Early Jazz Research Articles

Teaching Cultural Competency through Early New Orleans Jazz

Abstract: Studying the inception of early jazz in 20th-century New Orleans can provide opportunities to address issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion by increasing cultural competency. Providing students with a historical framework for the creation of jazz may promote empathy with musicians of diverse races, cultures, and musical backgrounds while applying these lessons to students' lives today. Early jazz itself can be examined as a combination of African and European musical ancestry brought together by Black, White, and Creole musicians for the birth of a unique musical idiom to the United States. Along with historical information, this article integrates three suggested lessons connecting cultural competency to the National Association for Music Education's 2014 Music Standards through the creation of jazz for a diverse array of students.

Scott Joplin in the Overworld: Super Mario's Rag-Inflected Score

Abstract A rolling banjo, walking bass, steel drum, and syncopated piano. What strange music to accompany your trials and tribulations throughout the Mushroom Kingdom. Eclecticism pervades the Mario franchise and manifests in its digital places, the ways players interact within them, and, indeed, the sounds emanating from them. Mario and his jumping adventures have long been in the hearts of players, the minds of scholars, and the ears of ludomusicologists. By engaging with Koji Kondo's scores for early Mario games, this article highlights an overlooked component in the iconic scores of early Super Mario games: ragtime music. Furthermore, this research contributes examples of African American and Latino musical creation and innovation to ludomusicological discourse. I argue that, as a means to connect, contextualize, and enhance Mario's movement with music, composer Koji Kondo draws from ragtime and early jazz styles because of their distinctive rhythmic qualities. His rag-inflected score establishes ragtime as fundamental to early Super Mario soundscapes. While a substantial ludomusicological body of literature focuses on the Western classical tradition in games, jazz-centered research is scarce. This cross-disciplinary research draws on a wide range of scholarly perspectives from jazz studies and ludomusicology, including work by Andrew Schartmann, Edward Berlin, Ingrid Monson, Neil Lerner, David Butler, and Charles Hiroshi Garrett. As game audio is indispensable in facilitating a player's sense of verisimilitude of Mario's imaginative and, at times, nonsensical worlds, an inquiry into how jazz participates in this unique audiovisual relationship is long overdue.

On the Tonic Added-Sixth Chord in Jazz

This article investigates the major-mode tonic added-sixth chord in jazz, a characteristic harmony well established by the 1930s. Beginning around 1930, routine use of the tonic added-sixth chord established it as a “dialect” distinct from the triadic dialect of early jazz, ragtime, and the various styles and genres antecedent to jazz. The article begins with an examination of how ".fn_scaledegree(6)."/I can be understood as both “dependent” on ".fn_scaledegree(5)." and “independent” in both dialects. Examples from the literature then follow, with particular focus on transitional pieces, where the underlying tonics were triadic but independent ".fn_scaledegree(6)."/Is in the melody created de facto added-sixth chords. Such pieces exhibited a freer use of ".fn_scaledegree(6).", enabling it to function in tonic harmonies without depending on ".fn_scaledegree(5).". Once independent of ".fn_scaledegree(5).", ".fn_scaledegree(6)." was eventually treated as a chord tone routinely added to the triad without melodic impetus and establishing the added sixth as a standalone jazz chord. After presentation of a table that summarizes the functions of ".fn_scaledegree(6)."/I, the conclusion suggests a possible “inclusive” ".fn_scaledegree(6)." as a subcategory of the independent ".fn_scaledegree(6)." and then proceeds to issues regarding advancing ".fn_scaledegree(6)."/I, ".fn_scaledegree(5)."/I, or both to deeper structural levels and the relevance of tonic-triad types at such levels.

Nocoastjazz

Nocoastjazz

Contributors to This Issue

Contributors to This Issue

Smears, Laughs, and Barnyard Hokum: Early Jazz Trombone and the Problem of Novelty

Smears, Laughs, and Barnyard Hokum: Early Jazz Trombone and the Problem of Novelty

The Ballad of Robert Charles: Searching for the New Orleans Riot of 1900

Rural histories often explode onto city streets. In an excellent new book, K. Stephen Prince illustrates this phenomenon for the American South at the dawn of the twentieth century. The defiance of one rural migrant, a Black Mississippian named Robert Charles, convulsed New Orleans, Louisiana, and the New South's Jim Crow racial order in the summer of 1900. On July 23, Charles defended himself against members of the New Orleans Police Department who first attacked him with nightsticks and then attempted to arrest him. Over five days, Charles killed seven white men, including four policemen. In retaliation, white mobs indiscriminately killed at least six Black men and women, injuring countless more. White law enforcement proved indifferent to or incapable of protecting Black life and property despite the deputization of 1,500 citizen policemen.But Prince doesn't stop there. In admirably accessible prose suitable for graduate and undergraduate students, he has written “a book about the nature of historical inquiry” (9). The author waded into sources believing he could “write a concise, narrative history” of the New Orleans riot (7). He emerged from research less certain, deciding instead to focus on the construction of the event's historical record and legacy, the “silencing, forgetting, and erasure” at the heart of Jim Crow's archive (9). Prince signals a notable example in the book's title. In 1938, the jazz artist Jelly Roll Morton told Alan Lomax about the existence of a song about Robert Charles. “I once knew the Robert Charles song,” Morton says, “but I found it was best for me to forget it.” His reason? “This song was squashed very easily by the [police] department . . . due to the fact that it was a trouble breeder” (1). Even after Charles's death, Prince argues, the Jim Crow state imposed a “narrative inequality” by policing the memory of Black rebellion (9).Perhaps Prince's greatest innovation is the book's structure. After an introduction in which the author reviews relevant histories of Jim Crow, the carceral state, and Black life, comes a prologue where Prince sketches the New Orleans riot in its simplest terms. Five thematic chapters follow. In chapter 1, “Setting,” Prince recreates the spatial and racial geographies of Jim Crow New Orleans. “Silence,” chapter 2, focuses on the known and unknowable life of Robert Charles, from his agricultural roots to his paid position selling Black nationalist and African emigrationist literature amid the sounds of early jazz. Chapter 3, “Riot,” explores the mob disorder of July 1900 from three vantage points: “white rioters, black New Orleanians, and the city's political and economic elite” (89). Prince considers local and national meaning-making in the aftermath of the riot in chapter 4, “Reckoning,” before closing with chapter 5, “Remembrance.” Prince ends with an eight-page epilogue that reconsiders New Orleans's twentieth-century history of urban inequality and violence as a spectral memorial to the life and death of Robert Charles.Yet how urban was Robert Charles's New Orleans, anyway? Readers of Agricultural History might take special interest in Prince's interrogation of space. In chapter 1, we learn that unimproved swampland constituted much of today's Crescent City in 1900. Charles and other poor Black migrants alternately thrived and survived in the back of the town on the marshy periphery that became more important as racial segregation limited the mobility of Black residents through the so-called Metropolis of the South. Prince argues that Black New Orleans “served as the hub of a diasporic community, a way station in a cycle of internal migration . . . a migrant community” (47). This New Orleans was less cityscape than a constantly reconstituting shelter for refugees from the plantation regime.On the other hand, New Orleans's white elite imagined a capital of the industrial South. Like progressives elsewhere, they terraformed their city to marginalize the Black working classes necessary for the creation of white wealth. They deployed a police force to draw fictional lines between white and Black space. And on the night of July 23, 1900, Robert Charles was the reminder of segregation's folly. “The audacious act of being in the city,” Prince writes, “constituted . . . an affront to white supremacy” (53). The rural could be Black, not so the urban.Ultimately Prince urges us to scrutinize such hard boundaries: known/unknown, urban/rural, remembered/forgotten. His study of Robert Charles and the social upheaval attached to his name opens new directions for American and southern historians of police power and Black rebellion. He also offers a model of careful historical analysis of biography, place, and event. Readers will find few heroes or villains in his account, and fewer injunctions. Instead, The Ballad of Robert Charles seeks to understand the manifold violence necessary to maintain white supremacy in America.

The Study of Australian Jazz and the Issue of Methodological Nationalism

The Study of Australian Jazz and the Issue of Methodological Nationalism

Economy Hall: The Hidden History of a Free Black Brotherhood

Economy Hall: The Hidden History of a Free Black Brotherhood

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

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...

Jazz Historiography, Eurocentric Philosophy, and the Problem of Hegel and Aristotle

As universities publicly address their continuing commitment to anti-racism, diversity, and multiculturalism both on campus and in the classroom, it is critical to explore how writing in our disciplines reproduced/reinforced White racist and sexist hierarchies. Rather than diversity statements functioning as performative speech acts (Ahmed, 2006), these statements could serve as a call to action to investigate how racism/sexism/classism operate in our disciplines during their inception. By looking at early jazz writing, we observe White racist/sexist paradigms and how Eurocentric logic justified these social maladies. Even in jazz history accounts that celebrate Black genius, it is through the problematic discourse of evolution, high art, and teleology that grants these accounts their social prestige (DeVeaux, 1991). Additionally, investigating the boundaries of Eurocentric paradigms in jazz historiography improves our theoretical conceptions and offers ways to move forward and address these problematic issues that persist. This study presents a methodology for jazz educators to explore the limitations of Eurocentric knowledge in jazz settings through a case study on Aristotelian/Hegelian logic formulation in jazz historiography. I demonstrate that Aristotelian/Hegelian reasoning and White racism/sexism produced reductive exclusionary definitions in early jazz writing. To make this argument, I turn to Aristotelian syllogisms and teleology and Hegel's "ideal" subject. Alongside illustrating a methodology for bringing Western philosophy into dialogue with jazz historiography in classroom settings, I then present concluding remarks toward extending theoretical work by proposing to flip subject-object epistemological relations in European philosophical discourse.

Интеграция и ассимиляция музыкальных компонентов джазовой и академической музыки в творчестве композиторов США с начала XX века

The article examines the evolution of thinking of American and European composers of the early 20th century, the expansion of their musical horizons in connection with the birth and emergence of Early Jazz, a new rhythmic music in the South of the United States. Almost all famous composers of the beginning of the century, to one degree or another, turned to jazz, each in his own way refracting new rhythms and harmonies in their work. In this process, the initial, basic material was professional composer compositions, and jazz contributed to assimilation. The article examines experiments of interest from the perspective of fusion of musical genres, synthesis of elements of the musical language, which later anticipated the birth of the unique musical style «Fusion».

Early Blues and Jazz Authorship in the Case of the “Livery Stable Blues”

ABSTRACT A 1917 copyright lawsuit over sheet music pursuant to the Original Dixieland Jazz Band’s first commercially successful record revealed challenges in determining legal authorial attribution and ownership for musicians more accustomed to communal creative processes. The case unearthed a network of at least ten eligible musicians, but it was eventually dismissed, such that no musician could be legally recognized as author – a decision that left many wondering: who created “Livery Stable Blues”? By examining extant court documents, this article demonstrates how distributed authorship models can facilitate more acute understandings of creative processes in early blues and jazz.

Rhythm Clubs, record series, and the everyday connoisseurship of ‘hot rhythm’ records in interwar Britain

The Rhythm Club movement was a crucial development in British jazz history: it galvanizedan emerging audience of primarily lower-middle-class young men, who dramaticallyreshaped how jazz was understood and consumed. Using contemporary pressclippings, as well as archive material relating to the earliest Rhythm Club meetings, Iexamine how participants developed a unique form of 'everyday connoisseurship' thatmerged ideals of autonomous 'art' culture with a critical vocabulary that was informedby more quotidian elements of musical consumption and leisure activity. My account ofhot rhythm appreciation seeks to nuance existing popular narratives of early jazz recordconsumption that overemphasize enthusiasts' isolation from a putatively authentic jazzperformance culture.

‘These Off-beat “Crazy Kids and Gals”’: Jazz in Ireland, 1918–1960

This paper conducts a historical overview of jazz in Ireland, with a focus on the Dublin jazz scene from 1918 to 1960. Using archival resources, it looks at black and black-influenced music, minstrelsy and blackface before examining the arrival and reception of early jazz in what was then part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. It traces the changing nature of the Dublin jazz scene, covering topics such as jazz as dance music, the anti-jazz movement and the development of the dominant narrative of jazz as art-form that continues to this day.
 This paper also documents the shifting reception of jazz in Ireland from a threatening foreign music through to a music that has served the purposes of both entertainment and art. It makes a case for the Irish jazz narrative to include the activities of amateur musicians, dance band musicians and others, arguing that their involvement with jazz went beyond a casual interest, establishing an active community of practice that constituted an early Irish jazz scene.

Double Bass Techniques of the Early Jazz Era

ABSTRACTWhile it is no secret that many early jazz recordings featured the tuba as the low-end instrument of choice, something seems to be missing from the standard pedagogy in regards to jazz double bass. The double bass had been treated, it seems, with a great deal of speculation as to its true role in early jazz performance practice. In light of this, there is a pressing need for hard research into the performance practices of the early jazz bassists. This article will outline the various ways in which the most notable jazz bassists of the era employed those techniques, with particular attention to the works of Wellman Braud, Steve Brown, and Bill Johnson, as well as to highlight several examples from after the early jazz period which directly reflect the influence of traditional New Orleans style performance practices.

From Juke Joints to Jazz Jams: The Political Economy of Female Club Owners

The history of jazz and blues is tied up with the spaces owned and curated by female proprietors. Early jazz making was supported by enterprising women who would host lawn parties at their residences in New Orleans. The blues developed in places known as juke joints, which were and are still often women-owned spaces in the southern United States. Nevertheless, while histories of jazz and blues tend to focus on the musicians and composers of the respective genres, the venues have largely gone unstudied. If venues have been discussed, they are primarily the larger spaces owned by men. The work of club owners is unique, as they also act as club managers and are frequently curators of the music being presented. Club ownership as an occupational category is largely marked as male, with the places and spaces of musical production often seen as being hostile to women. This paper seeks to examine the work of female club owners and reveal the hidden political economy of places and spaces of jazz and blues.

Establishing Italian Jazz on the International Scene 1960-1980

This paper sheds new light on the developments in Italian jazz in the two decades 1960-1980. It opens by touching on context and antecedents: the relationships with Italian musical traditions in early American jazz, the acceptance and refusal of jazz by Italian cultural institutions and movements before 1960, and the late '50s key developments both in jazz and arts/media. In the early '60s, Italian jazz was characterized by two small scenes with marked differences in Rome and Milan and with a few further relevant events. An active and well rooted specialist magazine (Musica Jazz) provides relatively good documentation on these beginnings, quite detached from other general movements in music. By the end of the decade several ideological, cultural, political ruptures will have changed this panorama, and while Italian jazz was active in these changes, its exponents also had to deal with the complex situation they created from the point of view of artistic challenges, working conditions, and relationships with the recording industry. In order to discuss these changes and the different strategies adopted by musicians, four case studies will be examined to gain a better understanding of the process. Nunzio Rotondo, while almost unknown outside of Italy, was one of the first Italian musicians to successfully perform internationally after the war. He subsequently worked within the Rome jazz scene, with limited exposure both live and on record. Giorgio Gaslini's ground-breaking work of the late 50s, his training in ‘classical' music, and his unflagging commitment to exploration made him a personality similar to Portal and Gulda. However, his artistic successes did not close the chasm between ‘serious' music and jazz in Italy. Enrico Rava took the opposite road to Rotondo, widely performing abroad and paying dues in Buenos Aires, New York, and Paris before gaining acceptance worldwide and in his own country. He has been instrumental in the creation of an international image of Italian jazz and even of an Italian sound, opening the doors to many others. Perigeo was a ‘jazz-rock' group of the early 70s. Their recordings are still extremely popular. The reaction to their music by the jazz establishment and then their curt dismissal by the industry led to their disbanding, after which the single members—Franco D'Andrea, Claudio Fasoli, Giovanni Tommaso—produced and still produce some of the most exciting Italian jazz.

The Clarinet in Early New Orleans Jazz: Style, Tone and Function

Very different from its sound in classical music, swing, modern jazz or other genres, the authentic New Orleans Jazz clarinet tradition remains among the most distinctive instrumental styles in American music. This program will focus on sound and tonal variety of the clarinet in early jazz in its role as an accompanying or featured instrument in dance ensembles and its high wailing voice in brass bands and jazz funerals. There will be a discussion of the instrument's distinguishing characteristics and tonal possibilities. The high level of diversity of sound among early jazz clarinetists will also be examined as affected by equipment, training and physical characteristics of individual players. Live musical examples will be provided by the Dr. Michael White Quartet. Dr. Michael White is a leading figure in traditional New Orleans jazz and one of only a few to creatively carry on the rich clarinet sound and style of that city. For over two decades he has been the main consultant for traditional jazz for the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival. A relative of several first generation jazz musicians, he has distinguished himself as a jazz historian, writer, producer, and composer. In 2015 he received the Jazz Hero Award from the Jazz Journalists Association. Dr. White earned his PhD in Spanish at Tulane University and currently holds the Charles Keller Endowed Chair in the Humanities at Xavier University of Louisiana.