ABSTRACT
The African American music known as jazz generally merits little mention in discussions of the musics of the African diaspora. Jazz's relation to other forms of African American music is minimal in their analyses, surfacing only in cursory mentions of jazz's seemingly passive "mixture" of European and African elements. The chapter explores jazz's performance rituals and the aesthetic that informs them, later posing connections to ritual and aesthetic in other Black Atlantic musics. It compares a number of works by selected scholars interested in accounting for meanings in African American musics. Much of the writing and criticism of jazz prior to the early 1960s was predicated on conceptions of musical style and performance that had very little to do with how practitioners of the music thought and acted. The scene and the blues aesthetic constitute two related ways of framing musical events as jazz and as performance.
