“Le facce nere del festival”: Black Musicians at Sanremo in the 1960s

<i>Singing Like Germans: Black Musicians in the Land of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms</i>, by Kira Thurman

I enter the ringing halls of the Palais Meran—the top floor of which now houses the Institute for Jazz Research of the University for Music and Performing Arts Graz.1 Coming from the United States,2 the mere concept that this institution is housed in the private residence of the Styrian Habsburg Archduke John already embeds a level of formality and extravagance to which I am unaccustomed. This is a building in which he died; this is a building that his heirs inhabited until 1939, a mere year after Germany's annexation of Austria. It is in the bones of this building itself that Austrian history has been written, shattered, and written over and over again.I was guided to this collection by my colleague Dr. Lawrence Davies. After hearing me speak on the mythology of Joséphine Baker in Paris during the Second World War, he told me that as a postdoc at the institute, he was provided an office that had a painted portrait of former Luftwaffe officer Dietrich Schulz-Köhn hanging on its walls. Dr. Davies remarked on the unease he and his other colleagues at the Kunst Uni Graz felt about this portrait, with a contradictory aura of menace and the innocuousness of the everyday that was cast upon their daily experience in the Palais Meran. In a palace where a reigning Habsburg died, a painted portrait of a high-ranking officer remains. Schulz-Köhn, often referred to casually as Dr. Jazz, was a leading figure in Germanic jazz scenes until his death in the late 1990s. He was a senior lieutenant in the Luftwaffe3 but was redeemed in German social consciousness largely around narratives claiming he saved beloved musician Django Reinhardt from Nazi peril. Social historian Carolyn Steedman reminds us that “you think, in the delirium: it was their dust that I breathed in.”4 Uncomfortable history seemed to hang in the palace's air.Dr. Davies directed me to some not-so-commonly known materials that exist in the Schulz-Köhn collections housed at the Kunst Uni Graz. Schulz-Köhn's library and record collection are meticulously catalogued and kept in the main rooms of the Institute for Jazz Research. However, when I arrived last January, Dr. Davies directed me toward what was commonly known as the “fishbowl.” The fishbowl exists outside of the institute proper. Once you enter the towering doors of the institute, the rooms of the library, the record collections, and subsequent offices open into each other. The fishbowl can be found on the top floor, just before entering the institute. Sandwiched between the restrooms, a copy machine, a hallway of offices, and the employee kitchen, the fishbowl is a corner protected by a half wall of glass. Inside the glass walls, there is a large study table and eight cabinets full of bits and pieces of uncatalogued materials from a few different collections. No one seemed to work in this space, especially in the winter, when the hallways themselves are not actively heated. On more than one occasion, I was encouraged to grab some materials and work in the library so I would not catch a cold.What I found, uncatalogued in the fishbowl, seems to me to be the richest and most productive materials in the archive. It was filled with random boxes and even grocery bags full of professional and candid photographs, collected or taken by Schulz-Köhn himself. Autographed Charlie Parker portraits were stored alongside National Socialist membership documentation, with notes and newspaper clippings that Schulz-Köhn had in his possession until his death in 1999. These documents were not part of his formal collections, but they do signal that they were pieces that he held onto until his passing and deemed worthy of donation and historization. Random and scattered—some artifacts with detailed descriptions, others with no notes at all—I began to sort through the thousands of photographs and correspondences. In doing so, I found the strangest connections between Schulz-Köhn and some of the most virtuosic jazz musicians of his time. I spent most of my days in the fishbowl unable to lock down or identify which artifacts held the greatest significance. Among the countless stacks of unlabeled photos and vague handwritten notes, each seemingly mundane piece connected to the next, and to the whole. Each unnamed face had a story in their eyes. And I did catch a cold.Referencing a recent debate around the phrase Menschen mit Nazihintergrund (people with a Nazi background) in German culture, American literature and memory studies scholar Michael Rothberg reminds us, “To be German requires remembering the Holocaust and confronting the Nazis’ genocidal practices. Yet such a confrontation risks simply repeating the original problem if it does not challenge the very notion of Germanness that made genocide possible in the first place.”5 As an American scholar with German heritage, I bring a distinct vantage point to this research. While my family's complicated relationship with our heritage risks reifying the original problem of the notion of Germanness, I have begun to see Germanness not in my hair color or genealogy, but in the ways I perform Germanness itself. Rothberg emphasizes that histories of violence persist ideologically and materially, as well as psychically. I realized that even when speaking English in Austria, I soften my hard Rs, adjust my syntax, and swallow my words. It was then that I began to realize that my performance of Germanness has been fostered within me my whole life, most predominantly as I have mimicked and performed the codes of rigor and virtuosity in the institutions of Western music. Music and musicology in the United States have a long legacy of German supremacy; performing Germanness is the key to becoming audible in such institutions, and this violence of exclusion psychically reverberates in invisible ways.The Third Reich itself had a very ambivalent relationship with jazz. While the music was banned for its connotations with Blackness, sexual promiscuity, and American democracy, it was later nationalized by Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels. State-sponsored orchestras such as Charlie and His Orchestra, the German Dance and Entertainment Orchestra (Deutsches Tanz- und Unterhaltungsorchester, or the DTU), and the Golden Seven produced jazz standards in line with the Reichsmusikkammer's musical restrictions and changed lyrics for propaganda efforts.6 The music was restricted in its amount of syncopation, and tempos were not allowed to be too fast nor too slow, as it would negate an Aryan sense of discipline and moderation. Scatting, riffs, plucking of violin strings, and drum breaks were all forbidden. Major keys were preferred, and orchestras were advised to replace all saxophones with a violoncello, viola, or suitable folk instrument.7 However, even the musicians in the state-sponsored orchestras would often push the boundaries into hotter forms of the music.However, these musical restrictions and underlying metonymical fears were not limited to the Third Reich; many philosophical and political ideologies of the era were grappling with the music and not only how it was being produced and consumed, but, more importantly, how it was perceived as shifting social and national consciousness. In all such cases, fears and fetishization of Blackness itself placed Black musicians in the crossfire.German Jewish philosopher Theodor Adorno's writings on jazz shared many of the same prejudices against the music, particularly in his racialized theorizations of syncopation as a tool of coercion and control in late capitalist society.8 While I certainly do not condone the ways in which Adorno's scholarship places the burden of the failures of late capitalist society on Black music, it is in fact difficult to brashly critique a Jewish philosopher living on the brink of the Holocaust—a Jewish philosopher who only witnessed the ways in which jazz was being appropriated and reproduced in bourgeois European society. Fumi Okiji bluntly writes, “[Adorno's] inability to see past the figure of the bourgeois is depressing.”9 It is unyieldingly frustrating as a jazz scholar, particularly as a swing scholar—as someone who takes commercial music and its use value as survival in marginalized cultures seriously—to allow intellectual space for his ruthless critique of the music, yet it remains impossible to separate Adorno's theories on jazz from his own fight for survival.Similarly, jazz critics such as Charles Delaunay, in authoritarian and antisemitic Vichy France, echoed anxieties of hot jazz as commercialized American decadence. He strived to rebrand French jazz as an ascendance from the American form, championing French musicians’ grace, genius, and purity. Across Europe and its political polarities, jazz fans boasted their elevated intelligence and sensitivity from their American counterparts. In France, “real jazz fans” were cultured and elite,10 while in Germany and Austria, “anyone who [was] interested in jazz [could] not be a Nazi.”11 In all such cases, an outward refusal of the Black American creation of jazz was tactically necessary to justify its place and value in the European social consciousness. Lauded for its connotations of freedom and revolution, yet stripped of its Blackness, it came to pacify political anxieties during the looming rise of the authoritarian regimes. In contemporary scholarship, terms such as “incubation,” “infected,” “hot jazz virus,” and “high-grade hot jazz fever” are still being used to describe Schulz-Köhn and his fellow hot jazz fans, without any consideration of their implied anti-Blackness or their historical embeddedness.12 Writing on the anti-Black racial imaginary in the early twentieth century, ethnomusicologist Ronald Radano notes, “The vast repetition of [B]lack music as a fever, drug, disease, and intoxicant indicate that the threat of [B]lack music related above all to fears of miscegenation, through which hot rhythm becomes a metonym of the [B]lack male body, and specifically, Negro semen or blood.”13While Adorno seemed to demand of jazz a revolution against alienation, capitalism, and fascist propagandistic control, Okiji pushes back on Adorno's concept of syncopation, claiming the rhythmic structure was never meant to be an act of revolution. She states, “Rather it calls white purity into profound doubt. It complicates and disturbs racial logic and distinction. . . . Syncopation should not be seen as an opposing pole to the main beat but as a shaking of that beat, a loosening of the soil around its roots, preparing the ground for its displacement.”14 She concludes, “Can we not say that jazz—and syncopation and swing more specificially—speaks the truth about the irreconciliation of modern life?”15 The engulfing anxieties and hypocrisies surrounding such irreconciliation are theorized by historian Julian Jackson, as he writes, “People who made different choices [during the war] often did so in defense of similar values . . . antagonists might share as many assumptions with their enemies as with those on their own side.”16 Jazz, and Black American jazz in particular, speaks truth to these anxieties and calls the racialized logics of both the Axis and Allies into profound doubt.Dietrich Schulz-Köhn, while at once an Oberleutnant in the Luftwaffe, also shared a passion for hot jazz. Covertly, throughout the war, he would attend gigs, collect and preserve banned records, and exchange secret jazz newsletters with enthusiasts throughout Europe. In many ways, he did immeasurable work to preserve the music throughout the war, which has been well-documented by scholars. However, referencing the selective memory surrounding Schulz-Köhn's wartime activities after the war, Andy Fry posits that these were “complexities of the wartime period people no longer wanted to hear.”17 While Schulz-Köhn was an avid collector and enthusiast of hot jazz that was banned in the Reich, there remains visual evidence of musicians and jazz narratives that he effectively purged from institutional memory.I will read one photograph in his collection as the punctum that begins to unravel the altruistic persona created around Dr. Jazz. It is an image of Django Reinhardt, Schulz-Köhn, a Jewish man named Henri Battut, and four Black musicians who have remained nameless in nearly all of the many-published reproductions of this image (see Copyright restrictions prevent the display of the image here. It may be viewed in the PDF display.). It should be noted that while the physical photograph in the archive itself does not identify any subjects, discourse and scholarship in jazz continued to reproduce these erasures to the present day. The photograph was taken outside La Cigale jazz club in occupied Paris in late 1942. While the focus of this article is on these four Black men who have been effectively lost for seventy-nine years, it is not my intent to downplay the racism and violence experienced by Reinhardt as a Roma musician, nor Battut as Jewish. Scholars such as Fry have written on the fraught existence of Reinhardt in Paris throughout the war, as well as how his music and image were deliberately whitened to satisfy Vichy ideology.18 “In its horror and glory,”19 this photograph encompasses a multitude of mysteries and racialized dynamics of power that played out through jazz music in occupied Paris, and it disrupts the narrative built around the figure of Dr. Jazz as the heroic savior of jazz musicians in the Third Reich. While it seems he may have had genuine relationships with some Black American jazz musicians and helped perpetuate their careers in postwar Europe, it remains unclear as to when and how he used the cloak of his uniform to protect himself in the Third Reich, as well as when and how he remained loyal to his oath to the fatherland. However, his active fetishization of Black musicians can be read through this photograph, which was distributed and published widely during and after the war. Here, nameless Black musicians visually contribute to Schulz-Köhn's cultural capital, while being granted neither a name nor a voice. This article contemplates the role that such Black swing-era musicians played in the formulation of the persona of Dr. Jazz in Germanic consciousness and jazz consciousness more broadly.Entering the archive with the knowledge of this photograph, I spent my time not searching for audible traces, but instead listening for silences. While the aim of this research is to tangibly locate and memorialize the lives taken, lost, or miswritten, it becomes imperative to critically contemplate silence, to take seriously the agential voices of our historical interlocutors, and to refuse to be separate from the wealth of knowledge available to us in the unknown and the unknowable. How might we productively consider the silencing impulse of Dietrich Schulz-Köhn, the allegedly altruistic and “most distinguished promoter of jazz in the Third Reich”?20 This article leads a reader through my process to locate the identities of the four unnamed musicians, and it concludes with their miraculous discovery seventy-nine years later, in a small archive in Guadeloupe. Throughout the process, I show that even musicians who were photographed and celebrated extensively by Schulz-Köhn were still stripped of their agential voice. Furthermore, this work asks us to puncture the ways our attention moves through an archive, and it dreams of a world in which the voices and agency of the silenced can be restored.21“They are out there.”23They are out there; they have to be out there. I repeated Daphne Brooks's revolutionary archival theories to myself. I simply could not accept a reality in which these musicians could be lost to history. I entered the archive in Graz with the knowledge that many of the photographs taken by Schulz-Köhn at gigs contained not only information on the musicians, set lists, and instrumentation, but also often contained darkroom and he seemed to be so The four of this photograph, so it was my that I could such yet the of all four were It of as it to the of the of memory with the of historical Black this the photograph in contemporary jazz scholarship and in the racial imaginary of Blackness in wartime Europe. It is a photograph taken by a German the of Schulz-Köhn outside La Cigale jazz club in occupied Paris in late I with this photograph for years, simply the of all four Black musicians were not only from the original photograph, but these also have been reproduced in jazz In was to identify the musician to Schulz-Köhn's as but scholarship on jazz in the Third Reich would to all four being After years of through thousands of photographs, and and down of I have been to identify all four Black musicians in this photograph as and and and and I to be or Henri The will the reader through my research process and its that around the that produced this photograph are vague and few Black musicians remained in Paris However, this is not an in the of jazz in the Third Reich. a of we first consider the for which Black musicians would or to the in occupied Paris, but also consider the of and performing to to both the French and German ambivalent relationships with American jazz. Black American musicians had Paris in of while others such as Joséphine who had for the of France, was allowed to to the for Andy Fry of the histories of jazz in Paris during the as the was began to . . . The first take that jazz was all from occupied banned by the it the with its American to or early in the war. The few musicians who did not were and after the United States entered the Black American remained in Paris, even if our attention has not yet for their and not all of were While and were Joséphine and Charlie are known to have remained in Paris during the this point in my these are the only Black American I have found, but my me that their vague and there is a that there were notes that while we might contradictory from even have published information on Black American jazz and surrounding year of who was and even name are as as the surrounding during the He then of the role of the of which a large role in how these and are He also to the ways in which historical as have often historical from these the identities of these four musicians, as well as their for in Paris during this to be a the of power dynamics and racial the hot jazz consideration the of and it for the ways in which jazz was appropriated to a of European ideologies and political anxieties of the relationship of photographs to hard and to evidence is fraught with histories of historian John of the relationship of to fact as being and that the photograph to our through both as well as the social surrounding its the concept of the photograph has to an of and notion is not only but also the of an emphasizes throughout his work the of visual a photograph of an does not the simply as it but actively the in the social consciousness of a society. created the image of the other they to which within their of a society. historian takes this to the of institutional silence, or European histories the and of histories of Western have largely been in a that of white cultural This institutional silence, or can be seen to of . . . as of is both the physical act of and the that Schulz-Köhn in fact created the image of the other he to and the institutional their narratives to these four Black musicians as and of I am of a reader to to see these musicians, to attention from what it is we have been to see and value as in white Western institutions and to contemplate the histories that we through Schulz-Köhn's collection of thousands of photographs, I found in so many of and of came from jazz musicians in photographs that I had never seen before or such as a in his of swing The most of all came when I a grocery full of random documents and found an Charlie Parker portrait I it where I found I had a few years, I could and this but it in the grocery in which I found it seemed a to both Parker and my archival I to the of Schulz-Köhn being and to their at the Palais Meran. It is still that this portrait is not more or Schulz-Köhn about someone the These of historian were with when my was with of the most was that of Schulz-Köhn with who could have been no more than years and restrictions prevent the display of the image here. It may be viewed in the PDF display.). The back of this photograph with and Black men from to photograph does not the of the white alongside The man in is Schulz-Köhn, and the hanging onto the of and at in is Schulz-Köhn's German jazz The on the of and indicate unease and of the Black musicians made with the or even at a with his his back as the most of The with the and from Schulz-Köhn and indicate a sense of and not genuine people into that can be and it that Schulz-Köhn only these men as they were to be was an of unease I felt upon photographs that seemed to genuine between Schulz-Köhn and Black American In these photographs, Schulz-Köhn seemed to share with musicians and were not photographs, but instead candid or that implied the musicians were just with their and cultural this perceived with Schulz-Köhn so after the seemed too to I am of the of histories such as of yet these were still my musical I that they came from a with racial histories and dynamics and that they had to their through the music at this I felt the of my and I had to with the notion that these musicians I could be ideologically ambivalent and may have been or even with Dr. with Schulz-Köhn, did not to the I felt when an copy of and a photograph out of a hanging out with Schulz-Köhn and breaks and my The I shared with through his felt I felt a similar years upon of of the time he spent in Germany in of is a in my time and in my body, and it to for the lives of then I realized that Schulz-Köhn this photograph in years after from in of While there is a that this was a mere or the on this photograph not only calls into the of the relationship between and Schulz-Köhn, but also the of his other I held these as I in my small photograph restrictions prevent the display of the image here. It may be viewed in the PDF was one of the first that I in the archive and was certainly one of the most The back of this photograph und in and during his in It was for me to accept or the of photographs when the musicians themselves as with in this photograph, is with the his is as he to his and even his are Each of these he was Schulz-Köhn's is the one that seems and he more than he would in his candid photographs with this of photographs (see Copyright restrictions prevent the display of the image here. It may be viewed in the PDF the relationship of to Schulz-Köhn and the of a While only Copyright restrictions prevent the display of the image here. It may be viewed in the PDF its it is that these came from a few days in in most in the they were not at a or were taken during the a a and even in a private These the of a that can take years in a German It could be that Schulz-Köhn would use the and of instead of the formal with which is a in German a of on on a might even that or with Dietrich and even his toward their as on his we see Schulz-Köhn alongside a is a the These were produced between and and were by to take

The Race of Sound: Listening, Timbre, and Vocality in African American Music

Reviewed by: Singing Like Germans: Black Musicians in the Land of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms by Kira Thurman Kathryn Agnes Huether Singing Like Germans: Black Musicians in the Land of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. By Kira Thurman. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2021. Pp. 368. Hardcover $32.95. ISBN 978-1501759840. In the field of musicology, several key studies have examined how categories of “Germanness” and “Otherness” have been constructed and negotiated in musical discourse, ranging from such topics as the musical practice of Martin Luther’s aesthetic reform, or the revival of J. S. Bach’s work under the auspices of the Enlightenment-era German Jewish patron Sarah Levy. The rise in antisemitism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries found its way into music criticism, with composers and music critics—such as Rudolf Louis and Richard Wagner—frequently attacking German Jewish composers such as Felix Mendelssohn and Gustav Mahler for the supposed aural “tainting” and eastern “accents” of their music. The Third Reich escalated racist musical stereotypes by defaming certain music as “entartet,” including Jewish composers, African American jazz, and Roma traditions. Now, musicologist [End Page 326] Kira Thurman brings attention to another important but heretofore overlooked topic in the history of the construction and policing of “Germanness” in German classical music, specifically the prominent role that Black classical musicians have played in the performance of that music from the late nineteenth century to the recent past. In Singing Like Germans: Black Musicians in the Land of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms, Thurman follows a chronological three-part trajectory: Part I: 1870–1914; Part II: 1918–1945; and Part III: 1945–1961. In Part I, Thurman conveys that the “music of Reinecke and other German composers floated freely out of the windows of chapels [and] concert halls in the 1890s [America]” (22). Black Americans’ drive to educate themselves in the music of Reineke and others, in addition to other academic approaches, was a mass movement that “promised to cultivate new generations of politically minded, culturally sophisticated, and socially aware Black citizens to advance their rights in a nation that still refused to recognize them” (23). German classical music, in its own immigrant journey to America, found a place in the lives of African Americans. But there was also movement in the other direction. Thurman presents a series of case studies on Black migration to, and venture within Germany— including Will Marion Cook, William H. Tyers, J. Elmer Spyglass, and Portia Washington— to name a few. Thurman is careful to explain the unique components of each individual’s transatlantic travel. Even across the ocean, Thurman unveils how Jim Crow still haunted African American lives in Germany, predominantly at the hands of white Americans who also found themselves in Germany. Thurman dedicates an entire chapter to a discussion of how transatlantic notions of race influenced white listening experiences of Black classical musicians in German, emphasizing the aesthetic component of this construction, which forced white listeners to confront the juxtaposition of the visual and aural. In Part II, Thurman emphasizes the heightening of racial propaganda that led toward starker forms of discrimination in the 1920s, specifically the “Black Horror on the Rhine” campaign. The author tracks how these racial slurs then impacted the reception of Black musicians in Germany. Despite the exceptional mastering of the German Lieder by Black musicians in this period, Thurman finds, in her scrutiny of the archive of German music reviews, that critics “revisited their definitions of Blackness and whiteness in response to Black performers’ musical erasures of the Black-white binary” (158). Part III focuses largely on the process of denazification and the role that Black musicians played in it. Thurman shows that the US State Department saw in them the “best asset in the reorientation of Germans” (196), a role that I view as far more nuanced and difficult than Leonard Bernstein’s “Mahler revival” in Vienna. In her closing chapters, the author demonstrates the continuation of racial discrimination and the push for Black musicians to carry an agency that was simultaneously denied to them by their own government. [End Page 327] As a scholar of the Holocaust and contemporary antisemitism, I personally see a...

Reviewed by: Lift Every Voice and Swing: Black Musicians and Religious Culture in the Jazz Century by Vaughn A. Booker Alisha Lola Jones Vaughn A. Booker, Lift Every Voice and Swing: Black Musicians and Religious Culture in the Jazz Century (New York: New York University Press, 2020) Lift Every Voice and Swing: Black Musicians and Religious Culture in the Jazz Century, by religion and African American studies scholar Vaughn A. Booker, incisively challenges assumptions about African American jazz musicians’ performance of race, personal belief, and socio-cultural hardwiring toward or against Afro-Protestantism in the popular imagination. Booker’s titular pun—Lift Every Voice and Swing—follows a tide of publications over the last decade on anthems (see Shana Redmond’s Anthem: Social Movements and the Sound of Solidarity in the African Diaspora [2013]) and particularly on “the Negro National Anthem”—J. Rosamond and James Weldon Johnson’s “Lift Every Voice and Sing”—profiled in Imani Perry’s May We Forever Stand: A History of the Black National Anthem (2018). Further, Lift Every Voice and Swing hearkens to the primacy of vocality and swing as prized organizing components and commoditized principles in religio- cultural performance practices that set apart popular African American musicians in the twentieth-century mediascape. After all, to echo Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington’s signature 1931 composition, “It Don’t Mean a Thing, If It Ain’t Got That Swing. ” [End Page 131] With a keen awareness of the African philosophical worldview that there is no bifurcation of the “sacred” and “secular,” Booker confirms that for many African American jazz and other musicians there is only a continuum between the religious and non-religious in the artistic discourses accessible to them. To illuminate this observation, he explores the extent to which four jazz tastemakers’ (networks’) commentary and performances influenced religious expression in multi-faith/transdenominational liturgy and popular religio-cultural portrayals: Cab Calloway, Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, and Mary Lou Williams. In the introduction, Booker establishes the parameters of “sacred” Afro-Protestant aesthetics, offering insight on the “swing concept” of vibraphonist and convert from Roman Catholicism to Christian Science Lionel Hampton. Hampton asserted that it was sacrilege for bands to swing (Negro) spirituals, especially in cinematic portrayals, presumably because of the sultry and sensuous musical associations that swinging prompts: “Sacred African American music was a cultural possession of Hampton and other African Americans, and, in his view, to transform it into a festive or entertaining commodity was to commit sacrilege and racial offense” (1). Hampton’s commentary reveals the extent to which Afro-Protestant religious expression is culture among African Americans, regardless of one’s personal belief. The first part of the book, entitled “Representations of Religion and Race,” comprises four chapters. Readers will note that Booker places taste-makers Cab Calloway and Ella Fitzgerald into the conversation by innovative means, tapping into often overlooked autobiographical material about Calloway, and, and taking alternative measures for Fitzgerald, who rarely interviewed and never produced an autobiography. The first chapter introduces a group of religious race professionals beyond male clergy who are middle-class leaders of Afro-Protestant denominations, organizations, and churches. In the second chapter, Booker concentrates on maestro Cab Calloway’s early jazz career and the extent to which, as a person who did not participate in institutional religion, he deploys religious humor to push the limits. Instead of typically centering Black male musicians within Bebop jazz discourse, the third chapter centers on the vocalist Ella Fitzgerald’s efforts to fashion her raced, gendered, and (non-)religious identity. Racial and religious reverence are investigated in the fourth chapter through Duke Ellington’s musical compositions in which he explores biblical and historical African civilizations. [End Page 132] Part two, “Missions and Legacies,” spans five chapters. The fifth chapter attends to Duke Ellington who was influential in religious literature while maintaining core conversation partners who were not formed in Christianity. We learn in the sixth chapter about Ellington’s theology through his recorded private thoughts in relation to his compositional practice. Composer Mary Lou Williams is featured in the seventh chapter, which examines her religious thoughts following her conversion to Roman Catholicism. Following Williams through her business archives...

Reviewed by: The Black Musician and the White City: Race and Music in Chicago, 1900–1967 by Amy Absher Robert M. Marovich Amy Absher, The Black Musician and the White City: Race and Music in Chicago, 1900–1967. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014. 202 pp. $55. Historians have examined twentieth-century African American music from many angles, from the social and cultural to the artistic and commercial. In The Black Musician and the White City: Race and Music in Chicago, 1900–1967, Amy Absher takes a somewhat different approach. In addition to offering social and cultural perspectives, she also examines Chicago's African American music community from the labor viewpoint. Absher crafts an academically rigorous but eminently readable book about how African American musicians strived to make a living from their art in one of the most segregated cities in America—Chicago—where an invisible but palpable color line determined where you lived, where you shopped, where you took your leisure and, in the case of popular and classical musicians, where you worked. Arguing that "musician radicalism was not born in the 1960s," Absher illustrates how Chicago's African American music community battled against segregation as early as the 1920s, when the only opportunities available for them were in Chicago's South Side club trade. Many of the city's first generation of jazz and blues musicians migrated from the South during the prewar period to escape Jim Crow laws, constant threats of racially motivated violence, and crushing poverty. What they found in Chicago were less explicit but equally insidious forms of discrimination. On top of that, the newcomers faced arrogance from some Old [End Page 68] Settlers, blacks who were born in Chicago or moved there prior to the Great Migration. The Old Settlers viewed the migrants' vernacular music as embarrassing reminders of vaudeville parodies of black folk music. For them, the best avenue for upward mobility was assimilation, not separation, and the musical soundtrack to assimilation was Western European classical music. Nevertheless, racism impacted old and new settlers alike, so Local 208 of the American Federation of Musicians (AFM) was created to counteract the discriminatory actions of the city's white Local 10. The assimilationist Old Settlers became 208's first and longstanding leaders. The true merit of Absher's book is its illustration of how the very actions designed to protect African American musicians from segregation sometimes worked against their ability to make a living wage; other times, the hand they were dealt by the majority turned into a winning hand. An example of the latter was when Local 208 members were denied opportunities to perform in the silk stocking nightclubs of the downtown area and relegated to the South Side. Before the Great Depression, the South Side had the most jumping nightlife for black and white patrons, and offered the most promising paydays for black musicians. Of the former, wages and benefits were not nearly as beneficial for Local 208 members as for their Local 10 brethren. Absher explains how, ultimately, the AFM ground game to secure greater exposure for black artists was no match for independently-owned record businesses, jukebox operators, and radio disc jockeys. The new vehicles for disseminating music disregarded color lines and opened up new opportunities for African American musicians, even if the musicians did not profit at the same financial level as did the record companies, jukebox operators, and radio stations. The book concludes with a page-turning narrative about how Local 208, long the defender of African American musicians, became such a liability by the 1960s that its younger members fought to reintegrate into Local 10. The internecine battle between Local 208 leaders and their members brought to a head the decades-long struggle for control of one's own artistic destiny, as well as the notion of what it meant to be race conscious. Although Absher discusses the challenges that black classical artists faced, her lens is focused on jazz, swing, blues, and rhythm and blues musicians. She barely mentions sacred artists, likely because for most of the time period she examines, the primary audience for sacred music was in the African American church and off the...

A Visual Critique of Racism: African American Art from Southern California

Jazz Diasporas: Race, Music, and Migration in Post-World War II ParisJazz Diaspora: Music and Globalisation

Reviewed by: Lift Every Voice and Swing: Black Musicians and Religious Culture in the Jazz Century by Vaughn A. Booker Brett Grainger Lift Every Voice and Swing: Black Musicians and Religious Culture in the Jazz Century. By Vaughn A. Booker. New York: New York University Press, 2020. 344 pp. $35.00. Scholarly narratives on African American religion have long centered on the Black church and its predecessor, "slave religion" (what Albert Raboteau called the "invisible institution"). In both cases, Protestant influences, themes, and institutional forms have dominated discussion. In recent decades, however, scholarship has widened to encompass non-Protestant and post-Protestant modes of religiosity, including Afro-Catholicism, Black Islam, and Afro-Diasporic traditions. Taken together, these developments have decentered the "Black [End Page 78] church" in American religious history by questioning its monopoly over African American religious and cultural life. Vaughn Booker's new work returns our attention to mainstream denominations and church life, but for a different purpose: to show the ways in which twentieth-century jazz musicians leveraged their celebrity to become "race representatives"—ambassadors of Black respectability to the white world—alongside religious leaders, advancing social and cultural progress for other African Americans and helping to transform the reputation of jazz from the devil's music to high art. Drawing upon a rich archive of popular materials—interviews and articles in the Black and white press, private writings, and a number of other sources—Booker demonstrates how jazz musicians embodied beliefs and practices that both mirrored and diverged from those of the Black church. The book is divided into two parts. Part I, "Representations of Religion and Race," describes how, early on, middle-class Black ministers worked to resist the rising popularity of jazz among their younger congregants. Their efforts failed, but with an ironic result: as the press held up jazz men and women as spokespersons for their race, these same artists came to see themselves as burdened with the responsibility of representation, turning the stage into a kind of pulpit. Booker focuses on three ways in which jazz artists performed religion for the public: through their "irreverent performances of African American religious leadership and expressive acts of worship," their "commitment to black Protestants' social and political activism against Jim Crow," and their "sacralization of 'Africa' in narratives of African American history" (13). If the second theme might come as less of a surprise to readers, the first and third themes are less well documented, and Vaughn presents them in especially striking and memorable ways. In chapter two, which focuses on Cab Calloway, Booker surprises and delights by situating the multitalented singer and bandleader within a long tradition of "religious irreverence." Chapter 4, "Royal Ancestry," moves from irreverence to reverence, showing how the "sacred concerts" of Duke Ellington, among other explicitly religious jazz works, presented an African American history "emerging from, and connected to, a sacred African past that included both biblical scriptures and ancient African civilizations," a story that effectively rendered "the enslaved African experience in the United State … as an extension of that sacred African history" (16). In Part II, "Missions and Legacies," Booker foregrounds the religious thought and practice of two pianists and composers, Duke Ellington and Mary Lou Williams. Booker attends to the ways Ellington struggled to articulate his theological beliefs as he navigated a variety [End Page 79] of religious settings, revealing how his sacred concerts were conceived less as an authentic recapitulation of the Black Protestant traditions of his childhood than an ecumenical religious project directed to an explicitly white liberal Protestant audience. Roman Catholicism receives the most sustained attention in the two chapters devoted to Williams, who Josef Sorett has described as the most famous Afro-Catholic convert of the post-war era, a period that saw a massive increase in African American affiliation with Catholicism. The seventh chapter explores Williams's religious journey to the Catholic faith. Booker ably narrates how Williams's loss of her friend, bebop pioneer Charlie ("Bird") Parker, to a heroin overdose contributed to her decision to convert and how Williams struggled with whether to give up music entirely until a number of friends, including several jazz-loving clergy, convinced her to use...

Research Article| October 01 2015 "He’s Calling His Flock Now": Black Music and Postcoloniality from Buddy Bolden’s New Orleans to Sefyu’s Paris J. Griffith Rollefson J. Griffith Rollefson Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Music (2015) 33 (3): 375–397. https://doi.org/10.5406/americanmusic.33.3.0375 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation J. Griffith Rollefson; "He’s Calling His Flock Now": Black Music and Postcoloniality from Buddy Bolden’s New Orleans to Sefyu’s Paris. American Music 1 January 2015; 33 (3): 375–397. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/americanmusic.33.3.0375 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressAmerican Music Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2016 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2016 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Amy Absher’s The Black Musician and the White City tells the story of African American musicians in Chicago during the mid-twentieth century. While depicting the segregated city before World War II, Absher traces the migration of black musicians, both men and women and both classical and vernacular performers, from the American South to Chicago during the 1930s to 1950s. Absher’s work diverges from existing studies in three ways: First, she takes the history beyond the study of jazz and blues by examining the significant role that classically trained black musicians played in building the Chicago South Side community. By acknowledging the presence and importance of classical musicians, Absher argues that black migrants in Chicago had diverse education and economic backgrounds but found common cause in the city’s music community. Second, Absher brings numerous maps to the history, illustrating the relationship between Chicago’s physical lines of segregation and the geography of black music in the city over the years. Third, Absher’s use of archival sources is both extensive and original, drawing on manuscript and oral history collections at the Center for Black Music Research in Chicago, Columbia University, Rutgers’s Institute of Jazz Studies, and Tulane’s Hogan Jazz Archive. By approaching the Chicago black musical community from these previously untapped angles, Absher offers a history that goes beyond the retelling of the achievements of the famous musicians by discussing musicians as a group. In The Black Musician and the White City, black musicians are the leading actors, thinkers, organizers, and critics of their own story.

Labor Organizer Nannie Helen Burroughs and Her National Training School for Women and Girls

Reviewed by: Brick City Vanguard: Amiri Baraka, Black Music, Black Modernity by James Smethurst Matthew Calihman James Smethurst.Brick City Vanguard: Amiri Baraka, Black Music, Black Modernity. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 2020. 227 pp. $26.95. Amiri Baraka’s development as an artist and thinker has raised vexing questions about race, nation, and class as forms of social identification and mobilization. In 1965, Baraka left the racially and ethnically mixed bohemian arts milieu of lower Manhattan for a life in Black nationalist cultural and political work. He decamped to Harlem, and within the same year, he returned to his hometown of Newark, New Jersey. A decade later, in the mid-1970s, he renounced Black nationalism for a Marxist politics that envisioned leading roles for African Americans and other peoples who had been subject to colonial domination and exploitation. For some observers, these changes were ruptures. But in Being & Race: Black Writing since 1970 (1988), Charles Johnson argued that Baraka’s development was a single continuous struggle: “There is from the very beginning a tension in his thought [End Page 97] between modern leftist intellectualism and race politics, between international Marxism and black nationalism” (24). Although many critics have shown that Baraka engaged with Black nationalism in even his earliest writing, few have recognized how far back his engagement with Marxism went. As William J. Maxwell notes in F.B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover’s Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature (2015), the subject who first emerges in Baraka’s FBI file, opened in 1957, was at least “curious” about Marxist politics (117). But the crucial study here is James Smethurst’s The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s (2005), which transformed scholarship on Black Arts by surveying the movement’s various regional manifestations and by tracing its origins to midcentury intersections of Black nationalism, bohemianism, and Old Left working-class radicalism. The Black Arts Movement established Baraka’s personal and institutional connections to a Popular Front movement that survived up to his time. In Brick City Vanguard: Amiri Baraka, Black Music, Black Modernity, Smethurst resumes his exploration of Baraka’s relationship to Marxism. The book focuses on the philosophy of history that Baraka began to devise early in his career and fully formulated during the four decades preceding his death in 2014, a period that critics have generally neglected. Smethurst considers Baraka’s historical materialist vision of the development of an African American culture, a Black nation, and a Black working class, the last of which, Baraka proposed, would play a vanguard role in an international communist movement. And in Brick City Vanguard as in The Black Arts Movement, place matters: It was in Newark, Smethurst argues, that Baraka learned to hear Black music as a kind of vernacular historiography of culture, nation, and class. Baraka’s Newark was a place where many thousands of Southern Black migrants, including his own parents, entered industrial modernity. Challenging most earlier accounts of Baraka’s family history (including many of Baraka’s own accounts), Smethurst writes that Baraka’s parents entered this world as working-class strivers and maintained a basically proletarian outlook even after they found their way to middle-class jobs. In workplaces, schools, and neighborhoods, among other social contexts, the Joneses and other Black Newarkers encountered European immigrant groups (most notably, Jews and Italians) in relationships that were determined by Northern Jim Crow but that involved cultural exchange. However, because the Great Migration continued through most of the twentieth century, the Black Newark culture in which Baraka grew up and to which he returned as an adult maintained a vital connection to its Southern Black roots; for example, the city’s Black musicians and audiences remained in touch with Southern blues styles.In some ways, the Newark in which this book places Baraka looks like the Northern metropolises in Richard Wright’s Marxist “folk history” of Black America, 12 Million Black Voices (1941). But whereas Wright’s narrative ends with a prophecy of Black people thronging hopefully into new interracial industrial labor unions, Baraka’s Newark story, as Smethurst recounts it, confronts a modern city in which racial caste persists and where the industrial...

Playing That Crystal Flute:Black Interventions in the Sonic Archives Kristin Moriah (bio) Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound. By Daphne Brooks. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021. 608 pages. $39.95 (hardcover). Black Diamond Queens: African American Women and Rock and Roll. By Maureen Mahon. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020. 408 pages. $29.95 (paperback). Black Ephemera: The Crisis and Challenge of the Musical Archive. By Mark Anthony Neal. New York: New York University Press, 2022. 232 pages. $27.00 (paperback). Black women and Black musicians have a contentious relationship with archival practices and popular memory. Take Lizzo, for example, and the moment she played James Madison's previously untouched two-hundred-year-old flute at a concert in Washington, DC, in fall 2022. In that instance, she was, as the kids say, her ancestors' wildest dreams. She certainly seemed to be creating a full circle, reaching toward the eighteenth century and grasping hold of a powerful symbol of the Enlightenment cherished by a founding father whose most notorious achievements would be used to disenfranchise women like Lizzo for generations. Common wisdom tells us that she was not meant to touch it. The crystal flute's very status within the Library of Congress calls attention to its symbolic power and its distance from Black women's marginalized position in society. Can you be Lizzo, a Black musician, and play the flute? More specifically, can you be Lizzo and play that flute? In their recent books, Daphne Brooks, Maureen Mahon, and Mark Anthony Neal reckon with such questions raised by Black musicians and musical archives at a time when Black music and its influence on popular culture is both ubiquitous and contentious. They write from a cultural context in which the roots, nuances, and implications of Black musical life have often been obscured and whose continued existence, in the [End Page 395] case of Black musical archives, is often tenuous. Their scholarship represents a deep engagement with a diverse set of sonic archives and innovators. The need to theorize work so foundational to American popular culture, to mine sounds always seemingly present and in motion, arises from a sense of urgency spurred by the fascination with and furor over Black popular musicians. In Liner Notes for the Revolution, Daphne Brooks argues that "Black women of sound" have "a history unfolding on other frequencies while the world adores them and simultaneously devalues them" (1). Brooks takes "seriously the centrality of sound in Black women's lives as a foundation for developing and sustaining pivotal, profoundly meaningful world-making sociocultural networks and forms of intimacy with one another" (12). In doing so, she recalls the work of scholars like Jayna Brown when she argues that "what these Black women musicians offer, in short, is another way of hearing, reading, theorizing, making the modern. Black women of sound sign and sing themselves through their listening such that they reframe archaic philosophies of the 'Self' born out of high Enlightenment—thought that never had them in mind" (17). In Brooks's work, readers will also find echoes of Paul Gilroy, Sylvia Wynter, and Alexander Weheliye and their interrogations of Western Humanism and modernity. What is more, while rigorously engaging with critical theory from a range of fields, Liner Notes is structured like a vinyl record. Thus the text speaks to the influence of material culture on Black sound studies. Black media form part of the message. Side A of Liner Notes is "a meditation on the importance of intellectual labour and Black women's sonic cultures" (45). Side B is "an exploration of elusive Black women musicians and the critics and artists who have focused their attention on their legacies in a variety of ways" (45). Side B takes inspiration from the experimental nature of B sides and moves more fully into "the speculative terrain of revolutionary possibility" (45). Taken together, each side is a reminder that listening is a central critical practice. Liner Notes is a manifesto that offers a blueprint for the work that Black feminism can accomplish in the field of sound studies. While Brooks is interested in how theory and cultural criticism can...

Translating Race on the French Stage