A Tale of Two Cities (and Two Ways of Being Inauthentic): The Politics of College Jazz in “Official Cleveland” and in the “Other Cleveland”

Abstract

In this article, I consider how discourses of jazz authenticity register social tensions in Cleveland, Ohio. Scholars have shown that the relationship between jazz and higher education is nothing new. However, fans and musicians express conflicting impulses toward college jazz. On the one hand, college jazz presents the financial and symbolic benefits of institutional legitimacy. Many musicians are themselves college jazz graduates and teachers. On the other hand, many express an aversion grounded in the belief that real jazz happens in urban nightclubs. I argue that people mobilize authenticity to critique college jazz in order to invoke the inequality of the city’s urban past and the invisibility of its rich jazz history.