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Abstract

Due in part to increasing intellectual and political polarization in the United States in recent decades, there has been a resultant decrease in viewpoint diversity and an increase in instances of groupthink and widespread conceptual bias in the construction of many jazz history narratives. One example of these phenomena is the historiographical narratives linking free jazz and avant-garde jazz with the Civil Rights Movement in twentieth-century America. In the past several decades, the narrative that free jazz and/or avant-garde jazz was predominantly artistically inspired by the Civil Rights Movement has become broadly espoused by a wide variety of both scholarly and mainstream jazz books and articles in spite of the fact that this narrative is poorly supported by the historical record and by the documented statements of many mid-century free jazz and avant-garde jazz practitioners. Using free jazz pioneer and icon Ornette Coleman as a case study, this article reviews a significant number of relevant textbooks, scholarly articles, and biographical publications about the saxophonist to examine the validity of the common claim that his music was inspired by the Civil Rights Movement. The authors conclude by suggesting that the narratives linking free jazz/avant-garde jazz to the Civil Rights Movement are very weakly supported by the existing evidence and that the foundation of these prevalent narratives is replete with intellectual errors including distortion by selection, correlation-equals-causation fallacies, and musically uninformed analyses. Consequently, the authors suggest that it is necessary to reassess how jazz history narratives are constructed broadly and to advocate for a broader diversity of perspectives in jazz discourse. Furthermore, this study proposes that jazz scholars would benefit from refocusing on removing ideological bias, eschewing the overemphasis on only one aspect of critical evaluation (such as sociopolitical factors), avoiding groupthink, and reestablishing a reliance upon logic, falsifiable evidence, and expert musical and theoretical analysis as guiding historiographical principles.

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