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Kelsey Klotz, "Dave Brubeck and the Performance of Whiteness" (Oxford UP, 2023)
01:09:36
An interview with Kelsey Klotz
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- [00:00]
Nathan Smith
Well, the holidays have come and gone once again.
- [00:02]
Kelsey Klotz
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- [00:06]
Nathan Smith
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- [00:09]
Kelsey Klotz
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- [00:12]
Nathan Smith
You get it now, you call it.
- [00:13]
Kelsey Klotz
An early present for next year.
- [00:15]
Nathan Smith
What do you have to lose?
- [00:16]
Kelsey Klotz
Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch limited time, 50% off regular price for new customers. Upfront payment required $45 for 3 months, $90 for 6 month or $180 for 12 month. Plan taxes and fees. Extra speeds may slow after 50 gigabytes per month when network is busy. See terms.
- [00:30]
Marshall Poe
Hello everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form, and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Nathan Smith
Hello, I'm Nathan Smith, host for the New Books Network. I have the pleasure today to speak with Kelsey Klotz, Lecturer of music and the Assistant Dean for Inclusive Excellence for the College of Arts and Architecture at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Today we're going to talk about her new book, Dave Brubeck and the Performance of Whiteness, which was just published by Oxford University Press earlier this month. To steal some good words from the inside flap. How can we jazz fans, musicians, writers and historians understand the legacy and impact of a musician like Dave Brubeck? It is undeniable that Brubeck leveraged his frame as a jazz musician and status as a composer for social justice causes. In doing so, he held to a belief system that during the Civil Rights movement modeled a progressive approach to race and race relations. It is also true that it took Brubeck, like others, some time to understand the full spectrum of racial power dynamics at play in post World War II, early Cold War and the Civil Rights era America. Dave Brubeck, in the Performance of Whiteness uses Brubeck's performances of whiteness across his professional, private and political lives as a starting point to understand the ways in which whiteness, privilege and white supremacy manifested in mid century America. How is whiteness performed and reperformed? How do particular traits become inscribed with whiteness? And further, how do those traits, now racialized in the listener's mind, filter the sounds a listener hears? To what extent was Brubeck's whiteness made by others? How did audiences and critics use Brubeck to craft their own identities centered in whiteness? Drawing on archival recordings, records, recordings and previously conducted interviews, author Kelsey Klotz listens closely for the complex and shifting frames of mid century whiteness and examines how they shape the experiences of Brubeck's critics, audiences and Brubeck himself. Throughout, Klotz asks what happens when a musician tries to intervene using his privilege as a tool with which to disrupt structures of white supremacy, even as whiteness continues to retain its hold on its beneficiaries. And with that, Kelsey Klantz. Welcome.
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Kelsey Klotz
Thank you so much. I'm happy to be here.
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Nathan Smith
Great. Can you start us off by telling us a little bit about yourself and how you got into this project?
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Kelsey Klotz
Absolutely. I think this project kind of fundamentally starts in the place that a lot of, I think a lot of projects start for early career scholars. It started in a, in a graduate seminar when I was working on my PhD at Washington University in St. Louis. I was writing a paper on the Lewiston Stadium concerts. There was one particular concert that Dave Brubeck did with Louis Armstrong. And I thought that that was a really interesting combination of artists and performers. And as I was working on these two artists for this paper, both Louis Armstrong and Dave Brubeck, I think I kept finding myself drawn to Brubeck in part because I felt like he was telling a really interesting story that hadn't really been told at that point. So we're talking about almost 10 years ago and the research on Brubeck at that point was sort of a good biography. A few articles here and there, a couple of thesis theses and not a lot else. So there was a lot of Room to sort of play. So after that I took a sort of day trip to the Brubeck Archive in Stockton, California. The AMS conference was in San Francisco that year. So I just sort of extended that a little bit just to kind of check things out, see what that collection was like. And that collection turned out to be massive and was just very, very interesting and, and had just so many different kinds of documents. And so that really began the focus on. On Brubeck. The dissertation kind of focused on cool jazz a little bit more broadly. So I was talking about Brubeck alongside Miles Davis and the modern jazz quartet. And when I looked to kind of take this into a book form, I was really thinking about, you know, what I was trying to think about what jazz studies needed at that moment. So I was thinking about the book in about, you know, 2017, 2018 in that time period. And in jazz studies we are, we are lucky to have just a really, just a wealth of lots of studies dealing with race, but particularly dealing with unpacking sort of the primitivist stereotypes and languages and discourses that previous jazz historians had kind of begun the history of jazz in. And there wasn't sort of a sustained look at whiteness. And particularly in 2017, 2018, in the kind of after, after the. The killing of Michael Brown, as Black Lives Matter was becoming more and more of a movement, it didn't feel like we needed another white scholar to talk about blackness. And so I decided to kind of take Dave Brubeck and continue down that path and really think about what it means to analyze whiteness in jazz studies.
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Nathan Smith
Sure. Oh, that's lovely. And to, I guess to kind of like get started on that track. Your introduction was. It's a wonderfully succinct overview for critical race theory, critical whiteness studies in particular, and feminist theories of performativity that you use in describing this implication of individuals like Brubeck within larger socio cultural structures, like, as you call it in the book, mid century whiteness in particular. Can you start telling us a little bit about how Brubeck functions in this regard? Like what about his career is enlightening for articulating or highlighting mid century whiteness and maybe what mid century whiteness is.
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Kelsey Klotz
Absolutely. So in the introduction, what I'm trying to do is kind of explain that whiteness can be theorized as a performance. So essentially these sort of spoken and unspoken rules, behaviors, speech, acts that white people define, they redefine them over the course of centuries. And so these behaviors and acts sort of constantly recirculate as habits. They build on the performances of other folks and they understand the racialized body or the racialized institution as a site of legacies and behaviors and acts that again, they build constantly on one another. So when I'm thinking about mid century whiteness, there are particular performances or collections of performances that we see just done over and over again that, that really kind of signal whiteness that show us whiteness. So in Brubeck's career, what I thought was really interesting with Brubeck and why I've, you know, found him to be a really fascinating person to focus on is that we consider him to be a good white person. Right. Like capital G, capital W, good white person. And this is kind of on the work of Shannon Sullivan and a little bit on Robin d'. Angelo. But we consider him to be that way because he. He sort of performs certain acts of goodness. He performs certain acts of what we might call now anti racism. But he's also at the same time that he's sort of becoming really invested in the civil rights movement. He is also at the same time still in. Embedded in a white supremacist structure, whether that is society writ large or the music industry more specifically, that his performance is always going to be sort of mediated by everything that's going on around him.
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Nathan Smith
No. Yeah, I mean that's in the chapter very nicely outlines that exact issue. It's, you know, that I think that was my favorite bit where you. Especially where you talk about how much, you know, you like. I think there's a bit where. What do you call it like loving and seeing Brubeck perhaps was the end of the introduction. So it's something to that effect where you just talk about your own relationship with doing this. Oh, loving Brubeck. Yeah, Here it is on page 29. And you just talk about your own relationship to getting to know someone. Loving the music, acknowledging good acts. Good acts in, I guess the good white person acts, as you're saying in the scare quotes. All those things can still happen while still trying to unpack how that doesn't excuse someone from these larger structural issues. And you do a lovely job throughout the entire text of pulling those two things apart. It's like Brubeck did a good thing. But also here are some other, you know, it's. You can't escape from this larger structure that enables, you know, him to do the good thing in the first place. The so called good thing. I suppose.
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Kelsey Klotz
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. That was something. It's important to me because he. Yeah, he is of it. He is of a time, we might say of the mid century. And it's not. Yeah, it's not my goal to kind of say, well, how dare you not do X, y, z things or keep these things in mind when it's, you know, 70 years ago. But at the same time, I think that ultimately what's. What's important to me is that we can learn from what he is doing, that we can kind of see these performances. And by performances, by the way, I don't necessarily mean them to be disingenuous, tenuous in any way. They might be incredibly thoughtful and incredibly meaningful to that person, but they are still sort of, when viewed collectively, something that we see sort of performed by white people and over and over again, but that these performances are something that we can continue to learn from. And I think that he in particular does. His career has so many places where we. We have. Have those moments of really kind of thoughtful reflection on. On what he's doing and. And what he might have otherwise done.
- [13:57]
Nathan Smith
Yeah, lovely. All right. I guess to jump. Jump into some of these performances and some of the. Some of the tensions and the historical details. So your first chapter, which I should add, as someone who recently led discussion sections on the Dave Brubeck Quartet in conjunction with the Modern Jazz Quartet for the jazz history class Tfing with Michael Veal, I found this first chapter, like it was the perfect coincidence of having to lead this discussion, like breakout group, while being able to review your book and your text was invaluable in helping articulate and differentiate between these two groups that are so often just kind of lumped together as, oh, yeah, here's that cool quasi contrapuntal third stream thing. So on a personal level, it was the right time, and I love this chapter, but to open it up to the. To our listeners. So how did the critics, like jazz critics in particular at the time, leverage terms such as swing, counterpoint, fugue, et cetera in characterizing and thus racializing these two different groups?
- [15:20]
Kelsey Klotz
Absolutely. It was really all about who they used those terms to describe and sort of again and again in my work on cool jazz broadly, it was sort of kind of looking first at, okay, how are these jazz critics describing cool jazz? And it was again and again sort of using terms from European classical music or describing it to your. With European classical music or composers and. Or thinking about sort of moderation and control, that all of these were the words to describe cool jazz in the beginning. And they're also overwhelmingly listing white jazz musicians as doing this now. Something that I found really interesting was that that wasn't the case in the very beginning for cool jazz. That in the very beginning for cool jazz, the. The first jazz critics are actually saying, well, actually, Charlie Parker, he's like the progenitor of cool jazz, that he is performing cool jazz. And so there was this narrative that. That emerged in the very beginning, for the first couple of years that that kind of said, yeah, Charlie Parker is doing cool jazz. And then, you know, we had Miles Davis, and Miles Davis is doing cool jazz. And so it was much more of an integrated conversation about the performers who were. Who were doing cool jazz. But by. By the time we get to the early 50s and the mid-50s, when Brubeck is really coming of into his career, that's when we really see this narrative solidify around cool jazz and white performers. And what that does, what that is done to do is, or how that's done is sort of through words like fugues and thinking about counterpoint, that these kind of specific European classical terms are. You know, these white musicians are performing them in jazz. And isn't this amazing? And then you have this sort of narrative that comes with that, that's just sort of adjacent to it that says, and because of all of these European classical elements, this is really thoughtful jazz. This is jazz that is intellectual. And isn't this just so much. This is. There's a very kind of progressive narrative of like, oh, jazz was born in the brothels. And it's progressed now to this fully mature form of jazz. Like, it's very clear in its. In its language. And so the way that the modern jazz quartet comes into this conversation in chapter one is that while the Dave Rubek Quartet is doing things like improvised counterpoint, and I, and I go into all of that and what that actually sounds like and how that works for them, the modern jazz quartet is another group that at the same time is also doing counterpoint and is actually like John Lewis is performing and composing fugues for the quartet. And they are not getting near the amount of attention. First of all, they aren't getting near the amount of attention, but they also are not being described for their use of counterpoint and fugues. The critics are still sort of. Even when they're using direct quotes from Bach or even when they're performing fugues, the critics are still saying, oh, but listen to them swing. And so they're really embedding them into this narrative of kind of natural talent and blackness and kind of hot rhythm. Whereas with Brubeck, we get this More intellectual strand going on in the. In the narrative. And so that's sort of figuring out, like, okay, what does whiteness sound like while it was crafted by these critics to. To kind of think about it in terms of European classical music with. With cool jazz.
- [19:43]
Nathan Smith
Yeah, no, yeah. Beautifully beautifully put. I mean, as it should be. You just finished the book, but I also want to hear you talk a little bit about Can Brubeck swing? Because that was also an interesting thing, because in the way you just articulated it kind of a little bit on what this is, a little bit me characterizing your wording. So the terms like counterpoint and fugue were used to be coded or to signify whiteness, intellectual refinements, the Western classical tradition, blah, blah, blah. Whereas swing kind of often carried that kind of essentialist, primitivist notion of blackness. But Brubeck himself also had kind of an interesting relationship in his own reflections on whether he swayed or not. So can you say a little bit about that?
- [20:41]
Kelsey Klotz
Yeah, absolutely. So the. When you listen to the Brubeck Quartet, at some point in time, you will hear a Brubeck solo that. That really sort of. It uses straight 8th notes. It just uses straight 8th notes. He will do that fairly frequently, or he'll do a sort of thing where he'll kind of come out of time a little bit, and he'll be doing sort of a different metered thing even before timeout, even before the album timeout, where it sort of doesn't sound like your. Your typical understanding of swing. And so this becomes a really important conversation that critics begin to have around Brubeck for a couple of reasons. One is that Brubeck, his. His star rises very quickly. His. His career really takes off very early. By 1954, he's already on the COVID of Time magazine. He' second jazz musician to ever be featured on the COVID And so critics are wary of him. And one of the ways that they sort of voice that wariness is by talking about whether or not he can swing. And critics kind of land all over the map on this. Generally, the critics who think that Brubeck got too famous too fast will also say that he does not swing and therefore he lacks, like, a fundamental feature of jazz. Critics who do like Brubeck will kind of offer this sort of moderated stance of, like, well, sometimes he does swing and sometimes he doesn't swing. But isn't the important part about jazz that you, as the performer get to choose, like, how much you swing? And. And so they're really trying to carve out this very careful sort of place for him. And Brubeck himself kind of says basically the same things. I. He says, I. I would say that I swing all of the times, but sometimes it's more than others. And so he really uses a sort of variable definition of swing to. To kind of carve a place for his music in the legacy of jazz history. Because by the 1950s, this is. This is incredibly important. You have to be able to swing to be considered a. An important jazz musician. So he also needs to sort of craft that narrative around swing. And the critics sort of also, they know, I think. I don't know if it's sort of totally conscious or not, but. But everyone knows that swing is sort of the fundamental element of jazz. That. And that if you're saying that someone doesn't swing, that is a sort of important charge and it is a way to sort of discredit him.
- [23:36]
Nathan Smith
Oh, no, absolutely. And, yeah, I've been, as I was telling you a little bit over the email exchange. I. I look at whiteness of a different sort a little bit earlier in jazz history. So I've been like, going through a lot of, like, Hugh Panaceas, the French critic. And swing is like, the concept. And he. He's at pain. It's not. It's not always just so easy as, oh, here's straight eighth notes D, and here's swing eighth notes, da, da, da. You know, it's not quite. It's a whole almost ineffability thing going on. And it's. For much of it, it's. Yeah, it is the best way to signal that this person doesn't belong if you say that they don't swing. So.
- [24:18]
Kelsey Klotz
Yeah, yeah. And the thing is in these. In these conversations, and there's really. There's like a span of four months where just critics are, like one after the. Are kind of sharing what they think about Brubeck. And they're not defining swing either. When they're saying that he doesn't swing, they just sort of say, he doesn't swing. And so we're left to sort of assume what they might mean by that. And so it's sort of. Okay, I think you mean the relationship between eighth notes. But then when you hear sort of black musicians talking about Brubeck and if he swings or not, and they're. And they're mixed. Like, some folks are saying, yes, he does, and some. Some are saying, no, he doesn't. But they're. They will also tend to go toward this. Toward the idea that, yes, swing is something fundamental to black communities performing jazz. And so there is sort of a different type of ineffability that they want to claim ownership of as well.
- [25:27]
Nathan Smith
Mm, no, absolutely. So I guess to open it up a little bit to the communities that Dave Brubeck kind of wanted to. Well, whether he personally himself wanted to or how he was just marketed in chapter two, you turn a little bit toward how he functioned within, like a larger public sphere that was emerging in the mid century. So what kind of. What kind of new audiences did he bring into jazz or was narrated as bringing into jazz?
- [26:07]
Kelsey Klotz
Yeah, this is all the respectable folks that if in chapter one, where I'm primarily talking about how critics are sort of building this narrative of intellect around Brubeck and other white cool jazz musicians, that in chapter two, we see how that narrative of intellect is also imbued with this kind of side narrative of respectability that he. Again, a lot of critics, some jazz critics, but in this chapter, I'm mainly focusing on sort of mainstream music critics that they see Brubeck as being very unique in the field of jazz because he's respectable. So that means that he can bring in people like housewives, self described housewives, that they are an audience who has been interested in jazz and who wants to be engaged in jazz in a number of different ways. Whether it's kind of playing jazz, composing, studying, you know, having ideas about, you know, different forms that jazz could take, or just writing to their favorite musician. They. They of that is available in the Brubeck archive. That there were just so many letters from women and girls who kind of wanted to talk about jazz with Brubeck. And his respectability was. Was sort of part of the marketing for these self described housewives. So he did a lipstick advertisement and he says, you know, he. He pretty explicitly for that one says, the reason why I did this was so that we could spread the good news of jazz to people hadn't heard it like the Vogue readers. So he has this very clear idea that like, oh, we can. We can pull people in and we can kind of welcome them in, and I can do that. He's the first jazz musician to perform at the Music Educators National Conference, to be invited to perform there. And so he can kind of present this image of respectability and that audience can feel themselves like they. They don't need to worry about this jazz because he. Of his respectability. So his respectability becomes part of their own performance of whiteness in many ways.
- [28:43]
Nathan Smith
Yeah, yeah, no, it's definitely. It's where the the audience, in some sense, can have some kind of personal. They use him as a prop to, you know, uphold their own identifications in their own. I mean, respectability and whiteness without using precisely those words per se. And. Yeah, no, I was just watching the. I think it's the most recent Miles Davis documentary, and I thought immediately of your book when they started talking about the original cover to miles ahead from 1957, which. The original cover showed a white woman on a boat with a child. You know, very, very, you know, jazz at Newport, you know, type. Type of. Type of scene. And Miles was less than thrilled about it. And it seems to be kind of a similar thing that people were hitting on perhaps. You know, it's obviously different. We don't. The book's on Dave Brubeck, but it's. But some of that in, like, the larger kind of cool jazz fear was certainly also being leveraged even, you know, with people like Miles Davis who were pretty high up in their career by that point as well.
- [30:03]
Kelsey Klotz
Yeah. And we. I mean, I don't talk about this as much in the book, but you can look at sort of the covers that Brubeck is doing, and it's sort of in the late 50s. He starts incorporating a lot of modern art onto his album covers. And so that's pretty. Pretty, you know, pretty much linking visually his. His music to some of those other. Another strand of sort of intellectualism in. In that sphere as well.
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Nathan Smith
Yeah, no, and I. In a similar vein to the second chapter, where you, you know, you also talk about his involvement with the Playboy magazine and that type of respectable masculinity and his kind of uneasy relationship to the high life and how he positioned himself as kind of a family man. I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about something that you mentioned earlier, which you pick up in the next chapter about the Time magazine covers. Right. Which seems to be touching on related issues. So, as you kind of mentioned, he was the second, I believe, of four jazz musicians from the time period, and the first one being Louis Armstrong in 1949, then Dick Brubeck. Was that 54?
- [31:31]
Kelsey Klotz
That was 54, yeah, 54.
- [31:33]
Nathan Smith
And then he's followed by Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk a few years later. Can you tell us a little bit about how that. His circulation within Time magazine and how that plays into this larger audience and jazz history, for that matter?
- [31:50]
Kelsey Klotz
Yeah. So in both chapters two and three, I would say that you're right. I am really interested in how the mainstream press is talking about jazz. So I Sort of move away from the jazz press. Because Brubeck is someone who is, in many ways at the nexus of jazz and popular music, and then particularly later on classical music. And so he gets written about quite a lot and very early on in these mainstream publications. So in Chapter two, we're looking. I look at Playboy and Esquire alongside sort of the Ladies Home Journal and Women's Home Companion and Vogue. And, you know, these are. Those are the types of places that I'm looking in Chapter two, where I really kind of bring in gender and kind of what respectability means in very different ways. But in Chapter three, I really focused in on the Time magazine article for Brubeck and for the other jazz musicians that appeared in Mid Century. Because. And I would say that actually what really motivated me to get into Chapter three, into the Time covers, was really the covers, not necessarily the stories at first. So when you look at all four covers next to each other, so you have Louis Armstrong, Dave Briebeck, Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk, the only figure that is looking directly out of the image is Dave Brubeck. That the other three musicians are all sort of looking off to the side or they're in some way, just not. It's not a direct kind of gaze straight out of the COVID And I thought that. That, you know, it was my initial inkling that that feels like it's saying something about sort of who is allowed to sort of make eye contact in this way with the COVID So I did some more work kind of just looking at the Time covers of those years and found that overwhelmingly, of course, black figures were represented far less on the COVID of Time magazine anyway. But of those who were sort of presented on the COVID of Time magazine, there were only three who ever sort of were allowed to look straight out. So one was James Baldwin. Althea Gibson was another. And then I think Muhammad Ali was the third. And it became very clear to me that while white figures were sort of allowed on the COVID of Time magazine to look in any other, in any type of way, to the side, out to the front, whatever, that it felt like the black gaze was much more controlled. And so when I followed that into the stories, into the COVID stories, what I found was actually sort of even less agency for the black performers who were covered than there was for Dave Brubeck. That basically the Time author came into the Brubeck interview even with certain expectations of what a jazz musician would act like or do or say. And Dave Brubeck did not fulfill those expectations. And the Author sort of adjusted his perception and said, oh, well, what an interesting and unique jazz performer. Whereas sort of the authors for Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk write about them in these very sort of stereotypical ways that really tie into legacies of blackface, minstrelsy, stereotypes.
- [36:12]
Nathan Smith
No. Yeah, yeah. What was the. The interviewer comes in and like orders whiskey or something and they don't drink. So he's like, oh, wow. He's. That's not like the jazz musicians that I've, you know, or at least the stories that people like to tell about what. Jazz musician.
- [36:29]
Kelsey Klotz
Exactly.
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Nathan Smith
Jazz musicians. And the whole nightlife is like, yeah.
- [36:34]
Kelsey Klotz
Yeah, Paul Desmond tells that story. And yeah, it's a, it's. It's a really interesting moment of sort of the ability of Brubeck to be seen on the COVID to, to kind of recognize him through kind of looking at him and taking him in as. Taking him on as a person, but also being recognized just as a person who has his own agency, who has his own likes and dislikes apart from anyone else, any other white persons.
- [37:06]
Nathan Smith
Right, yeah, right, interesting. So later on in his career, as we've kind of touched on a number of times, I guess I should say the first three chapters, as you've kind of positioned them, are talking a little bit about his reception, his deployment in marketing, his claims to respectability, his claims to other quote unquote, new audiences. But in the second or the last two chapters, I suppose you turn more directly toward Brubeck's involvement in civil rights and some of the, you know, there are many actors going on here, but some of the more directed, self conscious actions that he took. So could you, could you walk us through a little bit about the issues of integrating or segregating his quartet and why that mattered for whom, etc.
- [38:02]
Kelsey Klotz
Yeah, it seemed to matter for a lot of people. So chapter four really digs into this historical moment kind of in the before and after this 1960 Southern tour that Brubeck attempts to take. So he is meant to take a tour in the early spring or kind of late winter of 1960. And this is arranged by, you know, a booking agent through a group of Southern schools. So this is a very kind of sought after type of tour because the tour pays a little bit more and because it's being. It's block booking, because they're booking as a block in one particular region of the United States, the travel is sort of less onerous and more convenient. So you're not sort of going all the way across the country, and the travel costs are included. So there are lots of different ways that he's. He's gonna make really good money on this particular tour. And they get to January of 1960, and the tour is going to happen in late January. And all of a sudden you see in the. In the archive, you see the itinerary cut by half. So There are originally 25 schools, and 11 schools drop off of the itinerary. And then you start to see correspondence in the archive about sort of, okay, we need to figure out what's going on with the other schools. And so what had happened was they had sent the promotional material to these schools at the beginning of January, and the schools finally saw for the first time that Brubeck had an integrated quartet. So he had himself on piano, Paul Desmond on saxophone, Joe Morello on drums. Both Joe Morello and Paul Desmond are white. And then Eugene Wright on bass. And Eugene Wright is black. Eugene Wright joined the quartet for the European tour in the State Department tour in 1958. So he's actually been with the quartet for a while, but he is new sort of in the US to the quartet and new in sort of recording with the quartet. So people. That. People just didn't know that he had an integrated quartet at that point. And so the first 11 schools drop off the itinerary. They tell the remaining schools, the remaining 14 schools, like, hey, by the way, just. We want to be explicit. We are an integrated group, and we are not going to replace Eugene. Right? We will be an integrated group. And an additional 11 schools also drop, leaving only three of those schools. So this chapter takes that moment as the starting point, and then it sort of backs up and kind of explains how Brubeck got into. Into civil rights protesting, into this big moment of sort of refusal of we are not going to replace Eugene Wright. It documents a couple of different. Mostly smaller moments. And then it sort of then fasts forward a little bit to, okay, now he's had the 1960 tour. What does he do after that? And how does he get back into the South? Because Brubeck is pretty clear that he does want to play in the South. I mean, I titled the kind of front part of the title of Chapter four is We Want to play in the South. He's very clear that he knows there is an audience for him in the south, and he wants to get to that audience. And so it sort of talks about the booking agent who's sort of responsible for the Southern region. It talks about how quickly the Brubette Quartet kind of made its way back into formerly segregated institutions, sometimes within a matter of months. And often they were the first integrated group to perform at formerly segregated universities. And so there's a lot of danger there. And so where we sort of end that chapter is thinking about racial capitalism and thinking about the ways in which the music industry was not set up to support integration in an important way. It wasn't set up to support Brubeck's actions. So we're talking about a $40,000 tour that he would have gotten in that time. Now it would be around 400,000 or a little bit more with inflation. And he was able to recoup 18,000 of that tour, so less than half of what he was planning to receive. So, yeah, I think I'll pause there. We all. I also talk about the two albums that he makes in this time period that are specifically geared towards Southern audiences. He is not sort of being subtle about.
- [43:45]
Nathan Smith
No, no, no. He. No, it is. It is pretty. Pretty. There's. There's a market that he is trying to draw, for sure.
- [43:54]
Kelsey Klotz
Yeah.
- [43:54]
Nathan Smith
Including. Including, as you. As you detail, you know, leveraging Eugene Wright and sometimes, as you also just noted, in sometimes very dangerous ways, you know, taking him into institutions that, whether he knew explicitly or not, depending on who had the itinerary and who is, you know, handling all the books, taking him into these places where it, like, should there be a problem at one of these universities, it would be Eugene that would be experiencing some. Some of the most danger, aside from the financial loss, but for the entire quartet. But he also uses. And as you also detail his deployment. And what got me into this, this roundabout was the lovely description of Eugene's playing on those albums and some of the ways in which they positioned bass solos in such a way to try to kind of highlight some of these tensions and. Or perhaps ameliorate some of the tensions.
- [44:56]
Kelsey Klotz
Yeah, I found that to be really interesting as well, that typically, the bassist in the Brubeck quartet was sort of never featured too much. And Brubeck also seems to have been pretty picky about bassists. There's this, like, document in the archive called Principles and aims of the DBQ of the Dave Brubeck Quartet. And it's dated 1954. And it's meant to be very general, like, here's the type of music we want to do. And. But very quickly, all of the bullet points start talking directly to the bassist in like. And when I say directly, I mean he actually names the bassist and says, no, you are not supposed to play this type of bass line. And the reason is because Brubeck would often do like, a stride thing or he might do his own baseline while the bassist is playing. Yeah. So, like, the basis is sort of, I think, probably from Brubeck's perspective, getting in the way of what he wants to do. And so he. When he is making that argument that he can't perform without Eugene Wright, I do think that musically he means that. And so he. Yeah, in. In that album is putting Eugene Wright front and center on the album covers and then giving him solos, performing his compositions and, you know, doing things like writing about what a wonderful person he is in the liner notes and sort of just across the board in these number of ways. But, yeah, it is also, as I talk about in the conclusion to that chapter, Eugene Wright is maybe a little bit ambivalent about his role in this kind of protest section. And while Brubeck got a lot of praise for. For canceling that tour and for other things that he did. Eugene Wright, because he was a little bit ambivalent. And he kind of said, you know, I trust. He basically said, I trust. I trust. Dave, you didn't have to cancel that. I would have understood. Because of that ambivalence, a lot of. He got a lot of criticism from the black press, kind of saying, you know, you. You need to be doing a little bit more to support us. And that was something that, you know, Louis Armstrong faced that as well. Many black musicians were facing a lot of pressure to do something, and white musicians did not have that expectation whatsoever.
- [47:31]
Nathan Smith
Sure. Yeah. So that when they do do it, as in the case of Brubeck, it's. It's. It's that the aforementioned good deed, you know, it's something. It's something of. Marked, whereas, you know, for. Right. It's something that was. Was expected of, you know.
- [47:51]
Kelsey Klotz
Absolutely.
- [47:53]
Nathan Smith
All right, let's. A slight shift of gear.
- [47:57]
Marshall Poe
We're.
- [47:57]
Nathan Smith
We're kind of going away from the Dave Brubeck Quartet, per se, but touching on a lot. A lot of similar issues here. I. It's tough to formulate this question. The question for that I want to. That I want to ask for chapter five, or I've had trouble kind of formulating because there's so many dynamics at play and you do such an expert job in the chapter of, like, weighing these various things. So I guess first, can you just introduce us to chapter five? What's it about? What are some of the dynamics that are going on?
- [48:33]
Kelsey Klotz
Yeah. So chapter five is, I think, originally not a Chapter I thought I was writing, but it was one of those that it just. This piece kept. It just kept kind of nagging at me that, no, you're not. You're not done. Something needs to happen with this. So this piece, it's a cantata called the Gates of Justice. And he gets this commission in 68 and 69 and he from. From a Jewish rabbi. This is his second sort of big choral, orchestral, classical work. And it comes right after the quarte has broken up. And for Brubeck, he kind of says, you know, the world is in crisis. And I felt like I could do something more important by kind of shifting to a more classical medium and kind of giving a message that way. So the Gates of Justice was again, it was commissioned by Rabbi Charles D. Mintz, and it was intended to bring black and Jewish communities together. So there was this long standing narrative that in the beginning of the Civil Rights movement, black and Jewish communities had been pretty closely allied. And then by the end of the. Of the 60s, by the end of the Civil rights movement, that that allyship had broken down. That in like black communities were much more interested in autonomy and in their own agency and in making decisions for themselves. And they felt perhaps patronized to by Jewish leaders in the movement and Jewish communities still, they had a very strong moral imperative to be involved in the civil rights movement. And a lot of that was tracked to their histories and legacies of suffering. So this piece is. You're right, there's a lot balanced in this chapter, but this piece is meant in part for a very specific context for the Rockdale Temple in Cincinnati, Ohio, that this temple was located in a particular neighborhood that in the 60s experienced a lot of white flight and became much more of a black neighborhood. And by the late 60s, that temple, they decide to move to an almost entirely white neighborhood. So they move from a neighborhood that was 92% black to a neighborhood that was 99% white in the late 60s. And so part of what this cantata is meant to do is to remind that particular Jewish temple, those particular Jewish congregants that we've made this move. We. We are dedicating this new temple. But the Civil rights movement is still ongoing and we need to still keep. Continue to work on behalf of those who are suffering. What I talk about in the chapter is I'm sort of constantly balancing sort of. This cantata has a very kind of Jewish perspective because it's commissioned by Jewish rabbis, it's performed in a Jewish temple, and then it's performed at a broader Reform Jewish organization. And so it's, it's always sort of forefronting that perspective. And so what I try to bring in in that chapter is also that, okay, but here's the perspective from, from black civil rights leaders and from black folks in these communities about kind of their relationship with, with Jewish people. And so it's. It's a very. Yeah, it's a very complicated story. It's very hard to break down into. Into a little bite sized piece. But the cantata does some interesting things. It's an interesting piece. It also, you know, does some sort of racially essentialist things just through the two soloists. One soloist is a Jewish cantor. Yeah, Jewish cantor style tenor and. And then black baritone specifically noted that it needs to be a black baritone. And they sing in an operatic style but also with like blue notes and kind of scoops and stuff. And so there's some interesting musical moments happening. But yeah, it was, it ended up being a very interesting, A very interesting piece to kind of think about Brubeck at the end of the kind of formal civil rights movement and, and how he'd done all of these. He'd actually kind of done meaningful actions in the beginning of the movement. And by the end he feels that the way that he can most meaningfully participate is actually to sort of make a musical statement instead.
- [54:02]
Nathan Smith
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which, which you, you know, for, for our listeners out there, the, the text, this chapter in particular. Part of what makes it so dense is as you've kind of not dense, but complicated and like breaking it down is because you so nicely interweave like the larger structural narrative, like biography, who was working with Brubeck on, you know, putting together or picking out texts from various sources. MLK speeches, the Torah, etc. The Bible, some of, some of his. I believe her wife wrote a couple texts. His wife wrote a couple texts as well. Yeah. So you jump between like the very particularity of this specific piece and a close reading of the score as well as jumping out to like these larger issues of like, what are, you know, looking at Baldwin's thoughts on whiteness and Jewish identity, people at the time in the 40s, 50s leading up, and your ability to not only follow and trace in like small analysis in microcosm, in a certain sense, the work that's unfolding and try to unpack some of those racial dynamics, but also threading it into this larger historical neighbor or not neighborhood narrative. It's expertly done. And that's why I was like, how do I. How to, how to make, how to bring that out in a semi informal podcast interview. But yeah, no. So, yeah, I encourage our listeners to look forward to that last chapter. It's a real delight. Not to mention, as you also mentioned, as well as the. I believe I. I think it's around this time, if I'm remembering correctly, in Nella Painter's work, I believe it's the third enlargement of whiteness.
- [56:09]
Kelsey Klotz
Is.
- [56:12]
Nathan Smith
It Jewish communities and Italian Americans? I believe perhaps Hispanic, but it's around this time. Right. You know, so, like, it's an interesting. It's an interesting time for Jewish identity at mid century. Are they white? Are they not? Have they been included? Can they benefit from it while still trying to stand aside and. Yeah, sorry, I didn't mean to cover you up there.
- [56:38]
Kelsey Klotz
Oh, yeah, no, that's absolutely. I think that was the part that I was kind of wanting to talk about and also be very careful about. I am a person who is not. Not raised Jewish. I was raised Catholic. And so I was very careful about sort of the historical narrative, or at least I tried to be very careful about the historical narrative because I. Because what I really read was, yes, this is a moment of. For the Cincinnati neighborhood, this is a moment of white flight. And this temple is participating in white flight. They're trying to sort of do that in an ethical way, I think, but they are ultimately doing that. And more broadly, this is. I think a lot of reformed Jews in particular are thinking about how do we distinguish ourselves as like not being just totally white Americans. We don't see ourselves that way, but we are increasingly being seen that way. And there's a. So a lot of discomfort with that relationship.
- [57:53]
Nathan Smith
Yeah, no, and you and it.
- [57:56]
Kelsey Klotz
Yes. Yeah.
- [57:58]
Nathan Smith
All of that is just all unfolded into one chapter. You know, not to mention the fact that we have Brubeck here kind of orchestrating both literally and metaphorically this relation.
- [58:13]
Kelsey Klotz
Yeah. So I think if I were to sort of just sort of like make really obvious the kind of performances of whiteness that are happening. It is about Brubeck. That's why he's in the title. But Brubeck is really just the frame that he's a way to see other performances. So sometimes we focus on what he's doing and we say, we kind of point out, like, oh, these are ways that he's contributing to this respectability. But often it's really talking about how communities are. Are using him in their own performances. So it's not necessarily something that he. He has all the control over how he's going to be viewed and how he's going to be used. So if we're looking at chapter one, we're looking at jazz critics. Chapters two and three are kind of mainstream audiences and mainstream writers. Chapter four is, that's really kind of the most Rubeck focus, but it's really looking at the music industry and chapter five is looking at, at this particular Jewish community. So, yeah, it's trying to kind of look at performances through the lens of Brubeck more than anything.
- [59:22]
Nathan Smith
Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. And for the way that I thought about it, going through the book and I remember having this image kind of like float into my mind when I was reading the introduction and trying to, to and appreciating how you were navigating Brubeck as an individual, as a well meaning, quote, unquote, good individual, and these larger structural things and how ultimately what you're reflecting on are some of these larger performances of whiteness. Right. And in a certain sense, Dave Brubeck is like a prism, you know, and there are many facets, many sides that are going on here. And each of the chapters kind of like shines lights through, through different aspects. And he's not always the one shining the light. You know, it's not always an auto effective light. Sometimes it's critics, sometimes it's the audience. Sometimes, you know, as you're setting up here, it's this particular Jewish congregation in Cincinnati. I believe so. Yeah. No, that's an interesting. I'm glad you brought that back up because it's interesting how he gets weaved in and out or both centered, but also refracted off of throughout the entire book.
- [60:30]
Kelsey Klotz
Book. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks.
- [60:34]
Nathan Smith
Well, is there anything else you'd like to talk about? I mean, we, we, we can talk about the conclusion as well if you want to just, just finish out the, finish out the text.
- [60:50]
Kelsey Klotz
Sure. Do you have a particular question or do you want me to just.
- [60:56]
Marshall Poe
Going.
- [60:56]
Nathan Smith
To, as I've said, give you a little bit of a softball, just. Oh, why don't you just introduce us to it. We've jumped to the, to the 90s, I believe, a little bit later in Brubeck's life.
- [61:11]
Kelsey Klotz
Yep. Yeah. So this is again another one of those moments that I really did not think I was going to be writing about. When I wrote the book proposal, this was actually something that one of the reviewers mentioned was, oh, what about the relationship between Brubeck and indigeneity? And I had sort of a list of reasons and they were pretty good reasons, like the, the publisher accepted them as good reasons for why? Yeah, I think I won't be doing kind of thinking about Brubeck in that context. That had to do with, you know, he's. It comes about later in his life. He really doesn't seem to meaningfully engage with it. And so it just kind of appears in a couple of moments. But as I looked a little bit more deeply into it in the 1990s, in the early 1990s, Brubeck begins to sort of gently, I would say, claim, like, possible indigeneity. So. And of course, we know the 90s are a time rife with white people claiming indigeneity. Indigen, Indigenous background. So he is part of that as well. And he starts to. He kind of makes that claim, and then Gene Lees writes about it in great detail.
- [62:36]
Nathan Smith
The cats. The cats of any color. Yeah, right.
- [62:40]
Kelsey Klotz
Yeah. And so what it becomes is Brubeck's claiming of indigeneity becomes part of this white backlash to what's happening with jazz in the 1980s and 1990s. So as jazz is sort of being. Having its renaissance moment in the 1980s, and it's becoming institutionalized through things like Jazz at Lincoln center and Wynton Marsalis and Wynton Marcellus is working with folks like Stanley Crouch and Albert Murray, there becomes a very contentious narrative around and who gets to define jazz and who gets to be sort of claimed as a jazz musician. And it's really tightly tied to race and racial authenticity. And a lot of white musicians and a lot of white critics and historians feel pretty precarious. There's like, a precarity that they experience of, like, we are no longer the definers of this music. And so you have. Have folks like. Like, you have books like Cats of Any Color that are kind of explicitly lost chords that are explicitly advocating for, like, a more multicultural or a more white view of jazz. And Brubeck sort of gets swept into this. You see him start to become. In interviews in this time period, he's not only talking about this potential indigenous background, but he's also kind of. He's also kind of becoming very defensive about his race, again in a way that I hadn't seen since the early 50s. Yeah.
- [64:23]
Nathan Smith
Colorblindness.
- [64:24]
Kelsey Klotz
Yes. Yeah. He has. He kind of makes that return to colorblindness of that there's sort of no difference here or there shouldn't be a difference. And it. It really is a reaction, I think, to what's happening in jazz more broadly in the 1990s that you. You kind of can't actually that indigenous moment is actually a part of the 1990s discussion around jazz.
- [64:51]
Nathan Smith
Well, all right, now that you finished this book, what do you. What are you off on now? Like, what. What, do you have a new project that they're lining up up? What are you.
- [65:00]
Kelsey Klotz
How.
- [65:01]
Nathan Smith
How are you spending your days now? And where can we look forward to hearing or. Or seeing stuff by you again?
- [65:08]
Kelsey Klotz
Sure. I am right now spending my days quite often either teaching or in this new position as an assistant dean for inclusive Excellence, so in a more administrative capacity. And. But when I look kind of toward the future and places that I want to go next, I think that kind of inspired by the Housewives of Chapter two. Yeah, they're really kind of talking to me, and I have a sort of interest in Marian McPartland, but I'm really thinking about jazz and gender and the ways that genres are sort of constructed within jazz and what authenticity looks like from a gender perspective. There's been a lot of good work, of course, by Sherry Tucker, but then more recently, also Nicole Rustin Pascal, and so I'm sort of excited to join that conversation.
- [66:12]
Nathan Smith
Interesting. Yeah. No, great. Yeah. I mean, I know I have big ears sitting on my shelf just waiting, begging to be read. I need to get to it in particular, as I've told you, mind folks. Similarly, as you're kind of hinting at, a great, great deal of jazz literature centers upon either people want to do the great man narrative of stylistic innovation, or they want to talk about race. But I guess in my own definition there of bringing up the quote unquote, great, great man narrative gender often gets or has been sidelined discursively within jazz studies.
- [67:01]
Kelsey Klotz
So, yeah, yeah, there's just a lot of. You know, I've had a lot of conversations with folks who teach jazz history, who. They just don't. They. You don't necessarily know where to start or how to begin. So that's really the. That's really. The impulse is. Okay, let's. Let's continue to kind of create resources for that.
- [67:24]
Nathan Smith
Absolutely, Absolutely. That's beautiful. Well, Kelsey, thank you so much. This is. The book was a pleasure to read. It was a pleasure talking with you. But if I'm not mistaken, you're on your spring break, right?
- [67:39]
Kelsey Klotz
Yes, I am.
- [67:40]
Nathan Smith
So you should be relaxing somewhere on a beach, preferably.
- [67:44]
Kelsey Klotz
Well, I just got back from la, where it, you know, snowed, so my timing is just all over the place. But, yes, there will be relaxing.
- [67:57]
Nathan Smith
All right, well, I'll let you get to it. Thank you so much for coming in and talking and talking to me and the rest of the listeners. And I'd be happy to talk to you again next time you have something else you want to share with us.
- [68:09]
Kelsey Klotz
Great. Sounds awesome. Thank you so much.