Institute for Studies In American Music Conservatory of Music, Brooklyn College of the City University of New York NEWSLETTER Volume XXXV, No. 1 Fall 2005
“White “The music I’ve been singing, so traditional, it was Woman” as new once. And I’ve been learning to make it mine. But Jazz Collector this! This music is mine in New already!”1 So gushes Miralee Smith, the white Orleans opera singing, jazz-smitten (1947) ingénue played by Dorothy Patrick in the 1947 film New by Orleans, set in 1917. Despite Sherrie Tucker having spent a good deal of the scene talking over the collective improvisation of Louis Armstrong, Kid Ory, Zutty Singleton and other musicians, Miralee finds her attraction to “authentic New Orleans jazz” rising to a Dorothy Patrick, Arturo de Cordova, Louis Armstrong, Billie crescendo. Especially moved Holiday, and other musicians in New Orleans (1947) by the film’s theme song, “Do You Know What it Means to Miss New Orleans,” as sung by Endie, her black maid (played with palpable unhappiness by Billie Holiday in her only role in a feature motion picture), Miralee rises, eyes glowing, cheeks flushed; and declares, “I’m going to sing that New Orleans song!” For this act of white lady impropriety, Miralee is bounced from the Basin Street club. Such a rebuff would crush many a die-hard jazz fan, but not Miralee, whose desire now burns hotter than Buddy Bolden’s trumpet calling the children back home. This music is hers! She simply must feel the song of her black maid moving Inside through her own white lady body, as indeed, she will, before this musical romance is over. The grand finale This Issue finds her singing the song from the concert hall stage, making a “lady out of jazz” like Paul Whiteman. Hurricane Katrina Until recently, the only parts of New Orleans I had seen were the musical clips containing Billie Holiday— and the New Jazz Orthodoxy by how awful to see her in the maid’s uniform, but oh, how her singing transcended Hollywood’s limitations— Salim Washington...4 and Louis Armstrong, leading a “Trad” revivalist’s dream team of New Orleans musicians. The consensus of Celebrating Noah jazz and film critics, historians, and aficionados is that with the exception of the musical sequences, the film Creshevsky...... 6 is, as Donald Bogle puts it, “a dreary pedestrian mess.” Writes Bogle, “Although the story is supposedly Dusty Springfield and about jazz’s rise to mainstream acceptance, the real jazz innovators—Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday— the Motown Invasion are neatly relegated to the sidelines while the plot follows the lives of the lead white characters, who are by Annie Janeiro 2 Randall...... 8 uniformly bland.” Review: Searching for While I heartily agree with Bogle’s critical assessment, I would argue that the juxtaposition of bland white Robert Johnson characters with brilliant black musicians is not at all at odds with the racial project of the film, of “Trad” fans by Nathan W. of the 1940s, or of much jazz appreciation since then.3 White blandness and black affect, in fact, are not Pearson...... 10 incidental to this film. The characters with which the white target audience is invited to identify are united Review: From Paris to Peoria by by their weariness of European high culture and by their enthusiasm for jazz as played by black musicians. Nancy Newman...... 12 There is something, in other words, about the failure of the film that works in favor of its message: the New Orleans (continued) redemptive promise of authentic black New Orleans jazz for the information about white women as minstrel performers and bodies and souls of white Americans. audience members, as bohemians, and as fans of black music.7 Jayna Brown writes that what white women stood to gain from It isn’t enough to critique this film as musically “bright” and minstrel performance was “conditional access to realms of “dramatically a “dud” (to cite the headline that didn’t do justice to expressive freedoms they were otherwise forbidden.”8 Many Leonard Feather’s explicitly anti-racist review). These performances white women jazz fans would reject any analyses of their devotion of bland white characters gaping at creative black musicking are to jazz as appropriation, and understandably so. Yet white enactments of power; acts facilitated in large part through a womanhood has certainly shaped my own pathway of identification particular construction of white womanhood as unaware, or as a jazz fan, and jazz seemed to offer what felt like an “escape” “innocent,” of her social power.4 To face the entire film, rather than from the social position I continue to inhabit, which, of course, has just the musical sequences starring the black jazz musicians, its privileges in a racist culture. Part of my responsibility, then, as compels us to consider the curious efficacy of the “white lady” in a white woman jazz fan is to lose my “innocence” about the that very enactment of jazz appropriation analyzed in jazz studies pathways of identification I inherit. I may not identify with Miralee’s as a white masculinist routine. We in jazz studies have gotten jazz desire, but I need to know its history. adept at wagging our fingers at the unconscious primitivism of figures such as Mezz Mezzrow, Norman Mailer, and Jack Kerouac. Miralee knows nothing about jazz, except that it is “hers.” If And women-in-jazz historians like me have been far more interested “hip” means “in the know,” then “hip” she is not. How does her in recovering women jazz musicians of any race as forgotten desire drive this narrative about white jazz love? I want to make it historical actors, than in retrieving lost histories of white women clear that I am not arguing that Miralee Smith reveals what white as jazz appropriators, symbolic or otherwise. Yet, acknowledging upper-class northern U.S. women jazz fans were really like in 1947 such appropriation is central to appreciating the cultural politics or at any other time. But this representation is relevant towards an of a film like New Orleans. understanding about white womanhood and jazz desire. What I want to argue is that this performance tells us something about Krin Gabbard has identified the recurring figure of the “Jazz cultural legibility of one kind of figure of white woman, who, in this Nerd” as a white man who can’t bear any gaps in his collection, case, obscures a black women’s performance, and that the cultural and who develops an outside-the-mainstream masculine identity ubiquity of the trope of white woman that she performs makes it through amassing, organizing and memorizing jazz records, difficult to know about, imagine, and perhaps even to become especially those of black men whom the “Jazz Nerd” admires as another kind of white woman jazz fan. “hip.”5 Ingrid Monson cautions that the historical problem with “white hipness” is its tendency to project white desires for affect, I’m anchoring my reading in Ruth Frankenberg’s analysis of authenticity, sexuality, onto black bodies and black music—so the recurring, co-constructed and powerful “family of tropes” in that even when the “hipster” is sincere in loving jazz, he or she which White Woman is characterized as vulnerable, innocent, may be reproducing elements of the very aspects of dominant sexually pure, enabling White Man’s cultural value as protector of constructions of race that buoy white supremacist ideology. white womanhood. The trope of Man of Color shores up these Monson draws from Eric Lott’s analysis of the continuation of roles by standing in as white woman’s sexual predator—what minstrelsy through bohemianism in white men’s hipness, but she Angela Davis has called the Myth of the Black Rapist. (Alternately, also notes that “[m]any white women have enjoyed the reputation he is rendered sexless and powerless, as in Uncle Tom’s benign of black men and women for hypersexuality,” adding, that, friendship with Little Eva.) The trope of Woman of Color has the “[a]ttention to the particular pathways of identification would no thankless job of enhancing White Woman’s purity by representing doubt illuminate the cultural issue further.”6 everything she is not supposed to be: “seductress, fertile, unhygienic” who is “always on a slippery slope from exotic beauty to unfemininity To critically unpack the “pathways of identification” available and ugliness.”9 Throughout it all, White Woman must remain unsullied to jazz-loving white women historically, we need much more by the knowledge that her social position is powerful.
ISAM Newsletter Vol. XXXV, No. 1/ ISSN: 0145-8396 The power of these tropes is not in their accurate reflection of who we are, but in their efficacy in justifying hierarchical social Editors ...... Ellie M. Hisama and Jeff Taylor relations, and, as Frankenberg puts it, in the fact that they “continue Managing Editor ...... Carl Clements to enlist” actual people into their service with “varying degrees of 10 Contributing Editors ...... Ray Allen consciousness and unconsciousness….” The family of tropes, H. Wiley Hitchcock for example, makes it very easy for actual white women to become Carol J. Oja unknowing agents of racism while identifying as innocent and 11 Production Assistant ...... Kathleen Mason Krotman respectable. Hilary Harris posits that “the imagining and performing” of a genuinely “antiracist white womanhood” could The ISAM Newsletter is published in the Fall and Spring. Copyright 2005 by the Institute for Studies in American Music, Brooklyn College of the City only be achieved through tactics by which white women “fail” at University of New York, 2900 Bedford Ave., Brooklyn, NY 11210. the trope of “White Woman.”12 Tel: 718-951-5655 Fax: 718-951-4858 The white singer in New Orleans animates a jazz-liking white Email: [email protected] Website: www.bcisam.org woman who succeeds at the trope of White Woman, and therefore
2 ISAM Newsletter Volume XXXV, Number 1: Fall 2005 Continued on page 13 ISAM Matters Hurricane Katrina devastated much of New Orleans and the gulf region this fall. Over 1,300 people died, and many musicians lost their families, homes, and belongings, including their instruments. Flooding destroyed the music library at Tulane University, and several other university libraries were damaged. Many people are still awaiting aid. For a list of ways to help musicians and institutions affected by Hurricane Katrina, please see p. 5. Our colloquium series, Music in Polycultural America, continues to bring exciting speakers to campus. This fall, Jeffrey Magee (Indiana University) gave a lecture on the music of Irving Berlin, jazz, and Broadway in the 1920s. Daphne Brooks (Princeton University) presented a black feminist reading of rock criticism and performances by women musicians including Nikka Costa and Betty Davis. Annie Janeiro Randall (Bucknell University) gave a talk on Dusty Springfield’s performance at the Brooklyn Fox in 1964. Her article on Springfield appears in this issue of the Newsletter (p. 8). Finally, the composer/conductor Lukas Foss spoke about his music and played some of his compositions. We thank the Ethyle R. Wolfe Institute for the Humanities and the Cerf Fund for their generous support of our series. For information on our Spring 2006 lecture series, please visit our website, www.bcisam.org, or call the Institute at (718) 951-5655. The eighth meeting of the international conference Feminist Theory and Music took place at the City University of New York, Graduate Center and New York University on 23-26 June 2005, with over 200 participants and audience members. Highlights included the keynote address “Midsummer’s Night in Harlem: A Cultural Critic Listens” by Farah Jasmine Griffin; an opening plenary session with Suzanne Cusick, Farzaneh Milani and Elizabeth Wood; six concerts featuring music by Pauline Oliveros, Ursel Schlicht, Frances White and others, with performances by musicians including trombonist Monique Buzzarté, pianist Sarah Cahill, soprano Kristin Norderval, and violinist Airi Yoshioka; and fifteen paper sessions on topics ranging from American women making musical culture to feminist punk. Special events included a talk and performance by DJ Kuttin Kandi; a preview of a documentary on gospel singer Marion Williams by Ray Allen, Kathryn Golden, and Ashley James; and an excerpt from a documentary on jazz pianist and composer Mary Lou Williams by Carol Bash. The next Feminist Theory and Music conference will be held at McGill University in Montréal in summer 2007. Stay tuned for the conference announcement and call for papers. The next Feminist Theory and Music conference will be held at McGill University’s Schulich School of Music in Montréal in summer 2007. The conference announcement and call for papers will be posted at
TO SUPPORT MUSICIANS AND MUSIC PROGRAMS DONATING BOOKS, SCORES, RECORDINGS, INSTRUMENTS
The New Orleans Musicians Clinic provides free medical Efforts are being organized by American Musicological services, shelter, and information to musicians. Please send Society President Elaine Sisman, along with the Music Library donations to: NOMC Emergency Fund. Funds will be distributed Association and publishers to help New Orleans libraries by SW LA Area Health Education Center Foundation, Inc. and rebuild. This effort will be spearheaded by Laura Macy (editor can be contacted at: of Grove Online, Oxford University Press) and Paula Matthews (Princeton University Music Library). SW LA Area Health Education Center Foundation, Inc 103 Independence Blvd. Please organize book drives or collect your own unwanted Lafayette, LA 70506 or duplicated books, scores, and recordings, and speak with phone: (337) 989-0001 your local librarians to locate space to collect these items. e-mail: [email protected] or [email protected] As soon as libraries in New Orleans are able to accept these website:
The American Library Association has excellent information Editors’ note: Our thanks to Elizabeth West Marvin (Eastman on the situation of libraries in the gulf south and how to make School of Music) of the Scholars for Social Responsibility for donations: visit
ISAM Newsletter Volume XXXV, Number 1: Fall 2005 5 Celebrating Noah Creshevsky Noah Creshevsky studied composition with Nadia Boulanger in Paris in a number of my compositions, beginning with Circuit (1971) and Luciano Berio at Juilliard. As a faculty member in Brooklyn for harpsichord, on tape. The compact disc Man & Superman College’s Conservatory of Music, he coordinated the composition (Centaur CRC 2126) was largely connected to my interest in the program and directed the Center for Computer Music. Creshevsky’s ambiguous borders between live performers and their impossibly recent compositional work is part of a genre known as hyperrealism, expanded electronic counterparts. The idea of superperformers explored in his essay below. has numerous precursors, including the violin music of Paganini, On 3 November 2005 the Brooklyn College International Electro- the piano music of Liszt, conventions music or player piano, Acoustic Music Festival presented a concert to celebrate and the fully realized player-piano music of Conlon Nancarrow. Creshevsky’s sixtieth birthday. The concert took place at Klavierhaus Fundamental to the second genre of hyperrealism is the in Manhattan and featured performances by Vahagn Avetisyan expansion of the sound palettes from which music is made. (piano), Dennis Bathory-Kitsz (voice), Thomas Buckner (baritone), Developments in technology and transformations in social and and Beth Griffith (soprano). Highlights of the program were economic realities have made it possible for composers to compositions written in Creshevsky’s honor by Dennis Bathory-Kitsz, incorporate the sounds of the entire world into their music. George Brunner, Douglas Cohen, David Gunn, Michael Kinney, Tania Hyperrealism of this second genre aims to integrate vast and León, Robert Voisey, and Amnon Wolman. diverse sonic elements to produce an expressive and versatile In honor of Creshevsky’s birthday, musical language. Its vocabulary is an excerpt from León’s Para-Noah, and an inclusive, limitless sonic reminiscences and statements by his compendium, free of ethnic and friends and colleagues are published national particularity. on p. 7. The complete tribute Essential to the concept of statements are available at hyperrealism is that its sounds are
6 ISAM Newsletter Volume XXXV, Number 1: Fall 2005 Celebrating Creshevsky (continued)
Tania León, Para-Noah, mm. 32-38 Courtesy of Tania León
Fractured Sounds of a Broken World
I discovered in Creshevsky’s music a world I had never before experienced, even imagined. Here were sounds that hadn’t occupied the same musical space, now somehow co-existing, and creating an integrated music that seemed to transcend style, time, and place. —Robert Carl Hartt School of Music Creshevsky’s music magnifies the reality of the sounds, creating an unexpected level of integration between the familiar in sound, the familiar in meaning, and the familiar in composition. —Dennis Báthory-Kitsz Northfield, Vermont Sometimes a composer looks at a certain technology and sees it in a way that is not how it was designed. This is the case with Noah and samplers. He assembles several hundreds or more of pre-recorded sounds and imports them into the samplers…. The focus is on sound not pitch. His approach is one of the most imaginative I’ve experienced in all of MIDI implemented music and, in fact, all of electro-acoustic music. —George Brunner Brooklyn College You can teach almost any musically talented person to make music that sounds like music; what interests me are people who make music that sounds like themselves. Noah Creshevsky is certainly a composer whose music sounds like no other. —Thomas Buckner New York For Noah, the whole world of ideas, sounds, and experiences is a potential source of inspiration and he encourages the same openness in his students. —Nancy Hager Brooklyn College The fractured sounds of a broken world recover their unity in the kaleidoscope of Noah’s music. —Charles Amirkhanian San Francisco
ISAM Newsletter Volume XXXV, Number 1: Fall 2005 7 Dusty Springfield and the Motown Invasion While the Beatles were cutting a swath across America and This jarring contrast between the images projected on Sounds conquering the US pop charts during the mid-1960s British of Motown and those broadcast on the evening news is key to Invasion, another important musical phenomenon was taking place understanding the reception and lasting importance of the Motown across the Atlantic—the Motown Invasion of Britain. While Invasion and, indeed, the reception of their advocate, Dusty American teenagers were avidly consuming the Beatles’ records, Springfield, in both the UK and the US. The widely reported racial British teenagers were discovering Berry Gordy’s Motown Revue violence triggered by the civil rights movement was the ever-present and forming a fan base for a genre now known as “British Soul.” backdrop for the Detroit musicians: their April 1965 UK television This devotion to black American artists such as Tina Turner, Marvin appearance with Springfield followed the landmark events of 1964’s Gaye, and Aretha Franklin influenced the careers of British artists “Freedom Summer” and preceded America’s urban riots of 1965 by including Lulu, Tom Jones, and Annie Lennox. The first and only a few months. And while Springfield and the Motown artists perhaps best-known British artist in this long line of “blue-eyed scrupulously avoided attaching any political significance to their soul” vocalists was the late Dusty Springfield (1939-1999). TV special, no one could have missed the message of solidarity it Springfield was the most important figure in conveyed, following on the heels of Springfield’s front-page facilitating the deportation from Motown Invasion. In South Africa for her addition to covering refusal in December many Motown hits 1964 to entertain 2 herself, she gave segregated audiences. the Supremes, If the images of Stevie Wonder, the Sounds of Motown Temptations, and embodied a rejection of many other groups racism and apartheid their first television for an international exposure in the UK. audience, then the The Motown stars’ sounds of Reeves, appearance on Springfield, and the Springfield’s television other Detroit acts special The Sounds of singing together Motown in 1965 was enacted the same. This as significant as the was the first time Beatles’ landmark Springfield’s fans saw 1965 appearance on their idol in the presence the Ed Sullivan Show, of the singers that she which catapulted Martha Reeves and Dusty Springfield in the herself idolized, whose Tamla Motown television special, 1965 them into the sound she emulated in commercial stratosphere. The Sounds of Motown was conceived her own performances, and whose cultural background she and hosted by Springfield for the express purpose of igniting acknowledged as a principal source of her vocal style. Their musical the careers of the Detroit singers in European markets. Through harmony can be understood as demonstrating an idealized racial Springfield’s advocacy, these Detroit artists were transported harmony during a time of horrific racial disharmony through into the Europop spotlight.1 Springfield’s own persona as the “White Queen of Soul,” which 3 During The Sounds of Motown, audiences in Britain and across bound together seemingly incongruent racial elements. the globe were able to see the singers performing live the songs Springfield acquired the title “White Queen of Soul” as a result they had been hearing on their radios—songs such as “Dancin’ in of her many hit cover versions of songs by African American artists the Streets” by Martha and the Vandellas, “Stop in the Name of such as the Shirelles, Inez and Charlie Foxx, and Baby Washington.4 Love” by the Supremes, and “Just My Imagination” by Smokey Her first album, A Girl Called Dusty (1964) was dominated by such Robinson and the Miracles. The show allowed British and BBC covers. Springfield had internalized the then-current black pop audiences to view an image of African Americans who modeled a sound so thoroughly that many listeners in the US who had only hopeful postcolonial vision for the African diaspora. “Detroit” heard her songs on the radio but had never seen her assumed that represented the social and political attainment of black, middle- she was an African American.5 class urbanites who were rockin’ and rollin,’ but who also stood in Springfield’s covers of songs by African American singers stark contrast to other contemporary images of African Americans ranged from close copies of the original versions to clever that Europeans were likely to have seen: television news footage reworkings. Springfield faithfully copied the interpretations of black of black civil rights protesters in Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia female artists—her covers of The Shirelles’ “Mama Said [There’d as they were assaulted by police, harassed by White Citizens’ be Days Like This]” and the Velvelettes’ “Needle in a Haystack” Councils, and stalked by the Ku Klux Klan. are similar to the originals in most respects—but showed no
8 ISAM Newsletter Volume XXXV, Number 1: Fall 2005 Springfield and the Motown Invasion (continued) comparable fealty to interpretations of black male singers. For audiences. See Lucy O’Brien, Dusty: The Queen Bee of Pop (Pan Books, example, her cover of Garnett Mimms’s “It Was Easier to Hurt 1999), 64-77. Her” omits the gratuitous, spoken opening lines (“Give her some 3 Britain too was plagued by racism as a result of large-scale immigration from hard times, treat her mean/that’s what all the guys say/It’ll only its former colonies in the Caribbean and Asia. 4 make her love you more/but it just don’t go down that way”), The origin of the phrase “White Queen of Soul” is unknown, though the British pop singer Cliff Richard is credited with first using the expression and then shapes the song from an emotional position that is “white negress” in reference to Springfield sometime in the mid-’60s. See more complex and conflicted than Mimms’s. Springfield insisted O’Brien, Dusty: Queen Bee of Pop, 61. that her white, British session musicians copy precisely the 5 Martha Reeves was among those who had made this assumption and had even instrumental playing styles of black American musicians. She wondered why Berry Gordy had not yet signed such a talented black singer to even paid for her backing band, The Echoes, to hear concerts by the Motown label. Quoted in O’Brien, Dusty: Queen Bee of Pop, 59. James Brown and the Famous Flames to facilitate the exact 6 According to Derek Wadsworth, trombonist and arranger for The Echoes, reproduction of the sound of Brown’s band on her recordings.6 Springfield was obsessed with getting the right instrumental sound, and demanded countless takes during extremely expensive recording sessions until she was Though A Girl Called Dusty includes remakes of songs by satisfied with the sound. Interview with Wadsworth by the author (June white US singers such as Lesley Gore and Gene Pitney, Springfield 2004). 7 made no attempt to copy their singing styles. Springfield’s “You Journalist Ray Coleman wrote in a 21 November 1964 article for Melody Maker that “Her gay, dashing image clicked with thousands. And girl hit Don’t Own Me” bears little vocal resemblance to Gore’s perfect parade fans, notoriously apathetic towards girl singers until now, accepted her rendition of a New Jersey teenager’s first petulant attempt to as the symbol of a new ‘mod revolution.’” Quoted in Paul Howes, ed., The establish social and sexual autonomy. Similarly, her cover of Dusty Springfield Bulletin (March 1997), 10. Pitney’s “Twenty-Four Hours from Tulsa,” a song in which a 8 Paul Howes traces the origins of all of Springfield’s known recordings, man runs off with a new girlfriend, adopts a humorous, including foreign language releases in The Complete Dusty Springfield (Reynolds protofeminist stance as the protagonist who dumps her Tulsa and Hearn, 2001) while Patricia Juliana Smith examines Springfield’s “resignified” cover versions in “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me”: The boyfriend for a man she has just met at a truck stop. To the Camp Masquerades of Dusty Springfield,” in The Queer Sixties, ed. Patricia delight of her teenaged female fans, Springfield succeeded in Juliana Smith (Routledge, 1999), 105-126. regendering such songs and turning the usual male-female dynamic on its head.7 One wonders how audiences might have read the pattern of Springfield’s preferences, including her reverence for vocal interpretations of African American female artists and instrumental styles of African American male artists, and her willingness to invert power relationships in songs by ISAM Matters (continued) black and white American male singers.8 In all of its racial and gendered complexity, the reception of the groups Gastr del Sol and Squirrel Bait, Professor Grubbs US pop in Britain during the mid-1960s was a phenomenon of collaborated with the poet Susan Howe on Thiefth (Blue considerable significance both within the confines of pop music Chopsticks, 2005). George Rothman, founder and former director and within the broader sphere of pop culture. The Motown of the acclaimed Riverside Symphony, is Associate Professor of Invasion reflected and contributed to the evolving shifts in social Music and the conductor of the Brooklyn College Orchestra. With and political power relationships that marked this period in the the Riverside Symphony, he has recorded works by Mario US and Britain. The lasting cultural impact of this transatlantic Davidovsky (Bridge, 2002) and Stephen Hartke (New World moment in the 1960s and its extraordinarily rich music were Records, 1998); their recording of Andrew Imbrie’s Requiem undoubtedly as important as the endlessly analyzed social (Bridge, 1999) was nominated for a Grammy. A warm welcome to phenomena associated with the Beatles and the British Invasion. David and George. Good news for researchers and fans of the Newsletter: all past —Annie Janeiro Randall issues are being made available free of charge as pdfs on our website: Bucknell University www.bcisam.org. All issues of the Newsletter, from our very first published in 1971, should be available by early 2006. Notes During his sabbatical last spring, Jeff Taylor worked on his 1 Martha Reeves and Mark Bego, Dancing in the Streets: Confessions of a book Stompin’ ‘Em Down: Early Jazz Piano on Chicago’s South Motown Diva (Hyperion, 1994), 124. Vicki Wickham, producer of the show, gives an account of Dusty’s role in the creation of “Sounds of Side, to be published by the University of California Press. Motown” in Penny Valentine and Vicki Wickham, Dancing With Demons, Thanks to Jeff for co-editing this issue of the Newsletter. The Authorized Biography of Dusty Springfield (St. Martin’s Press, 2000), Congratulations to Carl Clements for his new CD Forth and Back 69 (Saraswati, 2005). I will be on leave in Spring 2006, and Ray Allen, 2 The much publicized expulsion of Britain’s top female singer from South who has been on a research leave with an Ethyle R. Wolfe faculty Africa occupied the front pages of UK newspapers for days. Springfield received support from members of Parliament and from Prime Minister fellowship, will serve as Acting Director. Harold Wilson. As a result of Springfield’s stance, most British singers touring South Africa after this incident also refused to entertain segregated —Ellie M. Hisama
ISAM Newsletter Volume XXXV, Number 1: Fall 2005 9 Searching for Robert Johnson During his short life Robert Johnson (1911-1938) was a blues Of particular value in this book is a critical analysis of Johnson’s musician of minor prominence but great talent. But since the lyrics. Pearson and McCulloch effectively place Johnson’s songs reissue of his songs twenty-three years after his death on the in the context of his time: “Johnson was very much a folk artist, but 1961 LP King of the Delta Blues Singers, he has become the he was also canny and businesslike in his mastery of the codes of most influential and iconic of all the country blues musicians. commercial culture, albeit largely within his own culture” (p. 71). His “Sweet Home Chicago” emerged as the signature tune of the An example of their insightful examination of Johnson’s songs is electric Chicago blues style of the early 1950s, and “Cross Road their discussion of “If I had Possession of Judgment Day”: “Paul Blues” became an archetype of blues rock after it was recorded by Oliver claimed to hear evidence of Johnson’s ‘tormented spirit’ Eric Clapton’s British rock group Cream in the late 1960s. For here, but the melody is straight out of the blues tradition and is decades it has been nearly obligatory known to most folks as ‘Rolling and for rock blues guitarists to cite Tumbling,’ the Delta national anthem. Johnson as their inspiration. The verses focus on mistreatment and seduction … but there is no hint Frank Driggs’s notes to the King of Faustian angst” (p. 75). They of the Delta Blues Singers album set demonstrate that Johnson’s songs in motion a process of myth-making are strong and emotional, but not that would endure for decades. Driggs more focused on the supernatural and early blues scholar Sam Charters or the singer’s own anxieties than portrayed Johnson as a deeply other performers of the era. The tormented artist and an easily picture that emerges is of a talented victimized primitive who never professional musician—well- traveled far from home. Speculations traveled, sophisticated, focused on on the violent causes of his unsolved his career—not of a primitive. death at the age of twenty-seven enhanced the Johnson mystique. But Pearson and McCulloch are the mythologizing of Johnson took passionate admirers of Johnson on grander proportions in 1966 when who eschew flowery description Pete Welding’s essay entitled “Hell and romantic images in favor of Hound on His Trail: Robert Johnson” presenting research that included a supposed quote from Robert Johnson, King of the Delta Blues Singers contextualizes Johnson’s life and Johnson’s mentor Son House Sony, 1998 art. The book persuasively shows speculating that Johnson had sold his soul to the devil in exchange how Johnson’s artistry included synthesis as well as innovation. for blues greatness. Generations of listeners have in various “Johnny Shines claimed Johnson could add a song to his ways clung to the supernatural tale, finding evidence of repertoire after hearing it only once … but Johnson did more Johnson’s ties with the devil in his songs such as “Hellhound that just cover the material of other artists; he was remarkably on My Trail,” “Me and the Devil Blues,” and “If I Had adept at drawing what suited him from an array of sources and Possession over Judgment Day.” The mythic aspects of Robert then melding the fragments into a personal statement through Johnson grew so strong that they began to obscure his music his own voice, his instrumental innovations, and his ability to and his impact upon the development of the blues. project feeling.” (p. 72) The reader emerges with renewed appreciation of Johnson’s creativity and a deeper Three recent books help correct the historical record while understanding of the contexts in which he worked. exposing the process by which Johnson’s career was mythologized. Read together, they provide a remarkably full picture of one of the Elijah Wald’s Escaping the Delta—Robert Johnson and the most important but misunderstood American musicians of the Invention of the Blues (Amistad, 2004; $14.95) draws upon a variety twentieth century. Barry Lee Pearson [no relation to the reviewer] of primary sources in retelling and interpreting the Johnson story. and Bill McCulloch’s Robert Johnson Lost and Found (University Citing a Fisk University and Library of Congress field research of Illinois Press, 2003; $24.95) distills available source material to project from the 1940s that describes daily life and musical tastes provide fresh and insightful commentary on Johnson’s life and in the rural South during Johnson’s life, Wald argues that rather music. In their preface, the authors warn: “We are suspicious of than being a place of unrelenting racial oppression and poverty, both the process by which the Johnson legend appears to have by the turn of the twentieth century the Mississippi Delta was for been constructed and the timing of the construction project” and many black farmers a land of potential opportunity. The first argue that “Johnson and his music are best understood in the generation of blues innovators, including Son House and Skip recollections of his peers and in the context of rural African James, who reached prominence in the early 1920s were thus the American culture as it existed during the lean times of the twenties products of a relatively stable, even optimistic African American and thirties” (preface, p. x). Pearson and McCulloch’s approach is rural world. Wald further observes that by the 1930s many factors, unromantic, research-driven, and underpinned by a deep notably the Depression and more mechanized farming, dramatically understanding of both the music and its cultural context. worsened the economic condition of the Delta. Poverty eventually
10 ISAM Newsletter Volume XXXV, Number 1: Fall 2005 Robert Johnson (continued) replaced optimism and stability. The second generation of blues Johnson the artist was all but erased, his image used to create performers, including Robert Johnson, B. B. King, Muddy Waters, cultural myths that reveal the ideologies of different interest groups. and Howlin’ Wolf, would reach maturity during this period of The truth about Robert Johnson hardly matters. We invest the economic decline which was also marked by technological images of and stories about Robert Johnson with our own values advancement, with radio and the jukebox bringing new sounds leaving Johnson as another ‘evanescent presence,’ drained of and styles to the ears of these younger players. his own history as he comes to signify something about ours” (p. 13). She also explores some of other ways writers, musicians, Wald thus provides an alternative picture of the social and and filmmakers have appropriated the Robert Johnson myth, musical context of Robert Johnson. Rather than comprising a turning the musician into someone quite different from who he group of primitive tradition-bearers, Johnson and his actually was. contemporaries including Elmore James and Muddy Waters emerged in the late 1930s as progressives who would eventually Schroeder frames her commentary by drawing upon Marxist relocate geographically and evolve musically. James and Muddy theory, John Fiske’s writings about the influence of “power bloc” Waters would become the progenitors of the electric Chicago blues authority on culture, and other social and cultural theories. style, and as Wald persuasively argues, it is likely that Johnson’s Unfortunately, this focus on a particular political, or socio- music would have evolved in similar fashion had he lived longer. economic, point of view regarding the creation and promulgation Wald reinforces this claim with compelling evidence that Johnson, of Johnson’s myth does not always illuminate as much as create a like his contemporaries, was inspired by the popular tunes of his set of political strawmen. If some of Schroeder’s assertions had day as much as by the blues. been supported by the kind of historical research that she largely rejects, they would have been much more convincing. For example, Wald’s discussion of Johnson’s songs is the most thorough in examining the various stories about Johnson’s violent death, assessment I have encountered, providing insightful, detailed she suggests “that this veiling of history includes underestimating musical portraits. In describing “Me and the Devil Blues” Wald the violence of the Depression-era Jim Crow South, violence that notes that “There is a good deal of dark humor mixed in with the … was pervasive and profound, stemmed from a variety of sources, fine singing, the brilliantly understated guitar work … that make and becomes visible in Johnson’s life once we resituate it in its this one of Johnson’s most fully conceived performances. The original time and place” (p. 48). Yet Johnson’s researchers have range of tone he can pack into a few lines is astonishing. The first not in general avoided acknowledging the violent, racist nature of verse starts with his voice sounding tight and forced … Then he the Depression Era south. Much of the writing that Schroeder steps aside, … talking in a normal, conversational tone … then he accurately describes as romanticizing Johnson in the 1960s indeed is again singing the opening line again, but now in a comfortable reinforces the notion that he was the victim of violent times. middle range, sounding like a more muscular Leroy Carr” (pp. 178- 179). By providing such perceptive musical discussions and Much of Schroeder’s book is devoted to critical analysis of situating Johnson’s music in its historical and cultural contexts, works of art, including books, films, and plays that re-imagine Wald’s book is the most accessible and broadly informative account Johnson or use the Johnson of legend as a key dramatic device. of Johnson and his music to date. She notes that in novels such as Alan Rodger’s Bone Music, Sherman Alexie’s Reservation Blues, and Walter Mosley’s RL’s Patricia Schroeder’s Robert Johnson, Mythmaking and Dream, the authors “all depict Johnson’s blues and their own art Contemporary American Culture (University of Illinois Press, 2004; of storytelling as powerful agents of multicultural transmission…” $24.95) has a different goal from the aforementioned studies. Rather (p. 114). Her book is valuable for this observation alone, but it than attempting to assemble a historically accurate story of would have been more useful if its explorations of myth and culture Johnson’s life, Schroeder interprets the process of mythologizing had not been so tightly circumscribed by the politics of critical that turned Johnson into an iconic figure. She is highly skeptical theory and if it had offered more evidence to back up suppositions about the validity of any historical accounts regarding Johnson’s about how Johnson’s image was constructed and used. life, noting “… even the simplest, most apparently factual details are open to dispute” (p. 19), and consequently dismisses efforts to The brilliance of Robert Johnson need not be mythologized to uncover the reality behind the myth as neither particularly be widely appreciated, but nearly all those who are familiar with interesting nor valuable. Instead, she seeks to offer “a better the musician have encountered aspects of the Johnson myth. And understanding of how Robert Johnson’s image has been used and while that romance will always play some part of how he and his what those uses tell us about American society in general and music are perceived, we benefit from the research, interpretation, postmodern culture in particular” (p. 64). and contextualization that Pearson and McCulloch, Wald, and Schroeder provide. Together these three books paint a rich picture Schroeder offers as an example the U.S. Postal Service’s 1994 of Johnson’s life and music as well as his transformation into an release of a Robert Johnson commemorative stamp. She argues American icon, and will serve as benchmarks for future research that originally Johnson’s image on the stamp was used to signify into Johnson and the country blues. America’s historical appreciation of jazz and blues music, but that the stamp was eventually highjacked by various interest groups —Nathan W. Pearson, Jr. including advocates of smokers’ rights, public health, and Rye, New York censorship. Schroeder concludes: “In this process, Robert
ISAM Newsletter Volume XXXV, Number 1: Fall 2005 11 Review: From Paris to Peoria The appearance of R. Allen Lott’s From Paris to Peoria: How subjects of Lott’s research, and his analyses promise to do the European Piano Virtuosos Brought Classical Music to the same for these figures. These three were the subject of Lott’s American Heartland (Oxford University Press, 2003; $55) bears a dissertation, and he has extended this study to include the more certain resemblance to the subject matter it treats: like the arrival of prominent Rubinstein and von Bülow. By bringing these five the nineteenth-century European virtuosi on these shores, this pianists together in a single volume, addressing their similarities book has been eagerly awaited and much anticipated. Having as well as their differences, Lott enables us to look at the question been tantalized by brief glimpses and advance reports, this reviewer of the virtuosi’s impact and accomplishments in an entirely new is happy to attest that the wait has been worthwhile. From Paris light. What he has found is a “listening continuum” spanning to Peoria offers the reader a vivid portrait of a singular aspect of thirty years, a time in which “most Americans believed the visiting concert life in the United States, the solo recitals of five notable virtuosos were a beneficent phenomenon, awakening musical pianists during the years 1845-1876. These are: Leopold De Meyer, interest among a wide range of audiences and providing excellent Henri Herz, Sigismund Thalberg, Anton Rubinstein, and Hans von models for students and aspiring professional musicians” (p. 292). Bülow, performer–composers who exerted tremendous influence Indeed, Lott observes that our own age is still beholden to the on America’s musical life virtuoso. The difference but whose concert tours is that while the mid- have never before been nineteenth-century systematically examined. virtuoso played his or her It is this systematic own, individualized treatment—the scholarly compositions, the late consideration of nineteenth and twentieth- travelling virtuosi—that century virtuosi performed is the book’s great their own, individualized innovation. Just as “interpretations” (p. 290). nineteenth-century Such insights coax Americans had to wait us toward a for celebrated European more sophisticated performers to make the understanding of the arduous trip across the function of spectacle Atlantic, we of the in the pursuit of twenty-first century have aesthetic pleasures. had to wait for the “The Celebrated Racer, De Meyer, (The property of G.C. Reitheimer, Esq.) winning the Lott has derived a emergence of an Great Fall Sweepstakes of 1846” (Yankee Doodle, October 1846) satisfying scheme for the intellectual climate that Courtesy of the Literature Department, The Free Library of Philadelphia presentation of an would support the abundance of information. serious treatment of such a topic. Just twenty-five years ago, for The book is organized into five roughly equal parts, each one focused example, H. Earle Johnson could pay a back-handed compliment to on a virtuoso and arranged in chronological order of his concert the New York Philharmonic and Boston’s Handel and Haydn tour of the United States. Each part is comprised of several chapters, Society by comparing their accomplishments to those of visiting providing relevant biographical information, an evaluation of the musicians. The “feeble bodies” of such mid–nineteenth century career point at which an American tour was undertaken, a American ensembles had “accomplished more for music than description of the tour and its highlights, analyses of repertory, touring virtuosi (De Meyer, Herz, Gottschalk, Ole Bull, Remenyi, and the introduction of “assisting artists.” In addition to providing and Thalberg) who, confounding audiences with their a wealth of material on five renowned pianists, From Paris to individualisms and their techniques, implanted low standards by Peoria is an important source of information on a number of notable means of galops, waltzes, themes and variations, and nauseous violinists, including Henry Vieuxtemps, Joseph Burke, George potpourris.”1 Similar attitudes have long found support in Liszt’s Knoop, Henryk Wienawski and Camillo Sivori (Paganini’s “only renunciation of the recital circuit and Schumann’s condemnations pupil” [p. 76]). Lott’s discussion of the prominent role played by of exhibitionistic performers. Yet to accept the received wisdom violinists in eliciting audience appreciation for fabulous technique, on this topic is to ignore both the re-evaluation of the role of fertile invention, and unique interpretation, suggests that a performers in shaping music history, as seen in Richard Crawford’s comparable project treating transatlantic violin virtuosi such as America’s Musical Life, and the nineteenth-century mingling of Eduard Remenyi and Miska Hauser awaits further research. popular and serious genres explored in Lawrence Levine’s The book’s structure resembles a mid-century concert or theater Highbrow/Lowbrow. program in its pacing, with the presentation of the main parts— Further evidence for the changed climate is found in the each containing lively writing and highly varied topics—linked by rehabilitated reputations of two of Johnson’s targets, Gottschalk two brief interludes. The latter address nineteenth-century views and Ole Bull. Three others—Herz, De Meyer, and Thalberg—are the on issues such as the educational value of virtuoso performance,
Continued on p. 14 12 ISAM Newsletter Volume XXXV, Number 1: Fall 2005 New Orleans (continued) supports the racial hierarchy while thinking she is championing the musical scenes in New Orleans, but in my reading, the charge black culture. I call this figure the “Jazz Virgin,” a white woman belongs solely to Miralee, whose female gaze we watch and adopt character who is stirred by what she hears in black music—which by the end of the scene. As she descends into the depths of the in this film is construed as sexuality, authenticity, emotion, “Orpheum Cabaret,” she can barely contain her physical excitement. newness, modernity—while other characters serve as her She gingerly steps into the club, eyes, and lips moist, face aglow. anxious protectors. 13 In this film, it is not only white men who The scene is remarkable for its situating of female pleasure in a jazz protect white womanhood, but all characters: a black male jazz scene, but complicated in the sense that what enables white female musician played by Louis Armstrong; a Creole gambling hall owner pleasure is the fetishizing of black men and a black woman. When and Miralee’s love interest, Nick Duquesnes, played by Mexican Endie finishes her song, Miralee plies Nick with breathless actor Arturo de Cordova; and the singing black maid played by questions that suggest her impending loss of innocence, such as, Billie Holiday. Repeatedly, other characters try to prevent jazz “Where does such music come from?” Nick begins to narrate the from entering Miralee’s body, or from entering the wrong parts of miracle of jazz until the once innocent and now fallen Grace who her body, or to prevent the wrong parts of the music from entering appears in the doorway. The climax of the scene comes when her body. Her protectors know that “too much jazz” signals Miralee, now consumed with her desire to feel Endie’s song danger—criminality, sexuality, impurity—and with them, the threat emanating from her own body, rushes for the stage. She is to topple the white woman from her pedestal.14 The character who “rescued” by Nick, who expels her from the club. The rest of the is most ambivalent about the pedestal is another white woman film is spent reconciling Miralee’s epiphany that jazz belongs to her, who represents an alternative to the “Jazz Virgin”—predictably, it with concerns that her love of jazz may lead to the loss of other is the “Jazz Whore,” a fallen white woman aptly named Grace, who entitlements for her and other white characters. has had too much jazz, drink, and sex, loses her social position, Like the “Jazz Nerd,” the “Jazz Virgin” collects, and in the final and is cinematically punished by getting hit by a car. The fallen scene, Miralee triumphs at New York’s Symphony Hall, delivering Grace is dark-haired and has a French surname, and so like Endie’s song in her best bel canto belt (dubbed by white lyric Duquesnes, she is Creole, not quite American, not quite white. soprano Theodora Lynch). Not an old stock aristocrat like her What will happen to innocent white Anglo-America if jazz enters mother, indebted to European notions of high culture, Miralee Miralee’s body? proves herself as a modern national subject, for whom shedding We are first introduced to Miralee when her boat from Baltimore Italian art songs and claiming jazz as her own enacts a gendered pulls into the port of New Orleans as Louis Armstrong plays in a story of innocent imperialism. We hear a little more chest resonance band on the pier. Her entrée to jazz appreciation is her training as in the finale than in Miralee’s European art song renditions and a singer of European art songs. From the moment we meet her, she English instead of Italian, but we do not hear signs of blackness is drawn to jazz without knowing what it is. As a “Jazz Virgin,” her such as blue notes, speech effects, syncopation, or improvised wide-open ears are a tabula rasa. We recognize Armstrong. The turns of phrasing and melody that would popularize other white chaperon hears danger, crime, and poor taste. Miralee hears women singers such as the Boswell Sisters from New Orleans, Armstrong’s sound, even identifies his instrument, but affirms her who also learned about black music from their maids. defining innocence when she exclaims: “That cornet in that wagon, did you ever hear anything like it?” She is resolutely a different Though referred to throughout the film as a “blues,” “Do You kind of a jazz listener than the Nerd, who has heard something like Know What it Means to Miss New Orleans” is a popular song it, knows that it’s Armstrong, and can name all the sidemen. written especially for this film, and is full of southern pastoral nostalgia scathingly critiqued in Abel Meeropol’s lyrics to “Strange This image of Miralee continues when she sets foot in her new Fruit.” Backed by an all-white symphony orchestra and an all-white home in New Orleans. Again, she leads with her fine-tuned yet jazz orchestra (Woody Herman’s first Herd), Miralee woos an all- jazz-innocent ears, drawn this time to the sound of Endie’s/Billie white concert-going audience to share her epiphany that this music Holiday’s voice. Again, she is protected—this time by two older belongs to them, too. In the final scenes of New Orleans, neither white women, her chaperon and mother—who act as culture police, Billie Holiday nor the black jazz instrumentalists who so inspired and do their best to enforce racial hierarchy. Nonetheless, when Miralee throughout the first half of the film are seen or heard. As the protectors of white womanhood leave the room, the budding film scholars have documented, while the black musicians were sexuality of the “Jazz Virgin” is once again apparent as she begs supposed to appear in an integrated finale, McCarthy-era Hollywood for more song. At the sound of Endie’s voice, Miralee seems would not allow it.15 And so, a white woman presents a nostalgic physically stimulated. She disobeys her mother, yet upholds and song about a happy south stolen from her black maid, thus transforming modernizes conventions of white power when she overrules Endie’s jazz into respectable American culture, and the film swells to its musical own attempts to protect white womanhood. She has commanded big finish without apology or even apparent awareness that one her to sing. Now she playfully orders her to take her “slumming.” might be called for. It is typical white-boy-meets-black-music Miralee’s pathway to jazz, then, trades on a race- and class- cinematic jazz fare, as analyzed by Gabbard, in which sincere white naturalized mistress-maid relationship, via “slumming,” a mode of devotees rescue jazz from black obscurity by trumpeting it from white white privilege that, like other forms of tourism, affirms hierarchy concert hall stages.16 Only this time, the colonizing white boy with a through exoticizing difference. Krin Gabbard has written about (dubbed) horn is a colonizing white girl with a (dubbed) voice. the erotic charge between Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday in Continued on page 14
ISAM Newsletter Volume XXXV, Number 1: Fall 2005 13 New Orleans (continued)
While painful to watch, the film New Orleans encourages us to piano aspirations, so she transfers her love to a white male swing musician, think critically about jazz desire among those who wish to oppose who suffers a moment of doubt when he worries that a more talented black musician is being left in the dust of his own success. Kit assures her boyfriend legacies of cultural imperialism, racial injustice, sexism, and poverty. that he is modern, unlike their black friend, who is “New Orleans.” Thanks to For me, this involves interrogating the spheres of jazz scholarship, Krin Gabbard for introducing me to this film. including women-in-jazz scholarship, and jazz fandom that I myself 15 Laurence Bergreen, Louis Armstrong: An Extravangant Life (Broadway inhabit. The tendency of jazz discourse to occlude ongoing Books, 1997), 427-49. histories of injustice and inequality is a pernicious one. A century 16 In Jammin’ at the Margins: Jazz and the American Cinema (University of of national love for New Orleans as the birthplace of jazz, for Chicago Press, 1996), Krin Gabbard points out that New Orleans is one of many Hollywood films that “wait until the end to elevate white music over instance, did little to rectify a century of cohabitation of jazz tourism black music” (79). Other films with this plot include The Fabulous Dorseys and institutional neglect of poor and black lives in the most flood- (1947), and The Benny Goodman Story (1955) (80). 17 vulnerable areas of the city and the wider Gulf region. The lyric 17 See Salim Washington’s article in this issue of the Newsletter. “Do you Know What it Means to Miss New Orleans” will never mean quite the same after Hurricane Katrina, but the root of its tragic irony—the idealization of moss-draped, gumbo-rich, all-male, color-blind egalitarian jam sessions—and concurrent neglect of From Paris to Peoria (continued) ongoing structures of race- and class-based unequal life chances— troubles a century of jazz desire. female pianists, and the changing function of the piano itself. In —University of Kansas addition, insets are used as “sweetmeats” throughout the book to treat special topics, such as “Liszt and America,” “The Bleeding of Notes Sivori” (by the press) and “Rubinstein’s Contract.” Everything is 1 New Orleans (1947), dir Arthur Lubin. All quotes are taken from the Kino framed by an introductory “prelude” and concluding “postlude.” DVD release (2000). Finally, two appendices coordinate much data. The first gives the 2 Donald Bogle, “Louis Armstrong: The Films,” in Louis Armstrong: A itineraries (dates and cities) of each pianist’s tour; the second, the Cultural Legacy, ed. Marc H. Miller (Queens Museum of Art/University of repertoire performed by Rubinstein and Bülow in the United States. Washington Press, 1994), 147. 3 Made in the 1940s, this film takes a clear side in the “Jazz Wars” raging at the From Paris to Peoria is also richly peppered with illustrations, time. “Trad” fans, also called “Mouldy Figs,” invested in early New Orleans including portraits of each pianist, maps displaying their concert jazz as a traditional folk music. See Bernard Gendron’s “Mouldy Figs and destinations, caricatures, cartoons, program broadsides, sheet Jazz at War (1942-1946),” Jazz Among the Discourses, ed. Krin Gabbard (Duke University Press, 1995), 31-56. music covers, and musical examples. Special mention should be 4 Leonard Feather, “The Reel Armstrong: Musically, New Orleans is a Bright made of the brief but insightful musical analyses featured in several Film; Dramatically, It’s a Dud,” Metronome (April 1947), 43. sections. From De Meyer’s “exotic” La danse du sérail, Op. 51, to 5 Krin Gabbard, Black Magic, White Hollywood, and African American Culture Herz’s crowd–pleaser, The Last Rose of Summer, Op. 159, to (Rutgers University Press, 2004). Thalberg’s opera fantasias, Lott has found a context in which to 6 Ingrid Monson, “The Problem with White Hipness: Race, Gender, and address “the music itself” so that such an endeavor is meaningful Cultural Conceptions in Jazz Historical Discourse,” Journal of the American rather than positivistic. Audio examples are available through a Musicological Society XLVIII/3 (Fall 1995), 405. supporting website (www.rallenlott.info), as are several full scores 7 The emerging scholarship on women and minstrelsy includes Jayna Jennifer Brown, Babylon Girls: African American Women Performers and the Making and an abundance of additional material. The website seems both of the Modern, Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 2001; Michele Wallace, “Uncle scholarly in design and promotional, and sections such as Tom’s Cabin: Before and After the Jim Crow Era,” The Drama Review 44/1 “Satire”—a compendium of lengthy articles “that spoof virtuoso (Spring 2000), 137-156; M. Alison Kiebler, Rank Ladies: Gender and pianists, traveling artists in general, the people who managed them, Cultural Hierarchy in American Vaudeville (University of North Carolina Press, 1999), and Pamela Brown Lavitt, “‘First of the Red Hot Mamas:’ Coon and the people who heard them”—promise to serve both purposes. Shouting and the Jewish Ziegfeld Girl,” American Jewish History 87/4 (1999), A small peculiarity of the book is that the index includes neither 253-290. Paris nor Peoria, although both places are mentioned in the text 8 Brown, Babylon Girls, 53. 9 Ruth Frankenberg, “Local Whitenesses, Localizing Whiteness,” in Displacing and many other towns have index entries. The omission of Paris Whiteness: Essays in Social and Cultural Criticism, ed. Ruth Frankenberg seems particularly unfortunate, as a more extensive consideration (Duke University Press, 1997), 11-12. of the transatlantic ramifications of the traveling virtuosi’s activities 10 Ibid., 11-12. would be welcome. But not to worry: we who study nineteenth- 11 Ibid., 15. century American musical life know that the greatest rewards are 12 Hilary Harris, “Failing ‘White Woman’: Interrogating the Performance of worth the wait. Respectability,” Theatre Journal 52/2 (2000), 183-209. —Nancy Newman 13 The jury is still out regarding the frequency of this formula, though if we University at Albany include jazz sound-tracks in films that aren’t literally “about” jazz, this plot is more common than it might seem at first glance. See Peter Stanfeld, “An Notes Excursion into the Lower Depths: Hollywood, Urban Primitivism, and St. Louis Blues, 1929-1937,” Cinema Journal 41/2 (Winter 2002), 84-108. 1 H. Earle Johnson, First Performances in America to 1900: Works with 14 Another fascinating representation of a white woman’s love of jazz occurs Orchestra. Bibliographies in American Music 4 (Detroit: College Music in Syncopation (1942), dir. William Dieterle. Kit’s father objects to her jazz Society, 1979), xiv.
14 ISAM Newsletter Volume XXXV, Number 1: Fall 2005 Hurricane Katrina (continued) a pioneering early jazz soloist (an honor universally awarded to restoration, rather than develop a way to incorporate humanitarian Louis Armstrong), and the even more egregious oversight as one values into city planning. of the first great saxophonists in the tradition (honors that It is not possible to rebuild—or even plan—culture, history, “properly” belong to Coleman Hawkins) are due in part to his cultural and community per se. What is possible is to examine how we can views about jazz, which do not neatly fit the heroic narrative of the excuse the failure of our political will and our government’s canonical jazz story. How might our views of the music’s meanings administration to prepare for a disaster that was inevitable and and aesthetics be different if Bechet’s example were as prominent foreseeable. We could confront the self-image of a nation that as that of Pops or Jelly Roll? always holds the morality, civility, and ultimately the humanity of Marsalis points out the injustice of “[t]he genuine greatness of black people in question. If this is a tall order for a country that Armstrong [being]reduced to his good nature.” But does not the cannot muster appropriate outrage at what many view as an ease of this reduction stem from political and economic realities illegitimate administration bent on imperialism (though often that informed the culture, just as much as the culture informed the cloaking its aims under calls for the expansion of democracy), it is political economy? The willful refusal to incorporate this truth into also a stretch for the spiritual resources of an aesthetic that hides art is the biggest weakness in the aesthetics of the nearly triumphant its head in technical brilliance over truth seeking, and institutional neo-conservative movement in modern jazz. If it is true that jazz respectability over revolutionary zeal. embodies, as Marsalis puts it, a “flowering of creative intelligence” —Salim Washington brought about “where elegance met an indefinable wildness,” at Brooklyn College its best the music has historically critiqued American hegemony through its blues-based revolt against the strictures of Western aesthetics. In a deal with the devil, jazz is threatening to become Now available from respectable with the full trappings of mainstream institutional The Institute for Studies in American Music support. We are constantly reminded of that old saw, “be careful what you wish for.” The not-so-hidden costs of this deal include: redefining jazz as America’s “sole” art form rather than as an African American art form, the reification of certain styles and artifacts over the processes and dynamic interactions of the music, and the acceptance of liberal bourgeois ideology over the revolutionary aspirations of earlier generations of jazz musicians. These are hefty costs indeed, and if paid in full will rob the United States of one of its historically rich voices, a potential resource in the humanization of a nation that values commodities over people. It is America’s perceived “me first and damn the world” attitude that has earned us the disdain of much of the globe. The attitude is so pervasive that some of us occasionally sink into its grasp even when trying to provide a prophetic voice. Hip hop artist Kanye West’s blistering attack on the Bush administration notwithstanding, I lament the lack of substantive critique of the American empire from the hip hop community in a time when the decadence of American culture and the viciousness of its politics A collection of essays with contributions from: have landed us into yet another war. Perhaps the willful ignorance Ellie M. Hisama David G. Pier and apathy of our artists only mirror the historical amnesia of a Afro-Asian Hip Hop Live Hip Hop in New York people who act surprised by the New Orleans crisis, despite the Jonathan Toubin clear example Mississippi flood of 1927, when the black poor were Hip Hop Music in Downtown Manhattan forced to repair the levee at gunpoint and abused in rescue camps. Stephanie Jensen-Moulton Our peculiar lack of historical consciousness is an apt companion Gender Dynamics in the Film Anne B. Real to the clouded vision in the discourse around “rebuilding” New Orleans. Evan Rapport Musician, scholar and activist Fred Ho raised the central issues that On the Brooklyn-based Rapper Sensational should be taken into account when he questioned (in a recent private correspondence) “the notion of rebuilding a defective New Orleans in Robert Wood which the wetlands were degraded and eviscerated, in which the ocean A Life in the Day of Benjamin Andre surrounding the coast has become a ‘dead zone’ devoid of oxygen Ejima Baker Carl Clements and nutrients to support marine life due to the scarring and pillaging Exploring Reggaetón Indian Music & Hip Hop by oil rigs and pipelines.” This disregard of environmental needs when they interfere with profits is mirrored in the local government’s For order information, call (718) 951-5655 plans to revitalize the tourist district as a key point of the city’s or visit
ISAM Newsletter Volume XXXV, Number 1: Fall 2005 15 Inside This Issue
Robert Johnson
Noah Creshevsky Dusty Springfield
Music in New Orleans
European Piano Virtuosos Billie Holiday
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