Race and Rhythm: The Social Component of the Swing Groove

Abstract

Recent explanations of the elusive rhythmic quality known as swing have tended to avoid explicit discussion of race, though use of the term inevitably carries racial meanings. This paper seeks to develop a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between race and rhythm in jazz and black music, more generally. It pursues a rapprochement between a music‐theoretical understanding of the “music itself” and the social and political work it does as a component of identity formation. To this end, it draws upon a “theory of practice” derived from ethnographic social theory and presents a model of social‐interactive processes in music derived from communications theory to clarify the relationship between the aesthetic effects of jazz rhythmic expression, on the one hand, and the ways in which those particular effects are invested with racial meaning, on the other.

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