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Call it Swing: A Jazz Blues Autoethnography

Article  in  Cultural Studies Critical Methodologies · August 2010

DOI: 10.1177/1532708610365476

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 Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies

Call it Swing: A Jazz Blues 10(4) 271­–282

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DOI: 10.1177/1532708610365476
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Tami Spry1

Abstract
This performative autoethnography utilizes jazz swing as a method to further activate the critical processes in qualitative
research. In reflecting on my father’s 25 years as a jazz musician, I find his everyday lived methodology of swing provides
an opportunity to explore the ways in which family inheritance collides with sociocultural practices of racial inequity and
cultural appropriation. Autoethnographically re/inhabiting this space and sound with my father revealed a performative
ethos, an empathetic epistemology of critical reflection activated by the transgressive discipline of jazz. Specifically, this
performative ethos is applied to issues of racial accountability, embodied theorizing, and the ethical implications of an
aesthetic/epistemic praxis in autoethnography. More broadly, I offer performative ethos as critical pedagogy assisting in
living a critical life where issues of power and privilege are personally political and are written and rewritten daily with
others in hope of utopia.

Keywords
autoethnography, blues, jazz, performativity, critical reflection, epistemology

To play jazz you have to embrace swing. Call it democracy
and coordination under the duress of time, or call it swing.
(p. xiv)
Wynton Marsalis, 2005, To a Young
Jazz Musician: Notes From the Road
It has become clear that every version of an “other,” where
ever found, is also the construction of a “self.” (p. 23)
James Clifford, 1986, Writing Culture:
The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography
The music [jazz] facilitated what Jim Crow with its segre-
gated social practices failed to prevent: different cultures
connecting and interacting. (p. 187)
Michael Eric Dyson, 2003, Reflections
on Philosophy, Race, Sex, Culture and Religion
Co-opting, corrupting, or deeply connecting one another,
jazz in America has not been played alone. Engaged by
selves and others in privilege, prosperity, obscurity, and
side by side on a bandstand, jazz embodies what Wynton
Marsalis (2005) calls “the strange dialogue of race, jazz,
and America” (p. xv). The history of jazz is pox-marked by
white appropriation and economic control (Austerlitz,
2005; Dyson, 2003), and though the roots of jazz are firmly
planted in African American experiences and communities,
many popular White jazz musicians of the beginning and
mid-20th century, like Jack Laine, were loath to admit that
African Americans had any effect on “their” music (Carney).
The cultural context within which jazz musicians lived in
the 1930s to 1950s was replete with Hollywood portrayals
and public discourse stigmatizing jazz as “black” music
that was perfected and refined by Whites (Gabbard, 1996,
p. 78). And though there were surely White jazz musicians,
like Bix Beiderbecke, who could swing, White musicians,
producers, and club owners made money off the artistry of

In the minds of many jazz enthusiasts, whites have played a 1

primarily parasitic role in the history of jazz, becoming rich
with their imitations of black innovators. (p. 66)
Krin Gabbard, 1996, Jammin’ at
the Margins: Jazz and the American Cinema
St. Cloud State University, St. Cloud, MN
Corresponding Author:
Tami Spry, St. Cloud State University, Professor of Performance Studies,
Department of Communication Studies, MS 170, St. Cloud State
University, 720 Fourth Ave. South, St. Cloud, MN 56301-4498
Email: tlspry@stcloudstate.edu
272 Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 10(4)
African American jazz greats for decades. The word “jazz”
itself was created by a White music critic and was vehemently
disliked by Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis,
and many other African American musicians (Austerlitz,
2005; Dyson, 2003; Gabbard, 1996).
But it is the basic play of swing to float and recast a subver-
sive melody around Old World sedimented scores. And so
jazz by any other name continues the transgressive process
of interrupting the hegemonic metronome of time/history
played with a one note Master narrative. “It [jazz] repre-
sents,” writes Jorge Daniel Veneciano (2004) “an aesthetic
practice that is defacto revolutionary in the cultural sphere”
(p. 268). In the hands of Count Basie, one single blue note
can call up centuries of subversive strategies in the complex
histories of race.
My dad grew up in Detroit and was a jazz drummer for
more than 25 years, playing with such greats as Count
Basie, Billy Strayhorn, The Clouds of Joy, The Glen Gray
Orchestra, and Jimmie Lunceford. To be sure, and this is
paramount when speaking of jazz in even the most perfunc-
tory way, it is essential to know that my dad could swing.
The first question asked about a jazz musician is, “Can he
swing?” How often I heard as I was growing up, a version
of Marsalis’ decree: “The rhythm section has got to, above
all else, be swinging, because swing invented the rhythm
section. If you’re not swinging, then there’s no grip. And
jazz has got to have grip” (2005, p. 50). Dad loved Billy
Strayhorn, “Man, that guy could write a song”; he didn’t
care much for the Duke, but didn’t deny that “the cat could
seriously swing.” My dad lived a life of a jazz musician,
immersed in “an imbricate relationship to a world of jazz
music, musicians, recording sessions, club scenes, and bus
tours” (Veneciano, 2004, p. 262). And even after he put his
sticks away, I have come to see that the methodology and
ethos of swing guided who he was as a husband, a father,
and a man until his death in 2003. An orchestra of blue
notes, my dad’s life is a reverberation of race seen through
the resonances of jazz.
Coda
At the hospital, I was smoothing his long thick white
hair, my other hand checking the heartbeat at his neck.
During the last hour, his heart began to talk to my
fingertips, the beats colored by blue notes, jazz cours-
ing through his veins and into mine, reminding me
who I am and where I come from.
Though my dad tucked away his life as a musician along
with his drums soon after I was born, his everyday lived
methodology of swing provides an opportunity to explore
the ways in which my family inheritance has collided
with sociocultural practices of racial inequity and cultural
appropriation. I trace this lived methodology through his
stories about life on the road as well as his own methods of
personal accountability so deeply ingrained in what I now
see as a jazz swing personal paradigm. Living as he did,
primarily with African American and Latino/a musicians for
25 years, his stories are necessarily embedded and embodied
in multiracial issues and experiences. His stories and accounts
provide a soundscape through which to engage and rescore
rhythms of power and privilege.
Autoethnographically re/inhabiting this time, space, and
sound of my father revealed a kind of performative ethos, an
empathetic epistemology of critical reflection activated by the
passion, improvisation, and transgressive discipline of jazz.
Specifically in this essay, I apply this performative ethos to
issues of racial accountability, embodied theorizing, and
the ethical implications of an aesthetic/epistemic praxis in
autoethnography. More broadly, I offer this performative
ethos as critical pedagogy assisting in living a critical life
where issues of power and privilege are personally political
and are written and rewritten daily with others in hope of
utopia. The jazz swing of hope and desire can improvise a
critical pedagogy of possibilities (Denzin, 2006; Madison,
2005), a transgressive song in dissonance with an American
parable of racial erasure, a new old song, an autoethno-
graphic libretto with a minor chord rewriting a major one, a
post-9/11 improvisation of hope.
Last, the words, wisdoms, and sounds of jazz great Wynton
Marsalis are deeply embedded in this work. His stories
about life on the road and his advice to young jazz musi-
cians made me weep with recognition of my father. It has
been Marsalis’ conceptualizations of jazz as a subversive
and democratizing process that has served as the foundation
for a performative ethos and also for a reconnection with
and reconstitution of life with my father as a drummer, as a
musician, and as a man.
Jazz Performativity
You’ve got to play. Together. You can’t play jazz alone.
Marsalis, 2001, p. 167
The linguistic simplicity of this methodologically com-
plex statement embodies the discipline, copresence, and
cop­erformativity of jazz. As I moved further into Marsalis’
writing, his language of jazz began to reveal and activate a
deeper dimension of performativity in the autoethnographic
process/product, characterizing a performative ethos. He
continues,
In order to improvise something meaningful, I had
to find and express whatever I had inside me worth
sharing with other people. But at the time it led me to
Spry 273
a new awareness of others, because my freedom of
expression was directly linked to the freedom of
others on the bandstand. I had something to say, and
so did they. The freer they were, the freer I could be,
and vice versa. To be heard demanded that we also
listened to one another. Closely. And to sound good,
we had to trust one another. (2008, pp. 12-13)
Marsalis articulates an epistemological copresence where
musicians must play/work together to discover and enunciate
“something meaningful.” How clearly this enactment of
coperformativity resonates with performance studies scholar
Dwight Conquergood’s (2004) “ethnography of the ears and
heart that reimagines participant observation as coperformative
witnessing” where knowledge is located, engaged, and “forged
from solidarity with, not separation from, the people” (p. 315).
Jazz further activates performance as an integrated agency
of culture by “focusing on the many subtle and complex
ways that performative forms and practices have functioned
to produce, sustain, and transform relations of power”
(Strine, 1998, p. 7). This essay, in concert with the others
in this issue, responds to a call by Phillip Auslander (2006)
to utilize performance studies as a methodological lens in
music analysis. In conflating critical reflection with a jazz
aesthetic, a performative ethos emerges to make meanings/
melodies/performances with the agency and ability to tran­
sform the Old World European Waltz into a transgressive
movement remixing soundscapes of power.
A performative ethos infused with jazz expands the
concept of the performative-I researcher position where the
researcher constructs “a plural sense of self that seeks to
navigate the interrelations between self/other/bodies/language”
(Spry, 2006, p. 343) into a larger methodological process.
Jazz activates notions of performativity, “the everyday prac-
tice of doing what’s done” (Pollock, p. 43), by its necessity
of motion, “to swing means to maintain equilibrium with
elegance, to be resilient” (Marsalis, 2005, p. xix), and by its
constant creation of meaning through sound, “The notes are
merely the covering, the façade. Listen to what they express.
Then you will hear meaning. You have to search for the
meaning and there are infinite implications in each nuance”
(p. 21). Motile identities are created through dialogical per-
formance with others in context, recuperating, as Conquergood
might say, “the saying from the said” (Conquergood, 1998,
p. 3). Dialogues of sound animating and reimagining iden-
tity and culture is fundamental in jazz. “Musicians create a
dialogue,” writes Vickie Willis (2008), “where they respond
to each other through improvisation—a conversation where
one speaks, another replies, another interrupts” (p. 295). Sounds
of discord/disagreement become catalysts for a deeper swing,
a further understanding of the possibilities available in sub-
verting imperialist discourse. A collective agency is established
through the vulnerable process of breaking and remaking
rhythms of meaning, a strength in speaking the politically per-
sonal. “Swing makes you constantly adjust. At any given time,
what’s going on musically may not be to your liking. You
have to know how to maintain your equilibrium and balance,
even if things are changing rapidly” asserts Marsalis (2005,
pp. 46-47). Jazz was created through struggle and continual
refinement through subversive adjustment and negotiations
with personal and professional White commodification.
When applied as a process of theorizing then, jazz has the
potential to invigorate the methodological efficacy of per-
formativity, operating as a constant improvisation breaking
and remaking meaning “under the coordination and duress
of time” and history. It embodies a postmodern multiplicity
and fluidity of truths. There are at any given time on the
bandstand a number of truths colliding, coordinating, and
ultimately dialogically performing (Conquergood, 1985) when
seeking a deep swing. “Autoethnography,” writes Stacy
Holman Jones (2005), “writes a world in a state of flux and
movement—between story and context, writer and reader,
crisis and denouement” (p. 764). Like an autoethnographic
performative-I positionality, jazz is less concerned with
individual identity construction and more concerned with
constructing a representation of the conflictual effects and
flux of the coperformance, of the copresence between selves
and others in contexts. Marsalis (2005) writes,
Be clear about the point: To play jazz, you have to embrace
swing, and the art of swing. A group of musicians strug-
gling to elegantly dance improvised melodies in complete
rhythmic coordination as each introduces another sense of
where the beat should actually be. The ultimate give-and-
take is right there, swing (p. 49-50).
Deep Swing
A child of the Great Depression growing up in Detroit, my
dad left high school when he was 16 to, literally, join the
circus as a drummer; he moved on to vaudeville and then
into big bands. His lived experience was a complex inter-
section of class, race, and cultural appropriation. In a jazz
retrospective The Horn Man, author Laurie Palazzolo (2003)
writes, “In addition to playing with such big-name band
leaders as Jimmie Dorsey and Jimmie Lunceford, in whose
band [Kirk] Spry was the only ‘white boy,’ Spry also
worked in the Paradise Theatre [in Detroit] in an area
known as . . . the Valley where mostly black musicians
played” (p. 75). Though he spent most of his music life with
African Americans, my dad’s relationship with and treatment
of African Americans before and after music is as varied
and complex as jazz itself, subverting—swinging—both
hegemonic narratives and critical analyses of race. Consid-
ering Ken Burn’s television series “Jazz,” Ben Ratcliff
(2001) writes, “It [jazz] is to show what happens when
American whites and blacks encounter each other, not in
274 Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 10(4)
the abstract but person to person, and make some sort of
connection” (p. 1). In the same article speaking about the
lineage of jazz, Marsalis asserts “minstrelsy was ‘the begin-
ning of a long relationship between blacks and whites and
black entertainment and white appropriation of it . . . and
this strange dance that we’ve been doing with each ever
since, really, the beginning of our relationship in America.’”
Jazz infused critical/performative autoethnography may
coperformatively interrupt and rewrite lyrics of race rela-
tions. Considering my father’s experiences through a jazz
infused autoethnography revealed intricate negotiations of
race construction sometimes interrupting and sometimes
perpetuating systemic racism. A critical pedagogy exists, I
think, in those personal spaces between interruption and
perpetuation. It is a space of decision making. It is a space
that presents an opportunity for intimate self-revelation and
evolution about how learned injustices effect behavior and
thereby presents a space for personal/political efficacy.
“White and black folks can never understand who they are
and what kind of country they can make together until they
understand that they are inextricably bound to one another”
(Marsalis, 2008, p. 104). This autoethnography is a small
step in the strange dance of race; it is a personally political
give-and-take scoring some of the riffs and echoes of life
as the daughter of a White man who could most definitely
swing.
Being the “only white boy” in any situation, but particu-
larly in jazz where deep swing requires deep engagement
with others, “Ebbing and flowing, you’re trying to become
one” (Marsalis, 2005, p. 118), it may follow that my dad
came out of music with a deep understanding of the every-
day systemic complexities of racial difference. But truths
and their definitions are partial, multiple, and contextual.
Rather than a multiculturalist gloss, Marsalis’ concept of
oneness exists in the tensive counterbalance that is jazz.
Jazz is performative, the saying of the said; it is the process
of music, a motile embodiment whose sound exists in/as a
doing of oneness. Like Kenneth Burke’s consubstantiality
where the prime motivation for communication is to achieve
an always unattainable merging of one another, jazz exists
as performativity in the ebb and flow, in the alchemy of dif-
ferences in power and accountability.
And so my dad’s understanding of race resided in the
multiple ebb and flow of swing. He was the “only white boy”
when he played with Jimmie Lunceford and would tell us
kids the story of being the only man allowed to enter motels
from the front door when traveling in the South. When I
would ask him to recount these experiences, his recollec-
tions played somewhere in the “challenge of time”. Marsalis
(2005) helps,
Swing ties in with the heart of the American experi-
ence: You make your way; you invent your way. In
jazz that means you challenge time, and you determine
the degree of difficulty of the rhythms you choose to
play. You try to maintain your equilibrium with style,
and work within the flow. That’s what swing offers.
(p. 48)
Paul Austerlitz (2005), however, deconstructs Marsalis’
lauding of “jazz’s ‘integration’ as an epitome of ‘American
democracy.” He asserts that “the inclusiveness of jazz is
atypical of dominant trends in the United States, that it
developed as a counterforce to racial polarization” (p. 20).
My dad’s experience of race in America seemed to play
somewhere in between these positions. Though my father
spoke of this experience with sadness, and of his band mates
with passion and connection, indicating a racial equilibrium
on the bandstand, he never recalled protesting when this
equilibrium destabilized as he walked through the front
door of the motel and his band mates were shuffled to the
back. In Jammin’ At the Margins, Krin Gabbard writes,
“Although the image of white parasites is much too simple,
without question white musicians have reaped greater rewards
from the long history of interracial musical borrowings” (p. 66).
These rewards certainly manifested in the everyday life of
White jazz musicians who remained, for the most part,
silent in a national chorus of racism. Rather than claiming,
however, a cultural/historical relativist stance—or a “That’s
just the way things were back then, I couldn’t do anything
about it” white lie—my dad made excuses neither for himself
nor the times. He called Billy Strayhorn his dear friend, and
Mahalia Jackson his favorite singer, the prefix “Black”
absent in front of these relationships. He just told these
stories and let my siblings and I come to our own con­
clusions; conclusions which have changed throughout the
years of my own challenges at working “within the flow”
of race privilege.
So, let’s be clear, he still chose to walk through the front
door. “The degree of difficulty in the rhythms [he chose] to
play” in those situations relied too easily, perhaps, on a
waltz of White privilege. If jazz cannot be played alone,
what beat did this drummer play as he walked through the
front door . . . alone. “The rhythm section has to, above all
else, be swinging.” What did he say to Billy or Jimmie or
Don Rodrigo (the man who would later be my godfather)
when they departed the bus and parted ways in front of the
motel? Perhaps when you’re White, you can choose when,
and when not, to swing. Recall, however, Marsalis’ words,
“to be heard we had to listen to one another. Closely. To
sound good, we had to trust one another.” My dad did not
get to where he was playing with the likes of Dorsey and
Lunceford by not listening closely, or not being worthy of
trust on, and presumably off, the bandstand. So . . .
This point in critical autoethnography constitutes a cru-
cial juncture. It is a potential endpoint. Critical reflection on
lived experience has brought us to a place in this analysis
Spry 275
where a concise critique could be employed arguing that it
is the core of White privilege that unreflexively ushers my
dad into the “front door” and, further, which allowed him
the choice of whether to even consider the ramifications of
his privilege. His identity, self-esteem, and personal safety
there in the South did not require him to think or behave
differently because of his color; he could go up to his room,
smoke a joint, do a shot and forget the whole thing ever
happened. Until the next time.
Without question, this critical cultural recognition of the
embodiment of race privilege is deeply significant. But if
I stop at this point, if I turn away from my dad in this auto-
ethnographic moment satisfied with a relevant critique that
exposes the White privilege of cultural ignorance and lack
of action, I may lose the opportunity to learn more about the
decision-making process of this White man in this “heart of
the American experience.” It was impossible to act oblivi-
ous to what was happening there as they stood outside the
bus in front of the motel, of so many motels. So in that lim-
inal moment of decision making when a White person is
betwixt and between interruption or perpetuation, between
embracing or challenging his or her own privilege, what was
going through my dad’s mind? In performative autoethnog-
raphy, knowledge is in the doing, in the forging of knowledge
together (Conquergood, 1991, 1998), in the “bodying forth”
writes Papagaroufali (2008), where the “interpretive ethno-
graphic process becomes a temporally and spatially decentered
and decentering ‘co-experience’ . . . . [where] meanings are
not simply ‘conceived’ but ‘sensed’” (p. 115). Doing
knowledge through a performative ethos encourages us
back in to, in this case, the motel room, back on the band-
stand, back through the front door, to body forth into this
liminal space of decision coperformatively, to aesthetically
engage liminality to theorize possibilities.
Who is to say then, what went through my dad’s mind in
those times, and surely they were many, when systems of
power and privilege would collide at 2 a.m. at a motel on a
dark road in a small town in 1940s southern America? In
the “ebbing and flowing, you’re trying to become one” in
the lights on the bandstand, and now here in the dark, in the
dangers of the South for dark skin in this coperformative
moment, how are the stakes different for each of these musi-
cians seeking to maintain equilibrium with style? I know
my dad was deeply connected to these men and women in
a way wholly unique to musicians. What did he do with this
imbalance of time and tempo, this challenge of time/history/
power?
And what was he expected to do by the White people
involved in these particular ebbs and flows? In what ways
was my dad’s white body at risk in this racially defined
moment if he choose not to perform his race properly, if
he were to challenge the required racist coperformance of
whiteness? Furthermore, how might he have put his band
mates at risk in defying this loyalty defining moment? How
often have White people, without considering the traps of
systemic racism, tried to “teach each other a lesson” at the
expense of people of color placing them in a potentially dif-
ficult or dangerous position with a retaliatory racist (Spry,
2008)? Jimmie Lunceford’s death for example is believed
to be the result of poisoning by a racist restaurant owner
who loathed feeding the Lunceford band (Daniels, 1971).
Living as he did in the landscape of jazz, surely my father’s
success as a respected musician, as a musician who could
swing, depended on deft negotiations of these liminal moments.
Did he and the band “play” these racists through racialized
performances learned individually and then played coper-
formatively, improvising and listening deeply for the right
note, the right rhythm, the right tim(ing)e to drop into the
bridge for a solo just in time for this particular audience?
Jazz “dwells not just in one solo at a time,” notes Vijay Iyer
(2004), “but also in a single note, and equally in an entire
lifetime of improvisations” (p. 395). Surely improvisation
is a main component in the pedagogy of racial code switch-
ing. Being “the only white boy,” my dad must have spent
years observing the subversive jazz swing of code switch-
ing from people whose lives depended on it. He must have
known the consequences of the wrong note at the wrong
time. They knew the musical score for this middle-of-the-
night middle-of-the-South performance, and must have
dep­ended on their abilities to body forth together, to col-
laborate, to coperform, to swing. Many reasons may exist
for that first question, “Can he swing?”
In reality of course, I have no idea what was going
through his mind in those next mornings when he walked
out the front door, onto the bus, and then up to the band-
stand for the next gig. But I do know that critically reflecting
on the possibilities of who he may have been with others in
those contexts engenders knowledge that interrupts the
silence or hegemonic narratives of racial privilege. Ulti-
mately, he was a musician with other musicians seeking an
aesthetic oneness while negotiating the sometimes terrify-
ing imbalances of social constructions of race. Marsalis’
words, whose stories of the road mirror my dad’s in so
many ways, are played at length:
The hypocrisy, the absurdity, the shame of it all: That
was the deepest truth in jazz. And for all the smiling
and grinning and yassahing that Louis Armstrong did
onstage, that truth is in every angry, exultant, bur-
nished, blood-soaked note he played or sang. Early
Miles Davis—the same. And you know what? It’s in
the sound of White musicians, too. They knew some
bullshit was destroying the core of our national life.
They recognized that lies worked in their favor,
allowing them to make money and be known as the
“king” of this and the “number one” of that, whereas
their Black counterparts were ignored. That injustice
hurt White musicians, too, because the music that
276 Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 10(4)
they wanted to play made them want to be a part of
one America. It let them know how beautiful that
would feel. (2008, p. 105)
My dad was too good a musician not to recognize this
“deepest truth in jazz,” and that this “bullshit” was in his
favor. And though sirens go off in my head about White
folks using this argument to say “Yeah, it’s not me it’s the
system,” thus absolving themselves of personal/political
responsibility, the performative pedagogy that is jazz swings
down deep into the learning and unlearning body where
personal truths might live and change and grow, or not. For
musicians, music is the system. Being part of one America
when contextualized by a jazz musician means being part
of the difficult, sometimes painful process of negotiating
each person’s, each musician’s desire for exp­ression, each
musician’s definition of freedom, each musician’s placement
in the system of race. Rather than a multiculturalist gloss,
Marsalis’ utopia of “how beautiful that would feel” assumes
the differently rugged terrain of privilege and oppression
that each musician must traverse on his or her way to the
rehearsal hall and to the bandstand, and furthermore, that
these varied pains and privileges will be played against and
with one another in service of a (im)possible oneness, a
wholeness of sound that is jazz. Jazz is a subversive
processing of “one America” an ebbing and flowing of
power, a constant flux of consideration on what is at stake
in creating beauty.
Coda
And sometimes, his heart would stop altogether,
struck speechless at the sight of my radiant mother on
the other side saying, “Hurry up, Kirk. We haven’t
got all day!! Give those poor kids some peace!” But
even at the sight of his one true love, he was not ready
yet to go gently, not ready yet to cease the blues beat-
ing of his heart.
Jazz Theorizing
Maybe in giving me jazz, my dad gave me the reason and
potential to body forth into the racial collisions of my own
life in an attempt to transform social systems who have a
stake in producing such collisions. “It’s a matter of under-
standing what a thing means to you,” writes Marsalis
(2005), “and being dedicated to playing that even if its
meaning casts a cold eye on you yourself” (p. 59). A per-
formative ethos allows for the confrontation of pain with
reflexive critique of one’s own social positioning, to recog-
nize the necessity to be what Judith Butler (2006) calls a
“social theorist”:
When the “I” seeks to give an account of itself, it
can start with itself, but will find that this self is
already implicated in a social temporality that exceeds
its own capacities for narration: indeed when the
“I” seeks to give an account of itself, an account that
must include the conditions of its own emergence, it
must, as a matter of necessity, become a social theo-
rist. (pp. 8-9)
I could hear my dad “giving an account” of himself to
others in his music on the bandstand. He must have reco­
gnized the hypocrisy, absurdity, and shame; but his accounting
of self may have “exceeded its own capacities for narration.”
Perhaps he didn’t know how to tell this story in a manner
that would “include the conditions of his own emergence,”
a manner that may implicate him in larger systems of power
and privilege. Perhaps he didn’t want to tell this part of the
story and, surely, as a White man he was not required to.
“How do we embrace ourselves?” Marsalis (2005) asks,
“How do we come together with the best part of our past?”
(p. 65). How do we practice what Butler (2006) calls, a
“critique that exposes the limits of the historical scheme of
things” (p. 17)? How do we begin a post 9-11 improvisation
exceeding our capacities for narration with a language that
is bloated with histories of slavery and continued oppression,
a language that often does not swing, a language that pro­
duces and maintains a “n” word? A kind of word that gets
caught in the throat like a marble, preventing speech or song.
Or it’s use accumulates in the throat like shards of glass,
cutting, tearing, mutilating breath that comes in and words
that go out. Maybe what we need is a language interrupted
with empathy and compassion, with a jazz swing, with truth
and reconciliation.
Some months ago, while working on this piece, I was
talking with a student from Kenya. We were talking about
Barak Obama and I mentioned how hungry people are in
the United States for a discourse of compassion. And she
said, “Are you sure?” she said, “because you Americans are
so used to being insulted by one another, your television,
your media, your language,” she said “Africans just don’t
talk to one another that way.” I’m not trying to make a cul-
turally essentializing observation about Americans and
Africans and all of the power differentials at work in that
exchange, rather, that exchange was an interruption of
language for me, an interruption of the European Waltz of
language, an engagement of deep swing. And my heart
began to ache thinking of how numbed we are to the banal
meanness of our cultural scripts. Her observation created, a
breech, a threshold, a space where through a performative
ethos and critical imagination, we might consider hope not
as an escape for the naive but as something with such com-
passionate potential that we can only imagine it, as Dwight
Spry 277
Conquergood might say, through dialogical performance
where we debate and embrace one another through a living
communion, an embodied improvisation.
Scholarships interrupted by critical imaginings of hope
are transgressive scholarships of the body with a heart,
scholarships that collide and commune. A language recon-
structed by D. Soyini Madison’s embodied theorizing, by
Ronald Pelias’ methodology of the heart, by Dwight Con-
quergoods’ people’s ethic of dialogical performance, and
by Norman K. Denzin’s radical critical performance peda-
gogy of hope. And most important, a language made and
remade, interrupted, and continually reconstructed by us
as we trip and stumble over the language of one another’s
bodies and then help one another up, sometimes in anger,
sometimes with compassion, but always with hearts full of
new words that might dislodge a marble, or gingerly pick
out the shards of glass, trying not to get cut.
Though my dad did not pursue these kinds of new words
through language, he left a pedagogical legacy through
swing, through “democracy and coordination under the
duress of time,” under the duress of history, encouraging
an autoethnographic practice that exposes the limits of the
historical scheme of things. Performative autoethnogra-
phy provides a process for a deeper personal understanding
of the political implications of social issues. The knowl-
edge gained in critically reflecting on my father’s choices
as a musician and as a father, may provide a textual voice
of resistance to taken-for-granted assumptions about race
relations. The partial and surely contingent knowledge artic-
ulated in autoethnography constitutes a “dialogue between
self and world” (Holman Jones, 2005, p. 766) assuming
wisdom on the part of both. What did this man decide to
do with the contextual reactions to the differences in skin
during his 25 years living in a world of jazz? Autoethno-
graphically responding to that question provides an open-
ended pedagogical response to and for and with others
who might use such a rejoinder to generate knowledge in
their own critical lives.
Jazz Epistemology: The Sweet
and the Bitter
Jazz teaches empathy—you create and nurture a feeling
with other people.
Marsalis, 2008, p. 63
Empathetic scholarship connects person to person in the
belief in a shared and complex world.”
Pelias, 2004, p. 12
Jazz engenders an empathetic epistemology improvising
knowledge through a performative discourse. The words of
Wynton Marsalis and performance studies scholar Ronald
Pelias suggest a significant connection between these art-
ist’s field of study rooted in understanding performance as
a way of knowing through felt sensing and embodied listen-
ing. Michael Eric Dyson (2003) writes, “We love Lester
Young’s and, later, John Coltrane’s sounds because the
very textures they evoke on the saxophone remind us of the
human voice crying, singing, laughing, speaking and shriek-
ing, complaining, and expressing joy” (p. 188). It is in the
performance that we feel an understanding, that we con-
struct knowledge in conjunction with the performer about
why we are crying, singing, speaking and shrieking, where
we body forth into the “temporality of such co-experiences”
(Papagaroufali, 2008, p. 120) constructing communal
knowledges.
Dwight Conquergood’s notion of a “performance-sensitive
way of knowing” suggests an empathetic epistemology through
embodiment. His words provide a thesis of performance
studies where we argue that the body is the form and func-
tion of knowledge discovery, production, and dissemination.
How familiar, then, is Paul Austerlitz (2005) notion of a
jazz consciousness, where, rooted in W. E. B. Du Bois’ con-
cept of double consciousness, “’jazz consciousness’ embodies
an aesthetic of inclusion and an ethos of ecumenity” (p. xxi).
Striving for empathetic knowledge construction requires an
openness to the connection, and also to the pain and confu-
sion inherent in significant empathetic interaction with others
(Spry, 2006). Austerlitz argues that the fluidity of jazz perspec-
tives evince “a high comfort level with the natural complexity
of our multifarious world” (p. ix).
In music, the channel of openness to pain and confusion,
to remaining present within the complexities intrinsic in
cultural and political issues of power and control, is deep
listening. “In music and in life, serious listening forces you
to recognize others” (Marsalis, 2008, p. 66), and in this
recognition—whether of similarity or of difference—is the
possibility of epistemic empathy, an understanding of how
we know what we know about being with others in a system
that empowers some and controls others. In concert with
Fredrick Douglas, Conquergood articulates a kind of sub-
versive listening to the “soundscapes of power within which
the ruling classes typically are listened to while the subordi-
nate classes listen in silence” (Spry, 2006, p. 315). Jazz is
the transgressive result of subversive listening, a listening
to responses toward hegemony with Conquergood’s “eth-
nography of the ears and heart.” Within this soundscape,
differences are experienced as a continual motivation for
connection, accord, and social redress (Spry, 2006). An
empathetic epistemology allows me to critically reflect on
my father’s experiences as an opportunity to inhabit the
278 Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 10(4)
liminal conflictual spaces of privilege with an “ethos of
ecumenity.” This approach encourages the autoethnogra-
pher to seek knowledge from rather than turn away from
other’s choices to perpetuate privilege. An empathetic jazz
epistemology is an approach that engages the messiness of
being human and applies theory improvisationally allowing
for new knowledge to body forth from a wide range of
experiences.
Critically reflecting on the embrasures and dissonances
with which my dad chose to function as a White man in the
largely African American world of jazz in the 1930s to
1950s brought me to a passage by Wynton Marsalis, or
maybe it was the other way around. Reading about his
experiences on the road, living and riding across the coun-
try in busses with other musicians, caused a deep and aching
echo of my dad’s voice. Letting “the good times roll” by
laughing together, or drinking or dancing or doing all at the
some time while playing the piano in the middle of the
living room was a staple in my upbringing. Having fun and
laughing together was at the core of our family life. When
we were growing up, my mom told us girls that one of the
most important things about marriage was finding someone
you could laugh with. Growing up as both my mother and
father did during the Great Depression, I came to see the
jazz standard Let the Good Times Roll
Let the good times roll
It don’t matter if you’re young or old
Ya gotta get together
and let the good times roll,”
as a significant strategy for balancing out the bitterness and
difficulties of life. And later, after losing our mother to
cancer in the prime of her life, I found that this strategy for
balance had equipped me for the critical reflection required
in performative autoethnography.
For me, balance is found somewhere in the liminal spaces
between self, other, and context. Critical autoethnography
requires that we write ourselves inside-out by continually
reflecting back on our lived experience, putting us inside
our bodies while simultaneously negotiating the interrela-
tions between ourselves and others. Critically reflecting on
depression has taught me about balance; while in depres-
sion, I am fundamentally convinced that I have never been
and never will be worth a damn again. But somehow through
the reflections and refractions of autoethnography something
of worth returns. Performance has taught me about faith.
“At the beginning of rehearsal, one is always afraid, vulner-
able, and hoping to believe. Even, and especially when, we
don’t think we will ever make present what seems so absent”
(Spry, 2009, p. 436). Though this passage is written in ref-
erence to the loss of our child, it speaks to the embodiment
of faith in performative autoethnography, faith in a mean-
ing making process. Being skeptical of language’s ability
to represent culturally complex experience is part of the
balance of faith because rooted in imperialism, language is
often unfaithful. Letting the good times roll does not stop
bad things from happening. Seeking cultural intervention
through autoethnography does not guarantee the efficacy to
intervene. Critical reflection requires balancing the sweet
and the bitter.
The following passage of Marsalis’ (2001) then reso-
nates for me as a catalyst of critique. It suggests a way of
living that makes one expectant of the bumps, bruises, and
passionate embraces of critical reflection. From Jazz in the
Bittersweet Blues of Life:
Sad plus happy equals the blues . . . .
And there are always those who would have you pay
For having a good time
For loving a woman
For getting high or drunk
Or talking and laughing too loud
Or cussing some mother----- out
Or just for being your beautiful sweet self. Hmm.
You want to know what I was taught by all those jazz
musicians I grew up around? There is no price to
pay for life except to live it . . . . And if someone
wants to make you pay a price for how you live,
fuck em.
And the blue-edged blade of love, him cut sharp both
ways.
Sweet and the bitter.
And when it cuts you to the bone
And you can still make love as if the bite of that
blade is what opened your heart for the first time
and set your blood on fire
and set your soul free
And when every time you play is like that time
then you gon’ find jazz in the bittersweet blues of life.
(pp. 159-160)
I read this for the first time in Chicago O’Hare airport on
a two and a half hour layover from the 2008 Congress of
Qualitative Inquiry and literally had to put my hand over
my mouth to hold in the sound as I wept hard at the reco­
llection of my dad telling me nearly the same thing when
I was 20 years old. Watching me move through the world
as a performance artist, as well as the sometimes bitter
stages of living, he told me that if you are going to try stick
your head above the crowd, you have to be ready for
someone to want to knock it off, to be ready for “those who
would have you pay”. And he would tell me in no uncertain
terms they don’t matter, because the only price for life is to
live it, passionately. If that blade cuts, then shedding blood
lets you know you’re alive; never ever give up on your art,
Spry 279
your voice, keep a tight grip on the blade of love, “Jazz has
got to have grip.” His words have walked me through the
bitter shadows of grief (Spry, 2009) playing a slow low beat,
just a soft circular brush stroke on the skin of the drum, just
enough to guide me in looking forward and back, critically
forward and back; and then, of course, with an ease of style
born of swing, glide past those who would have us pay for
the yearning to understand both the bitter and the sweet.
The following piece is a little of the sweet. Performative
autoethnography can also be a catalyst for critically refl­ecting
on origins of love, another partiality in the search for balance.
Cherry Red
Coleman Hawkins said he approached show tunes as if he
was making love. You have got to have control of time to
deal with love, man.
Marsalis, 2005, p. 50
It was, I guess, a performative ethos that taught me
about love. My mom would be in the kitchen, or
maybe doing a crossword puzzle. And then my dad
would begin a low slow boogie base blues. Though
he would begin many songs on the piano this way,
there was always something deeper, something sweeter,
something velvet, something that I now know was
sensual, embedded in this particular beat. He was
playing the jazz standard “Cherry Red.” Oh good-
ness. And though my mom didn’t always pay close
attention when dad sat down at the piano, when this
beat would begin, her body moving about the house
would shift, slightly, as if my dad had whispered
something to her, as if he were using the brushes in a
slow circle around the face of the drum.
By the time that my dad got to the line “rock me
momma, till my face turns cheeaarryyy red,” my mom
would be puttering closer to the piano saying, “Oh,
Kirk! Oh, stop that!” in a feigned modesty as she gig-
gled and poked my dad’s laughing shoulders, who
then patted her on the behind if she got close enough.
Though as a child I could not know the sensuality of
that song, I surely knew that it had to do with love and
joy and bodies, and that it was in the engagement of
bodies together, playing, swinging, swaying, being,
that the love was created; it could not be created alone.
By the time I was 10 or so, this baseline had
become a comfort, a lullaby, a chord plugging me into
the deep good time texture of life, of swing. I would
realize much later, that this was the clearest and
sweetest expression and explanation of love and sex-
uality that I could (and ever would) have ever received
from my parents. “It starts with an embrace” (Marsalis,
2005, p. 61).
Braiding a yearning for jazz in the bittersweet blues
of life with critical reflection and the culturally repre-
sentational anguish of language, is to swing; it is
“equipment for living” (Burke, 1972), equipment for lis-
tening to, and interrupting, “the hypocrisy, the absurdity,
the shame of it all”. Louis Armstrong, an accomplished
artist of collage as well as one of the greats, “had devel-
oped an ‘equipmental’ attitude toward the things around
him . . . empowering metaphoric tools of self-naming
and self-referencing” (Veneciano, 2004, p. 263). Articu-
lating the bittersweet is to live a critically reflexive life,
to college chords and discord with those things lost and
found around you, to develop an openness to a pedagogy
of possibilities, a learning from one another about
what is possible, swinging, together, in a post-9/11
improvisation.
Towers
(Written in 2002 as part of a larger work on loss, “Bodies of
Loss and Life”)
People of the towers,
those who flew,
those who jumped,
those gone from the blast,
those who heard death roaring down upon them from
above,
I want you to know that I think of you
almost daily.
I want you to know
that I have had to hold on to my grief for you.
I haven’t allow myself to feel it
because as soon as the
dust settled,
as soon as your ashes were ashes,
my grief was stolen from me,
our collective grief was stolen
and sold back as plastic flag stickers
from Wal-Mart
for someone’s SUV pick-up truck squad car.
Before we could even get to the funeral,
our grief was car-jacked
and driven away
as fodder for a war machine.
Sand of the Ages was kicked in our faces
and we were boiled in (greed for) oil
before we could ever understand
a world without you.
People of the Towers,
we raise our heads from the ashes,
our faces covered with the dust of souls,
our empty arms embrace
your furious absence.
280 Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 10(4)
Blues Episteme
Many come to scholarship from a space of pain. Like
bell hooks (1994), “I came to theory desperate, wanting to
comprehend—to grasp what was happening in and around
me. Most important, I wanted the hurt to go away. I saw in
theory then a location for healing” (p. 59). The blues req­
uires that we reflect on pain and how it got there. But if you
stay there, then it’s not the blues, it’s just pain. It’s not auto-
ethnography, it’s just pain. The blues is an aesthetic
theorizing, a rising from the shadowlands, a living from the
death of a child, an interruption of a language with a “n”
word. “The blues recognizes the importance of human
will,” writes Marsalis (2005), “It says, ‘I’m down now. But
I can always get up.’ Not, ‘I’m down now. I might as well
stay down.’ If it did that, it wouldn’t be ‘the blues.’ It would
just be ‘blues.’ The ‘get up’ part is what makes it ‘the blues’”
(p. xix). It was not until many years after my mother died
that I began to write myself out of the stifling pain of her
death (Spry, 1997). Critically reflecting on that pain allowed
me access into the complexities of family, gender, class,
and race.
A jazz improvised performative ethos addresses a
personal/political social praxis of pain. The more I began
to critically reflect on my own pain, the more I engaged
the blues, the more I realized the ways in which my own
struggles were connected to, and inherently part of larger
sociocultural pains, confusions, and disconnections. Each
time I followed the string theories of my pain, I would find
its ends woven into (t)issues of gender, race, class, religion.
And in following these strings, I would often find healing in
copresence with others. But, when discussing the democra-
tizing of theory, hooks (1994) reminds us, “Theory is not
inherently healing, libratory, or revolutionary. It fulfills that
function only when we ask that it do so and direct our theo-
rizing towards this end” (p. 61). Jazz, as an art, requires
craft in collaboration with others. It provides an apparatus
to pose and engage the questions of our lives as they con-
verge with others; but “it fulfills that function only when we
ask that it do so”. To be inherently healing, libratory, or
revolutionary, jazz, like theory, requires attention to the
aesthetic to be epistemic. Vickie Willis (2008) notes “The
ideas created in jazz are as varied as the ideas created in
spoken conversation, and can require that the musician be
not just an excellent conversationalist, but also an excellent
writer” (p. 295). Performance studies practitioners have
worked with the embodiment of emotion in the production
of knowledge for centuries, and are aware of the potential
dangers when expecting the expression of emotion in res­
earch to stand-in for aesthetic acumen. Emotion is not
inh­erently epistemic. If you stay there, then its not theoriz-
ing, it’s just pain. Though Marsalis (2005) writes much about
the necessity of emotion in jazz, he also cautions,
I’ll talk about one of the great misconceptions of
music—the supposed battle between technical profi-
ciency and emotional reality . . . As much as I may
urge the connection with emotion and feeling, keep in
mind: Emotion and feeling don’t make up the whole
story, because if you can’t play the notes and the har-
mony, you’re not going to be like Charlie Parker.
You’ll just be inept. (p. 21)
Jazz underscores, and surely, embodies the argument of
the aesthetic crafting of—for autoethnography—language as
an ethical imperative, as a movement of embodied art crafted
within and between the representations of power and
powerlessness. Performative autoethnography exists, as
Craig Gingrich-Philbrook (2005) asserts, in the aesthetic/
epistemic double bind. Audre Lorde (1984) would assert
that “poetry is not a luxury”; the art of language is a must, it
is an act of integrity, art is an ethical imperative. Autoe­
thnography is critically performative when experiences are
aesthetically crafted to reveal the personal as political, the
private as public analysis, or the emotional as epistemo­
logically evocative.
In a jazz rich performative ethos, perhaps technical pro­
ficiency and emotional reality collapse into one another
in such a way that we cannot tell where one begins and
the other ends, the sensual and the technical giving in to
one another’s desire. Such a collapse occurs for me when
I read Della Pollock’s doing of performative writing. With
this project in mind, as I reread her “Performing Writing,”
its rhythms, its cadence and “grip” found me critically
imagining the familiar and terrifying precipice of “live”
performance. Her words (1998, pp. 75, 79) call up my exp­
erience in italics.
At the brink of meaning
Just before you walk out onto the stage
poised between abjection and regression,
the moment in between the lights going down
and the sudden and terrifying certainty of your own
failure,
writing as doing replaces writing as meaning
you walk out on stage
writing becomes meaningful in the material,
you lift your heart with your instrument
Spry 281
dis/continuous act of writing.
and begin . . . . to play
to write beyond textuality into what might be called
social mortalities, to make writing/textuality
speak to, of, and through
pleasure, possibility, disappearance,
and even pain.
In other words,
to make writing
perform.
and you begin to swing.
Postscripts for Improvising
Jazz, performativity, the blues, copresence, emotion: the
aesthetic and the epistemic cut sharp both ways causing us
to care too much, or not enough about the ways we treat
each other’s skin color/pocket book/politics/sexuality. But
together, these things create a performative ethos that can
serve as a lens, a methodology, a “grip” in revealing the
love and hate and absurdity and profundity of post-9/11
life. My dad never quite understood what I did in academia
unless I was performing; and I never consciously under-
stood that it was a jazz swing of hope and desire, an emp­athetic
method of critical reflection activated by the passion, imp­
rovisation, and subversiveness of his music that made me
want to go out there in the first place.
“How do we embrace ourselves?” Marsalis asks. “How do
we give an account of ourselves?” asks Butler (2006). Surely,
critical ethnography, performative autoethnography, and
other critical narrative qualitative methods provide ways of
addressing these questions. Infusing jazz into such methods
can further activate the doing of meaning together in perfor-
mativity. Jazz swings off the bandstand into the audience and
beyond, asking us to listen to the down beat under hegemony
where the subaltern is practiced, perfected, and played as
the counterpoint to monologic one note systems of control.
Perhaps as in jazz, giving an account of ourselves, or
self-crafting with others in context is a matter of timing.
Timing is everything in jazz, and its downbeat exemplifies
the inherent subversiveness of jazz. In this vein, Marsalis
and Butler might do meaning together in the swing of time,
self, and context; Marsalis and Butler,
Self-crafting takes place within the context of a set of
norms
Actual time is constant.
that precede and exceed the subject.
Your time is perception.
These are invested with power and recalcitrance,
Swing time is a collective action.
setting the limits to what will be considered to be an
intelligent formation of the subject
Everyone in jazz is trying to create a more flexible
alternative to actual time. (p. 17)
within a given historical scheme of things. (p. 17)
You make your way; you invent your way. In jazz that
means you challenge time, and you determine the degree
of difficulty of the rhythms you choose to play. (p. 48)
Coda
And then, my two fingers, foolishly—as only the body
can be—believed they had submerged into the very
flesh of his dear heart, and once there, believed they
spoke to him in a way that only bodies can, sharing
the skin of their lives, knowing that they are each other,
hearing the beat from underneath the skin of the drum,
inside the body where language cannot go, places
where mother’s bodies speak to their children, and the
place where, in that speechless moment, my fingers
heard his final grace note, a bluesy last riff from one
of the greats. And as he left I could hear him say, “Cool,
man! Yeah, baby! Go!” “Yeaaaaahhhhhhh . . . .”
My dad could swing.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with res­
pect to the authorship and/or publication of this article.
Financial Disclosure/Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research and/or
authorship of this article.
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Text and Performance Quarterly, 17, 361-365.
Spry, T. (2006). A performative-I copresence: Embodying the
ethnographic turn in performance and the performative turn in
ethnography. Text and Performance Quarterly, 26, 4, 339-346.
Spry, T. (2008). Systems of silence: Word/less fragments of race in
autoethnography. International Review of Qualitative Research,
1(1), 75-80.
Spry, T. (2009). Bodies of/as evidence in autoethnography. Inter-
national Review of Qualitative Research, 1, 425-445.
Strine, M. S. (1998). Mapping the “cultural turn” in performance
studies. In S. Dailey (Ed.), The future of performance studies:
Visions and revisions (pp. 3-9). Annandale, VA: NCA.
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thetics of swing. In R. O’Meally, B. H. Edwards, & F. J. Griffin,
(Eds.), Uptown conversation: The new jazz studies. New York:
Columbia University Press. pp. 97-114.
Willis, V. (2008). Be-in-tween the spa[]ces: The location of women
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Bio
Tami Spry is a professor of performance studies at St. Cloud
State University currently working on a book, Body/Paper/Stage:
Doing Performative Autoethnography. Her publications appear in
Text and Performance Quarterly, Qualitative Inquiry, Interna-
tional Review of Qualitative Research, and Women and Language
as well as various anthology chapters.