Suchergebnisse

"This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in "Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies" on 8th May, 2019, available at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17533171.2019.1576955 For the Blue Notes, an ensemble comprised of South African jazz musicians living in Britain, 1968 was pivotal. After 3 years on the margins of the London jazz scene, their debut album Very Urgent was released in May that year to positive acclaim. Very Urgent was understood as an important statement of the British jazz avant-garde movement that captured the spirit of 1968, infused with the Blue Notes' musical South Africanisms. In this article, I explore how shifting understandings of jazz in the 1960s aided and undermined the Blue Notes' musical identities: as mbaqanga, hard bop, and free jazz musicians. I argue that Very Urgentand, to an extent, the Blue Notes cannot be understood solely in the terms favored by their early reception in Britain. Rather, both represent a complex matrix of personal, musical, and political relations that constituted British and South African jazz art worlds in the 1960s.

This research explores the dynamics of gender, sexuality and power for women performers within the jazz community in Cape Town. Although the history and development of South African jazz has been extensively researched, very few texts mention the presence and impact of women performers and has yet to include how questions of gender, power and sexuality influence both the cultures of jazz and the experiences of women jazz artists. The current study is strongly influenced by feminist theory, which seeks to uncover experiences obscured by patriarchal epistemologies. A qualitative methodology is used to ensure each narrative remains at the forefront of the research. Interviews were conducted with jazz women musicians involved in various roles within the jazz industry in Cape Town. These semi-structured interviews allow for these women to narrate their turbulent musical journeys. What is revealed and subsequently further explored are the rich identity politics involved in being women "performers", what is assumed and expected of them, the role "boys clubs" play in their exclusion, and the pressures and implications of stringent gender stereotypes, beauty ideals and vicious hyper-sexualization. Moreover, I explore the analytics of power within this specific culture and its' effect on jazz women. Their accounts reveal how the Cape Town jazz community remains saturated with gender stereotypes and is seemingly committed to continuing violent displays of misogyny. The study argues that despite the prevalence of this misogyny, women jazz artists actively design strategies which skilfully and innovatively allow them to pursue influential careers, deepening the meaning of "jazz" in Cape Town and beyond. The research thus both extends the analysis of feminist jazz theorists in Cape Town, and suggests that understanding the contemporary dynamics of gender and sexuality in South African jazz artists' experience deserves more research.

This study sought to answer two questions. First, who within the African American community is consuming jazz music? Second, are African American jazz consumers cultural snobs or cultural omnivores? Nationally representative data sets from the Cultural Policy and National Data Archives for the years 1982, 1992, 2002, and 2008 were used to answer these questions. Using classification and regression tree analysis and binary logistic regression, the author draws several conclusions. First, African American jazz consumers are educated and urban. Furthermore, since 1982, the level of education associated with the jazz consumer has increased. Second, African American jazz listeners are omnivores who reject rap. It is suggested that this particular consumption pattern reflects a form of segmented assimilation in which middle-class African Americans consume jazz in order to retain their racial heritage but reject rap in order to distance themselves from working- and lower-class African Americans.

Jazz and fascism : contradictions and ambivalences in the diffusion of jazz music under the Italian fascist dictatorship (1925-1935) / Marilisa Merolla -- Jazz in Moscow after Stalinism / Rüdiger Ritter -- Four spaces four meanings : narrating jazz in late-Stalinist Estonia / Heli Reimann -- Jazz in Poland : totalitarianism, Stalinism, socialist realism / Igor Pietraszewski -- Jazz in socialist Czechoslovakia during the 1950s and 1960s / Wolf-Georg Zaddach -- Trouble with the neighbours : jazz, geopolitics, and Finland's totalitarian shadow / Marcus O'Dair -- Performing the "anti-Spanish" body : jazz and biopolitics in the early Franco regime (1939-1957) / Iván Iglesias -- "The purest essence of jazz" : the appropriation of blues in Spain during Franco's dictatorship / Joseph Pedro -- Jazz and the Portuguese dictatorship before and after WWII : from moral panic to suspicious acceptance / Pedro Roxo -- A kind of "in-between" : jazz and politics in Portugal (1958-1974) / Pedro Cravinho -- A climbing vine through concrete : jazz in 1960s Apartheid South Africa / Jonathan -- "Fanfare for the warriors" : jazz, education, and state control in 1980s South Africa and after / Mark Duby -- From the 'Sultan' to the 'Persian side' : jazz in Iran and Iranian jazz since the 1920s / Gay Breyley -- On the marginality of contemporary jazz in China : the case of Beijing / Adiel Portugali -- Afterword : conclusions / Bruce Johnson

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.