Black Musicians Research Articles

Bridging South America and the United States in Black Music Research

Just as the idea of a as a symbolic construction of general is politically problematic, the concept of musical boundaries and borders within it is equally perplexing. Latin-American scholars have insisted on setting boundaries of musical traditions according to the existing social stratification at a given time and space. Most have perceived those traditions in a four-part model of stratification: primitive traditional indigenous communities, folk-rural-peasant groups, urban popular mestizo groups, and dominating elite urban groups. The basic difficulties with such a criterion of classification are that stratification is not fixed and stable and that sociocultural or ethnic can vary considerably in time and space, according to the various contexts in which it is negotiated and for what specific purposes. Boundaries and borders are clearly related to the question of and must be rethought with special attention to the various factors that contributed to forge an old or contemporary (Behague 2000). Actually, we must recognize as did Richard Morse, that the word keeps losing its edge and thus needs to be resharpened periodically. He writes, identity is not 'national character' as diagnosed by detached socio-psychiatry but collective awareness of historic vocation. Identity starts with tacit self-recognition (Morse 1995, 1). What seems particularly relevant, therefore, is the articulation of the relationship between music and the various contexts of (self-recognition) construction. In an earlier essay (Behague 1982), I called attention to the dubious benefit of previous searches for origins in Latin-American and Caribbean musical expressions in relation to the configuration of contemporary societies. I warned then that the general tendency in Europe and North America of viewing Latin America as a monolithic cultural area has often resulted in naive, simplistic, and reductionist generalizations about the traditional musics of Latin America, particularly in the writings of non-Latin-Americans. The actual diversity of the musics of the Latin-American continent has become clearer since the 1960s as a result of more field research being carried out by more scholars from Latin America, Europe, and North America. To day we have not, however, accumulated enough empiric knowledge of the vast music corpora of the continent to allow meaningful and comprehensive cross-cultural comparisons among music cultures that share a common ethnohistory but have developed different cultural expressions, as, for example, in the case of Afro-Caribbean communities of Cuba and Haiti and those of western Colombia and northeastern Brazil. I also argued at that time that the significance of the prominent social stratification that typifies Latin America's social organization elucidates to a large extent the musical expressions that function as class symbols. I asserted that stratification provides the keystone for accounting for the various musical and performative practices to be found in both rural and urban areas of the continent, assuming that the stratification is contextualized in very specific terms (time and space). Hence, the ways in which we have classified the musical traditions of the area need further reflection. The question becomes exponentially more intricate in attempting to bridge Latin American and U.S. black musical boundaries and traditions. In 1998, when Samuel Floyd approached me with very topic, my immediate response was that such a topic had never been dealt with before, to which he responded: this is the reason, of course, that we want to address it. And furthermore, the idea of a session on Traversing Musical Boundaries in Research and Writing was precisely to encourage a bridging of the Latin-American-Caribbean-U.S. connections, as well as a bridging of the geographical boundaries that plague black music scholarship and inhibit our knowledge of those connections. …

New Orleans: Area Musicians on the West Coast, 1908-1925

Although the basic pattern of development of jazz up to 1940 is articulated in terms of regions (the Midwest, the Southwest) and cities (New York, Chicago, New Orleans, Kansas City), only one of those locales has been studied in any detail. Many amateur, semiprofessional, and professional researchers have investigated and written about the music of New Orleans. There is but one book-length study on New York, now over twenty years old (Charters and Kunstadt 1962), and one on Kansas City and its region (Russell 1982). (1) There is no substantial study of Chicago and not even a respectable number of essays, although of course a great deal of jazz biography necessarily deals with musicians originating there or importantly active in the city. Finally, there is no major study devoted to that sizable part of the country west of the Rocky Mountains. The recent book compiled by Tom Stoddard, Jazz on the Barbary Coast (1982), defines its subject by time, place, and ethnicity somewhat narrowly but is nonetheless useful and interesting for that part of the California story involving black musicians in San Francisco and Oakland. Among the stories that we have been accustomed to tell using this geographical approach is the dissemination of southern dance music and performing styles, particularly those developed in New Orleans, to the rest of the country. We think of Chicago as especially favored in this respect, since a cadre of some three dozen, mostly black, New Orleans musicians was well-established there between approximately 1918 and 1928. They were well-established not only as club, cabaret, and dance hall musicians but also in the recording studios of Okeh, Vocalion, Columbia, Gennett, Paramount, Victor, and a few others. Actually, the bulk of the recording work went to a group somewhat smaller than three dozen. So far as New York City is concerned, for most jazz historians the story of New Orleans musicians there begins and ends with the Original Dixieland Jazz Band and the handful of black New Orleanians who recorded between 1923 and 1925 under the direction of Clarence Williams. This story is long overdue for revision, although it has to be said that the kind of musicianship required to survive in New York did not match the skills of most New Orleans jazz musicians and their way of making music in ensembles. By the end of the decade, however, one big band, that led by pianist Luis Russell, showed that Crescent City musicians could not only survive but even outclass many an eastern band on its home turf. For the last twenty-five or thirty years, an alternative story has frequently been proposed, namely that of the more or less simultaneous origin of jazz in any city where there were significant assemblages of Afro-American instrumentalists. Three problems beset this story (or hypothesis): first, the enormous discrepancy between the amount of knowledge we have of music in New Orleans and in other locales; second, the question of the overlap between ragtime and jazz, perhaps even between ragtime and whatever preceded it; and finally, insufficient knowledge of the travels of New Orleans musicians to cities other than Chicago and New York. Since very little of the voluminous literature of jazz devotes significant attention to what was going on with hot music in the West, it goes without saying that the story of the spread of New Orleans musicians westward has had to be inferred, as it were, from hints scattered here and there through the documentation of the activities of New Orleans musicians. Some of the major reference tools, however, have a bias that renders them of little use for the topic under investigation here. The chief biographical dictionary for New Orleans musicians (Rose and Souchon 1984) either ignores or inadequately reports any musical activities outside of New Orleans of the hundreds of musicians included (although the numerous photographs often testify to them). There is, nonetheless, a story, and one trusts that in due course it will be worked into the tapestry of jazz history. …

The Influences of Hispanic Music Cultures on African-American Blues Musicians

Egalitarian quests for multiculturalism can be offset by the lingering legacy of melting pot ideology. Cultural examinations of ethnicity exemplify this, for they frequently focus on minority-dominant relations, that is, the contributions of an ethnic group to the majority culture. Unless the linear, vertical focus of such scholarship is balanced by greater breadth, our perceptions will remain oversimplified and skewed. Recent work by Portia Maultsby has examined the role that ethnicity plays the between African-Americans and mainstream society and how such interactions affect musical creativity and musical (Maultsby 1993). These broad questions should continue to be addressed, but they also need to be supplemented with queries concerning intersubcultural developments among African-Americans and other ethnic groups apart from the mainstream (see Slobin 1993). This is my perspective in examining the influences of Hispanic cultures on African-American blues musicians. I will argue that social history, blues lyrics, musical evidence, and the life histories of black entertainers reveal that musical interaction between African-American blues musicians and Hispanic musicians has taken place in at least two primary areas: the Texas-Mexico border region, where downhome blues guitarists were influenced by the lifestyle of Mexican street singers and their chordophonic musical traditions; and New Orleans, where Cuban rhythms particularly affected school of blues pianists who developed the New Orleans sound of rhythm and blues. To great extent, however, these Hispanic influences on African-American musicians have been masked by marketing constraints and the zealous efforts of critics and blues revivalists to maintain generic purity and the image of the bluesman. The Blues Musician and Localities In recent article, Samuel A. Floyd Jr. has called for culture-derived to the study of black music, drawn on, among other things, a system of referencing ... from Afro-American folk music (Floyd 1993, 1). With regard to various forms of popular and vernacular music, this admirable goal can be difficult to achieve because emic folk categories, etic analytic categories, and the marketing categories of the industry often blur. Students and critics of popular have most often pursued standout commercial successes within mass cultural contexts, an approach that has been largely determined by the industry. They have accepted commercial mediation and have neglected the realities of living in small places. The result is that accurate portrayals of local cultures, that is, the that performers and audiences have actually shared in small group contexts, are few and far between. Contemporary views of the blues musician illustrate this problem. African-American blues originated in localities, but the directions of its developments and the larger public perception of its identity have been shaped by the commercial forces of popular culture. We often erroneously equate, for instance, performer's repertoire with her or his list of commercially released audio recordings, which in many instances are not representative of an artist's actual inventory of performed song. Thus, as folklorist-ethnomusicologist David Evans (1985, 109) has observed, Mississippi singer Johnny Temple sixty-two issued blues between 1935 and 1949, yet in his live performances in Chicago he could usually be heard playing polkas and Italian for underworld kingpins. Temple's polkas are not on wax, and his case is hardly unique. For marketing and promotional purposes, the industry has conventionally delimited musical styles. Jeff Titon (1977, 55) reports that from the 1920s into the 1940s black musicians who sang blues and hillbilly were rarely recorded performing the latter genre because record companies wanted blues, for blues sold; if they needed hillbilly music, they might as well turn to hillbillies. …

Le jazz : modernité, modernisme, identité

Since the 1910s, jazz has been the soundtrack of modernity. In view of the long and rich history of this art form, the aim of this paper is to study the connections between black musics, cultures and identities that critics such as LeRoi Jones, Ralph Ellison and Paul Gilroy have brought to light. Jazz musicians’ multifaceted and plural status in particular provides an interesting synecdoche of the transatlantic transactions which have been the mainspring of western culture.

Converging Interracial Consequences of Exposure to Violent Rap Music on Stereotypical Attributions of Blacks

The present study explored how media, specifically violent rap music, may influence Blacks’ and Whites’ attribution of Blacks through stereotype priming. When compared to controls and participants exposed to nonviolent Black musicians, those exposed to violent Black musicians reported attributions of a target Black male’s violent behavior that was particularly dispositional relative to attributions of a White male’s violent behavior or to any other condition. The findings also indicated that the impact of exposure to violent rap music generalized to judgments involving other stereotype-related traits (i.e., intelligence) but not to judgments of nonstereotypical traits (i.e., spatial skills).

Play of a fiddle: traditional music, dance, and folklore in West Virginia

Shedding new light on a region that maintains ties to the cultural identities of its earliest European and African inhabitants, Gerald Milnes shows how folk music in West Virginia borrowed rhythmic, melodic, and vocal forms from the Celtic, Anglo, Germanic, and African traditions. These elements have come together to create a body of music tied more to place and circumstance than to ethnicity. Milnes explores the legacies of the state's best-known performers and musical families. He discusses religious music, balladeering, the influence of black musicians and styles, dancing, banjo and dulcimer traditions, and the importance of old-time music as a cultural pillar of West Virginia life.

Monk Meets SNCC

Thelonious Monk--the enigma, the man who could compose with the radio blaring, wore unusual hats, danced around onstage, had periods of acute disconnectedness, and showed particular gifts in mathematics as a high school student--has long been a potent symbol of the jazz musician as artist. Monk's reluctance to verbalize--to interviewers, musicians seeking instruction, and even friends and family members--provides further evidence that music was his true language. Monk spoke the unspeakable through music and took the listener to another level through his utterly original compositions and improvisation.(1) By adopting and cultivating this quintessentially romantic concept of art, bebop musicians in the 1940s demanded that their music be taken seriously. The trappings of art brought dignity and prestige to African-American musicians struggling to overturn the legacy of minstrelsy and its demands for smiling buffoonery. In the context of a racially segregated society, the demand by black musicians of the 1940s to be acknowledged as artists was a rebellious political act.(2) Yet the notion of absolute music to which the romantic aesthetic subscribed held that true art was above politics. Consequently, musicians of the 1940s and 1950s found themselves in the ironic position of actively cultivating the image of the apolitical artist in order to assert the underlying political challenge posed by the obvious excellence of African-American music. This stance was particularly attractive to white intellectuals, bohemians, and progressives who could find common cause with African-American musicians in art. As the Civil Rights movement became a dominating presence in the public consciousness, however, particularly after the year-long Montgomery bus boycott (1955--56), the African-American community increasingly expected black musicians, entertainers, and celebrities to do their part in the struggle. In the midst of the Montgomery boycott, for example, Nat was beaten by whites while performing in Birmingham with a racially mixed band. Instead of earning the support of the African-American press, he was roundly denounced for having agreed to an engagement in a segregated theater. If the ordinary people of Montgomery could walk in protest day after day, they argued, the least someone like Nat could do was to refuse to play for segregated audiences. The idea of art divorced from politics, in other words, was placed under scrutiny by the burgeoning Civil Rights movement (A King Is Uncrowned 1956; Cole Leaves Us 1956).(3) Viewed against the backdrop of bebop's militancy and the battle waged for racial equality in the 1950s and 1960s, Monk's image has been decidedly apolitical. Unlike his contemporaries Max Roach and Charles Mingus, he did not speak out on politics through his words or music. In a well-known interview with Valerie Wilmer (1965, 22), Monk emphasized that he was not particularly interested in politics. I hardly know anything about it.... I never was interested in those Muslims. If you want to know, you should ask Art Blakey. I didn't have to change my name--it's always been weird enough! I haven't done one of those freedom suites, and I don't intend to. I mean, I don't see the point. I'm not thinking that race thing now; it's not on my mind. Everybody's trying to get me to think it, though, but it doesn't bother me. It only bugs the people who're trying to get me to think it. In 1958, Monk emphatically denied a social subtext for his music: My music is not a social comment on discrimination or poverty or the like. I would have written the same way even if I had not been a Negro (quoted in Brown 1958, 45).(4) SNCC's Salute to Southern Students On February 1, 1963, Thelonious Monk nevertheless performed at a gala fund-raising concert at Carnegie Hall for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). …

"The Prong of Love"

Drew Faust's central and important insight is that readers of Gone with the Wind must attend to how representations of race and gender work together. I could not agree with her more. But I also think that she oversimplifies that dynamic by failing to place it firmly in historical context and underestimates the roots of the book's appeal in what Anne Jones, following Zora Neale Hurston, calls, so wonderfully, the prong of love--the racialized myths of heterosexual romance. Faust notes quite rightly that Gone with the Wind, for all of Margaret Mitchell's professed fascination with the Civil War, is very much a book of the 1920s. I would push this point even further. The longing for blackness, the fluidity between black and white positions, which (like Joel Williamson in his essay How Black Was Rhett Butler) Patricia Yaeger so perceptively sees lurking in the novel's images, hidden in plain sight, peaked in the 1920s--the Jazz Age, the era of the Harlem Renaissance, of Flaming Youth. That period was marked by Red scares and race riots, by intense nativism and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan. But it was also a time in which black artists, ranging from the writers of the Harlem Renaissance to the black musicians who helped transform the traditional music of the South into one of America's great popular sounds, brought America's rich heritage of black folk culture into white consciousness more forcefully than ever before. Perhaps even Gone with the Wind, despite its willful refusal to recognize the humanity of its black characters, bears, at some level, traces of the hybrid cultural consciousness that energized both black and white American artists at that time.(1) In Mothers of Invention, Drew Faust brings to life an array of white southern women, and not one of them resembles Scarlett O'Hara. Both Mitchell and her protagonist are products of the sea change in manners and morals that began in the 1910s and altered the moral geography of the post-World War I urban South. Gone with the Wind's references to buying and selling could be read as metaphors for slavery, but to me they sound more like the relentless commodificafions that characterized the modern South. Faust points out that Gone with the Wind offered a view of the Civil War that challenged the Cavalier myth. She also asserts that no book has been more influential in shaping popular perceptions of the southern past. But if Gone with the Wind was so influential, then why did its skepticism, its revision of popular narratives, so little effect? Perhaps its revisionism failed in part because readers--especially women readers--were responding more to the novel's resonance with the racial and sexual politics of the interwar period than to its historical setting. This was a period in which a militant heterosexuality displaced the feminism and female separatism that Mitchell's mother, Maybelle, an ardent suffragist, exemplified. Generations of writers had already tattooed the plantation myth on the consciousness of the nation. Mitchell harnessed that myth to the romance novel and made race and regional conflict the backdrop for a story that appealed especially to young white women who wanted to have it all--sex and work, wild nights and respectability, companionate marriage and careers--but who still felt torn between Melanie's ladylike self-sacrifice and Scarlett's self-absorption. Certainly, given Gone with the Wind's staying power, it seems critical to think about reader response. Anne Jones has reminded us that we cannot assume that Margaret Mitchell identified with or fully shared the views of her protagonist or even those of her narrator. By the same token, we cannot assume that the millions of people who read Gone with the Wind and flocked to the movie saw in it either what Mitchell intended or what we now see as we look back from the far side of the Civil Rights movement and second wave feminism. My mother-in-law, for example, was growing up in Charleston when Gone with the Wind came out. …

Dr. David Kenneth Rycroft, 7 December 1924 - 8 August 1997

The shocking news reached me on a bright September 1997 morning, just as we were struggling to get our suitcases through the door of our hostel at Columbia College, Center for Black Music Research, Chicago where we had had a delightful two-month period of work. Our good friend Johann Buis had arrived to take us to O’Hare airport for the flight to Europe, with a letter in his hand. The promising letter came from GROVE, London. It was by Stanley Sadie, and dated 1 September 1997. My vision blurred when I read these sentences: “I expect you heard the sad news of David Rycroft’s death. This is very sad, and will make it more difficult for us to have the ideal coverage of South Africa that we had been aiming at.”

Black Music in the Academy: The Center for Black Music Research

THE CENTER FOR BLACK MUSIC RESEARCH The contributions of people of African descent to the history of Western extend far into the past. The earliest artistic depictions of musicians in Europe date back to the Middle Ages, and the earliest documented composer is the sixteenth-century composer and theorist Vicente Lusitano, whose African heritage was discovered by scholar Robert Stevenson.(1) Information about African American contributions to art music, however, has been slow to reach the general consciousness, and despite ground-breaking studies by Eileen Southern(2) and Samuel A. Floyd Jr.,(3) the term black music continues to be associated almost exclusively with blues and jazz. Art by composers is virtually absent from curricula, and, until quite recently, composers have had difficulty securing performances of their works. The neglect has been widespread, and the full extent of the contributions of composers has remained unrecognized and therefore ignored in the classroom. To remedy this situation and to form a network to foster research in all forms of music, Samuel A. Floyd Jr. founded the Center for Black Music Research (CBMR) in 1983 at Columbia College, Chicago, an urban institution dedicated to education in the creative and performing arts. From the beginning, the mission of the CBMR has been to research and promote the of people of African descent throughout the world. The CBMR accomplishes its goals through education, performance, publication, and scholarly discussion. The CBMR Library and Archives supports the mission of the CBMR by maintaining a broad collection of library and archival materials. PUBLICATIONS AND RELATED PROGRAMS The center's earliest work focused on its publications program. Floyd began editing the Black Music Research Journal (BMRJ) as an annual in 1980, three years before the establishment of the CBMR. In keeping with the center's goals, BMRJ has covered all aspects of music, from traditional forms to jazz to composed art music. Issues usually focus on specific topics and have covered such widely disparate subjects as the traditions of the Sea Islands and critical studies of Duke Ellington's Black, Brown and Beige.(4) One pioneering issue carried articles applying literary critical theory to music, and a more recent issue was devoted entirely to education and pedagogy.(5) An issue containing a catalog of works by a number of Afro-European classical composers has been of special interest to librarians.(6) BMRJ is now published twice yearly, and articles are usually commissioned from authors. Other CBMR publications include CBMR Monographs (1989-), a series of reference books and indexes, and the newsletter CBMR Digest (summer 1988-), published twice a year and available to individuals and libraries free upon request. The various grant-funded projects of the CBMR have sometimes sponsored their own publications. Kalinda! (summer 1994-fall 1997) was the newsletter of Project Kalinda, named after a dance of African origin found throughout the Caribbean and Latin America as well as in the southern United States. The project, which ended in December 1997, explored the common African roots of American, Latin American, and Caribbean music. Lenox Avenue: A Journal of Interartistic Inquiry (1995-) is a publication of the CBMR's Integrative Studies Program, which brings scholars together to explore common modes of discourse about all of the expressive arts. The Integrative Studies Program sponsors one or two seminars each year that involve senior scholars from a number of disciplines, including literature, art, history, theater, dance, and music. This program is closely linked to the center's Rockefeller Fellowships, through which the CBMR hosts two visiting research scholars each year. The fellowship program, which began in 1995, has been renewed for another three-year term. …

Black Music Traditions of Central Avenue

Because of the early development of an African American community on Central Avenue, the city of Tampa, Florida provides an excellent environment to document Black music traditions in the southeastern region of the United States. By the late nineteenth century, an urban Black working class had formed on Central Avenue. Black musicians were part of a distinct cultural community, including divergent lifestyles, which were organically linked to the rural and urban life experiences of Black people in the United States and the Caribbean.

Samuel A. Floyd, Jr. <italic>The Power of Black Music: Interpreting Its History from Africa to the United States</italic>. New York: Oxford University Press. 1995. Pp. 316. $30.00

Samuel A. Floyd, Jr. The Power of Black Music: Interpreting Its History from Africa to the United States. New York: Oxford University Press. 1995. Pp. 316. $30.00 Floyd Samuel A.Jr.The Power of Black Music: Interpreting Its History from Africa to the United States. New York: Oxford University Press. 1995. Pp. 316. $30.00. Louis Cantor Louis Cantor Indiana University-Purdue University, Fort Wayne Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 102, Issue 2, April 1997, Pages 551–552, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/102.2.551 Published: 01 April 1997

Squeezebox: The Legacy of the Afro-Mississippi Accordionists

It was Phil Wortham playing homemade four-string guitar with Tiny Hill working on a squeezebox. It wasn't like anything Atwater had ever heard before. music made him want to move. (Mosley 1995, 74) When I first read this passage from Walter Mosley's RL's Dream, his inclusion of Tiny Hill in the turn-of-the-century scene from rural startled me. Accordions rarely appear in depictions of African-American musicians, fictional or not. Walter Pat Rhodes made the only commercial recordings of a black accordionist in 1927. He was from Sunflower County, area that would provide a wealth of musicians in the following years. Unlike Mosley's Tiny Hill, the few comments Rhodes's accordion elicited in commentary treated his simple playing as aberration or novelty, especially in contrast to the sophisticated quality of the guitar playing on the same recordings (Charters 1967, 74; Calt and Wardlow 1988, 174). Most commentaries were more interested in the strong resemblance between Rhodes's The Crowing Rooster' and the guitarist Charlie Patton's more famous Banty Rooster Blues than in Rhodes's choice of musical instrument. As researcher Bengt Olsson stated, the accordion was considered an unusual instrument for playing down in Mississippi (Olsson 1970, 71). While there has been a sizable amount of research over the past fifteen years on ethnic musical traditions that use the button accordion, there has been remarkably little concerning usage by African Americans (Snyder 1994, 149). in this paper, I argue that Rhodes was not aberration, but rather one of a significant number of black musicians born in between 1870 and 1880 who played the diatonic button accordion. There is appropriate historical context, other than novelty, for the recordings of Rhodes and those of fellow Mississippian Blind Jesse Harris that is supported by examining the musical evidence, social history, and other available data. By piecing together the faint traces of this tradition, often little more than one line references gleaned from a wide range of sources, it is possible to get a rare glimpse, however tentative, into this distinctly black music. We must first recognize that this musical tradition was masked by a prejudice against accordions in general and by a stereotype that blacks, outside the Cajun region of southwest Louisiana, never played the accordion in any significant numbers. Peter Narvaez (1994, 203-205) addressed the effect that commercial mediation has had on commentary in terms of repertoire, but it also is critical to see the effect of this mediation on assumptions about instruments. voluminous interviews conducted with musicians overwhemingly emphasized musicians who had made records. Those who did not record or who played instruments not heavily recorded received little interest. Narvaez stated that blues commentators have sometimes neglected the existence of performance and repertory variations by overlooking fieldwork data gathered in localities (205). But we have to look beyond this to the forces at work in the fieldwork conducted. Many interviewers were themselves guitarists and showed little interest in references to other types of instrumentation, even when the interviewed offered it. At the time of Olsson's research in the Memphis region, this attitude was beginning to change. Both he and ethnomusicologist David Evans broadened their approach to interviews and noted references to fife and drum groups, single string instruments, banjo players, and even brass bands in the interviews they conducted (Evans 1983, 163-172; Olsson 1989). However, until ethnomusicologist Kip Lornell began conducting interviews in the 1970s, no researcher seems to have consistently asked informants if they had heard of or had known accordionists. Interviewers also never asked them to describe what the accordion to which they were referring looked like or sounded like. …

Sound Systems, World Beat and Diasporan Identity in Cartagena, Colombia

Diaspora 5:3 1996 Sound Systems, World Beat and Diasporan Identity in Cartagena, Colombia Deborah Pacini Hernandez Brown University In the early 1990s, anthropologists such as James Clifford and Arjun Appadurai began examining transnational cultural exchanges , in which people, capital, ideas, and culture flowed freely across boundaries and changed the relationship not only between center and periphery but also between different locations along the fringe. While both Clifford and Appadurai mentioned music and music bearers as examples of such "traveling cultures" and "global culture flows" respectively, neither ofthem paid any attention to an important transnational cultural phenomenon that was taking shape and becoming increasingly visible as they were writing: the emergence of the world music and world-beat industries. For music scholars, the term "world music" had long referred to everything that was not Western art music, that is, tribal music, folk music, non-Western classical music, and more recently, some popular music as well; it includes, then, such varied material as songs of the pygmies, Celtic fiddling, classical Indian ragas, Colombian vallenato, and Louisianan zydeco. (By "Western" I refer to those wealthy, powerful, and privileged North American and European countries James Clifford has collectively and appropriately referred to as a "powerful force field.") Before 1980, recordings of these musics, usually released in austere recordjackets with rather dense liner notes, were clearly considered to be serious educational documents intended for specialists, rather than entertainment for mass audiences. By the early 1980s, however, popular musics from diverse regions of the globe had begun appearing in postcolonial métropoles such as London, Paris, and New York, where immigrant populations had introduced the various musics from their home countries. Some of these recordings contained the sort of traditional and folk-oriented music that had been studied by ethnomusicologists as world music, but many of them contained modern, often highly hybridized, and clearly commercially oriented musics that fell beyond the traditional purview of ethnomusicologists. An interlocking commercial infrastructure , composed of record companies, retail and mail order concerns, radio shows, magazines, music festivals, and the like 429 430 Diaspora 5:3 1996 emerged to market these musics, which they did by cultivating the appetites of First World listeners for exotic sounds from the Third World. The term "world music" was appropriated from ethnomusicology to facilitate the marketing of these diverse musics, most of which did not fit into existing marketing categories. The consumers of this new category of world music were not specialists, however, but lay persons—although on the whole they were urban, affluent, well educated—and in Europe and the U.S., mostly white. The term "world beat" emerged about the same time, referring to a subset of world music that included the more dance-oriented products of cross-fertilization between First and Third World musical traditions: examples might be the modernized versions of traditional music by the likes of Nigeria's Sunny Ade, Haiti's Boukman Experience, or the work of U.S. rock musicians such as David Byrne and Paul Simon, who draw upon African and Latin American sources. The following definition by Andrew Goodwin and Joe Gore captures the complexity of world beat: "World Beat might be identified as Western pop stars appropriating non-Western sounds, as Third World musicians using Western rock and pop, or as the Western consumption of non-Western folk music" (72). Since the single most important element of dance music is rhythm, it is no accident that most world-beat musics have originated in areas where percussion has been most consistently and successfully cultivated over time—in Africa and its diaspora. Thus, while the term "world beat" does not refer explicitly to diasporan musics, operationally this clearly is the case because, in creative terms, the most powerful forces behind the world-beat phenomenon have clearly been black musicians. Indeed, even a partial listing of musics marketed as world beat confirms the importance of Africa and its diaspora: juju from Nigeria, soukous from Congo/Zaire/ Senegal, chimurenga from Zimbabwe, zouk from Martinique and Guadeloupe, soca (abbv. soul calypso) from Trinidad, punta from Belize/Honduras, vodou-jazz and misik rasin from Haiti, and Jamaican reggae. Significantly, many world-beat musicians, wherever they are from, explicitly invoke a...

A Life in Ragtime: A Biography of James Reese Europe.

James Reese Europe is one of the most important transitional figures in American music. As a composer and band leader at the height of ragtime, he had a strong influence on the first generation of jazz musicians who were to follow. Europe's life reveals much about the role of black musicians in American culture in a period when it was presumed they had little place.

Conference Report: Joint Meetings of the American Musicological Society, Center for Black Music Research and Society for Music Theory (Grand Hyatt Hotel, New York, 1-5 November 1995)

Conference Report: Joint Meetings of the American Musicological Society, Center for Black Music Research and Society for Music Theory (Grand Hyatt Hotel, New York, 1-5 November 1995)

What Prospective Music Teachers Need to Know about Black Music

What Prospective Music Teachers Need to Know about Black Music

Cats of any color: jazz black and white

In a series of candid interviews with jazz players, composers, and critics, Gene Lees explores racism in the past and present of jazz--both the white racism that for decades ghettoized black musicians and their music, and the prejudice that Lees documents of some black musicians against their white counterparts. With subjects ranging from Horace Silver to Dave Brubeck to Red Rodney, and a new introduction analyzing recent developments, Cats of Any Color chronicles jazz as a multiethnic art.

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.

Jimi Hendrix Deep Within the Blues and Alive Onstage at Woodstock--25 Years after Death

Since my bio on Jimi Hendrix was published 15 years ago, I would suppose by now that there is no danger in my becoming a critic, a designation I could never figure out, especially for an African-American writer. My bio, originally titled Jimi Hendrix . . . Voodoo Child . . . in hardcover and revised, abridged, and retitled by me to 'Scuse Me While I Kiss Sky in the early '80s for the Bantam Books mass-market paperback edition, is still very much in print and very much available having sold more than 500,000 copies worldwide. It was - at least, I like to believe - the first book to proclaim Hendrix the total genius that he is and to say why, and, most importantly, to show how he was coming from an African-American perspective. I wrote the book as the result of a promise I made to Hendrix at a nightclub in Manhattan in 1969. I had seen him go head to head with Sly Stone, who was then at his height, at the Fillmore East. They both blew me away so bad that I immediately revised my thinking about black music. While Amiri Baraka had gone from Blues People to Black Music, dealing with blues and jazz as art forms, I felt he had not really dealt with all that black expression in between. Not too many black writers were writing about the popular black music at that time. While Sly Stone's music was eminently danceable, Hendrix's was not, although he himself had no trouble dancing to it. And also singing and playing and doing feats with his guitar - all at the same time. Hendrix was then playing a highly refined art music under the aegis of rock. If you listened beyond the standard drums and bass routines, there emerged an amazing virtuoso artist on guitar. Many heard it then, many hear it now. People have not stopped listening to Hendrix, because his shit is the real deal. Recent events have shown that Hendrix's spirit is still very much involved in this world. day in April of 1993 when a touring art show that featured representations of Hendrix's image, entitled The Jimi Hendrix Exhibition, opened at a gallery in New York City's Soho district, Al Hendrix, his father, launched a lawsuit against the organizers of the show, who control the Hendrix Estate and who are also therefore the legal owners of Jimi Hendrix - all he had produced, including his image. Those anonymous entities purchased Jimi Hendrix some years ago. If this is not posthumous slavery, pop zombie-ism, then I don't know what is. word out at this show was that they were not interested in anything about the strange circumstances of Hendrix's death. They were celebrating his life. While those anonymous owners of Hendrix's oeuvre were avoiding talk or images of his death, a former girl friend, Kathy Etchingham, sought to have the original racist inquest reopened in England, where Hendrix was pronounced dead under mysterious circumstances in September of 1970. inquest allowed an open verdict that meant they could not really say how he died, but many people who testified told conflicting stories before and after their testimonies. And the ambulance drivers, who apparently were not listened to at the time, recently stated that, when the ambulance got to the Samarkand Hotel, the flat was empty except for Hendrix's dead body, a wine-soaked towel around his neck. Of course, the inquest was not allowed to be re-opened, but Etchingham may continue to defy those who would not enjoy such access to the rewards of Hendrix's genius if it were discovered that he was actually murdered. A girlfriend who was near him at the end stated soon afterwards on a radio program that the Mafia had killed him. Hendrix once said that rock 'n' roll was simply blues. Perhaps if he had waxed more extendedly on that subject black musicians might have heard it. It took the Black Rock Coalition behind Vernon Reid's band, Living Colors, to pound that point home way later. But no matter how you designate the music, what matters in the end is how well it is played, be it for the dancers on a postage-sized dance floor or for a venue the size of Woodstock, a rolling expanse of earth as far as the eye can see. …