Music in America Imprint
Ulises Escalante
Music in America Imprint
This essay examines “Jewish jazz” – attempts to combine “Jewish music” and jazz into a new genre – from the perspective of Jewish ethnic identity. The movement began with two albums in the early 1960s and then re-emerged in a second wave in the 1990s. I analyze these musical forays as attempts to explore and expand modern American Jewish identity. Jewish jazz began tentatively, reflecting the assimilationist leanings of American Jews in the post-World War II era. As multiculturalism emerged in the late twentieth century, Jewish jazz became brasher in proclaiming its Jewishness. These performances sought to expand Jewish identity to fit a multicultural society, and sometimes black musicians stretched their identities as well by expanding into Jewish music. At its best, Jewish jazz reaffirmed Jewishness while revealing connections with African Americans, with whom Jews have shared a diasporic, urban American culture. Such assertion and expansion of identity encountered fierce resistance in a society that is still attached to rigid ethnic categories.

Scholars in Jazz Studies who seek to analyze sexuality in meaningful ways struggle against a historical legacy of writing saturated by racist and colonialist desires manifest in primitivism, romanticism, and hyper-sexualization. This baggage does not go away when scholars turn their focus to “hidden histories of queer jazz musicians.” This article argues for another tack, to analyze heterosexual norms as social constructions; to understand intersectional analysis as a network of actively changing and contingent categories, and to attend to dynamics of “queering” and “straightening” in historically and culturally specific moments. This article poses the question—“when did jazz go straight?”—not as a literal question that can be answered once and for all, but as a candidate for inclusion in a new and improved “sexuality” compartment of the Jazz Studies toolkit.