Representing Jazz in the Twenty-First Century

Guest speaker: Krin Gabbard
Professor Emeritus in Comparative Literature, Stony Brook University, and Adjunct Professor of Jazz Studies, Columbia University

How do people think about jazz now that it is well into its second century? If jazz writers and scholars are too close to the music to assess its broader associations, then films, novels, and television programs from the twenty-first century may be the best place to find global attitudes toward the music. In novels such as Roddy Doyle’s Oh, Play That Thing (2004), Nathaniel Mackey’s Bass Cathedral (2007), and Michael Chabon’s Telegraph Avenue (2012), complex characters are seamlessly folded into well-established jazz histories. By contrast, in films such as The Terminal (Steven Spielberg, 2004), Tony Takitani (Jun Ichikawa, 2004), and Good Night and Good Luck (George Clooney, 2005), jazz functions primarily to promote nostalgia. More recently, in the AMC Television program, Preacher (2016-2018), jazz retains some of the strangeness and marginality it has carried at least since the middle of the twentieth century. Creative artists today encounter an extremely wide range of possibilities if they wish to put some jazz into their works.