Reconfiguring Rhythms: Jazz, Queerness, and Subversion of the Norm

Ria Panchal

Introduction

As a queer student, my decision to create a graphic work exploring the intersections of jazz and queer theory was inspired by Salim Washington’s assertion that jazz is an inherently avant-garde and perpetually evolving medium, as well as class discussions on the genre’s origins in challenging dominant ideologies. These ideas align closely with my understanding of queer theory, particularly the ways in which certain cultural elements, due to their inherent resistance to normative structures, can be strongly associated with queer symbolism without explicit connections to the LGBTQ+ community. Recognizing that jazz has been historically male- dominated, I sought to explore how other communities might have employed the genre and the social practice of jazz as a tool of subversion. I felt that using a combination of original artwork and text would most effectively convey the intricacies of queer artistic expression, given that artists like Sun Ra utilized visuals, theatricality, and camp alongside their music to convey their message, and that queer culture often emphasizes aesthetics that defy convention.

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PostScript

This graphic work was Ria Panchal’s concluding project for a “Jazz and the Common Wind,” a course I offered through Cornell University’s Africana Studies and Research Center and the Societies for the Humanities in the spring of 2024. The purpose of the course was to track “the Common Wind”—spirit of abolition—as it traversed the Atlantic world from the 19th century Haitian Revolution to the US Civil War, from anticolonial struggles to contemporary movements for ecological and gender justice. The course, of course, focused on how music and aesthetics embodied ideals of freedom, and located jazz as one manifestation of this multinational movement to build a better world beyond plantation capitalism and its afterlives.

After weekly seminar meetings and writing assignments in which the class dialogued with the work of Fred Moten, Katherine McKittrick, Robin D.G. Kelly, Daphne Brooks, Salim Washington and Haitian-American baritone Jean Bernard-Cerin among others, students were encouraged to think broadly about a final project that could take various forms of their choosing: a research paper, a podcast, and a mini-memoir were all submissions. Panchal proposed the following graphic essay about jazz’s latent queerness. I responded with an emphatic “yes.” This is, in my mind, exactly the kind of work that jazz studies pedagogy is uniquely positioned to encourage within the humanities. After Panchal sent me the final project, I was awe-struck by the art style, the power in which it conveyed so much with such little text, the way in which the aesthetic mapped the kind of queer temporality that Panchal tracked in the work of Sun Ra.

Benjamin Barson

Assistant Professor of Music, Bucknell University

Endnotes

I am indebted to Dr. Benjamin Barson for his guidance and support while I was preparing this work. In particular, his insights on the broader historical context in which Sun Ra existed and performed, as well as his suggestions regarding my analysis of musical theory, were invaluable. This project would not have been possible without his mentorship and encouragement.

  1. Sherrie Tucker, “When Did Jazz Go Straight?: A Queer Question for Jazz Studies,” Critical Studies in Improvisation 4, no. 2 (2008), 6.
  2. Tucker, “When Did Jazz Go Straight?,” 1.
  3. Jim Lopresti, “JAZZ: The Queer Touch,” Gay Men’s Chorus of South Florida (blog), March 11, 2022.
  4. Tucker, “When Did Jazz Go Straight?,” 6.
  5. Tucker, “When Did Jazz Go Straight?,” 4.
  6. Natalie Weiner, “Jazz, the Blues & the LGBTQ Roots We Ignore,” Tidal, June 24, 2020.
  7. Tucker, “When Did Jazz Go Straight?,” 5.
  8. Ege Altan, “Improvising Theatrical Jazz in a Queer Time and Space: Aishah Rahman’s Unfinished Women Cry in No Man’s Land While a Bird Dies in a Gilded Cage,” Language, Literature, and Interdisciplinary Studies (LLIDS) 2 no. 1 (September 2018): 99-109.
  9. Elizabeth Freeman, “Packing History, Count(Er)Ing Generations,” New Literary History 31, no. 4 (2000): 727–44.
  10. Chris Stover, “Sun Ra’s Fletcher Henderson,” in Queer Ear: Remaking Music Theory, ed. Gavin S.K. Lee (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 2023), 159.
  11. Stover, “Sun Ra’s Fletcher Henderson,” 161.
  12. Stover, “Sun Ra’s Fletcher Henderson,” 170-174.
  13. José E. Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 20.
  14. Val Wilmer, “John Gilmore," The Wire, 17 (July 1985), 14.
  15. Sun Ra, Sun Ra and his Solar Arkestra Visits Planet Earth, Saturn, 1966.
  16. John Szwed, Space is the Place (New York: De Capo Press, 1998), 173.
  17. John C . Reid, “It’s After the End of the World,” Coda 231 (April-May 1990), 30.
  18. José E. Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, ed. (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 27, quoted in Stover, “Sun Ra’s Fletcher Henderson,” 162.
  19. Szwed, Space is the Place, 317.
  20. Stover, “Sun Ra’s Fletcher Henderson,” 175-180.
  21. Image of drag king Percy Non Grata’s performance of a Ratatouille-inspired funeral for Remy the rat, who said of performing drag that it was “genuinely beautiful” that he now can be “exactly who [he] f**king wants to be” on and off stage. Photography by Greyson Askew for “‘I get to be this forever’: How a trans artist found ‘home’ in the drag king scene,” Pink Magazine, 30 September 2023.
  22. Muñoz, “Stages.” In Cruising Utopia, 98.
  23. Altan, “Improvising Theatrical Jazz in a Queer Time and Space,” 99.
  24. Altan, “Improvising Theatrical Jazz in a Queer Time and Space,” 104.
  25. Salim Washington, “‘All the Things You Could Be by Now’: Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus and the Limits of Avant-Garde Jazz,” in Uptown Conversation, ed. Robert O’Meally, Brent Hayes Edwards and Farah Jasmine Griffin (New York: Columbia University Press 2004), 27-28.
  26. Image from We Insist! Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite (Candid 9002, 1960).
  27. Image from Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus (Candid 8005, 1960).
  28. Inspired by “Young Michael Scott Shaking Ed Truck’s Hand” (meme), https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/young-michael-scott -shaking-ed-trucks-hand.