Newport Jazz Festival Research Articles

Mahalia Jacksonin musiikin ja hänen gospellaulutyylinsä saapuminen Suomeen 1950–1960 luvuilla

Mahalia Jackson (1911-1972), “The World’s Greatest Gospel Singer”, broke path for the worldwide popularity of African American gospel music. Her European concert tours never reached Finland, but since the 1950s, Finnish audiences have been able to listen to her music via recordings, radio, film and other media. This article explores the ways in which Jackson’s music came to Finland in the 1950s and 1960s. Furthermore, the article shows how the early marketing of her records and music critics’ excited reception of her gospel vocal expression sought to shape local audiences’ listening experiences and appreciation for the artistic merit of her music. This article is based on a study of various sources including advertisements, music reviews, correspondence and other archival materials, recordings, Jackson’s performance at the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival and the film Jazz on a Summer’s Day (1959). This article shows that when Mahalia Jackson’s music came to Finland, her gospel vocal expression was recognized for its powerful spirituality and emotional impact on listeners. Yet the ways in which her music was presented to Finnish audiences was often mystifying, decontextualized and guided by the interests of music industry actors. This limited the ability of local listeners to understand the cultural and historical meanings of her gospel vocal expression. At the same time, however, the enthusiasm and admiration demonstrated by music critics paved the way for the enduring influence of Mahalia Jackson’s music in Finland.

Hodges at Newport: The Rhetoric of “Jeep's Blues”

The Duke Ellington Orchestra's performance at the 1956 Newport Jazz Festival is remembered chiefly for its hard-swinging rendition of “Diminuendo in Blue and Crescendo in Blue” with an extended “interval” of twenty-seven solo choruses by tenor saxophonist Paul Gonsalves. While that number generated much excitement and considerable publicity, the band's later rendition of “Jeep's Blues” has received wider critical acclaim. The slow-tempo performance runs for six choruses, and Johnny (“Jeep”) Hodges' solo is based on only a few distinctive figures. By skillfully ordering and varying those figures Hodges created a coherent and moving statement, one that can be explicated in terms of concepts associated with musical rhetoric. Previous studies have shown that jazz musicians often conceive their improvisations in rhetorical terms. This study provides transcriptions of the Newport Festival performance of “Jeep's Blues” and another recording made some thirty-six hours later in a New York recording studio. The festival performance is analyzed using concepts and methods adapted from rhetoric as well as musical form, phrase rhythm, and Schenkerian voice-leading analysis. My analysis demonstrates that much of Hodges's musical eloquence derives from the way he ordered, elaborated, repeated, varied, and articulated a few basic ideas. It also examines how Hodges used temporal pacing and dynamic shading to further enhance expression. After briefly comparing the festival performance to the studio recording, I consider how a more recent theory of rhetoric, that of “signifying” might apply to “Jeep's Blues.”

On Reception of Improvised Music

Does the concept of improvisation have any meaning when a piece is recorded and experienced at another time and place? Dennen revisits John Coltrane's “My Favorite Things” from the 1963 Newport Jazz Festival to consider a theory of the reception of improvised music.

Failure to fuse

Festivals play a central role in popular music mythology. In 1969, the Newport Jazz Festival made headlines when producer George Wein controversially announced his intention to openly incorporate rock acts, including Sly and the Family Stone and Led Zeppelin, into the jazz festival. Newport 1969 is retrospectively represented as a symbol of the problems of integrating jazz and rock, but a critical examination of the festival and its coverage clearly illustrates how distinctions between jazz and rock—and jazz and rock audiences, for that matter—are socially constructed. This article will reconsider the importance of Newport 1969 by revisiting debates occurring in the pages of Down Beat, Rolling Stone, Jazz and Pop, and other music journalism during 1969 which discussed the merits of a merger between jazz and rock, and proposes that Newport 1969 was a watershed that exposed the key tensions in the emerging culture war between the two genres.

The Whore's Child (review)

who cosponsored the state's death penalty bill, and ends with scenes from recentprofiles ofmovie mogul Harvey Weinstein, director Wes Anderson and famed jeweler Yves Piaget. We're there as the assemblyman serenades his constituents at a spaghetti fund-raiser, when Weinstein accepts a medal at the French Consulate (then punts the evening 's festivities to attend a screening of Chocolat) and when Piaget hosts a dinner party for guests bejeweled in everything but Piaget. In between we meet, among others, John Huston and Humphrey Bogart discussing communism over lunch; Bill Clinton confessing his ignorance of the trifecta at a book signing in George Plimpton's Manhattan apartment; Pee Wee RusseU being presented to the Argentine Ambassador at the first Newport Jazz Festival; well-heeled ladies letting their hair down at a San Diego spa; and Jerry Stiller squirming his way through a Friar's Club Roast. "If I find it interesting to write," Ross explains with trademark succinctness , "I naturally assume the reader will find it interesting to read." And we do. With equal parts humor and compassion, Ross shows us famous people doing ordinary things (Herbert Hoover at seventy-five, walking New York City, amused at his own anonymity), ordinary people doing ordinary things (Indiana high school seniors oblivious to the marvels ofNewYork) and ordinarypeople doing extraordinary things (a new grade school principal comforting teachers and parents in the first days after September 11). And she has a delicious knack for capturing in words the sparks that fly when strange bedfeUows kiss: Benny Goodman and Yehudi Menuhin, Norman Mailer and Mohammed Ali, Ernest Hemingway and Marlene Dietrich These pieces are some of the most colorful and reflect what feels like Ross's own giddiness at finding herself present at such surprising pairings. Some critics (and even a few editors ) have characterized Ross's work as "fly-on-the-waU" reporting, a term that Ross disavows. "Any editor," she bristles, "instructing a reporter to be a fly—on or off the waU—is misguided ." Her technique, she explains, is grounded in being "simultaneously detached yet empathetic," a skül she attributes as much to gift as to craft. Using her talents for detaUed scene and revelatory dialogue, Ross tells her stories with the vividness of film, drawing us into her subjects' lives as participants rather than eavesdroppers . The end result is journalism that celebrates life, truth-telling void of cruelty or phoniness and a new generation of journalistic storytellers whose own work promises to preserve the legacy of a remarkable woman. (PU) The Whore's Child by Richard Russo Knopf, 2002, 272 pp., $24 In "The Farther You Go," the third story in Richard Russo's new coUection , the father offers a fitting remark for what troubles the rest of the characters . The term is "faUure of imagination ," and Hank, a prostate-cancer survivor, first uses it to describe his wife's inadequacy. After surgery she's bought him a riding lawn mower that ends up making the chore more painful to his recovering body. This is one of the many "failures" he points out, including the refusal of his daughter The Missouri Review · 209 to visit him in the hospital. "It wasn't that she couldn't imagine me with cancer," he explains. "She couldn't imagine me with a dick. That I am a man has somehow escaped her, which is why she doesn't think twice about bending over in front of me in her peasant blouse." Russo's style, typicaUy straightforward and easygoing, doesn't seek to shock his readers any more than it attempts tocoverup forhis characters. He allows them to speak naturaUy in their own voices, and it's because he puts such trust in his characters that we do too. We feel rewarded by their humor and intelligence, and we're able to forgive them when their judgments seem too harsh. Following up Empire Falls, which won this year's Pulitzer Prize, Russo continues to show his keen sense of relationships. He draws attention to the subtleties that drive people apart and the extreme conditions that sometimes, despite their best wishes, force people back together. In this, Russo's sixth book but...

Evidence: Monk as Documentary Subject

For those familiar with Thelonious Monk only through recordings, the experience of first seeing him perform on film can be startling. The outrageous hats, the splayed fingers, the sucked-in cheeks, the spastic dancing--all of it suggests a character with a story that goes well beyond the music. Yet for many years, Monk has been consistently presented as an inscrutable figure who could only be known through his music.(1) At least one filmmaker simply gave up trying to make sense of his puzzling exterior: when Bert Stem filmed the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival for Jazz on a Summer's Day (1958), he kept cutting away to shots of yacht races during the pianist's performance of Blue Monk; Monk is onscreen for less than thirty seconds. More ambitious filmmakers have extended a more searching gaze in three documentaries that provide strikingly different approaches to how Monk might be understood. The title of Matthew Seig's 1991 documentary is itself significant; Thelonious Monk: American Composer presents a dedicated artist and family man who created a spiritually rich music rooted in a great tradition. In Charlotte Zwerin's Thelonious Monk: Straight No Chaser (1988), Monk is bizarre and unpredictable, functioning as an artist primarily because of the highly professional support of sidepersons, the steadfast dedication of his wife Nellie, and the patronage of the Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter. The Monk prominently featured by Jean Bach in the film A Great Day in Harlem (1995) is a trickster who carefully choreographed how the world would see him. The Life and the Music: Meditations on Integration Although some writers of biography would like to turn their prose into a window with an unobstructed view of their subjects, they can never deliver the semblance of truth that is available to the documentary filmmaker.(2) Biographers in general and jazz biographers in particular face additional problems as they attempt to integrate the work of the subject with the life of the subject. Writers who examine a collection of biographical material eventually produce nuanced language to explain how the work relates to the life and vice versa. If documentary filmmakers are to justify the inevitable truth claims inherent in their work, they must rely on some combination of voice-of-God narration, archival footage, and talking heads to present their subjects. In the classical and documentary, narration is scrupulously avoided. John Grierson, perhaps the father of documentary cinema, simply turned his camera--and later his sound equipment--on his subjects in the 1920s and 1930s and recorded their activities (Winston 1995). In the modernist documentary--which probably begins with Point of Order (1964), Emile de Antonio's careful selection of early television footage to expose the malevolence of Joseph McCarthy--narration was written out as pretentious and awkward. In the jazz documentary of the 1980s and 1990s, we are likely to watch people being interviewed, often in front of carefully composed backgrounds and with no real evidence that anyone is doing the interviewing. When the documentary subject is a living person, filmmakers will train the camera on the subject and hope for moments of self-revelation. Even if there is no self-revelation, the mere presence of a camera and film crew ensures that the subject will at least seem to be transparent. When the documentary subject is a black jazz musician, transparency is much less inevitable, and the task of revealing the life through the work and vice versa becomes more complicated. For one thing, jazz archives are not nearly as full as archives for the Civil War and baseball, to pick two examples from Ken Burns' mammoth portfolio. (Burns' anticipated multipart series on jazz promises to provide a revealing comparison to his programs on less-controversial subjects that lend themselves more easily to documentary treatment.) Jazz filmmakers often have to improvise with a limited amount of stock footage, stills, and interviews. …

Mainstreaming Monk: The Ellington Album

He is, think, major jazz composer, the first since Duke Ellington. --Martin Williams (1963, 33) Monk took much of his style from Ellington and he would like to have been an accomplished pianist who could have articulated in the fashion of Ellington. --Clark Terry (quoted in Voce 1985) Ellington defined 101 arranging concepts and focused on sound. sound was the important thing. Thelonious did the same thing. --Larry Ridley (quoted in Gourse 1997, 259) continue to feel that to properly appreciate work and his position in jazz history it is essential to understand that he stands in direct line of succession from Morton and Ellington. --Orrin Keepnews (1986a, [2]) Duke Ellington's name surfaces often in discussions of Thelonious Monk. links between the two musicians seem so close as to be selfevident and irrefutable. Both excelled as composers in musical tradition known for its emphasis on improvisation. Both were distinctive pianists who displayed stylistic affinities--a percussive attack, penchant for dissonance, shared interest in Harlem stride. Both belonged to select group of exceptional figures in jazz--Jelly Roll Morton, John Lewis, and Charles Mingus also come to mind--who put their individual stamp on the ensembles that performed their works. Both created unique worlds of sound that set them apart from their contemporaries. Although their personalities and careers may have been poles apart, Monk and Ellington, so the literature on jazz reminds us repeatedly, were kindred spirits. Ellington thought so, too, apparently. He first heard music, according to trumpeter Ray Nance, in the summer of 1948. Nance was traveling with Ellington and small group of musicians on short tour of England and had taken with him a portable gramophone. As Nance told Stanley Dance in 1966 interview: I was on my way to Bournemouth, Hampshire, by train, and in my compartment put on one of my Thelonious Monk records. Duke was passing by in the corridor, and he stopped and asked, `Who's that playing?' told him. `Sounds like he's stealing some of my stuff,' he said. So he sat down and listened to my records, and he was very interested. He understood what Monk was doing (Dance 1981, 139).(1) In later years, Ellington and his orchestra occasionally appeared at festivals that featured Monk on the same bill. On one occasion, the 1962 Newport Jazz Festival, Monk sat in with the Ellington orchestra to play his own Monk's Dream and the Billy Strayhom homage Frere Monk, the latter twelve-bar blues with vaguely Monkian head and dissonant riff figures, including flatted-fifth chords in the last chorus. Both pieces were recorded by Ellington (without Monk) in September 1962 but not issued until the 1980s. They serve to reinforce the notion of musical kinship between Monk and Ellington--a relationship that Monk himself had invited listeners to consider seven years earlier. was July 1955 when Monk--a thirty-seven-year-old pianist and composer still not widely known to the public--made his debut recording for the Riverside label, released under the title Thelonious Monk Plays Duke Ellington (Riverside RLP 12-201). Backed by bassist Oscar Pettiford and drummer Kenny Clarke, the enigmatic, reclusive Monk interpreted eight compositions by the popular, internationally acclaimed Ellington. Nearly all were standards frequently performed by singers and instrumentalists: Sophisticated Lady, I Got Bad (and That Ain't Good), Solitude, Mood Indigo, It Don't Mean Thing If Ain't Got That Swing, I Let Song Go Out of My Heart, and the Ellington-Juan Tizol collaboration Caravan. exception was Black and Tan Fantasy, piece dating from 1927 that was closely identified with the Ellington orchestra and seldom played by others. Three years later, in 1958, the album was repackaged and reissued by Riverside with painting by Henri Rousseau, The Repast of the Lion, reproduced on the cover (see Fig. …