Making a new as we Notes on the fluid

Matthew Molinaro,

And many vanguard Black women theorists and musicians have done much to critique both of these possibilities, right, and make us aware that it’s not liberatory per se, as much as it has a strong liberatory potential.”

When I spoke with Eric Lewis, a professor of philosophy at McGill and the site lead for the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation (IICSI), he explained that collective jazz improvisation can be thought of as a “listening trust”––a strain of thinking shared by Black feminist theorists like bell hooks.

“When I have trust in my fellow improvisers, that’s the precondition for taking risks. That’s the precondition for making mistakes [....] And for me, what distinguishes an improvising jazz ensemble from being a member of a symphony orchestra is that in the improvising ensemble, I take ethical and moral

If I couldn’t play jazz, then I’d have to actively learn from it. I’d need to model the close listening performed by Black artists in order to foreshadow new political formations, especially across lines of race, gender, class, and sexuality. Discussing Nina Simone’s lyrics and performativity, Bessie Smith’s willingness and vulnerability to talk about Black queer identity, and Jeanne Lee’s experimental efforts to undermine both externally imposed identities and jazz lyrics, Lewis outlined to me how jazz can be a potent site for critical and philosophical work beyond canonical pages.

“Jazz, particularly collective jazz [and] improvised music is often seen as a crucible for experimentation in new social forms,” Lewis told me. “Because a jazz ensemble, insofar as it’s grounded in community, is a site for coming to discover the other dialogue across various silos or boundaries of difference, and experimenting in new social structures.

We’re in the city for jazz. Montreal’s internationallyrenowned jazz festival brings the best and brightest stars from around the world. But jazz history didn’t just start here with the spectacular—Black people laboured to make their art against the city’s segregation and racial surveillance. The government of Maurice Duplessis revoked the liquor license of Rockhead’s Paradise, founded in 1928 by Rufus Rockhead, a JamaicanCanadian porter (among other Black, Jewish, and Chinese establishments). This anticipated the passage of the 1937 Padlock Act that allowed the government to close down any establishment––mostly those of Black and racialized proprietors––who promoted and were suspected of communism. We might remember Rockhead’s for how it attracted Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, and Sarah Vaughn, but we can’t separate it from the long history of state intervention in jazz. Jean Drapeau won an election in 1954 on a promise to clean up the city and with it, take down Black-owned nightclubs and modernize, gentrify, and destroy Little Burgundy. Can we be proud of something that could have been erased?

We went on a family trip to Montreal in 2010. I reminisce on this trip because we met up with my grandfather, who immigrated from Jamaica to study here, to see the Miles Davis exhibition at the Musée des BeauxArts. We stood in this exhibition’s riches of

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