Toward Jazz’s “Official” History: The Debates and Discourses of Jazz History Textbooks

Abstract

he emergence of the “new jazz studies” over the last decade has seen an increasingly pointed critique of the historiography of the music, and of the construction of a canonical history of jazz in particular. While the “new jazz studies” does not have a definitive starting point, many attribute it to the emergence of Krin Gabbard’s 1995 Jazz Among the Discourses, which in the words of one reviewer, represented a “compelling critique of the modernist [jazz] canon.”1 Indeed, Gabbard himself lays out such a critique early in his introduction to the volume, arguing that the blame for the “jazz canon” lies with a desire to legitimize jazz by classicizing it:

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