Listening for Africa: Freedom, Modernity, and the Logic of Black Music’s African Origins by David F. Garcia

Abstract

Reviewed by: Listening for Africa: Freedom, Modernity, and the Logic of Black Music’s African Origins by David F. Garcia Hannah Strong (bio) Listening for Africa: Freedom, Modernity, and the Logic of Black Music’s African Origins by David F. Garcia David F. Garcia’s Listening for Africa: Freedom, Modernity, and the Logic of Black Music’s African Origins offers a thorough, though not exhaustive, examination of the study of Black American music and dance’s African origins from 1930 through 1950. Garcia examines the trajectory of Black music’s study, beginning with one of its earliest scholars, Melville Herskovits, his pupils, and peers. These historical studies are balanced by heavy theoretical and philosophical analyses. Ultimately, Garcia demonstrates that researching within a pre-established historical context is limiting and can easily produce biased results based on the ill-conceived notions present in the contexts of the studies’ subjects. Listening for Africa is aptly named and quite literally traces the study of the origins of Black American music to Africa, focusing intently on its academic study and performance. Special attention is paid to the [End Page 267] historical context that affected, limited, or intensified the researchers’ and performers’ work, including Jim Crow, WWII, integration, and the Cold War. The first three chapters, and a significant portion of the fourth, follow Herskovitz’s research closely, including his students and peers like Katherine Dunham and Mieczyslaw Kolinski. A significant portion of this addresses Herskovitz’s recordings of native Black music in Central and South America, the analyses and transcription of them, and the challenge to place them academically. In the final two chapters, Garcia breaks away from the academic study of Black music, focusing instead on performance during that time period, namely by Duke Ellington and Dámaso Pérez Prado. The analysis of Ellington focuses specifically on his struggle to compose an appropriate musical suite to represent both Africa and America for the celebration of Liberia’s centennial. Chapter five switches gears again, this time focusing on Mambo and its most famous dancer, Pérez Prado. Mambo occupied a specific place in dance and music culture in the Americas and faced significant challenges by conservative values, integration, and the popularity of a Black art form. One of the unique aspects of Listening for Africa is the plethora of research methods and sources that Garcia employs. Initially, one might presume that the text is mainly historical, musicological, or ethnomusicological, based on the detailed descriptions of histories, ethnographies, and the music, including music-theoretical analyses. With the addition of critical race theory, firsthand correspondences, and the in-depth analyses of photographs and charts, however, the book solidly holds its own as a historical and sociological text. Garcia balances these elements with what can often feel like overwhelmingly technical discussions of philosophy; each case is contextualized with Sartre, Hegel, Comte, Bourdieu’s Habitus, Gestalt Psychology, and theories of modernism, providing readers with more information about the researchers, their work, and the cultural forces that impacted it. The narrative element of the work, however, is deeply engaging, so much so that readers may identify with the subjects, glossing over the philosophy and history to find out what happens next to Dunham in her pursuits in academia and dance as a Black woman, or Kolinski as he flees Nazi Europe. Overall, the narrative element seems to win, at least for me, further solidifying its place as a teaching text, demonstrating the many ways in which Africa’s presence in American popular music was experienced, sought, and performed. The analyses of these key figures are only part of what makes Listening for Africa an outlier among other analyses of African influences on music. As their stories assist the book’s flow, Garcia [End Page 268] analyzes specific pieces using music theory to legitimize his argument further. These analyses, in addition to the deeply rooted philosophical analysis and the narrative aspects, create a work that is methodologically unique in ethnomusicological, philosophical, and Black music studies literature. Further evidence of the book’s all-encompassing nature are the seemingly endless details used: examples include the specific medium that field recordings were taken on, by whom the equipment was lent...