Gettin’ Around: Jazz, Script, Transnationalism by Jürgen E. Grandt (2018)

While several pioneering attempts by scholars of literature and music to prove traces of literature in jazz and vice versa – with the tools available to their respective disciplines – have been completed with sometimes contrasting results, author Jürgen Grandt sees rather a philosophical and spiritual energy at work that connects and feeds both international jazz on one level and the literature that puts that process into novels on another one.

“What the present study does attempt to offer is a long-overdue consideration of the ways in which jazz can inform critical practice in the field of transnational (American) studies. In doing so, Gettin‘ Around employs two specific yet sufficiently pliable concepts, Afro-kinesis and Afropolitanism, which seeks to foreground the aurality of transnational space-time dimensions.”

At first thought, this is (and always has been) an integral part of jazz music: to mix, to interpret, to include and to grow on all kinds of musical influences, no matter from which transnational origin they come. But actually, the thesis of the book is multi-layered.

Grandt lists many examples while trying to establish a functioning terminology of the central energy in this model: swing music or rather the slight incorrectness of the beat that permit an extra meter of rendering (musical) time ‘shorter’.
Those extremely tension-filled spaces act as his model for a theory of transnational (and not simply Western inspired) energy or creativity: “Afro-kinesis sips into the jazzy breaks of the Black Atlantic as well as its neighboring territories, looks around, and listens to a wide variety of stories, including their dissonances. Afro-kinesis is a form of motion that traverses preordained borders…. Lubed by swing, Afro-kinesis is the elasticization of time, musical as well as cultural, historical, and socioeconomical.”

His definition of Afropolitanism is largely owed to Taiye Selasi and refers to Africans everywhere in the world, Europe, the US, Asia, who still feel mostly African instead of drawn to any other country, nation or ethnicity; it describes powerful postcolonial identities that defer any limitation of nationality or culture.

He also combines with his theory of expression the writings of Walter Benjamin, particularly his texts on “the flâneur;” Benjamin, tone-deaf himself, experienced music as he counterpart of meaningful speech.

In this theory-loaded monologue on the effects of transnational jazz and its musician protagonists (here: Manu Dibango, Duke Ellington, Dexter Gordon, John Coltrane, (Swiss saxophonist) Jürg Wickihalder) and in an experimental sense literary counterparts – Hans Janowitz, Langston Hughes, Nick Hornby, Paule Marshall (and director Steven Spielberg) – Grandt takes the workings of two disciplines that ever since modernity influenced each other one step further. Various examples he takes from film (The Terminal by Spielberg), biographies, novels with musical content by black and white authors and a selection of highly eclectic texts.

(Grandt’s treatment of Spielberg’s Terminal here – with a Tom Hanks first unable to communicate in any language but his own – is a good example of this method. There, communication works on other levels and is based on similar experiences of very dissimilar people from different ethnic and spiritual origins.)

Grandt gets close to identifying a musical code that – on a spiritual level – not only will transcend borders, but also language. However, this is just one of the suggestions; as many arguments are based upon other assumptions that relate to musical input, i.e. musical style or the way some musical statement is “improvised,” rather than on written statements. (Some of the ideas and conclusions are strongly related to the experimental text-hybrids of jazz scholar Nathaniel Mackey on African-American music.)

As Gettin’ Around is a highly abstract and theoretical text, readers should be familiar with the genesis and multiple interpretations of Afro-kinesis and Afropolitanism (or at least Pan-Africanism). While the general idea here seems to be the search for a transnational network of rhythms, meaning and communication in all things loosely connected with African arts, music in particular, its detection is quite difficult.
And sometimes, readers may not be able to follow the arguments in this text. As many assumptions remain shady, unclear and are not exactly defined; making those assumptions rather proposals. And then, readers may become confused, as the main aim, seemingly, here is to establish some sort of blueprint for interracial, international and intermusical cooperation and dialogue. Jazz, however, has already established such a language and a state of mind since the 1930s; which was before the majority of texts and compositions listed here were written.

Gettin’ Around is not an easy text to read. Grandt’s model may be way too unspecific for some scholars, as it remains extremely open to any influence from music or philosophy, and thus lacks specifications that let us tell one theory from another.
Then again, it offers numerous interesting suggestions and mostly many intertextual and philosophical links, that point to some sort of universal code that connects both sound, emotions and communication that exists without words or text, but – in its most vital form – as communication “currently” still coded in music.
If we read this text as philosophical essay, is very informative, as it almost bursts with tons of details and facts on jazz composers, jazz recordings and novelists inspired by modern music.
The author is associate professor of English at the University of North Georgia and has published on jazz before, for example, his Kinds of Blue: The Jazz Aesthetic in African American Narrative (2004) is excellent scholarly work.

Review by Dr. A. Ebert © 2019

 

Jürgen E. Grandt. Gettin’ Around: Jazz, Script, Transnationalism. University of Georgia Press, 2018, 200 p.