How Do We Sound? How Do We Listen?

Abstract

How Do We Sound? How Do We Listen? Sherrie Tucker Thank you, Tracy, and thank you, everybody—and thank you to the faculty at the Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice for this incredibly reflexive, inspiring, interactive discussion of how you approach pedagogy through your work in this teaching and learning environment that is unlike any other. Your work veers dramatically and urgently away from the dominant models of jazz performance training. I just kept thinking, is this what their department meetings are like? Can we Zoom in? Just amazing discussion, openness, spirit. I took so many notes—your conversations are so unlike much of what is out there. And I want to thank the organizers of this incredible two-day event to spend quality time thinking through issues of jazz and gender justice with Black women at the center of jazz, jazz education, and jazz studies—and this conceived as a return—not as “breaking news, this just in!” Black women have been at the center of jazz, jazz studies, jazz and gender studies, jazz and racial justice studies, social justice studies, and social justice organizing for decades, recognized or not, in a continuum that is as old and as new as jazz itself. From my perspective, Black women have been at the center of the critical turn in jazz studies for at least thirty years. It’s been great to see so many of the people who I associate with this turn on this program. You have been at the center of developing frameworks for remembering and knowing the Black women at the center from before you were born. As we’ve heard again and again over the last three days, through the lens of Black feminist theory and praxis, centering Black women is not a narrowing but an expanding. It is capacious. A jazz that centers Black women, and Black feminist theory and praxis, returns and propels us toward a capacious jazz. Yesterday, Angela Davis talked about how “jazz helps us to feel differently,” an important part of “community-building projects.” She said, “It allows us to feel [End Page 86] what we cannot always put into words” and that jazz is a “practice of freedom.” Yesterday, we heard several rich discussions about Black feminist theory and praxis— and how it means many different things to different people and changes over time, while identifying some key principles. Capacious—such a beautiful word—kept recurring: the idea that Black feminist theory and praxis was not always inclusive in the same ways, but that it has been capacious in the tenet that freedom for Black women would mean freedom for everyone. The “everyone” has expanded at times, which is another principle: that Black feminist theory and praxis is responsible to changes in consciousness and expanding notions of inclusion. Robin D. G. Kelley offered a concise working definition of Black Feminist Thought yesterday as, and this is what I wrote in my notes, that [Black feminism] was “an interrogation into all forms of oppression and possibility that is born of Black women’s refusal to accept other people’s definition of who of they are.” That is a different kind of identity politics than an essentialist identity politics. It is also a different kind of identity politics than a universal, “everyone is the same” politics. This goes back to Barbara Smith’s explanation of identity politics, as put forward by the Combahee River Collective, as the assertion of a “right,” as Black women, to “create a politics that is absolutely aligned with our own experiences as Black women—in other words, with our identities. That’s what we meant by ‘identity politics,’ that we have a right. And, trust me, very few people agreed that we did have that right in the nineteen-seventies. So we asserted it anyway.”1 To acknowledge Black women at the center of something, is a fundamentally different move than the “other people’s definition” that habitually welcomes Black women as new arrivals to a space created without them. Centering and entering yield very different orientations. A shift in centering—who is perceived to have already arrived and belong—necessarily shifts an understanding of...