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Journal articles on the topic 'African American; Jazz music'
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1
Brothers, Thomas. "Solo and Cycle in African-American Jazz." Musical Quarterly 78, no. 3 (1994): 479–509. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/mq/78.3.479.
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Collins, John. "The early history of West African highlife music." Popular Music 8, no. 3 (October 1989): 221–30. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0261143000003524.
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Highlife is one of the myriad varieties of acculturated popular dance-music styles that have been emerging from Africa this century and which fuse African with Western (i.e. European and American) and islamic influences. Besides highlife, other examples include kwela, township jive and mbaqanga from South Africa, chimurenga from Zimbabwe, the benga beat from Kenya, taraab music from the East African coast, Congo jazz (soukous) from Central Africa, rai music from North Africa, juju and apala music from western Nigeria, makossa from the Cameroons and mbalax from Senegal.
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Morrison, Steven J. "A Comparison of Preference Responses of White and African-American Students to Musical versus Musical/Visual Stimuli." Journal of Research in Music Education 46, no. 2 (July 1998): 208–22. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/3345624.
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The purpose of this study was to examine the role of same- and other-group identification in musical preference decision-making. Subjects were African-American (n = 189) and white (n = 280) music students in Grades 6, 7, and 8. Each subject responded along a 9-point Likert scale to 10 instrumental music excerpts, five performed by African-American jazz artists and five performed by white jazz artists. Examples were presented according to one of three conditions: (1) music only, (2) music accompanied by a photograph of the performers, or (3) music accompanied by a photograph of different performers representing a different ethnicity. Results indicated that white subjects preferred examples by white performers regardless of presentation condition. African-American subjects preferred examples by white performers when presented with music alone, but preferred examples believed to be by African-American performers under the musical/visual conditions.
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Peretti, Burton W. "Caliban reheard: new voices on jazz and American consciousness." Popular Music 13, no. 2 (May 1994): 151–64. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0261143000007017.
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Wilfrid Mellers was one of the first scholars of American music to recognise that jazz was situated within many of the major contexts and controversies of American civilisation. InMusic in a New Found Land(1965) andCaliban Reborn(1967), he argued eloquently that jazz was the music which both expressed and challenged urban alienation from a distinctly African-American point of view.
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Anderson, Gene, and Thomas Hennessey. "From Jazz to Swing: African-American Jazz Musicians and Their Music, 1890-1935." American Music 14, no. 1 (1996): 115. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/3052463.
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Booker, Vaughn. "“An Authentic Record of My Race”: Exploring the Popular Narratives of African American Religion in the Music of Duke Ellington." Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 25, no. 1 (2015): 1–36. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/rac.2015.25.1.1.
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AbstractEdward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington (1899–1974) emerged within the jazz profession as a prominent exponent of Harlem Renaissance racial uplift ideals about incorporating African American culture into artistic production. Formed in the early twentieth century's middle-class black Protestant culture but not a churchgoer in adulthood, Ellington conveyed a nostalgic appreciation of African American Christianity whenever hewrote music to chronicle African American history. This prominent jazz musician's religious nostalgia resulted in compositions that conveyed to a broader American audience a portrait of African American religiosity that was constantly “classical” and static—not quite primitive, but never appreciated as a modern aspect of black culture.This article examines several Ellington compositions from the late 1920s through the 1960s that exemplify his deployment of popular representations of African American religious belief and practice. Through the short filmBlack and Tanin the 1920s, the satirical popular song “Is That Religion?” in the 1930s, the long-form symphonic movementBlack, Brown and Beigein the 1940s, the lyricism of “Come Sunday” in the 1950s, and the dramatic prose of “My People” in the 1960s, Ellington attempted to capture a portrait of black religious practice without recognition of contemporaneous developments in black Protestant Christianity in the twentieth century's middle decades. Although existing Ellington scholarship has covered his “Sacred Concerts” in the 1960s and 1970s, this article engages themes and representations in Ellington's work prefiguring the religious jazz that became popular with white liberal Protestants in America and Europe. This discussion of religious narratives in Ellington's compositions affords an opportunity to reflect upon the (un)intended consequences of progressive, sympathetic cultural production, particularly on the part of prominent African American historical figures in their time. Moreover, this article attempts to locate the jazz profession as a critical site for the examination of racial and religious representation in African American religious history.
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Drott, Eric. "Free Jazz and the French Critic." Journal of the American Musicological Society 61, no. 3 (2008): 541–81. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/jm.2008.61.3.541.
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Abstract From the mid-1960s to the early 1970s, free jazz was the subject of considerable public interest in France. The present article examines the conditions that fueled enthusiasm for American avant-garde jazz, focusing on the politicization of discourse surrounding the ‘new thing.’ Critics hostile to the movement felt that it undermined jazz's claim to universality, a cornerstone of postwar attempts to valorize the genre in the French cultural sphere. Yet the tendency to identify free jazz with various forms of African American political radicalism presented no less of a challenge for the movement's advocates. By constructing an image of free jazz that stressed its irremediable difference from the norms and values of European culture, writers were compelled to find alternative ways of relating it to contemporary French concerns. A reading of Philippe Carles and Jean-Louis Comolli's text Free Jazz Black Power shows how the authors' attempt to reinscribe African American cultural nationalism as an expression of transnational anticolonial struggle not only helped bring free jazz closer to the French experience, but also served as a way of working through the unresolved legacies of colonialism.
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Stowe, David W., Thomas J. Hennessey, and William Howland Kenney. "From Jazz to Swing: African-American Jazz Musicians and Their Music, 1890- 1935." Journal of American History 82, no. 2 (September 1995): 777. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/2082322.
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MAXILE, HORACE J. "Implication, Quotation, and Coltrane in Selected Works By David N. Baker." Journal of the Society for American Music 7, no. 2 (May 2013): 147–64. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1752196313000059.
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AbstractThis article explores composer David N. Baker's use of elements of jazz and vernacular music to articulate formal structures and suggest extramusical commentaries in his concert works, with particular focus on the Sonata for Cello and Piano and the Sonata I for Piano. Themes of homage to and respect for jazz saxophonist John Coltrane resonate through these works. Various features bring the jazz legend to mind, but Baker's compelling play with implication and quotation provides fertile ground for studying musical signification and the use of vernacular emblems within Western compositional structures and the concert music of African American composers. Conventional analytical methods are combined with readings of referential symbols to work toward interpretations that address both structural and expressive domains. This approach allows discussions of compositional techniques to intersect with cultural and philosophical considerations. By addressing issues of musical structure and expressivity, this article seeks to move beyond commonplace surface-level descriptions of black vernacular emblems in the concert music of African American composers.
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Monson, Ingrid. "The Problem with White Hipness: Race, Gender, and Cultural Conceptions in Jazz Historical Discourse." Journal of the American Musicological Society 48, no. 3 (1995): 396–422. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/3519833.
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This essay situates hipness within a broader range of African American history and moral debate than is generally presented in accounts of jazz history. The perspectives of Amiri Baraka, Mezz Mezzrow, Norman Mailer, and Dizzy Gillespie are used to develop the thesis that there is a problem with white presumptions about how hipness relates to African American cultural life and history. This problem requires addressing interrelationships between race and gender, as well as the legacy of primitivism embedded in common assumptions about how jazz since World War II relates to social consciousness, sexual liberation, and dignity.
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Asai, Susan Miyo. "Cultural Politics: The African American Connection in Asian American Jazz-based Music." Asian Music 36, no. 1 (2005): 87–108. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/amu.2005.0002.
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Deaville, James. "African-American Entertainers in Jahrhundertwende: Vienna Austrian Identity, Viennese Modernism and Black Success." Nineteenth-Century Music Review 3, no. 1 (June 2006): 89–112. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1479409800000367.
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According to jazz scholar Howard Rye, when considering public representations of African-American music and those who made it at the turn of the last century, ‘the average jazz aficionado, and not a few others, conjures up images of white folks in black face capering about’. We could extend this to include white minstrels singing so-called ‘coon songs’, which feature reprehensible racist lyrics set to syncopated rhythms. Traditional representations assign the blacks no role in the public performance of these scurrilous ‘identities’, which essentially banished them from the literature as participating in careers in the performing arts. As a result of the problems with the representation of blacks in texted music from the turn of the century, historians have tended to write vocal performance out of the pre-history of jazz, in favour of the purely instrumental ragtime. However, recent research reveals that African-American vocal entertainers did take agency over representations of themselves and over their careers, in a space unencumbered by the problematic history of race relationships in the USA. That space was Europe: beginning in the 1870s, and in increasing numbers until the ‘Great War’, troupes of African-American singers, dancers and comedians travelled to Europe, where they entertained large audiences to great acclaim and gained valuable experience as entrepreneurs, emerging as an important market force in the variety-theatre circuit. Above all, they performed the cakewalk, the late-nineteenth-century dance whose syncopated rhythms and simple form accompanied unnatural, exaggerated dance steps. By introducing Europe to the cakewalk, they prepared audiences for the jazz craze that would sweep through the continent after the war and enabled Europeans to experience the syncopated rhythms and irregular movements whether as dancers or as spectators.
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Ainsworth, Alan John. "“A Private Passion”." Southern California Quarterly 101, no. 3 (2019): 317–38. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/scq.2019.101.3.317.
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Photographer Bob Douglas’s 1940s–1990s career illustrates the race-based constraints experienced by African American photographers. Analyses of his images of jazz performers bring to light his rapport with the musicians and his sensitivity to their music and the differences between his practice and from that of white jazz photographers. His oeuvre is an important contribution to the history of both jazz and photography.
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Kočan, Kristina. "Problems in Translating Musical Elements in African American Poetry after 1950." ELOPE: English Language Overseas Perspectives and Enquiries 6, no. 1-2 (June 15, 2009): 45–60. http://dx.doi.org/10.4312/elope.6.1-2.45-60.
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In most cases, African American poetry eschews traditional literary norms. Contemporary African American poets tend to ignore grammatical rules, use unusual typography on many occasions, include much of their cultural heritage in their poetry, and interweave musical elements into literary genres. The influence of such musical genres as jazz, blues, soul, and gospel, together with the dilemmas that occur for the translator, will be shown to great extent, since music, like black speech, is a major part of African American culture and literature. The translator will have to maintain the specific African American rhythm, blues adaptations and the improvisational language under the jazz impact. The paper presents the problems in translating post-1950 African American poetry into Slovene, and asks to what extent can one successfully transfer the musical elements within this poetry for the target culture? Inevitably, it will identify a share of elements that are lost in translation.
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Choi, Eunjung, and Laura J. Keith. "Cultural Diversity." Music Educators Journal 103, no. 2 (December 2016): 35–40. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0027432116670459.
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Contemporary African-American classical composers Cedric Adderley, John Lane, and Trevor Weston intertwine strands of culture and individual experience to produce musical works whose distinct designs offer cultural resources that music educators can use to integrate diversity into instructional settings. Of special interest is their ability to combine traditional European styles and other musical styles, including jazz, gospel, and blues, in their music. The authors include recommendations for incorporating elements of these contemporary African-American–composed works into the curriculum.
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DJEDJE, JACQUELINE COGDELL. "The (Mis)Representation of African American Music: The Role of the Fiddle." Journal of the Society for American Music 10, no. 1 (February 2016): 1–32. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1752196315000528.
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AbstractDuring the early twentieth century, research on African American music focused primarily on spirituals and jazz. Investigations on the secular music of blacks living in rural areas were nonexistent except for the work of folklorists researching blues. Researchers and record companies avoided black fiddling because many viewed it not only as a relic of the past, but also a tradition identified with whites. In the second half of the twentieth century, rural-based musical traditions continued to be ignored because researchers tended to be music historians who relied almost exclusively on print or sound materials for analyses. Because rural black musicians who performed secular music rarely had an opportunity to record and few print data were available, sources were lacking. Thus, much of what we know about twentieth-century black secular music is based on styles created and performed by African Americans living in urban areas. And it is these styles that are often represented as the musical creations for all black people, in spite of the fact that other traditions were preferred and performed. This article explores how the (mis)representation of African American music has affected our understanding of black music generally and the development of black fiddling specifically.
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Iyer, Vijay. "Embodied Mind, Situated Cognition, and Expressive Microtiming in African-American Music." Music Perception 19, no. 3 (2002): 387–414. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/mp.2002.19.3.387.
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The dual theories of embodied mind and situated cognition, in which physical/temporal embodiment and physical/social/cultural environment contribute crucially to the structure of mind, are brought to bear on issues in music perception. It is argued that cognitive universals grounded in human bodily experience are tempered by the cultural specificity that constructs the role of the body in musical performance. Special focus is given to microrhythmic techniques in specific forms of African-American music, using audio examples created by the author or sampled from well-known jazz recordings.
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Dhakal, Lekha Nath. "Musical Tradition and Cultural Vision in Langston Hughes’s Poetry." Literary Studies 33 (March 31, 2020): 41–45. http://dx.doi.org/10.3126/litstud.v33i0.38034.
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In American music, Langston Hughes is one of the literary figures that hold a place similar to the aforementioned luminaries. In the literary field, Hughes is respected as one of the most important figures of the twentieth century. With the rise of African American Studies as an academic field in the 1970s, his life, writing, and influence has received frequent attention. What has not been documented in more specific terms is his importance to America’s musical culture in the twentieth century. Whether directly or indirectly, Langston Hughes has been a fixture in American musical culture, both popular and concert music, since the 1920s. In addition to his personal affinity for blues, jazz and other specifically African American musical forms such as gospel music, his vast contribution to American music specifically and American music culture in a broader sense can be separated into four general categories.
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GIVAN, BENJAMIN. "Dizzy à la Mimi: Jazz, Text, and Translation." Journal of the Society for American Music 11, no. 2 (May 2017): 121–54. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1752196317000049.
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AbstractThis article addresses issues of translation and transnational exchange, taking as a case study the two-pronged collaborative relationship between the French jazz singer, lyricist, and translator Mimi Perrin (1926–2010) and the African American trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie (1917–1993), whose memoir Perrin translated into French and with whom she collaborated on a 1963 jazz album. Perrin, who is the article's principal focus, founded the successful vocalese singing group Les Double Six in 1959 and then, after abandoning her musical career for health reasons in 1966, forged a new career as a literary translator. The article begins by examining her work as a translator of African American literature and demonstrates that her French edition of Gillespie's autobiography lacks some of the original's connotative cultural signification, in particular meanings conveyed through the book's use of black dialect. The article then turns to Perrin's work as a vocalese lyricist, which is notable in that she conceived of her lyricization of jazz improvisations as a sort of translation process, one that involved carefully selecting words in order to mimic the sounds of musical instruments. Her musical innovations are exemplified by a series of original French texts, set to Gillespie's music, on science fiction themes.
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WELLS, CHRISTOPHER J. "“Spinnin' the Webb”: Representational Spaces, Mythic Narratives, and the 1937 Webb/Goodman Battle of Music." Journal of the Society for American Music 14, no. 2 (April 24, 2020): 176–96. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1752196320000061.
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AbstractBenny Goodman and Chick Webb's 1937 battle of music has become a mythic event in jazz historical narratives, enshrined as the unique spectacle that defines Harlem's Savoy Ballroom and its legacy. While this battle has been marked as exceptional and unique, as an event it was a relatively typical instantiation of the “battle of music” format, a presentational genre common in black venues during the 1920s and 1930s. Within African American communities, battles of music re-staged ballrooms as symbolically loaded representational spaces where dueling bands regularly served as oppositional totems that indexed differences of locality (Chicago vs. New York), gender (men vs. women), ethnicity (Anglo- or African American vs. Latin), or race (black vs. white). This article details the ten-year history of battles of music that preceded the Webb/Goodman battle and that made its signifying rhetoric legible within African American communities. It then argues that the disconnect between the battle's relatively typical signifying rhetoric and its subsequent enshrinement as an exceptional event occurred due to a specific confluence of circumstances in the mid-1930s that shaped its immediate reception and subsequent legacy: Goodman's emergence as the “King of Swing” during a new period of massive mainstream popularity for swing music, a coterminous vigilance among both white and black jazz writers to credit black artists as jazz's originators and best practitioners, and the emergence of athletes Jesse Owens and Joe Louis as popular black champions symbolically conquering white supremacy at home and abroad.
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Vasiliu, Alex. "The Balkan tradition in contemporary jazz. Anatoly Vapirov." Artes. Journal of Musicology 20, no. 1 (March 1, 2019): 256–64. http://dx.doi.org/10.2478/ajm-2019-0015.
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Abstract The folkloric character of the beginnings of jazz has been established by all researchers of American classical music. The African-Americans brought as slaves onto the territory of North America, the European émigrés tied to their own folkloric repertoire, the songs in the musical revues on Broadway turned national successes – can be considered the first three waves to have fundamentally influenced the history of jazz music. Preserving the classical and modern manner of improvisation and arrangement has not been a solution for authentic jazz musicians, permanently preoccupied with renewing their mode of expression. As it happened in the academic genres, the effect of experiments was mostly to draw the public away, as its capacity of understanding and empathizing with the new musical “products” (especially those in the “free” stylistic area) were discouraging. The areas which also had something original to say in the field of jazz remained the traditional, archaic cultures in Eastern Europe, Asia, the Orient. Compared to folkloric works from very distant areas, the musical culture of the Balkans bears the advantage of diversity, the ease of reception of melodies, rhythms and instrumental sonority. One of the most important architects of ethno-jazz is Anatoly Vapirov. A classically-trained musician, an author of concerts, stage music and soundtracks, a consummate connoisseur of the classical mode of improvisation as a saxophone and clarinet player, Anatoly Vapirov has dedicated decades of his life to researching the archaic musical culture of the Balkans, which he translated into the dual academic-jazz language, in the hypostases of predetermined scored works and of improvised works – either as a soloist, in combos or big bands. This study focuses on highlighting the language techniques, emphasizing the aesthetic-artistic qualities of the music signed Anatoly Vapirov.
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Givan, Benjamin. "“The Fools Don’t Think I Play Jazz”." Journal of Musicology 35, no. 3 (2018): 397–430. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/jm.2018.35.3.397.
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Cecil Taylor (1929–2018), who was associated with the postwar black musical avant-garde, and Mary Lou Williams (1910–81), who had roots in jazz’s swing era, met in a notorious 1977 Carnegie Hall recital. These two African American pianists possessed decidedly different temperaments and aesthetic sensibilities; their encounter offers a striking illustration of how conflicts between coexisting performance strategies can reveal a great deal about musicians’ thought processes and worldviews. Evidence from unpublished manuscripts and letters, published interviews and written commentary by the performers, the accounts of music critics, and musical transcriptions from a commercial recording (the album Embraced) reveals that, in addition to demonstrating the performers’ distinct musical idiolects, the concert engaged longstanding debates over jazz’s history and definition as well as broader issues of black American identity. In particular, it dispelled still potent notions of jazz as a genre with a unilinear historical trajectory, and it encapsulated the inherent ambivalence toward the past often exhibited by the jazz avant-garde.
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Fejzula, Merve. "(Un) Cool Cats: Challenging the Traditional View of the French Response to Jazz." Journal of Jazz Studies 10, no. 2 (April 2, 2015): 203. http://dx.doi.org/10.14713/jjs.v10i2.95.
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ARNOLD-FORSTER, TOM. "Dr. Billy Taylor, “America's Classical Music,” and the Role of the Jazz Ambassador." Journal of American Studies 51, no. 1 (February 26, 2016): 117–39. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0021875815002662.
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The idea of jazz as “America's classical music” has become a powerful way of defining the music, asserting its national and artistic value, and shaping its scholarly study. The present article provides a history of this idea through a close analysis of its primary theorist and most visible spokesperson, Dr. Billy Taylor. It argues that the idea was not a neoclassical and conservative product of the 1980s, but had important roots in the Black Arts imperatives of the later 1960s and early 1970s. It suggests that Taylor initially made the idea work inventively and productively in a variety of contexts, especially through his community arts project Jazzmobile, but that these contexts diverged as his public profile was stretched thin across and beyond the United States. The idea's disintegration into clichéd ubiquity in the mid-1980s then provides a critical perspective on the idea of the “jazz renaissance,” and an opportunity to consider the role of the jazz ambassador in the context of debates about African American intellectuals.
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Solis, Gabriel. "Soul, Afrofuturism & the Timeliness of Contemporary Jazz Fusions." Daedalus 148, no. 2 (April 2019): 23–35. http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/daed_a_01740.
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The rise of jazz-R&B-hip hop fusions in contemporary Los Angeles offers an opportunity to reflect on the ways jazz matters to black audiences today. Drawing on recent Afrofuturist art and theory as well as on Amiri Baraka's analysis of the “changing same” in black music, this essay traces out the significance of work by artists as diverse as Kamasi Washington, Flying Lotus, Thundercat, and Robert Glasper, positing that their music tells us that jazz matters not only in itself, but also in its continuing capacity to engage in cross-genre dialogues for musicians and audiences who hear it as part of a rich continuum of African American musical expression.
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Gabbard, Krin. "La La Land Is a Hit, but Is It Good for Jazz?" Daedalus 148, no. 2 (April 2019): 92–103. http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/daed_a_01745.
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The debates around La La Land (2016) tell us a great deal about the state of jazz today and perhaps even in the near future. Many critics have charged that the film has very little real jazz, while others have emphasized the racial problematics of making the white hero a devout jazz purist while characterizing the music of the one prominent African American performer (John Legend) as all glitz and tacky dance moves. And finally, there is the speech in which Seb (Ryan Gosling) blithely announces that “jazz is dead.” But the place of jazz in La La Land makes more sense if we view the film as a response to and celebration of several film musicals, including New York, New York (1977), the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers films, and especially Jacques Demy's The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967). Both La La Land and Demy's film connect utopian moments with jazz, and push the boundaries of the classical Hollywood musical in order to celebrate the music.
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Sykes, Tom. "Music Outside? Innovation and ‘Britishness' in British Jazz 1960-1980." European Journal of Musicology 16, no. 1 (December 31, 2017): 178–90. http://dx.doi.org/10.5450/ejm.2017.16.5786.
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The 1960s and 1970s are regarded by some historians as being particularly creative decades for jazz in Britain, when British jazz developed its own sound that was distinct from that of American jazz. While not denying that this was a creatively fruitful period in British jazz, in this paper I argue that a ‘British sound' in jazz is difficult, perhaps impossible, to define, even though some authors have referred to a sense of ‘Britishness', particularly in the work of certain musicians discussed by Ian Carr in his book Music Outside: Contemporary Jazz in Britain. Some British jazz, performed largely by white (and mostly male) musicians at this time, was influenced during the 1960s by the contribution of immigrant black musicians from South Africa and the Caribbean; at the same time, musicians such as Michael Garrick and John Surman were drawing to some extent on British folk music for inspiration. Referring to examples from the period, I suggest that although much British jazz from 1960 to 1980 was innovative and became less ‘American', development of its styles was affected by many musical, cultural and political factors. To what extent this music sounds ‘British' is debatable, but its influence has led to the pluralism of jazz styles in Britain that continues today.
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ROBERTSON, MARTA. "Ballad for Incarcerated Americans: Second Generation Japanese American Musicking in World War II Camps." Journal of the Society for American Music 11, no. 3 (August 2017): 284–312. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1752196317000220.
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AbstractDuring World War II, the United States government imprisoned approximately 120,000 Japanese Americans, two-thirds of whom were American-born citizens, half of whom were children. Through ethnographic interviews I explore how fragile youthful memories, trauma, and the soundscape of the War Relocation Authority (WRA) Incarceration Camps shaped the artistic trajectories of three such former “enemy alien” youth: two pianists and a koto player. Counterintuitively, Japanese traditional arts flourished in the hostile environment of dislocation through the high number ofnisei(second generation) participants, who later contributed to increasing transculturalism in American music following resettlement out of camp. Synthesizing Japanese and Euro-American classical music, white American popular music, and African American jazz, manyniseiparadoxically asserted their dual cultural commitment to both traditional Japanese and home front patriotic American principles. A performance of Earl Robinson and John Latouche's patriotic cantata,Ballad for Americans(1939), by the high school choir at Manzanar Incarceration Camp demonstrates the hybridity of these Japanese American cultural practices. Marked by Popular Front ideals,Ballad for Americansallowedniseito construct identities through a complicated mixture of ethnic pride, chauvinistic white Americanism allied with Bing Crosby's recordings of theBallad, and affiliation with black racial struggle through Paul Robeson's iconicBalladperformances.
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Dunkel, Mario. "“It Should Always Be a Give-and-Take”." European Journal of Musicology 16, no. 1 (December 31, 2017): 191–207. http://dx.doi.org/10.5450/ejm.2017.16.5787.
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The 1960s and 1970s are regarded by some historians as being particularly creative decades for jazz in Britain, when British jazz developed its own sound that was distinct from that of American jazz. While not denying that this was a creatively fruitful period in British jazz, in this paper I argue that a ‘British sound' in jazz is difficult, perhaps impossible, to define, even though some authors have referred to a sense of ‘Britishness', particularly in the work of certain musicians discussed by Ian Carr in his book Music Outside: Contemporary Jazz in Britain. Some British jazz, performed largely by white (and mostly male) musicians at this time, was influenced during the 1960s by the contribution of immigrant black musicians from South Africa and the Caribbean; at the same time, musicians such as Michael Garrick and John Surman were drawing to some extent on British folk music for inspiration. Referring to examples from the period, I suggest that although much British jazz from 1960 to 1980 was innovative and became less ‘American', development of its styles was affected by many musical, cultural and political factors. To what extent this music sounds ‘British' is debatable, but its influence has led to the pluralism of jazz styles in Britain that continues today.
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BROWN, LEE B. "Marsalis and Baraka: an essay in comparative cultural discourse." Popular Music 23, no. 3 (October 2004): 241–55. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0261143004000169.
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In 1963, Amiri Imamu Baraka, a.k.a. LeRoi Jones, launched an Afrocentrist attack on the American white establishment that has been sustained, with variations, for forty years. He made a powerful case that the white commodity industry had systematically exploited and then debased authentic African-American music. In the meantime, a new kind of Afrocentrism has appeared, associated with the meteoric rise of Wynton Marsalis at New York's Lincoln Center. With the help of rhetoric similar to Baraka's, Marsalis has showcased and expanded the kind of black jazz he regards as authentic. However, the two men represent overlapping but also divergent points of view on the cultural politics of African-American music. This study compares these perspectives in detail, suggesting that behind the revealing differences between the two, both suffer from a formally similar outmoded essentialism.
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Williams, Sonja D. "Wade in the Water." Resonance 1, no. 1 (2020): 15–24. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/res.2020.1.1.15.
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In January 1994, Wade in the Water: African American Sacred Music, a first-time radio series collaboration between the Smithsonian Institution and National Public Radio, began airing on hundreds of NPR affiliate stations throughout America. An ambitious and influential series of 26 hour-long documentary programs, Wade explored 200 years of black sacred music, including spirituals, ring shouts, lined hymns, jazz, and gospel. The series also featured the insights of music creators, performers, listeners, and historians who could place African American sacred music traditions within the social, political, and cultural context of their times. Wade eventually won a Peabody Award and other awards of distinction. Conceived and hosted by Smithsonian Institution curator, artist, and MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Fellow Bernice Johnson Reagon, Wade required an intensive, five-year-long fundraising, research, and production journey of commitment. As the series’ associate producer, this article’s author worked with a host of dedicated radio producers, researchers, engineers, scholars, and music collectors who helped to make Wade a reality. Therefore, this article describes the series’ production journey from the vantage point of an insider, and it serves as a personal reflection on the making of a series that would set the standard for future long-form, NPR-based music documentary productions.
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Heile, Björn. "Uri Caine’s Mahler: Jazz, Tradition, and Identity." Twentieth-Century Music 4, no. 2 (September 2007): 229–55. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1478572208000522.
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AbstractAlthough Uri Caine first made his mark as a relatively straight-ahead jazz pianist – ‘roots’ to which he returns regularly – he has, arguably, become most famous with his often controversial versions of works from the ‘classical music’ canon. These recompositions, which often involve a host of other styles from Latin to dub, are usually regarded as examples of postmodern eclecticism. While this view is certainly valid, it needs to be complemented by more detailed analysis of both Caine’s artistic methods and their aesthetic and ideological implications. Among his work on classical composers, Caine’s engagement with Gustav Mahler is the most sustained. The result of this engagement is not an exercise in ‘crossover’ or ‘jazzed-up’ Mahler, but a radical reinterpretation of Mahler’s music that situates it as a Jewish voice within the cultural cross-currents of fin-de-siècle Central Europe. Through this reference to Mahler, Caine constructs a Jewish tradition within jazz that complements but does not compete with jazz’s overwhelmingly African-American heritage. What emerges is a pluralistic subjectivity in which different cultural identities and traditions are negotiated in an equal and open dialogue.
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Cardany, Audrey Berger. "Muddy Waters: His Life and Music." General Music Today 31, no. 3 (February 15, 2018): 73–79. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1048371318756626.
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The author reviews Mahin and Turk’s children’s book Muddy: The Story of Blues Legend Muddy Waters. This biography of McKinley Morganfield describes his challenges and successes in music and life. Illustrations reflect African American culture using color palettes to highlight the places Waters lived and the music connected to those places including the Mississippi Delta blues and the electric Chicago blues style. The musical writing of Mahin expresses Muddy’s story in a lyrical fashion, borrowing elements from the jazz idiom. The author includes a selected discography and suggestions for additional instruction in the music of Muddy’s life using the artistic processes of listening, responding, and performing appropriate for upper elementary and middle school students in general music.
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Horn, David. "Eileen Southern." Popular Music 22, no. 3 (October 2003): 378–79. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s026114300300326x.
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Eileen Southern, who died in Florida in October 2002, was widely recognised as a pre-eminent figure in the study of African-American music. Her seminal history, The Music of Black Americans, first published in New York in 1971, was the first academic study to give serious scholarly attention to the totality of African-American music – from the congregational singing of slaves to all-black Broadway musicals, from blues and jazz to experimental composers – and was hugely influential. Resolutely unpolemical and meticulously balanced, it did more to establish the validity of the subject in the academy than any other single book. It had its genesis in a course which Dr Southern (who had a Ph.D. in Renaissance music from Harvard) developed in the late 1960s at Brooklyn College. She herself later described how she was put under pressure to devise the course by a college administration somewhat desperate to find ways to meet the demands of black students for the inclusion of Black Studies in the curriculum. The idea met with disbelief among colleagues in the music department, and the particular scorn of an unnamed Englishman, holder of a Ph.D. in musicology from Oxford, who opined that a course in black music presented ‘nothing of substance to deal with’. Declaring ‘I'll show them’, a furious Eileen Southern was determined to design a course that demonstrated the range of black music. The result turned out to be so rich that a more sympathetic colleague suggested one day to Dr Southern that she turn the course into a book – and The Music of Black Americans was the result (Standifer, n.d.).
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Tracy, Steven C. "Sonny in the Dark: Jazzing the Blues Spirit and the Gospel Truth in James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues”." James Baldwin Review 1, no. 1 (September 29, 2015): 164–78. http://dx.doi.org/10.7227/jbr.1.10.
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The webs of musical connection are essential to the harmony and cohesion of James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues.” As a result, we must explore the spectrum of musical references Baldwin makes to unveil their delicate conjunctions. It is vital to probe the traditions of African-American music—Spirituals, Blues, Jazz, and Pop—to get a more comprehensive sense of how Baldwin makes use of music from the sacred and secular continuum in the African-American community. Looking more closely at the variety of African-American musical genres to which Baldwin refers in the story, we can discern even more the nuances of unity that Baldwin creates in his story through musical allusions, and shed greater light on Baldwin’s exploration of the complexities of African-American life and music, all of which have as their core elements of human isolation, loneliness, and despair ameliorated by artistic expression, hope, and the search for familial ties. Through musical intertextuality, Baldwin demonstrates not only how closely related seemingly disparate (in the Western tradition) musical genres are, but also shows that the elements of the community that these genres flow from and represent are much more in synchronization than they sometimes seem or are allowed to be. To realize kinship across familial (Creole), socio-economic (the brother), and most importantly for this paper appreciation and meanings of musical genres advances to Sonny the communal cup of trembling that is both a mode and an instance of envisioning and treating music in its unifying terms, seeing how they coalesce through a holistic vision.
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WRIGGLE, JOHN. "Jazzing the Classics: Race, Modernism, and the Career of Arranger Chappie Willet." Journal of the Society for American Music 6, no. 2 (May 2012): 175–209. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s175219631200003x.
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AbstractThe American popular music tradition of “jazzing the classics” has long stood at the intersection of discourses on high and low culture, commercialism, and jazz authenticity. Dance band arrangers during the 1930s and 1940s frequently evoked, parodied, or straddled these cultural debates through their manipulations of European classical repertoire. This article examines Swing Era arranging strategies in the context of prevailing racial essentialisms, conceptions of modernism, and notions of technical virtuosity. The legacy of African American freelance arranger Chappie Willet, and his arrangement of Beethoven's Piano Sonata, op. 13 (“Pathétique”) for the black dance band of Jimmie Lunceford, suggests that an account of the biography and artistic voice of the arranger is critical to understanding the motivations behind these hybrid musical works.
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Lowney, John. "Jazz Griots: Music as History in the 1960s African American Poem, by Jean-Philippe Marcoux." Twentieth-Century Literature 61, no. 3 (January 1, 2015): 417–23. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/0041462x-3154104.
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MUNTON, ALAN. "Misreading Morrison, Mishearing Jazz: A Response to Toni Morrison's Jazz Critics." Journal of American Studies 31, no. 2 (August 1997): 235–51. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0021875897005653.
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Toni Morrison's fiction, we have been repeatedly told, embodies features taken from jazz. Her books have a “jazzy prose style,” express a “jazz aesthetic,” or are “literary jazz.” Critics propose that jazz riffs can be found in her writing, and that she improvises in prose in a manner comparable to an improvising jazz musician. None of this seems to me to be true. To establish a relationship between music and prose fiction would be difficult under any circumstances. It is all the more difficult when the critics concerned show themselves to be unaware of the basic formal structures of jazz. The riff is foregrounded because it is the only feature of jazz that can be compared to prose (because both may include repetitions). It is a more serious objection that Rice, Small-McCarthy, Berrett, and others, including James A. Snead and Henry Louis Gates Jr., consistently ignore structure, harmony, and melody in favour of rhythm. The reason for this is that jazz rhythm can be traced back to its African origins, whereas structure, harmony, and melody require an engagement with European sources. Clearly, an ideology of authenticity is at work here. Yet a parallel argument is willing to relate Morrison's fiction to its European origins. For, if her novel Jazz is, as Rinaldo Walcott indicates, a rewriting of Scott Fitzgerald's version of the “Jazz Age,” then that rewriting or radical revision must occur by reference to a form – the novel – that originated in Europe and is (in the cited instance) a product of white America.
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Metzer, David. "Reclaiming Walt: Marc Blitzstein's Whitman Settings." Journal of the American Musicological Society 48, no. 2 (1995): 240–71. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/3128815.
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Between 1925 and 1928, Marc Blitzstein composed nine songs to texts by Walt Whitman. These settings highlight homoerotic and corporeal thematics, which dominant views of the poet had either obscured or denied. Challenging such interpretations, Blitzstein advanced a reclaiming of Whitman by homosexual readers. Subtitled "songs for a coon shouter," four of these settings introduce African American elements, either through "coon song" gestures or through incorporation of jazz idioms. These appropriations were intended to enhance Whitman's eroticism. They also create tensions between the "primitive" and the "civilized," high and low art, and white and black bodies.
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Polak, Rainer. "The lower limit for meter in dance drumming from West Africa." Empirical Musicology Review 12, no. 3-4 (June 25, 2018): 205. http://dx.doi.org/10.18061/emr.v12i3-4.4951.
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Human rhythm perception and sensorimotor synchronization are both constrained by temporal thresholds on several levels. The lower limit for durations that allow for entrainment at the level of metric beat subdivision has been estimated at about 100–120 ms (London, 2002; Repp, 2003). Tempos and subdivision durations reported for American jazz and East African xylophone music performance, however, suggest that the perception of shorter subdivisions within a range of 80–100 ms may well be possible. This paper musicologically analyzes and empirically measures the fastest metric subdivisions in two sets of live recordings of vernacular dance music from West Africa. In two recordings of Ewe drumming from Ghana, subdivision durations display mean values within a range of 90–100 ms for extended periods of time. Four recordings of jembe drumming from Mali feature subdivision IOIs of about 80–90 ms during their final and fastest sections. A lower limit for metric subdivision durations is hypothesized to perceptually constrain West African drumming within a threshold range of about 80–100 ms.
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McMillan, Ros. "‘To say something that was me’: developing a personal voice through improvisation." British Journal of Music Education 16, no. 3 (November 1999): 263–73. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0265051799000352.
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The study and practice of improvisation in music departments of Australian colleges and universities tends to be dominated by jazz and other African-American styles. However, the School of Music of the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne has developed a course of study with a different focus. While rooted in the fundamentals of jazz performance, the philosophy of the course is that students at the end of the twentieth century should endeavour to develop their own musical ‘voice’. An important means of assisting this development is the encouragement for students to compose their own music as the basis for improvisation. In many cases personal concerns and events form the basis for these original pieces and allow performers to develop their own compositional concepts. This is also a significant means of allowing the music to reflect the era and culture of the performers. This article outlines an investigation of ten students conducted over the three years of their degree studies. The investigation aimed to ascertain the conditions under which a personal voice might be acquired and the extent to which composition was employed in the participants' major performances.
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Barg, Lisa. "Queer Encounters in the Music of Billy Strayhorn." Journal of the American Musicological Society 66, no. 3 (2013): 771–824. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/jams.2013.66.3.771.
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AbstractThis article addresses issues of queer identity, aesthetics, and history in jazz through a focus on two midcentury works composed and/or arranged by Billy Strayhorn: a set of four pieces written in 1953 for an Off-Broadway production of Federico García-Lorca's The Love of Don Perlimplín for Belisa in Their Garden (Amor de Don Perlimplín con Belisa en su jardín); and several movements from the Strayhorn-Ellington adaptation of Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite (1960). My study considers how the two works engage artistic figures, themes, topics, and aesthetic practices that have strong queer historical affiliations. These include failed or impossible love, masking, stylized exotica, and other liminal spheres of identificatory ambiguity and reversal. Taken together, these works enable a positioning of Strayhorn within modernist queer cultural history and, more specifically, within the history of African American gay cultural production. At the same time, through showing how queerness inhabits jazz's past, my analyses of Strayhorn's queer musical encounters provide a critical vantage point from which to examine historical and cultural understandings of jazz at midcentury and, more broadly, the complex relationships between social identities (race, sexuality, gender) and composition, arrangement, and collaboration in twentieth-century music.
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Washburne, Christopher. "The Clave of Jazz: A Caribbean Contribution to the Rhythmic Foundation of an African-American Music." Black Music Research Journal 17, no. 1 (1997): 59. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/779360.
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FRY, ANDY. "‘Du jazz hot à La Créole’: Josephine Baker sings Offenbach." Cambridge Opera Journal 16, no. 1 (March 2004): 43–75. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s095458670400179x.
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When African-American entertainer Josephine Baker first arrived in Paris in 1925, her dancing to the ‘jazz hot’ of La Revue nègre was, famously, perceived as ‘primitive’. But her 1934 performances in Offenbach’s La Créole completed the construction – and tested the limits – of a complex redefinition of Baker as French. Substantially revised, the operetta in effect staged her own assimilation, a new black character serving as a foil for the ‘creole’ Josephine and marking her as ‘in-between’. If most observers saw Baker’s transformation as an affirmation of France’s civilising mission, the few dissenters paradoxically risked insisting on her difference in terms of an essentialised blackness. Recognising both personas as ‘performative’ relocates Baker’s agency. It helps move beyond fixed racial categories to dynamic cultural processes: ‘creolisation’.
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Yakhno, О. І. "Paradigms of rock music and jazz: comparative discourse." Problems of Interaction Between Arts, Pedagogy and the Theory and Practice of Education 53, no. 53 (November 20, 2019): 161–76. http://dx.doi.org/10.34064/khnum1-53.10.
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Objectives and methodology. The article is devoted to the revealing of the relation and differences between rock music and jazz, as the phenomena of the “third” layer. It is noted, that, in methodological terms, such a comparative approach is advisable to implement with the use of a paradigm apparatus that fixes a certain commonality in the development of each of the studied phenomena at different stages of evolution. The application of this concept to the phenomena of art is a characteristic feature of modern musicology. In the broadest sense, the paradigm is the possibility of “thinking by analogy” (according to Aristotle), and in music it relates both to the field of theory (views on music as a form of art) and practice (musical and artistic phenomena as the products of composer and performing art).The article proposes a classification of rock music paradigms, which are based on the available data on the aesthetics and communication of jazz and notes that rock music on the path of its evolution has passed a number of stages, which in general can be designated as paradigms. The article suggests a comparative description of the movement of aesthetic and communicative paradigms of jazz and rock music. It is noted that in jazzology this issue has long been relevant, which is not the case for the study of rock music. Despite all the differences in the time of emergence and the nature of evolution, vocabulary and semantics, social functions, jazz and rock have many “common points”. The results of the research. Such features, of jazz and rock music, as improvisational nature, a variety of intonational sources that combine multinational and diverse trends are revealed and systematized as common points. Among the special features are distinguished such as the reliance of jazz mainly on the instrumental and rock music on a mixed vocal and instrumental basis; first is referring to “elitist”, second is referring to “mass”. Various syntheses are also common in jazz and rock music, as well as the correlation of composition and improvisation, performing and authorial principles. It is not so much about mutual influences and syntheses, but about the directions of evolution, the general nature of which is defined as the movement from “realistic” to “phenomenological” (A. Soloviev on the jazz paradigms). At its onset, rock music, like jazz, has been “embedded” in the system of the social and political movement, where its autonomous aesthetic function was not yet identified (youth movements of the 1960s, within which the corresponding “protest music” arose). In the process of mastering vocabulary specific to rock music as a phenomenon of the “third” layer, a new paradigm arose, characterized first as conventionally realistic, and then as conventionally autonomous, where rock music reaches the level of professional art in which laws and rules are established by its representatives themselves (this period begins from the Beatles and will continue further by their followers – “Rolling Stones”, “Led Zeppelin”, “Deep Purple” and other groups). It is noted that “people of rock” as well as “people of jazz” are a special social and communicative community, in which the idea of free communication is the main and determining one, where social, interpersonal, and actually musical factors intertwine. The unifying communicative factor in jazz and rock music is the art of improvisation, in which, in symbiosis, the processes of creating and performing music coexist spontaneously, but are subject to certain paradigm settings. It is emphasized that in the social context, jazz and rock differ in ethnic and age factors, which, however, is eventually overcome in modern global society through consolidation (convergence of African-American and European sources of jazz, transition of rock groups to a more general theme that differs from the original youth focus). It is also noted that rock music, unlike jazz, is too deeply connected with social factors and is always based on topical themes, generalized with varying degrees of artistry. Therefore, its degree of autonomy is much lower than that of elite jazz, which by the last decade of the 20th century had turned into the officially recognized salon art, or into a “conglomerate” consisting of pop elements of various kinds close to the aesthetics of the show industry. It is proved that the differences between jazz and rock music are most clearly manifested at the level of radical-and-phenomenal paradigm, which means plunging into the realm of banal “nothing”, where acts (but actually – does not act) the principle of “no wave” (A. Soloviev about jazz) . While jazz in the post-bop period developed towards elite art under the Free rubric, the extreme expression of which was spontaneous collective “impersonal” (lack of leadership, lack of frontman), the style of rock music developed in a different direction, the vector of which can be considered the opposite of jazz. Firstly, in the field of stylistics and language as its primary carrier, rock music meant a return to improvisational syncretism – a dramatic combination of poetry and music. Secondly, rock music is directly immersed, unlike elite jazz with its style of full linguistic freedom and collage, in the realm of relevant musical and poetic vocabulary, coming not from the rhetorical type of creativity (translating “artificial” into “new artificial”), but from the realities of the set of generally accessible linguistic means, which exists at a given historical moment (and in a certain “geography”). In the conclusions of the article, it is noted that rock music, even in its experimental radical and phenomenological manifestations, associated mainly with the sound realm (electronics, dynamics), remains, as a whole, the phenomenon of pop culture. This does not mean the absorption of rock art by the realm of mass consumerism. The best rock music pieces, which have already become classic, combine in reasonable proportions the “elite” (innovative) and “mass” (traditional), give a special rational embodiment of the idea of combining improvisation and composition – the “cornerstone” in the musical art of the entire “third” layer. The aesthetics and communication of rock music in its latest paradigms are differentiated according to the criteria of various stylistic inclinations – genre, national, regional, personal. Therefore, the study of modern rock music is the task of a number of separate studies devoted to specific issues of the problem, in particular, its main difference from jazz, namely, in the vocal and instrumental nature.
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Kärjä, Antti-Ville. "Music at the Black Baltic Sea." Open Cultural Studies 3, no. 1 (January 1, 2019): 373–85. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/culture-2019-0032.
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Abstract Music is intimately implicated in racialising discourses. This is particularly pronounced in the case of so-called black music, i.e. the types of music that are commonly associated with African-American identity, most notably jazz and various forms of popular music. Genres of popular music are furthermore constructed continuously on the basis of a notion of their “black roots.” The idea of the “black roots” of jazz and popular music is an essential ingredient of Paul Gilroy’s (1993) analysis of a specific authenticity of blackness. To stress the history and consequences of the pre-twentieth century slave trade and institutionalised racism, Gilroy has coined the concept “Black Atlantic” that builds on the idea of a distinct double consciousness inherent in blackness as simultaneously a fundamental constituent and the ultimate other of the West. In the article, I aim at rethinking the notion of the Black Atlantic in relation to North-Eastern Europe. By way of marine analogy I ask, and building on the notions of the Black Pacific and the Black Mediterranean, how to formulate an analytical design “the Black Baltic Sea.” In addition to addressing the impact of global racialising tendencies in music, this entails considering the cultural dynamics at issue in relation to the dynamics of postsocialism in the Baltic Sea Region (BSR) and Northern European indigeneity. On the basis of such a consideration, I argue that the styles of “black music” have been appropriated and adopted throughout the BSR, albeit in clearly different national manifestations which for their part imply variegated intersections between postcolonial and postsocialist processes. These intersections become manifest in the discourses over “new Europeanness” in music and the construction of national musical traditions, particularly when juxtaposed with the prevailing Islamophobia as regards treatments of Muslim music in mainstream media.
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MUELLER, DARREN. "The Ambassadorial LPs of Dizzy Gillespie:World StatesmanandDizzy in Greece." Journal of the Society for American Music 10, no. 3 (August 2016): 239–69. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1752196316000201.
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AbstractIn 1956, trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie became the first jazz musician to participate in the State Department's Cultural Presentations program, a highly public aspect of U.S. Government's Cold War propaganda efforts abroad. Seeking to capitalize on this historic moment, Gillespie's record company issued two LPs featuring his ambassadorial ensemble: World Statesman (1956) and Dizzy in Greece (1957). To date, scholarship about the tours highlights how Gillespie skillfully navigated the shifting political landscape both on and off the bandstand. The role that commercial record making played in the renegotiation of African Americans’ social position during this era, however, remains undertheorized. This article reveals how, despite the albums’ claims of representation from abroad, the LPs contain only a small portion of Gillespie's tour repertoire. I argue that these LPs were never meant to document the tours with veracity; rather, they were products of a political and technological moment when Gillespie's record label could leverage musical diplomacy to circulate an elevated vision for jazz within the country's cultural hierarchy.
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Wald, Gayle. "James Weldon Johnson's Modern Soundscapes / Jazz Griots: Music as History in the 1960s African American Poem / Black Resonance: Iconic Women Singers and African American Literature." American Literature 87, no. 4 (December 2015): 841–43. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/00029831-3329638.
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Macías, Anthony. "California’s Composer Laureate." Boom 3, no. 2 (2013): 34–51. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/boom.2013.3.2.34.
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This essay uses the 1960s, Gerald Wilson’s most prolific period, as a window into his life and work as a big band jazz trumpeter, soloist, arranger, conductor, and composer. This selective snapshot of Wilson’s career inserts him more fully into jazz—and California—history, while analyzing the influence of Latin music and Mexican culture on his creations. Tracing the black-brown connections in his Alta California art demonstrates an often-overlooked aspect of Wilson’s musical legacy: the fact that he wrote, arranged, recorded, and performed Latin-tinged tunes, especially several brassy homages to Mexican bullfighters, as well as Latin jazz originals. Wilson’s singular soul jazz reveals the drive and dedication of a disciplined artist—both student and teacher—who continually honed his craft and expanded his talents as part of his educational and musical philosophy. Wilson’s California story is that of an African American migrant who moves out west, where he meets a Chicana Angelena and starts a family—in the tradition of Cali-mestizaje—then stays for the higher quality of life, for the freedom to raise his children and live as an artist, further developing and fully expressing his style. However, because he never moved to New York, Wilson remains under-researched and underappreciated by academic jazz experts. Using cultural history and cultural studies research methods, this essay makes the case that Gerald Wilson should be more widely recognized and honored for his genius, greatness, and outstanding achievements in the field of modern jazz, from San Francisco to Monterey, Hollywood, and Hermosa Beach.
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WEISETHAUNET, HANS. "Is there such a thing as the ‘blue note’?" Popular Music 20, no. 1 (January 2001): 99–116. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0261143001001337.
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Among the most frequently repeated formulae in the description of the traditions most often called Afro-American music, in particular the styles of jazz, blues, soul and rock, is the concept of the `blue note’. It may also seem that this is a most widely accepted idea. The ‘blue note’ is usually thought of as a kind of basic element in those styles, as constituting the `ethnic’ or ‘African’ aspect of those musics as opposed to the ‘Western’ contributions of harmony.My main attempt here is to step into the somewhat muddy waters of musicological and sociological/anthropoligical/ cultural studies discourses of ‘the blue’ and ask what the ‘blue idea’ really is about. In rethinking the concept of the ‘blue note’, I find it necessary to differentiate between two concerns that often seem to be somewhat unconsciously or muddily mixed together:(1) the idea of the ‘blue note’ as referring to pitch, thinking of the note as an ‘item’, commonly thought of as the slight altering of the minor third and the flattened seventh; and(2) the general concept of `blue feeling’ linked to the idea of playing ‘blue notes’: in short, the performance of music with a ‘blue feel’.