Arts & International Affairs Volume 5, Number 1, Summer 2020 | Page 10

EQUITABLE GRANTMAKING IN PRACTICE
create, perform, and present these music traditions. The jazz program became the pivotal
benchmark for us to gauge progress.
Jazz presents a unique sociological lineage. Its genealogy is inextricably linked with systems
of oppression, and the experience of marginalization and exclusion. The infinite
and awesome original repertoire created by Black and Latinx artists in this music, to
capture Homi Bhabha, remains a persistent intervention “in those ideological discourses
of modernity that attempt to give a “hegemonic ‘normality’ to the uneven development
and the differential, often disadvantaged, histories of nations, races, communities,
peoples.” Yet its institutional appropriation by the academy, its absorption into Western
European classical aesthetics, jazz criticism, and patronage have virtually written out its
multicultural, syncretic encounters in aesthetic development�the spirituality of jazz as
it were. Apart from the commodification of yoga perhaps, it would be hard to come up
with an example of a practice so completely untethered from its cultural roots.
So, how would CMA go about instilling inclusivity in the funding landscape when grants
selection processes were established through the framework of the Western European
classical conservatory model of excellence? How would we assess the very notion of
excellence? Whose practice determines innovation in this music? What is the value of receiving
a substantial commission, the privilege of unencumbered creativity in a largely
unregulated performance industry? With the conservatory divide in jazz pedagogy,
which artist groups historically have received the information, the know-how to enter
the institutional systems of arts funding, the privilege to receive the financial endorsement,
and the eventual entry into the greater mainstream cultural narrative? Interrogating
equity thus became the starting point.
In search for answers, I was guided by alternative modes of documenting jazz. Photographs
of iconic artists as Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, and Bud Powell brutally
beaten by police just moments after a performance or pivotal studio session, force us to
confront the circumstances of creative production and artistic realization. In the zeitgeist
of the Black Lives Matter movement, several contemporary and millennial black
jazz artists including Terence Blanchard (Breathless), Greg Lewis (The Breathe Suite),
Samora Pinderhughes (The Transformations Suite, The Healing Project) and Christian
Scott (K.K.P.D/ Ku Klux Police Department) remind us that for Black jazz artists and
audiences, artistic creation and reception does not merely begin and end at its aesthetic
parameters. To evoke Bhabha again, “it forces us to confront the concept of culture beyond
the canonization of the “idea” of aesthetics, to engage with culture ... produced in
the act of social survival.” Artists are themselves dynamic, living archives rarely factored
into mainstream narratives of jazz. Pianist Don Pullen and drummer Andrew Cyrille,
two of jazz’s most iconic innovators, as young artists, performed for the domestic staff of
the mansions of East Hampton, NY, which were comprised entirely of black women at
the time, until those bars closed. Where does the legitimacy of excellence formed by an
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