Media Review Essay

Abstract

For much of the past one hundred years, film has played a central role in turning jazz musicians into recognizable cultural figures, condensing their lives into formulaic narratives of genius and tragedy. In his 2010 book Jazz Icons: Heroes, Myths and the Jazz Tradition, Tony Whyton argues that audiences’ experience of jazz is heavily influenced by the symbolic power of venerated iconic figures like Duke Ellington and Miles Davis. For Whyton, the process of mediation – the representation of jazz artists in recordings, film, photographs, etc – is essential for creating and maintaining this symbolic power. At the same time, the prevailing ideology of jazz as an autonomous art form and the romantic mythology of the “jazz life” insist on jazz as an unmediated experience of idealized genius. This insistence on jazz as unmediated experience leads, Whyton argues, to an erasure of the difference between “the star on stage and the living person backstage”: