Dave Brubeck and the Performance of Whiteness

How can we—jazz fans, musicians, writers, and historians—understand the legacy and impact of a musician like Dave Brubeck? It is undeniable that Brubeck leveraged his fame as a jazz musician and status as a composer for social justice causes, and in doing so, held to a belief system that, during the civil rights movement, modeled a progressive approach to race and race relations. It is also true that it took Brubeck, like others, some time to understand the fullspectrum of racial power dynamics at play in post-WWII, early Cold War, and civil rights-era America.Dave Brubeck and the Performance of Whiteness uses Brubeck's performances of whiteness across his professional, private, and political lives as a starting point to understand the ways in which whiteness, privilege, and white supremacy more fully manifested in mid-century America. How is whiteness performed and re-performed? How do particular traits become inscribed with whiteness, and further, how do those traits, now racialized in a listener's mind, filter the sounds a listener hears?To what extent was Brubeck's whiteness made by others? How did audiences and critics use Brubeck to craft their own identities centered in whiteness? Drawing on archival records, recordings, and previously conducted interviews, Dave Brubeck and the Performance of Whiteness listens closely for the complex andshifting frames of mid-century whiteness, and how they shaped the experiences of Brubeck's critics, audiences, and Brubeck himself. Throughout, author Kelsey Klotz asks what happens when a musician tries to intervene, using his privilege as a tool with which to disrupt structures of white supremacy, even as whiteness continues to retain its hold on its beneficiaries.

Kelsey Klotz's Dave Brubeck and the Performance of Whiteness offers the first sustained critical analysis of the role of whiteness in shaping jazz history. Klotz is at once insightful, nuanced, and brave in raising issues that illuminate how whiteness shaped multiple dimensions of Dave Brubeck's career in ways that can only be understood within a broader a social analysis including race, gender, class, and indigeneity. The book is deeply researched, well-argued and convincing. It is a must read for anyone interested in the history of jazz or music and social justice in the 20th century, Dave Brubeck and the Performance of Whiteness presents a thoughtful and nuanced argument about the artist's music and career. It is timely - a book the jazz world needs to reflect on this pivotal musician. Highly recommended!, Klotz boldly invites us to reconsider the racial world within which Brubeck thrived. Meticulously focusing on Brubeck's music, persona, positionality, interventions, and his reception by audiences and critics, Klotz unpacks how the historical wages of whiteness endure into the future. Although Klotz insists that this is not an anti-racist project, this work urges us to be more aware of the complexities of race and its impact on how artists like Brubeck have been esteemed by audiences and critics., Klotz adroitly fuses jazz studies and whiteness studies in this brilliant, deeply researched study of Dave Brubeck as a vital and contested figure in post-World War II American culture. This groundbreaking book will inform and enrich the discussion of jazz and race for years to come.

Kelsey Klotz is Lecturer in the Department of Music at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Her research focuses on jazz, race, identity, and privilege. Her articles have appeared in Dædalus, the American Studies Journal, Jazz Perspectives, and the Journal of Jazz Studies. She holds a BA in Music (piano) from Truman State University and a PhD in musicology from Washington University in St.Louis.