Navigating Jazz: Music, Place, and New Orleans.

Conceiving, historicizing, and analyzing the cultural creation of place as a contested musical act, this dissertation scrutinizes conventional understandings concerning the relationship between place and musical representation and proposes a new framework for interpreting relationships of music and place. Detailed examination of the intersections between sound, associated terrain, and worldview draws out the generative capabilities of geographical thought. The complex relationship between the city of New Orleans and the music of jazz serves as a backdrop for exploring the multifaceted means through which sound both engineers and activates ideas of place. Close analyses of musical portraits of New Orleans—as performed by musicians across a range of historical contexts—provide a more thorough understanding of place-based struggles to claim, protect, and transform the city’s so-called jazz heritage. Such musical visions of the city not only contribute to its iconic position in the national imagination but also express different and often conflicting perspectives with respect to local and regional identity. Key debates surrounding the emerging field of music and place studies form the backdrop for Chapter One, which focuses on New Orleans to reveal new avenues of analytical inquiry. Prevailing methodologies are challenged and reimagined in terms of the creation, imagination, and relocation of musical places. Chapter Two explores the many lives of the song “Basin Street Blues”—its interpretations, variants, and representations across time, space, and media—to inform a new theory of musical place, encapsulating the analytic potential of cultural geography. Conjured scenes of Congo Square, as imagined by jazz artists including Duke Ellington, Wynton Marsalis, and Donald Harrison, Jr., form the subject of Chapter Three.These stylized depictions of historically fraught relationships to New Orleans as the “birthplace of jazz” reveal complex personal and professional relationships to emblematic New Orleans communities, traditions, and tourism. Chapter Four tackles the disputed local terrain of musical tradition and preservation, mapping the (re)definition of traditional New Orleans jazz as performed by the Preservation Hall Jazz Band. Finally, Chapter Five examines the music of Trombone Shorty, an artist working in the post-Katrina context, to illustrate the implications of performances of place in exile.PhDMusic: MusicologyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/133368/1/sarezesu_1.pd