Leonard Feather and the 1951 blindfold test

White male European critics such as Feather found themselves drawn to the United States, to a music culture which they did not truly belong to. They had to negotiate their reverence for US culture in general and African American music specifically while wrestling with their own identities.Footnote ⁸ For Feather, his own integration into the US jazz world was mirrored by a commitment to anti-segregation, interracialism, and colourblindness.

Feather came from a well-off Jewish family in London and had emigrated to the United States in the 1930s in order to pursue his jazz dreams.Footnote ⁹ In a remarkably diverse career, he worked in almost every possible function of a cultural intermediary in the jazz world – composer, record producer, manager (including a brief stint for Duke Ellington), and union organizer – but it was his work as a journalist, editor, radio broadcaster, and author that would make him most famous. Other than his contributions to US publications, Feather served as a correspondent for the British magazine Melody Maker and the Swedish Estrad.Footnote ¹⁰ Feather was also accepted by the African American press and was the first white jazz writer for the Black paper New York Amsterdam News. Feather would sometimes stress the similarities rather than differences he shared with African Americans, whether positioning himself as a composer and producer of Black music or as a Jewish immigrant. In 1940s and 1950s, Feather was a vocal and important white ally to Black musicians, constantly documenting the grim details of Jim Crow white supremacy in his articles and trying to break down the colourline through his work as a journalist, producer, promoter, activist, and organizer.

Feather was also a strong advocate for female musicians. In an argument that runs parallel to my critique of his approach to race, Christopher Robinson has written about Feather's promotion of female artists, showing that even as he attempted to challenge gender bias, he did so from a ‘paternal position’. Similar to the colourblind approach, he believed, in Robinson's words, that ‘gender is inaudible’.Footnote ¹¹ Indeed, as early as 1937, in an article for Melody Maker, Feather had explicitly proposed the blindfold test as a means to prove a gender-blind ideology; and as the subject of the very first published blindfold test, in Metronome in 1946, Feather chose a woman, pianist Mary Lou Williams.Footnote ¹² Such examples going back to the genesis of the concept reveal that Feather had always envisioned the blindfold tests as a venue for an underlying critique of music's social boundaries. Of course, an overview of the hundreds of interviews Feather conducted for the column over the decades also reveal that Eldridge's 1951 test was the moment where such underlying critique was brought most explicitly to the surface. In this sense the article perhaps deserves the notoriety it has enjoyed ever since.

In presenting his critique of gendered and racial barriers, Feather was a progressive thinker, but not a radical. In this way, he was similar to critical race scholars Michael Omi and Howard Winant's description of ‘early [civil rights] movement leaders [who] were also assimilation-oriented and individualistic to a degree that appears a bit embarrassing today, but made more sense in the repressive and racial climate of the time. They were moderates who sought to end “race-thinking” and ensure “equality” to each individual.’Footnote ¹³ Although it is always difficult to judge the past by the standards of the present, I follow Omi and Winant's line of enquiry in order to expose the ways in which Feather's intentions may be deserving of our critique. Here, I am also attempting to follow Eldridge's contemporaneous critique of Feather. So, while we should not diminish Feather's wide-reaching efforts, we can also point out that the ideas that drove Feather were not anti-racist, as we would understand it today, but rather the result of a liberal ideology of colourblindness fixated on assimilation and integration.Footnote ¹⁴ In both practical and ideological terms, Feather's main target was segregation; to the point where, as Gennari writes, ‘one has to wonder whether interracialism as an end in itself became an idée fixe that undermined the objectivity Feather was so keen to claim for himself’.Footnote ¹⁵ As should be clear, Feather's colourblind ideology did not mean that he avoided the topic of race. Indeed, Feather included a whole chapter on ‘Jazz and Race’ in The Book of Jazz (1957);Footnote ¹⁶ although, as Scott DeVeaux argues, by confining his discussion of race to a single chapter, Feather's point is ‘not to connect the expressive power of music to oppressive social conditions, but to exorcise them so that the rest of the book may safely be devoted to the development of musical language’.Footnote ¹⁷ Similarly, Feather's interest in colourblind listening was not a rejection of the fact that the issue of race mattered to musicians; rather, it was a rejection of the idea that it mattered to the music itself (the latter being itself an ideological concept). Furthermore, the question of race was the central issue in his 1951 blindfold test with Roy Eldridge.

The records on the blindfold test

By 1951, Leonard Feather had served many roles in US jazz life but had most prominently secured his place as a superstar journalist, serving as one of the editors for Down Beat. In editorials for the magazine as well as general articles and interviews, Feather covered issues of racial discrimination and celebrated bands that combined Black and white musicians, as well as non-US (particularly European) musicians. This is also reflected in the recordings he played for Eldridge (quoted here as they were listed and annotated by Feather in the printed article):

The selection was carefully curated. Let us consider the first track in some detail. Feather opened with the pianist George Shearing, one of the few white musicians who was widely recognized as having a distinctively innovative voice in the bebop idiom. Leading the test with this artist was, I suggest, significant for two reasons other than just Shearing's whiteness. First, Shearing was, like Feather, English and in this way he served as an avatar for Feather's own national identity. The two Englishmen were indeed closely linked, as it was Feather who had been instrumental in securing Shearing immigration into the United StatesFootnote ¹⁹ and, upon Shearing's arrival, had written an article titled ‘Even a Londoner Can Have a Natural Feeling for Jazz’, an argument that runs parallel to the colourblind thesis in his blindfold test with Eldridge.Footnote ²⁰

Second, and especially relevant for the question of colourblind listening, Shearing was visually impaired. Here, Shearing serves as part of what disability studies scholar David Bolt has termed the metanarrative of blindness, in which blind characters are used in service of an overriding narrative that seems to displace their agency and where blindness often represents something other than visual impairment.Footnote ²¹ In this case, Shearing fits the trope of the blind genius, which has been especially attributed to pianists (Art Tatum, Ray Charles, Tete Montoliu, and Stevie Wonder, to name a few others).Footnote ²² In the context of the blindfold test, this trope can fit together with the question of nationality, as George McKay suggests in a comparative reading of Feather's and Shearing's identities: ‘I do not wish to equate the permanent condition of blindness … with a temporary game of blindfolding, and yet, though very different, British blindness may not have meant (only) lack of vision, but a refusal to see in the American way.’Footnote ²³ By showcasing Shearing at the outset of the test, Feather was thus implicitly inserting his own identity in the musical selection while conflating questions of race and disability, privileging Englishness, whiteness, and ability. In Feather's metanarrative of blindness, Shearing's genius lay not only in his mastery of jazz, but also in the fact that he, via his blindness, overcame boundaries of nationality, ethnicity, and race.

Shearing's mastery was, of course, also heard in the music. The theme of ‘To Be or Not to Bop’, composed by Shearing, and his improvised solo demonstrate all the hallmarks of the bebop style, pioneered by Black musicians such as Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie in the 1940s. It is an up-tempo tune (approx. 245 bpm), with a three-against-four polyrhythmic introduction (also used as the coda), tritone substitutions are often used in place of regular ii–V–I chord changes, the melody and solo lines use chromaticism prominently, and Shearing uses bebop scales (both major and dominant) in his solo. Actually, at times, Shearing's playing on this recording sounds like a piano version of Parker's soloing. His bebop vocabulary is so immaculate that he, among other things, repeatedly uses (in both the composed melody and in his solo) the rising triplet arpeggios preceded by an upper or lower neighbour note that the pioneering music theorist of jazz Thomas Owens's identified as Charlie Parker's signature ‘favourite motive’.Footnote ²⁴ Also, in an example of Shearing's distinction as a pianist, the second chorus of his solo features his famous locked hands style of improvising with block chords (which Eldridge commented on approvingly as being when the record ‘gets going nicely’) in highly chromatic passages. When pressed for an answer on racial identification, Eldridge thought that ‘on this kind of playing it's hard to tell white from colored’ and guessed that the pianist ‘might be white’, while the bassist and drummer were ‘colored’ (the entire trio were, in fact, white).Footnote ²⁵

Depending exactly on how one categorizes the recordings, seven of the ten tracks on the blindfold test were with modern jazz players such as Shearing. It reflects Feather's preference for the most progressive jazz style of the 1940s and early 1950s, bebop. The implicit contrast is Eldridge, who was primarily associated with swing jazz. Feather's interest in bebop was not only a matter of taste, but also part of his wider project of jazz aesthetics and historiography, which he put forth in the 1949 book Inside Bebop, where he contrasts the swing audiences of the Savoy Ballroom with bebop, noting that ‘by 1939, a few scattered attempts at real mixed bands began along 52nd Street [the location of the most famous bebop clubs]. The important thing was that musicians were getting to know each other; there was no longer a fence that kept white culture on one side and a Negro culture on the other.’Footnote ²⁶ The jazz-historical moment in which the test took place is important as the blindfold test stands as an indicative case of what Steven Elworth refers to as the years of ‘jazz in crisis’ (i.e., the waning popular appeal of swing jazz, the rise of bebop as a countercultural Black art form, and the racial politics that each style represented).Footnote ²⁷ The two protagonists in the blindfold test, Feather and Eldridge, come to represent different historical perspectives. Eldridge came to prominence during the Swing Era, when the jazz world was more shaped by segregation and when musical styles, sometimes reductively labelled hot and sweet, were respectively associated with Black and white musicians. By contrast, Feather represented modern jazz (especially bebop) as leading towards integration – not only between Black and white, but, as the example of Shearing shows, also between US musicians and non-US musicians.

The emphasis on integrated bands was clear in other selections for the blindfold test, which were also smartly chosen to trip up Eldridge: six bands out of the ten included in the article were racially mixed. And Feather slyly selected records where the individual stylistic differences between Black and white musicians were negligible. For instance, he played a recording with the white trombonist Kai Winding (incidentally also, like Shearing, originally from Europe) on two different recordings, including ‘Flying the Coop’ where he played alongside the Black trombonist J. J. Johnson, with whom he famously shared a bebop style and sound that was sometimes virtually impossible to differentiate. Identification of the musicians on this track is further complicated by the fact that the two trombonists are trading fours – something Eldridge missed entirely, assuming that there was only one trombone soloist on the recording.

Eldridge's familiarity with jazz performers was, on the other hand, showcased by his instant recognition of several of the musicians on the records, that is, not their racial identity but singling them out by name. Eldridge, for instance, correctly identified track number 8 as a white band, name-checking the saxophonist, Eddie Miller. This record by the bandleader Bob Crosby exemplifies the so-called sweeter playing and arranging style associated with white big bands of the swing era, most famously the bands of Glenn Miller and the Dorsey Brothers or by Crosby's more celebrated brother, Bing.Footnote ²⁸ So, Eldridge's inability to guess the racial identity of some of the performers did not stem from a lack of fine-grained musical sensitivity. Eldridge actually provided explanations for not being able to pass Feather's exam satisfactorily. For instance, Feather played ‘Venus de Milo’ with the cutting-edge Miles Davis band (later included on the canonical Birth of the Cool LP, 1957), to which Eldridge remarked that he could not racially identify them because ‘most of these guys play with hardly any vibrato, and a sound without vibrato is an easier thing to capture than one with a distinctive vibrato’.Footnote ²⁹ Thus, Eldridge offers a musical analysis of bebop (that boppers, especially in the then nascent cool jazz style, play with less vibrato than in previous jazz styles) and links this to the politics of appropriation. Setting aside the proposition that it is easier to imitate a sound without vibrato than with it, the statement highlights Eldridge's social analysis: he was not making an essentialist claim about the racially inherent sound of musicians; he was trying to criticize the ways in which white musicians have succeeded by ‘capturing’ sounds made by Black people.

In many cases Eldridge could not pick out the race of the musicians or got it wrong (also highlighted in Feather's annotations). For instance, Eldridge said of a piano duet between Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn: ‘White or colored? It's impossible to tell’; and of a recording by the all-Black Billy Taylor Quartet that he ‘couldn't tell who was colored and who was white. They could be Eskimos for all I know.’Footnote ³⁰ At the end of the interview, he had to admit:

It is worth quoting Eldridge's afterthoughts in full since this remark has often been reduced to the last sentence or left out entirely in subsequent references to the blindfold test. Rather than a complete capitulation to Feather's universalizing colourblindness, the quote shows how Eldridge in fact identified the particular problems associated with Feather's method and ideology. For example, going back to the first track of the test, Eldridge commented that it was difficult to racially identify the musicians ‘on this kind of playing’, indicating that the question of race and colourblind listening was not generalizable to all kinds of music to the extent that Feather perhaps wished. The kind of playing in question, modern bebop, featured on multiple tracks on this blindfold test, exemplified the problem at hand, even if Eldridge had been overconfident in his ability to racially identify the musicians. The fact that Shearing, a white Englishman, was excelling musically in bebop, a style led by young African Americans, was in some ways a sign of the increasing integration in the jazz world around 1950. To Feather, racial identification equalled racial essentialism, which was the premise of the blindfold test. But that does not mean that racial politics had become an aesthetically moot point, as Feather implied (though, of course, Feather still thought race was a socially relevant question). Importantly, the racialized contrasts in style and the political economy of appropriation were even more stark in the style that Eldridge himself was more associated with, swing music, and in New Orleans revival jazz.Footnote ³² Both of these subgenres were de-emphasised in Feather's selection of tracks, thus further exposing Eldridge. But by putting the spotlight on white imitators, Eldridge highlighted how Feather's narrow framing of racial issues as a matter mostly related to Jim Crow segregation policies, as well as his celebration of interracialism, seemed to overlook the problem of cultural appropriation. Furthermore, Eldridge clearly took issue with Feather's privileging of the recorded medium, prompting us to look critically at Feather's combination of the blindfold test and colourblind ideology. A review of the blindfold test's history reveals that the interview was not just a fanciful idea, sprung from Feather's mind, nor was it the starting point for an examination of current race politics in the jazz world. It was, in fact, the end point of a debate sparked by an interview with Eldridge that Feather had published in Down Beat two months earlier.Footnote ³³

Roy Eldridge and the 1951 blindfold test

Jazz historiography mainly positions Roy Eldridge as a master of the swing style and a pivotal figure in the transition from swing music to bebop, in the late 1930s and early 1940s (though not a bebop player himself).Footnote ³⁴ However, he was still a big name in the jazz world at the time Feather administered his blindfold test in 1951. There was also a cruel irony in the way Feather used interracial bands to confuse Eldridge in the blindfold test, for Eldridge was famous for being part of bands that crossed the colourline. During the late 1930s and 1940s he had played in bands lead by the white musicians Gene Krupa and Artie Shaw, as well as fronting his own Black bands at various times during this period. He was also a mainstay of the explicitly interracial bands in the Jazz at the Philharmonic tours, organized by the white producer and promoter Norman Granz whose efforts to desegregate jazz concerts parallels Feather's activism.Footnote ³⁵ In 1950, Eldridge joined a group led by Benny Goodman for a tour of Europe. Goodman's presence in this story is important for his near-mythic status as a white integrator of jazz during the Swing Era; a time when he, according to historian Lewis Erenburg, ‘was the most visible symbol of racial integration in the music business’.Footnote ³⁶ As evidenced by Eldridge's own career and the fact that interracial bands have existed since the beginning of jazz, there was, by 1950, nothing spectacular about Eldridge's collaboration with a white musician like Goodman. However, Eldridge did come in a long line of Black musicians to play in Goodman's bands that were historically positioned as explicitly desegregated.Footnote ³⁷ Eldridge was conscious of this history and proudly positioned himself within and against this legacy, stating that ‘until that time [when I joined Gene Krupa's band in the early 1940s] no colored musician had worked with a white band except as a separate attraction, like Teddy [Wilson] and Lionel [Hampton] with Benny Goodman’.Footnote ³⁸ Discourses and material realities of segregation and integration were also part of Eldridge's decision to stay in Paris after the rest of the Goodman band went back to the United States. Though he never relocated permanently, Eldridge voiced some of the same reasons for going to Europe as other African American colleagues who joined the jazz diaspora in a space less governed by racial segregation (though that did not necessarily mean that France, for example, was a colourblind space).Footnote ³⁹ Eldridge's performance history reaching back to the late 1930s and his more recent prolonged trip to Europe was thus already part of a discourse on race, specifically segregation and interracialism.

It was Eldridge's return stateside in 1951 that was the occasion of an interview that received top-billing in the 15 May issue of Down Beat. Under the headline ‘No More White Bands for Me’, Feather presented an interview with Eldridge in which the trumpeter compared his time in Europe with his traumatic experiences of discrimination when touring with Shaw's and Krupa's bands in the United States. In a harrowing account, Eldridge described the indignities of not being allowed into the same hotels, train cars, or bars as his white bandmates, and how racism made him physically and mentally ill, summarizing:

Eldridge described how the French jazz critic Charles Delaunay had made the suggestion that he spend extended time in Europe, eventually using Paris as a base from which he made tours to Germany, Scandinavia, and Tunisia. He recounted how his time in Europe ‘was a wonderful year. During that whole time I was never once reminded that I was colored – the only exception was when there were some visiting Americans out to make trouble.’Footnote ⁴¹ That made him conclude: ‘As long as I'm in America, I'll never in my life work with a white band again!’ (by which he meant that he would not work for a white bandleader).Footnote ⁴² The debate about race that eventually ended with the blindfold test was thus not only about US race relations and Jim Crow segregation. Taking this additional source material into account, which has not been included in previous scholarly references to the blindfold test, we can also appreciate the blindfold test as part of a longer dialogue between Feather and Eldridge. Even if they appear as antagonists in the eventual blindfold test, the two of them were explicitly motivated by some of the same transatlantic experiences of race and jazz appreciation. More than the eventual blindfold test, it was this discussion that elicited the debate in Down Beat in 1951.

A month after the initial interview where Eldridge announced his decision to refrain from working under white bandleaders in the future, the African American singer and actress Lena Horne was the subject of a page-1 story in Down Beat (where another front-page story was about Jim Crow segregation). Horne was quoted saying that Eldridge was ‘running away’ from the problem and acknowledging the work of white allies such as Krupa and Goodman.Footnote ⁴³ The same issue of the magazine, as well as the following one, also included short letters to the editor, responding to the interview with Eldridge. The same 13 July issue that included the infamous blindfold test also included an article by the white club owner Frank Holzfeind who had recently featured Eldridge at the Blue Note Club in Chicago (and probably spoken with Eldridge on the matter then). Holzfeind took it upon himself to state that Eldridge was not ‘a crusader’ on ‘a soap box’, and wrote that ‘because he is the great musician that he is, he is asked to play with the best – not because the best is getting big-hearted about the fact that a Negro should be given equal opportunities. These leaders would take a musician like Roy if he were any color.’Footnote ⁴⁴ Despite its motivation, Holzfeind's article thus somewhat ironically comes across as supporting Feather's liberal colourblind agenda more than Eldridge's objections to white supremacy. Ostensibly about Eldridge, Holzfeind's and Feather's statements actually decentre Eldridge at the expense of their white authors’ position as anti-racists.Footnote ⁴⁵

My critique of Feather in the present article is then also an attempt to recoup some of Eldridge's way of listening. Though penned by Feather, the interviews compel us to position a musician such as Eldridge as a thinker at least as capable of the same kind of cultural sensitivity, transnational perspective, political intervention, and intellectualism that Feather at times pretended to.Footnote ⁴⁶ The problem of this particular blindfold test emerged because Feather was unwilling to actually take Eldridge's premises seriously as a matter of listening. In the almost literally psychoanalytic setup of the test (Eldridge as the analysand on the couch, Feather as the analyst), Feather was seemingly trying to ‘cure’ Eldridge. However, Eldridge's objections were aimed at ‘the white imitator of a colored musician’, questioning the racialized political economy of jazz, and it was Feather that framed it in terms of problems of racial essentialism. I would suggest that Eldridge's arguments are better understood as part of the broader Black intellectual tradition of dialectical thinking that includes, among others, Du Bois's double consciousness, Baraka's the changing same, and Gilroy's anti-anti-essentialism.Footnote ⁴⁷ Feather's essentialism was, by comparison, orthodox and his selection of recordings for the blindfold test was, in that sense, grounded in the sonic colourline, which racializes sound through constructed definitions of sonic whiteness and Blackness. This imagination of sound and visuality (which I explore further later) is especially problematic because, as Stoever argues, ‘American proponents of color blindness have been able to declare race invisible in the twenty-first century precisely because dominant listening practices grounded in antebellum slavery and shaped by segregation continue to render it audible.’Footnote ⁴⁸ Contrary to Feather's insinuations, Eldridge was not policing the sonic colourline, he was arguing that blindfolded listening to recordings does not subvert the appropriation, copying, essentialism, and commodification that relies on the sonic colourline. Indeed, as my research has uncovered, in the history of the exchange between Feather and Eldridge, Feather's blindfold test comes across as a crass form of mockery when we consider that it was presented as a ‘gotcha’ at the end of a series of articles, which started with Eldridge's outrage and pain experienced at the hands of Jim Crow. Reading further into the pages of Down Beat and other mid-century jazz periodicals, we see that this was also because Eldridge was a foil for Feather's shadowboxing with other white critics in a debate over so-called reverse racism in transatlantic jazz discourse.

‘Crow Jim’: discourses of reverse racism in mid-century jazz

Halfway between Holzfeind's article on page 7 and Feather's blindfold test with Eldridge on page 12, one finds that issue's editorial promoting the idea that jazz is a force for democracy and mentioning that Leonard Feather had recently been contracted to broadcast for Voice of America in Europe.Footnote ⁴⁹ Next to that, we find a letter-to-the-editor from the African American serviceman Jasper Haynes, writing about contrasting attitudes towards race in Europe and the United States. However, this piece was not a response to the articles surrounding Eldridge. Instead, it was critique of Down Beat's editorial from March of that year which stated that ‘Crow Jim [is] as Bad as Jim Crow’.Footnote ⁵⁰

‘Crow Jim’ was a critique of an essentializing fetishism of African American performers at the supposed expense of white musicians.Footnote ⁵¹ This primitivist myth of Black authenticity was a discourse that was especially associated with French jazz critics and European audiences.Footnote ⁵² Indeed, Down Beat's editorial was a critique of the French magazine Jazz Hot's best-of-the-year poll featuring predominantly Black musicians, supposedly refusing to acknowledge the fact ‘that in any blindfold test on modern jazz soloists it would be impossible to identify which men are white and which colored’.Footnote ⁵³ Unsigned, but possibly penned by Feather, this editorial thus explicitly laid the groundwork for the connection between European jazz criticism, ‘Crow Jim’, accusations of ‘reverse discrimination’, colourblind ideology, the acousmatic question, and the blindfold test that would be realized in the interview with Eldridge four months later.Footnote ⁵⁴

Suspecting an ‘unrealized undercurrent of true jim crowism’, Sgt Haynes, in his letter to the editor, wondered ‘how any comparison can be made between the attitude of the southern vulgarian and that of the European continental … The one is a feeling of outright contempt and brutality to the point of barbarism, the other a feeling of truly civilized liberalism and receptivity.’ Like Eldridge, he had lived in both Europe and the United States (stationed as part of the military, we can assume) and held ‘that the white American public has a long way to go in matching the continental European outlook toward this unnecessarily overworked idea of race’.Footnote ⁵⁵ While still attesting to the lesser degree of discrimination in Europe, he thus refuses to view race as a transatlantic zero-sum game between Jim Crow and ‘Crow Jim’. This elicited a rare editorial amendment from the magazine, acknowledging that there was no hope of civil equality ‘without “race consciousness”’. Making a transatlantic distinction, the editor's note continued to point out that ‘this effort toward an ideal America is to accept each man on his own worth; each musician primarily for his own music. This, it was pointed out in our editorial, many Europeans were not doing. They were excessively color-conscious, though in a different way.’Footnote ⁵⁶ Such attacks on ‘colour consciousness’ were not unique to Down Beat.Footnote ⁵⁷ As historians of twentieth-century United States have shown, this idea of ‘reverse racism’ was the immediate precursor to the ideology of colourblindness that would become hegemonic along the notion of a ‘post-racial’ US society from the 1970s onwards. Omi and Winant argue that ‘colorblind racial ideology represented a step beyond “reverse discrimination” because it repudiated the concept of race itself’.Footnote ⁵⁸ The pages of Down Beat in 1951 show an accelerated microcosm of this process, starting with editorials and debate on ‘Crow Jim’ in March and ending with proof of colourblind listening in the blindfold test in July. This also shows how someone like Feather was moving the focus from a squarely anti-segregationist stance to, in George Lipsitz's words, a ‘colorblindness [that] pretends that racial recognition rather than racist rule is the problem to be solved’.Footnote ⁵⁹ Here, it should be acknowledged that in terms of both its progressive and its regressive politics, the colourblind ideology that Feather and Down Beat presented in the early 1950s was, in the general context of US society, ahead of its time, as it was not until the 1970s that the discourse of colourblindness gained hegemony.Footnote ⁶⁰

Given the rarity of such editorial responses, Down Beat's reply to Sgt Haynes gains extra weight, even more so because it was directed at a self-identified Black reader. Such debates over race fit into a pattern of whites accusing racial and ethnic minorities (and in this case also European critics) of ‘playing the race card’. I argue that Down Beat's and Feather's promotion (alongside other white musicians and critics) of ‘Crow Jim’ discourse is an early example of what Eduardo Bonilla-Silva describes as the colourblind racism that became the hegemonic racial ideology in post-Civil Rights United States. Under this ideology ‘whites enunciate positions that safeguard their racial interests without sounding “racist.” Shielded by color blindness, whites can … even claim to be the victims of “reverse racism.”’Footnote ⁶¹ In a broader perspective of jazz historiography, the blindfold test is also the precursor to what Ingrid Monson has dubbed white resentment narratives, which complain that white musicians have been left out of jazz history or are considered to be less authentic than African Americans. Feather is one of the forefathers to writers who, in Monson's words, well into the twenty-first century ‘make use of liberal, individualist ideology to argue for a colorblind or race-neutral perspective that views music itself above and beyond politics’.Footnote ⁶² As supportive as Feather otherwise was of Black musicians, this talk of ‘Crow Jim’ combined with colourblind ideology worked in the blindfold test as an attack on Eldridge's listening skills. Through the blindfold fest, Feather mobilized colourblindness as a shield to safeguard his own position as the adjudicator of ‘correct’ listening with more racial literacy than Eldridge, an African American man.

Colourblind audile technique and the acousmatic imagination

That it was this idea of European ‘reverse racism’ that Feather was taking aim at is clear from the introduction to his blindfold test with Eldridge:

Feather's argument against ‘Crow Jim’ was ideological, but the blindfold tests themselves were equally ideological. To illustrate this, we can go back to the very first blindfold test (published in Metronome in 1946), which Feather opened with this programmatic statement:

By charting a history of regimes of listening practices, the blindfold test acts as what Jonathan Sterne calls audile technique.Footnote ⁶⁵ Colourblind listening is an audile technique regime.Footnote ⁶⁶ As Jennifer Stoever has shown in her study of the sonic colourline, the use of acousmatic listening in relation to questions of race were not entirely new and have precursors in nineteenth-century US music culture.Footnote ⁶⁷ But as Stoever also argues, sound appeared somewhat contradictory ‘in the dominant discourse of race during the postwar era, a period that simultaneously marked the beginning of the modern conception of “color blindness” and the high-water mark of segregation’.Footnote ⁶⁸ Feather's blindfold tests are but one example of how sound technology was used with new force in mid-twentieth-century cultural production to establish ideas and practices that would eventually lead to the wider hegemony of colourblind ideology in US society after the Civil Rights Era.Footnote ⁶⁹ Stoever's description can also be applied to Feather's privileging of recorded music as ‘a technology of the sonic color line, developing and circulating new acousmatic protocols of racialized sound and listening no longer dependent on immediate bodily presence’.Footnote ⁷⁰ The blindfold test was one of these new acousmatic protocols.Footnote ⁷¹ Similar to the sonic work of doctors, scientists, and engineers, Feather's blindfold tests present listening as a technical skill imbued with rationality and analytic thought – though many of the musicians interviewed would subvert this premise with some very subjective remarks. It also gives symbolic currency to the virtuosity of the audile technique associated with the record reviewer and music critic, such as Feather himself.Footnote ⁷² The technique relied on an acousmatic imagination that presented sound technology as what Sterne calls a vanishing mediator.Footnote ⁷³ In other words, Feather's investment in colourblind listening rested upon making his own whiteness invisible through his use of technology. This places Feather, in his own way, as yet another white intellectual critic, focused on the study of ‘the music itself’, that is, the recordings themselves. Indeed, Guthrie Ramsey puts it bluntly, ‘at its worst, Feather's blindfolding created a kind of bogus interaction with a musical text that mirrors few musical (or any other) experiences in the real world’.Footnote ⁷⁴ As such, the blindfold test is a specific rather than universal audile technique that may not match well with, for instance, Roy Eldridge's approach to listening to records. His insistence on listening for Blackness and white appropriation in music was not a concession to Jim Crow or Crow Jim, but was a protest against the colourblind epistemology based on recordings that Feather presented him with. Though, his struggle was, at least in that moment, futile.

As the preceding quote from Feather's first blindfold test shows, this technique has an ideological aim, which is underpinned by what Sterne has identified as the audiovisual litany, a discourse that relies on essentializing distinctions of hearing and vision.Footnote ⁷⁵ Through the blindfold tests, Feather misrepresents specific ideas around sound and vision, and claims that one audile technique is universally and normatively ‘clearly the best’. Such a representation of the senses is, as Sterne puts it, a ‘zero-sum game’,Footnote ⁷⁶ where Feather positions colourblind listening as a technique that is opposed to the discriminatory prejudices that he exclusively associates with vision (even though it was not yet explicitly racialized in the case of the first test). Aiming to disassociate the sound from its source and conceptualize the blindfold test, Feather centred the acousmatic situation in a manner similar to his contemporary, the musique concrète composer Pierre Schaeffer, who famously theorized and idealized a mode of reduced listening.Footnote ⁷⁷ Drawing on the audiovisual litany, Feather promoted the acousmatic imagination, a term coined by the film theorist Vivian Sobchack which I develop and define as the privileging of acousmatic listening, and the technological and ideological separation of sight and sound, based on the ontological primacy afforded to recorded sound.Footnote ⁷⁸ Rather than challenging the audiovisual litany and image-sound hierarchies, like Sterne and Sobchack advocate for, Feather's insistence on the sharp distinctions between sound and visuality are invested in his acousmatically imaginary distinctions between race as a visual fact and sonic fiction.

In this way Feather's acousmatic imagination also maintains a racialized segregation of sound and visuality in order to promote colourblindness. Omi and Winant argue that in processes of racialization ‘there is a crucial and non-reducible visual dimension to the definition and understanding of racial categories’.Footnote ⁷⁹ Feather was clearly trying to combat the racism he saw coming from ocular-centric white supremacy. But by appealing to the acousmatic imagination, he did not challenge the audiovisual litany that colourblind listening shares with white supremacist listening. Indeed, the acousmatic question, as theorized by Eidsheim, is the premise of all of Feather's blindfold tests – even those that are not specifically about race. By claiming that colourblind listening was possible qua acousmatic listening, Feather attempted to circumvent the problem of race altogether because he envisioned the acousmatic imagination as neutral. However, as Eidsheim argues, ‘we actually assign value when we pose and respond to the acousmatic question’.Footnote ⁸⁰ Rather than answering the question, Feather took the acousmatic imagination as axiomatic of listening itself and did not see the value that he was assigning to listening in the process. Eldridge, on the other hand, seems to have been keenly aware of the values that both he and Feather were assigning to listening. Both seem to have been somewhat vexed by the fact that, as Eidsheim puts it, ‘listening through the acousmatic question arises from the impossibility that the question will yield a firm answer’.Footnote ⁸¹

Eldridge and Feather both sought firm answers when confronted by racial segregation in the mid-twentieth century. Each of them based their arguments and showed their value of sound when confronted with the acousmatic question, but with differing emphases. As Eldridge's afterthoughts to the blindfold test shows, he privileged the unique qualities of sound associated with particular performers and performances, especially valued in African American musical traditions. Conversely, he criticized white imitators of Black sound. Feather, on the other hand, emphasized the vanishing mediation of the record medium in a discourse of acousmatic imagination.

Whiteness and the possessive investment in colourblind listening

Sociologists have observed how most white people understand racism to be a form of prejudice, whereas for most people of colour it is systemic or institutionalized.Footnote ⁸² Scholars of whiteness have often remarked on how white supremacy draws its power from its apparent invisibility.Footnote ⁸³ Invisible, at least, to white people since, as Eldridge's refusal to work for white bandleaders show, people of colour have always been keenly aware of the power of whiteness.Footnote ⁸⁴ Feather believed that he could eradicate prejudice via the acousmatic imagination, and indeed used that term (‘prejudice’) continually in his articles on ‘Crow Jim’. Rather than do away with prejudice and race, though, the blindfold test just institutionalized it in a new colourblind framework, reinforcing what Lipsitz has famously called ‘the possessive investment in whiteness’.Footnote ⁸⁵ Monson frames the blindfold test exactly in terms of possession (though not using Lipsitz's terms), and writes that when Feather concluded that listening itself was colourblind, ‘he was asking Eldridge to forfeit his claim to having a special connection to Black music by virtue of being raised as an African American. He was asking him to say that race and history don't matter; it had become everybody's music now.’Footnote ⁸⁶ The claim to cultural possession that Feather took for himself, in the name of colourblind universalism, was based in his whiteness.

As Feather sought to erase race in a colourblind audile technique, he was blind to his own whiteness, inhabiting what Guthrie Ramsey has called the invisible white critical ‘I’.Footnote ⁸⁷ This subjectivity of the white critic fits within a broader US discourse of twentieth-century expertise where, as the intellectual historian Susan Searls Giroux argues, the ‘refusal to “see race” … is a celebrated marker of the professional expert's detachment and decorum, or is more militantly defended as a form of realpolitik waged against pernicious forms of identitarian distraction’.Footnote ⁸⁸ Thus, someone like Feather mobilized technology, the acousmatic question, and colourblind listening against the Francophone critics that he accused of ‘Crow Jim’ identitarian and primitivist distraction and against African American musicians such as Eldridge who he saw as equally essentialist. More than a mere application of technology, though, Feather's audile technique is related to Tukufu Zuberi and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva's critique of academic methods that, despite their best intentions, re-entrench whiteness as objective while condemning non-whites to positions of perpetual subjectivity.Footnote ⁸⁹ When administering the blindfold test, Feather took on the de-racialized identity of a jazz scientist who simply recorded the results of an exam, as opposed to Eldridge's putatively subjective position. It is perhaps not coincidental that Feather's colourblind listening is historically coterminous with hi-fi culture for white, male, middle-class professionals, which, paraphrasing Stoever's study of tape recorders (like the ones Feather would have used) in the 1950s, protects the ‘institutionalized standards of racialized sonic citizenship’ that Eldridge was forced to concede to.Footnote ⁹⁰ Likewise, the blindfold tests came to prominence around the same time as mid-century aesthetics associated with Pierre Schaeffer and John Cage, which Marie Thompson argues constitute a white aurality that continues to mar sound studies. It is not difficult to see the parallels to Feather in her description of ‘the modernist virtue of scientisitic and traceless observation; entangled with formations of whiteness, masculinity and Eurocentricism, it pertains to a subjectless position from which the world is observed from everywhere and nowhere, and from which bias is “removed” through obfuscation’.Footnote ⁹¹ This subjectless whiteness was a privileged persona of the critic that Feather pursued through his colourblind project. In the famous case of Eldridge's ‘failed’ exam, the successful invisibility of Feather's own whiteness stood in marked contrast to Eldridge's nominal failure as a racialized Black person who could not recognize their own Black music.

The legacy of the blindfold test

Roy Eldridge never forgave Leonard Feather for, in his mind, blowing an issue out of proportion and putting him on the spot, later telling journalist Dan Morgenstern: ‘Boy, that cat really hung me on the wall with that.’Footnote ⁹² On the other hand, Feather did not have second thoughts and reprinted part of the fateful blindfold test under the heading ‘Riddle of the Races’ in his 1958 New Encyclopedia Yearbook of Jazz. In order to extend his point beyond Eldridge, he also included a quote from a blindfold test where Miles Davis misidentified the Black saxophonist Buddy Collette, saying ‘I can't tell … All those white tenor players sound alike to me.’Footnote ⁹³ For Feather, such statements confirmed his commitment to colourblind listening in the context of US jazz culture, but he would also explain how it was, at least in his own eyes, a product of his perspective as a European and a Jew, writing in the mid-1960s: ‘The myth of race, a curious distortion of Hitler's theories, almost disappeared in jazz until the stirring of a chauvinistic theory that Negroes are the only real “blues people” caused an alarming rift.’Footnote ⁹⁴ Here, voices of other critics echo in Feather's writing.

The first echo was a European one, associating any kind of ‘race consciousness’ with racism, as Feather attempts to criticize ‘playing the race card’ by ‘playing the Nazi card’, as it were. More specifically, Feather was still positioning himself against the primitivist myth and ‘Crow Jim’ that he found especially pronounced in French jazz criticism. Feather's reluctance to giving Black musicians primacy in jazz may also be a reaction to the increased anti-Americanism of the Cold War. As Mary Dudziak has shown, the foreign critique of US Jim Crow discrimination grew to considerable heights in the post-war period.Footnote ⁹⁵ American observers were quick to see the connection (correctly) between the supposedly superior European appreciation of jazz and growing anti-Americanism, associated especially with left-leaning French critics.Footnote ⁹⁶ From this point of view, the French attraction to Black jazz represented a fundamental anti-American misunderstanding of the United States, which was at odds with the liberal, colourblind ideals of both music and society that Feather saw embodied in jazz.Footnote ⁹⁷ The legacy of such contested transatlantic discourses is with us today. Perhaps ironically, given Feather's protests against French ‘Crow Jim’, contemporary European jazz discourses let the apparent contradiction of ‘race consciousness’ and colourblindness exist side-by-side. As William Kirk Bares argues, twenty-first-century European jazz ideology brings ‘to the fore the competing visions of jazz universalism … as visions of jazz as American melting pot dazzle alongside stagings of jazz as European haute culture or jazz as African diasporic consciousness’. Bares critiques such visions of the music for putting forth a ‘postpolitical’ jazz universalism ‘according to a logic of managed liberal-democratic multiculturalism’ that is not dissimilar to Feather's mid-twentieth-century vision of interracialism and colourblindness in jazz.Footnote ⁹⁸

The second echo in Feather's statement was a newer African American one, with reference to Amiri Baraka's (at the time still going by the name LeRoi Jones) Blues People (1963), in which Feather read a re-segregating of jazz into authentically Black and derivatively white forms. As the 1950s became the 1960s, the Civil Rights Movement gained further momentum and Feather was increasingly confronted with African American musicians and critics, such as Baraka, who were explicitly political in their art and writings. In Blues People, Baraka asserted the fundamental Blackness of jazz and in contrast to Feather's interracial ideal heard bebop as an ‘anti-assimilationist sound’.Footnote ⁹⁹ As such, Feather also revealed that his politics were perhaps more caught up in the waning New Deal Order rather than standing in solidarity with Black political leaders of the late 1950s and 1960s. Martin Luther King, Jr's dream of a colourblind society had a different valence than Feather's, to say nothing of his response to Baraka's critique of hegemonic whiteness.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Building upon the ideology of colourblindness, Feather objected to a discourse centred on Baraka's blues people. Baraka for his part was happy to bring identity politics explicitly into the question of music criticism. In his now-famous essay ‘Jazz and the White Critic’ (published in Down Beat, the same publication that housed the blindfold tests), Baraka charged that class and race should be central concerns of jazz criticism, and that ‘we have got to set up standards of judgment and aesthetic excellence that depend on our native knowledge and understanding of the underlying philosophies and local cultural references that produced blues and jazz in order to produce valid critical writing or commentary about it’.Footnote ¹⁰¹ In Baraka, Feather quite rightly saw a figure similar to Eldridge who insisted on the primary Blackness of jazz. Conversely, Feather's biography and the full history of the motivations behind the Roy Eldridge blindfold test shows that jazz criticism was not only hegemonically white because the profession was made up of mainly white (male) Europeans and Americans. Jazz criticism was white because it centred white critics and their supposedly objective, normative listening position.

This case study also reveals that US debates about race and racism cannot be separated from transnational discourses and experiences of racialization. Eldridge's racial politics were influenced by his stay in Europe and Feather was a British journalist working in the United States. Even as Feather proposed the blindfold test as an acousmatic question that could somehow circumvent questions of racial identity, national belonging, and creative ownership, I have shown how the blindfold test was deeply implicated in transatlantic politics of race and critical authority. Feather's anti-racism was built on the idea of simply rejecting ‘race consciousness’, in which he did not differentiate strongly between US Jim Crow and European ‘Crow Jim’. In this, one might be tempted to read his ideas as a distant forbearer of Paul Gilroy's arguments against raciology and racial particularism. It is, however, worth distinguishing between Gilroy's conceptualization of Black anti-anti-essentialism and his warning that ‘deconstructing “races” is not the same thing as doing away with racism’.Footnote ¹⁰² Feather might be regarded as an exponent of the former, but his colourblind ideology was at fault for the latter.

As noted, the legacy of this particular blindfold test lies not least in its anecdotal presence in both formal and casual jazz discourse to this day. More widely, the blindfold test format continues to enjoy widespread popularity and is still a regular feature in Down Beat. It has also been copied in multiple music publications and radio stations across the globe. Most prominently, Leonard Feather took the format with him, now titled ‘Before & After’, when he started publishing for JazzTimes in the late 1980s and the magazine has continued with the column after Feather's death; the British magazine The Wire publishes a version of the blindfold under the title ‘Invisible Jukebox’; and blindfold tests have been conducted in front of live audiences at places such as the Monterey Jazz Festival and the North Sea Jazz Festival (sometimes with the collaboration of Down Beat). In these venues, the question of race is rarely explicitly at the fore. However, the acousmatic imagination and colourblind audile techniques have continually been leveraged in other places where race – not to mention other markers of identity – is a contested topic. From the 1940s onwards, radio was increasingly cast as a colourblind medium in the United States; often both exacerbating the racist stereotyping of Black voices and amplifying the hegemonic middle-class whiteness of US airwaves.Footnote ¹⁰³ Colourblind ideology continues to be employed in the casting of voice actors for film, TV, and video games, and most spectacularly in a reality TV show such as Love Is Blind.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ And legal actors, from police officers to judges, continue to uphold white supremacy and settler colonialism through claims to their own colourblind inability to hear race.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

Perhaps the most contentious arena for colourblind listening today is music auditions. Almost direct equivalents to Feather's blindfold test, so-called blind (or better, ‘anonymous’) auditions conceal a performer (e.g., using a curtain) from the judges in an attempt to prevent bias. Infamous cases about the use (or lack) of anonymous auditions include the Black bassist Art Davis, who filed an unsuccessful discrimination lawsuit against the New York Philharmonic, and female trombonist Abbie Conant, who was selected as the first choice as principal trombonist for the Munich Philharmonic and subsequently subjected to sexism by the orchestra's conductor and received less pay than her male counterparts. Focusing mainly on gender equity, several social scientific studies have taken up the case of anonymous auditions, though importantly – perhaps because they come from outside the fields of musicology, critical race studies, or gender studies – none of those studies question the audiovisual litany or trouble the ideological implications of acousmatic listening.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Indeed, in recent years it is feminist musicologists and musicians seeking greater race and gender equity who have questioned the use of anonymous auditions.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Following on from that, musicologist Will Cheng has critiqued the ‘moral masquerades’ of screened-off auditions that allows orchestras to claim that they are not engaged in discrimination. For Cheng, the main problem with anonymous auditions is that they seem to foreclose reflection from those administering the audition: ‘Although screens and redactions of identity can level the playing field on a case-by-case basis, they concurrently generate complacency and conceit, and therefore aren't viable as long-term substitutes for continuous practices of self-critique and awareness.’Footnote ¹⁰⁸ That it is within the world of Western art music that acousmatic listening is celebrated and used to foreclose critique is not accidental. Loren Kajikawa argues that ‘through the use of colourblind language, classical music, like whiteness, manages to avoid becoming an object of scrutiny’.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Thus, these debates speak not only to the possible role colour- or gender-blind listening may play in affirmative action, but also cautions us that acousmatic listening in itself will not undo classist and racist hierarchies that support the white heteronormative ableist patriarchy. As the music industry and music education seeks to become more diverse, inclusive, equitable, and move beyond white hegemony, we can learn from past attempts at anti-racism such as Feather's – well-intentioned as it was – to question the assumptions of music, technology, and listening that are embedded in the audile techniques we privilege. In incorporating the full history of articles and commentary that led to the blindfold test with Roy Eldridge, I have attempted to go beyond an analysis of the case that stops at Leonard Feather's intentions or uses the blindfold test as an anecdote in a larger story. As Eldridge had made clear, his concern was about discrimination, violence, exploitation, and appropriation. Without this context, a reference to Feather's colourblind blindfold test can too easily be a way for – especially white – readers and listeners to distance themselves from a prominent liberal, but unwoke figure in jazz history and to disavow their own privilege and complicity in racialized hierarchies.

In closing, I want to make clear that I am not arguing that any blindfold test, specifically, or any invocation of the acousmatic imagination, more broadly, per definition is racist. Indeed, Down Beat's blindfold tests also presented Black musicians as voices of music criticism and Feather presented remarkably diversity compared with the rest of the magazine's coverage, with a not insignificant number of women and non-Americans among his interviewees. However, I am rejecting the idea that a hermeneutics of listening could reveal an a priori colourblind state of mind. Put more bluntly, I am reiterating the simple fact that acousmatic listening is a specific – not universal – audile technique. As a sonic and cultural practice, this coupling of technology, music, and colourblind politics is ideological and continues to place whiteness at the centre of listening.