Spontaneous Composition and Charles Mingus’s “Scenes in the City”

Abstract: This essay examines Charles Mingus’s concept of “spontaneous composition” through a close analysis of Scenes in the City (1957/1959), a hybrid work combining spoken narration and jazz performance. Situating the piece within the cultural landscape of late-1950s New York, the essay traces Mingus’s engagement with overlapping musical and literary scenes, including the jazz poetry boom associated with the Beat Generation and contemporaneous debates about composition within experimental music circles. Against a backdrop of racialized genre hierarchies and primitivist discourse in jazz criticism, Mingus’s approach to composition (grounded in orality, improvisation, and extended form) emerges as both an aesthetic and political intervention. By rejecting “pencil composition” while maintaining tight formal control, Mingus challenged prevailing assumptions about authorship, notation, and musical seriousness.

Through comparative listening and structural analysis of Scenes in the City and its earlier iteration A Colloquial Dream, the essay demonstrates how Mingus’s extended form creates responsive musical environments in which narration and improvisation unfold collaboratively. Rather than treating music as accompaniment to text, Mingus integrates the narrator into the ensemble, using sectional flexibility, cueing, and dynamic contrast to negotiate the temporal and semantic demands of spoken language. The essay argues that Scenes in the City represents a rare success within the jazz–poetry experiments of the period and serves as a key example of Mingus’s broader project of self-historization. Ultimately, the article suggests that attending to Mingus’s spontaneous composition requires listening across boundaries—between improvisation and composition, music and language, and the multiple cultural scenes that shaped jazz in midcentury America.

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Racializing Sound in Early Jazz: A Case Study on Fletcher Henderson (with help from Lil Nas X)

Abstract: This essay interrogates the racialization of sound in the U.S. music industry by examining how musical style, genre, and listening practices have been historically tethered to racial identity. Centering on early jazz bandleader Fletcher Henderson, the essay situates his career within the volatile racial, economic, and cultural landscape of the 1920s, when recording companies institutionalized racial difference through categories such as “race records” and stylistic labels like “hot” jazz. Drawing on scholarship in music theory, sound studies, and critical race studies, the article demonstrates how Henderson’s classically trained, arranged approach to jazz challenged prevailing assumptions about Black musical “primitivity” and enabled rare crossover success into white popular markets. At the same time, Henderson remained constrained by unequal access, exploitative labor practices, and industry gatekeeping that limited Black musicians’ creative freedom, financial gain, and historical recognition.

The essay places Henderson’s experience in dialogue with the contemporary case of Lil Nas X, whose chart-topping “Old Town Road” was briefly removed from Billboard’s country charts in 2019, revealing the persistence of racialized genre policing in popular music. By tracing continuities between early twentieth-century recording practices and twenty-first-century chart classification, the essay argues that the music industry continues to enforce a “sonic color line” that disciplines Black artists who transgress stylistic boundaries. In doing so, it illuminates how racialized listening practices not only shape markets and careers but also influence the historical narratives that define artistic legitimacy, authenticity, and value. Ultimately, the article contends that examining Henderson’s legacy alongside Lil Nas X offers a critical lens through which to understand the durability of anti-Black logic in American music culture and the ongoing struggle over who is permitted to sound (and be remembered) as universal.

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