Editorial Jazz in Australasia Bruce Johnson University of Turku (Finland), University of Glasgow (UK), Macquarie University, Sydney (Australia) [email protected]
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[JRJ 8.1-2 (2014) 5-22] (print) ISSN 1753-8637 doi:10.1558/jazz.v8i1-2.27135 (online) ISSN 1753-8645 Editorial Jazz in Australasia Bruce Johnson University of Turku (Finland), University of Glasgow (UK), Macquarie University, Sydney (Australia) [email protected] Introduction As one of the first musics mediated by modern technologies, jazz was cir- culated globally with a rapidity unprecedented for any other new music. As early as 1922, US journalist Burnet Hershey reported that in his recent journey around the world he found jazz everywhere (Walser 1999: 26). The speed of its international circulation tells us as much about modernity itself as about the music that became its anthem. Curious, then, that it has taken so long for the history of diasporic jazz to be taken seriously. The jazz nar- rative has been overwhelmingly US-centric for most of the music’s history, with jazz outside the US generally neglected as some kind of inauthentic reflection of the ‘real thing’. This is a deeply conservative approach to the study of a modern cultural form, telling us, for example, very little about the dynamics of globalization/glocalization in relation to a genre that may be regarded as having created the modern musical template. Indeed, that jazz came to be regarded as the quintessential new music of the twentieth cen- tury was itself a phenomenon of its diasporic process. On the basis of their own reports (see for example Shapiro and Hentoff 1955, especially 3–74) musicians in what is regarded as the birthplace of the music, New Orleans, thought of themselves as bearers of a local semi-folk tradition, not as har- bingers of internationalist modernity. It was the new audiences in diasporic sites that made the music the anthem of all that was modern, emancipative and thus threatening to tradition. The further from the source, the more comprehensively was that asso- ciation defined, and this is partly because of the primary diasporic media. Jazz was a music disseminated, especially beyond the US, largely by recordings, radio and film. It was thus delivered via the medium not of pro- vincial folk traditions but by technologies that coded it as of an increas- ingly internationalized New World that represented the future. It was in © Equinox Publishing Ltd 2015, Office 415, The Workstation, 15 Paternoster Row, Sheffield S1 2BX. 6 Jazz Research Journal the diasporic process that jazz became, internationally, the soundtrack to modernity (see further Johnson 2000: 7–27; Johnson forthcoming). Jazz was not invented then exported, arriving in some contaminated and ener- vated form, but was continuously invented in the diasporic process, which thus contributes to, rather than compromises, the jazz tradition (see further Johnson 2002a: passim). Even where diasporic jazz has attracted attention, what are in many ways the most instructive forms have been overlooked and even scorned for their embarrassing gaucherie—that is, the earliest attempts to make local sense of the music, before its international, place- less codification from the 1960s through such infrastructures as the LP, its cover notes, jazz education programmes and fake books. To me there are more telling lessons in a non-US recording from the 1920s of Edwardian dance-band or vaudeville trained musicians still trying to find their feet, than a diasporic 1960s performance by musicians whose greatest pride is to be indistinguishable from their New York counterparts. But from the late twentieth century the situation has been changing, with studies of jazz in Europe, including the early general study, God- dard (1979) and later Atkins (2003), and specific regional studies includ- ing, inter alia, the USSR (Starr 1983); the UK (Godbolt 1984); the Third Reich (Kater 1992); South Africa (Ballantine 1993); Finland (Haavisto 1996); Japan (Atkins 2001) and France (Nettelbeck 2004). The flow of such studies now gains impetus yearly. This shift has been given momen- tum by the ‘New Jazz Studies’, and the current centre of gravity of its diasporic interests may be seen as the Hera-funded research project Rhythm Changes (see http://heranet.info/rhythm-changes/index). Austra- lia was among the first regions to receive such attention. Following the ‘registry’ style privately printed publication by Hayes, Scribner and Magee (1976), extended scholarly monographs began with Andrew Bisset (1979, updated 1987) followed by Johnson (1987), Whiteoak (1999) and more focused, anecdotal and interview-based surveys as exemplified by Wil- liams (1981), Clare/Brennan (1995), Sharpe (2001, 2006, 2008), Boldis- ton (2007), Shand (2009), Newton (2009), James (2014) and Hopgood (2014). There are also discographical resources by Dean (2005), and most comprehensively by Mitchell (1988, 1998, 2002). There are several essay- length overviews of Australian jazz history including Johnson (2008) from which much of the following is condensed. There is also a growing library of jazz in New Zealand, including Hardie and Thomas (2009); Ward (2009, 2013) (see also Ward’s website nzjazz.wordpress.com); and there is cov- erage in Bourke (2010). © Equinox Publishing Ltd 2015. Editorial 7 Thus far I have been identifying nation(s) as a regional descriptor, since that is the most succinct way to tell a potential reader what to expect, and given that the nation is not the US this situates the volume very much with the ‘New Jazz Studies’ that have emerged since the late twentieth cen- tury. But I want to take that alignment further along a chain of logic. The idea embodied in the term ‘Australian jazz’ or ‘Australasian jazz’ overlooks internal regionalisms and micro-communities that challenge that mono- lithic idea of nation, as indicated dramatically by the titles of the texts listed above in the category of Australasian jazz studies. One of the thrusts of ‘New Jazz’ and diasporic jazz studies is to challenge the schematic models of entrenched jazz narratives, by breaking down simplistic binaries such as ‘centre (US)/margins (the rest)’, or based on essentialisms of place, gender and race. This process discovers continuities where, before, there had been ruptures, but also micro-differences elided in conceptions of jazz based on, for example, nation. ‘Australian jazz’ occupies the greater space in this collection, and for discursive convenience in this Introduc- tion, I shall focus on that component of Australasia. The term certainly has some coherence as a subject, but it is also intersected by lines of force that range from the regional to the personal. When Europeans began to speak of Australian jazz in the wake of our successive exports, perhaps what they were really noticing was a regional flavour or even the personal signatures of particular musicians such as Ade Monsbourgh and Roger and Graeme Bell, which happened to coalesce for them with other supposed markers of ‘Australian-ness’ (see further Johnson 2000: 141–64). Without losing a bigger picture, the current enquiries into diasporic jazz often involve deli- cate nuancing and cross-hatchings that force us to reconsider schematic models of the music and its history. I have arranged the articles in this collection into three sections that more or less constitute thematic categories, and within each the order is more or less chronological. It will help to contextualize the individual stud- ies if we situate them in the historical narrative. Cultural contexts Jazz began to be spoken of in Australia towards the close of World War I, but this was not our first exposure to entertainment derived from African- American sources, and the transition was by no means clearly marked, largely because the performances identified by the term jazz were under- stood so differently from later interpretations. ‘Australia’s First Jazz Band’, led by a female singer Belle Sylvia, was presented in mid-1918 on a Sydney © Equinox Publishing Ltd 2015. 8 Jazz Research Journal theatre stage, a vaudeville setting that had hosted a broad range of light entertainments including minstrelsy, a pattern evident in other diasporic sites including England (see, for example, Parsonage 2005; Rye 2014). The collection begins, then, with John Whiteoak’s discussion of what might be called the ‘prehistory’ of jazz in Australia, including African-American min- strel companies, musicians, dancers, brass bands and ragtime artists from the late nineteenth century and the 1910s, which introduced certain social, cultural and musical practices that evolved into those of early so-called ‘jazz’ in Australia. Contemporary reviews suggest that one understand- ing of jazz by audiences and performers was as a form of comic anarchy, with novelty instruments, sons trouvés, extravagant animation and a gen- eral zaniness (Johnson 1987: 1–2). Low culture in Australia was far more irredeemably ‘low’ than it was in the US where, only six years after the first recordings proclaimed the emergence of jazz from its vernacular origins, jazz was toying with ‘symphonic form’ through the premiere of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue with Paul Whiteman’s Orchestra in 1924. There is little evidence of any courtship across the high/low divide for perhaps the first fifty years of Australian jazz history, and still today relatively little acknowl- edgement of the dignity and significance of the music on its own terms, with corresponding attempts to seek a haven in the category of ‘art’, avert- ing the eyes from its low-rent associations (see Johnson 2002b). From the beginning, Australian writers noted that the origins of jazz were ‘negroid’ and embodied a challenge to authorized notions of musical- ity. In every way jazz represented a reaction against pre-twentieth-century Anglo-European high-cultural orientations. Cacophonous, raucous, liter- ally brazen, jazz represented part of a larger ‘otherness’ to the civilizing arts of Europe. As such it became entwined with broader notions of alien- ness. The 1920s saw an ambivalent fascination on the part of the West with exotic cultures, including one of its periodic flirtations with chinoiserie and other exotic motifs apparent in new art movements.