African American Jazz Musicians Research Articles

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

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

Contributors to This Issue

Other| June 01 2022 Contributors to This Issue Jazz and Culture (2022) 5 (1): 116–118. https://doi.org/10.5406/25784773.5.1.11 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Contributors to This Issue. Jazz and Culture 1 January 2022; 5 (1): 116–118. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/25784773.5.1.11 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 PressJazz and Culture Search Advanced Search CISCO BRADLEY is associate professor of history at the Pratt Institute. He has published widely and is the author of two books, the most recent of which is Universal Tonality: The Life and Music of William Parker (Duke University Press, 2021). He is the founder of the Free Jazz Oral History Project that has recorded more than 120 interviews since 2016. He is also the editor of www.jazzrightnow.com, where he has published hundreds of interviews and music reviews since 2013. His current research focuses on music and migration in the United States and Africa.RASHIDA K. BRAGGS is an associate professor in Africana studies and affiliate faculty in comparative literature at Williams College. Her book Jazz Diasporas: Race, Music and Migration in Post-World War II Paris investigates the migratory experiences of African American jazz musicians in 1946–1963 Paris. Her work has been published in such journals as the Black... You do not currently have access to this content.

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

Jazz provided the soundtrack for Chinese modernity. To be modern in the Republican era (1919–1949) China, specifically in treaty port cities such as Shanghai, meant listening and dancing to American jazz music. It also engendered and embodied an alternative, nontraditional social space for the interaction of multiracial groups centered-around improvisational music. Mediated through African American jazz music, musicians from around the world collaborated, learned, listened, and played jazz in China. Whether the music heard originated directly from Black musicians themselves or entered the Shanghai soundscape through movies, radio, or the play of white or Asian musicians, the imprint of music created by Black creatives was ever-present. This paper addresses the understudied topic of Black musicians and entertainers in Shanghai during the Republican era. African American jazz musicians and their Black musical aesthetics and traditions engendered and became constitutive of Chinese modernity. This paper argues that the Black cultural production of jazz musicians not only helped fuel the cultural industry of Jazz Age Shanghai, it created alternative social spaces for the practice of a global internationalism and cosmopolitanism, and extended the Black Radical Tradition to Asia. The ubiquity of African Americans in Shanghai also exposed a manifestation of Chinese anti-Blackness from both Chinese Nationalists and Communists elements that would reveal racial fissures that would negatively impact the latter’s relationship with Blackness at the inception of the Sino-Black solidarity movement from the 1930s onward to its collapse in the 1970s.

Lift Every Voice and Swing: Black Musicians and Religious Culture in the Jazz Century by Vaughn A. Booker

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...

Skunder Boghossian: A Brief Introduction to the Man and the Artist

Skunder BoghossianA Brief Introduction to the Man and the Artist Elizabeth W. Giorgis (bio) Perhaps one could say that everything about Skunder’s life—the sizzling of his ideas or the over intensity of his artistic talent—is surreal and at times hard to imagine. I remember the evening in September 1996, when I was first introduced to him. I had expressed my intent to write an article on him when he told me to come back to his studio/workspace in Washington, DC, the following day. We met the following day with all intentions on my part to talk about his work. Instead, he gave me a bulk of videos, tapes, and books of Ethiopian history, of African American comedians of the 1970s, and of speeches of civil rights activists that I thought at first were totally inappropriate. He engaged me in unfamiliar, peculiar, and riddled conversations such as the Chalcedonian and Monophysite doctrine of the Orthodox Church. This doctrine, I later learnt, was a debate between two ideologies on questions of whether Christ’s nature remains altogether divine and not human even though he has taken on an earthly and human body with its cycle of birth, life, and death. Of course, I was puzzled by all these overtures at first, but then I realized that it was as if he wanted me to see the metaphor of his work, and rightly so, as the paintings of Skunder Boghossian are deeply expressive in a spiritual way where art is more than a language spoken. It is metaphysics, a critical study, or yet again a systematic view of Skunder’s own natural environment. The Chalcedonian and Monophysite discussion was to show me the interconnectedness of cultures as Monophysites, I found out, were the ones that trekked down from the Near and Middle East to the region of what is now called Ethiopia. And through my friendship with Skunder that began in September 1996, and lasted until his death in 2003, I found his artistic brilliance and passionate overtures connote a certain reality but always within a universal concept of ingrained myths, symbols, and allegories unique to people of color. Skunder was born in Addis Ababa in 1937, to an influential father of Armenian descent and an Ethiopian mother. His training in art informally began at the then Teferi Mekonnen School. It was while he was a student at Teferi Mekonnen that he also met Larry Erskine, an African American neighbor who introduced him to the Voice of America jazz program that used to be relayed to Addis Ababa from Tangier. And ever since then, music, and particularly jazz, has molded and formed the colors and shapes of his canvas. In 1955, at the age of seventeen, Skunder won second prize in abstract art at the National Art Exhibition held for the Jubilee Anniversary Celebration of Emperor Haile Selassie. Following this success, he was awarded a scholarship to study abroad. He studied at the St. Martin’s School of Art and [End Page 10] Central School in London, the Academie de la Grand Chaumiere (1954–1956), and the Ecole Superieure des Beaux Arts in Paris (1957–1966). His upbringing in jazz took root in Paris where the best of African American jazz musicians had flocked. He knew them all: Bud Powell, Lester Young, Sonny Rollins, famed jazz musicians and the visual and aural particulars of the Paris jazz world. Pretending to be an assistant, he told me, he carried the saxophone of Sonny Rollins so as to get a front seat during Rollins’s performances, and had a part in Louis Armstrong’s 1961 movie Paris Blues. His fascinating presence amongst these jazz giants informed his exquisite knowledge in music. It was also in Paris that he met Andre Breton, the savant of the surrealist movement, who frequently came to the Grand Chaumiere and who conducted informal seminars that Skunder habitually attended. The South African artist Gerard Skoto, who Boghossian had also befriended in Paris, introduced him to the great Cuban painter Wilfredo Lam in 1959, at the Second International Congress of Negro Writers in Rome. It was then that Skunder became closely acquainted with pioneers of the liberation...

Performing, Representing, and Archiving Belief: Religious Expressions among Jazz Musicians

The archives of African American jazz musicians demonstrate rich sites for studying expressions of religious belief and daily religious practice in public and private arenas, in professional and personal capacities. Highlighting print material from the archives of Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington (1899–1974) and Mary Lou Williams (1910–1981), this article examines the ways that these musicians worked to articulate their beliefs in print and to make meaning of their routine practices. Ellington and Williams produced written records of their aspirations for non-clerical religious authority and leadership, novel notions of religious community, and conceptions of quotidian writing tasks as practices with devotional value in the middle decades of the twentieth century. In preparation for his Sacred Concert tours of American and Western European religious congregations, Ellington theologized about the nature of God and the proper language to address God through private hotel stationery. Following her conversion to Roman Catholicism, Williams managed a Harlem thrift shop and worked to create the Bel Canto Foundation for musicians struggling with substance abuse and unemployment. This study of the religious subjectivity of African Americans with status as race representatives employs archival historical methods in the effort to vividly approximate complex religious interiority.

West African Drumming and Dance in North American Universities: An Ethnomusicological Perspective by George Worlasi Kwasi Dor (review)

West African Drumming and Dance in North American Universities: An Ethnomusicological Perspective. By George Worlasi Kwasi Dor. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2014. [304 p. ISBN 9781617039140 (hardcover), $60; ISBN 9781496802583 (paperback), $30.] Illustrations, appendices, glossary, bibliography, index. This 300-page book was written by a Ghanaian musicologist who for many years has directed the University of Mississippi's Ole Miss African Drum and Dance Ensemble. He examines the growth of West African drumming in North American universities since the 1960s (which began in 1964 at UCLA and Columbia University). These programs were followed by Wesleyan, Berkeley, Toronto, and Tufts Universities, and drumming is now taught in approximately forty American and Canadian universities that host liberal arts, music and dance, African studies and world music programs. Dor supplies a useful table of the first such seventeen university units (p. 45). Dor first examines the reasons for the suppression of African drumming in the Americas during the era of slavery, including the Christian (and particularly Protestant) hostility to African drumming and culture in North America; however, slaves were able to perform African-influenced music within their independent black churches, with their spirituals, ring dances, and pats, in which African drum rhythms were transferred from drums to hand claps. Despite the abolition of slavery in the U.S.A. in 1865, in the Post-Reconstruction Jim Crow era with its accompanying scientific racism, the negative attitude to African performance as backwards, savage, and primitive continued to exist. Nevertheless, there was a growing interest in traditional African performance from the 1930s, reflected by six key personalities whom Dor discusses. The first was the Sierra Leonean Asadata Dafora Horton, who studied art music and opera in Europe and then in 1930 formed his Federal Theatre African Dance Troupe in Harlem. He was followed by the African American dancer Katherine Mary Dunham, who studied anthropology at the University of Chicago, researched Caribbean voudoun (voodoo) dance, became the first black choreographer for the Metropolitan Opera, and set up her own Ballet Negres in the 1940s. Pearl Primus was a dancer and choreographer from Trinidad who was born into a Santeria family and studied anthropology at New York University. She carried out ethnographic research in West and Central Africa, and her first dance production was in 1943. Dor mentions three West Africans who became important for the African drum culture in the U.S. during the 1950s and 1960s. One is the Ghanaian percussionist Guy Warren (Kofi Ghanaba), who in 1957 released the first of his several African jazz albums and worked with African American jazz musicians Max Roach and Thelonius Monk. Likewise, in the 1950s, the Nigerian drummer Michael Babatunde Olatunji set up a college African drumming group in the United States; he later released records including Drums of Passion and worked with John Coltrane and Art Blakey. The sixth pioneering figure is the djembe drummer Ladji Kamara, who came to the States in the 1960s with the Ballets Africain (of the newly-independent Guinea) and became the father of the American djembe movement. Besides the roles of these six figures, Dor offers four other reason for the acceptance of African drumming in the American academy, the first being the role of African and Africanist scholars who from the 1950s and 1960s onward reassessed the importance of African culture and music: John Blacking, David McAllister, Mantle Hood, and A. M. Jones; and the West Africans, J. H. Kwabena Nketia, Akin Euba, and Chiekh Anta Diop. Secondly, there was the impact of West African independence that resulted in Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah and Guinea's Sekou Toure establishing touring drum and dance performance groups like Les Ballets Africain and the Ghana Dance Ensemble (set up in 1962 by Kwabena Nketia and Albert Mawere Opoku). …

"A New Kind of Music": Jazz Improvisation and the Diasporic Dissonance of Paule Marshall's The Fisher King

Paule Marshall’s novel The Fisher King (2000) revisits a familiar site for readers of her fiction: the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant, familiarly known as Bed-Stuy. The primary events of The Fisher King take place in this historic African diasporic neighborhood during the spring of 1984; however, the retrospective plot that underlies these events encompasses an expansive black Atlantic geography of migration from the US South and the Caribbean to New York in the early twentieth century and from New York to Paris in the postwar years. What connects the characters who make these journeys is also what divides them: the life story of a jazz musician, the Caribbean American pianist Sonny-Rett Payne, whose rise and fall evokes legendary narratives of mid-century African American jazz musicians. Beginning in Bed-Stuy, continuing in Kansas City during World War II, and returning to establish his reputation in Brooklyn and then the Manhattan clubs where bebop came into being, SonnyRett eventually migrates to Paris, where his career continues to ascend, only to come crashing down during the 1960s. In its narrative structure as well as its plot, The Fisher King is at once an homage to and inventive revision of earlier African American narratives that feature jazz musicians as protagonists. Narrated through the dialogic interplay of the novel’s multiple voices and memories, Sonny-Rett’s life story evokes the tension between the individual and collective expression associated with jazz performance. His trajectory as a musician recalls previous African American jazz narratives, especially those inspired by Charlie Parker, from James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” (1957) to John Williams’s Night Song (1961) and William Melvin Kelley’s A Drop of Patience (1965). Like these narratives and other renowned African American jazz novels, from James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912) through Toni Morrison’s Jazz (1992), The Fisher King dramatizes the historical impact of jazz through its narrative adaptation of specific jazz performance practices, most notably improvisation. The Fisher King features dramatic scenes of jazz improvisation, and, like the process in which Sonny-Rett transforms popular

"Myriad Subtleties": Subverting Racism through Irony in the Music of Duke Ellington and Dizzy Gillespie

In his autobiography, Dizzy Gillespie recognizes the impact racism had on his youthful behavior and acknowledges his misreading of Louis Armstrong's minstrelsy-influenced performance style: Hell, I had my own way of Tomming. Every generation of blacks since slavery has had to develop its own way of of accommodating itself to basically unjust situation. ... Later on, I began to recognize what I had considered Pops's [Armstrong's] grinning in the face of racism as his absolute refusal to let anything, even anger about racism, steal the joy from his life and erase his fantastic smile (2009, 296). Since jazz, from its origins in the early 1900s in New Orleans, was increasingly performed by black musicians for white audiences, African-American jazz musicians have often been focal point for racial conflict in the United States, especially during the first half of the twentieth century. As Gillespie suggests, black musicians frequently dealt with racial prejudice by relying on strategies derived from African-American culture, in particular signifying, which includes variety of rhetorical strategies including indirection, irony, and verbal disjunction. Tomming, reference to the eponymous character from Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin ([1852] 1982), is generally used pejoratively to criticize blacks who apparently ingratiate themselves with white society by unctuous and exaggerated servility; however, this persona might equally be regarded as form of signifyin(g), or more specifically, indirection or masking that facilitates ironic subversion. Although the guise it took in jazz performance changed from apparent submission to feigned aggression, signifying often characterized black dealings with the dominant white culture both in slavery and during the 1940s when the social changes that occurred in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century gradually began to mitigate the racist oppression African Americans had suffered for several centuries. Critical Approach The primary focus of this discussion is on the gradual decline in irony used in jazz during the first half of the twentieth century as political (Gates 1988, 45) and satiric tool to attack the ideology of white supremacy. During this period, the parodic revisioning of the various elements that constitute jazz performance (e.g., musical narrativity, costume, gesture, and language), which has been seminal characteristic of jazz since its inception, gradually achieved greater expression and became significant factor in the emergence of bebop. A discussion of this nature is problematized by the complexity of irony and the related genres of satire and parody, the still relatively opaque nature of musical meaning, and the difficulty of tracking microlevel social change. Irony, as Linda Hutcheon argues, is a discursive strategy operating at the level of language (verbal) or form (musical, visual, textual) (1994, 10). It also involves, according to Margaret Rose, a statement of an ambiguous character, which includes containing at least two messages, one of which is the concealed message of the ironist to an 'initiated' audience, and the other the more readily perceived but 'ironically meant' message of the code (1993, 87). Thus, there are several key elements that must be in place for ironic communication to take place: (1) the social context in which the irony occurs; (2) the decoders or interpreters whose comprehension of the ironic message is often based on community of understanding they share with the encoder that excludes those who don't grasp the ironic meaning; (3) the encoders or ironists who perceive ironic incongruity and fashion message reflecting that insight; and (4) the message itself, which can be transmitted in performance by various means. Irony, moreover, is foundational to both satire, which aims at correcting social or extramural ills, and parody, which focuses on the form of discourse or the intramural. …

Dig: Sound and Music in Hip Culture by Phil Ford (review)

Reviewed by: Dig: Sound and Music in Hip Culture by Phil Ford Joseph R. Matson Dig: Sound and Music in Hip Culture. By Phil Ford . New York : Oxford University Press , 2013 . [ xii, 336 p. ISBN 9780199939916 . $29.95 .] Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, index. Phil Ford’s Dig: Sound and Music in Hip Culture is both brilliant and challenging. Ford could almost be describing his own book when he writes about Thelonious Monk’s rendition of “I Should Care,” “We know it is supposed to mean something, but on first hearing we know just as surely that we do not know what” (pp. 75–76). Summarizing the book is tricky because the arguments spill from one chapter into the next, and many riddles are left unsolved. (To paraphrase the group Tower of Power: What is hip? Hipness is what it is, and sometimes hipness is what it ain’t.) Music is an important presence throughout the work, including long sections of analysis of music by such artists as Thelonious Monk and Miles Davis (pp. 67–76), but it is more a study of counterculture than a study of music. Although chapter 2 begins in the 1930s, most of the action takes place between the 1940s and the 1960s, in Cold War America. The subjects of Ford’s research include some of the highest profile artists of the period—Bob Dylan, Miles Davis, Jack Kerouac—as well as much lesser-known figures, most notably John Benson Brooks, the jazz artist who serves as the focus of the book’s final chapter. In the introduction and first chapter, Ford lays the intellectual framework for the [End Page 297] rest of the book. Because hip style is constantly changing, it is difficult to define or theorize, and because hipness is fundamentally resistant to squareness, writing a book about hipness may seem antithetical (pp. 3–4). Yet Ford has plenty to say, as did the artists he quotes throughout the book. Much of the first chapter connects hipness to Zen Buddhism, a practice that interested many mid-century hipsters. (See especially Ford’s list of seven points of contact between Zen and hipness on pp. 29–32.) The remaining chapters are arranged in roughly chronological order with some overlap, and “collectively they narrate the history of a change in how Americans understood themselves from the 1940s through the 1960s” (p. 17). Chapter 2 recounts hip styles of the 1930s and early 1940s, especially among African American jazz musicians. In chapter 3, hipness gets co-opted by Beat poets, who were most often white and, although many were ardent fans of music, not accomplished musicians. Here the stakes seem especially high because of the almost mythic aura surrounding the Beats and their connection to hipness. Hipness then explodes from small pockets of counterculture into mainstream America, the part of the history chronicled in chapter 4, including a wide stylistic swath from Charlie Parker to Bob Dylan. Even a figure as square as Vladimir Horowitz attempts to don a mantle of hipness, or at least that is how his record label clothes him (“Vladimir Horowitz is hung up on Chopin,” quoted on p. 109.) Norman Mailer’s essay “The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster” (in The White Negro [San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1957]) plays a minor role throughout the book, but it steps into the spotlight in chapter 5. Ford methodically reconstructs Mailer’s creative process to show not only how Mailer’s ideas developed over time but also how concerned he was with the sound of those ideas. Ford concludes, “Even though Mailer’s writing leaves the impression of improvisation, it does so through a carefully calculated and painstakingly crafted rhetoric of spontaneity” (p. 170). Like chapter 5, chapter 6 focuses on a single figure, this time John Benson Brooks. “[Brooks] knew almost everyone you’ve ever heard of in the postwar New York jazz scene while remaining relatively unknown himself. . . . Brooks had a Zelig-like habit of appearing off in the corner of now-legendary historical tableaux” (p. 180). He had a brief career as a jazz performer and composer, but Ford focuses especially on his final album, Avant Slant (Decca [1968...

‘THEY TREAT US WHITE FOLKS FINE’

Arriving in India in the mid‐1930s seeking performance opportunities and an improved quality of life, African American jazz musicians were active in expanding the presentation and consumption of jazz and Western popular music. Finding appeal in the power and success that African American musicians commanded, Anglo‐Indian and Goan musicians also performed jazz in cosmopolitan centres throughout India. In Bombay, Goan musicians integrated Western popular music into local live performances in cabarets, and eventually into some early film songs. This article outlines the role of African American musicians in increasing the terrain of Western popular music in India beginning in the 1930s, and concludes by speculating on the artists' influence on early Bombay cabaret songs and the ‘hybrid’ music of the early film industry.

Early Musical Development of Selected African American Jazz Musicians in Indianapolis in the 1930s and 1940s

I propose, by way of definition that creativity is the reaction of the human spirit to the variety of its experiences; a reaction expressed through forms and structures (which may be tonal, verbal, written, visual or physical).... Significantly the creative fruit is determined by, and is as unique as, the intensity of the experiences and the quality of the response. --Mari Evans (1) Introduction Indianapolis, a city of approximately 365,000 in 1930, was home to nearly 45,000 African Americans who lived, worked, worshipped, and learned in a close-knit segregated community. For these citizens, it was a city of contradictions. Members of the Ku Klux Klan dominated positions of power in city and state government, (2) racial tension was high, and neighborhoods, parks, businesses, and schools were segregated. Yet a spirit of hope and optimism prevailed in the African American community. Indianapolis poet Mari Evans wrote, Black folk were firmly convinced that with hard work and a 'good' disposition the future was theirs for the taking. (3) As was the case in many other Northern cities, the growing African American community in Indianapolis was a result, in part, of the Migration, which Peretti defined as both the physical movement of blacks from plantations to Northern cities after 1900 and the intellectual and cultural adventurousness to which this movement gave rise. He proposed that the Great Migration profoundly altered the values, daily goals, and self-expression of blacks. (4) Music was an integral part of the lives of many African Americans--in their homes, schools, and churches. Centrally located with ready access to train and air travel, Indianapolis was a frequent stop for vaudeville acts, traveling shows, and nationally famous musicians and bands. The city offered a particularly rich musical environment for those who were interested, and many were interested. Musicians who have since distinguished themselves in the field of jazz, such as David Baker, Erroll Grandy, Slide Hampton, Freddie Hubbard, J.J. Johnson, Virgil Jones, Wes Montgomery, Larry Ridley, Melvin Rhyne, and Jimmy Spaulding, are among those whose early musical development took place in Indianapolis. What variety of experiences coalesced for these young African Americans in Indianapolis in the 1930s and 1940s and came to creative fruition through the form and structure of jazz? How did they acquire the necessary technical skills and musical knowledge? What factors contributed to their early musical development? Methodology Interviews were conducted with ten African American jazz musicians who developed musically in Indianapolis in the 1930s and 1940s. Previous research studies; transcripts of interviews; biographies of musicians; primary sources such as public records and archives from city government and public schools; and ethnographic, sociological, and historical writings provided data which complemented and corroborated information from the interviews and also supplied contextual information. Themes To illuminate the events and practices contributing to the development of young African American jazz musicians in Indianapolis in the 1930s and 1940s, the results of this investigation have been categorized into three overarching themes: formal music education, informal music education, and the contributing political, social, and cultural environment. Formal music study through the public schools, as well as private instruction by individuals and institutions, provided young players with technical skills and a strong musical knowledge base. Informal music education, which occurred through exposure to musical families, participation in jam sessions and big bands, and access to radio, recordings, and live performances, offered a highly charged creative environment for experimentation. The social, political, and cultural conditions that existed in Indianapolis for young African Americans supported the growth of jazz and jazz musicians. …

Cultural Politics: The African American Connection in Asian American Jazz-based Music

The incipient period of Asian American jazz-based music is a compelling site for studying the African American influence on Asian American politics and culture more broadly in the 1970s and 1980s. The cultural politics of Asian American musician-composers on both the east and west coasts present a view of this Afro-Asian connection. In particular, Asian American jazz-based music in the 1970s and 1980s demonstrates the strong pull both politically and musically of Black Nationalism and its attendant art form, Free Jazz, at a time when Asian Americans were beginning a process of reinventing themselves. The early music of Glenn Horiuchi and Mark Izu of the San Francisco Bay Area's Asian Improv Arts Collective and New York musician-composer Fred Ho narrate the rise of a politicized music. All three artists, well known within the Asian American music world, share a sociopolitical stance, a penchant for improvisation, and an approach that explores the nuances of traditional Asian music. The political viewpoints and performative practices of African American jazz musicians in the 1960s did initially inspire and shape Asian American politics and creative music, but starting in the late 1970s into the 1980s a number of musician-composers began to chart new musical territory that embodied their own political and cultural consciousness. Asian Americans identified with jazz because it served as a collective voice of urban African American communi-

Between Resistance and Revolution: Cultural Politics and Social Protest

Between Resistance and Revolution: Cultural Politics and Social Protest. RICHARD FOX and ORIN STARN. eds. New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997; 279 pp. This volume offers a wide range of case studies and theoretical discussions of the politics of betweenness - the and political space between violent revolution and everyday resistance. With the decline of revolutionary movements and the travails of post-revolutionary societies such as Cuba and Ethiopia, members of marginalized groups have engaged in yet do not seek the total overthrow of the social order (p. 3). Under the auspices of the Guggenheim Foundation, the volume editors, Richard Fox and Orin Starn, brought together scholars from a variety of disciplines to foster dialogue about the midways of mobilization among diverse movements - from environmental movements in India to indigenous media in Australia and peasant in Peru. Among the themes that the volume explores are the politics of (re)membering past social protest, the engagement of movements with new technologies such as video production and biotechnical-based conservation, and the articulations of the local and the global. The concepts that provide a theoretical umbrella for the volume, betweenness and cultural politics, are offered not to generate static models of but rather as points of departure for understanding how cultural representations play a pivotal role in the formation and maintenance of social protest (p. 6). Under this umbrella fit a variety of approaches and emphases that do not necessarily adhere to more traditional notions of social movements based on protests and demand-making. For example, Yoshinobu Ota, in his contribution Appropriating Media, Resisting Power: Representations of Hybrid Identities in Okinawan Popular Culture, focuses on how island activists through theater and television integrate elements of U.S., Japanese, and Okinawan cultures to articulate a new sense of identity. The ethnomusicologist Ingrid Monson, in her contribution Abbey Lincoln's Straight Ahead: Jazz in the Era of the Civil Rights Movement, shows how AfricanAmerican Jazz musicians challenged racism through their music and struggles for control over clubs and record companies. In both cases struggles over identity and culture influence and are conditioned by wider struggles (such as the civil rights movement in the case discussed by Monson). These cases highlight the complex interaction between social and the production of alternative versions of identity and history. As Fox and Starn note in their introduction to the volume, these interactions must be understood in terms of specific historical and intersections - neither popular culture nor music are necessarily implicated in social protest. The editors view culture as a creative process that gets made into (usually temporary and short-lived) structure as people become conscious and learn to cope with historical events (p. 8). The contributions to the volume that focus on how activists have (re)interpreted the histories of in their countries are especially relevant for this project. In articles on Peru, Korea, and Brazil contributors show how the meanings associated with revolution and in the 1980s are a major element of how members of activist groups have (re)imagined social in the 1990s. Orin Stam, in his article Villagers at Arms: War and Counterrevolution in Peru's Andes, describes how members of peasant groups organized against the Shining Path. While the Peruvian army supported these groups, Starn convincingly argues that Andean peasants did not act as military pawns but rather had their own agenda in rejecting the Shining Path's violence and attempts to limit participation in regional markets. Starn emphasizes that the reasons that peasants engaged in counter-revolution are complex and varied as are their hopes for a better future. …

The March on Washington, At Home and Abroad

On August 28, 1963, as participants in the historic March on Washington made their way to the Lincoln Memorial, individuals in several countries around the world took to the streets and marched in support. U.S. citizens abroad and citizens of other nations, some with ties to the U.S. civil rights movement and many without, thousands marched to show their solidarity with those demonstrating in Washington. March on Washington activities in Europe were in large part due to the efforts of James Baldwin and other African Americans in Paris. Baldwin called a meeting at a Paris nightclub that ultimately led to a petition drive that quickly spread all over Europe. Hoping to support the civil rights movement although living in Paris, African American jazz musicians, actors and others circulated a petition in the international editions of U.S. papers. In Paris, one week before the Washington March, they held a walk to the U.S. Embassy, and over 560 people deposited petitions in support of the March. That same day, U.S. citizens and others called upon U.S. diplomatic posts in other European cities, registering their support for the March. The focus on U.S. diplomatic posts was not simply due to the fact that these were U.S. government offices abroad. It was also due to the fact that these activists believed that race discrimination harmed U.S. foreign affairs, and they hoped that the international impact of the civil rights movement would spur change at home. Apparently unrelated to these efforts, and uncoordinated with each other, on the date of the March on Washington, the Mayor of Kingston, Jamaica led a march of 2500 in that city. 1200 to 1400 marched on the U.S. Consulate in Amsterdam. In Oslo, Norway, one hundred people marched through heavy rain to present a petition to the U.S. Embassy. Demonstrators with picket signs protested at the U.S. Embassy in Ghana. The Nassar government ensured that no large demonstration would take place in Cairo, Egypt. Hundreds of police officers were stationed in the city early in the morning, and they stopped all but two of the thirteen marchers willing to face this police presence from approaching the U.S. Embassy. These actions pleased U.S. government representatives. As an Embassy officer put it, the government's handling of this protest was in line with the assurances to the Embassy. The U.S. government reacted to the March on Washington by trying to affect the message projected by the marchers, and the way that message was perceived overseas. Efforts to manage the international impact of the March were consistent with broader U.S. efforts during the cold war to turn the story of race in America into a story of the superiority of democracy as a system of government. Accordingly, through efforts to influence the content of speeches, and a pre- and post-March propaganda campaign, the Administration did its best to cast the March as a story about democratic political participation, rather than as a critique of government inaction on civil rights.

From Jazz to Swing: African-American Jazz Musicians and Their Music, 1890-1935

From Jazz to Swing: African-American Jazz Musicians and Their Music, 1890-1935

From Jazz to Swing: African-American Jazz Musicians and Their Music, 1890- 1935.

From Jazz to Swing: African-American Jazz Musicians and Their Music, 1890- 1935.

From jazz to swing: African-American jazz musicians and their music, 1890-1935

In the 1920s, many black regional jazz bands were recorded and became products of the entertainment industry, which was altering the face of America from the handmade, homemade, homemade society of the ninteenth century to the mass-produced, mass-consumed technological culture of the twentieth century. Making use of the files of African American newspapers, such as the Chicago Defender, as well as published and archival oral history interviews, Hennessey explores the contradictions that musicians often faced as African Americans, as trained professional musicians, and as the products of differing regional experiences. From Jazz to Swing follows jazz from its beginnings in the regional black musics of the turn of the century in New Orleans, Chicago, New York, and the territories that make up the rest of the country.