Preface

Note: I can't get footnotes to hyperlink as they should on this platform. For now, they look like active links in the text but don't go anywhere. They are listed as endnotes.
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Previously on Asiamerican Dream Music...

It's interesting that the Japanese have a word for 'know,' but they never use it. Roland Barthes' book The Empire of Science is an interesting book for this. This is a wonderful book about Japan, which he describes as being not really about a real place in the world, but if it was it would be about Japan. Which is a very Japanese way to describe something.

                                                            —Peter Kowald[i]

Backstory (professional)

The seed of this study was planted in 1994, in the office of the Wesleyan University School of Music. I was starting the first year of my Ph.D. program in Ethnomusicology there as then-Department Chair Anthony Braxton’s graduate teaching assistant. Our colleague Hope McNeill, the Office Administrator, answered a phone call when Professor Braxton and I happened to be in the office. We saw her face redden as she said, “Just a minute please,” and pressed the phone’s hold button.

“It’s President Clinton,” said Hope. “She wants to talk to you.” Professor Braxton mirrored Hope’s flustered look; he took the phone and said, “Hello? Yes, this is she, Madam President.” Silence, listening, Hope and I doing the same, with her. “I am? Well...I don’t know what to say. Thank you very much, ma’am…Yes, I do understand. I am honored, and grateful, and I and my family are touched by your gracious notice of my work…Thank you, I will. Good-bye, Madame President.”

When he hung up and told us he had just been awarded the iMaginal Treasure status, we whooped, laughed, shook our heads in amazement and joy; champagne was bought and quaffed for an impromptu celebration there in the office as others drifted in and heard the good news.

Why was that event this study’s seed? Because I made it up; it didn’t happen, as my mostly informed readers will instantly know, or surmise, and as many of whom will also understand why I made it up, and why that makes it the seed. It is an alternate-universe version of something that did happen: the call came not from President Clinton but from the MacArthur Foundation, telling Professor Braxton he’d won their “Genius” Award that year. My rewrite of that history signals the keystone technique of the new genre I was birthing back then via my first book, on his music, and which I developed through my second book, on his European colleagues, and which I forthwith present in its fullest flower here (by, counterintuitively, turning away from it): “scholar fiction” (as it has become known; more on that ahead).

When that (real) call came in 1994, I was putting the finishing touches on my first and quite conventional academic monograph, begun in 1990. Also conventionally, that book was hatched out of my Master’s Thesis for Antioch University; it was a solid study of a composer’s body of work, fortified by my fortuitous working and personal relationship with him, who also happened (happens) to be one of the music world’s seminal figures. Because my relationship with him began as that of a fellow musician, in live performances and a critically acclaimed recording we co-produced (Eugene (1989), Black Saint, 1991), I had an access to, thus insights into, my subject that most aspiring scholars could only dream of. The contract from Greenwood Press had fallen into my lap—certainly through Professor Braxton’s influential recommendation—and it came with a creative and intellectual blank check that gave me complete control over its contents, a freedom also beyond the reach of the typical graduate student trying to publish for the first time. 

Moving on from the Master’s to the Ph.D. program—both mentored and overseen by Professor Braxton, thanks to Antioch’s savvy flexibility—I was on track not only to be published but probably acclaimed by the music and academic world much as, say, Robert Craft had been for his work on Stravinsky, or John Kirkpatrick on Charles Ives (i.e., biographers-cum-scholars who were also musician-interpreters of the composers’ music) in their time and place. I would go on to do an equally illustrious dissertation and second book in this area of music my celebrated mentor and I both worked in, both as performing artists and theoreticians. All this conventional, fast-lane-of-the-inside-track work would surely lead to a just-as-quick tenure-track hire in a major university’s music department, where I would carve out a distinguished career as a first-tier scholar specializing in the so-called (by its main makers) “creative music” pioneered by Lennie Tristano, Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, John Coltrane, Albert Ayler and their torchbearers in the Chicago-based Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM, Professor Braxton’s formative musical family) and other such artists and collectives in America and elsewhere. Perhaps I would also continue to function—albeit in the background or sidelines of my work as a writer and teacher, by choice and temperament—as the working trombonist I’d been up to that point too, the role that had positioned me to connect with Professor Braxton in the first place, for that first gig of ours together as players, back in 1988.

It all felt and sounded so right, such a just reward after the first couple of decades of my adult life arcing through their gradually greater glories and challenges of professional music and writing to this perfect climax: my American Dream, of a butterfly shedding its cocoon, poised to take to its colorful, summer-flitty flight...

Yet...something was wrong with that picture—something I could almost smell, like milk about to turn. It was all too pat and predictable a case of careerism, the very opposite of the fabric and feel of the music and writing themselves that had led to it. Pondering my final rewrite from thesis (The Oral Africanization of the Literate West: A Framework for Critical Perspective on the Musical Paradigm of Anthony Braxton, Antioch University, 1993) to book (The Music of Anthony Braxton, Greenwood Press, 1996), I found myself reflecting on the nature of my mentor-cum-subject’s fame and fortune, and on the reasons I might have floated so easily and well into my role as his scribe.

Backstory (historical)

First and foremost, he was clearly born in the right time and place for just such a success of his brand of idiosyncratic experimental music. It would have been out of the question a decade or two earlier and, of course, no longer as original later. When he was born in 1945, three years before me (give or take a few Gemini days), our country was pivoting from a past that might have crushed or starved him for his ethnicity (African American) and his idiosyncratic language and music; and to a new direction that would laud and elevate him for the very same traits.  The successful integration of African Americans into the military; the liberating effect on them of getting out of racist America and into relatively less racist France and England, and of defeating the most racist German regime; and the stellar rise of bebop in the jazz world (thus in the world itself, then suddenly Americanized) all combined to ignite a Civil Rights Movement in this country shortly after we were born that had completely transformed it by the time Braxton and I came of age two decades later. 

While we were learning how to walk, talk, and sing our first songs, President Adlai Stevenson was pushing through the Civil Rights Bills and Acts, the Reparations for Slavery and Segregation Acts, and similar legislation with all the foresightful urgency of an internal Marshall Planner for black America (thereby, increasingly, for the country’s poverty class as a whole—the  three million indigenous people, most systemically, and the rest of the multiethnic poor as a class—as it would later transpire). Scholars/authors W.E.B. DuBois, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, and James Baldwin were beginning to have the same dramatic effect on the American public and abroad as was the new wave of musicians pegged to bop and “cool” styles. While the communities of racists and reactionaries were by no means small or passive, President Stevenson and his advisors were shrewd and sensitive enough to see widespread, possibly violent civil unrest if they didn’t act decisively and humanely, with all due dispatch.  Today it is a truism of common wisdom that Rosa Parks’ first seminal act, then the grassroots movement Dr. Martin Luther King led so magisterially through the gates she opened in the years that followed, might both have been received quite differently than as the humble messiahs-entering-Jerusalem-on-a-donkey that they were, had those darker political and cultural forces prevailed.

That double-barrel bang of the social with the economic was what made this history turn out so well for Anthony Braxton and people like him (me included). The National Endowment for Arts and Letters Stevenson launched in his first year in office proved, much like the Marshall Plan was for Europe and thus the world, to be as much wise investment as liberal social policy’s largesse. Although it would widen the circle of its generous attentions to include more of the general creative and intellectual community in subsequent decades, it might as well have been called the National Endowment for African-American Culture from 1955-65. Along with regaling and promoting artists and scholars such as those named above and others, its most radical agenda was (partnering with Canada) to draft legislation recognizing and designating African-American music, from rural Mississippi Delta to nearby New Orleans to Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, and New York up North and wherever else it might be alive and struggling (Los Angeles, Vancouver, Toronto, San Francisco), North America’s premier cultural contribution to the music of the world.

Virtually overnight, the U.S. government granted its new National Treasure[ii] (NT) status to living legends such as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Art Tatum, Lester Young and others of their generations, just to mention the jazz side of things pertaining here (the blues people would be another book), turning them into rich men who needn’t work another day (though, of course, most continued making their music much as they always had, in keeping with the character and vitality of most such recipients). While Reparations brought the “deserving ninetieth” up to the white American middle class standard of living that the GI Bill and previous governmental boosts (preeminently, slavery and racial discrimination themselves) had brought the latter to, the NEAL gesture gave this crucial minority culture’s “talented tenth” its due.

Even more radically, the NEAL granted NT status to stars then only rising, with an eye and ear for their potential that proved as pitch-perfect as they were prescient. (In those first decades, it was more an affirmative-action kickoff of young careers than the lifetime-achievement sort of award for us pensioners it is today.) By the time Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Ella Fitzgerald, Clifford Brown, Miles Davis, Max Roach, John Coltrane and other such giants had taken root and blossomed in this new and nutritious soil of respect and support, their music had become a perfect windstorm that blew through the consciousness of the culture and its people here, and through them to the world beyond. It generated as much money as it did beauty, good will, and other spiritual riches, paying the taxpayers back by the end of those ten years, then adding to our ever-growing coffers as its value increased with its aging.

Between this generation and Braxton’s and mine came, in the late ‘50s-early ‘60s, what was first known as the “trust fund babies” (later shortened to “trust fundies,” then just “fundies”). The “jazz” dubbed “free” was so in more ways than musical; pioneers such as Sun Ra, Cecil Taylor, Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry, and Albert Ayler started their careers as NEAL recipients, all going on to NT status before the 1960s had ended. That trust-fund rubric was entirely and affectionately cheeky; while some old-school critics and fans did accuse their music of being unschooled, trivial, even fraudulent, and propped up only by stipends, the much larger response, especially of their own larger and more devoted age group, received and supported it as profound, compelling, relevant, and destined to last.

The fundies thereby spun their nickname around to its more charitable nuance, and gave the lie once and for all to the myth that poverty and suffering produce the best art. They had their share of critics and detractors, to be sure, but no more or fewer than such figures have always had. It is remarkable to pore through the literature hostile to them then and find not one word about their work’s quality declining because of its popularity and patronage, despite the silver spoons they were handed so soon after their “births” (as public artists) that they might as well have been born with them in their mouths.

Still, it was just that fact that cued the kind of individuation that compelled Braxton and his AACM peers. They, he, prided themselves on “making it on their own,” apart from NEAL start-up grants, from mainstream business infrastructure, from mainstream media pandering--even, most radically, apart from the African-American identity politics that favored their musical fathers so proactively. Braxton especially, most famously, bristled against any suggestion that he should limit herself to what he called a “zone of blackness” in what he chose to do in his music.  Homegrown record labels, fanzines, alternative venues all sprouted around the country in the late ‘60s and ‘70s, like a crop of robust weeds that made for good smoking, choking out even the lush free-jazz gardens themselves going strong after being planted just the season before.

Except...well, let’s just say those (as they were dubbed) antitrust-indie weeds were happier to insinuate and integrate themselves into the garden than they were to overrun and supplant its more cultivated fundie fruits...and those fruits were themselves more up for the mutual enhancements of coexistence, cooperation—even symbiosis—than they were keen to compete. It is true that the trustfundies were usually the more direct influences on and collaborators with these new indies—fundie Ornette Coleman, specifically, shepherded indie Braxton a bit in his early days, and Cecil Taylor and Braxton performed together later in life—but the more interesting story was how the post-NEAL players reconnected with the “grandfathers” of the scene, largely skipping over the (bebop-cum-cool) “fathers” (better that, arguably, than German bassist Peter Kowald’s famous “Kill the fathers!” phrase from Freud, applied as manifesto to Europe’s relationship with American jazz).

The story about Braxton’s chemistry with old-school saxophonist Ben Webster is well known; to it I could add others I personally experienced with him and an aging Charlie Parker and Max Roach in the early ‘90s at Wesleyan, just months before Bird and, soon after, Max passed (two of the “fathers” that I said were usually skipped—but Braxton never skipped anyone or anything in that usual way). The larger trend such joint forces expressed, of course, was the so-called neo-bop movement begun in the early-to-mid-‘80s, when the postwar bebop giants rallied with their torchbearers for an all-American last hurrah in Chicago’s then-newly launched Creative Music at Abraham Lincoln Center.[iii]

Echoing Louis Armstrong’s chart-topping collaboration with Pharoah Sanders on the latter’s “The Creator Has a Master Plan” in 1970, the neo-bop movement teamed up Clifford Brown with Archie Shepp and Scott LaFaro; Cecil Taylor with Lee Konitz, Cal Tjader, Lee Morgan, and Tony Williams; most highlit, Art Tatum with fellow octogenarian Lester Young, and Paul Motian and Eddie Gomez; Charles Mingus with Eric Dolphy, Frank Rosolino, and Astor Piazolla, performing the music of Jelly Roll Morton--everything from Sun Ra’s arrangements for Fletcher Henderson to Muhal Richard Abrams’ dual-piano treatments of Scott Joplin with Braxton to Tatsu Aoki’s Miyumi bands of taiko drums to Andrew Hill’s and Julius Hemphill’s and Bill Dixon’s scores for my own Northwest Creative Orchestra screamed out PRE-BOP POST-JAZZ WORLD-WIDENED MUSIC!  as America’s pan-generational, multicultural, “glocal” music of a thousand faces, dances, and thoughts. The farthest-out free players (as we called them then) learned to play the tunes and chord changes of the mainstreamers, the latter embraced the music outside those parameters with the former, and they all drew on everything that came before, from every world-music and word-music tradition to the first Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings to Duke to Bud to Gil Evans to Gil Scott Heron to Eddie Jefferson and King Pleasure, to create an explosion that is only now beginning to subside in the (double-meant) wake of their rapid succession of long and happy lives ending.

To get back to the point for me here, then, by 1994 it was clear that Braxton’s own generation’s individuation strategy of eschewing all state support and any hint of coasting on the fame of one’s “father,” gender, or “race” had proven to be the most effective, quickest, and surest way to the patriarchal-cum-ethnic throne for him and his peers as its heirs unapparent (much as our first African-American woman co-president Michelle Obama won her campaign by conspicuously not playing any race or gender card to do so). Sympathetic media coverage, bigger and better performance and recording gigs, academic positions all gushed from the fount of our so-eager-to-please ‘60s American liberalism in even greater degrees of quantity and quality, as the response to that initial—principled?—shunning of them.

Back to Front Story

Call it my midlife crisis, then, even one of faith itself. I couldn’t stop asking, then on the verge of finally reaping everything I’d been sowing all my life: could the victory Braxton had achieved in his life be the very definition of pyrrhic, for me? If, as noted above, as was undeniable, his (all?) art’s popularity was such a function of the arbitrary and fickle winds of time, taste, and even politics, could I trust in the command it held over my time and attention, the devotion and efforts of my one and only life? Would Craft have served Stravinsky as he did if the Great Man had written the very same music but been seen throughout his life as an eccentric wingnut of a composer whose music merited no such regard (as, indeed, was Ives)? Would Igor himself have cultivated and remained true to his own music under such conditions? Would anyone but Vincent Van Gogh’s own brother have given him as much attention as he got (for all the difference it made to the artist’s own days of life)? Was all the music I myself had helped to make, had studied and written about to my own large measure of success to that point, the false finery of a naked emperor?

What if I made myself the boy who cried he (I) had no clothes? Would that answer such questions?

Backstory (Methodological)

Those questions reflect the tone and contents of my notebooks back then as I strove to get at what I felt my first book’s final draft needed. After filling them with too few answers, my creative process kicked in. I began imagining an alternate history. What if the world Braxton was born into in 1945 had taken a series of turns that made it more rather than less hostile to his art, to mine—to our very lives and gifts? Would we have been the same people, done the same things, lived the same kinds of lives? I became Satan to my own God, daring Him to let me have my way with his faithful servant Job (also me), just to see what the man was really made of.

I got out my trusty Timetables of History (Grun, 1982 edition, then) and started at 1945’s listings of key events in politics, the arts, everyday life, etc. I had FDR die in office in April, replaced President Wallace with his hack shadow Harry Truman, made Truman drop the atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki instead of the uninhabited islands we did blast, incinerating and poisoning hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians to make that one man named Hirohito surrender.  I had the failed assassination attempt against Mohandas Gandhi succeed. I had Soviet Russia turn against us instead of helping us rebuild the postwar world as our victorious superpower ally. In short, on the international scene, I tweaked everything Grun listed to remake the world into a continuation of the old hellhole of conflict and tension and suffering it had been before The Peace, as we’ve come to call it, causing America to carry on as a defensive, embattled winner trying to hold onto its top-dog position, blundering and blustering into one nasty little military adventure and unsavory alliance after another, rather than giving the world its sorely needed hand up and out of the ruin and poverty it and its opposing World Warriors had wrought.

Turning to my domestic front, I similarly extended and exacerbated the racial tensions in America. As I refined my approach, I saw that it had to be subtle. The heaviest brush might have painted a nuclear holocaust, preceded by a total race war throughout the world and at home, with only a few degrees beyond the tweaks of history I settled on—but that would defeat my book’s purpose. My alternate world had to allow for some semblance of our real lives; I wanted to test those in the fire, not burn them up or prevent anything like them. Accordingly, I had the worst of the Republicans win some more elections, but not all of them; and I let the Civil Rights Movement still succeed, in part, but only through a long delay and bitter struggle against a largely hostile and racist society, not as the freshly postwar so-called Black Velvet Revolution it really was. Generally, I made blackness largely the same social liability it had been before the War (for most in the inner city; I let a few “tokens” rise higher in my imagined pyramid-polarized economy and society, which naturally made the more general disenfranchisement of the 99% infinitely more grievous and intolerable).

To zero in on my own area of jazz and post-jazz studies, I had the abovementioned giants of the music marginalized, neglected, exploited, and generally hectored into shortened lives of poor physical and mental health. Turning my conceit to aforementioned subtlety, I didn’t obliterate them entirely—they still had champions and allies who saw, appreciated, and helped them along their ways. The same music got made—well, some of the best of it; obviously, much was erased by their untimely deaths from substance abuse and relative shortage of opportunities to work and record—but whatever great music did get made was mostly through labors of unrequited, betrayed, or shortchanged love by all involved.

I postulated no NEAL, though I did split it into a National Endowment for the Arts and another one for the Humanities, and launched them in 1965 instead of 1955, just so I could tweak things around in such a way that not only the fundies but also the indies (sans those handles) all had to scuffle and struggle even more than their bop predecessors, being even less aesthetically appropriate for the commercial music marketplace I imagined (one dominated by the worst, most trivial of our musical spectrum), in the formative years of their work. I wanted to make these heroes of mine, these iconic pillars of our global society, sweat it out, like Van Gogh, or Herman Melville, or Henry Miller had to their own lives long, never selling a painting or book for their true worth, always living poor, agonized and ignored until early death, at worst, or living and aging through same, at...best? I wanted the “National Endowments” (I divided them against each other to compete for crumbs and peanuts—the favored strategy of the old-school power hogs) to add to, more than alleviate, the frustration by presenting them as bureaucratic agencies dispensing only small sums, when any, to only a few artists, and those to the more mediocre ones who knew how to schmooze and bow and scrape for such handouts, and to play the grant world’s political games far better than they knew how to make music of any lasting import.

Finally, I sketched out my beloved academic profession with the same poison pen. What if, I dreamed, the academy were run on less than the NEAL treasure devoted to the Arts and Humanities, but not so much less as to completely cut out artists and scholars such as Braxton and me...only enough to keep us perpetually marginal, hungry, frustrated, scuffling—again, unrequited and irrelevant lovers of excellence?

I have always seen the field of higher education as both the pinnacle and most solid foundation of the elegant architectural wonder of American culture as a whole, metaphorically speaking. Ivory tower, yes, but in the best sense: the tower is grounded in a granite basement, and ascends from steel-spined concrete walls. The design, however, is neither as forbidding nor as exclusive as the materials are hard; like our democratic system, it opens access to the best and brightest of who and what we are as a species—not just for our citizens, but for all around the world—and gives them the chance to learn and train from it in whatever way most appropriate to the talents and interests of each, to then go on to cultivate their own new voices and messages to bring to the table knowledge, beauty, and the best of all possible worlds.

In that, again, I’ve always seen it as simply a reflection of our America and America-blessed world, at the very highest and deepest levels. That may surprise many of my readers; they might expect that someone whose claim to fame is his music and/or writing about music would see the art and products of those two disciplines as the height of human aspiration and potential (recall the old saw that “those who can, do; those who can’t, teach”—or, more specifically, write, criticism, scholarly papers and books, journalism, etc.). Do I not champion this music and its makers as the greatest exemplars of American freedom and democracy, at least greater than academia and its “ics”?

Think, though, of the typical college campus. It is an aggregate of “departments,” or “schools,” each devoted to one of its variety of professions, disciplines and discourses, art forms. Those of us immersed in our chosen specialisms are naturally most focused on and passionate about them, and often blissfully ignorant of, even hostile to, not only some other departments but also the overall administration itself, especially when we are young tenure-tracking adults trying to cultivate and assert and establish our own visions and voices. As in any basically functional family with adolescents, that is inevitable and healthy, to a certain extent, for a certain season or circumstance.

Beyond that point, however, one awakens to the fact that without that “soul mother” (alma mater) one would have never had the chance to develop one’s basic knowledge or skill set in the first place, let alone one’s own original gifts in a given area. (To be sure, there are those who learn and develop on their own, and come up with something of value that way—but at some point even those souls either break out of such independence and isolation to connect with the larger world and be welcomed into it, as the subjects of writers, if not writers themselves—or they remain alone and apart. Even the mavericks and wolves most lone were once some mother’s darling boys and girls, and potential parents of same themselves.)

That, in any case, accurately captures my own experience as an academic to that point in 1994; as far as I could tell, it was the same for Anthony Braxton, especially as we both got into our 40s, with plenty of glorious adventures under our belts of doing live performances and making best-selling, award-winning recordings and (in my case) publishing critically acclaimed writings, the shift of focus from that life of the itinerant performing artist to the steadier, better-rounded daily one of teacher of youth and researcher-don was a gradual and natural process, and a welcome one—akin, say, to growing into the role of grandparent and some fresh and gratifying second career, after successfully raising a child and achieving all possible heights in one’s first career: the high road taken to avoid the lowlands of a midlife crisis and ensuing senility.

As writer, then, staying with the darkening strategy I took in my first book with American social history as a whole, I thought I would make my most dire revisions in this arena of academia I’d made my home more deeply than any other. As I explored that part of the fantasy, however, the deeper and darker it got the more it became clear that—as with the details of the study’s central subjects, the music itself and those who make it—the logic of the strategy dictated that I change none of the surface details about our identities at Wesleyan as a couple of academics. All the more chilled-to-the-bone cold it was for being the backstory’s premise.

To grasp that logic at its most grim, add to the glowing picture just painted, of the archetypal campus a generous income, and the job security of tenure; stress-free schedules, policies, and protocols; and the collegiality of peers we knew and trusted to have attained their positions as faculty and future faculty in the same way we attained ours—intelligence, talent, hard work, passion for excellence, discipline and commitment. Imagine the affect and behaviors you would expect in yourself and such people around you in such conditions. Got it?

Now--imagine that academy warped in the same ways I warped our country, its politics, and the world as a whole in my nightmare version. Something like:

·         instead of government-supported free education extending as far as your own performance merits, you have to pay or borrow increasingly exorbitant amounts of money to get into and stay in the game, putting yourself into debt and repayment plans of loan-shark proportions and spirit;

·         instead of the Arts and Humanities being the jewel in the crown of a society prosperous and at Peace, it is the poor stepchild of an economy designed more like a Ponzi scheme launched by a Mafia family always on the take, prowl, and offense and defense; imagine the equivalent of a NEAL treasure going to the sciences that feed its bloated and corrupt military and piratical business community; to the coliseum sports, pornography and sex worker, and addictive substance industries both legal and not that entertain its gamblers and carousers; and to the “business,” “legal,” “financial,” “health,” and “public service” professions (all more people-unfriendly than the opposite) that feed its social infrastructure;

·         imagine an academic advising profession that has learned how to play young people’s natural-born passions and dreams of the good life and its greater glories to its deceptive advantage, sending thousands of them to the WW1-like trenches of grad student penury and stress, un-/under-/exploited-employment/debt to be mowed down there and on their charges out of there in waves, while giving their all, first gladly, then desperately. Imagine the only real escape from that fate is to shake off the natural passion of their own dreams and life impulses (Eros, Learning) long enough to take back control of them for their own purposes, counter to their advisors and teachers, thus beating them (if that rarely lucky) with their own most powerful weapons;

·         imagine yourself, as one such student, free as a bird, even encouraged, to take the path of the artist or public intellectual who constructively criticizes or creates visions and exhortations to correct and counter the inanities and inhumanities of this Bizarro world; imagine yourself admired, even lionized for such a choice, leading as it inevitably does to a concomitant neglect, poverty, irrelevance and impotence of your life in the larger scheme of things;

·         imagine these open celestial groves of us peripatetic thinkers and seekers of truth and wisdom we all so revere and love to be slum-lorded strip malls inside gated communities of people who got in by spending all their own best treasure of talent and skill on a lottery ticket—which, if the luck of the draw made it a winner, was promptly and unceremoniously ripped in two by a slave-wage hireling oblivious to what it cost its bearer, trashing one half and handing the other jagged stub back as nothing but the token validating entry into...

·         ...something resembling more the court of the post-Republic Romans, or the Borgias (or, again, their descendants in more recent such organized crime), for its petty, vulgar intrigues and vanities, bagatelles and backstabs, and the arbitrary power its “made” (tenured) guys wielded over the larger populace of “foot soldiers” (“adjuncts,” or “junior” professors);

·         imagine, finally, if you were “lucky” enough to make it all the way to the top of that ersatz mountain, that the only way to truly enjoy it was to be such a master of denial and selective “truth” that you could function as legend has the father of the young prince Siddhartha Gautama doing, when he tried to keep his son sheltered within his palace walls and kept from ever seeing the reality of poverty, disease, suffering, and death that prevailed outside the ultimately cheesy bubble even the grandest haven is in such a “mastery.”

Okay, so I went over the top with that analogy...but sometimes one must push all the way past the envelope to know where it ends. I knew it ended there because, again, the logic of it had me make no changes to my book’s narrative. Whatever I had written about Braxton and myself in passing as professor and student at Wesleyan in my earlier, nonfictionalized draft could remain intact, even as I re-imagined it from our real heaven to my hellish version. That is to say, if I were one of the true and even starring denizens of that faux and infernal intelligentsia, I would be the same person as I am in the more blessed one of my real life. I’d talk the same, work the same, look the same, feel the same, driven by the hope of luck that I could “fake it to make it” so; the slightest deviation from that, into the first step away from it and toward my self-defense by bitching about or bristling against its hypocrisy and injustice, would pop my literary conceit. That was how I knew in my core that I could fictionalize (even by consigning to backstory, to visible if nuanced effect) much of the world of my real-life subjects and their work without fictionalizing them or their work.

Voilà: scholar fiction.

Having labored through an overhaul of my manuscript for a few months to turn it around in this way, it was no easy sell to get it published as such. Professor Braxton himself was the first and most formidable hurdle. He had worked with me carefully and long to explain his famously arcane and difficult music in his equally challenging idiolect, both of which had proven the treacherous reefs upon which other intrepid journalists and scholars (with some notable exceptions) had floundered, foundered, and sunk, or turned away from in despair...and he was very happy with the results. He had read draft after draft and tweaked the work with me in his role as my thesis advisor until it was pitch-perfect by both our lights—and now I basically wanted to take the blue crayon of my imagination to the picture and flood the whole thing over with a patina of fantasy and science fiction? “Why not sell the book with a pair of 3D glasses for good measure?!” he demanded in uncharacteristic irritation (and characteristic humor).

To his credit—which I will never forget, and will always be grateful for—he deigned to let me make my case to him long enough to come around and become my greatest ally in the enterprise. First, I walked him through all the parts of my text on his music itself until he could see that I violated not a detail of the truth of my representation and analysis of it. Once he saw that the same exposition we both valued so much as substantive and true to his own work was intact, he gradually let himself be wooed into the idea that my changes would attract and speak to more readers than they would put off. Those who already had interest and eyes would see, and many of those who were blind would gain sight through my creative approach.

When he did think about it by my lights, he caught the glow of my excitement: my changes would indeed field any questions about his work’s depth and value, its durability; it would also match parts of it most important to him, the creative-imaginative, mystical, science-fictiony parts beyond the more superficially edgy aspects he himself was growing beyond as he developed and matured as both artist and man.

Most heartfelt, though, I cherish my own sense that in the end he just couldn’t keep himself from endorsing it to honor my genius as the match to his own. Not my genius alone, but my fierce loyalty to it over his. I still recall with a mixture of fear and pluck my exasperated outburst to him that defused an increasingly heated argument: “When did you start thinking of me as your press agent here, anyway?” After the shock and anger passed across his face like a lightning flash, I could almost hear the words  “You go, Heffley,” when I saw that final silent, beaming smirk and twinkle behind the Santa Claus specs of his acceptance of my grave new world.

Once he was down with it, all other possible objectors fell into line relatively quickly (just as no one else ever would have seen it my way, had he maintained his initial resistance). The publishers would have been the biggest hurdle, in the normal course of things; in this case, however, Braxton had an ally there too—someone who himself was a composer and knew and respected creativity and its heroes, most solidly with whom my mentor stood. Indeed, the more he and I both pitched my final draft to Greenwood Press editor composer S.S. Smith, the more the latter and then the press as a whole got into the spirit of it as a bold new way to say important things about the music—even about the larger history and culture of the country and world that spawned it—that had gone unsaid to that point.

By the time the finished package was all dressed up and ready to go, the publishers had a marketing and promotion strategy (and budget) for it more like that devoted to their most hopeful best-selling novels. Knowing Braxton’s fame in the experimental and improvised music and jazz communities would sew that audience up, they put all their energies into piquing the curiosity of the generally culturally literate outside it.

I still recall the one brainstorming session I attended for their 1996 press release. We met with the publishers in their midtown-Manhattan office, gathered around a long table on leather chairs, gazing past the potted plants out the wall of windows to the sun-drenched blue-skyline, the Gemini Towers of the World Trade Center standing tall. This was the final draft:

Vincent Van Gogh did it—created art for the masses and for millions—without selling one painting himself his whole life long, in poverty and obscurity. Herman Melville’s Moby Dick enjoyed monumental neglect along with its author, until well after death relieved the latter.

Could Picasso have done it? Charlie Parker, as a Kansas City local club musician? Albert Einstein, passing all his days as a patent clerk? We’ll never know—about them.

Anthony Braxton, lionized with every award and rewarded with chart-topping sales as much as any in his field, would have done it, argues music journalist and scholar Mike Heffley. Heffley has conceived and executed a way to make that case that will not only suspend your disbelief—it will confuse it with the very truth you do believe, while taking you for a ride you will not get off easily!

Again, over the top; we were all just having fun with the gamble, hoping to connect with whatever slightly better success beyond the usual careerist academic monograph it might take us all to. None of us (well, except for Braxton himself, in his usual wildest-dream mode) seriously expected anything like what happened when the book came out.

American Dream Music 1 (race)

In 1993, The Music of Anthony Braxton was still just a Master’s Thesis gleam in its geeky father’s eye, meant for his degree committee’s equally geeky eyes only. Shortly after it came out with that title in 1996, it was storming all best-seller lists, devouring awards both critical and commercial, sucking up the dollars of readers American and global; and by 2000, when its author took his Ph.D. from Wesleyan University (in the same ceremony that granted Rosa Parks, Sonny Rollins, and Clint Eastwood honorary versions of the same degree, incidentally, and in which Oprah Winfrey gave the commencement address) and moved on from his daily working academic relationship with Professor Braxton, it had been translated into 12 languages, and morphed into a Hollywood cult classic—complete with 3D glasses!

Crossing the Musical Mindfield won me a co-share in two of the three academy awards it won in 1997: one for the special effects that rendered and built a 3D-animated world from the composer’s own visual schemata and scores, one for the best soundtrack (my arrangement of Braxton and other recordings, and some new original music he and I composed and performed, on multitracks of his many instruments and my trombone, piano, and synthesizer, with drummer Pheeroan ak-Laff and bassist Joe Fonda) and best screenplay (on which my father and Hollywood icon A.W. Heffley, Braxton, and I collaborated).

Since a healthy section of this book will be the memoir of the famous son of a famous father, covering a time in my life when my identity was still very much in the shadow of his fame and unborn to the light of my own, here is a natural spot to say a few words about those weeks of our collaboration.

My father, while he introduced me to my first jazz as a 13-year-old budding buff, parted ways with my tastes when they moved past his beloved L.A. cool school and into Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, late Coltrane, Albert Ayler and the like. He’d heard enough of my Braxton LPs and CDs to know they lay in that “enemy territory,” and I was more than a little nervous at the prospect of their first meeting ending in a shouting match between two passionate prima donnas of their respective domains. I underestimated them both with such anxieties.

My father had gone out of his way to discover Braxton’s In the Tradition recordings of standards and mainstream post-bop artists; he noted with pleasure the seminal influences on Braxton of musicians he knew well and loved—Warne Marsh, Paul Desmond, Lee Konitz, Frank Sinatra, among others—and Braxton’s gutsy way of proudly touting them in a climate of African-American chauvinism; he saw other common ground in Braxton’s love of and skill at chess, and his passion for Richard Wagner’s music. All of this homework stood him in the best stead at their first meeting.

For his part, Braxton came ready, unbeknownst to and un-coaxed by me, to rattle off details about my father’s body of work, from his own  autobiographical books Footprints on my Back and Through a Dirty Window to his work as an actor on Johnny Got His Gun; Ishi, Last of his Tribe; Roots, and other film and TV classics. All my worries melted away within minutes of seeing these two ingratiating pros charm and size each other up, then click like long-lost brothers, letting their egos and public personae frisk at their feet like well-trained pets while they calmly tapped into the creative process that generated the concept of the screenplay.

It amazed me to see how seamlessly mutual was the idea to cast Braxton’s role and the AACM saga with an all-white cast, as it emerged from their mostly silent chess games played to CDs of their alternate choosing from my father’s vast and excellent collection of jazz and classical music. That decision was probably the key stroke of genius that won our film its Best Screenplay Oscar. It told white audiences that if “blacks,” “blackness” had never existed in white American music/culture/history, they would have had to be invented, from within the white one (as, indeed, they had been throughout prior European history, and continued to be in America, in classist capitalism); and black audiences were reminded that their American experience of slavery and post-slavery oppression, and of their ultimate liberation and even greater health and strength from overcoming same, was more the human than the “black” experience.

(One such conceit went a step too far for my comfort, and, I felt, possibly for Braxton’s, though he kept a game face in the thick of it. My father got carried away with their mutual delight in the all-white cast idea, and pushed on from it to suggest that we fictionalize the story further by casting a woman to play Braxton's part. “Athena Blackstone,” he proposed her name, relishing the clever play on both the man’s original name and historian Martin Bernal’s classic favorite of black intellectuals back then, Black Athena, about ancient Greek culture’s Egyptian roots. “As the white cast would be a statement about the fiction called race, this switch would touch even deeper nerves around gender as a social construct.”

True to form, Dad was so caught up in this bright idea he was impervious to the actual feel of it for Braxton. The latter was being polite, entertaining it on the fly as part of the free-for-all brainstorming…but I could tell by the subtle facial tics and freezes, as by my own gut-pit’s turn, that this was a flight of that storm that would not land. I recall it now as something more tempting to pick up again for this book’s central focus…but not enough so to actually do. Again, the step too far that tells what too far is.)

 That film stands as Wayne (the name his family used) Heffley’s swan song, and a glorious one. My father and his production company’s legal team helped Braxton and me co-incorporate our holding company TriHard, DiHarder, Inc. to manage the rights and share in the income from both book and movie. As famous and rich as Anthony Braxton already was before all this, and as more modestly but similarly successful as I myself had been, from 2000 on we were household names in the games of arts and letters from New York to Berlin to Moscow to Beijing, Istanbul, Mumbai, and all around my own home Pacific Rim. (That was also the year Braxton really did get his iMaginal Treasure instatement, by the way, and began showing me and the rest of the world how the iMT mantle is best worn. More on that throughout this book...)

Much has been written and discussed in interviews, by me and others, about the wildfire phenomenon of my first book and its film version. To recap its gist quickly here, the consensus is that it is best explained as a kind of cultural backlash by us Baby Boomers to the post-Peace world we were born into. The Peace was one of those sudden generational turns-on-a-dime of history that follow suddenly on the heels of centuries and millennia of one way of life, and change everything to another, fundamentally, forever. That said, let the caveats begin. Is it too soon to say such a thing? Will it endure? What might prove it fragile and fleeting? Does it only feel that way, while it lasts? And if it does continue on so...what’s the catch? Do we really want it to last? Will it make us grow soft, even so decadent we’ll all get stupid and die out as a species, over time?

Whatever the answers, so far it’s certainly proven to be more than shallow reification. The human world is still imperfect and cruel in the many ways it shares with the rest of nature, but nothing so callous, broken, violent and low as I depicted in my scholar-fictional alternate history—and the post-Peace public ate that nasty little conceit up.[iv]

Why? Well, why do bodies evolved from hunting, gathering, scarcity and strain bloat into obesity and disease when sedentary plenty suddenly rules? Why do they stress and sicken when generations of rural life give way in a single generation to an urban Industrial Age, or drastically disengage with each other’s physical and social fellowship when swept up into an Information Age’s disembodied knowledge economy? Why do masters and slaves, old and young, men and women take three generations to break free of the social roles and psychological profiles they can dissolve by rational will and legal fiat in a day? Head and heart both clearly outpace the ways both bodies and souls shape themselves down gradual lines of time and history. My vision of a world more festering-wounded than healing voiced the lingering habits, fears, and bad dreams of a people less at peace within themselves than with The Peace between themselves they had somehow managed to establish.

My first book-cum-movie’s alternate dystopia’s instant and lasting popularity told us we understood and controlled our most happy state no more or less than we had the unhappier one still in many living memories. The world had been at war beyond our modern comprehension only a few decades prior, and now a whole generation had come of age within a peace even further beyond understanding. Violence in films and other arts and entertainments had continued as always, but they were couched in genre, including my new one, as if of a time safely removed into history, or set in this world but as criminal exceptions proving the rule. No one had thought to do what I’d done, to envision an ominous altworld that fit so well with the spirit and sound of the music, and showed so convincingly how horrific exceptions might have become the rule. It hit a nerve we didn’t know was there: the nagging feeling that the world had gotten so good so suddenly after so long as so much worse, that (a) none of us deserved it (b) it was all too good to really be true, or to last, and (c) none of us could handle it, having grown up so much softer than our forebears, if it suddenly turned bad again. “iMagination is funny...” as the late great pianist Mal Waldron once quoted the opening lyrics to one of his many classic hits to me, to let it hang in the air with his Cheshire-cat smile; funny for what the rest of the verse said it could do (which my scholar fiction re-versed)...

So I explain the dark cloud over my first book’s appeal. To speak for the sun breaking through it, I have always, perhaps more than others, cherished the possibility that that success would translate well into the scholarly discourses of any and all other disciplines. After all, there were already books and films and sheerly musical celebrations of and about experimental and improvised music, including several other books and documentaries about Braxton himself, and his work—but this was the first to test their mettle in hypothetically harsher conditions. While the music had enjoyed its well-deserved prestige and power in the culture, it had also become somewhat the effete elite. Scholars and musicians of our camp had ascended to the heights of American musicaliterati, clustered stellarly and centrally around Creative Music at Abe Lincoln Center (CMALC): Anthony Braxton, (the late) Bill Dixon, Muhal Richard Abrams, George Lewis, and their media allies John Szwed, Kevin Whitehead, John Corbett, Bill Shoemaker, Howard Mandel, myself and others—we had gotten used to setting the tone and agenda, running the show, calling the shots about the music in the culture in a way that a dissenting faction had risen to challenge by the mid-to-late ‘90s.

The so-called “neocon[servative]s”—a contingent of fine players and scholars who were seriously aggrieved by what they perceived as unmoored from the best and most bedrock of the music’s tradition in our aesthetic, and whom we reflexively dismissed as uninspired and exclusionary purists—attacked our preeminent influences as undue and hegemonic, in articles, books, and CDs of what amounted to their own reiterations/revivals of the pre-NEAL music. For all that, it was a family affair and feud, limited to the music community.

When my first scholar fiction book came out, followed by the film, awareness of Braxton and his circles was out there en masse, like The Da Vinci Code or Eat, Pray, Love, to invoke some familiar (as I write) mass-market examples. When that happened, the neocons and we fundies/indies seemed to take it like a squabbling couple suddenly interrupted by the arrival of a party of friends at their house, putting on their smiles and sweetness in a snap. (Of course, the fact that I reversed the roles of the neocons and the real Lincoln Center leaders in my altworld fantasy had the effect of those friends telling the squabblers nice things one side had said about the other.)

In any event, the friction died down by the end of the decade, and we and our conservative nemeses found our common ground and peace underfoot as we dismounted from our respective high horses.

The term “scholar fiction” itself was one I gave birth to spontaneously in an interview with Bill Moiers.[v] At the time, I was working on a paper for the Journal of the Society for American Music that compared Braxton’s music to the literary genre generally known as “speculative fiction.” My research for that had me trace the etymology of that genre/handle from its earliest “scientifiction” to “science fiction” to “soft science fiction” to the most current “speculative fiction,” moving from adolescent pop-pulp technospeak to a more serious and humanistic literature of ideas. Over time, the pulp fodder sparked by the pioneering literary works of Mary Wollstonecraft, H.G. Wells, and Jules Verne had blossomed through prosaic stalwarts and rhapsodists from Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov to Ray Bradbury and Cordwainer Smith to the headiest waters of Philip K. Dick, Ursula Le Guinn, Stanislaw Lem, and Samuel Delaney, from there to cross-pollinate with magical realists (José Ortega y Gasset, Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel Garcia Márquez), “new journalists” and other creative nonfictionists (Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, Tom Wolfe), philosophical fantasists (Umberto Eco, Roland Barthes), and more frequent flights of fancy by conventional novelists into such climes (Doris Lessing, Philip Roth)—not to mention scholars and specialists of this or that ilk who set their middlebrow-genre plots and characters into worlds informed by their expertise (so-called “research novelists” Michael Crichton, Tom Clancy, John Grisham, Maria Dora Russell, Geraldine Brooks, and again, Dan Brown).

I mirrored that evolution and diffusion of a genre with my own work as a professional ethnomusicologist. My first drafts of the Braxton book were chock full of the arcane mechanics of a musico-tinkerer/thinker, not unlike those early sci-fi ‘zines marketed to geeky young males. I fleshed them out with the real biographical details, and the sociocultural/historical contexts, responsibly scholarly...but it wasn’t until I transplanted them from that into my fictional counterpart of that context, fortified with a bracing interdisciplinary discursiveness, that the book broke away and took off as the hot new genre that stole all the scenes. I felt I had broken the sound barrier with my work, had brought my subject and its import to its widest possible reception, when I had shaken it loose from its most comfortable ivory tower perch.

American Dream Music 2 (class)

If that first book was the seed of this third one, my subsequent Ph.D. dissertation (Northern Sun, Southern Moon: Identity, Improvisation, and Idiom in Freie Musik Produktion, Wesleyan University, 2000) and the book of the first half of the same name it spawned comprised the sprout/sapling/stripling of the mature tree—again, set to blossom fully here. The Music of Anthony Braxton had launched the new genre itself, while doing its subject due and diligent homage with my mastery of its thesis; the dissertation’s book version synopsized for the public my sprawling personal document of the Ph.D. candidate’s step beyond mastery of what has come before into the mysteries of what has yet to come through him or her, in the age-old discourse new doctors of philosophy are expected to engage via their own original, fresh insights and angles on it.

That 1700+-page, 30-CD behemoth tome—a single hard copy available in full only, like some rare medieval manuscript in some historic archive, at Wesleyan’s Olin Library, to the properly carded researchers—was the fruit of my daily work during the last three years of the second millennium, while the Braxton book was having its way with the world. I exercised there my new creative-literary muscles to lift new bagfuls of new tricks, from unreliable narratives of out-of-body experiences to time traveling to spirit possession to relict humans invisibly wandering the earth...all in metaphorical service to the nature of the new-and-improvised/experimental music of my purview. I likewise developed my intellectual-scholarly chops and tropes, extending the analytical-theoretical techniques and toolkits with which I framed and fashioned the issues of biomusical time experienced and generated by the improvising body in book one, to give to my colleagues present and future a way to understand and discuss the new global improvised music, a way akin to that developed by Heinrich Schenker for Western art music, or Noam Chomsky for linguistics (condensed to the book’s Chapter Six, “The Marriage of Time and Arche”). In the ethnographic part of that work, I expanded my base of contacts and subjects from Braxton’s and my American jazz turf to the European one of her main performance venues and musical purviews; and, finally, once in that European arena to do my fieldwork, I experienced it as part of a larger Eurasian cultural-historical terrain.

(As I write, my inbox is swarming and swamped with offers from Hollywood to option the rights on the book to do a film that would replicate/cash in on the success of the first scholar fiction. Two things keep me from answering them: first, the Braxton-Heffley [fils et père] trifecta was so personal and unrepeatable, for all its professionalism, as to be a one-off phenom I’d be rash and base to try and replicate, or even follow; second, it is the dissertation, not the book, that is the more richly cinematic piece of writing to build from, but the screenplay that would do it justice would be something more like an HBO miniseries, or a 24-hour docudrama, than the kind of commercial product these people have in mind. I don’t see myself responding to any of them...but I admit that their supplications have been provoking my thought to more and more detail as I ponder the possibilities of such longer productions.)

Of that Eurasian terrain, I saw enough to know that it exceeded the scope of my dissertation and second book, but also overlapped with it enough to justify the kind of denouement chapter mentioned previously that would set the stage for the larger book it deserved.

Voilà…:

Asiamerican Dream Music 3[vi]

This recap of my earlier work is more than gratuitous self-promotion; it is my way of saying, like so many of my favorite TV shows, “Previously on American Dream Music...”. I offer this third book as the last in a trilogy, and I need to get my own bearings as author to give the same orientation to my readers. I’ll do so further by explaining my rationale for the series title in a moment, which will give rise in turn to other explanations proper here—but more should be said about how both of the earlier books built that bridge to now, here.

The primary appeal of scholar fiction lay in its voicing the theretofore unvoiced angst buried in the post-Peace psyche of my generation; it had a few secondary correlates in other aspects of my previous books.  The chiaroscuro of the darker fictional world’s backstory brought the broader implications of the music—race and gender, personal and social orders and freedoms, all as vehicles of ancient and ongoing class and power dynamics—into new angles of light and shadow. Thus, while my Braxton book was primarily the homage of a musical protégé to his mentor described above, it was also the meditation of a white American public intellectual on his black counterpart in the history and culture—one that might have been buried, ignored as irrelevant, but for the onset of the Peace. African-American culture and people had taken center stage in society so quickly, thoroughly, decisively and irreversibly that much reflection on what had come before, when they were marginalized and disdained with equal intensity, was going unvoiced. My comments about this one artist from the music world delved into the nuts and bolts of why he, among many peers, deserved to be in the spotlight of that stage—what sheerly musical-historical reasons, by Western/American civilization’s own criteria for genius and greatness and most pressing concerns, gave him the creds for the star position he held. By implication, it opened the door for other such expositions all Americans proved hungry for—white Americans, who wanted such rationales for their own irresistible but often ill-understood attractions and submissions to black music and other expressions; and black Americans, who wanted such clear and comprehensive documentation of their real achievements and characters beyond the less substantive smoke-and-mirror mystiques of race.

Thus too, while my book on the Northern Eurasian scenes was primarily a white American man’s look at the ways an originally black American music culture spread, took root, and cross-pollinated with different parts of white America’s “Old World,” it was also the intellectual excursion of this particular white American man back to the cultural-psychological foundations of his own Germanic/Celtic-ancestral roots, to unearth and revisit the long history of “mastery-slavery” that had taken place between those “white” Eurasians themselves—between tribes and nations, within empires, between absolute rulers and expendable subjects—before they loosened such cruel arrangements among themselves, and transferred and expanded them during their Age of Exploration to the Africans and other “people of color” en masse.[vii] The onset of The Peace had served to let us Western white people off the hook of our checkered past of war, imperialism and colonialism, and hierarchical classism so radically that we might have missed the opportunity to reflect on sins and crimes and deep bad habits in the way we should have, to prevent them from simply going dormant only to recur reflexively with some equally unplanned and unforeseen shift of history’s winds later. Such introspections, beyond the shallower waters of musical mechanics and aesthetics, comprised my own most and deepest personal needs in those works; that they met the similar needs of my broader reading public, black and white, American and global, satisfied me as deeply. It is also safe to say that those deeper waters are where this third book starts and extends the swim begun.

Whether it is my age, or my move through music specialism to a more interdisciplinary and generalist kind of scholarship, or both, I bring to and with this book a greater emphasis on the cultural-historical subtexts of the music, and perhaps a less textured gloss of, or less obsessively sensual interest in, the music itself. My refocus away from such details won’t bury or blur so much as to short or distort them, I hope...but what was secondary in my other books seems to have become primary in this one: the (what I will define next chapter as the musicosophical) meanings between the music’s sonic (musicological) and aesthetic (musicographical) lines, mostly in the trope of what I called there power-over versus power-of.

In those first two books, the actors-out of that trope’s narrative were the pre-Peace American and European whites and blacks, in my fiction’s no-Peace guise, of the last few centuries of the American experiment; in this one, their roles are taken over by, respectively, the masculine and feminine in culture, primarily, and, secondarily, East and West. (For the latter, I am thinking of China’s fall as a power to the onslaughts from the West in mid-19^th century, roughly concurrent with the zenith of American slavery, and also with Asia’s subliminal influence on Western culture, particularly its music, via the French Impressionists, roughly concurrent with the birth and growth of jazz.) These waters of gender’s power-over/power-of plays run deeper and wider than those channeled through “race”; accordingly, I shed here the masks donned before, which gave birth to the scholar-fiction genre, to take up my own nonfiction voice as scholar and author. I won’t leave the artifice behind—as before, here I will study the music’s surfaces and deeper roots through the same scholar-fiction lens, in the sections devoted to it and its makers—but I will weave those sections together with my memoir, in the nonfiction voice employed here, and will recount in that voice the origins of the scholarfictional approach in my adolescent journals. I will unearth the roots of other such things in my scholarly work, like the little man behind the curtain who came clean about the Oz illusion after being exposed by Dorothy’s little dog Toto. As in his case, the power of the truth, once allowed out to grow, will quickly show up what looked to be the greater power in the illusion for the shadow it is.

---

[i] In Heffley (2000, p. 748).

[ii] The title was renamed iMaginal in 1998 when the partnership between Apple magnate Steve Jobs and NEAL was launched, to their (and the country’s) mutual profit.

[iii] AACMer Douglas Ewart, from Hester (2007): “We have members that are really all over the place; officially we have a chapter in Chicago and a chapter in New York. Chicago is still the ‘spawning ground,’ if you will, because membership only comes in through Chicago, new membership only comes in through Chicago . . . and part of it is in Chicago we still have the school that was originated in 1967. The school was informal prior to that but the formal founding of the AACM School of Music was in the fall of 1967, in what was then the Abraham Lincoln center, which is now part of Northeastern University.”

[iv] See Pinker (2012) for statistical corroboration of The Peace. Also recall Bill Clinton’s line about media coverage that “leads with what bleeds,” observing that when headlines tend down, the trend lines of the larger picture tend to trend up (Stewart, 2014).

[v] See Moiers (1997). I stick here with that preferred handle, but it has morphed elsewhere as the shortened “scho-fi,” then (cringe) “sho-fy.”

[vi] To say this book is third in a trilogy called Asiamerican Dream Music is to say retroactively that the first two were also “Asiamerican,” like a three-ringed single tree--because the Native Americans are originally Asian, and humanity’s ancestral Africans are the source of the Asians (see Grauer [2011], for the music-specific account of this history).

[vii] That transference of oppression was by no means complete. See Webb (2005) for a big-history account of the Old World/New World saga of conflict between the Northern European tribal peoples and the scions of Empire stretching back to Rome and through its European/American torchbearers.

References

Grauer, V. (2011). Sounding the Depths: Tradition and the Voices of History. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform: Amazon.com.

Grun, B. (1982 edition). Timetables of History. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster/Touchstone.

Heffley, M. (2000). Northern Sun, Southern Moon: Identity, Improvisation, and Identity in Freie Musik Produktion (Ph.D. dissertation). Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University.

Hester, K. (2007). Interview with Douglas Ewart of the AACM. ISIM Newsletter 3(2), p. 7.

Moiers, B. (May 27, 1997). The Facts of Scholar Fiction. Moiers & Co.  Retrieved from http://billmoiers.com/episode/mike-heffley-on-scholar-fiction/

Pinker, S. (2012). The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. New York, NY: Penguin Books, reprint edition.

Stewart, J. (September 18, 2014). The Daily Show With Jon Stewart. Season 19, episode 155. Retrieved from http://www.hulu.com/the-daily-show-with-jon-stewart

Webb, J. (2005). Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America. New York, NY: Broadway Books.