Jazz In America Research Articles

Nocoastjazz

Nocoastjazz

Sounds from Nowhere

When Pandit Ravi Shankar began performing for Western audiences in the 1960s, his collaborative instinct for the meeting of Hindustani music and jazz was challenged by what he described as "shrieking, shouting, smoking, masturbating, and copulating" audiences of "strange young weirdos," according to Mick Brown writing for <i>The Telegraph</i>. We can only imagine the debates of high and low art which were fought between Shankar and George Harrison, Bud Shank, or even Tony Scott, who were few of his many collaborators from the West. Caught between its original referent and its appeal to learned style, jazz (with its roots in African-American history) is placed at the center of debates about authenticity, gatekeeping, and located-ness. Once something like "world music," composed through collaboration, fusion, and re-sampling, enters a space not used to any of the styles mixed into this world of music, it creates unique soundscapes. Ethnomusicologist Martin Stokes, writing "On Musical Cosmopolitanism," looks at the course of sounds through the world to think of music "as a process in the making of 'worlds,' rather than a passive reaction to global 'systems'" (6). The world created is never an unproblematically imported ambience. A jazz club anywhere in the world does not always correspond to Dixieland, or Chicago, or New York, nor does it reveal the influence of Black labor-songs, vaudeville, or ragtime. This is where an album like Indian composer duo Shankar-Jaikishan’s <i>Raga-Jazz Style</i> (1968) becomes interesting, compressing 11 ragas from Hindustani music into curt pieces corresponding to different, morphed forms of jazz. By looking at the history of the circulation of interfused styles of jazz in America, Goa, Bombay, and mainstream Hindi cinema, this paper examines the material conditions of creativity, and attempts to inscribe this global creative collaboration of forms into a connected history of jazz and Hindustani music.

The Culturally Conservative View of Jazz in America: A Historical and Critical Analysis

Jazz in America, once identified with social rebellion and political protest, has since the 1980s become closely associated with cultural conservatism, a belief system that places high value on traditionalism. Jazz, from this perspective, embodies traditional American values and norms, particularly those related to the nation’s democratic principles. Those who perceive jazz in this manner commonly depict the music as a model of democracy that serves as a guide to individual behavior. This essay has two basic objectives: the first is to trace the historical development of the culturally conservative view of jazz; the second is to critically analyze this theoretical perspective. The essay’s goal is to combine the historical and critical analyses into a comprehensive examination of the culturally conservative view of jazz in America as it has evolved since its initial conceptualization by Ralph Ellison.

Listenin’ to the Breeze

Listenin’ to the Breeze Jeffrey R. Di Leo (bio) Benson: The Autobiography George Benson With Alan Goldsher Da Capo Press www.dacapopress.com 222 Pages; Print, $25.99 “Listen.” So begins Miles: The Autobiography (1989) withan imperative from the master that no right-minded jazz fan would ignore. Love him or hate him, when Miles Davis spoke to us with his horn, welistened, just as we did when the man behind the horn told his life story back in 1989. “The greatest feeling I ever had in my life—with my clothes on—was when I first hear Diz and Bird together in St. Louis, back in 1944,” he continues. “I was just eighteen years old and had just graduated from Lincoln High School.” Davis’s story, like those of Diz and Bird, is part of the origin story of jazz in America, one that cannot be retold enough by its progenitors. “When I heard Diz and Bird in B’s band, I said, ‘What? What is this!?’ Man, that shit was so terrible it was scary.” It’s a moment of pure jazz injected into the teenage bloodstream of a genius. The rest is music history—and Davis left few stones unturned in the 400-plus pages of densely and richly packed autobiography. The world of jazz is hyper-competitive, particularly onstage where musicians aim to outplay and out-style one another. It is also a world where the footsteps and shadows of the greats like Bird and Miles are often respected almost to a fault. This respect is part of the jazz code, a set of unwritten rules. Learning from those who practice them is a revealing glimpse into artistic life. This is the gift of Benson: The Autobiography (2014) by George Benson and Alan Goldsher: engaging stories from a talented guitarist with a mellow voice who seemed always one step behind the giants of jazz. George Benson recounts his interactions with and feelings about many musicians from his long and remarkable life in music. In one of the book’s more memorable passages, Benson recalls getting a call from Miles asking him to join a recording session. “After I hung up, I stared at the wall for a good long while,” says Benson, “the same question blowing through my head over and over again: What am I going to play on a Miles Davis record?” Turns out Benson was right: his role in the session ended up little more than a vamp reinforcement. “And to tell the truth,” confesses Benson, “most of what happened that afternoon and evening was well out of my comfort zone.” But Benson made his mark, laying down the guitar track for “Paraphernalia,” a cut from Davis’s 1968 classic album, Miles in the Sky—a track that opened a new chapter in Davis’s musical journey. Later, Benson recounts getting paired with guitarist John McLaughlin for a gig at Lincoln Center. “I’m sure he [the promoter] was hoping for a guitar gunfight at the O.K. Corral,” says Benson, but both guitarists decided to take it back a notch. Afterwards, Benson wondered about the strange, sitar-sounding effects used by McLaughlin, who replied, “I don’t want people comparing us, so I did something completely different.” Benson is dismissed by some jazz enthusiasts because of his crossover turn towards popular and mainstream music. If anything, Benson’s original sin as a jazz musician is becoming a household name. He seems to be aware of this as he tells his story in this wonderfully concise and fast-moving autobiography. Benson rose in popularity in the mid-1970s with the release of his album Breezin’. “After twelve months,” writes Benson, “the album sold over four million copies and was nominated for five Grammy Awards.” “After that, things started changing. Drastically.” But surprisingly, these tales of drastic changes amount to little more than the final thirty-five pages of the book. The fact that Benson devotes only one fifth of the book to the last half of his career, notably the period after he became a household name, is telling. The tension between artistic and commercial success tempers the entirety of his autobiography...

Cuttin' up: how early jazz got America's ear

The emergence of jazz out of New Orleans is part of the American story, but the creation of this music was more than a regional phenomenon: it also crossed geographical, cultural, and technological lines. Court Carney takes a new look at the spread and acceptance of jazz in America, going beyond the familiar accounts of music historians and documentarians to show how jazz paralleled and propelled the broader changes taking place in America's economy, society, politics, and culture. Cuttin' Up takes readers back to the 1920s and early 1930s to describe how jazz musicians navigated the rocky racial terrain of the music business - and how new media like the phonograph, radio, and film accelerated its diffusion and contributed to variations in its styles. The first history of jazz to emphasize the connections between these disseminating technologies and specific locales, it describes the distinctive styles that developed in four cities and tells how the opportunities of each influenced both musicians' choices and the marketing of their music. Carney begins his journey in New Orleans, where pioneers like Jelly Roll Morton and Buddy Bolden set the tone for the new music, then takes readers up the river to Chicago, where Joe Oliver's Creole Jazz Band, featuring a young Louis Armstrong, first put jazz on record. The genre received a major boost in New York through radio's live broadcasts from venues like the Cotton Club, then came to a national audience when Los Angeles put it in the movies, starting with the appearance of Duke Ellington's orchestra in Check and Double Check. As Carney shows, the journey of jazz had its racial component as well, ranging from New Orleans' melting pot to Chicago's segregated music culture, from Harlem clubs catering to white clienteles to Hollywood's reinforcement of stereotypes. And by pinpointing specific cultural turns in the process of bringing jazz to a national audience, he shows how jazz opens a window on the creation of a modernist spirit in America. A 1930 tune called Cuttin' Up captured the freewheeling spirit of this new music - an expression that also reflects the impact jazz and its diffusion had on the nation as it crossed geographic and social boundaries and integrated an array of styles into an exciting new hybrid. Deftly blending music history, urban history, and race studies, Cuttin' Up recaptures the essence of jazz in its earliest days.

The White Reception of Jazz in America

It came almost like start of terror, like sudden awakening, this shattering storm of rhythm, these tone elements never previously combined and now let loose upon us all at once. (Darius Milhaud) From 1917 to 1930, white America was forced to realize that new form of music, jazz, rising on radio waves and appearing in clubs worldwide, was here to stay. At the same time, articles analyzing, judging, appraising, and condemning jazz flooded into publication. Titles such as Unspeakable Must Go (see McMahon), Students in Arms Against Why 'Jazz' Sends Us Back to the Jungle, and Problem (see Wilson) appeared in mainstream publications and revealed the political and racial endeavors of hostile white critics. By asserting in 1925 that jazz release of all suppressed emotions at once (Rogers 30), J. A. Rogers created description that whites would expand on in order to label jazz in Harlem culture as primitive and evil. served in several ways as precursor to fifties' be-bop and rock-'n'-roll, eighties' pop, and nineties' rap. Principal among them is that jazz critics, like critics of these later musical forms, were often diabolical in their attacks on the music. Motivated by political and racial concerns, many jazz critics during the Harlem Renaissance publicized their dislike of jazz music in order to express their dislike of African Americans. In striving to analyze and to understand the concepts of jazz music white critics often hid behind black stereotypes in order to explain the increased fascination the world had with jazz. Some, in utter contempt, wrote that jazz plagiarized and then mutilated the works of classical, white composers. Still other critics maintained that jazz was dangerous, unhealthy, or, even worse, form of bayou voodoo. In an attempt to understand jazz, many publications resorted to asking professionals why Europeans liked jazz, since jazz was acclaimed in Europe as form of musical liberation. Magazines turned to composers, doctors, educators, and even the black populace to explain jazz. Stunningly, what remains consistent in the reports on jazz is not the ultimate dislike of the music, but the political and social dislike of the black population. In sum, the articles on jazz that appeared in mainstream magazines between 1917 and 1930 reveal the racial prejudice that white jazz critics had against African Americans. As magazines first began to recognize jazz, between 1917 and 1920, critics' principal aim appeared innocently enough to be asking what, exactly, jazz was. Yet, delving deeper into the language of early articles, one soon discovers that the explanations of jazz are also the signs of aggression by white critics against the recently emancipated black man. Popular publications such as Literary Digest and Current Opinion linked jazz immediately to slavery and Africa and, shortly thereafter, disqualified any claim jazz might have to being serious musical genre. For example, in the Literary Digest article Appeal of Primitive Jazz (1917), the critic begins by analyzing the word jazz but finishes with an outright racial manifesto against the black man. (1) Jazz, the article begins, is a strange word, an adjective descriptive of (26), but the article then goes on to explain what sort of band might be called jazz: The groups that play for dancing, when colored, seem infected with the virus that they try to instill as stimulus in others. They shake and jump and writhe in ways to suggest return of the medieval jumping mania. The word, according to Walter Kingsley, famous in the ranks of vaudeville, is variously spelled jas, jass, jaz, jazz, and jascz; and is African in origin. The switch from Africa to slavery is short leap for this writer, since shortly after asserting the word's African origin, the article links the word to slavery: In old plantation days, when slaves were having one of their rare holidays and the fun languished, some West-Coast African would cry out, Jaz her up, and this would be the cue for fast and furious fun. …

The Reception of Jazz in America: A New View

The Reception of Jazz in America: A New View

The Reception of Jazz in America

The Reception of Jazz in America

The reception of jazz in America: a new view

The reception of jazz in America: a new view

The Reception of Jazz in America: A New View

The Reception of Jazz in America: A New View

The Reception of Jazz in America: A New View

The Reception of Jazz in America: A New View

Another Hard Look at Jazz in America

Another Hard Look at Jazz in America

The Encyclopedia of Jazz

The first appearance of Leonard Feather's Encyclopedia of Jazz was heralded by critics, musicians, and record collectors as a major contribution to the literature of jazz. Never before had America's native music been treated so meticulously, objectively, and comprehensively. The appearance of two later volumes, The Encyclopedia of Jazz in the Sixties and The Encyclopedia of Jazz in the Seventies (with Ira Gitler) only confirmed the initial enthusiasm and the judgement that here were basic books for any music library. This marks the first paperback publication of this book, soon to be followed by paperback editions of the other two volumes. With more than 2,000 biographies and 200 photos, it spans the history of jazz from its origins to 1959. But more than a biographical dictionary, the book also features essays on the jazz tradition, its major players and composers, the relationship between jazz and classical music (written by Gunther Schuller), a social history of jazz in America, the jazzman as critic, and a grammar of jazz language that can serve as an ideal introduction for young listeners. In addition, Leonard Feather provides a chronology, list of international critic polls, musicians birthdays and birthplaces, a bibliography, and a discography of recommended recordings. For anyone seriously--or even casually--interested in the development of jazz and blues, this classic reference work can guide you unerringly through the many dimensions of the music's wonderful history.

A History of Jazz in America

A History of Jazz in America