intellectual branch of military science, this gender division is far from anthropologys fault, yet the discipline need not reproduce the structure of gender domination by way of phallogocentrism at the level of methodological valuation. v And it is within this frame that I would like to argue that playing jazz in Gibraltar is, or at least has the potential to be, a feminist method if coupled with a feminist methodology. I would like to posit that the opposition to experimental ethnographic methods is generated by their very existence outside of the phallogocentric order of research, and their drawing upon what Spivak (2011) calls the intuition of the transcendental: those research moments in which the empirical is beyond the evidentiary. As such, experimental, affect-driven methods like playing jazz contain the potential to rework the phallogocentric order of empiricism in new, feminist ways. Such is particularlty true if these methods are brought to bear on the analysis of culture not simply as a way of life, but also as a whole way of struggle (Thompson 1967). As numerous public anthropologists feminist or otherwise have suggested, culture is not a prewritten script of social interaction, but rather to be understood as a field of ongoing political struggle (Merleau-Ponty 1962). From this perspective, Auslander (2011) argues that it is only through labor with a community within these sites of struggle that intersubjective forms of understanding can be produced, which is quintessential to writing about the cultural not of ones own. Labor, in the Marxist tradition, however, can be taken widely to mean cultural production as much as manual forms of industrial production, thus opening a space in which playing jazz becomes that labor that creates covalent bonds between ethnographer and

interlocutor. The site of struggle, in this sense, is local aesthetic delineation of Gibraltarian jazz in the face of hegemonic global definitions. The labor, as I intend to show, is that of listening. An intersubjective approach differs substantially from participant-observation. As Gibson (2006) discusses about his work on knowledge economies of jazz harmony, As a guitar player I was to some extent an active member of the jazz community, but at the time I was only a neophyte member as I had only been playing for around four years. As such, I was yet to reach an acceptable level of skill to enable me to rely on my own knowledge as a good guide to the tacit rules of participation. The challenge for me then was to somehow get musicians to articulate their conceptions of this knowledge to me. Gibson here gives a great example of participant-observation, in that he participates on the fringes of the community where he can also observe at a distance. He has enough knowledge to not need a translator, but lacks the skill to fully participate in knowledge production itself, which precludes his ability to do an ethnography of economies of jazz knowledge production, i.e. an ethnography of the labor of listening within the jazz community. Having played jazz bass for two decades, trained both informally in the jazz scenes of Peoria and Chicago, as well as classically trained in the university institutional framework, my position in the jazz community is much different than Gibsons in that I can occupy the very space of playing jazz a halfie anthropologist in a sense.vi As Saldaa (2005) remarks concerning ethnodrama, a fluency in performance facilitates new forms of knowledge exploration, a type of unwritten communication that reveals an intersubjective sense of ethos underlying spoken narratives and cultural practices. Jazz is, at its foundation, an improvisational music that requires intersubjective connectivity, whereby musicians create compositions instantaneously based on a) a pre-existing melody (which may or may not be strictly adhered to), and b) an agreed upon chord progression that follows, and transforms during performance based on, agreed upon rules dictated within jazz harmonic theory (e.g. tritone substitutions; flat-2, major-7, sharp-11 chords subbing for tonic; etc.). Jazz, in short, can

be understood as a body of tacit knowledge of how to do jazz improvisation (Bailey 1992). However, jazz musicians frequently alter melodies, chord structures, and groove (i.e. samba, swing, bop, waltz) based on responses and signals to one another. During performances, these responses and signals are not simply call and response, but rather based on the predictive ability of a group in groove or resonance with one anothers thought process (Martin 1996). This is known as listening ahead, listening to and for the future, a form of prediction based on how the group is locked in sync with one another. To do so, jazz requires a form of intersubjective listening in order to create ideal musical moments. It was through an intersubjective listening to the future that the ensemble catches or kicks figures, meaning to emphasize a rhythmic motif to the point of musical climax. As Monson (1996) states, The ongoing process of decision-making that takes place in the ensemble perhaps explains why musicians often say the most important thing is to listen. They mean it in a very active sense: they must listen closely because they are continually called upon to respond to and participate in an ongoing flow of musical action that can change or surprise them at any moment (43) In this sense, it is not the case that jazz musicians can play anything at anytime, but that they can only play what a group will allow them to, and agree to, at any one musical moment this I demonstrated in my opening vignette. vii In methodological terms, then, jazz performance becomes a form of communication that cannot be spoken, it does however reveal the norms of how we as jazz performers are supposed to listen to one another, and what we are supposed to hear. I was given the chance to begin pursuing Gibraltarian jazz as a research topic during the summer of 2011. Having already conducted research for two years prior, and making myself known to the jazz community during those visits, I was given the unique opportunity to play with the Gibraltar Jazz Society house trio on multiple occasions in the absence of the typical bass player, himself on vacation and various business trips throughout the summer. 9

Based on 70 hours of interviews with 7 different Gibraltarian musicians, countless jam sessions with these 7 musicians and many other Gibraltarian blues, jazz, and rock musicians, and numerous regular performances (or gigs), I was able to come to an understanding of Gibraltarian jazz both as part of a pseudo-universal genre of music and simultaneously distinctly Gibraltarian. Given the fact that European jazz, from a political economic perspective, has long been thought to be derivative of the United States scene, with Gibraltarians holding U.S. jazz greats as their own inspiration, and some performers at the Gibraltarian Jazz Society jam sessions being graduates of the Berklee College of Music, it should be of little surprise that there are some cross cultural regularities.viii However, although Gibraltarian jazz, in simplistic sense, may have originated from the United States, it is always semiotically regimented through a local cultural and social history of Gibraltarian listening that exists in tension with dominant forms of British, U.S., French, and/or Spanish forms of jazz (Feld 2012). The questions to be pursued then, at least in this study, are what are the historical constituents of this Gibraltar aesthetic and process of regimentation? Or, to use a phrase coined by Feld, what are the social formations and relations of force out of which an acoustemology a sonic cosmology arise? In addition to discussions of what and what not to play, and perhaps more important, were those moments performing when collective effervescence made it clear what figures to catch and what sounds to make the intersubjective labor of playing jazz. In essence, this communication beyond language allowed me to locate the acoustic unconscious, that unsignifiable trace that lies beneath the immediately-conscious musical moment (Wilf 2012), that is particular to Gibraltarian jazz. In the ways previously discussed, using playing jazz as a data collection method subverts the phallogocentrism of traditional methods by drawing on affective experience, or data collection, as evidence. It further allowed for a different form of reciprocal method that

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occurred instantaneously through performance, whereby I demonstrated a cultural competence of playing and thus listening like Gibraltarian jazz musicians and shared this understanding, through performance, with them. In playing jazz with Gibraltarian performers, who as state earlier are all men, I was able to learn to some extent the jazz acoustemology of Gibraltarian men; not just to what they listen, but deeply how they listen and understand the musical phonology of the Gibraltarian jazz language (Monson 1996). Learning to listen as Gibraltarian, or at very least in a Gibraltarian fashion, has enabled me to pose questions regarding the historically-derived indexicality of gendered noise, which may or may not be the source of womens exclusion, as I will discuss. Finally, to address the feminist potential of affect-driven performance methods in ethnography, while playing jazz creates a space for subverting phallogocentrism, it is only through a methodological political commitment to gender equity that this subversion becomes feminist. Employing a method in which personal experience is placed on par with masculine scientific ways of knowing within structures of domination can only be feminist if executed with the political intention of moving towards gender equity through the undermining and usurpation of abstract forms of masculinity. In addition to jazz performance, I utilized traditional ethnographic and historical methods such as interviews and archival document retrieval and analysis. This was not to retreat from my stance that affective methods are in themselves a valid approach to data gather, but rather to supplant my own insecurities and shortcomings in applying experimental methods as well as to meet the demands placed on me as a graduate student in the social sciences. My sample, generally speaking, was the circumscribed community of Gibraltarian jazz musicians and performance-attending regulars. To these more traditional methods, I apply a feminist methodology in that my attention is to gender hierarchies that over-value the racialized masculinity of British Gibraltarian men and the very process of oppression. Further,

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drawing from feminist cultural studies, I use gender as an entry point into understanding the interacting oppressive systems of colonialism, race, and color. Doing feminist anthropology in Gibraltar as a U.S.-based and educated male requires some unpacking, however. First, on the topic of masculine domination: In some instances, mens participation within feminist discourses has been framed as a hijacking of womens liberation through intellectual domination. While this concern is especially valid given the ways that men have attempted to gather institutional power through intellectual steering and hoarding, the opposite (i.e. mens nonparticipation) presents two other significant, and to me weightier, issues. The first is the false assumption that patriarchy, misogyny, and androcentrism only affect and oppress those with womens bodies. Patriarchy, as Bourdieu (2008) points out, is an insidious force that oppresses all people underneath that fail to attain the patriarchs version of masculinity. The second issue in mens nonparticipation is the reproduction of a sexual division of labor, through which men reap the benefits of gender equality without contributing to the political, or intellectual, labor of doing so. Through gender-turned-feminist political consciousness, men can avert this issue.ix I take this to be the case in my own study, as I use my privileged point of entry as a musically-trained man to critique the structures of masculinity that have oppressed men themselves, and served as an ideological block for Gibraltarian women jazz performers.x At issue, second, are the colonial undertones of a U.S. trained and educated male doing feminist work in a contemporary British colony. Said (1989) has broadly critiqued anthropology as a colonial engagement, in which anthropologist/colonizers search for an interlocuteur valablexi, while the colonized try to fit the colonizers categories of interlocutor and, indeed, no field is without sociocultural, historical, and political formations of exploitation. In feminist work, such as my own, this would mean that interlocutors would attempt to flaunt a

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level of gender consciousness and musicianship in order to gather the sociocultural and material capital that comes from being the anthropologists assistant. Doing research on a small community of seasoned and professional musicians and listeners that has circumscribed itself, and focusing on an issue gender hierarchy which few of them have any interest in, in some ways I found the opposite problem of chasing off potential interlocutors. Being honest of the potential that this constitutes an excuse, or a dodging of the issue, I must also admit to a level of economic privilege, as a graduate student in communication studies, which means that I certainly occupy a position of privilege in traveling to Gibraltar to study often working-class musicians through the assistance of research grants. Therefore, I do inherently reproduce structures of cultural domination that need not be rehearsed here. However, we all begin our political forays from compromised positions ideologically, ethically, politically. But politics is not simply the settling colonial, racist, or misogynist accounts. It is, instead, about using the sites of contradiction to make progress against these issues. I take my political challenge to be the analysis of those contradictions that encircle interlocutors and myself in order to transform the conditions that shape them. In short, I use my position of gendered and colonial privilege to reveal the gaps in the power structure that are articulated by contradictions between the doxa of jazz listening and wider inclusivity statements regarding Gibraltarian jazz, the Gibraltar Jazz Society, and jazz as an element of national identity and cultural citizenship.xii Performing jazz standards in Gibraltar In what remains of this essay, I will layout a history of Gibraltarian jazz musicians experience of playing and thus by extension, listening to jazz. I begin here by describing Gibraltarian jazz musicians experience of playing jazz. Koselleck (2004) defines experience as crucial to understanding history as it is lived and enacted, noting that

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Experience is present past, whose events have been incorporated and can be remembered. Within experience a rational reworking is included, together with unconscious modes of conduct which do not have to be present in awareness. There is also an element of alien experience contained and presented in experience conveyed by generations or institutions (259, emphasis added). Important here is that experiences combine both personal lived moments and artifacts of institutional forms of discipline. This is particularly pertinent to listening, which I understand to be a form of techn that both informs and is informed by, product and productive of, the British Gibraltarian acoustemology of jazz. In this sense, listening to jazz, which is foundational to playing jazz, is an experience in Kosellecks sense, as it encapsulates both individual experiences of having performed Gibraltarian jazz and the alien experience of a local aesthetic history that is not necessarily present in awareness (ibid). I have already begun discussing the experience of listening and playing jazz in Gibraltar through the post-mortem of my first bebop solo and the methods that I employ. However, to fully understand this death the jazz scene in Gibraltar needs to be given a wider context. I focus here on the weekly Gibraltarian Jazz Society jam sessions, not because it is the only space where jazz is played jazz occurs many places around Gibraltar, but because it is a) the most consistent recurring jazz in Gibraltar, b) it is the primary training ground for future jazz musicians, and thus where they learn the norms and conditions of performing Gibraltarian jazz, and c) it is the only jazz that carries the official title of the British Gibraltarian state through various forms of funding and namesake. In other words, simply put, analyzing the Gibraltarian Jazz Society allows for a perspective into jazz as an institution.xiii George, the bassist whom I mentioned in my introduction, founded the Gibraltar Jazz Society (GJS heretofore) in 2000, in light of a quickly disappearing musical tradition that had circulated since World War II. From the 1980s to 2000, Gibraltar was dominated by one jazz trio for which George was the bassist. With the passing of the pianist and the drummer, George was left with few local options in terms of fellow jazz musicians. George established the 14

GJS not simply for selfish reasons (i.e. because of a lack of gigging opportunities), but because he believes jazz has something to teach people about both themselves and Gibraltar. Jazz is not just a part of who I am personally, but part of the wider history of identity in Gibraltar. And it was disappearing. A part of our history, poof. For George, the Gibraltar in Gibraltar Jazz Society functions not simply as a signifier of geolocality where the society and jazz are geographically but rather a distinction about a particular type of jazz in a particular place with a particular history. The GJS hosts a weekly jam session/performance on Thursday evenings at the OCallaghan Elliott Hotel. Using a trio of piano, drums, and bass, the GJS opens each night with a special trio performance before inviting horn players, pianists, and drummers it is important here to note that George rarely sees another bass player, my appearance being the first for a very long time to sit in for standard jazz tunes like Autumn Leaves, Blue Bossa, My Funny Valentine. Each set of songs, approximately 45 minutes, ends with a special trio piece which may or may not include special guests, like myself. Following a brief intermission between sets one and two, the special guest remains part of the group for the remainder of the night until the closing tune, which is played by the GJS trio. During the summers of 2009-2012, the musicians and listeners present at the GJS jam session consisted mainly of Gibraltarians and British tourists/expats. Spanish musicians rarely appeared during the jam sessions, and when they were present, they were invited and paid by George to play the entire evening Berkeley graduate and jazz pianist Juan Galiardo being one example. The vast majority of musicians at the GJS jam sessions, professional and otherwise, were local Gibraltarian men.xiv On the night of my failed bebop solo, I had arrived at the OCallaghan Elliott hotel a few minutes into the first set. I waved to George to let him know that I had arrived. The trio

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had started with Alone Together, a medium swing in a minor key. Following that, they played a blues, a ballad, and a bossa. In U.S. jazz logic, the tune that would follow would be a burner called such because of its burning speed. Earlier that day, George told me that he would introduce me towards the end of the first set (as per the nightly format discussed above). Having finished the bossa, a Jobim tune that has since escaped my memory and notes, George caught my eye and gave me a nod. I became instantly nervous, as I thought that I was about to be thrown to the wolves playing on an up-tempo bebop tune a challenge for upright bass players given the demanding arm and finger strength to play dexterously at high speeds for long periods of time. George gave me a warm introduction to the crowd that had gathered, about 30 people in all, also introducing a young saxophonist named Stelios. Stelios, George said, had been woodshopping jazz parlance for practicing the tune My Funny Valentine, which George announced as the tune to be played. Another ballad? I thought to myself. U.S. jazz musicians typically avoid or skip the ballad for these types of gigs, given that U.S. listeners find the long form boring and uninteresting, and club owners find it depressing and antithetical to the mood of their establishment. I remember my nervousness being multiplied the feeling that I was being tricked. Surely we were about to play a bop tune so that I could prove my worth. I thanked George, we exchanged spots behind his double bass, and he said good luck. Good luck is not something one says about a ballad, I thought to myself. So I asked Stelios, how do you like it? Slow and not too funky he said with a straight face. And he counted My Funny Valentine off slowly. 1- [snap]-2- [snap]-1-2-3-4.

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There were no surprises. Jazz ballads present a different type of challenge to upright bassists: the prolonged chords and the fluid time require a great deal of concentration on both time and pitch the latter of which is of less concern in bebop playing and a great deal of finger strength to sustain notes repeatedly over long periods of time. These challenges are inherent in the two primary responsibilities of jazz bassists during ballads: a) playing the root of a chord (in tune, no less); and b) maintaining the time feel of the group. The first job was the simple one in this setting. The second job, the sense of time, is where I first met resistance. To give slow ballads a sense of movement, bassists employ double-time feels: playing two beats to every one beat to give the sense that a tune is twice as fast (while it remains the same speed). However, each time I set up the double time, making eye contact with the drummer so that we were connected, he would cock his head with a funny look, confused by why I kept doing that. Perhaps, I thought to myself, I wasnt setting the double time up right. So I would do it again. Nope, the drummer resisted, furrowing his brow.xv While George was quick to dismiss bebop, few words were wever aid about this moment of aesthetic resistance. Instead, it would be described by one guitarist as not feeling right. It was only through playing consistently with Gibraltarian jazz musicians, and mapping the acoustemology through the unspoken intersubjective labor of jazz, that I was able to mark the boundaries of Gibraltarian jazz not simply as an aversion to bebop, but also an aversion to conventions that might be heard as bebop-like. Although Gibraltarian musicians were always quick to turn away this explanation, usually defaulting to its just not the right time, the right time is an aesthetic taste defined by a sociohistorical process of aesthetic development qua distinction as purely an artisitic decision.

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The final tune of my first set with the GJS was one that I myself had called, Straight No Chaser: a blues tune played medium, but which lends itself to double time solos in the bebop tradition. The head of the tune, its melody, was well received. And the pianists solo was applauded. My solo, the one described above in the introduction, however, garnered curiosity in the audience and what felt like consternation from my fellow musicians. It is a reaction I would later witness in regards to another local musician often ostracized because of his inclination towards fast and technical playing. Willy is a black American he emphatically notes he is not African jazz flutist from Philadelphia, living in Spain as a basker: a musician that gathers the bulk of his money through playing on street corners in Gibraltar and Spain. Willy came to Gibraltar in the 1980s on a wim that musicians had a much easier time surviving (i.e. feeding themselves and paying rent) in southern Spain. He spent a great deal of time performing with various musicians throughout southern Spain, but rarely crossed into Gibraltar until the 1990s. During the 1990s, Willy was able to get occasional jazz gigs in Gibraltarian bars and restaurants with other Spanish musicians. Where he was originally a simple player, referring to his preference for melodies over technicality, the skill he acquired playing 6 hours of basking solo, and then 4 hour evening gigs, greatly increased his technical proficiency. By the time the GJS started its weekly jam sessions in 2000, Willy had made the switch to a bebop-influenced style, which was far more welcomed in Spain than in Gibraltar. In 2011, I unknowingly invited Willy to jazz night after seeing him day after day on the side of the road playing various jazz standards, bebop tunes, and current popular hits. Willy told me that he would happily come, particularly because it had been a while since he had seen another American jazz musician, but that he and George disagreed on all things jazz.

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Willy did not come out that night, but I told George of my extending an invitation. George, and numerous other musicians, laughed heartily. Willy will not come, he can practice scales anywhere! The reference to practicing scales refers, insultingly, to the change-running style of bebop solos. As Charlie, a regular drummer, put it, Even when we play slow, Willy plays too fast, too technical. Hes like a machine: no creativity. My initial reaction was to try to understand this in terms of racial conflict between Gibraltar and black-ness, which to them represents Africa. Yet, bebop, when I played it, was still disgusted, and my status as white researcher challenges the possibility that it was a racism directed at Willy himself. Perhaps, I thought early on, it was about policing the boundaries of Gibraltarian jazz as only that played by Gibraltarians. However, the presence of Spanish musicians, particularly drummers and pianists, makes it clear that Gibraltarian jazz is not ontologically conditioned on the musician. Instead, I would come to understand the difference as a distinction of taste. As was shown in the replacement of a bebop tune with a ballad, and Willys use of bebop in a ballad being total opposite, Ballads and bebop can be understood as defining the outer boundaries of Gibraltarian jazz. Where ballads are considered taxing to U.S. listeners, and thus an inconvenience, they exist as an alternative to the bebop style disliked by Gibraltarian jazz musicians today. Taken together with the tunes that are played, and those which are considered unplayable because of their association with bebop, there is a very clear dichotomy in Gibraltarian jazz: swing vs. bebop. Swing, while in the U.S. referring to a specific era of jazz that was dominated by big bands, is used by Gibraltarians to describe all of those songs bossa, blues, standard that are not bebop. Included in the category are an overwhelming number of songs that include lyrics, but a defining characteristic is that, if the song did not have lyrics, ones could be written and sang. Gibraltarians define bebop, on the other hand, as

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those songs with lyrics that cannot be sung because of their speed. Furthermore, the characteristic style of soloing in bebop, called change running, which refers to a solo built out of outlining chords through technical rules of theory as opposed to the social norms of melody, is regarded as mechanical noise and monotonous. As mentioned earlier, while bebop is vocally denounced by George and numerous other Gibraltarian jazz musicians, there is also an unspoken distaste to the conventions of bebop being located in other tunes (e.g. double time, chord substitutions, change running). By way of transition, I will speak to the ways in which the distinction between bebop and swing provides a map of musical taste. Taste in music, Bourdieu (1972) tells us, is a means of strategy and competition, used by elites to confer the cultural superiority by means different than purely their economic position. Preferences in music, in the neoliberal context understood to be innate individualistic choices, are actually socially conditioned, and reflect a symbolic hierarchy that is determined and maintained through various lines of force; taste becomes a hoarding of cultural capital in order to make distinct ones upper place in social hierarchies. Taste, Bourdieu argues, thus functions as a type of social weapon that defines the limits of high and low culture, music and mechanical noise. One must be cautious, however, of assuming that individuals understand the social weapons they deploy to again channel Bourdieu. In the case of Gibraltarians, their taste, formulated on their preferences through listening, is the result of what Bourdieu calls doxa, how to listen to music, or rather, how bebop as mechanical, goes without saying because it comes without saying (169). Listening, as a practice through which taste is enacted, is an articulation of doxa, which itself is a sociohistorical formation. The most insidious aspect of doxa is that individuals are brought into doxa through socialization; listening becomes a social

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weapon that reproduces existing orders of gender, race, color, and class without Gibraltarian jazz musicians realizing as much. Bourdieu continues: Moreover, when the conditions of existence of which the members of a group are the product are very little differentiated, the dispositions which each of them exercises in his practice are confirmed and hence reinforced both by the practice of the other members of the group and also by institutions which constitute collective thought as much as they express it, such as language, myth, and art. The self-evidence of the world is reduplicated by the instituted discourses about the world in which the whole groups adherence to that self-evidence is affirmed. The adherence expressed in the doxic relation to the social world is the absolute form of recognition of legitimacy through misrecognition of arbitrariness, since it is unaware of the very question of legitimacy (162). As Bourdieu points out, doxa itself hides the ways in which social existence comes about and therefore results in legitimating a particular social order by way of naturalizing a particular way of being in the world the recognition of legitimacy through misrecognition of arbitrariness. In this sense, then, the Gibraltar Jazz society becomes an institution in which listening, taste, and doxa are bound together in service of creating distinction. The question that remains, however, is what distinctions are being made, along what axes? How, in other words, is Gibraltarian jazz musicians aversion of bebop, and the Gibraltar Jazz Societys consequential denunciation of that form, bound up in a history of gender, race, color, and class? In what follows, I historically ground the conflict between bebop and swing within the racial and color politics of gender and labor in Gibraltar, using the ethnographic experiences above as an hermeneutic lens through which historical documents can be read and doxa revealed. Race, labor, color, bebop In the previous section, I ended with a discussion of the doxa of jazz listening and taste, which, established through various historical modalities, constitutes the traces of something not experienced, yet embedded in the actors disposition a key aspect of experience as described by Koselleck (2006), with whom the section opens. Having described the contemporary manifestations of this doxa, my aim in this section is to provide a historical 21

perspective on the ontogenesis of this doxa, and the distinction between racial and color lines that it enables/reproduces. My work here begins in the years preceding the 1939 evacuation of Gibraltarian citizens from Gibraltar to London, North Africa, and the Caribbean, but also requires a reference to the early days of Gibraltar as a British colony. Following the 1704 military conquest of Gibraltar by Anglo-Dutch forces, the colony was primarily home to a civilian labor force from around the Mediterranean and other British colonies. These communities maintained their own localized national identities (Stewart 1967), simply considering themselves residents in Gibraltar and not citizens of it. However, with the 1939 evacuation of Gibraltars civilian population in the midst of World War II, Gibraltarian was created as a bounded category of people to be managed by the state in other countries, transforming Gibraltarian from a reference to those who lived in or around the garrison to a technology of the state intended to control the flow of migrant/refugee bodies. When repatriated in 1944, many Gibraltarians had been fully interpolated as British either through claiming an identity or through racist forms of identification that labeled Gibraltarians in England as less than English, and not fully British. Further, the evacuation and repatriation allowed for various British institutions to replace the previously established local institutions: public education, welfare systems, and state infrastructural development investment replaced those social services provided by religious, international, and neighborhood networks. Following the 1944 repatriation, British-ness was embedded not just in identity and identification politics, but also the everyday practices of Gibraltarians. Given the complicated nature of identification in Gibraltar by the British state, I situate British-ness within analytic matrices of race and color. These categories are constructed by myself as the analyst and researcher, but are reflective to the material situations that I have

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observed in Gibraltar over the past years. I borrow, in part, from Guglielmos (2004) distinction between the two terms. By race, I am referring to the distinction between English, Gibraltarian, Spanish, Asian, and African. I use race here, despite these categories referent being nation states, because of the ways that English for instance is used to refer to particular bodies and not others. Gibraltarians, many of whom are the younger generations of Spanishand Italian- Mediterranean and Maltese families, aspire in many ways to British-ness, but state very clearly that they are not English in a way complimentary to the way English official state that they are not Gibraltarian (Peake 2012). British-ness, then, refers to something beyond English-ness. It thus makes sense to disarticulate it from race and nation. Through various interviews and the combing of archival documents, I have come to understand British-ness, or British, as a categorical designator for whiteness as a social category. As Guglielmo states, Color as I use it, is a social category and not a physical description. White Italians, for instance, could be darker than black Americans while Italians suffered greatly for their putative racial undesirability as Italians they still benefited in countless ways form their privileged color status as whites (8-9). In this sense, the striving for British-ness is an essence of negotiating the racial hierarchies of Gibraltar through a not fully congruent hierarchy of color. In Gibraltar, Spanish, North African, and Arab residents are grouped together as brown; Africans as Black; and Gibraltarians and South Asians lumped together in an ambiguous racial category that frequently strives to attain white-ness while making distinctions to brown-ness. Brown, while collapsed with Spanish, is being divided to correspond to the whiteness signified by the concept of British-ness, and the use of British from this point forward should signify the same as white. Gibraltarians particularly those of Mediterranean genealogy status as colonial subjects intensifies these politics of identification, whereby even attaining white British-ness does not ensure the same privileges as being English.

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The history of Gibraltarian jazz can be seen, not necessarily as an articulation of this history, but, as a site for its negotiation. As early as 1931, British troops had imported the dance band genre of jazz. While tied to English troops and British-ness, this genre of jazz still presented some worries in the 1930s. As W.S. Gulloch, chief of police of Gibraltar, wrote on December 17, 1931 in regards to an application for a dance hall in the Caf Universal, Dancing in public houses is not conducive to good order, and after all the Caf Universal is just a public house. What was frowned upon was not necessarily the Dance Band sound, but rather the dancing itself associated with unbecoming, i.e. un-British, behavior. Gulloch went on, I do not think that decent women in Gibraltar will go to the Caf Universal or any other public house to dance. Thus, if no respectable women were present, then soldiers would turn to either homosexuality or prostitutes (Howell 2004). In the meanwhile, the British military began its own dance bands, in order to liven up Gibraltar. As Gulloch, and an unknown accomplice listed as Russo, suggest in a letter to the Colonial Secretary of Gibraltar in 1935, As regards the extended hourse (ibid.), I am advised by Hon. A.S. that you have authority to grant permission under the Revenue Ordinance. A criticism that has been leveled at Gibraltar, particularly during out season, is that after 11pm it becomes a city of the dead. Provided that the place is well conducted and that no abuse creeps in, I do not see why we should not provide amenities which are common elsewhere, for those who like late and expensive hours. While the Dance Bands that played at locations like the Caf Universal were not military dance bands, the creation of those bands and the general acceptance of various venues for civilian and military performance alike, points to the ways in which the genre of music was accepted so long as there was no dancing. As the 1935 colonial secretary states, I am inclined to thinking that we should limit entertainments in cafes to orchestra only. If they wish to have dancing, they must take out a cabaret license, but such a license should only be issued if they separate the cabaret premises.

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He would Gulloch would later write in reply that under no circumstance should cabarets and hotels exist in the same building the connection between jazz and hotel lobbies/bars would not develop until the 1950s. Dance band music existed in tandem with the English gentlemans taste in classical music, and dance band music mimicked that musical form in many ways: dance band music had minimal improvisation, was often meticulously scored by a composer, and was near always under the control of a band leader who may or may not have been a fellow instrumentalist in the group. Furthermore, like the English gentlemans classical music, dance band music followed traditional harmonic protocol, emphasizing the 7th tone only on the Dominant (V) chord of a single key. In both its history and technicality, bebop stands in opposition to the English Dance Band tradition in Gibraltar. Historically speaking, there is no institutional record of bebops entrance into Gibraltar. As David Taylor, one of Londons premiere bebop musicians during the 1950s and 60s, stated in an interview, In the years from the 1950s to the 1960s when I was around the London jazz clubs I do not recall hearing about any musician heading off to Gibraltar and I have never come across any mention of the place in my own researches. Based on a lineage of jazz musicians gathered from interviews with George, the head of the Gibraltar Jazz Society and an active bassist in the jazz scene, this is because bebop made its way to Gibraltar from Paris by way of Spain during the 1950s. Bebop would occasionally flow into Gibraltar from Spain, but was never institutionalized, and often associated with Spanish-ness. Some Gibraltarian musicians, particularly those of Mediterranean heritage denied access to English Gentlemans culture, took up interest in bebop and played on some occasions. This was particularly true, according to George, for the Gibraltarian dock workers. Understanding again the form of distinction and taste being enacted, and that taste is informed by a sociohistorically

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developed doxa, it was by nature of their class position that Gibraltarian dock workers were unable to attain British status, and thus lacked the taste in the sounds of English gentleman. They had little stakes in that distinction project. If the congruency between dance band music and the classical music of English gentleman is drawn by the musical norms of composition, then bebop exists far outside these norms. Unlike the gentleman forms, bebop often draws from a highly technical, often deviating, harmonic language of key shifts. Further, if the scale tones of gentlemans music is within the diatonic scale the 7 tone scale that makes up an entire key , bebop mobilize surround tones and chromaticism such that all twelve tones of the musical language can be used depending on approach. The result is a music that is angular and technical in ways that tend towards dissonance; the bebop aesthetic goes so far to sometimes frame the consonant norms of classical and dance band music boring. Second, unlike the music of gentleman, bebop is highly technical and scheming in its sporadic bending of various musical rules. If the worry with dance band music was that it would insight dancing in public space, the moral crisis of bebop is that it would yield musicians with little concern or respect for the highly regimented forms of harmony and melody. Mimesis being a primary concern of the quotidian media effects theories of English administrators in Gibraltar, the dancing of the dance band would lead to its ulterior form of sex; Bebop musicians disrespect of age-old rules, or at least the expectation that rules are meant to be bent for the purpose of a particular ends, in bebop would lead at worst to revolution and revolt and at best to unrestrained aggression. Bebop, for most purposes, remained something Spanish. It, however, did not remain exterior to Gibraltar, as Spanish musicians would regularly come to Gibraltar to play with local jazz musicians. And while jazz fusion made a rise at the beginning of the 1960s, supplanting

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the evolutionary form of the dance band style, bebop remained something played by Spanish musicians regularly.xvi This residual existence solidified, for Gibraltarians and the English, the connection between bebop and Spanish and/or brown. As George elaborated, however, the relationship between bebop and Spanish brown-ness was not necessarily just an aesthetic connection. Instead, folk theories had developed by the 1960s as to the connection between the two. Principle, and perhaps most articulate of the collapse of Spanish race with brown color, was that bebop somehow spoke to the ontology of Spanish workers which included both Spanish and Gibraltarian workers, denied access to white privileges because of their class position as manual laborers. Historical documents, primarily noise complaints and letters to the colonial secretary, reveal that bebop was performed mostly in the bars and houses of dock workers. Through metaphors of noise and simplistic production of monotonous sound, along with parallels drawn between the urban din of the dock and that music that they play, it is not hard to understand a mimetic theory of music being made: Spanish, i.e. brown people, enjoy bebop because the techn resembles the work of the factory or ship yard. In this instance, bebop enters into a network of signification: IF industrial labor = brown laborers, industrial labor urban din, bebop playing : industrial labor :: bebop sound : urban din, THEN bebop = brown, and thus !(White).xvii In short, bebop becomes the musical articulation of both a colorcategorized labor form and a racialized aesthetic that are counterposed to British whiteness. These color politics are buried even deeper within the historical aesthetic politics of taste, and are connected to issues of gender and sexuality. In the early arrival of bebop in the late 1940s/ early 1950s, classical music was considered the civilizing element of English soldier life. It was, as one colonial document requiring all British troops to be exposed to the history of British marches stated, what civilized men. This civilization must be placed within a

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colonial theory of masculinity that was articulated in the division between British as white and Spanish as brown. If militarism yielded an overly aggressive masculinity, then the feminine form of classical music would serve to soothe the savage beast. Underlying this is a logic that the feminine form of classical music would serve to negate the over-accumulation of masculine symbolic capital which, as Bourdieus theory of capital goes, has material effects (in this instance, hyperagressivity). This appreciation of classical forms, then is a civilizing tool to discipline the militarized colonial male. Bebop, on the other hand, with its technical flurry of notes, signified a level of hyperagressive masculinity that paralleled colonial conceptualizations, or at very least imaginings, of brown-ness. The maddened series of notes, its relentless pursuit of the most dissonant combination of tones, signified to English ears, and to the ears of those who aspired to be counted as British, an illogical, unrestrained, even savage, aesthetic that was understood to be the expression of an ontology that threatened orderly forms of dignified society. Dance band music, as connected to classical music, stood on the white side of a musical spectrum, while bebop existed nearer to the savage aesthetic of what McClintock (1994) calls the English fetish of African Drums the sound of savage-ness. Its complex form, one can assume, allowed for its existence in brown-ness, as opposed to digressing fully into the black savage aesthetic imagined by and through British colonialism. This historical moment, or series of moments perhaps being more apropos, provides a view into the doxa that guides Gibraltarians taste in jazz, and their disregard for bebop as a genre. It makes clear that Georges description of bebop as mechanical, industrial, and lacking in soul is the articulation of a racializing project of distinction lying beneath taste. Bebop as mechanical marks the ways in which a musical aesthetic is mediated by a sociohistorical racial and color politics of sound; in short, bebop is always known through the tinting lens brownness. This brown-ness, however, is part of a matrix of color, race, and gender that speaks as

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much to white privilege in Gibraltar as it does an understanding of white masculinity as civilized and sophisticated. To be without a soul, as posited by George, is not simply a lack of soul, but signifies the ways in which savagery is both hyperagressive and illogical despite, in terms of music theory, the immense theoretical apparatus required of bebop players. To be a machine, as Charlie states about Willy, is to lack the capacity for feeling and to be incapable of true art. In short, while Gibraltarian jazz musicians understand their evaluations of bebop to be neutral aesthetic choices, their remarks are part of an invisible project of distinction that goes without saying because it comes without saying. This is particularly true of their aesthetic choices in jazz performance, e.g. their resistance ot bebop conventions. Further, the project of distinction can be located within jazz playing itself, and not just the dismissal of bebop. If one listens to Gibraltarian jazz musicians play today, and listen to the jazz that Gibraltarians prefer to listen to, the dotted-eighth note swing pattern of dance band music is a prominent figure. Less present, and often resisted, is the eighth note triplet slur pattern, which is more closely associated with bebop swing. What this points to is the way in which Gibraltarian jazz has been re-imagined, or at very least re-produced, at the contemporary moment to reflect an aesthetic genealogy of white-ness, whether consciously done or otherwise. Moreover, the preference for jazz standards and musical theatre songs (popularly referred to as show tunes), reflects a harmonic vocabulary that resonates with the dance band tradition, and often ignores the harmonic exploration and expansion of the bebop tradition. In short, Gibraltarian jazz is a project intimately tied to English aesthetics moreso than jazz heritage. This is not because Gibraltarians actively aim to erase the presence of Brown-ness, or that they are actively engaged in the racial project that undergirds British colonialism in Gibraltar, but is instead an artifact of Gibraltarians precarious position within the spectrum of

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color, and their attempt to negotiate white-ness. As Gibraltarians, George, Charlie, and other jazz musicians are not English. However, neither are they simply Gibraltarian; if one is not English, the Manichean logic of English racializing projects immediately characterizes one as Spanish in this localized case. Thus, in order to maintain access to the privileged position of British white-ness, Gibraltarians must make a distinction between themselves as British white and their potential categorization of Spanish brown. Aesthetic taste in this moment, and its subsequent mobilization in and through playing and listening to jazz, then points to the dialectic between structure and agency described by Bourdieu (1972). Gibraltarian jazz musicians are socialized, through the GJS and other forms of implicit color and racial education, to understand a particular jazz aesthetic as one that will make one a good jazz musician in opposition to a machine, and one that is Gibraltarian British Gibraltarian as opposed to other or Spanish (as the collapse of race and color). As musicians accommodate to this aesthetic, they internalize these expectations and reproduces them without forethought, later reproducing these conditions through the education of future musicians. What they reproduce in that instance is not simply an aesthetic decision, but a history of racial negotiation. Playing jazz, as premised on listening to jazz, is thus a critical labor within contested dynamic cultural spaces, known or unknown. Expectation: women & swing Jazz as a critical labor, while situated in the negotiation of race and color, is also invisibly gendered. The current state of musicians in the GJS, all men with the exception of two women an English vocalist, and a Korean pianist , is an artifact of the history of Gibraltarian jazz as the negotiation of a particular form of masculinity. Jazz, whether dance band or bebop, was outside the realm of respectable women, as Gulloch wrote in 1935. Because of the location of jazz, public houses and cabarets, women were discouraged from going to see jazz, let alone becoming a working musician in the public house or cabaret 30

which would surely compromise English and British forms of femininity as innocent and pure. Thus, historically, jazz has been the negotiation of racialized and colored masculinity with little room for women. Does it really matter, however, if women are missing from the Gibraltarian jazz scene as performers? In 2012, the first international GibJazz Fest took place, with heavy endorsement by the Ministry of Culture. Gibraltarian jazz, it would seem by the massive attendance and heavy involvement of the ministry of culture, has become a site for a project of national identity formation and deployment. Further, in terms of Gibraltarian cultural production, few forms of music are produced in Gibraltar. If jazz is to become a primary site for the production of both Gibraltarian nationality and ethos, then the absence of women reproduces the colonial idea that womens involvement in nation building is ancillary because of their location within the private sphere national discourse is undertaken in the public sphere. Koselleck (2006) argues that we must understand the present not just as a series of experiences, but also a sequence of expectations, a dialectic between what is and what ought to be, what would have been vs. what will have been. As important as experience then is expectation, it directs itself to the not-yet, to the nonexperienced, to that which is to be revealed (259); in short, the future is something produced, not something that lies in wait. Expectation, as interpersonal and structural, serves as a guide for the imagining of cultural production and the direction in which it should head, and what experiences are possible. Expectation plays a crucial role in the production of jazz futures in Gibraltar in two ways. First, we must examine the lack of Gibraltarian women in the GJS. Historically speaking, their absence is a complex entanglement of moral and racial negotation. In the case of the former, recalling Gullochs 1935 argument that one would only find prostitutes and the disrespected women of society in the presence of jazz must be understood as the beginnings of a

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sexualization of female performers. While at first this may have barred women from the scene, it came to result in a misogynistic interpretation of Gibraltarian womens role in jazz. Speaking to one male Gibraltarian jazz musician, whom I will leave un-named, provided a critical insight into the ways in which the sexualization of female jazz performers was transformed from a moral ban into a misogynistic evaluation of women as sexual, as opposed to musical, performers. Who would want a Gibraltarian woman as a jazz musician? Even if she could sing, she probably wouldnt look pretty. Worst yet, Id have to sit behind her, and if Im going to sit back here, I want a vocalist that looks as good for the audience as she does to me. This musician, here, refers to the ways in which female jazz musicians are expected to a) be vocalists, and b) exist purely for the male gaze. Women as vocalists is the product of rigid stereotypes of women attempting to be men, as well as the economic sanctions that affect women cultural producers ability to acquire the tools and skills needed to perform jazz in Gibraltar. This should be distinguished from the reality of the European jazz scene, where women play a particularly important role as musicians as well as vocalists. The latter case, women performers sexualization, is the product of the moral associations with jazz recall the difference between a dance band performance and cabaret being premised on mens relationship and interaction with the women present. The male musicians expectation of what jazz femininity constitutes, the way he produces the female jazz vocalist as sexual object, is tied into the fetishization of English femininity and the historical conjunction of sex and jazz in cabaret. If this sexualization is what lies in wait for female musicians, and they understand this to be the case, what incentive is there for women to become jazz musicians? And what might this say of an identity project based on the internalized misogyny of jazz culture? Secondly, the horizon of expectation also dictates the social imagining of what will constitute legitimate jazz, which has become an important aspect of planning the GibJazz Fest.

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Of the 7 jazz combos that is, groups with less than 10 musicians, which thus excludes the London University big band , there is only one female musician, herself a vocalist. However, this is an anomaly in a European jazz scene that includes numerous female musicians and band leaders. It is, in essence, the product of a combined lack of gender consciousness and an overdetermination of expectation of what constitutes legitimate good jazz, the latter of which is necessary to build the credibility of the jazz festival that subsequently lacks women musicians. If the GJS is to include women in its fold, and thus in the production of jazz nationality, there is a critical intervention needed along three lines. First, gender consciousness must be cultivated amongst male musicians about the project of masculinity in which they are involved, the ways in which this project yields an uncomfortable sexualization of female participants, and thus excludes women. Secondly, young women must be sought out as potential jazz musicians, explicitly encouraged to join the Gibraltarian jazz society. Surely, their sexualization and the restriction to vocalist are two barriers of entrance. But, so too is the history of jazz as a project of negotiating masculinity; women held few stakes in the initial project of distinction that constituted the jazz scene. Thus, the motivation to participate is much lower than it is for Gibraltarian men who locate an identity project within the performance of jazz and jazz listening. Finally, and deriving from the first, much must be done by way of diversifying the gender of international jazz performers and guests entering Gibraltar. If young women are to participate in jazz, they must be able to imagine themselves as participants. This involves using gender consciousness to alter the horizon of expectation not simply for jazz musicians, but for potential jazz listeners and consumers. Further, because of the lack of women jazz musicians, the diversifying of international performers should also be accentuated through direct pedagogical access with women performers for both young men and women. These three

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initiatives could create a space for the co-production of jazz nationality that, while not a single and monolithic idea, moves beyond the colonial production of women as private inhabitants who transgress into the spaces of public jazz as sexualized deviants. Such is crucial for a equitable national identity project like Gibraltarian jazz nationalism. Conclusion This essay has examined the stakes that men hold in the project of distinction encapsulated by the aversion of bebop in Gibraltarian jazz, as well as revealed the reasons for womens absence from the jazz scene. True to a feminist ethic, I have also included potential ways in which this gendered history might be overcome. Recognizing the risk of reproducing a system of colonialization where white men attempt to save brown women from brown men (Spivak 2011), I am careful to not prescribe my suggestions as solutions, and recognize that out of these a multitude of other gendered issues would spring from the matrices of racial and color politics. This is the product of the always already compromised position of a researcher-turnedjazz musician-turned-researcher. However, as I made clear in my methods, all political projects are compromised by the position of the researcher. Were we to wait until our political contradiction were resolved, little to no political work would occur. Instead, I embrace my contradictory and compromised state as a fold of white male privilege, one that, while potentially reproducing colonial structures, also allows me privileged access to the jazz community necessary of making a feminist intervention. The future directions necessary to side-step, or at very least short circuit, the colonial structure is working with Gibraltarian men and women to rectify the racialized gendered exclusions in Gibraltarian jazz nationalism. This essay has also attempted to make an intervention into the gender politics at home, particularly the gendered politics of empiricism. Recognizing, again, that the compromised position of ethnographic and historical inquiry as phallogocentrism does not preclude its political potential, I have also attempted to bring an affect-driven, feminized methodology to 34

bear on social scientific methods. I come to the conclusion that playing jazz is certainly not a feminist method, in the sense that there are no such feminist methods; rather, playing jazz, as a tool for revealing the empirical beyond the evidentiary, which is then mediated through and deployed with a feminist political agenda, can become a feminist methodology. Through playing jazz, I was able to come to an understanding of the unstated avoidances of Gibraltarian jazz musicians, and further able to locate their way of listening to jazz historically. Thus, I was able to come to the conclusion that listening reproduces a form of gender exclusion, acting as a line of force that trumps the lines of desire that constitute womens potential longing to be part of jazz. At a much broader, disciplinary level, I am interjecting in a conversation about globalization that has carried on over the past twenty years in socio/cultural anthropology, which typically ignores the sensorium. Arguments have always ensued around global forms, with a critical eye towards how global forms might be imperialistic, or how they were transformed in processes of glocalization. The mistake that these approaches often make is in ascribing a false ontology to something, such as jazz, that constructs it as monolithic; or, they mistakenly assume that glocalization is a transformation of the object to fit local aesthetics. What these approaches wholly miss is the more interesting question of symbolic mediation: why the glocalized object was considered glocalizable, or how local peoples thought of the object when it arrived. In turning a critical ear towards how gender, race, and color politics shape how people come to media forms like jazzas well as an awareness of differing social forces creating different subjective experiences along intersecting lines of gender, sexuality, and raceI demonstrate that in order to understand global forms of cultural production, we must pay as much attention to the sociohistorical construction of taste, as we do to a media objects glocalization. It is in doing so that we can bring understandings of gender, race, and

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color to bear on the question of why jazz is local in Gibraltar? as opposed to assigning jazz a false ontology by asking in what ways is jazz local to Gibraltar?
i ii

To provide further example of the gendering of approaches to knowledge, one can turn to the more recent debate regarding the word science in the American Anthropological Association mission. In a clear nod to those angry feminists who hate science, psychologist Alice Dreger suggested in a blog post on Psychology Today that Its safe to assume the AAA will not be promoting the public understanding of how human behaviors evolved, especially if those human behaviors are anything that might make some or all humans look violent, greedy, harmful to the environment, or (worst of all) sexually dimorphic (emphasis added). This, unfortunately, poses all feminist scholars or at very least the liberal ones running the AAA as anti-science, something clearly not true (See CITES). http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/fetishes-i-dont-get/201011/no-science-please-wereanthropologists iv Worth further note, while experimental ethnography, feminist or otherwise, has been used since the 1990s, they still fail to appear in the latest edition of Bernards (DATE) Research methods in anthropology, which still serves as the definitive methodological text in cultural anthropology. v This, in part, explains the strong opposition to postmodernity and the introduction of literary methods to anthropology in the 60s and 70s, based on the fear that they would transform the status of explorer men to that of feminized male literature scholars (CITE). vi Abu-Lughod defines Halfie anthropologists as those who are working in communities that they have ambivalent claims of membership or commonality. vii Goffman (1969) refers to this as musical interaction order the ways in which musicians make sense of and produce the sounds that are both improvised and that which is improvised upon. viii This is not to say that jazz is always a U.S. art form. Anthropologists have argued that global musical forms are globalized, while the music itself is often localized. Under the rubric of the collapse of difference that often haunted political economic engagements of global media, globalized media would replicate not just musical forms but also musical histories. That there are differing local histories of global musical forms is enough, according to Condry, ix According to Marxist feminist standpoint theory, all men are capable of feminist gender consciousness, because its not ontological but epistemic. Most men are, after all, raised by their mothers. What trumps the gender consciousness, and the true enemy of feminists, is abstract forms of masculinity that ascribe gender status to young men and boys. It is by undermining and/or overthrowing this abstract masculinity. x Here I use ideology in the Althusser-ian sense, whereby it means that ideology precludes the Gibraltarian womens ability to imagine themselves as jazz musicians. xi interlocuteur valable translates to valid negotiattor, and denotes anthropologists seeking out a person in a culture that can translate that culture to, and negotiate its boundaries for, an anthropologist. Often paid positions, it is supposed that locals will attempt to fit the ideal image in order to get hired by the anthropologists thus gaining material, if not also symbolic, forms of capital.
iii xii

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Im interested in institutions because looking for ontogenesis of listening is a fools errand. Instead, I am interested in the moments where particular ways of listening acoustemologies are institutionalized and the histories of those institutions. xiv Two women Oko and Angela who have two different sets of privilege. No local women. xv The second reason why this ballad was strange was that it had been used to introduce a guest (me). Rarely are guests in the U.S. introduced on a ballad, unless the guest is a vocalistxv. Instead, guest musicians are introduced through medium and upbeat songs. Towards the end of the ballad, however, I had made sense of why George introduced me. As ballads are long and slow and require a great deal of concentration on pitch and strong vibrato, an amount of strength similar to that required by bebop tunes although in different ways is necessary. Having played a ballad already, and My Funny Valentine being a longer form in a particularly difficult key, George decided to spare himself the muscle work of playing another ballad. He would confirm my suspicions during the intermission. His motivation was not solely performance-based then, but also materially based in energy/strength expenditure. xvi In 1969, after Gibraltarians passed a referendum confirming their loyalty to the British crown, His Excelency Generalisimo Francisco Franco closed the border between Gibraltar and Spain, with hopes of closing off the supply chain to Gibraltar and forcing the residents to reclaim Spanish loyalty. Occurring on 9 June, 1969 with little warning, families were divided by the border. Some of the migrant labor force had been cut off from Gibraltar, while some of the migrant labor force was trapped in Gibraltar. Those who were musicians were, according to George, overwhelmingly jazz musicians. xvii In longform, this means that industrial laborer is equal to brown laborer, that industrial labor, and thus brown laborers, yields the urban din, and if bebop playing is to industrial labor as bebop sound is to urban din, then bebop is equal to brown, and further, that bebop is the logical negation of white just as brown is the logical negation of white, Spanish the logical negation of English.
xiii

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