Henri Lopes's
1990
novel, Le Chercheur d'Afriques, embraces the post-colonial reality of multiple roots (Glissant). Much like Jazz music itself, the novel embodies the principles of la créolité ...outlined by Bernabé, Chamoiseau, and Confiant in their 1989 work, Éloge de la Créolité. This paper will explore the rhythms, musical composition, and musical intersections that enrich and shape the novel paying particular attention to jazz music, lyrics, rhythm, and sounds embedded in the novel's structure, language, and imagery, and examine ways in which the layering music and musical references throughout the text has the power to create soundscapes, evoke emotions and memories.
The bookJazzmen(1939) claimed New Orleans as the birthplace of jazz and introduced the legend of Buddy Bolden as the "First Man of Jazz." Much of the information that the book relied on came from a ...highly controversial source: Bunk Johnson. He claimed to have played with Bolden and that together they had pioneered jazz.
Johnson made many recordings talking about and playing the music of the Bolden era. These recordings have been treated with skepticism because of doubts about Johnson's credibility. Using oral histories, theJazzmeninterview notes, and unpublished archive material, this book confirms that Bunk Johnson did play with Bolden. This confirmation, in turn, has profound implications for Johnson's recorded legacy in describing the music of the early years of New Orleans jazz.
New Orleans jazz was different from ragtime in a number of ways. It was a music that was collectively improvised, and it carried a new tonality--the tonality of the blues. How early jazz musicians improvised together and how the blues became a part of jazz has until now been a mystery. Part of the reason New Orleans jazz developed as it did is that all the prominent jazz pioneers, including Buddy Bolden, Bunk Johnson, Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, Johnny Dodds, and Kid Ory, sang in barbershop (or barroom) quartets. This book describes in both historical and musical terms how the practices of quartet singing were converted to the instruments of a jazz band, and how this, in turn, produced collectively improvised, blues-inflected jazz, that unique sound of New Orleans.
As a special journal issue, the guest editors continued their study on (anti)blackness within K-12 schooling and teacher preparation programs. Through the introduction’s white space, the guest ...editors attempt to theorize and center (anti)Blackness. Moreover, they existentially critique the “ordinary” assumptions about who can be a human and explain why Black existence continues on despite their collective suffering. The introductory article is organized as follows: (1) a thorough explanation of bad faith and antiblackness, (2) an illustration of antiblackness’ manifestations in K-12 schooling, and (3) the importance of using jazz as an analytic frame to curate the contributors’ scholarship.
Sounding Affective Consensus Benjamin Barson
Journal of Extreme Anthropology,
12/2023, Letnik:
7, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
This paper explores how New Orleans Black dockworkers created affective communities by utilizing brass bands, as evidenced by newspapers, union records, and testimonies from jazz musicians. In an ...attempt to weave together congruences between ‘history from below’, the affective turn, and theorists of the Black radical tradition, I argue that the nation’s largest Black Union in the late nineteenth century, the Longshoremen’s Protective Union Benevolent Association of New Orleans, successfully intervened in this port city’s economy by building a mass movement. They did so not only because of their strategic location in relation to capital and a modernizing logistics industry, but also because these dockworkers successfully struggled to control the affective modalities and temporalities of daily life. It was in this latter strategy that polyphonic brass bands and collective singing traditions played important roles in struggling for bodily autonomy and new social relations formulated in opposition to the profit motive. I coin this felt solidarity ‘affective consensus,’ which was a consensus-based decision-making process activated by agreed-upon musical conventions. Its power lies in its historical connections between democratic traditions of assembly, workplace struggles, and forms of participatory music making--all emblematic of late nineteenth-century Black New Orleans.
Current creativity research reveals a fundamental disagreement about the nature of creative thought, specifically, whether it is primarily based on automatic, associative (Type 1) or executive, ...controlled (Type 2) cognitive processes. We propose that Type 1 and Type 2 processes make differential contributions to creative production depending on domain expertise and situational factors such as task instructions. We tested this hypothesis with jazz pianists who were instructed to improvise to a novel chord sequence and rhythm accompaniment. Afterward, they were asked to perform again under instructions to be especially creative which, via goal activation, is thought to prompt the musicians to engage Type 2 processes. Jazz experts rated all performances. Overall, performances by more experienced pianists were rated as superior. Moreover, creativity instructions resulted in higher ratings. However, there was an interaction between instructions and expertise, revealing that explicit creativity instructions significantly improved improvisation ratings only for the less experienced musicians. We propose that activating or reconfiguring executive Type 2 processes facilitates creativity for less experienced musicians, but does not improve creative performance significantly for more experienced ones because the latter have largely automatized the processes responsible for high-level improvisation or because they have achieved a near-optimal balance between associative Type 1 and executive Type 2 processes. Thus, increasing controlled Type 2 processing is unlikely to help, and may sometimes even diminish, the creativity of experts' performances.
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