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Journal articles on the topic 'African American musicians'
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1
Burke, Patrick. "Tear down the walls: Jefferson Airplane, race, and revolutionary rhetoric in 1960s rock." Popular Music 29, no. 1 (January 2010): 61–79. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0261143009990389.
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AbstractWhile the notion of the ‘rock revolution’ of the 1960s has by now become commonplace, scholars have rarely addressed the racial implications of this purported revolution. This article examines a notorious 1968 blackface performance by Grace Slick, lead singer of Jefferson Airplane, to shed light on a significant tendency in 1960s rock: white musicians casting themselves as political revolutionaries by enacting an idealised vision of African American identity. Rock, a form dominated by white musicians and audiences but pervasively influenced by black music and style, conveyed deeply felt but inconsistent notions of black identity in which African Americans were simultaneously subjected to insensitive stereotypes and upheld as examples of moral authority and revolutionary authenticity. Jefferson Airplane's references to black culture and politics were multifaceted and involved both condescending or naïve radical posturing and sincere respect for African American music. The Airplane appear to have been engaged in a complex if imperfect attempt to create a contemporary musical form that reflected African American influences without asserting dominance over those influences. Their example suggests that closer attention to racial issues allows us to address the revolutionary ambitions of 1960s rock without romanticising or trivialising them.
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Gazit, Ofer, and Nili Belkind. "Affective Authenticity." Journal of Popular Music Studies 36, no. 1 (March 1, 2024): 51–78. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/jpms.2024.36.1.51.
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This article develops the concept of “affective authenticity” to explore the experiences and reception of US-based African migrant musicians in the 1960s and 1970s. Based on interviews, archival sources and musical analysis, we trace the migration stories of South African singer Letta Mbulu and the ways in which she negotiated conflicting demands for “authenticity” in her musical performances on the American stage. Affective authenticity represents a heterogenous, explorative sound, reflecting pan-African politics and aesthetics that created the very conditions for African and African American musical collaborations. This aesthetic was countered with expectations for “scientific authenticity:” an ethno-linguistically circumscribed performance that catered to colonial ears and conceptualized African musics as insular, ancient and unchanging – an aesthetic held and policed primarily by (white) music critics. Through analysis of the Yoruba hymn Ise Oluwa (1927) and its “translations” in Mbulu’s performance on the soundtrack for the television show Roots (1977), we show the careful balance of voices, texts, instruments, and rhythms African migrant musicians perform in order to adhere to conflicting demands for authenticity, and the rebuke they experience when they transgress them. We also place conceptualizations of affective and scientific authenticity applied to popular music in broader discourses occurring during the height of the civil rights movement in the United States, the decolonization of Africa, and the entrenchment of the apartheid regime in South Africa.
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Williams, Patrice Jane. "African American Sheet Music." Charleston Advisor 24, no. 3 (January 1, 2023): 5–9. http://dx.doi.org/10.5260/chara.24.3.5.
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African American Sheet Music is a database created by the Center for Digital Scholarship located in John Hay Library at Brown University. It is a culturally rich database filled with sheet music, illustrations, lyrics, and music publishing history centering around the lives of African American composers, musicians, singers, dancers, and stage actors. Various descriptions have the holdings set between different collection dates; however, in the search filters researchers can search items between 1800 and 1926, with some years missing in between. African American Sheet Music contains a wealth of information about African American theater during eras such as the Antebellum South, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and Post-Reconstruction. In addition, there are important illustrations for blackface minstrelsy. Approximately 1,455 items are digitized and readily available for research usage.
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Sutton, Matthew. "The Burden of Racial Innocence: British-Invasion Rock Memoirs and the U.S. South." European Journal of Life Writing 11 (April 21, 2022): 21–40. http://dx.doi.org/10.21827/ejlw.11.38627.
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Mid-sixties British rock musicians have rationalized their firsthand experience and profitable interactions with American racial segregation by adopting a stance of racial innocence, or a belief that youth and virtue make one immune to charges of complicity with organized structures of racism. This almost childlike subject-positioning disingenuously separates musicians’ expertise on African American blues from a more mature acknowledgement of the oppressive racial conditions that shaped the music, implicitly excluding them from culpability in the continued imbalance of power between black and white musicians.
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Dorsch, Hauke. "“Indépendance Cha Cha”: African Pop Music since the Independence Era." Africa Spectrum 45, no. 3 (December 2010): 131–46. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/000203971004500307.
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Investigating why Latin American music came to be the sound-track of the independence era, this contribution offers an overview of musical developments and cultural politics in certain sub-Saharan African countries since the 1960s. Focusing first on how the governments of newly independent African states used musical styles and musicians to support their nation-building projects, the article then looks at musicians’ more recent perspectives on the independence era.
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Shirts, Peter. "The African American Collections Relating to Music at Emory University’s Rose Library." Notes 80, no. 4 (June 2024): 605–31. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/not.2024.a928765.
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ABSTRACT: United States music history has for years privileged whiteness and largely ignored or disregarded the contributions of African Americans. The Stuart R. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, houses over thirty collections (and growing) related to African American musicians that could be used to both uncover and recover the critical role African Americans played in the music culture of the United States. This article presents a brief overview of these holdings to date, including the papers of composers (such as William Dawson, George Walker, and Undine Smith Moore), entertainers (such as Victoria Spivey, Bricktop, and Geoffrey Holder), and researchers (such as Rae Linda Brown, Geneva Southall, and Delilah Jackson). Types of materials held include manuscript letters and scores, photographs, and published music (both print and recorded) by and about African Americans.
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Moshugi, Kgomotso. "Reception and Makings of African Vocal Ensemble Sounds beyond Binaries." Religion and the Arts 27, no. 4 (October 6, 2023): 483–97. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/15685292-02704002.
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Abstract Since 1877, the Seventh-day Adventist (SDA) Church from North America has established its presence in Southern Africa. As with missionization in other denominations, this introduced a variety of primarily Euro-American musical influences into African religious practices. Over the years, Adventist musicians have constantly negotiated a complex relationship to their African contexts, often yielding musical outcomes that cannot be reduced simply to an indigenous vs exogenous or ‘African’ vs ‘Western’ binary evaluation. This intersectional phenomenon is not thoroughly explored in the current scholarship on SDA music. This paper provides background and details on collaborations and exchanges in various repertoires since the 1980s. I argue that these embody intersectional ideas that emerge beyond geographical, cultural, and chronological boundaries. The study is developed from analyzing unstructured interviews and audio recordings to illustrate perpetually blurred boundaries in musical practices that have conventionally distinguished “African” vocal sound.
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Boye, Gary R. "Lagniappe: Country Music in North Carolina: Pickin' in the Old North State." North Carolina Libraries 61, no. 3 (January 20, 2009): 103. http://dx.doi.org/10.3776/ncl.v61i3.167.
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While all Southern states share historical connections in culture and geography, North Carolina is in many ways unique. From the Outer Banks to the industrial Piedmont to the High Country of the west, the state has a unique mix of regions and cultures. Music figures prominently in North Carolina, and its musicians reflect the diversity of the geography. The state’s earliest musicians were the Native Americans, especially the Cherokee, whose music has been recorded and studied in some detail. European-American music has flourishedsince colonial days: in Salem, the Moravian church has sponsored the development of sacred choral and instrumental music for over 200 years. In the early twentieth century a distinct African American blues style originated from the textile mill and tobacco towns of the Piedmont region.
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Lingold, Mary Caton. "In search of Mr Baptiste: on early Caribbean music, race, and a colonial composer." Early Music 49, no. 1 (February 1, 2021): 49–66. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/em/caab002.
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Abstract Mr Baptiste was a musician living in late 17th-century Jamaica who composed music portraying African traditions as they were performed by enslaved musicians on the island. This article argues that Baptiste was probably a free person of colour and perhaps one of the earliest-known Black American composers to have published Western notation. His music was printed in Hans Sloane’s 1707 travelogue and natural history of Jamaica. The article also addresses broader issues concerning the underrepresentation of marginalized performers in colonial music histories, with special attention to musical life in the early modern Caribbean.
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Ohman, Marian M. "African and African-American Musicians Seeking Progress at A Century of Progress." Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society (1998-) 102, no. 3-4 (October 1, 2009): 368–401. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/25701241.
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Narvaez, Peter. "The Influences of Hispanic Music Cultures on African-American Blues Musicians." Black Music Research Journal 22 (2002): 175. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/1519948.
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Narvaez, Peter. "The Influences of Hispanic Music Cultures on African-American Blues Musicians." Black Music Research Journal 14, no. 2 (1994): 203. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/779484.
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Sacks, Howard L. "From the Barn to the Bowery and Back Again: Musical Routes in Rural Ohio, 1800-1929 [Phillips Barry Lecture, October 2000]." Journal of American Folklore 116, no. 461 (July 1, 2003): 314–38. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/4137794.
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Abstract Drawing on a community study of musicians from Mount Vernon, Ohio, I examine the interpenetration of regional and national musical cultures by examining the repertoires and life histories of Dan Emmett, founder of the first professional blackface minstrel troupe in 1843; the Snowden Family Band, African American stringband musicians who performed in the 1850s through 1920; and John Baltzell, a champion fiddler of the 1920s. Instead of viewing national trends as destructive of regionality, I propose that artists are (and were) selective, active participants in the process of forming repertoire and style. Community-based musicians respond to a variety of national musical influences while maintaining a continuing attachment to locality.
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Cole, Ross. "Mastery and Masquerade in the Transatlantic Blues Revival." Journal of the Royal Musical Association 143, no. 1 (2018): 173–210. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02690403.2018.1434352.
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ABSTRACTFocusing on two influential broadcasts staged for British television in 1963–4, this article traces transatlantic attitudes towards blues music in order to explore the constitutive relationship between race, spectatorship and performativity. During these programmes, I claim, a form of mythic history is translated into racial nature. Ultimately, I argue that blues revivalism coerced African American musicians into assuming the mask of blackface minstrelsy – an active personification of difference driven by a lucrative fantasy on the terms of white demand. I ask why this imagery found such zealous adherents among post-war youth, situating their gaze within a longer tradition of colonialist display. Subaltern musicians caught within this regime were nonetheless able to ‘speak’ via sung performances that signified on the coordinates of their own marginalization. The challenge for musicology is thus to heed the relational syncretism arising from intercultural contact while acknowledging the lived experience of African American artists unable fully to evade the preordained mask of alterity.
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GOODMAN, DAVID. "“On Fire with Hope”: African American Classical Musicians, Major Bowes’ Amateur Hour, and the Hope for a Colour-Blind Radio." Journal of American Studies 47, no. 2 (November 9, 2012): 475–94. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0021875812001387.
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Amateur talent shows were among the most popular programs on mid-1930s network radio, but for African Americans they had an importance that went beyond entertainment. These shows attracted considerable attention in the black press and from black audiences because they held out the promise of escape from the constraints of Jim Crow into a colour-blind national public sphere. This article explores the participation of African American performers on the most popular of the radio amateur shows, Major Bowes’ Original Amateur Hour. It focusses particularly on two black classical performers on the Amateur Hour – singers Otis Holley and La Julia Rhea – contrasting their success on the radio show with the obstacles they encountered in the segregated world outside the studio. Radio did stimulate hope about the possibility of a race-free sound world, a new sense that such a thing could be possible. That the first generation to test the idea – gifted performers such as Holley and Rhea – often failed to translate radio success into mainstream acceptance, should not lead us to neglect the increase in hope that the early mass media provoked among African Americans.
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Ruby Jindal. "Reconstructing Identities: Black American Poets of Harlem Renaissance." Research Ambition an International Multidisciplinary e-Journal 7, no. III (November 30, 2022): 01–04. http://dx.doi.org/10.53724/ambition/v7n3.02.
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American literature’s 400-year history has been shaped by the rise of black writers who have often written rich and vibrant literary forms to complement American literature and culture. The goal of this paper is to present how African American literature attempted to rebuild their identities, during the Harlem Renaissance, primarily to end the negative stereotypes of black people. This was an era of unparalleled artistic achievement focused on the Harlem section of New York City by black American writers, musicians, and artists. Poets such as Langston Hughes, Claude Mc Kay, and Countee Cullen have been the most influential poets of the Harlem Renaissance period and their poetry has tried to articulate authentically the African American experience. The key purpose is to discuss how these new groups of black writers have taken a step forward to shift the deeply prejudicial image of blacks that has touched every heart.
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Whiting, Cécile. "More Than Meets the Eye: Archibald Motley and Debates on Race in Art." Prospects 26 (October 2001): 449–76. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0361233300001009.
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In 1933, Archibald J. Motley Jr., an African-American artist from Chicago who enjoyed a moderate level of national and international renown, issued his only formal public statement concerning the relationship he perceived between his art and race. His words, resonating with confidence, assert his conviction that painting could capture the truth of race through pigment. Reproduced opposite this declaration,Bluesof 1929 (Figure 1), which depicts well-coiffed men and women dancing in the Petite Cafe in Paris to tunes played by musicians seated in the foreground, would seem to reinforce Motley's point: paint transcribes the gradations of skin pigment incarnated by the various African, West Indian, and perhaps even African-American patrons of this nightspot. The color of skin, transmuted into the color of paint, identifies and catalogs race.
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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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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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Darkwa, Asante, and Irene V. Jackson. "More Than Drumming: Essays on African and Afro-Latin American Music and Musicians." Black Perspective in Music 15, no. 1 (1987): 120. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/1215117.
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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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Monts, Lester P., and Irene V. Jackson. "More than Drumming: Essay on African and Afro-Latin American Music and Musicians." African Arts 19, no. 3 (May 1986): 76. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/3336426.
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Olsen, Dale A. "More Than Drumming: Essays on African and Afro-Latin American Music and Musicians." Hispanic American Historical Review 66, no. 2 (May 1, 1986): 439. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/00182168-66.2.439.
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Winans, Robert B., and Irene V. Jackson. "More than Drumming: Essays on African and Afro-Latin American Music and Musicians." Journal of American Folklore 99, no. 393 (July 1986): 358. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/540835.
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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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Hughes, Richard. "Gates, Jr And Higginbotham, Eds., Harlem Renaissance Lives - From African American National Biography." Teaching History: A Journal of Methods 34, no. 2 (September 1, 2009): 110–11. http://dx.doi.org/10.33043/th.34.2.110-111.
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With hundreds of accessible entries on the lives of African Americans directly or indirectly associated with this period, Harlem Renaissance Lives is an ambitious effort to highlight, and sometimes uncover, the role of African Americans in shaping the United States in the twentieth century. While the entries are brief, the book's strength is its breadth with portraits of not only writers, artists, actors, and musicians but also educators, civil rights and labor activists, entrepreneurs, athletes, clergy, and aviators. Students of history will find familiar figures of the period such as Langston Hughes, Josephine Baker, Duke Ellington, Marcus Garvey, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. However, the real value of the work is in highlighting, however briefly, the lives of hundreds of lesser-known African Americans. Some figures, such as educator Roscoe Bruce, the son of a U.S. Senator, grew up relatively privileged, but many of the biographies involve African-Americans whose unlikely contributions begin with a background that included slavery and sharecropping. Regardless, each entry includes a valuable bibliography and information about relevant primary sources such as an obituary and archival collections.
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Drane, Gregory. "The Role of African-American Musicians in the Integration of the United States Navy." Music Educators Journal 101, no. 3 (March 2015): 63–67. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0027432114565132.
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Lavan, Makeba. "Teaching Afrofuturisms as American Cultural Studies." Radical Teacher 122 (April 28, 2022): 52–63. http://dx.doi.org/10.5195/rt.2022.936.
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Kodwo Eshun asserts that “Afrofuturism studies the appeals that black artists, musicians, critics, and writers have made to the future, in moments where any future was made difficult for them to imagine.” Afrofuturism allows African diasporic writers to imagine new and alternate cultural elements in hopes that these will take root in the collective consciousness and shift the cultural paradigm towards true citizenship and equity. It is this main idea that we explored over two semesters (spring 2020 and Spring 2021) of classes taught online in the wake of brutal state sanctioned murders, subsequent uprisings and a global pandemic. As we learned to maneuver these changes, students facilitated lateral learning across discussion groups and questions, asynchronous group meetings, and collaborations with other classes in a class modeled after the Black Radical Tradition.
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Rapetti, Valentina. "Singing back to the Bard: A conversation on Desdemona with Rokia Traoré." Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance 13, no. 3 (December 1, 2020): 337–44. http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/jafp_00035_7.
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Rokia Traoré is a Malian singer, guitarist and composer, known worldwide for her artistic syncretism and political activism. Her distinctive style blends elements of traditional Malian music with blues, folk and rock to address contemporary geopolitical and humanitarian issues. She is the artistic director of Fondation Passerelle, a non-profit organization she founded in 2006 to support young African singers and musicians by offering them high-quality professional training and work opportunities in the music industry. In this interview, she discusses her experience as songwriter and performer in Desdemona (2012), a cross-cultural theatre adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Othello staged by American director Peter Sellars, with texts by African American Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison, sharing some intimate memories and elaborating freely on the role of performers and the importance of focused listening in live stage productions.
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Wimble, Jeff. "“The Noise of Our Living”: Richard Wright and Chicago Blues." Humanities 13, no. 1 (January 31, 2024): 28. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/h13010028.
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Historicizing the musical genre known as “Chicago blues,” I further complicate Richard Wright’s already complicated attitudes toward “the folk” and modernity. Utilizing close readings of 12 Million Black Voices, I show how Wright’s apparent denigration of the blues as an outmoded, pre-modern artistic form is dependent on his historical situation writing before the advent of a new electrified form of blues that developed in Chicago shortly after the book’s publication. Utilizing biographical details of the life of Muddy Waters, I show how his work as a musician in Mississippi, then in Chicago, and his development of an electrified blues style, parallels and personifies the shift from an African American perspective rooted in an agrarian, pre-modern south to an industrial, modern north documented so effectively by Wright. Furthermore, the Chicago blues musicians’ transmogrification of the rural Delta blues into an electrified, urban expression manifests the vernacular-modernist artistic conception which Wright seems to be envisioning and pointing toward in 12 Million Black Voices.
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Turner, Diane. "Black Music Traditions of Central Avenue." Practicing Anthropology 20, no. 1 (January 1, 1998): 21–24. http://dx.doi.org/10.17730/praa.20.1.b06g13202633r087.
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Because of the early development of an African American community on Central Avenue, the city of Tampa, Florida provides an excellent environment to document Black music traditions in the southeastern region of the United States. By the late nineteenth century, an urban Black working class had formed on Central Avenue. Black musicians were part of a distinct cultural community, including divergent lifestyles, which were organically linked to the rural and urban life experiences of Black people in the United States and the Caribbean.
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Dunning, Eric. "#BBQBecky & #PermitPatty: African-American Humor & Resistive Discourse on Twitter." Studies in Linguistics and Literature 4, no. 2 (May 8, 2020): p33. http://dx.doi.org/10.22158/sll.v4n2p33.
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Humor has always been a social tool by which to navigate the slings and arrows of human existence. This has been exceptionally true for historically marginalized groups, such as African-Americans. Throughout U.S. history, “Black humor” has served to challenge authority, resist domination, lampoon the powerful and assuage injustices. It has served and both balm and weapon for a cultural group that has often found itself on the outside looking in, while being punished for being in that position. However, even within marginalized groups, canonical examples of cultural humor have been largely produced by a small segment of the population (i.e.,comedians, writers, poets, musicians). Social media, Twitter especially, has removed the barriers of production and gatekeeping of humor. Therefore, by examining responses to a cultural moment by “non-elite” African-Americans on Twitter, as the this paper does, helps to elucidate some evident trends, narratives, rhetorical strategies and tropes that may possibly be considered universal hallmarks of “Black Humor” as resistive discourse. Furthermore, these hallmarks can perhaps be understood to be the preeminent forms by which African-Americans create community, resist oppression and challenge hegemonic norms.
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Feng, Mark Hsiang-Yu. "Hakka Blues and Jazz: The Inspiration of Black Music in the Hakka Taiwanese Musical Revitalization Movement in Postdictatorial Taiwan." Asian Music 55, no. 2 (June 2024): 114–49. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/amu.2024.a933043.
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Abstract: This article discusses the influence of African American blues and jazz on the Hakka Taiwanese musical revitalization movement since the late 1990s. Case studies examine the discourse and materialization of two types of musical fusion, namely Hakka blues and Hakka jazz, by Sanguetai (1997–2007) and Sanguetaihousheng (2008– present). Their performances express appreciation for Black music and advance diversity and inclusion in Taiwan; furthermore, they allow the musicians to articulate their resistance against the status quo and elevate the social status of sango . Black music has a decisive position in the development of neotraditional Hakka Taiwanese music .
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May, Lissa Fleming. "Early Musical Development of Selected African American Jazz Musicians in Indianapolis in the 1930s and 1940s." Journal of Historical Research in Music Education 27, no. 1 (October 2005): 21–32. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/153660060502700103.
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Molloy, Molly. "Book Review: Field Recordings of Black Singers and Musicians: An Annotated Discography of Artists from West Africa, the Caribbean and the Eastern and Southern United States, 1901–1943." Reference & User Services Quarterly 58, no. 3 (June 22, 2019): 194. http://dx.doi.org/10.5860/rusq.58.3.7057.
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This last work of author/compiler Craig Martin Gibbs joins his other unique discographies from the same publisher—Black Recording Artists, 1877–1926: An Annotated Discography (2012) and Calypso and Other Music of Trinidad, 1912–1962: An Annotated Discography (2015)—to provide detailed access to the legacy of African American and African music from the earliest years of sound recording. As noted in the front matter, Craig Martin Gibbs died in October 2017.
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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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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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SPRINGER, ROBERT. "Folklore, commercialism and exploitation: copyright in the blues." Popular Music 26, no. 1 (January 2006): 33–45. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0261143007001110.
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Though federal law in the United States provides for the protection of artistic property, including music, African-American blues musicians, since the appearance of their first commercial records in the 1920s, have generally not received their due. Part of the problem came from the difficulty of squaring the discrete notions of folk composition and artistic property in those early days. But the exploitation of black artists was largely attributable to common practices in the record industry whose effects were multiplied in this case by the near total defencelessness of the victims. Imitations and cover versions led to a veritable despoliation of black talent which has only belatedly received legal compensation and public recognition.
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Weaver, Crystal, Mark Varvares, Elaine Ottenlips, Kara Christopher, and Andrew Dwiggins. "CLO19-058: Live Music to Decrease Patient Anxiety During Chemotherapy Treatments." Journal of the National Comprehensive Cancer Network 17, no. 3.5 (March 8, 2019): CLO19–058. http://dx.doi.org/10.6004/jnccn.2018.7132.
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Background: Music therapy began in the United States after World War II when community musicians went to veterans’ hospitals to provide live music to those experiencing post-war trauma. Music therapy programs continue to utilize community musicians who provide live music to patients in treatment centers to supplement formal music therapy sessions by credentialed professionals. Little evidence has been gathered regarding the potential ability of these live music performances to decrease the anxiety levels of oncology patients during chemotherapy treatments. Purpose: To determine if listening to live music performed by community musicians decreases oncology patient anxiety levels during chemotherapy treatments in an outpatient infusion center. Method: This quasi-experimental study involved an experimental group who listened to live music by community musicians and a control group who did not listen to live music during a single chemotherapy treatment for 30 minutes. Pre- and post-test measures of blood pressure, pulse, respiration per minute, and responses to the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (ie, common measures of anxiety) were collected by a registered nurse on all participants. The sample included 60 participants (30 control and 30 experimental). Demographic information for the participants was: (1) 60% were male and 40% were female; (2) 73% were Caucasian and 27% were African American; (3) the mean age was 62 years; and (4) 100% had a cancer diagnosis. Results: Independent sample t-test was conducted to determine if there were differences in the amount of change for dependent variables. Significance was set at P<.05. Results revealed a significantly higher score difference in the experimental group when compared to the control group for pulse, respiration per minute, and systolic blood pressure (Table 1). Conclusion: Listening to live music by community musicians can decrease oncology patient anxiety levels during chemotherapy treatments as evidenced by significant decreases in pulse, respiration per minute, and systolic blood pressure. Additional studies may examine if greater decreases in anxiety levels are achieved by the implementation of formal music therapy sessions by credentialed professionals.
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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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Hedge Olson, Benjamin. "Burzum shirts, paramilitarism and National Socialist Black Metal in the twenty-first century." Metal Music Studies 7, no. 1 (March 1, 2021): 27–42. http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/mms_00030_1.
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Over the last ten years, the radical right has proliferated at an alarming rate in the United States. National Socialist Black Metal (NSBM) has become an important feature of neo-Nazi, White supremacist and militant racist groups as the radical right as a whole has gained traction in American political life. Although rooted in underground music-based subculture, NSBM has become an important crypto-signifier for the radical right in the twenty-first century providing both symbolic value and ideological inspiration. The anti-racist and apolitical elements of the North American metal scene have responded in a variety of different ways, sometimes challenging racist elements directly, at other times providing ambivalent acceptance of the far right within the scene. While fans, musicians, journalists and record labels struggle to come to terms with the meaning of NSBM and how it should be addressed, NSBM-affiliated political and paramilitary groups have formed and started making their violent fantasies a reality. As many elements within the American metal scene continue to perceive NSBM as a purely artistic movement of no concern to the world outside of the metal scene, proponents of NSBM are marching in the streets of Charlottesville, burning African American churches, murdering LGBTQ people and plotting acts of domestic terrorism.
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Johnson, Bruce. "Deportation Blues <br> doi:10.5429/2079-3871(2010)v1i1.5en." IASPM Journal 1, no. 1 (April 8, 2010): 1–13. http://dx.doi.org/10.5429/297.
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The history of popular music in the twentieth century has been regularly intersected by outbreaks of moral panic regarding the debilitating influence of particular genres, for which the association between 'blackness' and degradation has provide especially inflammable fuel. In Australia this has been intensified by virtue of a strain of racism and xenophobia, most recently manifested in the government's refusal of entry to Rapper Snoop Dogg in April 2007 after failing a 'character test'. One case from 1928 resulted in a generic quarantine that affected the development of popular music in Australia for decades. Throughout the 1920s there were vigorous union lobbies against jazz, and especially the importation of bands from the US and England. The complaints drew their authority from the criteria of art and morality and the two obligingly converged when the first African-American jazz band toured with the revue 'The Coloured Idea' in 1928. During its season in Melbourne, collusion between the local yellow press tabloid Truth, the intelligence organization the Commonwealth Investigation Branch, and the local police, led to members of the band being caught in drug and alcohol-fuelled frolics with local women. In a unique act of censorship, the whole band was deported, and union proscriptions introduced on black musicians made it the last African American jazz band allowed into the country for decades. This paper provides an account of this episode, and a discussion of the issues regarding popular music, race and gender on which it pivoted.
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Navei, Nyamawero. "The Lioness of African Music: Cultural Interpretation of Wiyaala’s Stage Costume Art." International Journal of Cultural and Art Studies 7, no. 1 (April 30, 2023): 49–63. http://dx.doi.org/10.32734/ijcas.v7i1.10463.
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In stage performance, costume art is an essential visual signature device with the veracity to unveil the character and cultural identity of the performer. Stage costume art could also be deployed to respond to pertinent societal issues. In spite of its versatile essentiality in performing arts, there seems to be a dearth of scholarly interpretation of stage costume art of Ghanaian musicians, thereby creating a knowledge gap. This qualitative case study makes a hermeneutical interpretation of eight random-purposively sampled stage costumes of Wiyaala (a Ghanaian female musician) to establish their cultural symbolism. The study found Wiyaala not only an iconic Ghanaian artiste but an internationally recognised musician who toured many countries across Africa, Europe, the Americas, and other continents for musical stage performances. It emerged that Wiyaala’s stage costumes were locally self-constructed, and ably reflected the uniquely versatile indigenous African (Ghanaian) dress cultural identity in respect of African (Ghanaian): royal dress fashion, war costumes, initiation costumes, and others. Wiyaala could be said to have prioritised interest in using her locally sourced stage costume art to promote and preserve indigenous African (Ghanaian) dress cultural identity. Since Wiyaala is an iconic musician, she is encouraged to continue deploying locally sourced costume art for her stage performances to promote and preserve African (Ghanaian) dress cultural identity for posterity. This tends to decolonise the stage costume choice of many Ghanaian musicians with its cascading impact on the Ghanaian textile and fashion industry for economic and job gains.
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Cimbala, Paul A. "Black Musicians from Slavery to Freedom: An Exploration of an African-American Folk Elite and Cultural Continuity in the Nineteenth-Century Rural South." Journal of Negro History 80, no. 1 (January 1995): 15–29. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/2717704.
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Burford, Mark. "Sam Cooke as Pop Album Artist—A Reinvention in Three Songs." Journal of the American Musicological Society 65, no. 1 (2012): 113–78. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/jams.2012.65.1.113.
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Abstract Though African American singer, songwriter, and entrepreneur Sam Cooke (1931–1964) is commonly celebrated as a pioneering soul singer, the preponderance of Cooke recordings suggesting to many critics a “white” middle-of-the-road pop sound has troubled this reception. From June 1957 until the end of 1959, Cooke recorded for the independent label Keen Records, where he charted a course for realizing his professional and socioeconomic aspirations, including his determination to harness the prestige attached to the long-playing album and the “album artist.” This article explores relationships between the repertory, performances, and production on three Keen album tracks: “Danny Boy,” “My Foolish Heart,” and “I've Got a Right to Sing the Blues.” These recordings reveal Cooke's seldom-noted proximity to contemporaneous figures and concerns: “Irish tenor” Morton Downey, who built a career on the fluidity between ethnic identity and pop's transparent “whiteness”; Billy Eckstine, who struggled to navigate the racial and sexual politics of the pop balladeer; and the black studio musicians whose campaign for employment equity in 1950s Los Angeles found resonance with Cooke's vision. Taking Cooke's endeavor seriously positions us to assess freshly Cooke's skills as a vocalist, the processes through which “pop” becomes racialized as white, and intractable methodological challenges in black music studies.
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Stoia, Nicholas, Kyle Adams, and Kevin Drakulich. "Rap Lyrics as Evidence." Race and Justice 8, no. 4 (January 31, 2017): 330–65. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/2153368716688739.
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Recent scholarship has shed light on the troubling use of rap lyrics in criminal trials. Prosecutors have interpreted defendants’ rap lyrics as accurate descriptions of past behavior or in some cases as real threats of violence. There are at least two problems with this practice: One concerns the interpretation of art in a legalistic context and the second involves the targeting of rap over other genres and the role of racism therein. The goal of the present work is translational, to demonstrate the relevance of music scholarship on this topic to criminologists and legal experts. We highlight the usage of lyric formulas, stock lyrical topics understood by musicians and their audiences, many of which make sense only in the context of a given genre. The popularity of particular lyric formulas at particular times appears connected to contemporaneous social conditions. In African American music, these formulas have a long history, from blues, through rock and roll, to contemporary rap music. The work illustrates this through textual analyses of lyrics identifying common formulas and connecting them to relevant social factors, in order to demonstrate that fictionalized accounts of violence form the stock-in-trade of rap and should not be interpreted literally.
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Presswood, Marketus. "Sonicated Blackness in Jazz Age Shanghai, 1924–1954: Jazz, Community, and the (In)visibility of African American Musicians in the Creation of the Soundtrack of Chinese Modernity." Souls 22, no. 2-4 (October 1, 2020): 260–91. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10999949.2021.2003627.
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Dzivaltivskyi, Maxim. "Historical formation of the originality of an American choral tradition of the second half of the XX century." Aspects of Historical Musicology 21, no. 21 (March 10, 2020): 23–43. http://dx.doi.org/10.34064/khnum2-21.02.
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Background. Choral work of American composers of the second half of the XX century is characterized by new qualities that have appeared because of not only musical but also non-musical factors generated by the system of cultural, historical and social conditions. Despite of a serious amount of scientific literature on the history of American music, the choral layer of American music remains partially unexplored, especially, in Ukrainian musical science, that bespeaks the science and practical novelty of the research results. The purpose of this study is to discover and to analyze the peculiarities of the historical formation and identity of American choral art of the second half of the twentieth century using the the works of famous American artists as examples. The research methodology is based on theoretical, historical and analytical methods, generalization and specification. Results. The general picture of the development of American composers’ practice in the genre of choral music is characterized by genre and style diversity. In our research we present portraits of iconic figures of American choral music in the period under consideration. So, the choral works of William Dawson (1899–1990), one of the most famous African-American composers, are characterized by the richness of the choral texture, intense sonority and demonstration of his great understanding of the vocal potential of the choir. Dawson was remembered, especially, for the numerous arrangements of spirituals, which do not lose their popularity. Aaron Copland (1899–1990), which was called “the Dean of American Composers”, was one of the founder of American music “classical” style, whose name associated with the America image in music. Despite the fact that the composer tends to atonalism, impressionism, jazz, constantly uses in his choral opuses sharp dissonant sounds and timbre contrasts, his choral works associated with folk traditions, written in a style that the composer himself called “vernacular”, which is characterized by a clearer and more melodic language. Among Copland’s famous choral works are “At The River”, “Four Motets”, “In the Beginning”, “Lark”, “The Promise of Living”; “Stomp Your Foot” (from “The Tender Land”), “Simple Gifts”, “Zion’s Walls” and others. Dominick Argento’s (1927–2019) style is close to the style of an Italian composer G. C. Menotti. Argento’s musical style, first of all, distinguishes the dominance of melody, so he is a leading composer in the genre of lyrical opera. Argento’s choral works are distinguished by a variety of performers’ stuff: from a cappella choral pieces – “A Nation of Cowslips”, “Easter Day” for mixed choir – to large-scale works accompanied by various instruments: “Apollo in Cambridge”, “Odi et Amo”, “Jonah and the Whale”, “Peter Quince at the Clavier”, “Te Deum”, “Tria Carmina Paschalia”, “Walden Pond”. For the choir and percussion, Argento created “Odi et Amo” (“I Hate and I Love”), 1981, based on the texts of the ancient Roman poet Catullus, which testifies to the sophistication of the composer’s literary taste and his skill in reproducing complex psychological states. The most famous from Argento’s spiritual compositions is “Te Deum” (1988), where the Latin text is combined with medieval English folk poetry, was recorded and nominated for a Grammy Award. Among the works of Samuel Barber’s (1910–1981) vocal and choral music were dominating. His cantata “Prayers of Kierkegaard”, based on the lyrics of four prayers by this Danish philosopher and theologian, for solo soprano, mixed choir and symphony orchestra is an example of an eclectic trend. Chapter I “Thou Who art unchangeable” traces the imitation of a traditional Gregorian male choral singing a cappella. Chapter II “Lord Jesus Christ, Who suffered all lifelong” for solo soprano accompanied by oboe solo is an example of minimalism. Chapter III “Father in Heaven, well we know that it is Thou” reflects the traditions of Russian choral writing. William Schumann (1910–1992) stands among the most honorable and prominent American composers. In 1943, he received the first Pulitzer Prize for Music for Cantata No 2 “A Free Song”, based on lyrics from the poems by Walt Whitman. In his choral works, Schumann emphasized the lyrics of American poetry. Norman Luboff (1917–1987), the founder and conductor of one of the leading American choirs in the 1950–1970s, is one of the great American musicians who dared to dedicate most of their lives to the popular media cultures of the time. Holiday albums of Christmas Songs with the Norman Luboff Choir have been bestselling for many years. In 1961, Norman Luboff Choir received the Grammy Award for Best Performance by a Chorus. Luboff’s productive work on folk song arrangements, which helped to preserve these popular melodies from generation to generation, is considered to be his main heritage. The choral work by Leonard Bernstein (1918–1990) – a great musician – composer, pianist, brilliant conductor – is represented by such works as “Chichester Psalms”, “Hashkiveinu”, “Kaddish” Symphony No 3)”,”The Lark (French & Latin Choruses)”, “Make Our Garden Grow (from Candide)”, “Mass”. “Chichester Psalms”, where the choir sings lyrics in Hebrew, became Bernstein’s most famous choral work and one of the most successfully performed choral masterpieces in America. An equally popular composition by Bernstein is “Mass: A Theater Piece for Singers, Players, and Dancers”, which was dedicated to the memory of John F. Kennedy, the stage drama written in the style of a musical about American youth in searching of the Lord. More than 200 singers, actors, dancers, musicians of two orchestras, three choirs are involved in the performance of “Mass”: a four-part mixed “street” choir, a four-part mixed academic choir and a two-part boys’ choir. The eclecticism of the music in the “Mass” shows the versatility of the composer’s work. The composer skillfully mixes Latin texts with English poetry, Broadway musical with rock, jazz and avant-garde music. Choral cycles by Conrad Susa (1935–2013), whose entire creative life was focused on vocal and dramatic music, are written along a story line or related thematically. Bright examples of his work are “Landscapes and Silly Songs” and “Hymns for the Amusement of Children”; the last cycle is an fascinating staging of Christopher Smart’s poetry (the18 century). The composer’s music is based on a synthesis of tonal basis, baroque counterpoint, polyphony and many modern techniques and idioms drawn from popular music. The cycle “Songs of Innocence and of Experience”, created by a composer and a pianist William Bolcom (b. 1938) on the similar-titled poems by W. Blake, represents musical styles from romantic to modern, from country to rock. More than 200 vocalists take part in the performance of this work, in academic choruses (mixed, children’s choirs) and as soloists; as well as country, rock and folk singers, and the orchestral musicians. This composition successfully synthesizes an impressive range of musical styles: reggae, classical music, western, rock, opera and other styles. Morten Lauridsen (b. 1943) was named “American Choral Master” by the National Endowment for the Arts (2006). The musical language of Lauridsen’s compositions is very diverse: in his Latin sacred works, such as “Lux Aeterna” and “Motets”, he often refers to Gregorian chant, polyphonic techniques of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and mixes them with modern sound. Lauridsen’s “Lux Aeterna” is a striking example of the organic synthesis of the old and the new traditions, or more precisely, the presentation of the old in a new way. At the same time, his other compositions, such as “Madrigali” and “Cuatro Canciones”, are chromatic or atonal, addressing us to the technique of the Renaissance and the style of postmodernism. Conclusions. Analysis of the choral work of American composers proves the idea of moving the meaningful centers of professional choral music, the gradual disappearance of the contrast, which had previously existed between consumer audiences, the convergence of positions of “third direction” music and professional choral music. In the context of globalization of society and media culture, genre and stylistic content, spiritual meanings of choral works gradually tend to acquire new features such as interaction of ancient and modern musical systems, traditional and new, modified folklore and pop. There is a tendency to use pop instruments or some stylistic components of jazz, such as rhythm and intonation formula, in choral compositions. Innovative processes, metamorphosis and transformations in modern American choral music reveal its integration specificity, which is defined by meta-language, which is formed basing on interaction and dialogue of different types of thinking and musical systems, expansion of the musical sound environment, enrichment of acoustic possibilities of choral music, globalization intentions. Thus, the actualization of new cultural dominants and the synthesis of various stylistic origins determine the specificity of American choral music.
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Stallings, L. H. "The Songs of Blind Folk: African American Musicians and the Culture of Blindness. Terry Rowden. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009. 184 pages. $65.00 cloth; $22.95 paper." MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States 35, no. 4 (December 1, 2010): 197–99. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/melus/35.4.197.
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Joachim, Joana. "Black Gold: A Black Feminist Art History of 1920s Montréal." Canadian Journal of History 56, no. 3 (December 1, 2021): 266–91. http://dx.doi.org/10.3138/cjh.56-3-2021-0017.
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The 1920s have been touted as the golden era of jazz and Black history in Montréal. Similarly, the decade is well known for the Harlem Renaissance, a key moment in African American art history. Yet this period in Black Canadian art histories remains largely unknown. As a first step toward shedding some light on this period in Black Canadian art history, I propose to use what I term a Black feminist art-historical (bfah) praxis to discuss some visual art practices undoubtedly active alongside well-known jazz musicians and cultural producers in 1920s Montréal. This paper presents an overview of critical race art history and feminist art history, as well as Black feminist approaches to visual representation, to outline what might be considered four tenets of bfah praxis. Applying these tenets, I propose that a new art history may emerge from well-known art objects and practices as well as lesser-known ones. I posit that through a deliberately bfah approach, new meanings emerge and the voices of Black women, even when obstructed by mainstream white narratives, may begin to stand out and shed light upon a variety of histories. This praxis aims to underline the subtext lurking at the edges of these images and to make intangible presences visible in the archive and in art history. I propose bfah as a strategy for more nuanced discussion of the work of Black Canadian artists and histories that have by and large been left out of official records.