Sociality and Identity

This chapter offers a comparative perspective on the relationship between the social and the aesthetic by contrasting the development of an Afro-modernist aesthetic of politics and music in American jazz improvisation of the 1950s and 1960s and the aesthetics of sensibilisation in the contemporary musical aesthetics of Mali. Both musical traditions are highly improvisational and virtuosic but articulate the connections among social, ethical, religious, and musical in different ways. In Mali, the idea of sensibilsation as an important activity for popular artists involves educating broad audiences about major issues of social, political, ethical, and medical concern through lyrics and performance styles that raise awareness through a combination of contemporary information and traditional modalities of expression. Race was the primary social variable examined and articulated in the social aesthetics of jazz in the 1950s and 1960s; gender, health, and economic aspirations provide the central points of social aesthetics in contemporary Mali. A comparative perspective on the aesthetics of improvisation provides insight into how processes of improvisation can carry a wide variety of relationships to the social.

This chapter approaches questions of social aesthetics through a narrow focus on Billy Strayhorn’s work as a vocal arranger. Strayhorn’s work with singers merged the musical and personal in particularly gendered ways. Barg theorizes the gendered musical and personal terrain of his collaborations both for the paths of musical meaning toward which it might direct us and for how they mark what the historian Matthew Tinkcom has called, in a different but related context, the “queer labor” of gay male artists working behind the scenes in the entertainment industry. Strayhorn’s musical legacy presents an intriguing and distinctly queer paradox: he was a very active musical presence, and his compositions and arrangements were enormously influential, yet he remained largely anonymous in the public sphere. Strayhorn’s dissident sexual identity required that he work in the shadow of a collaborator, a distanced but empathetic space from which his voice could merge with and give shape to the voices of others. How, then, might we relate the queer conditions under which Strayhorn labored to his aesthetic practices as a vocal arranger and to the gendered labor and position of the singers with whom he worked?