Breaking (from) the History: Postmodern Narrativity in the Music of Jaki Byard

As a pianist and improviser, Jaki Byard (1922–1999) seems to have had an unabridged, if unbound, history book of jazz styles at his fingertips. Rather than synthesizing these in “add-and-stir” fashion, Byard often strings together coherent stylistic gestures in delightfully unintuitive ways. His solo and small-group records of the 1960s and 1970s consistently demonstrate this proclivity for creative anachronism. Yet despite having performed with, recorded with, or taught many better-known jazz performers over an exceptionally long and productive career, Byard has often been relegated to a marginal position in prevailing popular and academic jazz histories. In this context, I approach Byard as a kind of “symptom bearer” whose failure to fit comfortably into received style-based historical narratives offers a unique opportunity to interrogate the critical apparatus behind them. In response, I suggest an alternative theoretical approach to Byard's stylistically transgressive performance-as-historiography based in contemporary narrative theory.