Reception Of Jazz Research Articles

Review essay: Between the Material and the Ephemeral

Review essay: Between the Material and the Ephemeral

‘Not Music but Sonic Porn’: Identity Politics, Social Reform, and the Negative Reception of Jazz

The 1920s fascination with jazz music and dance provoked deep concern and anxiety about the future direction of society in different corners of the world. Jazz was readily associated with various social evils that were considered a threat to the cultural and moral wellbeing of nations as well as the mental and physical health of both individuals and society in general. Negative reception of jazz was not limited to the United States but seems to have expanded around the globe just as rapidly as the appeal of the music and movements loosely identified at the time as jazz. The article identifies defining elements of this negative discourse to explore their mechanism and bearings in particular localized settings, namely, in Australia and Iceland. The focus is on how the perceptions of jazz as a social evil contributed to conceptualizing ideas of social reform and how the demonization of jazz played a role in defining national character and culture. Australia and Iceland serve as examples for understanding the way in which the negative discourse gained a foothold in society by relating to pre-existing social anxieties, political objectives and historical context.

Book Review: Tropical Riffs: Latin America and the Politics of Jazz by Jason Borge

Taking on a sprawling and elusive notion like jazz is an ambitious enterprise. Jason Borge limits his perspective in this book mostly to representations of jazz by Latin American music critics and in film. Framing the book is the question of the reception of jazz in Latin America, specifically Brazil, Argentina and Cuba, and the politics of reception as refracted through issues of nationalism, race, and imperialism. As such, for readers who are acquainted with the many musicians and styles that populate the book, this is an informative and thorough account of the fortunes of jazz from the moments of its appearance to a waning “afterlife” (ch. 5) of the 1980s and ’90s. Each of the countries merits a chapter, and it is instructive for comparative purposes to trace the trajectory of jazz as it entered different social and political contexts. Most salient seems to be the question of race, and the ways that various critics navigate the ascribed “blackness” of jazz within their respective national conversations.In Argentina, Borge argues that the powerful and prevailing ideology of whiteness made it difficult for non-whites to enter the musical canon as it was written by critics of the 1930s and ‘40s. But that didn’t mean that there was no jazz, or that there were no non-white Argentines playing it. It only meant that critics were blind to their participation in the increasingly worldwide phenomenon.In Brazil, anxiety about what Borge identifies as Americanization shaped critical and audience responses to jazz. Moreover, it was through cinema rather than records that a widespread apprehension of the genre took place. In film, most jazz musicians were white. While Brazil did not suffer from the same kind of erasure of the role of people of African descent in the national imaginary (though that did not exempt Brazilians from their own particular forms of racism), somehow jazz was again more aligned with whiteness than might otherwise have been the case. Toward the 1960s, when bossa nova and jazz might be understood as related and intertwined, the relationship continued, paradoxically, to be a fraught one, at least in the eyes of critics.In Cuba, jazz and Cuban genres such as mambo were very closely related because of frequent in-person exchanges as musicians circulated between Havana, Miami, and New York. Cuba’s geographical proximity and a long history of what historian Louis A. Pérez has referred to as “ties of singular intimacy” (1990) in political and cultural realms meant that the musicking on both sides of the Florida straits grew up alongside one another and became entangled. Yet both American and Cuban critics, the argument goes, were too invested in keeping jazz distinct from Latin jazz, and the discursive effect was that both failed to recognize the inextricable histories of the two genres.Throughout, the author works to read and interpret his sources on their terms and without anachronistically reading twenty-first-century perspectives into mid-twentieth-century-cultural production. For the most part, he successfully exposes the contours of nationalist thought and aspirations to modernity, as well as understandings of race and gender that seem appropriate to the contexts in question. In some cases, however, the intention to interpret sources generously results in somewhat tone-deaf assertions about clearly racist tropes. The drawings of Miguel Covarrubias, for example, are described as “capturing the jaunty, playful spirit of Harlem clubs.”(28) Yet they appear almost shockingly to rely on and amplify visual cues that signaled blackness with exaggerated features and primitivist lines. Perhaps, to 1930s’ viewers, these images did indeed seem “lithe and modern” (28), but perhaps it would also be helpful to point out that they no longer appear as such, and instead look more like they are partaking of the kinds of visual regimes that we understand to be constitutive of the structural racisms that pervade the Americas.This is a paradoxical history, a history as much about what did not happen as what did. For the most part, it is the sustained focus on what the critics said, with additional attention to the ways that jazz appeared in film that leads Borge to his conclusions. This may be more useful for readers familiar with the musicians, films and performances to which the book refers. It may be less useful to those looking for an approach informed more by sound studies, especially in some recent iterations that attend to performance, the racialization or gendered nature of acousmatic music, infrastructure and technology. Similarly, a view that lingered more on the shifting venues and forms in which jazz was proffered and consumed by distinct audiences might also have yielded alternative, or additional, claims. The study of music in Latin America is a robust field, and this book is an instructive contribution.

‘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.

Towards a history of jazz in Greece in the interwar era

The article examines the production, diffusion and reception of jazz in Greece in the interwar era. By examining various press articles, radio programmes and theatre booklets, it reveals unknown aspects of its history and brings into light forgotten sources of the past. It analyses issues of categorization, namely ‘modern’ and ‘popular’ music, the role of Greek theatrical composers, different musical circulations from France and Germany, as well as triangulation effects passing through Italy and Turkey. A certain attention is attributed to the term jazz and its meaning in interwar Greece and some interpretation of its relative oblivion is attempted.

The reception of jazz in Adelaide and Melbourne and the creation of an Australian sound in the Angry Penguins decade

This article re-examines some of the arguments in ‘An Australian Sound’ (Clunies-Ross 1979) suggesting that jazz in Melbourne and Adelaide in the 1940s was developing distinctive local attributes, before it was swamped by the international revival of traditional jazz. Jazz developed in Adelaide and Melbourne simultaneously with modernism in literature and the visual arts, and was associated with the formation of the Contemporary Art Society in both cities. The poet Max Harris took an interest in jazz and was perhaps responsible for the introductions leading to the first Australian jazz convention, in 1946, which brought the Graeme Bell band and the Southern Jazz Group together. He added jazz sections in his magazine Angry Penguins and its off-shoot, which formed the programme of the first convention. Local jazz experts debated Australian developments in the pages of these magazines, in the context of contributions from New York and London. Australian sounds in jazz culminated in the forty-five original tunes recorded for the ABC by Dave Dallwitz with the second Southern Jazz Group in 1951, and then they faded, until Dallwitz re-emerged as a jazz musician in the 1970s and recorded a lot of original music, including the Ern Malley Suite, which brought him international recognition and confirmed the distinctive qualities of Australian jazz in what is now identified as the ‘traditional’ mode.

“Das wahre Programm der Zeit hieß: Jazz”: Zum Stellenwert des Jazz als (musik)kulturelle und literarische Chiffre in der österreichischen Zwischenkriegszeit

Usually the early European jazz reception is associated, after Paris, with Berlin and the culture of the Weimar Republic, while Austria and particularly Vienna are paid but scant att ention in this context. When looking more closely at the cultural and artistic dynamic in Vienna during the 1920s, however, one encounters a surprising density of both the reception of jazz and independent contributions as differentiations of existing artistic practice in the areas of literature, music, theater, and feuilleton writing. This paper on the one hand reconstructs the broad spectrum of jazz presence based on contemporary sources and, on the other hand, investigates the cultural and discursive meaning of the latter, that is, to what extent it can be regarded as a cultural code of the time and how it interfaced with other parallel artistic phenomenons (for instance, debates about new music) and political discourses (Americanism, national stereotypes, racism, and so on).

Conflicting Strategies of Management and Memory at the Indiana Roof Ballroom, 1933-34

The Indiana Roof Ballroom in downtown Indianapolis houses a unique artifact relating to the reception of jazz and popular music in the early 1930s known as the “Jazz Door.” Two stagehands listed the bands that played at the Roof from 1933 to 1936 on the door, giving a rating of one to four stars (fair to extraordinary), for each band. This paper compares the entries on the Door for the 1933-34 season with ticket prices and publicity for the Ballroom, as seen in the local newspapers. Such a comparision demonstrates that the creators of the Jazz Door and the management of the Indiana Roof Ballroom had differing opinions on the roles and purposes of popular music. In seeking to explain these differences, this paper views the Jazz Door not only as a record of jazz criticism, but seeks to place the Door within the larger contexts of society and commerce at the height of the Depression.

Promoting Affect and Desire in the International Industrial World of Smooth Jazz: The Case of Candy Dulfer

In this article, I suggest that the feminized and sexualized associations of smooth jazz as fashioned by the industry during the 1990s have since contributed to its vitriolic and sometimes hysterical denouncement by jazz performers and scholars. In particular, I uncover the affective, sexual, and gendered significance surrounding smooth jazz's reception to highlight the industrial complex precipitating its commercial ascent. Finally, I concretely interrogate these values by highlighting the work of Dutch saxophonist Candy Dulfer, emphasizing the industrial dimensions undergirding her reception as a highly successful 1990s instrumentalist whose work was often promoted as smooth jazz, despite the stylistic diversity of her recordings. Here I contrast industry discourse to those performative values expressed by Dulfer, while also recognizing the larger historical and cultural reception of jazz as a highly gendered, racialized, and sexualized cultural phenomenon. Ultimately I show how Dulfer both participated in and disrupted the feminized and sexualized associations of smooth jazz to artfully side-step the bonds of anxiety over legitimacy that might otherwise have confined her in an increasingly fragmented and international jazz world. By uncovering the semiotic significance attached to smooth jazz's promotion and reception, my analysis indirectly critiques dominant scholarly debates, which cumulatively and exclusively emphasize race and ethnicity (over gender or sexuality) as essential constructs influencing jazz's broader cultural significance. These biases have led to under-developed conceptualizations of jazz's complex professionalization during the late-twentieth century.

Jazz and machine-age imperialism: music, "race," and intellectuals in France, 1918-1945

Jeremy Lane's Jazz and Machine-Age Imperialism is a bold challenge to the existing homogenous picture of the reception of American jazz in world-war era France. Lane's book is the first to examine the responses of diasporic French Africans and Antilleans to the music they first heard in Paris in the interwar years, analysing the place of jazz within the emerging negritude and creolite movements. Jazz and Machine-Age Imperialism is also the first study of the sometimes symbiotic, sometimes antagonistic relationship between these intellectuals of colour and contemporary white jazz critics. Through close readings of the work of early white French jazz critics, alongside the essays and poems of intellectuals of colour such as the Nardal sisters, Leon-Gontran Damas, Leopold Sedar Senghor, and Rene Menil, the book highlights the ways in which the French reception of jazz was bound up with a series of urgent contemporary debates about primitivism, imperialism, anti-imperialism, black and Creole consciousness, and the effects of American machine-age technologies on the minds and bodies of French citizens.

Willis Conover's International Jazz Diplomacy through Fandom: The Friends of Music USA Newsletter (1964–1969)

Willis Conover's Friends of Music USA (FOMUSA) Newsletter functioned as a record of overseas jazz reception and as a document that cohered a global network of fans. From 1964–1969, the newsletter gave a voice to Conover's jazz fans throughout the world, as it contained their correspondence in the form of excerpted letters. Consequently, the newsletter today comprises a social document of jazz reception by an international audience in the midst of the avant-garde jazz movement of the late 1960s. My research has shown that, while Conover intended his musical selection process in his broadcasts to remain both personally and musically unbiased, the newsletter, distributed to subscribing Friends chapters, contained decidedly partisan sentiments voiced through listener correspondence. The opinions and assertions contained in the newsletter served to shape the attitudes and the reception of jazz by a vast, international audience of fans and musicians overseas. Lastly, I present the FOMUSA Newsletter as a document inspired by Conover's prior experience as a fan and author of science fiction and fantasy literature by placing it in the context of fanzines, an integral component in the phenomenon of fandom.

Impact of an Interdisciplinary Concert Series on Stress and Work-Life Balance in a Dental College

A piano concert series and jazz reception program was organized at the College of Dentistry at New York University, in 2007. An anonymous survey to assess the response of faculty, staff, and students to the concert series was conducted during 2010 to 2011. Overwhelmingly, the respondents recommend that music concerts in the dental college be continued. Support is apparent in the overall recommendation and in questions dealing with stress, productivity, music, the auditorium, and the community. Differences between groups defined by status (student, faculty, other, or unknown) and by previous music study (yes, no, or unknown) were small. Events such as a concert series organized at the College of Dentistry apparently can have positive influence on work–life balance.

Le Jazz: Jazz and French Cultural Identity

This study traces in detail the reception of jazz in French culture, principally during the interwar years but going back as far as the earliest Parisian fashion for ‘le cakewalk’ in the first years of the twentieth century. It concludes with the triumphant acceptance of jazz in the Liberation years after the end of the Second World War, when the music was finally assimilated into the mainstream musical culture of France. In the intervening years this was by no means a foregone conclusion: debates raged between the passionate enthusiasts of the earliest New Orleans jazz orchestras that arrived in France after the First World War, such as Hugues Panassié, and the diverse proponents of aesthetic conservatism that condemned the music as foreign to the national spirit and an affront to ‘la clarté française’. In the 1930s the increasing commercialisation of jazz, following the runaway success of Josephine Baker and La Revue nègre in 1925, led to sectarian quarrels even among the partisans of the music: the purists, such as Panassié, nostalgic for the original ‘hot’ New Orleans style, and those prepared to accept the evolution of the form into the mostly white swing bands of the 1930s and their French imitators, such as Ray Ventura. In the repressive context of the German Occupation the music was predictably denounced as a foreign, Judeo-American influence; but to be ‘swing’ became a covert form of cultural resistance associated with the Zazous, and this connection probably ensured jazz's final triumph in the postwar years. The cultural politics of this complex evolution are revealing: the early critical condemnation of the music regularly drew on predictable racial stereotypes, and even among its partisans its appreciation was often coloured by the exotic appeal of American Negro culture and a sense that its purest form was necessarily a black form of expression. Matthew Jordan's thoroughgoing scholarship in tracing these developments is to be admired: he unearths many obscure journalistic examples of aesthetic conservatism that might otherwise have been forgotten, and even goes to the trouble of translating them systematically into English, which all too often serves to highlight their absurdity. His study documents the quarrels among the fans with similarly conscientious even-handedness, understanding the passionate admiration of a Panassié for the earliest forms of the music, but allowing due recognition for the broader church that would go on to embrace Duke Ellington and even bebop. He seems less at home with Benny Goodman, Paul Whiteman, and their French imitators, but acknowledges the role of chanson figures like Charles Trenet and Johnny Hess in the integration of the style into mainstream French popular culture. This is a satisfying study of the complex strands that lead to the assimilation of a foreign cultural influence and the way that the contemporary received view of the significance of jazz in French culture is not one that can be taken for granted.

Ralph Ellison’s Righteous Riffs: Jazz, Democracy, and the Sacred

Ralph Ellison’s Righteous Riffs: Jazz, Democracy, and the Sacred Steve Pinkerton (bio) I am not particularly religious, but I am claimed by music. —Ralph Ellison, “Living with Music” (1955) I don’t know what it was, some kinda church song, I guess. All I know is I ends up singin’ the blues. —Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952) We were rebirthed dancing, we were rebirthed crying affirmation of the Word. . . . We stamped our feet at the trumpet’s sound and we clapped our hands, ah, in joy! And we moved, yes, together in a dance, amen! —Ralph Ellison, Three Days Before the Shooting . . . (2010) A recent public service advertisement from Americans for the Arts speaks suggestively to contemporary understandings of jazz music’s cultural value. Confronting a putative pandemic of American musical ignorance, the full-page print ad wonders rhetorically “Why Some People Think Duke Ellington Is a Member of the Royal Family,” then proceeds, in prose surrounding a portrait of Ellington in white tie and top hat, to address the composer’s “royal” status in remarkably ambivalent ways. “Kids don’t get enough art these days,” it begins. “They don’t have enough access to theater, poetry or jazz. So you can see why some kids might confuse a jazz legend named Duke with royalty named duke. But it’s time to set the record straight.” This lumping-together of jazz with poetry and theater under the rubric of High Art suggests already the gains and losses sustained by classic jazz in the age of its entrenched canonization, what we might call its “Ken Burns era.” It also paves the way for the royal treatment Ellington subsequently receives—or would receive, if not for the ad’s rhetorical inconsistency: Hear ye, hear ye. His Royal Highness, Sir Duke. . . . He didn’t wear a crown. He didn’t rule over a small English state. Instead he ruled with an orchestra that blew the roof off the joint. He reigned over jazz institutions like Harlem’s Cotton Club. . . . By the time he was telling folks to “Take the ‘A’ Train,” Duke Ellington and his orchestra were sitting on the throne of jazz royalty. “His Royal Highness”—not to be confused, remember, with “royalty named duke”—nonetheless “ruled,” “reigned,” and occupied “the throne of jazz royalty.” But if such a throne exists, then aren’t the uninitiated correct in supposing what the ad elsewhere implies is a false assumption, namely that Ellington belongs to a royal family? This apparent self-contradiction betrays the often false and always slippery dichotomies in jazz discourse between the inertly iconic and the violently iconoclastic. Which, after all, is the true nature of the Ellington orchestra—did it lounge on its throne, or did it “blow the roof off the joint”? How can one square the ad’s praise of Ellington’s “nontraditional approach to jazz” with its offering of Ellington as jazz tradition incarnate? At stake here is the relation between the sacred (transcendent, authoritative, pure) and the profane (pedestrian, improvised, corrupt), categories that have long informed the reception of jazz, and which a careful study of the music can help to clarify. For what this ad does, finally, is to hail jazz’s profane, un-aristocratic status as a way of exalting and re-crowning a neglected jazz deity. Counterintuitively, its unabashedly secular status makes the music of Ellington and [End Page 185] his ilk culturally sacred; somehow not being a duke makes Ellington the Duke, his iconoclasm sealing his status as icon. His ethereal “throne” rests securely among the “gritty sound” of “growling trombones” and “sultry saxophone chords” that distinguish his music, which is still profane enough to be hip—Ellington appreciators, the ad assures us, make for “well-rounded, finger-snapping members of society, daddy-o”—yet so sacred that ignorance of Ellington constitutes a kind of sacrilege, a woeful blindness to the divine Word of jazz: a Word made flesh in the jazz pantheon where Duke sits, presumably, at the right hand of Louis Armstrong. Of course, the ad’s ambivalent aims—to affirm Ellington’s canonicity and to make him fashionable for...

Le jazz: jazz and French cultural identity

&L mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:Calibri,sans-serif; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:Times New Roman; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} In Le Jazz, Matthew F. Jordan deftly blends textual analysis, critical theory, and cultural history in a wide-ranging and highly readable account of how jazz progressed from a foreign cultural innovation met with resistance by French traditionalists to a naturalized component of the country's identity. Jordan draws on sources including ephemeral critical writing in the press and twentieth-century French literature to trace the country's reception of jazz, from the Cakewalk dance craze and the music's significance as a harbinger of cultural recovery after World War II to its place within French ethnography and cultural hybridity. Countering the histories of jazz's celebratory reception in France, Jordan delves in to the reluctance of many French citizens to accept jazz with the same enthusiasm as the liberal humanists and cosmopolitan crowds of the 1930s. Jordan argues that some listeners and critics perceived jazz as a threat to traditional French culture, and only as France modernized its identity did jazz become compatible with notions of Frenchness. Le Jazz speaks to the power of enlivened debate about popular culture, art, and expression as the means for constructing a vibrant cultural identity, revealing crucial keys to understanding how the French have come to see themselves in the postwar world.

How Britain got the blues: the transmission and reception of American blues style in the United Kingdom

Contents: Preface Jazz reception in Britain: misunderstandings and recordings in exile The first time I met the blues: blues arrives in Britain 1953-1957: the problem of the new 1957-1962: the blues revival, part I 'London: the new Chicago!': the R&B boom of 1963-1965 Blues at the crossroads: the British blues revival part III, 1965-1970 Bibliography Index.

RYTHME DE TRAVAIL, RYTHME DE JAZZ

Existing studies of the reception of jazz in France have tended to posit a neat distinction between those commentators, who saw the music as the degraded product of an Americanized machine age on the one hand, and those who sought in its unconventional rhythms and melodies a source of primitive, Black African authenticity, on the other hand. This article questions such accounts by showing how notions of primitivism and modernity were closely articulated in the discourse of critics and fans of the new music alike. As a musical form apparently rooted in West African tradition, jazz was attributed a capacity for returning its audience to a more “primitive” state, a state figured as at once seductively authentic and dangerously debasing. In this, jazz mimicked the effects of mechanized industrial labour, which, through the imposition of a set of repetitive, mindless physical tasks, similarly risked reducing the French worker to a more “primitive” state, that of an unthinking beast of burden. If this state threatened to debase the worker, it simultaneously held out the possibility of recovering a sense of primitive harmony through the adaptation of the worker's bodily rhythms to the rhythms of mechanized labour in the new Taylorist and Fordist factories. Whether in the writings of the conservative commentator Georges Duhamel, or in the work of the surrealist ethnographer André Schaeffner, jazz was seen to be analogous to mechanized labour in the simultaneous threat of violent disruption and the chance of restored harmony it promised to the human body. As such, jazz in inter-war France could become a powerful figure for the wholesale transformation of bodies and affects contingent on France's continuing passage from a rural, agricultural society to an urban, industrial economy.

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 Color of Jazz: Race and Representation in Postwar American Culture.

Although now sometimes called classical music, jazz has not always been accorde favorable appellations. Accurate though these encomiums may be, they obscure the complex and fractious history of jazz's reception in the U. S. Developing out of the African American cultural tradition, jazz has always been variously understood by black and white audiences. This penetrating study of America's attitudes toward jazz focuses on a momentous period in postwar history -- from the end of World War II to the beginning of the Black Power Movement. Exploring the diverse representations of jazz and jazz musicians in literature and popular culture, it connects this uneven reception, and skewed use of jazz with the era's debates about race and racial difference. Its close scrutiny of literature, music criticism, film, and television reveals fundamental contrasts between black and white cultures as they regard jazz. To the detriment of concepts of community and history, white writers focus on the individualism that they perceive in jazz. Black writers emphasize the aspects of musicianship, performance, and improvisation. White approaches to jazz tend to be individualistic and ahistorical, and their depictions of musicians accent the artist's suffering and victimization. Black texts treating similar subject matter stress history, communitarianism, and socio-personal experience. This study shows as well how black and white dissenters such as the Beats and various African-American writers have challenged the mainstreams's definition of this African-American resource. It explores such topics as racial politics in bohemian Greenwich Village, the struggle of the image of Charlie Parker, the cultural construction of jazz performance, and literature imitation of jazz improvisation. As a cultural history with relevance for contemporary discussions of race and representation, The Color of Jazz offers an innovative and compelling perspective on diverse, well-known cultural materials. Jon Panish is a lecturer at the University of California, Irvine.

Music and Performance during the Weimar Republic

1. Stage and screen: Kurt Weill and operatic reform in the 1920s Bryan Gilliam 2. Rethinking sound: music and radio in Weimar Germany Christopher Hailey 3. 'Overcoming romanticism': on the modernisation of twentieth-century performance practice Robert Hill 4. Lehrstuck: an aesthetics of performance Stephen Hinton 5. Singing Brecht versus Brecht singing: performance in theory and practice Kim H. Kowalke 6. German musicology and early music performance, 1918-1933 Pamela Potter 7. Jazz reception in Weimar Germany: in search of a shimmy figure J. Bradford Robinson 8. The idea of Bewegung in the German organ reform movement of the 1920s Peter Williams.