Kelsey Klotz, "Dave Brubeck and the Performance of Whiteness" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Jan 6, 2026

Kelsey Klotz, a music lecturer and assistant dean at UNC Charlotte, dives into the legacy of jazz legend Dave Brubeck. She explores how Brubeck, despite his progressive beliefs, navigated mid-century racial dynamics, examining the performance of whiteness in his music and public image. The conversation touches on critics' racialized views, Brubeck's respectful appeal to mainstream audiences, and the controversies from his integrated touring. Klotz also discusses Brubeck's efforts to bridge communities through his work, revealing the complexities of identity in jazz.

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INSIGHT

Brubeck As A Prism For Mid‑Century Whiteness

Dave Brubeck functioned as a lens to observe mid-century whiteness performed across culture and institutions.
His 'good white person' acts revealed how liberal anti-racist gestures can coexist with and be constrained by white supremacy.

INSIGHT

Critics Racialized Jazz Through Language

Critics racialized musical qualities by attaching European-classical terms to white players and 'swing' to Black artists.
This language recoded technical descriptors into markers of intellect and whiteness versus primal Blackness.

INSIGHT

Swing As A Gatekeeping Standard

Debates about whether Brubeck 'swung' coded belonging in jazz and were deployed to validate or discredit him.
Swing remained an ineffable, racialized standard that critics and musicians used to police authenticity.

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How can we—jazz fans, musicians, writers, and historians—understand the legacy and impact of a musician like Dave Brubeck? It is undeniable that Brubeck leveraged his fame as a jazz musician and status as a composer for social justice causes, and in doing so, held to a belief system that, during the civil rights movement, modeled a progressive approach to race and race relations. It is also true that it took Brubeck, like others, some time to understand the full spectrum of racial power dynamics at play in post-WWII, early Cold War, and civil rights-era America.

Dave Brubeck and the Performance of Whiteness (Oxford UP, 2023) uses Brubeck's performances of whiteness across his professional, private, and political lives as a starting point to understand the ways in which whiteness, privilege, and white supremacy more fully manifested in mid-century America. How is whiteness performed and re-performed? How do particular traits become inscribed with whiteness, and further, how do those traits, now racialized in a listener's mind, filter the sounds a listener hears? To what extent was Brubeck's whiteness made by others? How did audiences and critics use Brubeck to craft their own identities centered in whiteness? Drawing on archival records, recordings, and previously conducted interviews, Dave Brubeck and the Performance of Whiteness listens closely for the complex and shifting frames of mid-century whiteness, and how they shaped the experiences of Brubeck's critics, audiences, and Brubeck himself. Throughout, author Kelsey Klotz asks what happens when a musician tries to intervene, using his privilege as a tool with which to disrupt structures of white supremacy, even as whiteness continues to retain its hold on its beneficiaries.

Nathan Smith is a PhD Student in Music Theory at Yale University (nathan.smith@yale.edu).

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