The New African Diaspora, the Built Environment and the Past in Jazz

Abstract

This paper examines the past in music metaphorized as the “spirit within you” in the jazz composition and performance of Cape Town-born, New York-based jazz singer, Sathima Bea Benjamin. This “spirit within you” encompasses a particular approach to jazz that invokes both a personal past and collective memory of bygone eras of popular music and jazz performance that are freshly conceived by a woman living in the new African diaspora. The “spirit” contained in, and then emerging from, the body suggests that the past in music is relevant for the present, invoking the idea of living history, a usable past that continues into the present through reiteration in contemporary jazz performance. This view is contrasted with the idea of the past conceptualized in the older African diaspora as “cultural memory” and the past in jazz as contained on the recorded object, and the conventional ways in which jazz history has been narrated. With these contrasts in mind, I compare jazz performance as a particular kind of lived experience, or “walking in the city” (de Certeau), with jazz historiography, considered as a panoptical view of the city/jazz from above. I argue that representations of the past in jazz might benefit from greater dialogue between these two perspectives by introducing the notion of a usable past or living history – a way of thinking about jazz performance that characterizes a new African diasporic sensibility in jazz performance.