UC Santa Barbara

This dissertation examines diffuse Cleveland jazz scenes as locations in which the confusing meanings and importance of race in the post-civil rights era are debated and enacted. An impossible contradiction at the core of the scene is that jazz is legitimated by its institutionalization and ascendancy on the cultural hierarchy at the same time that many of its new homes remain inaccessible to black people because of the continuing legacy and continuity of racial spatial containment. As a consequence, seemingly neutral questions of aesthetics and musical categorization are pitched to racial inflections. Through ethnographic research, I explore how the complex and sometimes incongruous baggage ascribed to jazz resonates on Cleveland’s segregated streets and suburbs. The paradoxes built into Cleveland jazz show the fault lines between music’s power to create new racial subjectivities and the entrenched material conditions of race.