South End Shout: Boston’s Forgotten Music Scene in the Jazz Age details the power of music in the city’s African American community, spotlighting the era of ragtime culture in the early 1900s to the ...rise of big band orchestras in the 1930s. This story is deeply embedded in the larger social condition of Black Bostonians and the account is brought to life by the addition of 20 illustrations of musicians, theaters, dance halls, phonographs, and radios used to enjoy the music. South End Shout is part of an emerging field of studies that examines jazz culture outside of the major centers of music production. In extensive detail, author Roger R. House covers the activities of jazz musicians, jazz bands, the places they played, the relationships between Black and white musicians, the segregated local branches of the American Federation of Musicians (AFL-CIO), and the economics of Boston’s music industry. Readers will be captivated by the inclusion of vintage local newspaper reports, classified advertisements, and details of hard-to-access oral history accounts by musicians and residents. These precious documentary materials help to understand how jazz culture evolved as a Boston art form and contributed to the national art form between the world wars. With this book, House makes an important contribution to American studies and jazz history. Scholars and general readers alike who are interested in jazz and jazz culture, the history of Boston and its Black culture, and 20th century American and urban studies will be enlightened and delighted by this book.
Caravan is a popular jazz standard that is recorded frequently. The first recording of Caravan by Barney Bigard and his Jazzopators from December 19, 1936, credits Juan Tizol as the sole composer. ...However later recordings give credit to both Duke Ellington and Tizol as the composers and his manager, Irving Mills, as the lyricist. Because Ellington and Mills commonly used the band members' ideas and compositions, it is perhaps easy to assume that the conception of Caravan follows a similar narrative. Despite Tizol's insistence on compositional independence, trumpeter Rex Stewart contends that Caravan's melody "evolved from another tune, Alabamy Home," which is credited to Ellington. And indeed Alabamy Home and Caravan are quite similar in melody, harmony, and exotic affect. Inconsistent information in Stewart's account and the fact that the first recording of Caravan was made three months before the Gotham Stompers had recorded Alabamy Home initially complicate Stewart's assertion. However, a trombone part from the Ellington archive at the Smithsonian Institution for Alabamy Home, dated between 1926 and 1928, indicates that Alabamy Home was written first. I suggest that Tizol refined the exoticism of Alabamy Home, originally devised for the Cotton Club, to create Caravan, the most famous of his self-proclaimed "Spanish melodies." I trace the back-and-forth musical exchange between Caravan and Alabamy Home through four manuscripts and five recordings dated between 1926 and 1937. By doing so, I explore the irregular case of these two pieces connected by their shared melody, harmony, and affect, but with differing levels of success in the Duke Ellington songbook.
The life of Howard Johnson, nicknamed "Stretch" because of his height (6'5"), epitomizes the cultural and political odyssey of a generation of African Americans who transformed the United States from ...a closed society to a multiracial democracy. Johnson's long-awaited memoir traces his path from firstborn of a multiclass/multiethnic" family in New Jersey to dancer in Harlem's Cotton Club to communist youth leader and, later, professor of Black studies. A Dancer in the Revolution is a powerful statement about Black resilience and triumph amid subtle and explicit racism in the United States. Johnson's engaging, beautifully written memoir provides a window into everyday life in Harlem--neighborhood life, arts and culture, and politics--from the 1930s to the 1970s, when the contemporary Black community was being formed. A Dancer in the Revolution explores Johnson's twenty-plus years in the Communist Party and illuminates in compelling detail how the Harlem branch functioned and flourished in the 1930s and '40s. Johnson thrived as a charismatic leader, using the connections he built up as an athlete and dancer to create alliances between communist organizations and a cross-section of the Black community. In his memoir, Johnson also exposes the homoerotic tourism that was a feature of Harlem's nightlife in the 1930s. Some of America's leading white literary, musical, and artistic figures were attracted to Harlem not only for the community's artistic creativity but to engage in illicit sex--gay and straight--with their Black counterparts. A Dancer in the Revolution is an invaluable contribution to the literature on Black political thought and pragmatism. It reveals the unique place that Black dancers and artists hold in civil rights pursuits and anti-racism campaigns in the United States and beyond. Moreover, the life of "Stretch" Johnson illustrates how political activism engenders not only social change but also personal fulfillment, a realization of dreams not deferred but rather pursued and achieved. Johnson's journey bears witness to critical periods and events that shaped the Black condition and American society in the process.
From the mid-1950s to the late 1970s, jazz was harnessed as America’s "sonic weapon" to promote an image to the world of a free and democratic America. Dizzy Gillespie, Dave Brubeck, Duke Ellington ...and other well-known jazz musicians were sent around the world – including to an array of Communist countries – as "jazz ambassadors" in order to mitigate the negative image associated with domestic racial problems. While many non-Americans embraced the Americanism behind this jazz diplomacy without question, others criticized American domestic and foreign policies while still appreciating jazz – thus jazz, despite its popularity, also became a medium for expressing anti-Americanism. This book examines the development of jazz outside America, including across diverse historical periods and geographies – shedding light on the effectiveness of jazz as an instrument of state power within a global political context. Saito examines jazz across a wide range of regions, including America, Europe, Japan and Communist countries. His research also draws heavily upon a variety of sources, primary as well as secondary, which are accessible in these diverse countries: all had their unique and culturally specific domestic jazz scenes, but also interacted with each other in an interesting dimension of early globalization. This comparative analysis on the range of unique jazz scenes and cultures offers a detailed understanding as to how jazz has been interpreted in various ways, according to the changing contexts of politics and society around it, often providing a basis for criticizing America itself. Furthering our appreciation of the organic relationship between jazz and global politics, Saito reconsiders the uniqueness of jazz as an exclusively "American music."This book will be of interest to students and scholars of international relations, the history of popular music, and global politics.
The archives of African American jazz musicians demonstrate rich sites for studying expressions of religious belief and daily religious practice in public and private arenas, in professional and ...personal capacities. Highlighting print material from the archives of Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington (1899–1974) and Mary Lou Williams (1910–1981), this article examines the ways that these musicians worked to articulate their beliefs in print and to make meaning of their routine practices. Ellington and Williams produced written records of their aspirations for non-clerical religious authority and leadership, novel notions of religious community, and conceptions of quotidian writing tasks as practices with devotional value in the middle decades of the twentieth century. In preparation for his Sacred Concert tours of American and Western European religious congregations, Ellington theologized about the nature of God and the proper language to address God through private hotel stationery. Following her conversion to Roman Catholicism, Williams managed a Harlem thrift shop and worked to create the Bel Canto Foundation for musicians struggling with substance abuse and unemployment. This study of the religious subjectivity of African Americans with status as race representatives employs archival historical methods in the effort to vividly approximate complex religious interiority.
Dossier illustrant le concert donné par : Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra ; Vincent Balse (présentation)
Picture of the concert given by: Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra; Vincent Balse ...(presentation)
Ellington in Sweden Edstrom, O.
The Musical quarterly,
09/2013, Letnik:
96, Številka:
3/4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
The issue of whether jazz should bridge over to classical music was a topic that also applied to other big bands, and thus many similar articles followed over the late 1940's. Nevertheless, Duke ...Ellington's position as the best arranger, his top ranking as a composer, and his orchestra's top ranking in English and American jazz journals were consistently commented on in the pages of OJ and Estrad-the Ellington orchestra's uber-status remained untouched. Other new but related topics in Swedish coverage included (a) whether or not the Ellington arrangements and compositions that did not conform to standard, chorus-based schlager or popular-song forms were to be considered jazz, and (b) how one should experience and evaluate the longer, "extended" Ellington pieces as program music.
PDF
