Jazz Culture Research Articles

K. Heather Pinson, The Jazz Image: Seeing Music Through Herman Leonard’s Photography. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2010. 240 pp. ISBN 978- 1604734942 (hbk) £29.74.

Book review.

‘We’ve got a gig in Poland!’

This article explores the role of jazz music in Britain in World War II, and examines the demand for jazz in the forces and among the civilian population. It considers the fractious Melody Maker–BBC relationship, the hedonistic underworld of so-called ‘Harlem in London’, and the creation of an entertainment-oriented BBC Forces’ Programme, which provided an outlet for Charles Chilton’s pioneering ‘Radio Rhythm Club’. It argues that the British public was in fact far more receptive to Nazi propaganda themes than is commonly considered to be the case, and that the success (and potential for success) of William Joyce’s ‘Lord Haw-Haw’ broadcasts gave added impetus to the need to provide acceptable entertainment on the BBC. In questioning the ‘People’s War’ discourse regarding national unity, issues of race and alleged British exceptionalism through the prism of jazz culture, the article intends to advance understanding of the complex wartime conditions which accelerated the progress of authentic jazz into mainstream British culture and broadcasting.

Recitative: The Persuasive Tenor of Jazz Culture in Langston Hughes, Billy Strayhorn, and John Coltrane

Jazz is more than music. Jazz is a culture defined by a progressive ethos encoded in sound. By putting the poetry and music of Langston Hughes, Billy Strayhorn, and John Coltrane into conversation, this essay demonstrates the versatility and vitality of jazz culture. However, jazz culture has come to be drowned out in America today, and so I argue for a return to the voices of jazz's past so that we can give a new ear to jazz artists working today. Such listening should be seen as a means to reinvigorate progressive values today and in the future.

Jazzwomen: music, sound, gender, and sexuality

This paper offers a feminist contribution to the critical exploration of jazz histories. It demonstrates the ways jazzwomen have been and continue to be excluded from the practices and processes that form dominant jazz culture in the UK and USA. I show how jamming and improvisation as well as producing sound(s) in leisure places and spaces function to reproduce male entitlement to jazz. In addition to this historical excavation, I draw from two semi-structured interviews with professional white women tenor saxophonists. The arguments I pursue concern the openings and closings for women in jazz and the physical and temporal leisure (and work) spaces that players have entered and occupied. It appears that the production of jazz sounds, which themselves have various currencies in wider society, are significant to how women have been and continue to be recognized as jazz musicians. Specifically, I argue that a gendered critique of the social construction of sound is important to feminist analyses of music and leisure. Women did contribute to the early formation of jazz genre: for instance, women singing the blues crafted a sensory mode of expression that was rich and deep in gendered meaning. However, women instrumentalists, especially ‘horn’ players (saxophones, trumpets, and trombone) often go unheard, and unknown. They have been made invisible.

Remixing jazz culture

In the twenty-first century, cosmopolitan musical collectivities reinvigorate the architectural spaces of urban neighbourhoods to forge new engagements with culture and technology. Within the New European city, hybrid economic forums (Lessig) generate musical activities involving both shared practices such as musical bartering and proprietary resources such as state-of-the-art commercial recordings. In this article, I examine the growing phenomena of mixed-mediated musical collectivism by examining the socio-cultural, musical and performative activities of two Dutch groups and their surrounding collectives, Kyteman’s Hiphop Orkest (and collectivity Kytopia) and C-mon & Kypski. By offering an ethnographic and socio-cultural analysis of these two Dutch groups, I illuminate the embeddedness of late-capitalist musical collectivities to European hybrid processes. Contemporary forms of musical collectivism are distinguished from earlier varieties by highlighting participants’ engagement with hybrid practices including mixed-genre creativity; sharing of resources and professional skills, and finally collaborative networks among music and non-arts participants through a combination of local and transnational circuits.

Airing Authenticity: The BBC Jam Sessions from New York, 1938/39

AbstractIn November 1938 and January 1939, the BBC relayed two American Jam Sessions from New York to Britain. Regarded as historic by critics and producers, the live relays broke from BBC tradition in their presentation of improvised jazz and in their production as “informal parties.” Both broadcasts featured Alistair Cooke as announcer and “a galaxy of swing stars” (including Sidney Bechet, Teddy Wilson, and Tommy Dorsey) assembled by the New York bandleader Joe Marsala; however, British jazz enthusiasts responded to them very differently. Whereas the second session was widely praised, the first session inspired controversy, particularly after a leading critic deemed it a “washout.”The divergent reception demonstrated the challenges of maintaining the jam session's status as a paragon of authenticity as it underwent three key transitions during the late 1930s: the transformation from in- and inter-group activity to public event; the transmission from New York's jazz and swing cultures to Britain's enthusiast subculture; and the transmutation from live performance to live broadcast. This article examines the context, planning, content, and reception of the 1938/39 BBC jam sessions as a case study in how authenticity in jazz was rearticulated in public, mediated, and transnational spaces.

Mingus in the Act: Confronting the Legacies of Vaudeville and Minstrelsy

This essay explores Charles Mingus as performer through the lens of vaudeville and minstrelsy entertainment legacies of earlier jazz performers, and particularly the careers of Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong, and Fats Waller, each of whom Mingus included in his list of a “heritage of traditions.” Within the context of the so‐called colorblind racial ideology of midcentury American jazz culture, the author examines Mingus’s critique of the jazz industry and of his mainly white audiences, to whom he explicitly and implicitly articulated black male performance identities in his writings, liner notes, lectures to audiences, spoken‐word compositions, and in, among other works, the compositions “Eat That Chicken” and “The Clown.”

The Power of the Zoot: Youth Culture and Resistance during World War II (review)

Reviewed by: The Power of the Zoot: Youth Culture and Resistance during World War II Gigi Peterson The Power of the Zoot: Youth Culture and Resistance during World War II. By Luis Alvarez. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. 336 pp. $34.95 (cloth). Luis Alvarez adds an important comparative dimension to the growing body of works on Mexican-descent youth in 1940s Los Angeles, works which discuss the so-called Zoot Suits Riots and the Sleepy Lagoon case. In The Power of the Zoot, he argues that through counter-cultural forms of "zoot" and jazz culture (the two intersect), minority youth asserted their dignity in the face of segregation and other white-dominated norms of propriety and power. Alvarez offers a broader exploration of "zoot culture" as "multiracial, gendered, and transregional" (p. 5). To accomplish this, he compares and connects Mexican American and African American manifestations of zoot culture in both Los Angeles and New York City. He integrates other ethnic strands (Asian American, Euro-American) into discussions of youth cultures and also provides national context, including discussion of race riots across the United States in the summer of 1943. Alvarez builds on earlier scholarship on both African American "hepcats" in New York and mostly Mexican-descent pachucos/as in Los Angeles (though often used interchangeably with "zoot suiter," the terms are not quite synonymous). His greatest innovation, in terms of the historiography, lies in uniting the two scenes and in adding interview excerpts and readings of primary sources that "place the youth themselves as central figures" (p. 6). The work is admirably wide and deep, though essentially US-focused (others have treated the inter-American dimensions of wartime antidiscrimination struggles). His study is bicoastal without disorder, alternating successfully between Los Angeles and New York thanks to thematic organization and solid transitions. The book's structure follows a logic seen in some previous works. Part 1 explains histories of discrimination that shaped communities and the lives within, including through labor markets, residential and other modes of segregation, law enforcement, and ideas of deviant minority youth. Part 2 provides a richly textured discussion of jazz-zoot culture, including commonalities and differences between its New York and Los Angeles variants. Central to Alvarez's argument is that "Body Politics"—the display of style—and claiming of "Public Space" in segregated cities were "Struggles for Dignity"—including the rejection of racialized, class-laden norms for proper comportment. Part 3 details the 1943 riots in Los Angeles and offers a fine synthesis of those that [End Page 551] followed in cities across the nation. A thoughtful epilogue discusses "the interethnic and internationalist dimensions of youth culture" that developed after World War II, underscoring the long-range historical significance of 1940s countercultures. The study is enriched by multiple voices of those who lived these developments. Explaining or recalling youthful days, they articulate the sense of self derived from living "the politics of cool." Alvarez deftly blends analysis with letting historical actors speak for themselves, and the resulting work underscores the complexities of identifications and the ironies of some forms of resistance against stereotype and oppression. As Alvarez notes, in constructing and asserting alternative masculinities (in the face of a dominant cultural ideal of "white" manhood), some zooters questioned the masculinity of white servicemen and "denigrated the dignity of young African American and Mexican American women, gays, and lesbians" (p. 164). Through lines such as this one, The Power of the Zoot suggests some interesting avenues for future research. The work is well grounded, with a bibliography that includes a substantial array of secondary works, including studies of youth and subaltern cultures far removed from U.S. locales. Notably, Alvarez thus reminds readers how global reading and comparative angles can aid analysis. Indeed, he explains that his "understanding of dignity [a key concept in his study] is deeply influenced by the Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico" (p. 248 n. 19). In noting intellectual debts, particularly British culture and subaltern theorists, he is meticulous in the text as well as citations, a practice to be applauded. This underscores, however, a puzzling standard of acknowledgment for Eduardo Obregón Pagán's Murder at the Sleepy Lagoon (University...

Jazz Re‐Bordered: Cultural Policy in Danish Jazz

The small nation of Denmark has served as one of the main European centers for jazz production and consumption since the 1930s. Beginning in the mid‐1980s, a number of young Danish musicians, producers, and cultural policy makers emerged who collectively transformed jazz in Denmark. This paper investigates how state‐sponsored cultural policies, an upsurge in nationalistic fervor, broader political and economic change throughout Europe, as well as the economic prosperity of the U.S. in the mid‐1980s, are tied to striking changes in the jazz performed and produced in Denmark in recent years. The paper argues that through the efforts of both public and private institutions in collusion with creative musicians within Denmark, and through alliances of like organizations and musicians across Europe, Danish jazz has evolved out of the shadow of America, resulting in the re‐bordering of a historically marked African American music, into an independent and self‐consciously Eurocentric expression. The paper identifies key historical developments in the jazz of Denmark, tracing how the tensions between local and global identities in the context of the transatlantic jazz culture have been navigated within the backdrop of a social welfare state and have culminated in the emergence of a vibrant and uniquely inflected “Danish jazz.”

Hotter than that: the trumpet, jazz, and American culture

Hotter than that: the trumpet, jazz, and American culture

Jump for joy: jazz, basketball, and black culture in 1930s America

Jump for joy: jazz, basketball, and black culture in 1930s America

The Feminization of Mass Culture and the Novelty of All‐Girl Bands: The Case of the Ingenues

The internationally acclaimed all‐girl jazz band of the 1920s and 1930s, the Ingenues, became one of the most popular featured attractions of the multi‐faceted stage‐show performances showcased in combination with the new sound‐films. The Ingenues, like other mass‐mediated white all‐girl jazz performances, remained intimately connected to the mediums of film, vaudeville, and variety revue as well as the controversial chorus‐girl spectacles. During the Jazz Age, the seemingly remarkable appearance of all‐girl jazz bands was not unprecedented but rather culturally prepared by a particular consumerist presentation of gender and sexuality promoted during these highly transformative decades. By connecting the various discourses surrounding all‐girl jazz bands to the earlier and more commodified spectacles of “girl acts” introduced in variety revues and vaudeville, this article reveals how the immense popularity of the Ingenues in the transformative vaudeville/film combinations was facilitated in part through the careful construction of a “feminine novelty” which codified notions of innovation, versatility, sexuality and musical amateurism. Ultimately, women's unexpected musical success became implicated in modernist debates about the deleterious effects of a feminized “jazz culture” which threatened notions of an autonomous male musical culture and also destabilized proscribed gender relations.

Iain Anderson.This Is Our Music: Free Jazz, the Sixties, and American Culture.:This Is Our Music: Free Jazz, the Sixties, and American Culture.(The Arts and Intellectual Life in Modern America.)

Iain Anderson.<i>This Is Our Music: Free Jazz, the Sixties, and American Culture</i>.:This Is Our Music: Free Jazz, the Sixties, and American Culture.<i>(The Arts and Intellectual Life in Modern America.)</i>

Revealing representations of jazz in the Weimar Republic

While in America and elsewhere jazz made its debut in the middle and late 1910s, the Weimar Republic (1919–1933) remained relatively isolated from jazz until 1920. Touring groups opted for travel in economically and politically stable areas. Until the first live jazz concert in 1924, Germans learned of jazz through sheet music, recordings, and soldiers returning from World War I. Lasting records of jazz culture exist due to the advances in sound recording, photography, and publishing. Jazz images from the Weimar Republic offer a glimpse into the triangular relationship of ethnic African and African-American jazz artists with jazz culture and with German audiences. Many images de-emphasize the African-American jazz artists by using stereotypical tropes, masking the artist, and avoiding physical portrayals of the artist. These techniques reflect the adaptation of jazz culture for audiences within a nation recovering economic and political stability.

The spectre of the literary curriculum

Abstract The literary curriculum is not the literacy curriculum. The literary curriculum encompasses aspects of the taught curriculum, the assessed curriculum, and the processes of curriculum development and adjustment. The literary curriculum is named as such because it results from the systematic drive to make curriculum space legible, readable, and enumerable in ever-increasing detail. The aim is to display this space as ordered, predictable, and regulable. Unfortunately, the literary curriculum produces the opposite of its aim. It leaves teachers illiterate and disoriented. Instead of order, it produces a manufactured disorder. Introduction There are experts and there are pretenders. How can we tell the difference? Charlie Parker showed us. In jazz culture an up-and-coming musician sometimes requests the privilege of sitting in--for a couple of pieces--with an established combo. Commonly these requests are refused because any failure to uphold the band's standards is resented. Charlie Parker, arguably the jazz idiom's greatest player, saw things differently. He received such requests with enthusiasm. Why? Because he liked to learn from the newcomers' ideas. He overlooked their weaknesses, encouraged them, engaged with them and, as a consequence, enriched both his and their music (Berliner, 1994). That is the distinguishing test. The genuine expert feels deeply her equality with the rest of us; the fake is acutely conscious that only she knows best. Parker's approach to leadership is simple, but, by the standards of contemporary education, most peculiar. In education there are three kinds of expert. I'm referring to archetypes, not actual individuals. They are each genuinely a cut above the rest of us because they have some heightened level of understanding about education. But they differ in their willingness to listen and respond to others as equals. The flame of democracy burns differently within them. The first type of expert, although blessed with great insight and wisdom--born of years of experience and thoughtful reading of history's outstanding thinkers--is eager to learn from the ideas of the novice. The second type is not really wise and insightful, but scholarly. The works of esteemed thinkers are read and chewed over; usually somewhat deferentially, in a conversation among almost equals. But the teacher next door has nothing of interest to say. These experts bend the knee to the departed while turning their back on their neighbour. The third is neither wise nor scholarly. They are superior because they have command of a method. Their democratic spirit, anaemic at best, disregards both the human experience of contemporaries and the wisdom bequeathed by scholarly tradition. They know how to collect and interpret data, and they hear the data's disembodied voice speak to them of facts. So, the first kind of expert extends the education conversation to both the living and the dead; the second, only to the dead; and the third, to neither the living nor the dead. In our day the third kind of expert speaks loudest, and with a newly authorised language. The new grammar and vocabulary make it easier to ask questions like: Are our schools effective? How can we obtain better information? and Are our policies being implemented? In time such expressions become so familiar they slip off the tongue. When this happens we know that the forensic metaphor is likely to be guiding educational thought (Neyland, 2003). When the forensic metaphor guides, we can be sure of the weakening of those narratives and larger visions that uniquely express and shape our deeper commitment to those we teach. These practice-enriching stories and ideals are the essential of education--gods with a small g. When these essential gods of education are silenced there arises a new deism, expertocracy, and a new oracle, information. This, more or less, is the current state of things. Is there a credible alternative to the forensic metaphor, expertocracy, and the worship of data? …

Rationalisation, Race, and the Weimar Response to Jazz

ABSTRACTSurveying articles on jazz in the Weimar‐era popular press, one finds that commentators and critics commonly read the music as an expression of primitive blackness, a product of a rationally organised, industrial mode of composition, or a strange combination of both. The rationalised/industrialised and black elements perceived in jazz were generally understood as antithetical; the concept of blackness itself was rarely scrutinised. In exceptional cases, writers began to view blackness as a media‐generated construct and thereby re‐situate race itself as a product of modern popular culture. Siegfried Kracauer stands out in this regard. He recognised that the response to jazz was rarely about the music itself, and his critiques of jazz culture and the encompassing fascination with blackness contain an unusual degree of critical reflection on the public imagination of race in the Weimar Republic.

New Democracy and Alternative Culture: Jazz in West Germany after the Second World War

The American Forces who occupied Germany in 1945–46 had hoped that popularising jazz music might assist in the redemocratisation of Germans under the age of thirty. The Amerika-Häuser established by the US State Department to build a cultural foundation for democracy amongst younger Germans, and American Forces Network radio each contributed to the gradual emergence of a West German jazz culture which was marked by a series of jazz festivals and the development of a viable recording industry. However most strata of German society neither understood nor cared about jazz. Jazz became confused with — and diluted by — rock ‘n’ roll. Both were rejected as unwanted “Americanization”. Fewer than ten percent of teenagers acquired any taste for jazz. Its appeal was confined to the more privileged and educated. Hence the jazz culture which did recruit itself from the surviving remnants of the Third Reich did not provide an impetus toward democracy.

Cante Hondo: Charles Mingus, Nat Hentoff, and Jazz Racism1

Turning to the work of bassist and composer Charles Mingus and critic and record producer Nat Hentoff, I examine challenges to the liberal discourse of postwar jazz culture. Both were vocal critics of the cultural and racial politics of jazz. Because ideals of integration and democracy had long been central to its identity as a cultural practice, its participants saw jazz culture as a barometer of the national character and potentially representative of the fulfillment of democratic society. The participants were often less willing to see the effects of the nation on this world — jazz culture echoed evolving cultural and social discourses about racial and gender identity, the demands of the market, national boundaries, deviancy, and the function of artistic practice. Hentoff and Mingus present competing perspectives that offer suggestive avenues for rethinking jazz historiography and race.

Northern sun, southern moon: Europe's reinvention of jazz

Until the 1960s American jazz, for all its improvisational and rhythmic brilliance, remained rooted in formal Western conventions originating in ancient Greece and early Christian plainchant. At the same time European jazz continued to follow the American model. When the creators of so-called free jazz--Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, John Coltrane, Albert Ayler, Sun Ra, Anthony Braxton, and others--liberated American jazz from its Western ties, European musicians found their own distinctive voices and created a vital, innovative, and independent jazz culture. Northern Sun, Southern Moon examines this pan-Eurasian musical revolution. Author and musician Mike Heffley charts its development in Scandinavia, Holland, England, France, Italy, and especially (former East and West) Germany. He then follows its spread to former Eastern-bloc countries. Heffley brings to life an evolving musical phenomenon, situating European jazz in its historical, social, political, and cultural contexts and adding valuable material to the still-scant scholarship on improvisation. He reveals a Eurasian genealogy worthy of jazz's well-established African and American pedigrees and proposes startling new implications for the histories of both Western music and jazz.

Review: Jazz Cultures by David Ake; Going for Jazz: Musical Practices and American Ideology by Nicholas Gebhardt

Review: Jazz Cultures by David Ake; Going for Jazz: Musical Practices and American Ideology by Nicholas Gebhardt