JRJ/Deconstructing the Jazz Tradition: The 'Subjectless Subject' of New Jazz Studies

From its first publication in Black Literature Forum in 1991, through and beyond its reprinting in Robert O’Meally’s edited volume The Jazz Cadence of American Culture in 1998, Scott DeVeaux’s ‘Constructing the Jazz Tradition’ remains one of the most influential essays in academic jazz studies. So frequently do jazz studies scholars jumpstart their journal articles, book introductions, and dissertations with gestures toward DeVeaux’s analysis of the ‘Jazz Tradition’ as an interested narrative - rather than an objective account of a linear jazz past - that one could characterize much current work in New Jazz Studies under the rubric: ‘Deconstructing the Jazz Tradition’.