Probleme und Methoden der Historiographie des Jazz
At the beginning, there is the choice and the necessary limitation of the material to be inspected. From the aesthetic-critical point of view, the jazz historian might limit his attention only to those artists and their contributions who, judging by today's aesthetic standards, reaches a noteworthy artistic level. To be able to evaluate this beyond any doubt, he might limit his material only to recorded music which he himself can listen to and judge. This, however, will never offer a true and complete picture, as the recorded music offers only a selection, sometimes even a haphazard one, from the vast body of music constituting the actual history of jazz. Moreover, this selection may not always include the best or most characteristic pieces of music created by the musicians and listened to by their contemporaries. This implies that the testimonies of the contemporaries have to be accepted as an additional source, but they have to be verified, checked and interpreted very carefully. There may easily be a substantial difference between the "truth" of a witness who lived through a certain period, participated in its emotional climate and sees the past through the eyes of somebody sharing its experiences, and between the much colder "objective truth" of a historian who tries to achieve a more detached and generally valid survey of the past.
But the history of an art has not only to deal with the values created by this art; it has also to explain the conditions under which these values were created, and their impact upon society. In the case of jazz, this means that attention cannot concentrate on pure jazz only, but must also take into consideration those transitional types of music which made it possible for jazz, a music different from European musical tradition, to be accepted by the audience. This is of special significance for the history of jazz in Europe where the hybrid efforts of popularizers usually preceeded actual jazz. For jazz could develop only when its new forms of expression were known and mastered to a sufficient degree.
A third aspect which the jazz historian will have to pursue is the constantly changing aesthetic conception of jazz and the changes in its social and aesthetic functions. The artist's personal beliefs, convictions or intentions may not be decisive for the aesthetic quality of his work, but can explain very much when we place the artist and his work into proper historical perspective.
Besides, the historian must bear in mind certain characteristic traits of the jazz community which tend to make of it a minority world of its own and give jazz a special place in the world of arts as well as in society. The jazz historian should not be affected by these preconceptions himself, but he should always be aware of them and understand them.
Even if history as a scholarly discipline cannot make use of the methods of literature, an ideal jazz historian should have some of the qualities attributed by a literary critic to Scott Fitzgerald: to be able, at the same time, to see his material from within and without, to judge it and to love it.