In December 1917, U.S. Merchant Marine Truman Blair Cook wrote a diary entry describing his crew’s arrival in Arica, Chile—a small mining town near the country’s northern border. The following is excerpted from Oregon Historical Quarterly, where Cook's diaries were published in 1976:

Dec. 28. Arrived at Arica [in northern Chile] and dropped anchor at 11 a.m. Seems good to see signs of people. . . . Running from the beach is a pier of concrete and steel with locomotive cranes that lift the cargos from the lighters onto the flatcars. When anyone from the ship goes ashore they are rowed in by boatmen for a peso . . . each way. If after six up to ten p.m. he soaks you from 3 to 10 pesos if he thinks he can get away with it. Arica is the port for the railroad that runs back into Bolivia and Bolivia's outlet for her rich mines.

The town is of about 2,000 population, mostly Chileans, Spanish and Indians. Only a few Americans and few more English can be found, but all speak Spanish. . . . The whole town reeks of the smell that is common to all of the towns in this country. Everything is very high and doubly so to an American, as they see you coming, so to speak.

The town is very proud of its jazz band and its bright uniforms. It plays every other evening and Sunday morning and evening. I found it hard to talk to the people at first but now I know a few Spanish words and get along in a way. I have only been ashore four times as I always come back with enough fleas to keep me in misery for a week. The town is full of them and the dogs' backs are brown with them. The natives seem to be entirely ignorant of them. The only trees to be seen are the few in the plaza and a few more in the streets. The plaza is a jumble of trees, flowers, historic cannon, and statues of the liberation of the country.

This entry is a rather typical seaman’s description of a maritime voyage. What makes it remarkable, however—and also vexing—is that it refers to the town’s “jazz band,” and thus is the earliest use of the word that I have found referring to musical activity in Chile. It is clear that jazz activity was taking place in the country long before North American recording companies set up studios in Santiago in 1930—according to musicologist Álvaro Menanteau, the first jazz recordings by Chilean musicians were recorded in Buenos Aires in 1926 in an effort to cater to Chilean taste in popular music (2003:27).

What makes this reference to the Arica town jazz band vexing, for jazz scholars at least, is that the reference alone does little to describe what that jazz activity sounded like. Indeed, 1917 is the same year that the Original Dixieland Jazz Band recorded their jazz sounds in New York; it is possible but highly unlikely that the inhabitants of a remote mining village in the Atacama Desert had access to that record as a musical touchstone. It is also possible that the sounds produced by the Arican “jazz band” reminded Cook of early tours along the North American West Coast by African American musical pioneers such as Jelly Roll Morton.

Original Dixieland Jazz Band's recording "Dixie Jass Band One-Step"

What this encounter between the North American merchant marine and this band of Chilean musicians does show, however, is that the word jazz was traveling rapidly around the world as a way of naming musical activity. And although the term now connotes a relationship to musical genre, it also carries with it a host of other meanings. This point is illustrated perhaps most dramatically by Mark Laver in his 2015 book Jazz Sells: Music, Marketing, and Meaning, which addresses the use of jazz in advertising. (A preview of this book was published here in March.) After enumerating a bizarre and wide-ranging list of products bearing the name “jazz,” Laver concludes,

If jazz can simultaneously be a seasoned potato, a diet cola, an in-ear thermometer, and a super yacht, if it can cost anywhere from US$1 to £300 million, its core meaning is exceptionally elusive, if it has any singular core meaning at all. (2015:2)

The word’s association with music has never been exclusive, either. First printed in the Los Angeles Times in reference to a minor league pitcher’s curveball in 1912, the word only became associated with musical practice in New Orleans a few years later. As Lewis Porter notes in the link above, before the mid-1910s, New Orleans musicians referred to what they did as “ragtime.” Cook, a West Coast sailor who had spent time in California before 1917, seems to have been familiar with the word’s seedier connotations—this is evident from the other associations in the text to dirt, stench, and fleas.

Furthermore, the word has undergone subtle transformations as it has assimilated into other languages. In Spanish, for example, the spelling is maintained but the pronunciation is changed depending on local dialect—Chileans pronounce it “yass,” for example, while Argentines call it “shass.” In Russian, meanwhile, the pronunciation is similar but it is transliterated into the Cyrillic alphabet as “джаз." The dominance of the name, it bears noting, is deeply connected to the United States’ role as a hegemonic power throughout Latin America in the wake of World War I. In Jazz Sells, Laver draws on an argument from Ernesto Laclau to drive this point home:

[If] the unity of the object is the retroactive effect of naming itself, then naming is not just the pure nominalistic game of attributing an empty name to a preconstructed subject. It is the discursive construction of the object itself. . . . The essentially performative character of naming is the precondition for all hegemony and politics. (Quoted in Laver, 2015: 231)

In other words, the music being played by the uniformed Aricans only became “jazz” upon the arrival of an Oregonian merchant marine. Thus, it was Cook—neither Arican nor African-American musicians—who called the group a jazz band.

This awkward fit between the word and the music has never gone away, as Amiri Baraka famously noted in his influential Down Beat essay “Jazz and the White Critic.” Nicholas Payton put it most provocatively when he wrote at his blog in 2011,

I can’t speak for anyone else, but I don’t play Jazz. I play Postmodern New Orleans music. . . . I am a part of a lineage. I am a part of a blood line. My ancestors didn’t play Jazz, they played Traditional, Modern and Avant-garde New Orleans Music. I don’t play Jazz. I don’t let others define who I am. . . . The man who lets others define him is a dead man. With all due respect to the masters, they were victims of a colonialist mentality.

In his 2005 essay “Core and Boundaries,” jazz historian Scott DeVeaux delves more deeply into the ways in which this core meaning is maintained, both the word and the music. He demonstrates how jazz history has been written by drawing boundaries, leaving out many musical practices along the way. Those boundaries have defined a set of dichotomies, with the core jazz meaning lying on one side and not the other: art, not commerce; black, not white; male, not female; and North American, not European, African, or of any other geographical provenance—certainly not Arican! Writing in a similar vein, John Szwed designates the musical practices that fall outside of these boundaries with scare quotes—as “jazz”—in his book Jazz 101 (2000). This has been done, as Payton notes, by mostly white North American critics and historians without separating the word from the music.

But DeVeaux also argues that contemporary listeners—not to mention a staggering diversity of musical practices drawing on jazz histories—lie mostly outside of those boundaries, and in order to reach them, we must cross them and engage with those peripheries. My dissertation fieldwork, which has recently taken me to Chile to focus on jazz practice at the Santiago club Thelonious, concerns itself deeply with this interplay between inside and outside—core, boundary, and periphery—especially in terms of geography and nationality, but also race, class, and gender. The practices of musical performance and listening that take place on a given night in Santiago—or, for that matter, Arica—may fall well outside of these boundaries, in terms of race and geography, while falling squarely within them in terms of class, gender, and musical taste.

I plan visit to Arica in early 2016 to follow the trail started perhaps unwittingly by Cook—a fellow white Oregonian—nearly a century ago. As I learn more about the surprising local histories that have played out alongside both this word and the sounds with which it has been associated, I am drawn more closely to the music that those Arican bandsmen were making at the time they encountered Cook’s jazz-tinged ears. It has been suggested by Payton and others that the word be retired, replaced by Black American Music, or #BAM. But what happens when we add Brown Arican Music to the historical mix? Whether we like it or not, these sounds have been connected through the uses of the word "jazz" by white North Americans to describe music made by nonwhite others. And as I hope to have shown, listening for these global jazz connections can offer deep surprises—about both the word and the music it has named.

Works Cited

Baraka, Amiri. "Jazz and the White Critic." Down Beat. August 15, 1963.

Cook, Truman B. 1976. “Merchant Marine 1917-1918.” Oregon Historical Quarterly 77(2):100-129.

DeVeaux, Scott. 2005. “Core and Boundaries.” Jazz Research Journal 2(1):15–30.

Laver, Mark. 2015. Jazz Sells: Music, Marketing, and Meaning. New York, NY ; Abingdon: Routledge.

Menanteau, Alvaro. 2003. Historia del Jazz en Chile. Santiago: Ocho Libros Editores.

Payton, Nicholas. 2011. "On Why Jazz Isn't Cool Anymore." Nicholas Payton Blog. https://nicholaspayton.wordpress.com/2011/11/27/on-why-jazz-isnt-cool-anymore/.

Porter, Lewis. 2011. "Origins of the Word Jazz." WBGO.org Blog. http://www.wbgo.org/blog/origins-word-jazz.

Szwed, John. 2000. Jazz 101: A Complete Guide to Learning and Loving Jazz. New York: Hachette Books.

Alex W. Rodriguez is a writer, improviser, trombonist and PhD candidate in ethnomusicology at UCLA. He founded the Sounding Board subsection "Space is the Place" in 2013 and served as Editor in Chief for Ethnomusicology Review in 2014. Alex studied trombone performance Amherst College, and completed a Master of Arts degree in Jazz History and Research at Rutgers University, where he wrote his thesis on early jazz trombonist Jack Teagarden and studied trombone with Conrad Herwig. His current research focuses on jazz clubs around the world and the creative improvised music communities that surround them, with case studies in California, Chile, and Siberia. He is currently conducting fieldwork at the Santiago jazz club Thelonious, Lugar de Jazz. Alex also contributes jazz coverage to NPR Music and maintains a blog, Lubricity. He also co-founded the UCLA Omni-Musicality Group, and has served as the Brass Instructor and Curriculum Director for the Santa Monica Youth Orchestra and PS1 Elementary School.

Recent discussions in historical musicology suggest that there is a growing interest in the relationship between Western music and the position of Europe in world history. This incipient “global turn,” if it can be characterised as such, reflects an increased awareness of globalisation within other academic disciplines and in contemporary world society and politics. Perhaps the most important intellectual influence, which has been felt across a range of disciplines, is the growth of postcolonial studies. While postcolonial theory has been most thoroughly applied in the social sciences—and has long been integral to disciplines such as anthropology and ethnomusicology—its impact can also be seen in the rise of global historical studies. Some historians may reject postcolonial theorists’ distrust of large-scale narratives or empiricist methodology, but there is no doubt that much historical work now recognises the interdependency of European history with that of the rest of the world.

Key to this global conception of history—and, implicitly, to traditional European historiography—are debates surrounding the notion of a “great divergence” between the West and the rest, leading to the emergence of modernity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Yet while the exceptionalism of Europe has been challenged in many quarters, other scholars have sought to defend this model, and it continues to have considerable purchase in the media and in popular consciousness (e.g. Ferguson 2012). Indeed, as Dipesh Chakrabarty and others have argued, the construct of history itself, with its emphasis on development and progress, is deeply intertwined with ideas of Western superiority and the mechanisms of imperialism (Chakrabarty 2008; Young 1990). From this perspective, the opposition of a European “history” of music versus a non-European “ethnography” of music (evident in the still common use of the “ethno-” prefix for research about non-European musics) is not simply a matter of disciplinary boundaries, but is the product of habits of thought which have their roots in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century colonialism. As Gary Tomlinson writes:

Across the century from 1750 to 1850 music lodged itself at the heart of a discourse that pried Europe and its histories apart from non-European lives and cultures. Perched at the apex of the new aesthetics, it came to function as a kind of limit-case of European uniqueness in world history and an affirmation of the gap, within the cultural formation of modernity, between history and anthropology … It arose, it is not too much to say, in complex alliance with Europe’s increasing domination of foreign territories and societies around the world. (Tomlinson 2007:285)

One type of response to the absence of the non-European in historical musicology, therefore, has been to explore precisely these narratives of Self and Other in European musical thought during and after the Enlightenment. Thus, several authors have detailed the way in which European music writing has represented non-European cultures as a means of self-fashioning and in order to reinforce various ideological constructs, from universalism to romanticism and evolutionism (Tomlinson 2007; Zon 2013; Bohlman 2013). Other scholars have researched the role of music in the colonial encounter, emphasising the way in which cross-cultural musical experiences shaped identities both in the colonies and in metropolitan centres (Agnew 2008; Irving 2010; Woodfield 2000). Non-European musics—or imaginings of them—became increasingly present in the cities of Europe during the later nineteenth century, whether through world exhibitions, musical exoticism, or new compositional techniques, and these issues too are well represented in musicological literature (Fauser 2005; Locke 2011; Cowgill and Rushton 2006).

Despite the obvious merits of these studies, what they have in common is an almost exclusive reliance on European-language sources and an overwhelming focus on European music. Where non-European musics are discussed, it is invariably through the prism of colonial literature, or with reference to their appropriation by European composers. This is perhaps in keeping with a particular approach to global history, which emphasises the colonial roots of modernity and sees globalisation as an aspect of the European project to map, conquer and subjugate economically the rest of the world (e.g. Nussbaum 2005). Echoes of this are also found in Jürgen Osterhammel’s recent global history of the nineteenth century, where he describes the spread of opera to Asia and the Americas in order to illustrate the globalisation of aesthetic practices (Osterhammel 2011:28–30). There is a certain inevitability to such accounts of European “cultural imperialism,” which suggest that, historically speaking, local musical practices are of little consequence in comparison with the universal adoption of Western art music and its aesthetic conventions (see e.g. Cook 2013). Yet the problem here, at least as far as musicology is concerned, may lie in the paradoxes of postcolonial theory itself, and more specifically in the influential work of Edward Said (1978, 1993).

Dealing as it does with representations of the Other in European culture (and, it should be noted, examining only European sources), there is little room in Saidian discourse for the Other to emerge as a historical actor. As Robert Young points out, “if Said denies that there is any actual Orient which could provide a true account of the Orient represented by Orientalism, how can he claim in any sense that the representation is false?” (Young 1990:130). (A further irony here is Said’s patronage of the West–Eastern Divan Orchestra [led by Daniel Barenboim], which, as Rachel Beckles Willson [2009] has trenchantly argued, serves to reinforce ideas of European cultural superiority and to obscure political conflict while claiming to foster “harmony” in the Middle East.)

Such contradictions have, of course, been discussed at length within postcolonial studies, and are certainly recognised by some scholars who have studied Orientalism in relation to European music. Matthew Head, for example, acknowledges that “anti-imperialist and anti-Orientalist theory … may express political and ethical concern for the Other but it does not itself cut through the web of Orientalist discourse to provide insight into the reality of the Other’s attitudes”—though in the final analysis, Head reaffirms his belief in the validity of Said’s theory (Head 2000:137). Other musicologists too have offered valuable critiques of Orientalism, adding historical depth and nuance to the somewhat bleak and undifferentiated picture of Western imperialism suggested by Said’s reading of European opera (de Mascarenhas 2010; Locke 2005; cf. Said 1993:133–59). But although such studies give us an increasingly refined understanding of how Europeans perceived the Orient in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the focus on representation (fostered above all by Said’s own work) means that they tell us nothing about the historical reality of music-making outside of Europe. While this may not be the aim of the authors, it is problematic in as much as it has led to further distortions of the historical record and, I would suggest, has perpetuated inaccurate perceptions of non-European musics.

The literature on European appropriations of “Turkish” music is particularly instructive, since the Ottoman Empire, as a major Islamic power that posed a threat to Christendom throughout the early modern period, has often functioned as Europe’s paradigmatic Other. The fashion for turquerie in early modern Europe was thus mirrored by a politicised discourse that portrayed the Ottomans as corrupt and despotic (Çırakman 2001). A number of scholars have analysed musical depictions of the Ottomans during the eighteenth century—e.g. those by Rameau and Mozart—as well as Orientalist writing on Ottoman music. In a contribution to the recent Cambridge History of World Music, for example, Sebastian Klotz (2013) discusses perceptions of “world music” during the Enlightenment, with particular reference to an essay on Ottoman music by Charles Fonton (1725–93) (for a critical edition of Fonton’s essay, see Neubauer 1999). However, by analysing it solely within the framework of European history, Klotz fails to take into consideration the broader (“global”) context of Fonton’s essay, which is essential to explain what distinguishes it from the work of, say, Jean-Benjamin de Laborde (1780).

Most importantly, Fonton was a Levantine, or a person of European descent who lived in the Ottoman Empire, and a member of a dynasty of dragomans (interpreters) who had been resident in Istanbul for several generations. He was born in Istanbul, and although he spent nine years (1737–46) in Paris for his education, he passed most of his life in Istanbul and Izmir (Smyrna), where he died in 1793 (Touzard 1997). Fonton’s subject position is therefore not “European” in a straightforward sense—indeed, the Levantines of the Ottoman Empire (perhaps in a similar way to the “Eurasians” of India) were often regarded with suspicion and distaste by “real” Europeans (Coller 2010).

“Air de Cantimir.” A peşrev in the mode Bestenigar by Dimitrie Cantemir (1673–1723), transcribed by Charles Fonton (1751, p. 137)

So while Klotz is undoubtedly correct to argue that aspects of Fonton’s essay reflect the values of the French Enlightenment, in order to properly contextualise it one must also place it within the framework of Ottoman history; or rather, one must attend to the complex entanglement of European and non-European history. Klotz’s lack of engagement with Ottoman or Middle Eastern studies literature is typical of musicological analyses of Orientalism, which tend to locate the site of “cross-cultural” encounter squarely within Europe. This approach effectively silences the actual music of the Ottoman Empire, substituting for it a close reading of European sources and musical practices that reaffirms the Eurocentrism it ostensibly seeks to displace. This is emphatically not due to a lack of historical evidence: in comparison with many other non-European music cultures, there is an abundance of primary sources on Ottoman music, many of them including notation, not to mention a large and accessible secondary literature (İhsanoğlu et al 2003). Yet in his discussion of Fonton, Klotz repeats the canard that there is “an absence of notational systems” or “written clues” in relation to non-European musics, thereby reiterating the idea that the Orient is knowable only through European perceptions of it (Klotz 2013:281).

However, by actively engaging with the written sources of Ottoman music, we can begin to move away from a one-sided discussion that concentrates solely on European perceptions of the Orient, and instead attempt to understand the historical reality of musical practices during the Ottoman period. Fonton’s transcriptions of Ottoman music, for instance, may usefully be compared with contemporaneous Turkish-language sources such as the Kevseri Mecmuası (c. 1740), which reveals that, far from being imaginative exotica, they correspond (albeit with inevitable distortions) to the music played in mid-eighteenth-century Istanbul (Ekinci 2012; Wright 2007:22–5). An awareness of correspondences such as these allows us to distinguish between real musical contacts with the Ottoman Empire—facilitated here by the particular circumstances of Fonton’s life—and European representations of “Turkish” music. It also shifts the debate away from representation and towards a more historically situated discussion that takes into account the material conditions which enabled musical encounters. By avoiding this approach in favour of an analysis that focuses only on discourse, we risk setting up a solipsistic debate about Self and Other in which the Other is nowhere to be found.

“Der makam bestenigar, berefşan.” Cantemir’s Bestenigar peşrev, transcribed by Mustafa Kevseri (c. 1740, fol. 47v)

Of course, as many scholars have pointed out, “authentic” representations of non-European musics may be equally as problematic as orientalist imaginings of them (see e.g. Head 2003:211–12). Partly for this reason, musicologists may feel more comfortable critiquing European perceptions of the Other than attempting to engage with actually existing non-European musics. Furthermore, it should be emphasised that any move towards a less isolationist narrative of European music history is surely to be welcomed. Nevertheless, to quote Gary Tomlinson again, “[w]e should say not that Europeans have begun to hear non-European musics, but that [we] have begun to scrutinize the peculiar deafness that at once constitutes our modernity and conceals the global forces in it” (Tomlinson 2007:196). However well-intentioned and self-critical our attempts to acknowledge the Others of Western music may be, the disproportionate weight given to European perspectives at the expense of local worldviews and practices gives rise to a worrying sense that we have been here before. If we are really interested in moving beyond Eurocentrism—towards “a history of many different voices” (Strohm [2013])—it is therefore imperative that we also attend to thevery real sounds, documents and practices of non-European musics.

Audio: Peşrev in makam Bestenigar / usul berefşan (16/8 meter) composed by Dimitrie Cantemir

Jacob Olley is a research associate on the long-term project "Corpus Musicae Ottomanicae: Critical Editions of Music Manuscripts from the Near East," based at Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster and funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). He is currently completing a PhD entitled "Writing Music in Early Nineteenth-Century Istanbul: Ottoman Armenians and the Invention of Hampartsum Notation" in the music department at King’s College London.

Email: olley@uni-muenster.de

Works Cited

Manuscripts

Fonton, Charles. 1751. Essai sur la musique orientale comparée à la musique européene [sic]. Bibliothèque nationale de France, ms. n. a. 4023.

Mustafa Kevseri. [c. 1740]. [Untitled treatise and music collection]. Milli Kütüphane, Ankara, [microfilm] Mf1994 A 4941.

Other Sources

Agnew, Vanessa. 2008. Enlightenment Orpheus: The Power of Music in Other Worlds.

          Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Beckles Willson, Rachel. 2009. “The Parallax Worlds of the West–Eastern Divan Orchestra.”

          Journal of the Royal Musical Association 134: 319–47.

Bohlman, Philip V. 2013 “Johann Gottfried Herder and the Global Moment of World-Music

         History.” In The Cambridge History of World Music, edited by Philip V. Bohlman, 255–76.

         Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2008. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical

         Difference. New ed. Princeton, N.J.; London: Princeton University Press.

Çırakman, Aslı. 2001. “From Tyranny to Despotism: The Enlightenment’s Unenlightened

         Image of the Turks.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 33: 49–68.

Coller, Ian. 2010. “East of Enlightenment: Regulating Cosmopolitanism between Istanbul

         and Paris in the Eighteenth Century.” Journal of World History 21(3): 447–70.

Cook, Nicholas. 2013. “Western Music as World Music” In The Cambridge History of World

         Music, edited by Philip V. Bohlman, 75–99. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Cowgill, Rachel and Rushton, Julian, eds. 2006. Europe, Empire and Spectacle in

         Nineteenth-Century British Music. Aldershot: Ashgate.

de Laborde, M. [Jean-Benjamin]. 1780. Essai sur la musique ancienne et moderne. 4 vols.

          Paris: Ph.-D Pierres.

de Mascarenhas, Domingos. 2010. “Beyond Orientalism: The International Rise of Japan and

          the Revisions to Madama Butterfly.” In Art and Ideology in European Opera:

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          and Clive Brown, 281–302. Suffolk: The Boydell Press.

Ekinci, Mehmet Uğur. 2012. “The Kevserî Mecmûası Unveiled: Exploring an Eighteenth

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          199– 225.

Fauser, Annegret. 2005. Musical Encounters at the 1889 Paris World’s Fair. Rochester

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Ferguson, Niall. 2012. Civilization: The Six Killer Apps of Western Power. London: Penguin.

Head, Matthew. 2003. “Musicology on Safari: Orientalism and the Spectre of Postcolonial

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Head, Matthew. 2000. Orientalism, Masquerade and Mozart’s Turkish Music. London: Royal

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İhsanoğlu, Ekmeleddin, Ramazan Şeşen, Gülcan Gündüz and M. Serdar Bekar. 2003.

          Osmanlı Mûsikîsi Literatürü Tarihi (History of Music Literature during the

          Ottoman Period). Istanbul: İslâm Tarih, Sanat ve Kültür Araştırma Merkezi.

Irving, D.R.M. 2010. Colonial Counterpoint: Music in Early Modern Manila. Oxford:

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Klotz, Sebastian. 2013. “Tartini the Indian: Perspectives on World Music in the

          Enlightenment,” In The Cambridge History of World Music, edited

          by Philip V. Bohlman, 277–97. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Locke, Ralph P. 2011. Musical Exoticism: Images and Perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge

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Locke, Ralph P. 2005. “Beyond the Exotic: How ‘Eastern’ is Aida?” Cambridge Opera

          Journal 17: 105–39.

Neubauer, Eckhard. 1999. Der Essai sur la musique orientale von Charles Fonton mit

          Zeichnungen von Adanson. Frankfurt am Main: Institute for the History of

          Arabic- Islamic Science at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University.

Nussbaum, Felicity A., ed. 2005. The Global Eighteenth Century. Baltimore, Md.; London:

          John Hopkins University Press.

Osterhammel, Jürgen. 2011. Die Verwandlung der Welt: Eine Geschichte des 19.

           Jahrhunderts. München: C.H. Beck.

Said, Edward W. 1993. Culture and Imperialism. London: Vintage.

Said, Edward. 1978. Orientalism. London: Routledge.

Strohm, Reinhard. [2013]. “Balzan Research Project: Towards a Global History of Music.”

           http://www.music.ox.ac.uk/research/projects/balzan-research-project/

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Tomlinson, Gary. 2007. Music and Historical Critique: Selected Essays. Aldershot: Ashgate.

Touzard, Anne-Marie. Touzard, “Un drogman musician: coup d’oeil sur la vie et les oeuvres

de Charles Fonton.” In Istanbul et les langues orientales: Actes du colloque organisé par

           l'IFEA et l'INALCO à l'occasion du bicentenaire de l'Ecole des langues

           orientales, Istanbul, 29-31 mai 1995, edited by Frédéric Hitzel,

           197–214. Paris: L'Harmattan.

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            Eighteenth-Century Anglo-Indian Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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            nihavend»?” Studii şi cercet. Ist. Art., Teatru, Muzică, Cinematografie,

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Recording

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfLxosgmIuE

“Peşrev in makam Bestenigar / usul berefşan (16/8) - Dimitrie Cantemir.” From the album Cantemir: Music in Istanbul and Ottoman Europe around 1700. Ihsan Özgen, Linda Burman-Hall and Lux Musica. Golden Horn Records, 2002.

Issues of space and place pervade jazz historical narratives, especially when considering conventional “up the river” histories. According to such accounts, jazz began in New Orleans (presumably a product of mixing influences in Congo Square and Storyville), traveled up the river to Chicago (to Lincoln Gardens or Austin High School), east to New York City (many cite the Cotton Club in the Swing era and Minton’s and 52nd Street for bebop), west to Los Angeles (and the supposed birth of West Coast Jazz on Central Avenue), and so on. Though scholars now debate the usefulness of such simplistic and often uncritical place-based narratives, they remain a stock feature of many jazz pedagogies.

Part of my work investigates how race and class impact the perception of particular places of jazz performance. In this blog post, I consider a specific site—George Wein’s Storyville: The Birthplace of Jazz, a Boston jazz club that opened in 1950 and lasted until 1960. Through close study of articles, oral history interviews, audio, images, and census information, I demonstrate how Storyville’s overt discourse of respectability—a discourse that privileged white audiences as “serious” connoisseurs of jazz art music—was rooted in race and class-based stereotypes.

Storyville, Boston

In 1950, Boston University graduate George Wein, the son of a physician, shocked his family by opening a jazz club in Boston’s Copley Square Hotel. Unashamed of what he described in his autobiography as “jazz’s seamy origins,” Wein took the name of his club from New Orleans’s former red-light district, Storyville, created by the New Orleans City Council at the turn of the twentieth century as a means to contain prostitution in the city. Storyville has long been associated with the beginnings of jazz: Cornetist Buddy Bolden, trumpeters Joe “King” Oliver and Louis Armstrong, and pianist Jelly Roll Morton grew up and played in and around Storyville. As Murray Forman argues, “it is in and through language that the values of place are produced.” Therefore, for Wein to take the name of Storyville for his club was to link his club to historical narratives of authentic jazz.

Postcard image of Basin Street, ca. 1908.
http://archive.oah.org/special-issues/katrina/Long.html

By the end of 1950 the Copley Square Storyville closed, due to a miscommunication with the management of the Copley Square Hotel. In 1951 Wein re-opened the club in the Hotel Buckminster, closer to both Boston University and Fenway Park. The Buckminster Storyville was not as successful as the Copley Storyville until Wein booked British jazz pianist George Shearing in September 1951. In 1953, Wein moved Storyville back to the Copley Square Hotel, which was under new management. The club stayed in the Copley Square Hotel until it closed permanently in 1960.

Location and Audience

In his recollections of Storyville, Wein does not specify which location he means (Hotel Buckminster or the Copley Square Hotel), suggesting that his concept of Storyville as a space remained largely unchanged, regardless of the actual place it occupied. Wein explained in a 2008 interview that Storyville’s audience was primarily white and college-educated:

Once we caught on, our audience was mostly made up of professors from the different local colleges. We didn’t draw many kids because they didn’t drink and most were under 21, the legal age limit then…The club attracted blacks when I had certain artists booked, but for the most part the audience was white and middle class.

Though Wein featured somewhat diverse groups of musicians including Dixieland Revivalists Bob Wilber and Jimmy McPartland and “modern” jazz artists such as Charlie Parker, the Modern Jazz Quartet, George Shearing, Sarah Vaughan, and Billie Holiday, many of these musicians were indeed successful among white audiences. Wein further explained that the club’s Copley Square location was ideal for the primarily white, affluent, and educated neighborhood surrounding it: “In terms of location, clientele, and the quality of the music, Storyville could be the first club poised to compete with the Savoy and the Hi Hat, both in an African American neighborhood.”

Census information corroborates Wein’s claims that the areas surrounding the Copley Square Hotel and Hotel Buckminster included a white, well-educated, white-collar audience. The image below shows a mapping of Boston’s 1950 census results regarding race and ethnicity, which indicates that while Copley Square was on the border of a distinctly white and a distinctly black neighborhood, the Copley Storyville itself was neatly tucked into a predominantly white neighborhood—and the Hotel Buckminster was located in an even more racially segregated neighborhood.

1950 Census map of Boston (the lighter the shading, the whiter the population, and vice versa). Includes Tract K-4A (Hotel Buckminster), Tract J-3 (Copley Square Hotel), Tract K-5 (Copley Square), Tract L-2 (Savoy and Hi Hat) and Boston University (for reference).
Source: Sweetser, Frank L. The Social Ecology of Metropolitan Boston: 1950. Boston University. Division of Mental Hygiene, Massachusetts Department of Mental Health, 1961.

In the chart below, I compare the race, education, and type of employment across the Copley Square, Copley Square Hotel, Hotel Buckminster, and Savoy and Hi Hat neighborhoods. The confluence of race, class, and education in these neighborhoods is clear when comparing the Storyville neighborhoods with Tract L-2, the census tract that contained the Savoy and the Hi Hat jazz clubs. The Savoy and Hi Hat clubs were not only located in a majority African American neighborhood, as Wein noted, but the neighborhood also included significantly more blue collar workers, fewer professionals/managers, and fewer high school graduates. Ultimately, Tract L-2 demonstrates how place, race, class, and access to education intersected. In other words, perceptions of race inevitably rely on perceptions of class and education, as well.

Census data for the Copley Square Hotel (Tract J-3), Copley Square (Tract K-5), the Hotel Buckminster (Tract K-4A), and the Savoy and the Hi Hat (Tract L-2).

Storyville as a Listening Room

Although Wein drew upon Storyville, New Orleans’s authenticity, he simultaneously distanced his own Storyville from the shady reputation of its namesake, insisting that “Storyville was a respectable place.” He stressed that his vision of Storyville was that of a “true music room. Storyville was never a joint. We had no floor show, no drug dealers or resident hookers. We kept things clean.” For Wein to call his own Storyville “respectable” and emphasize its freedom from drugs and sex work was another way of explicitly naming it a white place, a racial designation further underscored by associations with affluence and education, and in direct opposition to working class black places.

Unlike Storyville, New Orleans, George Wein’s Storyville was indeed known by its patrons and by music critics to be a “respectable” club. One way in which critics implied Storyville’s whiteness was by invoking the necessity for “serious” listening at Storyville. In 1953, Nat Hentoff referred to Storyville’s “relative silence.” Cyrus Durgin, a music reporter for the Daily Boston Globe, also wrote about Boston Storyville’s apparently surprising need for “attentive listening.” A self-described “longhair” (i.e. lover of European classical music), Durgin used Storyville as an example of how jazz had become a “serious” music, calling it Boston’s “best temple of jazz” in 1954. Durgin offered the actions of Storyville’s audiences as “proof” of jazz’s shift toward “attentive listening performances” by the Gerry Mulligan and Dave Brubeck Quartets—both heard as predominantly white groups by their audiences.

Some people do talk, but not many, and conversation is frowned upon. Most of the customers are there to listen, to Mulligan’s closely-woven musical strands that sound not unlike syncopated Bach, or to Brubeck’s resourceful piano style, with its moving voices of counterpoint and its fascinating shades of harmonic and instrumental color.

In this passage, Durgin not only described Storyville as a relatively quiet listening experience, in which any talking was limited to only brief interactions, but he also related the necessity for such close listening only to white musicians, through his descriptions of Mulligan and Brubeck’s Bach-like and contrapuntal music.

For all of George Wein, Nat Hentoff, and Cyrus Durgin’s insistence that Storyville was a “quiet” place for listening to jazz, albums and radio broadcasts recorded live at Storyville suggest that quiet was a relative term. Though Durgin specifically highlighted silent audiences for performances by Mulligan and Brubeck, these musicians’ live recordings feature audience noise particularly prominently. Mulligan’s December 1956 recording at Storyville offers a glimpse at the frustrations some jazz musicians felt even toward Storyville’s “quiet” audiences. Audience chatter is prevalent throughout the tracks, but perhaps the most striking moment is found during “Limelight,” when Mulligan has an infamous encounter with a whistling audience member.

While Mulligan’s outburst could have been unique, especially at a club so renowned for its “respectful” audience, the Storyville audience seems to have been noisier than Cyrus Durgin or George Wein cared to remember. For instance, on a Brubeck recording from October 22, 1952 at Storyville, a patron whistles along with saxophonist Paul Desmond on the melody of “You Go to My Head.” Rather than accost the patron as Mulligan did, the characteristically non-confrontational Desmond simply deviated enough from the melody to throw off the whistler, who eventually stopped.

Images of the Brubeck Quartet at Storyville complicate the dichotomy between “serious” and participatory listening. (See one image here; while this is the only archival image available online, other images in the Brubeck Collection show more of the Storyville scene.) Indeed, the audience pictured seems to demonstrate the kind of focused listening described by Durgin and Wein—all visible bodies are focused on the stage and the Brubeck Quartet, all bodies pictured seem still. But the tables and the items left casually on them remind us that Storyville was a social place—a nightclub—in which it was not only acceptable to drink and smoke, talk and laugh, but in which such behaviors were expected. Even if Brubeck’s music was, as critics often claimed, more “complex,” more “intellectual” for its references to European classical music, audiences could choose to focus their listening entirely on the Brubeck Quartet—or not.

The Copley Square Hotel Storyville today (at the Fleur-de-lis)—it’s now an exclusive club with images reminiscent of Storyville, New Orleans (http://storyvilleboston.com). The Hotel Buckminster Storyville is now a Pizzeria Uno.

Conclusion

By acknowledging Storyville as a “listening” club, Wein, Durgin, and other jazz writers implicitly linked the club and its audience members to whiteness—even if audio accounts suggest that the audience was less silent than suggested in written accounts. Put simply, Storyville remained a club, in which conversation and drinks were not merely accepted, but expected, and although musicians such as Mulligan insisted on being heard as “serious” artists, audiences nevertheless felt comfortable attempting such participation. In other words, Storyville was a place in which primarily white, educated, middle and upper-class audiences could be privileged as “serious” listeners by white jazz commentators—even if the behaviors and modes of listening they enacted were actually not “silent,” “quiet,” or “attentive.” Regardless of the actual experience of listening at Storyville, the club’s location in a white neighborhood, white audience, and overt discourse of respectability directly countered narratives of black places, such as Storyville, New Orleans, which remain rooted in race and class-based stereotypes—narratives that were distinct from places of whiteness.

The stakes of research on race, class, and place are not limited to historical reconstructions such as the case study I have investigated here, but rather are imperative to understanding the full spectrum of present-day race and class-based privileges and injustices. Living in St. Louis, in which every municipality that makes up the greater metropolitan area carries with it an implicit association with race and class, the importance of such research on the race of place is all too obvious. Consider, for instance, the infamous “Delmar Divide” and the policing of black bodies in implicitly white public spaces, including but not limited to the very visible deaths of Michael Brown, Rekia Boyd, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, and Trayvon Martin. For two recent examples of such policing leading up to the Missouri primaries, see: 

http://www.riverfronttimes.com/newsblog/2016/03/14/how-st-louis-stopped-donald-trump

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/kansas-city-pepper-spray-trump_us_56e51dc1e4b065e2e3d637f1

But it is not enough to simply identify places of blackness or of poverty (nor is it appropriate to assume that places of blackness are places of poverty, or vice versa). We need to also make places of whiteness and of affluence visible. In his explanation of the importance of race to space, political philosopher Charles Mills argues that normative space, or space that is seemingly not raced, is frequently raced white: “Space is just there, taken for granted, and the individual is tacitly posited as the white adult male, so that all individuals are obviously equal.” Likewise, George Lipsitz argues that public spaces not often discussed in terms of race are usually raced white, or privilege whiteness. I would add that in addition to privileging whiteness, such normative public spaces also privilege whiteness as it intersects with upper and upper-middle class identities, and educational backgrounds—and further, masculinity, heterosexuality, and ability. Such privileges are not completely invisible—as Sara Ahmed, bell hooks, and George Yancy argue, whiteness is largely not invisible to the people of color who experience the negative manifestations of white privilege daily. So in closing, I emphasize that it is only by making places of whiteness visible to white people that we can begin to alter, and indeed dismantle, the associations of whiteness, affluence, and educational status with discourses and spaces of respectability.

Notes

Cover photo: Storyville, ca. 1955. Detail of a photograph by Nissan Bichajian, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Libraries, Rotch Visual Collections. http://dome.mit.edu/handle/1721.3/34173

References

Ahmed, Sara. “Declarations of Whiteness: The Non-Performativity of Anti-Racism.” Borderlands E-Journal 3, no. 2 (2004).

Durgin, Cyrus. “Jazz Moves to Newport as Serious Music Form.” Daily Boston Globe (20 June 1954), C79.

Frith, Simon. “Rhythm: Race, Sex, and the Body.” In Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music, 123-144. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996.

hooks, bell. “Representing Whiteness in the Black Imagination.” In Displacing Whiteness: Essays in Social and Cultural Criticism, edited by Ruth Frankenberg, 165-179. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997.

Forman, Murray. The ‘Hood Comes First: Race, Space, and Place in Rap and Hip-Hop. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2002.

Hentoff, Nat. “Counterpoint.” Down Beat (1 July 1953), 8.

Lipsitz, George. How Racism Takes Place. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2011.

Mills, Charles W. The Racial Contract. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997.

Sweetser, Frank L. The Social Ecology of Metropolitan Boston: 1950. Boston University. Division of Mental Hygiene, Massachusetts Department of Mental Health, 1961.

Wein, George. Myself Among Others, with Nate Chinen. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2003.

Wein, George with Marc Meyers, “Interview: George Wein (Part 1)” Jazz Wax (23 July 2008): http://www.jazzwax.com/2008/07/interview-georg.html

Yancy, George. Look, A White!: Philosophical Essays on Whiteness. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2012.

Kelsey Klotz recently completed her PhD in Musicology, with a certificate in American Culture Studies, at Washington University in St. Louis. She is currently a Senior Teaching Fellow at Washington University, and has also been awarded the Graduate Student Fellowship from the Center for the Humanities and the Dean’s Award for Excellence in Teaching. Her dissertation, “Racial Ideologies in 1950s Cool Jazz,” examines the cultural construction of whiteness in histories of cool jazz.

An Arabic translation of this article can be found here.

Introduction: 129° F

Many of my friends an colleagues in Kuwait were shocked that I came during a time of world record high temperatures to study music during the past summer. Temperatures reached a blistering 129 degrees Fahrenheit during mid-August, but it was not the first time I experienced such heat. During the 2014-15 academic year, I spent ten months in the Sultanate of Oman on a Fulbright scholarship studying the oud  and performing with the Oud Hobbyists Association. After visiting Kuwait twice during my stay in Oman, I decided that it would be the ideal place to return for summer 2016 after my first year at UCLA. My connection with the oud began a few years before I traveled to the Gulf while I was studying Arabic during my undergrad in Morocco and later in Egypt, where I attended classes and participated in concerts with Naseer Shama's bayt al-'ud al-'araby (Arabic Oud House). Due to friendships I retained during my undergraduate studies with Kuwaitis and other students from the region, I always retained a strong interest in Gulf music (often referred to as khaliji music), and specifically musical traditions that utilize the oud.

 Kuwait City resides on a large bay, which historically was an ideal natural harbor for maritime trade vessels from around the Indian Ocean.

Music aside, the Gulf's historical connections with other nations and cultures surrounding the Indian Ocean also drew me in. As the place of the Arabic language's origin and of great wealth due to the current oil economy, GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council) nations play a vital role in the affairs of the larger Arab world. At the same time however, Indian Ocean connections also help distinguish this region from the rest of the Arabic speaking world in some very important respects (Bishara 2014); culturally these include cuisine, clothing, language, and music. Internally, the Arabian Peninsula is also an extremely diverse region and historical connections, migrations, and cultural movements from within are equally important as those between continents on maritime routes (Urkevich 2015). The musical styles I have been interested in developed historically on similar networks of exchange between Yemen, the Gulf (my preferred term to “Arab” or “Persian” Gulf), East Africa, and India, during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Considering the significance and complexity of this history, a large part my field work is reviewing historical sources in English and Arabic on music, maritime trade, and migrations. In addition to my research, I have also been involving myself with a broad community of musicians and local organizations. When I first arrived to Kuwait, I connected with a NGO called Loyac, which promotes concerts, the arts, and community service. I have been participating in some of their public music performances and also giving oud lessons through their organization. While I am deeply interested in the history of the region, my involvement at Loyac and other musical activities have kept me in the present.

In the midst of an oud lesson with Hussa - photo credit: Faris Ali

Ṣawt and the Diwaniyya

One of the musical genres I have been particularly interested in is called ṣawt, popular throughout the Gulf region among oud players, poets, and music connoisseurs. The genre's instrumentation usually features oud, violin, and small cylindrical drums called merwas. There is a dynamic and ever developing relationship between lyrics, melody, and rhythm in ṣawt. Performers may substitute and interchange melodies, poems, and rhythms creating endless combinations of the three; however, some poems are more commonly paired with a particular melody and rhythm. Today, there are about four rhythms commonly performed in ṣawt and a far greater number of melodies drawn upon by singers performing the repertoire.

Ṣawt has historically been a point of contention between Kuwaiti and Bahraini musicians and scholars arguing as to whom founded the genre. Similarly, and due to the genre's Yemeni influences, others argue that ṣawt in the Gulf region is merely an extension of other genres performed in Southern Arabia, which consists of the Hadhramout province of Yemen and in the Dhofar province of Oman (Kathiri 2009). As these heated scholarly debates have somewhat subsided, most consider the renowned poet, 'Abdullah al-Faraj (1836-1901) to be the founder and innovator of this genre after his return to the Gulf region from Bombay in the late nineteenth century. For centuries before the discovery of oil, the economy of the Gulf and the greater Arabian Peninsula relied heavily on trade with port cities surrounding the Indian Ocean from East Africa to modern day Malaysia and Indonesia. As the capital of the British Indian Empire, Bombay was the main economic hub of the region where many Arab traders, mercenaries, and laborers lived during the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Al-Faraj's father was a rich businessman and worked in the pearl and horse trade in Bombay (two of the most desired exports from the Arabian Peninsula during that time), and encouraged him to pursue the arts and music (al-Faraj 2001). When al-Faraj returned to the Gulf in the latter part of the nineteenth century, he brought back with him an original repertoire of songs, poetry, and melodies mixing a variety of Yemeni and Indian influences. This repertoire was later developed by other musicians throughout the twentieth century into the genre ṣawt performed today.

Kuwait and Bahrain have both been historically the most prominent nations for ṣawt performance and record production; however, many musicians in Kuwait tell me that only the older generation of musicians in Bahrain still perform ṣawt. They add that in Kuwait, ṣawt performers and enthusiasts have been much more successful in maintaining and developing the tradition. In fact, performers of the younger generation in Kuwait are often invited to Bahrain and Qatar to perform for older audiences and musicians who are the few connoisseurs of ṣawt left there. Perhaps Kuwaitis have been more successful at maintaining the genre because the context of its performance has also been kept alive: the diwaniyya, which remains a vital political and cultural institution in Kuwaiti society. A diwaniyya is a large meeting room for men connected to a family house where extended family, friends, and colleagues meet and socialize. Musical gatherings and concerts held inside diwaniyyas are commonly referred to as jelsāt, samrāt, or qā'dāt. Many diwaniyyas are purposed solely for musical performances and often for specific genres depending on the taste of the owner. During one jelsa, some friends told me it was more common for women to participate in these musical gatherings during the 1950s and 1960s, but this was before more conservative ideologies took hold during the late 1960s and gender segregation became more prominent in various social contexts in Kuwaiti society. Currently, the music conservatory in Salmiya, Kuwait continues to blur these lines teaching men “female”  traditional musical genres and women “male” traditional genres. Ṣawt is considered one of the “male” genres taught to women in the conservatory context.

The performers end of diwaniyyat 'ahal al-marwās; from the left: Khalid al-Shati, Salah Hamed Khalifa (son of a renowned ṣawt performer Hamed Khalifa), Fahed al-Kendary, Abdullah al-Jadda, Yousef al-Jadda, and a guest playing merwas.

During the past summer, I attended many qā'dāt (sin qā'da; commonly used in reference to a ṣawt performance) in the diwaniyya pictured above, which is dedicated specifically to the preservation and performance of ṣawt. The name of the diwaniyya is called diyaniyya 'ahal al-marāws (roughly translates to “diwaniyya of the people of the marwās”) and was established as a meeting place for ṣawt performers and other musicians. Located in a rural suburb outside Kuwait city called Chabt, the diywaniyya was founded by a group of friends and connoisseurs of ṣawt (two of them are pictured above: Fahad and Abdullah) who consider performing ṣawt a hobby, and pay for the diwaniyyas' expenses out of their own pockets. In addition to a variety of old tape decks and large speakers, they have decorated the diwaniyya with old photos depicting ṣawt performers, a plethora of antiques, ancient gramophones, and old record collections - most of them gramophone 78 rpm records that were common before vinyl. After the ṣawt performance during my first visit, we sat and listened to some of the old seventy eights which included mostly music from the Gulf region, but also recordings of famous Egyptian stars such as Umm Kalthoum, early twentieth century Hindi film classics, and some 1930s jazz hits by Louis Armstrong and Russ Morgan.

Also partly visible in he picture above, it is worth noting the model of the old Kuwaiti maritime vessel, the boom. Such models are common in majālis (living rooms similar to diwaniyyas), diwaniyyas, and in households around the Gulf and serve as reminders of the maritime past. In diwaniyyat ahal al-marwās, the model holds particular significance as boom ships were also a primary context of ṣawt performance before the oil boom. Musicians were hired to perform on the decks of ships as they traveled from the Gulf to the coasts of South Asia, Southern Arabia, and East Africa. In a travelogue documenting his time on a Kuwaiti boom sailing from Yemen to Zanzibar in the 1930s, Australian Alan Villiers recalls a variety of musical activity at sea from gramophone records playing, to ṣawt performances, and a the Kuwaiti crew singing songs in Farsi at port in Kenya (Villiers 2006).

Recording ṣawt: From Indian Ocean Trade Routes to Cassette Decks

As with many musical traditions around the world, the development of the record industry during the early twentieth century had a great effect on the development of ṣawt and its transmission to preceding generations. The first recordings of ṣawt were made in the late 1920s by the second generation of performers after 'Abdullah al-Faraj. Before the age of the oil economy, many of these earlier performers still traveled maritime trade routes between Iraq, the Gulf, and Western India. The record pictured below from the diwaniyya's record collection features Sālim Rāshid al-Sūri, an Omani ṣawt singer who spent extensive time recording in India during the 1930s. Famous Kuwaiti musicians who followed similar routes recording in Cario, Baghdad, and Bombay during this early period include  Salah and Daud Ezra, and 'Abd al-Latīf al-Kūwaytī who made the first recordings of ṣawt in Baghdad for the Bayḍafūn (Baidaphone) company in 1927. As early as 1930s, ṣawt records were being sold in Yemen as the record industry began to recirculate ṣawt repertoire on maritime routes between the Gulf and Yemen (al-Salhi 2015).

Diwaniyyat 'ahal al-marwās and other circles of musicians in Kuwait continue to document and record ṣawt by videotaping and sound recording almost every performance they host. Today, many musicians and diwaniyya owners make their own private audio recordings, archive them, and distribute them using social media. Like the enthusiasts at 'Ahal al-marwās, many musicians throughout Kuwait make live recordings with old cassette tape decks or boomboxes, and later convert the cassette audio into a digital file. Despite also having new state of the art field and portable recorders, many prefer the sound of cassette recordings because of their distorted, warm, and “living” (ḥayy) feeling. Here is the link to 'Ahal al-marwās's Soundcloud page, “mrwas_q8,” where they upload many of the musical performances (or qā'dāt) they host. The recordings here feature some of the most renowned ṣawt performers from Kuwait and the gulf region today including Ibrahim al-Khashrim, Salah Hamed Khalifa and Suleiman al-Amari. Please give them a listen, follow, and show support for ṣawt music internationally! The diwaniyya also has an Instagram account under the same name: “@mrwas_q8”.

https://soundcloud.com/mrwas_q8

Documentation and Social Media

The picture below is of myself and renowned musician and ṣawt performer Naser Abo Awad, recording into his Phillips cassette boombox. I was invited to do so in order to document my presence as a guest musician at the jelsa in his family's diwaniyya. As others have mentioned previously in our field (Seeger 1987), being a musician often makes the ethnomusicologist an subject of fascination and worthy of documentation by members of the culture she is studying, rather than the other way around. As an American playing oud professionally and as a teacher here in Kuwait, I have attracted considerable attention from local news media, local musicians, and also considerable attention on social media networks. Throughout the GCC, social media apps such as Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat have some some of the most active users in the world while having economically and culturally transformed Gulf society in recent years (Elzaini 2015). Through connections made on social media, I knew many of my friends and colleagues before personal meetings or even before arriving in Kuwait. Many musicians similarly use social media to document jelsas and their own daily musical activities sharing them with others. By using apps like Instagram and Snapchat, I have been able to document and keep a fairly large community within Kuwait, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and the broader region up to date about my experiences here as a researcher and musician. I commonly make posts about my research, participation in interviews, concerts I attend, and my own performances in both English and Arabic. This has allowed for a greater breadth of interaction and communication between myself and other researchers, musicians, and an interested public throughout the region.

Ethnomusicologists have long wrestled with the concept of field work, what it entails, and what its boundaries are. Similarly, others have pointed out that ethnomusicologists can offer inventive approaches to participant observation research and ethnography as both social scientists and musicians (Titon 2008:38). As a foreign researcher in an area of the world that continues to struggle for nuanced, accurate, and honest representation, I continue to wrestle with the concepts of ethnography and “field work.” As a musician and researcher, the field is everywhere from my Instagram account, to the stage, and to the actual process of picking my MA paper topic that I will write this year (which musicians, scholars, and fellow ethnomusicologists here in Kuwait commonly inquire about and critique). As others have indicated, defining the field is perhaps not as important as being reflective about our experience, how we gain knowledge, and how knowledge and experience is written about (Rice 2008; Berger 2008). In this installment for Notes From the Field, I have hoped be informative about my experience, but also convey a brief glimpse of a fascinating history and the current activities of musicians here in Kuwait. It was certainly all worth the heat.

 A post I made on my Instagram account thanking members of the Bin Hussein group for their hospitality and hosting an 'uns, which is a celebration where a variety of traditional musics are performed including sawt. The occasion of the 'uns was to celebrate Khalid Bin Hussein's return to Kuwait from Germany, where he was accompanying his wife going through a successful cancer treatment.
 

References

Al-Faraj, Abdullah. 2001 (1903). Diwan Abdullah al-Farj. Kuwait: The Abdul Aziz Saud
    al-Babateen Prize Foundation for Poetic Creativity.
Al-Salhi, Ahmed. 2015. “Catalog of Kuwaiti and Egyptian Songs: Studies about Historical Musical
    Documentation dating back to 1930.” Message of Kuwait 52:30-41.
Berger, Harris M. 2008. “Phenomenology and the Ethnography of Poplular Music: Ethnomusicology at
    the Juncture of Cultural Studies and Folklore.” In Shadows in the Field: New Perspectives for
    Fieldwork in Ethnomusicology, edited by Gregory Barz and Timothy J. Cooley. New York:
    Oxford University Press.
Bishara, Fahad Ahmed. 2014. “Mapping the Indian Ocean World of Gulf Merchants, c.
    1870-1960.” In The Indian Ocean: Oceanic Connections and the Creation of New Societies,
    edited by Abdul Sheriff and Engseng Ho. London: Hurst & Company.
Elzaini, Sarah. 2015. “Social Media's Economic Revolution in the Gulf.” Foreign Policy Association.
    February 9. http://foreignpolicyblogs.com/2015/02/09/social-medias-economic-revolution-in
    the-gulf/ (accessed 15 September 2016).
Kathiri, Muselim. 2009. “The Oud in the Arabian Peninsula: Historical Studies.” Nizwa -
    Cultural Chapter 57:151-163
Seeger, Anthony. 1987. Why the Suya Sing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Titon, Jeff Todd. 2008. “Knowing Fieldwork.” In Shadows in the Field: New Perspectives for
    Fieldwork in Ethnomusicology, edited by Gregory Barz and Timothy J. Cooley. New York:
    Oxford University Press.
Rice, Timothy. 2008. “Towards a Mediation of Field Methods and Field Experience.” In Shadows in
    the Field: New Perspectives for Fieldwork in Ethnomusicology, edited by Gregory Barz and
    Timothy J. Cooley. New York: Oxford University Press.
Urkevich, Lisa. 2015. Music and Traditions of the Arabian Peninsula: Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain,
    and Qatar. New York, N: Taylor and Francis.
Villiers, Alan. 2006 (1940). Sons of Sindbad. London: Arabian Publishing Ltd.
 

History is not a universal narrative of one tradition, one person, one people, or one nation; rather, it is the sum of all possible histories that may illuminate a present moment or place. To conduct research in ethnomusicology, musicology, or any other discipline of the humanities is to inherently engage in the study of histories, including how they converge, intersect, and conflict. People have different habits, different worldviews, and different cultures of music as a result of certain historical experiences, which are remembered and reimagined over time. As researchers of music in culture or music as culture, we also become wrapped up within intersections and conflicts between histories, and have our own ways of imagining them too. Editors of the Ethnomusicology Review would like to invite you to share historical perspectives from your research for our online platform "Sounding Board." Tell us why conflicts and convergences of history are important to understanding a current place or space of music making of interest to you today. Additionally, if you have any other project, conference paper, or unpublished work dealing with issues surrounding history and music, feel free to reach out!

Please contact Gabe Lavin, associate editor of Ethnomusicology Review’s “Sounding Board: Historical Perspectives,” at glavin@ucla.edu if you wish to contribute or have any questions. Sounding Board is an informal, yet academically focused online platform to discuss research, ideas, and other issues related to the fields of musicology and ethnomusicology.

In 1990 Congress passed Public Law 101-343 which authorized and requested the President to issue a proclamation designating the month of November 1990 as "National American Indian Heritage Month."  Since 1995 the President has issued annual proclamations which designate November as National American Indian Heritage Month, or since 2009 as National Native American Heritage Month. These proclamations celebrate the contributions of Native Americans and urge the peoples of the United States to learn more about Native American cultures.  For more information, check out this page from the Law Library at the Library of Congress.

In honor of National Native American Heritage Month, I thought I would highlight some of the Ethnomusicology Archive's Native Californian recordings.

Traditional music of native Northwest California: brush dance, feather dance, and gambling songs. Discussion and performances by Loren Bommelyn (Tolowa), Aileen Figueroa (Yurok), Joy Sundberg (Yurok) and Charlotte Heth (Cherokee). Recorded at the UCLA Media Engineering Center on April 12, 1976, during the class session of UCLA Music 153C, Sociology of American Indian music.

Traditional music of native Northwest California: brush dance, feather dance, and gambling songs. Discussion and performances by Loren Bommelyn (Tolowa), Aileen Figueroa (Yurok), Joy Sundberg (Yurok) and Charlotte Heth (Cherokee). Recorded at the UCLA Media Engineering Center on May 23, 1977, during the class session of UCLA Music 153C, Sociology of American Indian music.

Cahuilla Birdsongs (1987). The Cahuilla people are the first known inhabitants of California's Coachella Valley. Cahuilla bird songs tell the stories of the origin of the Cahuilla. Fieldwork done by Edith Johnson, Brenda Romero, and Gail Schwartz. Professor Romero tells me that she uses this recording in her classes to this day.

Ethnomusicology M115, Musical Aesthetics in Los Angeles, Professor Steve Loza.  UCLA Ethnomusicology graduate student Johanna Hofmann speaks about Native American music as expressed through powwow events and culture in Los Angeles.  Hoffman's master thesis (1992) was "Spirituality in the Inter-tribal Native American Pow-wow."

Flower World: Music Archaeology of the Americas, Volume 2. Edited by Matthias Stöckli and Arnd Adje Both. Berlin: Ekho Verlag. 2013. [198 p., Individual €59; Institutional €92.] illustrations, photographs, references, index.

The field of American music archaeology has developed dramatically since the 1968 publication of Robert Stevenson’s Music in Aztec and Inca Territory, which, for better or for worse, remains one of the most referenced sources on pre-Columbian music in the Americas. At present, the field has moved increasingly towards exploring identifiable regional variations and historical transitions in form and function––a shift away from the tendency to make sweeping generalizations that marks Stevenson’s generation of scholarship. The recent publication of the second volume of Flower World: Music Archaeology of the Americas offers an exciting glimpse into the new methodological questions and considerations arising as a result of this transition to regionally specific and culturally informed archaeological musical studies. Each of the eight studies in the volume provide a unique framework for archaeological research tailored to a particular set of research challenges, including limited ethnographic records, scant surviving archaeological data, and a lack of playable instruments. Collectively, the studies highlight the growing flexibility of musical archaeology in the Americas, and its capacity to contribute to both historical and contemporary research questions in archaeology and ethnomusicology.

Henry Stobart and Daniela La Chioma Silvestre Villalva author two studies utilizing innovative research questions and methods. Stobart’s integration of architecture and space in his analysis of the Inca ushnu platforms is one example of how musical archaeologists are reexamining performance environments in conjunction with ethnographic sources. Through his analysis, Stobart suggests that the acoustic conditions of the platforms lend themselves more towards visual rather than auditory performances. His analysis of space and function provides a useful set of considerations for future historical studies of performance at historical sites. The study by Villalva also draws on contextual clues regarding the function and significance of musical performance. In her study of music and fertility, she analyzes the iconography of the antaras that appear on Nasca vases, and relates these to what is known of Nasca music and the Nasca cosmos. By connecting iconography and function, she compellingly hypothesizes that the images include two categories: a supernatural depiction and an earthly counterpart. Her study utilizes a research methodology that demonstrates how musical meaning can be unearthed from unlikely sources, including “non-musical” ceramics.

Egberto Bermúdez and Grazia Tuzi provide another set of ethnographic source options for historical research, blurring the line between archaeology and ethnography. Tuzi’s study surveys the historical Voladores dance and how it has evolved into the current contemporary performance. Tuzi presents a number of illustrations of Voladores, ranging from depictions in the early colonial sources, like the Duran Codex, Bobonicus, and Fernández Leal Codex, to later depictions from the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Tuzi then examines the transformations in the Voladores tradition, including its more recent adaptation for tourist entertainment, as well as how the UN designated status of “intangible cultural heritage” has affected its performance. Tuzi keenly demonstrates how ethnomusicology can integrate musical archaeology to illuminate the significance of current performance practices through her refreshing mix of ethnographic fieldwork and detailed historical investigation of Colonial sources.

Bermúdez also draws on Colonial sources in his ethnographic study of Columbian sacrificial music performance, in which he examines a particular case of Spanish policing from the early Colonial Era. He draws from an extensive body of Colonial era literature in his research, including the Cantares, and the Florentine Codex, and he argues that the processes of cultural exchange hypothesized by Reichel-Dolmatoff support these broader connections. Bermúdez’s willingness to seek larger connections is commendable, but also raises the question of how and when culturally specific works like the Florentine Codex can be applied to other American cultures. Hopefully this will continue to be explored in future publications.

In addition to the diverse methodologies and data employed by the studies mentioned above, the Flower World collection also includes organological studies that explore instrument usage, classification, and distribution. Organological studies in the collection include a study of Nasca whistles by Anna Gruszczyńska-Ziólkowska; a study of ceramic instruments from the Greater Nicoya region by Carrie L. Dennett and Katrina C. Kosyk; a study of poli-globular flutes by Vanessa Rodens, Arnd Adje Both and Gonzalo Sánchez Santiago; and a study of the Hopewell panpipe by Mark Howell.

Several of the studies propose methods for categorizing the highly diverse ceramic instrument collections by typology and historical period, including the studies by Gruszczyńska-Ziólkowska and Rodens, Both and Santiago. Gruszczyńska-Ziólkowska identifies two categories of construction among Nasca whistles that she postulates correspond with two historical periods. The study finds that the changing aesthetics were likely tied to changing functions, although what these functions were is currently indiscernible. The study by Rodens, Both and Santiago endeavors to tentatively classify poli-globular flutes into four types with eleven sub-variants. The chart of poli-globular flutes in this study is exemplary, and includes the known providence of the instrument, approximate dates, dimensions, observations, an image, publications that have discussed the artifact, and the name of the artifact’s current collection. This chart should be a model for future studies. Additionally, the study includes an excellent literature review of recent Mesoamerican organological studies, which is highly overdue.

Rather than addressing classification, the study by Dennett and Kosyk and that by Howell focus instead on larger thematic relationships within the instrument collections. Dennett and Kosyk alternatively find overarching themes that transcend the identified chronological and political boundaries in the Greater Nicoya. The study postulates that the consistent appearance of animal iconography indicates a continuing function of the instruments that transcends the identifiable historical periods and regional political boundaries. The study by Mark Howell offers a glimpse of another creative archaeological methodology. With little data available, Howell instead focuses on the relationships between construction materials, potential sounding capabilities, and the sacrificial contexts in which they were found. He aptly demonstrates how asking broader questions can lead to meaningful musical analysis in contexts with limited surviving data.

In sum, the collection offers a refreshing acceptance of the diversity of the pre-Columbian Americas. Future publications might consider how to put these studies in dialogue with each other. For instance, how do the studies by Gruszczyńska-Ziólkowska and that by Dennett and Kosyk overlap in their respective findings regarding the intersections between historical periods and larger overarching themes? What are the next anticipated steps for classifying the many other ceramic instrument collections that defy classification, as initiated by Rodens, Both and Santiago in their study? And how should recurring themes, such as the overlap between iconography, material, meaning, function and organological classification, be negotiated going forward?

Although some readers might lament that there are few overarching conclusions to be drawn from the present volume, each study represents an important step toward piecing together how these musical cultures operated as separate entities and participants in larger regional networks. The collection continues to build upon a growing body of literature moving analysis from generalizations to a more informative specificity.

References

Stevenson, Robert. 1976. Music in Aztec and Inca Territory. Los Angeles: University of California Press.

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Kristina Nielsenis currently a doctoral student at UCLA with an interest in pre-Hispanic instruments and modern reinterpretations of pre-Hispanic music. Kristina received her MA from UCLA after completing BM in piano performance at Western Washington University and an additional year of studies in the Mesoamerican Languages and Cultures program at Copenhagen University. She founded and now manages the Historical Perspectives subsection of the Sounding Board.

Hidden in the Mix: The African American Presence in Country Music. Edited by Diane Pecknold. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013. [392 p. ISBN 9780822351634. $27.95.] Illustrations, index, bibliography.

Reviewed by Scott V. Linford

Country music in the United States self-consciously narrates racial, gender, and class identities. While the narrative that country music is white music has long held sway in popular consciousness, a relatively recent wave of scholarship and musical activity has disrupted that myth by deconstructing its origins and highlighting the contributions of African-American country musicians. The twelve chapters of Hidden in the Mix: The African American Presence in Country Music, edited by Diane Pecknold, make a valuable contribution to this literature by documenting the participation of African Americans in country music and analyzing country music as a site for the elaboration of African-American identities.

Reasserting the African American Presence in Country Music

Interventions into the white myth of country music have gained traction in the last few decades, constituting a distinct nexus of scholarly production. Librarian Dena Epstein’s 1975 article unearthing the banjo’s African roots was a seminal step in recovering the instrument’s black history,[1] and has inspired a number of subsequent works searching for banjo analogues in West Africa (Adams and Pestcoe 2007; Adams and Sedgwick 2007; Bamber n.d.; Coolen 1991 and 1984; Jagfors 2003; Linford 2013; Pestcoe n.d.; Shaffer 2005). This effort set the stage for Cecilia Conway’s beautifully written account of African-American banjo history and the living tradition of black banjo players in North Carolina (1995), based on two decades of fieldwork that overlapped with parallel work by Kip Lornell (2002, 1989, 1975, 1974) and Robert Winans (1982, 1979). Karen Linn’s more analytical work traced the banjo’s changing racial, regional, gender, and class significance in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, particularly connecting these deliberate changes in the instrument’s meaning to the economic maneuverings of banjo manufacturers (1991). Recent works by Aaron Fox (2004a, 2004b) and Geoff Mann (2008) have analyzed the strategies used by country musicians to self-consciously create and promote white and working class identities, and have helped lay bare the constructed nature of country music’s semiotic whiteness. Finally, and perhaps most explicitly related to this project, journalist Pamela Foster’s two books (2000, 1998) illuminate the numerous and regular contributions of African Americans to country music.

Working in tandem with this scholarly research are the recent efforts of African-American musicians to reassert the African-American presence in country music. While Taj Mahal, Otis Taylor, and others have been working in country subgenres for decades, recent albums by Sankofa Strings (2012), The Ebony Hillbillies (2011), and the Grammy-winning Carolina Chocolate Drops (2012, 2010, 2006) have a more evidently self-conscious mission to play with country music’s narratives and roots. The Carolina Chocolate Drops in particular make ample use of the revisionist rhetorical strategy identified by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. as “signifyin’”: “a metaphor for formal revision, or intertextuality, within the Afro-American literary tradition. […] To name our tradition is to rename each of its antecedents, no matter how pale they might seem. To rename is to revise, and to revise is to Signify” (1988:xxi). African-American discourse theorizes about itself self-reflexively, especially through “unmotivated” repetition that expresses respect and through “motivated” revision that recasts earlier texts in a critical light. The playfully ironic but seriously evocative title of the Carolina Chocolate Drops’ 2010 album, Genuine Negro Jig–and the eponymous song which is re-named “Snowden’s Jig (Genuine Negro Jig)”–reclaims and renames a song composed by African Americans and stolen by a minstrel performer, resetting it in a contemporary, hip hop-style groove created by foot-stomping and the minstrel instrument of the bones. This haunting arrangement simultaneously signifies self-reflexively on the blackness of the original tune and uses its troubled history to signify the contemporary African-American identities of the performers.

Hidden in the Mix enters this field with a deliberate mission, described eloquently in Pecknold’s introductory essay “Country Music and Racial Formation.” The book seeks to move beyond the conceptualization of African-American musicians as mentors and inspirations for more well-known and commercially successful white musicians (e.g., the partnership between African American Lesley Riddle and the white “father of country music” A.P. Carter, or the influence of African-American guitarist Arnold Shultz on the white “father of bluegrass” Bill Monroe). Instead, it aims to explore the work of African-American country musicians in their own right and the fascinating complexity of country music’s relationship to black identities. On a simple level, then, it responds to Christopher Waterman’s observation that “performers, genres, texts, and practices not consonant with dominant conceptions of racial difference have [...] often been elided from academic, journalistic, and popular representations of the history of American music” (2001:167). More subtly, Hidden in the Mix avoids narrow conceptions of country music and blackness, a pairing whose incongruity has been played for laughs, or used to symbolize alienation from an authentic black self, or employed as a form of what Toni Morrison calls “playing in the dark,” using notions of blackness to provide affective depth to white identities. Working from a constructivist model of race and identity, the book’s ultimate goal is neither to argue that country music is “really” black nor to exploit the apparent curiosity of black musicians participating in a genre that is racialized as white, but rather to explore “the shifting and multifaceted ways in which resilient black identities are fashioned through musical production, whether that music is construed as ‘black’ or not” (2013:7).

After Pecknold’s thoughtful introduction, the book’s twelve chapters are grouped in two parts. Part One, “Playing in the Dark,” addresses the paradox that country music retains strong significations of whiteness despite the large number of African Americans who have contributed to its repertoire, and that even the high-profile presence of prominent African-American performers such as Ray Charles has counter-intuitively served to accentuate the genre’s semiotic whiteness. Part Two, “New Antiphonies,” approaches country music as a site for the negotiation of black identities, viewing the genre’s collisions with soul, hip hop, Caribbean dance halls, and others as sonic contributors to conceptions of blackness. Black music here is not reflective of an a priori cultural essence; it participates in the construction of black identities.

Part One: Playing in the Dark

Part One’s four chapters achieve their goal from diverse angles. Patrick Huber’s “Black Hillbillies: African American Musicians on Old-Time Records, 1924-1932” (Chapter One) provides an excellent introduction to the historical creation of separate “hillbilly music” and “race music” recording genres, including the ways that these genres not only reflected segregationist ideas but contributed to the naturalization of racial categories in the United States. His survey of the significant number of African-American and interracial recording sessions released in the hillbilly genre prior to 1933 holds historical value for its insights into the early years of country music’s construction as an “invented tradition.” Diane Pecknold’s “Making Country Modern: The Legacy of Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music” (Chapter Two) continues this focus on the influence of the recording industry, interrogating the role of Ray Charles’ seminal album in challenging the perception that “race music” would not play well on regional radio stations. The album’s success changed the economic landscape of recording label categories, but Pecknold argues that the primary impact of the album was to redirect the class narrative of country music and not, as is now popularly believed, to challenge country music’s whiteness.

The latter two chapters of Part One examine the careers of lesser-known African-American musicians in relation to country music’s white narrative. Erika Brady’s “Contested Origins: Arnold Schultz and the Music of Western Kentucky” (Chapter Three) focuses on the role of African-American guitarist Arnold Schultz in the development of bluegrass and especially the thumbpicking guitar style. While his actual contributions to those musical developments are unclear, Schultz has become a mimetic originary figure, whose blackness adds to the controversy of those genres’ origins. “Fiddling with Race Relations in Rural Kentucky: The Life, Times, and Contested Identity of Fiddlin’ Bill Livers” (Chapter Four) by Jeffrey A. Keith narrates the remarkable life of African-American fiddler Bill Livers as an exemplar of race relations and ethnic interchange in rural Kentucky. Keith describes three phases in Livers’ career: as a “buffoon” in an otherwise all-white band who nevertheless used storytelling to subtly undermine racism; as “the embodiment of romantic primitivism” (120) in a hippie band that sought to unite rural culture and 1960s counterculture; and finally as a regular on the folk revivalist circuit. In all three stages, Livers’ acute awareness of changing racial power dynamics guided the way he adjusted his performance style to meet the expectations of his audience.

Part Two: New Antiphonies           

United by their approach to country music as a site for the negotiation of black identities, the eight chapters of Part Two cover diverse terrain. Tony Thomas’ “Why African Americans Put the Banjo Down” (Chapter Five) challenges the prevailing argument that black musicians stopped playing the banjo in the twentieth century due to its associations with the racist stereotypes perpetuated by minstrel shows, arguing instead that black musical tastes, dances, and performance contexts changed in ways that did not accommodate the banjo. Thomas’ assertion that the organological limitations of the banjo (particularly its characteristically short sustain and limited range) made it unsuitable for blues music may overlook the success of musicians such as Taj Mahal, Otis Taylor, and the Carolina Chocolate Drops in adapting the banjo to the blues. Likewise, his argument that African Americans do not share white Americans’ enthusiasm for nostalgia may not account for differences in class and rural/urban identities within the African-American experience (indeed, the seventh chapter of Hidden in the Mix discusses the musical trope of African-American nostalgia for rural life). However, Thomas' reevaluation of previous arguments and the evidence used to support them makes this chapter a significant contribution to recent conversations about the banjo's African-American history and identity.

Kip Lornell’s highly personal essay “Old-Time Country Music in North Carolina and Virginia: the 1970s and 1980s” (Chapter Six) tells the story of his groundbreaking fieldwork with African-American musicians working in non-blues country genres in the 1970s and 1980s. His chapter underscores the diversity of African-American folk music as including far more than only blues and gospel genres, but the chapter’s real value (especially for ethnomusicologists) lies in the autobiographical story of how Lornell’s lifetime of musical interests led to his much-appreciated career of scholarly and applied work. “The South’s Gonna Do It Again: Changing Conceptions of the Use of ‘Country’ Music in the Albums of Al Green” (Chapter Seven) by Michael Awkward explores the works of Al Green and particularly his intimate, spiritual Belle Album (1978) in the context of shifting notions of black masculinity and “the country” as a source of nostalgic musical inspiration. Although Awkward’s prose is sometimes serpentine, he manages to weave together issues of fame, racialized gender expression, and fraught regional symbolism at a time when African Americans were questioning the promise of the urban North and returning to the imagined homeland of the black South.

The only essay to consider country music outside the United States, “Dancing the Habanera Beats (in Country Music): The Creole-Country Two-Step in St. Lucia and Its Diaspora” (Chapter Eight) by Jerry Wever is an ethnographic and historical account of the popularity of country music among African-Caribbean dancers in St. Lucia. Although the prevalence of country music from the United States in St. Lucia is sometimes bemoaned by musicians and intellectuals as a form of musical colonialism, others prefer to view country music as a musical form that is already creolized by the contributions of African Americans and the characteristically Caribbean habanera rhythm. Wever positions the St. Lucian case study as an intervention into the dialogue about the racialization of country music in the United States, providing a welcome global perspective that could be supplemented by studies of United States country music elsewhere in the world (cf. Cohen 2005; Goertzen 1988) as well as other “country” musics such as Mexican and Chicano norteño and Brazilian música sertaneja and música caipira (Dent 2009).

Adam Gussow’s “Playing Chicken with the Train: Cowboy Troy’s Hick-Hop and the Transracial Country West” (Chapter Nine) takes on the hybrid genre variously known as country rap, hick-hop, or hill-hop, particularly with regard to the career of African-American musician Troy Coleman, better known as Cowboy Troy. While audiences and critics sometimes react to Coleman’s deliberately controversial music with surprise or thinly veiled racist horror, Gussow argues that the braggadocio of Coleman’s stage persona hides a savvy finesse that asserts a space for blackness in contemporary country music and encourages listeners to think of country music as a creole genre.

Barbara Ching’s “If Only They Could Read between the Lines: Alice Randall and the Integration of Country Music” (Chapter 10) argues that the work of African-American country songwriter and novelist Alice Randall (a Harvard graduate, occasional university professor, and “a postmodernist versed in critical race theory” [256]) toys with what communications scholar Josh Kun calls “audiotopias.” For Kun, audiotopias are “almost-places of cultural encounter,” where sounds with diverse semiotic significances (for example, “white music” and “black music”) can exist simultaneously in the utopian sonic space of American music (Kun 2005:17). While briefly engaging with black country artists of the second half of the twentieth century (such as Charley Pride, Linda Martell, and Stoney Edwards) and discussing their different approaches to addressing race, Ching focuses on the ways that Randall self-consciously engages narratives of country’s supposed whiteness (for example by simultaneously paying homage to Aretha Franklin and Patsy Cline in a song she wrote for Trisha Yearwood). An excellent analysis that brings forward Randall’s use of utopian musical space to address the question of African-Americans’ relationship to country music, Ching concentrates almost entirely on the lyrical content of Randall’s oeuvre, neglecting the possibilities of examining musical sound as a discursive and performative practice unto itself (a critical aspect of Kun’s audiotopia concept).[2]

“You're My Soul Song: How Southern Soul Changed Country Music” (Chapter 11) by Charles L. Hughes describes the large, interracial group of session musicians, songwriters, producers, performers, and executives in Memphis, Nashville, and Muscle Shoals who collectively shaped the sounds and genre identities of Southern soul, country, and country-soul music. While previous works have discussed the contributions of white musicians to soul music (as in Hughes’ discussion of foundational works by Peter Guralnick [1986] and Barney Hoskyns [1998]), Hughes hones in on the mutual influences and interracial collaborations of soul and country music in a field nonetheless fraught with prevailing white appropriation and control of black musics. Hughes’ meticulously researched work provides a valuable glimpse behind the scenes, highlighting the importance of non-performers in shaping musical sounds and meanings.

The book’s final chapter, David Sanjek's “What's Syd Got to Do with It? King Records, Henry Glover, and the Complex Achievement of Crossover” (Chapter Twelve) is a narrative account of Jewish-American executive Sydney Nathan and African-American A&R man Henry Glover of King Records and their practice of marketing crossover recordings (i.e., recording the same song in multiple genres and styles). Sanjek differentiates “crossovers” from crossracial “covers” such as those by Pat Boone and his ilk, which verged on embarrassing racial impersonation or caricature. Taking a rather idealistic view of this practice, Sanjek characterizes crossovers as “a musical melting pot, for two (and sometimes more) musical and cultural traditions consequently collide, fuse, and reformulate” (311). He further implies that Nathan and Glover’s financial directives happily aligned with positive social motivations of integration: “an ancillary element of [King Records’] agenda ratified the pluralistic essence of our national character” (336). While a cynical reader might wish to inquire further into the racialized power dynamics between the mercurial Nathan and strategic Glover, this essay’s placement at the end of the volume may be a gesture at optimism for country music’s potential as an audiotopic site of crossracial collaboration and integration.

Conclusions

Hidden in the Mix stands as an important contribution to literature on American country music and its wide range will be appealing to a broad readership, especially scholars of ethnomusicology, music history, anthropology, American studies, and ethnic studies. The book’s introduction and twelve chapters amply fulfill their two-fold mission to deconstruct the creation of country music’s whiteness and interpret country music as a site for the negotiation of blackness. Aside from these general themes, the book brims with unforgettable anecdotes: the story of black guitarist Amédé Ardoin, who was savagely beaten after playing at a white house party with white Cajun fiddler Dennis McGee, allegedly for accepting a handkerchief from the daughter of the white homeowner (30); Ray Charles’ pithy response to an interviewer who asked about the difference between white and black jazz bands (“Oh, about a hundred dollars a week” [85]); the aging Bill Livers’ wholehearted embrace of the 1970s free love ethic (illustrated by an anecdote involving an appreciative female fan and a wheelbarrow [132]) and the way he sometimes dumbed down the technical complexity of his fiddling so as not to appear superior to white fiddlers (133); Kip Lornell’s simple but inspiring ethnographic mission to “go out into the field, find out what’s on the back roads and in small communities, and add to the body of knowledge by way of album liner notes, articles, books, and recordings” (173); and the easy way that Nashville songwriter and producer Buddy Killen used the same disco-infused backing track with two different sets of lyrics to score simultaneous hits on the R&B charts (recorded by African American Joe Tex) and the country charts (recorded by Caucasian Bill Anderson) (283). By turns tragic, comedic, inspiring, and insightful, these stories enliven the chronicle of race and music in the United States.

Works Cited

Adams, Greg and Shlomo Pestcoe. 2007. “The Jola Akonting: Reconnecting the Banjo to its West African Roots.” Sing Out! 51(1):43-51.

Adams, Greg and Paul Sedgwick. 2007. “Encountering the Akonting: A Cultural Exchange.” Old Time Herald 10(9):36-41.

Bamber, Nick. n.d. “Two Gourd Lutes from the Bijago Islands of Guinea Bissau.” <http://www.shlomomusic.com/banjoancestors_ngopata.htm> Accessed July 18, 2013.

Carolina Chocolate Drops. 2012. Leaving Eden. Sound recording. Nonesuch.

______. 2010. Genuine Negro Jig. Sound recording. Nonesuch Records.

______. 2006. Donna Got A Ramblin' Mind. Sound recording. Music Maker.

Coolen, Michael Theodore. 1991. “Senegambian Influences on Afro-American Musical Culture.” Black Music Research Journal 11:1-18.

______. 1984. “Senegambian Archetypes for the American Folk Banjo.” Western Folklore 43(2):117-132.

Cohen, Sara. 2005. “Country at the Heart of the City: Music, Heritage, and Regeneration in Liverpool.” Ethnomusicology 49(1):25-48.

Conway, Cecelia. 1995. African Banjo Echoes in Appalachia: A Study of Folk Traditions. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.

Dent, Alexander. 2009. River of Tears: Country Music, Memory, and Modernity in Brazil. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Ebony Hillbillies. 2011. Barefoot and Flying. Sound recording. EH Music.

Foster, Pamela. 2000. My Country, Too: The Other Black Music. Nashville: Publishers Graphics.

______. 1998. My Country: The African Diaspora’s Country Music Heritage. Nashville: My Country.

Fox, Aaron. 2004a. Real Country: Music and Language in Working-Class Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

______. 2004b. “White Trash Alchemies of the Abject Sublime: Country as ‘Bad’ Music.” In Bad Music: The Music We Love to Hate, edited by Christopher J. Washburne and Maiken Derko, 39-61. New York: Routledge.

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. 1988. The Signifying Monkey. New York: Oxford University Press.

Goertzen, Chris. 1988. “Popular Music Transfer and Transformation: The Case of American Country Music in Vienna.” Ethnomusicology 32(1):1-21.

Guralnik, Peter. 1986. Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm and Blues and the Southern Dream of Freedom. Boston: Little Brown.

Hoskyns, Barney. 1998. Say It One Time for the Broken Hearted: Country Soul in the American South. London: Bloomsbury.

Jagfors, Ulf. 2003. “The African Akonting and the Origin of the Banjo.” The Old-Time Herald 9(2):26-33.

Kun, Josh. 2005. Audiotopia: Music, Race, and America. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Linford, Scott V. 2013. “O’teck Akonting: Ethnography of a Senegambian Folk Lute.” Society for Ethnomusicology Annual Meeting. Indianapolis, 11/15/2013.

Linn, Karen. 1991. That Half-Barbaric Twang: The Banjo in American Popular Culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Lornell, Kip. 2002. “Non-Blues Secular Black Music in Virginia.” In American Musical Traditions. Volume 2: African American Music, edited by Jeff Todd Titon and Bob Carlin, 42-49. New York: Schirmer Reference Books.

______. 1989. “Banjos and Blues.” In Arts in Earnest: Field Studies in North Carolina Folklife, edited by Daniel W. Patterson and Charles G. Zugg, 216-31. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

______. 1975. “Pre-Blues Black Music in Piedmont North Carolina.” North Carolina Folklore Quarterly 23(1):27-32.

______. 1974. “North Carolina Pre-Blues Banjo and Fiddle.” Living Blues 18:25-27.

Mann, Geoff. 2008. “Why Does Country Music Sound White? Race and the Voice of Nostalgia.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 31(1):73-100.

Pecknold, Diane, ed. 2013. Hidden in the Mix: The African American Presence in Country Music. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Pestcoe, Shlomo. n.d. <http://www.shlomomusic.com/> Accessed July 18, 2013.

Sankofa Strings. 2012. Colored Aristocracy. Sound recording. CD Baby.

Schaffer, Matt. 2005. “Bound to Africa: The Mandinka Legacy in the New World.” History in Africa 32:321-369.

Waterman, Christopher. 2001. “Race Music: Bo Chatmon, ‘Corrine Corrine,’ and the Excluded Middle.” In Music and the Racial Imagination, edited by Ronald M. Radano and Philip V. Bohlman, 167-205. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Winans, Robert. 1982. “Black Instrumental Music Traditions in the Ex‑Slave Narratives.” Black Music Research Newsletter 5(2):2-5. 

______. 1979. “The Black Banjo-playing Traditions in Virginia and West Virginia.” Journal of the Virginia Folklore Society 1:7-30.

Scott V. Linford is a doctoral candidate in Ethnomusicology at UCLA. His research approaches music as key feature of experiential senses of community, through fieldwork in West Africa, Central America, and the United States. An award-winning filmmaker and banjoist, Scott formerly served as Editor-in-Chief of Ethnomusicology Review and Director of the UCLA Bluegrass and Old Time Ensemble.

Cornwall, at the far south west of the United Kingdom, is simultaneously a county of England, a royal Duchy, and Celtic nation, and as such its culture and heritage bears witness to a long history of conflicting social, economic and cultural pressures. Cornwall’s musical traditions have often been overshadowed by other aspects of its heritage as well as by the outputs of its Celtic cousins; however, both Cornwall’s contemporary and historical musical heritage is rich and varied, with a range of genres and styles.

Above: Map showing Cornwall, UK courtesy of Nilfanion.

Cornish carols are one such genre; a social and musical tradition performed at Christmas, as opposed to May or Easter carolling traditions. The local representation of a non-conformist religious choral practice that was widespread across the United Kingdom, the corpus known today as Cornish carols is largely the result of an upsurge in carol composition following the visits of John Wesley (1703-1791) and the subsequent growth of the Methodism. Surviving caroling traditions in Cornwall, such as those in Padstow, reflect elements of practices described in early nineteenth century accounts of caroling practices in Cornwall. These accounts describe groups of musicians touring their particular town, village or parish throughout the night singing carols to the local residents at their houses (Gilbert 1822; Sandys 1833). The musicians were also usually rewarded with some money or food and drink.

Above: Carolers outside the Golden Lion pub in Padstow, December 2010 (photo: Elizabeth Neale).

Above: The Padstow carolers performing "Zadoc" (Recorded by Elizabeth Neale, 2011).

Sounding Out: The Cornish Association

Cornish carols were spread across the world during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through the migration of Cornish miners to the British colonies and other territories (Payton 2005). Their presence in South Australia during the 1890s is of note since the carols were explicitly tied to perhaps the most fervent contemporary expressions of Cornish identity. The discovery of copper at Kapunda, Gawler and the northern Yorke Peninsula in the mid-nineteenth century resulted in thousands of Cornish miners voluntarily traveling to the colony with the aid of government-assisted passages. In particular, the towns of Moonta, Wallaroo and Kadina (the Copper Triangle) became known as Australia’s “Little Cornwall,” and continue to celebrate Cornish heritage. The prominent historian of the Cornish in Australia, Professor Philip Payton, considers that the nineteenth-century Cornish communities in the Copper Triangle not only unconsciously retained Cornish culture in their continuation of existing cultural habits, but also that “individuals and organizations deliberately replicated former behaviour or adopted ‘Cornish’ rhetoric as a means of asserting community or institutional identity in their new land” (Payton 2007:57).

Adelaide was evidently also a strong locus of Cornish identity, since it was there that the Cornish Association of South Australia (CASA) was formed in 1890. The project of a group of influential Cornishmen, the CASA’s aims were not only to facilitate social interaction and to aid new migrants in South Australia, but also to promote Cornish culture and customs. Complex narratives of race and identity immediately emerged within the CASA’s rhetoric; during the inaugural banquet, John Langdon Bonython (vice-president of the CASA) made a speech in which he overtly positioned the Cornish as the descendants of the pre-Roman inhabitants of the United Kingdom, stating that it was “the stock of these hardy Celts which were now building up this Greater Britain of the South” (The Advertiser 22/2/1890:5). However, he was also at pains to maintain their British credentials and unswerving allegiance to the empire:

Their monuments were in every continent, and no people had done more to build up the British Empire than the people of Cornwall. (Loud cheers) They talked about hands across the sea uniting the various portions of the British Empire, and making federation possible, but whose hands were they but the hands of Cornishmen, who in their pride of race never forgot that they were citizens of the British Empire. (The Advertiser 22/2/1890:5).

The foregrounding of race in these dialogues reflects the contemporary social and scientific preoccupation with classification. The term race was often interchangeable with “species,” and in the context of human civilizations, connoted language and culture alongside physical and mental characteristics. As such, positioning the Cornish as a Celtic race and therefore separate from the Anglo-Saxon English was a powerful assertion of distinct biological and cultural identity.

These dialogues of race and identity were reiterated during the CASA’s promotion of Cornish carols. The Cornish Musical Society (CMS) was formed later in the same year with the express purpose of practicing specifically Cornish carols to be sung at Christmas under the auspices of the CASA. The group gave their first concert in 1890, using as their source material a collection that was published by musician, collector and teacher Robert Hainsworth Heath in Cornwall in September 1889.

Above: Frontispiece of Robert Hainsworth Heath’s Cornish Carols, Part 1, published in 1889 (photo: Elizabeth Neale, author’s copy).

The first of two collections of Cornish carols, Heath included pieces that he had collected from other local composers, as shown on the front cover, and others that he had composed himself. Well-publicized both before and after, the initial concert was a success and it was repeated and expanded the following year. At this gathering, Bonython stated that:

It was a long retrospect to look through nineteen centuries back to the time when the first Christmas carol was heard on the plains of Bethlehem. But Cornish people should never forget that a hundred years had not elapsed before carols celebrating the Nativity were being sung in Cornwall and that they had been sung there forever since. Passed down from generation to generation, the strains of these carols linked the present with the past and united the Cornish of today with the Cornish of the first century. It was no wonder that the people of Cornwall were carol singers, and that wherever they might be found they still sang at Christmastide the sweet songs of the old home. (The Advertiser 28/12/1891:6)

In spite of the rhetoric conveyed by admirers of the carol tradition, a further examination of the genre, music and texts utilized by the Cornish Musical Society further complicates the conception of Cornish identity promoted by the Cornish Association in two primary ways that highlight the musical collision between a Cornish and British imperial identity. First, while the collection includes a number of texts not yet found in extant collections of hymns and carols, and are therefore likely to have been composed by Cornish musicians, it concurrently, also includes texts such as “Joy To The World,” and “While Shepherds” from English and Scottish hymn writers such as Isaac Watts, John Cawood and James Montgomery. These are not of Cornish origin and would have been well known across the United Kingdom. Second, the style of the musical materials cannot be said to be unique to Cornwall. Cornish carols generally are written for four parts (sometimes sharing three parts between SATB) and are usually unaccompanied, although historical accounts often describe he presence of instrumentalists within caroling parties (Shaw 1967:102). While the carols may employ a variety of texts, they characteristically begin in unison, and as the stanza progresses, develop a fugal section before returning to complete the stanza in unison. As such they are rather analogous within the genre of Protestant hymn fuging tunes, popular in both England and America in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Temperley 1981). There is therefore a clear disjuncture between the provenance of the musical materials utilized to support Cornish identity, and the cultural and biological heritage claimed by the CASA.

Reconstructing Music, Contesting Identity

The vision of Cornish identity disseminated by the CASA thus included intertwining and colliding notions of Celtic, English, British and imperial identity; however, the musical materials that were used to support an ancient Cornish heritage were not congruent with the history claimed by the CASA. This is not to suggest that the genre of Cornish carols is academically illegitimate, or that the CASA were deliberately misleading; rather, the intention is to recognise the constituent materials of the tradition in conjunction with the rhetoric put forward by the CASA in order to gain a deeper insight into the narratives at play. Indeed, the CASA’s initial promotion of Cornish carols appears to have bolstered the tradition significantly, considering the genre’s subsequent upsurge in performance and the further publication of other collections of Cornish carols within South Australia.  The performance of Cornish carols became an established part of the CASA’s activities in the following decades. The tradition not only musically evoked a distinct historic identity and culture, but also was active in the present, socially bonding Cornish communities in the South Australia and conceptually bonding the Cornish across the diaspora.

The CASA’s efforts reflect the contemporary European political, sociological and compositional trends towards the use of folk or traditional culture in the project of nationalism and the process of nation-building (White and Murphy 2001; Bohlman and Radano 2000). In tandem, as scholars have increasingly critiqued, debated and deconstructed the concepts of race, the nation (Anderson 1983) and the socio-cultural apparatus of nationalism (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983), the door has opened for examining the construction and performance of identity within regions, among deterritorialised peoples and within other non-nation states. Further development of these debates among diaporic communities would broaden the academic perspective of migrant cultures, especially when their historical context is taken into account. As such, the Cornish caroling tradition, and the context and dialogues surrounding it, is significant not only for our understanding of historical Cornish diasporic identity in Australia, but also in ethnomusicological approaches to the music cultures and projects of historic migrant minorities.

Works Cited

Anderson, Benedict. 2006 (1983). Imagined Communities. London: Verso.

Bohlman, Philip V., and Ronald M. Radano, eds. 2000. Music and the Racial

Imagination. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Gilbert, Davies. 1822. Some ancient Christmas Carols, with the tunes to which they

were formerly sung in the West of England. London: John Nicholls and Son.

Heath, Robert Hainsworth. 1899. Cornish Carols, Parts 1 & 2. Leipzig: Robert

Hainsworth Heath.

Hobsbawm, Eric, and Terence Ranger. 1983. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.

Payton, Philip. 2007. Making Moonta: The Invention of Australia’s Little Cornwall.

Exeter: University of Exeter Press.

––––––. 2005. The Cornish Overseas: A History of Cornwall’s ‘Great Emigration’.

Fowey: Cornish Editions Limited.

Sandys, William. 1833. Christmas Carols, Ancient and Modern. London: Richard

Beckly.

Shaw, Thomas. 1967. A History of Cornish Methodism. Truro: D. Bradford Barton

Ltd.

Temperley, Nicholas. “The Origins of the Fuging Tune” In Royal Musical Association

Research Chronicle 17:1-32.

The Advertiser (South Australia: 1889-1931). "Cornish Association, Inaugural

Banquet – An Enthusiastic Gathering" (writer unknown). 22/2/1890:5.

––––––. "Cornish Musical Society: Christmas Carols" (writer unknown), 28/12/1891:6

White, Harry, and Michael Murphy. 2001. Musical Constructions of Nationalism:

Essays on the History and Ideology of European Music Culture 1800-1945.

Cork: Cork University Press.

Bio

Elizabeth is a second year PhD candidate co-supervised at Cardiff University and the Institute of Cornish Studies at the University of Exeter. She received her BA in music and English literature and MA in ethnomusicology from Cardiff University, and her project is supported through the South West and Wales Doctoral Training Partnership.

In December 1917, U.S. Merchant Marine Truman Blair Cook wrote a diary entry describing his crew’s arrival in Arica, Chile—a small mining town near the country’s northern border. The following is excerpted from Oregon Historical Quarterly, where Cook's diaries were published in 1976:

Dec. 28. Arrived at Arica [in northern Chile] and dropped anchor at 11 a.m. Seems good to see signs of people. . . . Running from the beach is a pier of concrete and steel with locomotive cranes that lift the cargos from the lighters onto the flatcars. When anyone from the ship goes ashore they are rowed in by boatmen for a peso . . . each way. If after six up to ten p.m. he soaks you from 3 to 10 pesos if he thinks he can get away with it. Arica is the port for the railroad that runs back into Bolivia and Bolivia's outlet for her rich mines.

The town is of about 2,000 population, mostly Chileans, Spanish and Indians. Only a few Americans and few more English can be found, but all speak Spanish. . . . The whole town reeks of the smell that is common to all of the towns in this country. Everything is very high and doubly so to an American, as they see you coming, so to speak.

The town is very proud of its jazz band and its bright uniforms. It plays every other evening and Sunday morning and evening. I found it hard to talk to the people at first but now I know a few Spanish words and get along in a way. I have only been ashore four times as I always come back with enough fleas to keep me in misery for a week. The town is full of them and the dogs' backs are brown with them. The natives seem to be entirely ignorant of them. The only trees to be seen are the few in the plaza and a few more in the streets. The plaza is a jumble of trees, flowers, historic cannon, and statues of the liberation of the country.

This entry is a rather typical seaman’s description of a maritime voyage. What makes it remarkable, however—and also vexing—is that it refers to the town’s “jazz band,” and thus is the earliest use of the word that I have found referring to musical activity in Chile. It is clear that jazz activity was taking place in the country long before North American recording companies set up studios in Santiago in 1930—according to musicologist Álvaro Menanteau, the first jazz recordings by Chilean musicians were recorded in Buenos Aires in 1926 in an effort to cater to Chilean taste in popular music (2003:27).

What makes this reference to the Arica town jazz band vexing, for jazz scholars at least, is that the reference alone does little to describe what that jazz activity sounded like. Indeed, 1917 is the same year that the Original Dixieland Jazz Band recorded their jazz sounds in New York; it is possible but highly unlikely that the inhabitants of a remote mining village in the Atacama Desert had access to that record as a musical touchstone. It is also possible that the sounds produced by the Arican “jazz band” reminded Cook of early tours along the North American West Coast by African American musical pioneers such as Jelly Roll Morton.

Original Dixieland Jazz Band's recording "Dixie Jass Band One-Step"

What this encounter between the North American merchant marine and this band of Chilean musicians does show, however, is that the word jazz was traveling rapidly around the world as a way of naming musical activity. And although the term now connotes a relationship to musical genre, it also carries with it a host of other meanings. This point is illustrated perhaps most dramatically by Mark Laver in his 2015 book Jazz Sells: Music, Marketing, and Meaning, which addresses the use of jazz in advertising. (A preview of this book was published here in March.) After enumerating a bizarre and wide-ranging list of products bearing the name “jazz,” Laver concludes,

If jazz can simultaneously be a seasoned potato, a diet cola, an in-ear thermometer, and a super yacht, if it can cost anywhere from US$1 to £300 million, its core meaning is exceptionally elusive, if it has any singular core meaning at all. (2015:2)

The word’s association with music has never been exclusive, either. First printed in the Los Angeles Times in reference to a minor league pitcher’s curveball in 1912, the word only became associated with musical practice in New Orleans a few years later. As Lewis Porter notes in the link above, before the mid-1910s, New Orleans musicians referred to what they did as “ragtime.” Cook, a West Coast sailor who had spent time in California before 1917, seems to have been familiar with the word’s seedier connotations—this is evident from the other associations in the text to dirt, stench, and fleas.

Furthermore, the word has undergone subtle transformations as it has assimilated into other languages. In Spanish, for example, the spelling is maintained but the pronunciation is changed depending on local dialect—Chileans pronounce it “yass,” for example, while Argentines call it “shass.” In Russian, meanwhile, the pronunciation is similar but it is transliterated into the Cyrillic alphabet as “джаз." The dominance of the name, it bears noting, is deeply connected to the United States’ role as a hegemonic power throughout Latin America in the wake of World War I. In Jazz Sells, Laver draws on an argument from Ernesto Laclau to drive this point home:

[If] the unity of the object is the retroactive effect of naming itself, then naming is not just the pure nominalistic game of attributing an empty name to a preconstructed subject. It is the discursive construction of the object itself. . . . The essentially performative character of naming is the precondition for all hegemony and politics. (Quoted in Laver, 2015: 231)

In other words, the music being played by the uniformed Aricans only became “jazz” upon the arrival of an Oregonian merchant marine. Thus, it was Cook—neither Arican nor African-American musicians—who called the group a jazz band.

This awkward fit between the word and the music has never gone away, as Amiri Baraka famously noted in his influential Down Beat essay “Jazz and the White Critic.” Nicholas Payton put it most provocatively when he wrote at his blog in 2011,

I can’t speak for anyone else, but I don’t play Jazz. I play Postmodern New Orleans music. . . . I am a part of a lineage. I am a part of a blood line. My ancestors didn’t play Jazz, they played Traditional, Modern and Avant-garde New Orleans Music. I don’t play Jazz. I don’t let others define who I am. . . . The man who lets others define him is a dead man. With all due respect to the masters, they were victims of a colonialist mentality.

In his 2005 essay “Core and Boundaries,” jazz historian Scott DeVeaux delves more deeply into the ways in which this core meaning is maintained, both the word and the music. He demonstrates how jazz history has been written by drawing boundaries, leaving out many musical practices along the way. Those boundaries have defined a set of dichotomies, with the core jazz meaning lying on one side and not the other: art, not commerce; black, not white; male, not female; and North American, not European, African, or of any other geographical provenance—certainly not Arican! Writing in a similar vein, John Szwed designates the musical practices that fall outside of these boundaries with scare quotes—as “jazz”—in his book Jazz 101 (2000). This has been done, as Payton notes, by mostly white North American critics and historians without separating the word from the music.

But DeVeaux also argues that contemporary listeners—not to mention a staggering diversity of musical practices drawing on jazz histories—lie mostly outside of those boundaries, and in order to reach them, we must cross them and engage with those peripheries. My dissertation fieldwork, which has recently taken me to Chile to focus on jazz practice at the Santiago club Thelonious, concerns itself deeply with this interplay between inside and outside—core, boundary, and periphery—especially in terms of geography and nationality, but also race, class, and gender. The practices of musical performance and listening that take place on a given night in Santiago—or, for that matter, Arica—may fall well outside of these boundaries, in terms of race and geography, while falling squarely within them in terms of class, gender, and musical taste.

I plan visit to Arica in early 2016 to follow the trail started perhaps unwittingly by Cook—a fellow white Oregonian—nearly a century ago. As I learn more about the surprising local histories that have played out alongside both this word and the sounds with which it has been associated, I am drawn more closely to the music that those Arican bandsmen were making at the time they encountered Cook’s jazz-tinged ears. It has been suggested by Payton and others that the word be retired, replaced by Black American Music, or #BAM. But what happens when we add Brown Arican Music to the historical mix? Whether we like it or not, these sounds have been connected through the uses of the word "jazz" by white North Americans to describe music made by nonwhite others. And as I hope to have shown, listening for these global jazz connections can offer deep surprises—about both the word and the music it has named.

Works Cited

Baraka, Amiri. "Jazz and the White Critic." Down Beat. August 15, 1963.

Cook, Truman B. 1976. “Merchant Marine 1917-1918.” Oregon Historical Quarterly 77(2):100-129.

DeVeaux, Scott. 2005. “Core and Boundaries.” Jazz Research Journal 2(1):15–30.

Laver, Mark. 2015. Jazz Sells: Music, Marketing, and Meaning. New York, NY ; Abingdon: Routledge.

Menanteau, Alvaro. 2003. Historia del Jazz en Chile. Santiago: Ocho Libros Editores.

Payton, Nicholas. 2011. "On Why Jazz Isn't Cool Anymore." Nicholas Payton Blog. https://nicholaspayton.wordpress.com/2011/11/27/on-why-jazz-isnt-cool-anymore/.

Porter, Lewis. 2011. "Origins of the Word Jazz." WBGO.org Blog. http://www.wbgo.org/blog/origins-word-jazz.

Szwed, John. 2000. Jazz 101: A Complete Guide to Learning and Loving Jazz. New York: Hachette Books.

Alex W. Rodriguez is a writer, improviser, trombonist and PhD candidate in ethnomusicology at UCLA. He founded the Sounding Board subsection "Space is the Place" in 2013 and served as Editor in Chief for Ethnomusicology Review in 2014. Alex studied trombone performance Amherst College, and completed a Master of Arts degree in Jazz History and Research at Rutgers University, where he wrote his thesis on early jazz trombonist Jack Teagarden and studied trombone with Conrad Herwig. His current research focuses on jazz clubs around the world and the creative improvised music communities that surround them, with case studies in California, Chile, and Siberia. He is currently conducting fieldwork at the Santiago jazz club Thelonious, Lugar de Jazz. Alex also contributes jazz coverage to NPR Music and maintains a blog, Lubricity. He also co-founded the UCLA Omni-Musicality Group, and has served as the Brass Instructor and Curriculum Director for the Santa Monica Youth Orchestra and PS1 Elementary School.

Recent discussions in historical musicology suggest that there is a growing interest in the relationship between Western music and the position of Europe in world history. This incipient “global turn,” if it can be characterised as such, reflects an increased awareness of globalisation within other academic disciplines and in contemporary world society and politics. Perhaps the most important intellectual influence, which has been felt across a range of disciplines, is the growth of postcolonial studies. While postcolonial theory has been most thoroughly applied in the social sciences—and has long been integral to disciplines such as anthropology and ethnomusicology—its impact can also be seen in the rise of global historical studies. Some historians may reject postcolonial theorists’ distrust of large-scale narratives or empiricist methodology, but there is no doubt that much historical work now recognises the interdependency of European history with that of the rest of the world.

Key to this global conception of history—and, implicitly, to traditional European historiography—are debates surrounding the notion of a “great divergence” between the West and the rest, leading to the emergence of modernity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Yet while the exceptionalism of Europe has been challenged in many quarters, other scholars have sought to defend this model, and it continues to have considerable purchase in the media and in popular consciousness (e.g. Ferguson 2012). Indeed, as Dipesh Chakrabarty and others have argued, the construct of history itself, with its emphasis on development and progress, is deeply intertwined with ideas of Western superiority and the mechanisms of imperialism (Chakrabarty 2008; Young 1990). From this perspective, the opposition of a European “history” of music versus a non-European “ethnography” of music (evident in the still common use of the “ethno-” prefix for research about non-European musics) is not simply a matter of disciplinary boundaries, but is the product of habits of thought which have their roots in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century colonialism. As Gary Tomlinson writes:

Across the century from 1750 to 1850 music lodged itself at the heart of a discourse that pried Europe and its histories apart from non-European lives and cultures. Perched at the apex of the new aesthetics, it came to function as a kind of limit-case of European uniqueness in world history and an affirmation of the gap, within the cultural formation of modernity, between history and anthropology … It arose, it is not too much to say, in complex alliance with Europe’s increasing domination of foreign territories and societies around the world. (Tomlinson 2007:285)

One type of response to the absence of the non-European in historical musicology, therefore, has been to explore precisely these narratives of Self and Other in European musical thought during and after the Enlightenment. Thus, several authors have detailed the way in which European music writing has represented non-European cultures as a means of self-fashioning and in order to reinforce various ideological constructs, from universalism to romanticism and evolutionism (Tomlinson 2007; Zon 2013; Bohlman 2013). Other scholars have researched the role of music in the colonial encounter, emphasising the way in which cross-cultural musical experiences shaped identities both in the colonies and in metropolitan centres (Agnew 2008; Irving 2010; Woodfield 2000). Non-European musics—or imaginings of them—became increasingly present in the cities of Europe during the later nineteenth century, whether through world exhibitions, musical exoticism, or new compositional techniques, and these issues too are well represented in musicological literature (Fauser 2005; Locke 2011; Cowgill and Rushton 2006).

Despite the obvious merits of these studies, what they have in common is an almost exclusive reliance on European-language sources and an overwhelming focus on European music. Where non-European musics are discussed, it is invariably through the prism of colonial literature, or with reference to their appropriation by European composers. This is perhaps in keeping with a particular approach to global history, which emphasises the colonial roots of modernity and sees globalisation as an aspect of the European project to map, conquer and subjugate economically the rest of the world (e.g. Nussbaum 2005). Echoes of this are also found in Jürgen Osterhammel’s recent global history of the nineteenth century, where he describes the spread of opera to Asia and the Americas in order to illustrate the globalisation of aesthetic practices (Osterhammel 2011:28–30). There is a certain inevitability to such accounts of European “cultural imperialism,” which suggest that, historically speaking, local musical practices are of little consequence in comparison with the universal adoption of Western art music and its aesthetic conventions (see e.g. Cook 2013). Yet the problem here, at least as far as musicology is concerned, may lie in the paradoxes of postcolonial theory itself, and more specifically in the influential work of Edward Said (1978, 1993).

Dealing as it does with representations of the Other in European culture (and, it should be noted, examining only European sources), there is little room in Saidian discourse for the Other to emerge as a historical actor. As Robert Young points out, “if Said denies that there is any actual Orient which could provide a true account of the Orient represented by Orientalism, how can he claim in any sense that the representation is false?” (Young 1990:130). (A further irony here is Said’s patronage of the West–Eastern Divan Orchestra [led by Daniel Barenboim], which, as Rachel Beckles Willson [2009] has trenchantly argued, serves to reinforce ideas of European cultural superiority and to obscure political conflict while claiming to foster “harmony” in the Middle East.)

Such contradictions have, of course, been discussed at length within postcolonial studies, and are certainly recognised by some scholars who have studied Orientalism in relation to European music. Matthew Head, for example, acknowledges that “anti-imperialist and anti-Orientalist theory … may express political and ethical concern for the Other but it does not itself cut through the web of Orientalist discourse to provide insight into the reality of the Other’s attitudes”—though in the final analysis, Head reaffirms his belief in the validity of Said’s theory (Head 2000:137). Other musicologists too have offered valuable critiques of Orientalism, adding historical depth and nuance to the somewhat bleak and undifferentiated picture of Western imperialism suggested by Said’s reading of European opera (de Mascarenhas 2010; Locke 2005; cf. Said 1993:133–59). But although such studies give us an increasingly refined understanding of how Europeans perceived the Orient in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the focus on representation (fostered above all by Said’s own work) means that they tell us nothing about the historical reality of music-making outside of Europe. While this may not be the aim of the authors, it is problematic in as much as it has led to further distortions of the historical record and, I would suggest, has perpetuated inaccurate perceptions of non-European musics.

The literature on European appropriations of “Turkish” music is particularly instructive, since the Ottoman Empire, as a major Islamic power that posed a threat to Christendom throughout the early modern period, has often functioned as Europe’s paradigmatic Other. The fashion for turquerie in early modern Europe was thus mirrored by a politicised discourse that portrayed the Ottomans as corrupt and despotic (Çırakman 2001). A number of scholars have analysed musical depictions of the Ottomans during the eighteenth century—e.g. those by Rameau and Mozart—as well as Orientalist writing on Ottoman music. In a contribution to the recent Cambridge History of World Music, for example, Sebastian Klotz (2013) discusses perceptions of “world music” during the Enlightenment, with particular reference to an essay on Ottoman music by Charles Fonton (1725–93) (for a critical edition of Fonton’s essay, see Neubauer 1999). However, by analysing it solely within the framework of European history, Klotz fails to take into consideration the broader (“global”) context of Fonton’s essay, which is essential to explain what distinguishes it from the work of, say, Jean-Benjamin de Laborde (1780).

Most importantly, Fonton was a Levantine, or a person of European descent who lived in the Ottoman Empire, and a member of a dynasty of dragomans (interpreters) who had been resident in Istanbul for several generations. He was born in Istanbul, and although he spent nine years (1737–46) in Paris for his education, he passed most of his life in Istanbul and Izmir (Smyrna), where he died in 1793 (Touzard 1997). Fonton’s subject position is therefore not “European” in a straightforward sense—indeed, the Levantines of the Ottoman Empire (perhaps in a similar way to the “Eurasians” of India) were often regarded with suspicion and distaste by “real” Europeans (Coller 2010).

“Air de Cantimir.” A peşrev in the mode Bestenigar by Dimitrie Cantemir (1673–1723), transcribed by Charles Fonton (1751, p. 137)

So while Klotz is undoubtedly correct to argue that aspects of Fonton’s essay reflect the values of the French Enlightenment, in order to properly contextualise it one must also place it within the framework of Ottoman history; or rather, one must attend to the complex entanglement of European and non-European history. Klotz’s lack of engagement with Ottoman or Middle Eastern studies literature is typical of musicological analyses of Orientalism, which tend to locate the site of “cross-cultural” encounter squarely within Europe. This approach effectively silences the actual music of the Ottoman Empire, substituting for it a close reading of European sources and musical practices that reaffirms the Eurocentrism it ostensibly seeks to displace. This is emphatically not due to a lack of historical evidence: in comparison with many other non-European music cultures, there is an abundance of primary sources on Ottoman music, many of them including notation, not to mention a large and accessible secondary literature (İhsanoğlu et al 2003). Yet in his discussion of Fonton, Klotz repeats the canard that there is “an absence of notational systems” or “written clues” in relation to non-European musics, thereby reiterating the idea that the Orient is knowable only through European perceptions of it (Klotz 2013:281).

However, by actively engaging with the written sources of Ottoman music, we can begin to move away from a one-sided discussion that concentrates solely on European perceptions of the Orient, and instead attempt to understand the historical reality of musical practices during the Ottoman period. Fonton’s transcriptions of Ottoman music, for instance, may usefully be compared with contemporaneous Turkish-language sources such as the Kevseri Mecmuası (c. 1740), which reveals that, far from being imaginative exotica, they correspond (albeit with inevitable distortions) to the music played in mid-eighteenth-century Istanbul (Ekinci 2012; Wright 2007:22–5). An awareness of correspondences such as these allows us to distinguish between real musical contacts with the Ottoman Empire—facilitated here by the particular circumstances of Fonton’s life—and European representations of “Turkish” music. It also shifts the debate away from representation and towards a more historically situated discussion that takes into account the material conditions which enabled musical encounters. By avoiding this approach in favour of an analysis that focuses only on discourse, we risk setting up a solipsistic debate about Self and Other in which the Other is nowhere to be found.

“Der makam bestenigar, berefşan.” Cantemir’s Bestenigar peşrev, transcribed by Mustafa Kevseri (c. 1740, fol. 47v)

Of course, as many scholars have pointed out, “authentic” representations of non-European musics may be equally as problematic as orientalist imaginings of them (see e.g. Head 2003:211–12). Partly for this reason, musicologists may feel more comfortable critiquing European perceptions of the Other than attempting to engage with actually existing non-European musics. Furthermore, it should be emphasised that any move towards a less isolationist narrative of European music history is surely to be welcomed. Nevertheless, to quote Gary Tomlinson again, “[w]e should say not that Europeans have begun to hear non-European musics, but that [we] have begun to scrutinize the peculiar deafness that at once constitutes our modernity and conceals the global forces in it” (Tomlinson 2007:196). However well-intentioned and self-critical our attempts to acknowledge the Others of Western music may be, the disproportionate weight given to European perspectives at the expense of local worldviews and practices gives rise to a worrying sense that we have been here before. If we are really interested in moving beyond Eurocentrism—towards “a history of many different voices” (Strohm [2013])—it is therefore imperative that we also attend to thevery real sounds, documents and practices of non-European musics.

Audio: Peşrev in makam Bestenigar / usul berefşan (16/8 meter) composed by Dimitrie Cantemir

Jacob Olley is a research associate on the long-term project "Corpus Musicae Ottomanicae: Critical Editions of Music Manuscripts from the Near East," based at Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster and funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). He is currently completing a PhD entitled "Writing Music in Early Nineteenth-Century Istanbul: Ottoman Armenians and the Invention of Hampartsum Notation" in the music department at King’s College London.

Email: olley@uni-muenster.de

Works Cited

Manuscripts

Fonton, Charles. 1751. Essai sur la musique orientale comparée à la musique européene [sic]. Bibliothèque nationale de France, ms. n. a. 4023.

Mustafa Kevseri. [c. 1740]. [Untitled treatise and music collection]. Milli Kütüphane, Ankara, [microfilm] Mf1994 A 4941.

Other Sources

Agnew, Vanessa. 2008. Enlightenment Orpheus: The Power of Music in Other Worlds.

          Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Beckles Willson, Rachel. 2009. “The Parallax Worlds of the West–Eastern Divan Orchestra.”

          Journal of the Royal Musical Association 134: 319–47.

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Recording

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfLxosgmIuE

“Peşrev in makam Bestenigar / usul berefşan (16/8) - Dimitrie Cantemir.” From the album Cantemir: Music in Istanbul and Ottoman Europe around 1700. Ihsan Özgen, Linda Burman-Hall and Lux Musica. Golden Horn Records, 2002.

Issues of space and place pervade jazz historical narratives, especially when considering conventional “up the river” histories. According to such accounts, jazz began in New Orleans (presumably a product of mixing influences in Congo Square and Storyville), traveled up the river to Chicago (to Lincoln Gardens or Austin High School), east to New York City (many cite the Cotton Club in the Swing era and Minton’s and 52nd Street for bebop), west to Los Angeles (and the supposed birth of West Coast Jazz on Central Avenue), and so on. Though scholars now debate the usefulness of such simplistic and often uncritical place-based narratives, they remain a stock feature of many jazz pedagogies.

Part of my work investigates how race and class impact the perception of particular places of jazz performance. In this blog post, I consider a specific site—George Wein’s Storyville: The Birthplace of Jazz, a Boston jazz club that opened in 1950 and lasted until 1960. Through close study of articles, oral history interviews, audio, images, and census information, I demonstrate how Storyville’s overt discourse of respectability—a discourse that privileged white audiences as “serious” connoisseurs of jazz art music—was rooted in race and class-based stereotypes.

Storyville, Boston

In 1950, Boston University graduate George Wein, the son of a physician, shocked his family by opening a jazz club in Boston’s Copley Square Hotel. Unashamed of what he described in his autobiography as “jazz’s seamy origins,” Wein took the name of his club from New Orleans’s former red-light district, Storyville, created by the New Orleans City Council at the turn of the twentieth century as a means to contain prostitution in the city. Storyville has long been associated with the beginnings of jazz: Cornetist Buddy Bolden, trumpeters Joe “King” Oliver and Louis Armstrong, and pianist Jelly Roll Morton grew up and played in and around Storyville. As Murray Forman argues, “it is in and through language that the values of place are produced.” Therefore, for Wein to take the name of Storyville for his club was to link his club to historical narratives of authentic jazz.

Postcard image of Basin Street, ca. 1908.
http://archive.oah.org/special-issues/katrina/Long.html

By the end of 1950 the Copley Square Storyville closed, due to a miscommunication with the management of the Copley Square Hotel. In 1951 Wein re-opened the club in the Hotel Buckminster, closer to both Boston University and Fenway Park. The Buckminster Storyville was not as successful as the Copley Storyville until Wein booked British jazz pianist George Shearing in September 1951. In 1953, Wein moved Storyville back to the Copley Square Hotel, which was under new management. The club stayed in the Copley Square Hotel until it closed permanently in 1960.

Location and Audience

In his recollections of Storyville, Wein does not specify which location he means (Hotel Buckminster or the Copley Square Hotel), suggesting that his concept of Storyville as a space remained largely unchanged, regardless of the actual place it occupied. Wein explained in a 2008 interview that Storyville’s audience was primarily white and college-educated:

Once we caught on, our audience was mostly made up of professors from the different local colleges. We didn’t draw many kids because they didn’t drink and most were under 21, the legal age limit then…The club attracted blacks when I had certain artists booked, but for the most part the audience was white and middle class.

Though Wein featured somewhat diverse groups of musicians including Dixieland Revivalists Bob Wilber and Jimmy McPartland and “modern” jazz artists such as Charlie Parker, the Modern Jazz Quartet, George Shearing, Sarah Vaughan, and Billie Holiday, many of these musicians were indeed successful among white audiences. Wein further explained that the club’s Copley Square location was ideal for the primarily white, affluent, and educated neighborhood surrounding it: “In terms of location, clientele, and the quality of the music, Storyville could be the first club poised to compete with the Savoy and the Hi Hat, both in an African American neighborhood.”

Census information corroborates Wein’s claims that the areas surrounding the Copley Square Hotel and Hotel Buckminster included a white, well-educated, white-collar audience. The image below shows a mapping of Boston’s 1950 census results regarding race and ethnicity, which indicates that while Copley Square was on the border of a distinctly white and a distinctly black neighborhood, the Copley Storyville itself was neatly tucked into a predominantly white neighborhood—and the Hotel Buckminster was located in an even more racially segregated neighborhood.

1950 Census map of Boston (the lighter the shading, the whiter the population, and vice versa). Includes Tract K-4A (Hotel Buckminster), Tract J-3 (Copley Square Hotel), Tract K-5 (Copley Square), Tract L-2 (Savoy and Hi Hat) and Boston University (for reference).
Source: Sweetser, Frank L. The Social Ecology of Metropolitan Boston: 1950. Boston University. Division of Mental Hygiene, Massachusetts Department of Mental Health, 1961.

In the chart below, I compare the race, education, and type of employment across the Copley Square, Copley Square Hotel, Hotel Buckminster, and Savoy and Hi Hat neighborhoods. The confluence of race, class, and education in these neighborhoods is clear when comparing the Storyville neighborhoods with Tract L-2, the census tract that contained the Savoy and the Hi Hat jazz clubs. The Savoy and Hi Hat clubs were not only located in a majority African American neighborhood, as Wein noted, but the neighborhood also included significantly more blue collar workers, fewer professionals/managers, and fewer high school graduates. Ultimately, Tract L-2 demonstrates how place, race, class, and access to education intersected. In other words, perceptions of race inevitably rely on perceptions of class and education, as well.

Census data for the Copley Square Hotel (Tract J-3), Copley Square (Tract K-5), the Hotel Buckminster (Tract K-4A), and the Savoy and the Hi Hat (Tract L-2).

Storyville as a Listening Room

Although Wein drew upon Storyville, New Orleans’s authenticity, he simultaneously distanced his own Storyville from the shady reputation of its namesake, insisting that “Storyville was a respectable place.” He stressed that his vision of Storyville was that of a “true music room. Storyville was never a joint. We had no floor show, no drug dealers or resident hookers. We kept things clean.” For Wein to call his own Storyville “respectable” and emphasize its freedom from drugs and sex work was another way of explicitly naming it a white place, a racial designation further underscored by associations with affluence and education, and in direct opposition to working class black places.

Unlike Storyville, New Orleans, George Wein’s Storyville was indeed known by its patrons and by music critics to be a “respectable” club. One way in which critics implied Storyville’s whiteness was by invoking the necessity for “serious” listening at Storyville. In 1953, Nat Hentoff referred to Storyville’s “relative silence.” Cyrus Durgin, a music reporter for the Daily Boston Globe, also wrote about Boston Storyville’s apparently surprising need for “attentive listening.” A self-described “longhair” (i.e. lover of European classical music), Durgin used Storyville as an example of how jazz had become a “serious” music, calling it Boston’s “best temple of jazz” in 1954. Durgin offered the actions of Storyville’s audiences as “proof” of jazz’s shift toward “attentive listening performances” by the Gerry Mulligan and Dave Brubeck Quartets—both heard as predominantly white groups by their audiences.

Some people do talk, but not many, and conversation is frowned upon. Most of the customers are there to listen, to Mulligan’s closely-woven musical strands that sound not unlike syncopated Bach, or to Brubeck’s resourceful piano style, with its moving voices of counterpoint and its fascinating shades of harmonic and instrumental color.

In this passage, Durgin not only described Storyville as a relatively quiet listening experience, in which any talking was limited to only brief interactions, but he also related the necessity for such close listening only to white musicians, through his descriptions of Mulligan and Brubeck’s Bach-like and contrapuntal music.

For all of George Wein, Nat Hentoff, and Cyrus Durgin’s insistence that Storyville was a “quiet” place for listening to jazz, albums and radio broadcasts recorded live at Storyville suggest that quiet was a relative term. Though Durgin specifically highlighted silent audiences for performances by Mulligan and Brubeck, these musicians’ live recordings feature audience noise particularly prominently. Mulligan’s December 1956 recording at Storyville offers a glimpse at the frustrations some jazz musicians felt even toward Storyville’s “quiet” audiences. Audience chatter is prevalent throughout the tracks, but perhaps the most striking moment is found during “Limelight,” when Mulligan has an infamous encounter with a whistling audience member.

While Mulligan’s outburst could have been unique, especially at a club so renowned for its “respectful” audience, the Storyville audience seems to have been noisier than Cyrus Durgin or George Wein cared to remember. For instance, on a Brubeck recording from October 22, 1952 at Storyville, a patron whistles along with saxophonist Paul Desmond on the melody of “You Go to My Head.” Rather than accost the patron as Mulligan did, the characteristically non-confrontational Desmond simply deviated enough from the melody to throw off the whistler, who eventually stopped.

Images of the Brubeck Quartet at Storyville complicate the dichotomy between “serious” and participatory listening. (See one image here; while this is the only archival image available online, other images in the Brubeck Collection show more of the Storyville scene.) Indeed, the audience pictured seems to demonstrate the kind of focused listening described by Durgin and Wein—all visible bodies are focused on the stage and the Brubeck Quartet, all bodies pictured seem still. But the tables and the items left casually on them remind us that Storyville was a social place—a nightclub—in which it was not only acceptable to drink and smoke, talk and laugh, but in which such behaviors were expected. Even if Brubeck’s music was, as critics often claimed, more “complex,” more “intellectual” for its references to European classical music, audiences could choose to focus their listening entirely on the Brubeck Quartet—or not.

The Copley Square Hotel Storyville today (at the Fleur-de-lis)—it’s now an exclusive club with images reminiscent of Storyville, New Orleans (http://storyvilleboston.com). The Hotel Buckminster Storyville is now a Pizzeria Uno.

Conclusion

By acknowledging Storyville as a “listening” club, Wein, Durgin, and other jazz writers implicitly linked the club and its audience members to whiteness—even if audio accounts suggest that the audience was less silent than suggested in written accounts. Put simply, Storyville remained a club, in which conversation and drinks were not merely accepted, but expected, and although musicians such as Mulligan insisted on being heard as “serious” artists, audiences nevertheless felt comfortable attempting such participation. In other words, Storyville was a place in which primarily white, educated, middle and upper-class audiences could be privileged as “serious” listeners by white jazz commentators—even if the behaviors and modes of listening they enacted were actually not “silent,” “quiet,” or “attentive.” Regardless of the actual experience of listening at Storyville, the club’s location in a white neighborhood, white audience, and overt discourse of respectability directly countered narratives of black places, such as Storyville, New Orleans, which remain rooted in race and class-based stereotypes—narratives that were distinct from places of whiteness.

The stakes of research on race, class, and place are not limited to historical reconstructions such as the case study I have investigated here, but rather are imperative to understanding the full spectrum of present-day race and class-based privileges and injustices. Living in St. Louis, in which every municipality that makes up the greater metropolitan area carries with it an implicit association with race and class, the importance of such research on the race of place is all too obvious. Consider, for instance, the infamous “Delmar Divide” and the policing of black bodies in implicitly white public spaces, including but not limited to the very visible deaths of Michael Brown, Rekia Boyd, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, and Trayvon Martin. For two recent examples of such policing leading up to the Missouri primaries, see: 

http://www.riverfronttimes.com/newsblog/2016/03/14/how-st-louis-stopped-donald-trump

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/kansas-city-pepper-spray-trump_us_56e51dc1e4b065e2e3d637f1

But it is not enough to simply identify places of blackness or of poverty (nor is it appropriate to assume that places of blackness are places of poverty, or vice versa). We need to also make places of whiteness and of affluence visible. In his explanation of the importance of race to space, political philosopher Charles Mills argues that normative space, or space that is seemingly not raced, is frequently raced white: “Space is just there, taken for granted, and the individual is tacitly posited as the white adult male, so that all individuals are obviously equal.” Likewise, George Lipsitz argues that public spaces not often discussed in terms of race are usually raced white, or privilege whiteness. I would add that in addition to privileging whiteness, such normative public spaces also privilege whiteness as it intersects with upper and upper-middle class identities, and educational backgrounds—and further, masculinity, heterosexuality, and ability. Such privileges are not completely invisible—as Sara Ahmed, bell hooks, and George Yancy argue, whiteness is largely not invisible to the people of color who experience the negative manifestations of white privilege daily. So in closing, I emphasize that it is only by making places of whiteness visible to white people that we can begin to alter, and indeed dismantle, the associations of whiteness, affluence, and educational status with discourses and spaces of respectability.

Notes

Cover photo: Storyville, ca. 1955. Detail of a photograph by Nissan Bichajian, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Libraries, Rotch Visual Collections. http://dome.mit.edu/handle/1721.3/34173

References

Ahmed, Sara. “Declarations of Whiteness: The Non-Performativity of Anti-Racism.” Borderlands E-Journal 3, no. 2 (2004).

Durgin, Cyrus. “Jazz Moves to Newport as Serious Music Form.” Daily Boston Globe (20 June 1954), C79.

Frith, Simon. “Rhythm: Race, Sex, and the Body.” In Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music, 123-144. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996.

hooks, bell. “Representing Whiteness in the Black Imagination.” In Displacing Whiteness: Essays in Social and Cultural Criticism, edited by Ruth Frankenberg, 165-179. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997.

Forman, Murray. The ‘Hood Comes First: Race, Space, and Place in Rap and Hip-Hop. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2002.

Hentoff, Nat. “Counterpoint.” Down Beat (1 July 1953), 8.

Lipsitz, George. How Racism Takes Place. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2011.

Mills, Charles W. The Racial Contract. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997.

Sweetser, Frank L. The Social Ecology of Metropolitan Boston: 1950. Boston University. Division of Mental Hygiene, Massachusetts Department of Mental Health, 1961.

Wein, George. Myself Among Others, with Nate Chinen. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2003.

Wein, George with Marc Meyers, “Interview: George Wein (Part 1)” Jazz Wax (23 July 2008): http://www.jazzwax.com/2008/07/interview-georg.html

Yancy, George. Look, A White!: Philosophical Essays on Whiteness. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2012.

Kelsey Klotz recently completed her PhD in Musicology, with a certificate in American Culture Studies, at Washington University in St. Louis. She is currently a Senior Teaching Fellow at Washington University, and has also been awarded the Graduate Student Fellowship from the Center for the Humanities and the Dean’s Award for Excellence in Teaching. Her dissertation, “Racial Ideologies in 1950s Cool Jazz,” examines the cultural construction of whiteness in histories of cool jazz.

An Arabic translation of this article can be found here.

Introduction: 129° F

Many of my friends an colleagues in Kuwait were shocked that I came during a time of world record high temperatures to study music during the past summer. Temperatures reached a blistering 129 degrees Fahrenheit during mid-August, but it was not the first time I experienced such heat. During the 2014-15 academic year, I spent ten months in the Sultanate of Oman on a Fulbright scholarship studying the oud  and performing with the Oud Hobbyists Association. After visiting Kuwait twice during my stay in Oman, I decided that it would be the ideal place to return for summer 2016 after my first year at UCLA. My connection with the oud began a few years before I traveled to the Gulf while I was studying Arabic during my undergrad in Morocco and later in Egypt, where I attended classes and participated in concerts with Naseer Shama's bayt al-'ud al-'araby (Arabic Oud House). Due to friendships I retained during my undergraduate studies with Kuwaitis and other students from the region, I always retained a strong interest in Gulf music (often referred to as khaliji music), and specifically musical traditions that utilize the oud.

 Kuwait City resides on a large bay, which historically was an ideal natural harbor for maritime trade vessels from around the Indian Ocean.

Music aside, the Gulf's historical connections with other nations and cultures surrounding the Indian Ocean also drew me in. As the place of the Arabic language's origin and of great wealth due to the current oil economy, GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council) nations play a vital role in the affairs of the larger Arab world. At the same time however, Indian Ocean connections also help distinguish this region from the rest of the Arabic speaking world in some very important respects (Bishara 2014); culturally these include cuisine, clothing, language, and music. Internally, the Arabian Peninsula is also an extremely diverse region and historical connections, migrations, and cultural movements from within are equally important as those between continents on maritime routes (Urkevich 2015). The musical styles I have been interested in developed historically on similar networks of exchange between Yemen, the Gulf (my preferred term to “Arab” or “Persian” Gulf), East Africa, and India, during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Considering the significance and complexity of this history, a large part my field work is reviewing historical sources in English and Arabic on music, maritime trade, and migrations. In addition to my research, I have also been involving myself with a broad community of musicians and local organizations. When I first arrived to Kuwait, I connected with a NGO called Loyac, which promotes concerts, the arts, and community service. I have been participating in some of their public music performances and also giving oud lessons through their organization. While I am deeply interested in the history of the region, my involvement at Loyac and other musical activities have kept me in the present.

In the midst of an oud lesson with Hussa - photo credit: Faris Ali

Ṣawt and the Diwaniyya

One of the musical genres I have been particularly interested in is called ṣawt, popular throughout the Gulf region among oud players, poets, and music connoisseurs. The genre's instrumentation usually features oud, violin, and small cylindrical drums called merwas. There is a dynamic and ever developing relationship between lyrics, melody, and rhythm in ṣawt. Performers may substitute and interchange melodies, poems, and rhythms creating endless combinations of the three; however, some poems are more commonly paired with a particular melody and rhythm. Today, there are about four rhythms commonly performed in ṣawt and a far greater number of melodies drawn upon by singers performing the repertoire.

Ṣawt has historically been a point of contention between Kuwaiti and Bahraini musicians and scholars arguing as to whom founded the genre. Similarly, and due to the genre's Yemeni influences, others argue that ṣawt in the Gulf region is merely an extension of other genres performed in Southern Arabia, which consists of the Hadhramout province of Yemen and in the Dhofar province of Oman (Kathiri 2009). As these heated scholarly debates have somewhat subsided, most consider the renowned poet, 'Abdullah al-Faraj (1836-1901) to be the founder and innovator of this genre after his return to the Gulf region from Bombay in the late nineteenth century. For centuries before the discovery of oil, the economy of the Gulf and the greater Arabian Peninsula relied heavily on trade with port cities surrounding the Indian Ocean from East Africa to modern day Malaysia and Indonesia. As the capital of the British Indian Empire, Bombay was the main economic hub of the region where many Arab traders, mercenaries, and laborers lived during the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Al-Faraj's father was a rich businessman and worked in the pearl and horse trade in Bombay (two of the most desired exports from the Arabian Peninsula during that time), and encouraged him to pursue the arts and music (al-Faraj 2001). When al-Faraj returned to the Gulf in the latter part of the nineteenth century, he brought back with him an original repertoire of songs, poetry, and melodies mixing a variety of Yemeni and Indian influences. This repertoire was later developed by other musicians throughout the twentieth century into the genre ṣawt performed today.

Kuwait and Bahrain have both been historically the most prominent nations for ṣawt performance and record production; however, many musicians in Kuwait tell me that only the older generation of musicians in Bahrain still perform ṣawt. They add that in Kuwait, ṣawt performers and enthusiasts have been much more successful in maintaining and developing the tradition. In fact, performers of the younger generation in Kuwait are often invited to Bahrain and Qatar to perform for older audiences and musicians who are the few connoisseurs of ṣawt left there. Perhaps Kuwaitis have been more successful at maintaining the genre because the context of its performance has also been kept alive: the diwaniyya, which remains a vital political and cultural institution in Kuwaiti society. A diwaniyya is a large meeting room for men connected to a family house where extended family, friends, and colleagues meet and socialize. Musical gatherings and concerts held inside diwaniyyas are commonly referred to as jelsāt, samrāt, or qā'dāt. Many diwaniyyas are purposed solely for musical performances and often for specific genres depending on the taste of the owner. During one jelsa, some friends told me it was more common for women to participate in these musical gatherings during the 1950s and 1960s, but this was before more conservative ideologies took hold during the late 1960s and gender segregation became more prominent in various social contexts in Kuwaiti society. Currently, the music conservatory in Salmiya, Kuwait continues to blur these lines teaching men “female”  traditional musical genres and women “male” traditional genres. Ṣawt is considered one of the “male” genres taught to women in the conservatory context.

The performers end of diwaniyyat 'ahal al-marwās; from the left: Khalid al-Shati, Salah Hamed Khalifa (son of a renowned ṣawt performer Hamed Khalifa), Fahed al-Kendary, Abdullah al-Jadda, Yousef al-Jadda, and a guest playing merwas.

During the past summer, I attended many qā'dāt (sin qā'da; commonly used in reference to a ṣawt performance) in the diwaniyya pictured above, which is dedicated specifically to the preservation and performance of ṣawt. The name of the diwaniyya is called diyaniyya 'ahal al-marāws (roughly translates to “diwaniyya of the people of the marwās”) and was established as a meeting place for ṣawt performers and other musicians. Located in a rural suburb outside Kuwait city called Chabt, the diywaniyya was founded by a group of friends and connoisseurs of ṣawt (two of them are pictured above: Fahad and Abdullah) who consider performing ṣawt a hobby, and pay for the diwaniyyas' expenses out of their own pockets. In addition to a variety of old tape decks and large speakers, they have decorated the diwaniyya with old photos depicting ṣawt performers, a plethora of antiques, ancient gramophones, and old record collections - most of them gramophone 78 rpm records that were common before vinyl. After the ṣawt performance during my first visit, we sat and listened to some of the old seventy eights which included mostly music from the Gulf region, but also recordings of famous Egyptian stars such as Umm Kalthoum, early twentieth century Hindi film classics, and some 1930s jazz hits by Louis Armstrong and Russ Morgan.

Also partly visible in he picture above, it is worth noting the model of the old Kuwaiti maritime vessel, the boom. Such models are common in majālis (living rooms similar to diwaniyyas), diwaniyyas, and in households around the Gulf and serve as reminders of the maritime past. In diwaniyyat ahal al-marwās, the model holds particular significance as boom ships were also a primary context of ṣawt performance before the oil boom. Musicians were hired to perform on the decks of ships as they traveled from the Gulf to the coasts of South Asia, Southern Arabia, and East Africa. In a travelogue documenting his time on a Kuwaiti boom sailing from Yemen to Zanzibar in the 1930s, Australian Alan Villiers recalls a variety of musical activity at sea from gramophone records playing, to ṣawt performances, and a the Kuwaiti crew singing songs in Farsi at port in Kenya (Villiers 2006).

Recording ṣawt: From Indian Ocean Trade Routes to Cassette Decks

As with many musical traditions around the world, the development of the record industry during the early twentieth century had a great effect on the development of ṣawt and its transmission to preceding generations. The first recordings of ṣawt were made in the late 1920s by the second generation of performers after 'Abdullah al-Faraj. Before the age of the oil economy, many of these earlier performers still traveled maritime trade routes between Iraq, the Gulf, and Western India. The record pictured below from the diwaniyya's record collection features Sālim Rāshid al-Sūri, an Omani ṣawt singer who spent extensive time recording in India during the 1930s. Famous Kuwaiti musicians who followed similar routes recording in Cario, Baghdad, and Bombay during this early period include  Salah and Daud Ezra, and 'Abd al-Latīf al-Kūwaytī who made the first recordings of ṣawt in Baghdad for the Bayḍafūn (Baidaphone) company in 1927. As early as 1930s, ṣawt records were being sold in Yemen as the record industry began to recirculate ṣawt repertoire on maritime routes between the Gulf and Yemen (al-Salhi 2015).

Diwaniyyat 'ahal al-marwās and other circles of musicians in Kuwait continue to document and record ṣawt by videotaping and sound recording almost every performance they host. Today, many musicians and diwaniyya owners make their own private audio recordings, archive them, and distribute them using social media. Like the enthusiasts at 'Ahal al-marwās, many musicians throughout Kuwait make live recordings with old cassette tape decks or boomboxes, and later convert the cassette audio into a digital file. Despite also having new state of the art field and portable recorders, many prefer the sound of cassette recordings because of their distorted, warm, and “living” (ḥayy) feeling. Here is the link to 'Ahal al-marwās's Soundcloud page, “mrwas_q8,” where they upload many of the musical performances (or qā'dāt) they host. The recordings here feature some of the most renowned ṣawt performers from Kuwait and the gulf region today including Ibrahim al-Khashrim, Salah Hamed Khalifa and Suleiman al-Amari. Please give them a listen, follow, and show support for ṣawt music internationally! The diwaniyya also has an Instagram account under the same name: “@mrwas_q8”.

https://soundcloud.com/mrwas_q8

Documentation and Social Media

The picture below is of myself and renowned musician and ṣawt performer Naser Abo Awad, recording into his Phillips cassette boombox. I was invited to do so in order to document my presence as a guest musician at the jelsa in his family's diwaniyya. As others have mentioned previously in our field (Seeger 1987), being a musician often makes the ethnomusicologist an subject of fascination and worthy of documentation by members of the culture she is studying, rather than the other way around. As an American playing oud professionally and as a teacher here in Kuwait, I have attracted considerable attention from local news media, local musicians, and also considerable attention on social media networks. Throughout the GCC, social media apps such as Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat have some some of the most active users in the world while having economically and culturally transformed Gulf society in recent years (Elzaini 2015). Through connections made on social media, I knew many of my friends and colleagues before personal meetings or even before arriving in Kuwait. Many musicians similarly use social media to document jelsas and their own daily musical activities sharing them with others. By using apps like Instagram and Snapchat, I have been able to document and keep a fairly large community within Kuwait, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and the broader region up to date about my experiences here as a researcher and musician. I commonly make posts about my research, participation in interviews, concerts I attend, and my own performances in both English and Arabic. This has allowed for a greater breadth of interaction and communication between myself and other researchers, musicians, and an interested public throughout the region.

Ethnomusicologists have long wrestled with the concept of field work, what it entails, and what its boundaries are. Similarly, others have pointed out that ethnomusicologists can offer inventive approaches to participant observation research and ethnography as both social scientists and musicians (Titon 2008:38). As a foreign researcher in an area of the world that continues to struggle for nuanced, accurate, and honest representation, I continue to wrestle with the concepts of ethnography and “field work.” As a musician and researcher, the field is everywhere from my Instagram account, to the stage, and to the actual process of picking my MA paper topic that I will write this year (which musicians, scholars, and fellow ethnomusicologists here in Kuwait commonly inquire about and critique). As others have indicated, defining the field is perhaps not as important as being reflective about our experience, how we gain knowledge, and how knowledge and experience is written about (Rice 2008; Berger 2008). In this installment for Notes From the Field, I have hoped be informative about my experience, but also convey a brief glimpse of a fascinating history and the current activities of musicians here in Kuwait. It was certainly all worth the heat.

 A post I made on my Instagram account thanking members of the Bin Hussein group for their hospitality and hosting an 'uns, which is a celebration where a variety of traditional musics are performed including sawt. The occasion of the 'uns was to celebrate Khalid Bin Hussein's return to Kuwait from Germany, where he was accompanying his wife going through a successful cancer treatment.
 

References

Al-Faraj, Abdullah. 2001 (1903). Diwan Abdullah al-Farj. Kuwait: The Abdul Aziz Saud
    al-Babateen Prize Foundation for Poetic Creativity.
Al-Salhi, Ahmed. 2015. “Catalog of Kuwaiti and Egyptian Songs: Studies about Historical Musical
    Documentation dating back to 1930.” Message of Kuwait 52:30-41.
Berger, Harris M. 2008. “Phenomenology and the Ethnography of Poplular Music: Ethnomusicology at
    the Juncture of Cultural Studies and Folklore.” In Shadows in the Field: New Perspectives for
    Fieldwork in Ethnomusicology, edited by Gregory Barz and Timothy J. Cooley. New York:
    Oxford University Press.
Bishara, Fahad Ahmed. 2014. “Mapping the Indian Ocean World of Gulf Merchants, c.
    1870-1960.” In The Indian Ocean: Oceanic Connections and the Creation of New Societies,
    edited by Abdul Sheriff and Engseng Ho. London: Hurst & Company.
Elzaini, Sarah. 2015. “Social Media's Economic Revolution in the Gulf.” Foreign Policy Association.
    February 9. http://foreignpolicyblogs.com/2015/02/09/social-medias-economic-revolution-in
    the-gulf/ (accessed 15 September 2016).
Kathiri, Muselim. 2009. “The Oud in the Arabian Peninsula: Historical Studies.” Nizwa -
    Cultural Chapter 57:151-163
Seeger, Anthony. 1987. Why the Suya Sing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Titon, Jeff Todd. 2008. “Knowing Fieldwork.” In Shadows in the Field: New Perspectives for
    Fieldwork in Ethnomusicology, edited by Gregory Barz and Timothy J. Cooley. New York:
    Oxford University Press.
Rice, Timothy. 2008. “Towards a Mediation of Field Methods and Field Experience.” In Shadows in
    the Field: New Perspectives for Fieldwork in Ethnomusicology, edited by Gregory Barz and
    Timothy J. Cooley. New York: Oxford University Press.
Urkevich, Lisa. 2015. Music and Traditions of the Arabian Peninsula: Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain,
    and Qatar. New York, N: Taylor and Francis.
Villiers, Alan. 2006 (1940). Sons of Sindbad. London: Arabian Publishing Ltd.
 

History is not a universal narrative of one tradition, one person, one people, or one nation; rather, it is the sum of all possible histories that may illuminate a present moment or place. To conduct research in ethnomusicology, musicology, or any other discipline of the humanities is to inherently engage in the study of histories, including how they converge, intersect, and conflict. People have different habits, different worldviews, and different cultures of music as a result of certain historical experiences, which are remembered and reimagined over time. As researchers of music in culture or music as culture, we also become wrapped up within intersections and conflicts between histories, and have our own ways of imagining them too. Editors of the Ethnomusicology Review would like to invite you to share historical perspectives from your research for our online platform "Sounding Board." Tell us why conflicts and convergences of history are important to understanding a current place or space of music making of interest to you today. Additionally, if you have any other project, conference paper, or unpublished work dealing with issues surrounding history and music, feel free to reach out!

Please contact Gabe Lavin, associate editor of Ethnomusicology Review’s “Sounding Board: Historical Perspectives,” at glavin@ucla.edu if you wish to contribute or have any questions. Sounding Board is an informal, yet academically focused online platform to discuss research, ideas, and other issues related to the fields of musicology and ethnomusicology.

In 1990 Congress passed Public Law 101-343 which authorized and requested the President to issue a proclamation designating the month of November 1990 as "National American Indian Heritage Month."  Since 1995 the President has issued annual proclamations which designate November as National American Indian Heritage Month, or since 2009 as National Native American Heritage Month. These proclamations celebrate the contributions of Native Americans and urge the peoples of the United States to learn more about Native American cultures.  For more information, check out this page from the Law Library at the Library of Congress.

In honor of National Native American Heritage Month, I thought I would highlight some of the Ethnomusicology Archive's Native Californian recordings.

Traditional music of native Northwest California: brush dance, feather dance, and gambling songs. Discussion and performances by Loren Bommelyn (Tolowa), Aileen Figueroa (Yurok), Joy Sundberg (Yurok) and Charlotte Heth (Cherokee). Recorded at the UCLA Media Engineering Center on April 12, 1976, during the class session of UCLA Music 153C, Sociology of American Indian music.

Traditional music of native Northwest California: brush dance, feather dance, and gambling songs. Discussion and performances by Loren Bommelyn (Tolowa), Aileen Figueroa (Yurok), Joy Sundberg (Yurok) and Charlotte Heth (Cherokee). Recorded at the UCLA Media Engineering Center on May 23, 1977, during the class session of UCLA Music 153C, Sociology of American Indian music.

Cahuilla Birdsongs (1987). The Cahuilla people are the first known inhabitants of California's Coachella Valley. Cahuilla bird songs tell the stories of the origin of the Cahuilla. Fieldwork done by Edith Johnson, Brenda Romero, and Gail Schwartz. Professor Romero tells me that she uses this recording in her classes to this day.

Ethnomusicology M115, Musical Aesthetics in Los Angeles, Professor Steve Loza.  UCLA Ethnomusicology graduate student Johanna Hofmann speaks about Native American music as expressed through powwow events and culture in Los Angeles.  Hoffman's master thesis (1992) was "Spirituality in the Inter-tribal Native American Pow-wow."

Figure 1.“Drawing of an Argentine gaucho playing his guitar”. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons under CC.

Introduction

There are few times that an entire genre can be identified as wholly exemplifying a socio-historical identity while maintaining an accessible style for the masses. The nacionalismo musical (musical nationalism) that burst onto the scene during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Argentina is precisely this type of genre. It is a curious mixture of poetry and song together with socio-political commentary proffered by gaucho characters shared via the reflections and lamentations of their payador peers, both of whom wandered the outskirts of society (literally and figuratively). This essay proposes that nacionalismo musical was a crucial component for the Argentine identity-formation process and that it occupies a dual role in the literary and musical worlds. Due to the popular styles that it pulls from—payador rural and urban ballads and gaucho poetry­—nacionalismo musical has achieved a much greater degree of accessibility, and thus, longevity within the Argentine imagination and cultural spheres.

This essay discusses how gauchesca themes and image were leveraged within Argentine popular culture for calculated purposes, namely to aid in the delineation of an Argentine identity at a time when those in power felt threatened by what they perceived as frenetic energy and disjointed efforts as a result of rapid change as the eighteenth century turned over to the nineteenth. I will begin by briefly establishing who the gaucho and payador were and highlight why in a late nineteenth century and early twentieth century Argentine context they became so popular in the imaginations of the people regardless of class. I will then demonstrate that while gaucho prose predominantly belongs to the field of literature, it also conforms exceedingly well to nacionalismo musical in how it combined with gaucho-centric ballads to ultimately act as oratory devices of dissent and as a vehicle to educate and pass on information to the masses.

Gaucho and Payador Balladry

The gaucho have long held court in the Argentine cultural imagination. Possessing a legacy of grit dating back to the Colonial period, they pioneered the mass expanse of pampas (plains) spanning Uruguay and Argentina readying it for settlement (Pinnell 1984:243). Early gauchos who settled the plains were the musical benefactors of the European instruments brought to the New World by colonizers and missionaries. It is no accident that the sole instrument associated with the gaucho (the guitar) is also the one that was the most common among missionaries and conquistadores of the time.[1] While perhaps not social equals, the gaucho, missionary, and colonizer social groups would have certainly crossed paths.

Over time it became the business of guitar-playing musician gauchos, or payadores, to roam and entertain other gauchos at moments of leisure by either singing songs that they had memorized or, when challenged, to make up new ones on the spot in a type of freestyling ballad competition (Pinnell 1984: 246-247). In fact, it is this later practice that would become the “tour de force of the gaucho balladeers…Two singers would match their skills by improvising alternate verses without losing a single beat on their guitars. Each verse had to connect in content with the one before it, and the singer who faltered or broke tempo was the loser” (Pinnell 1984: 248). 

It was the individualism, self-reliance, and superior equestrian skills cultivated during settlement efforts that later gauchos to have a defining role in the 1819 War of Independence when Argentina liberated itself from the Spanish grasp (Umphrey 1918:144). The transition to total autonomy was not easy for the newly independent nation, and again it was the gaucho who fought during the decades of civil wars that followed independence. As the nineteenth century turned to the twentieth, a relative stability was achieved as Argentina burgeoned with industrialization and mass urban (im)migration. It was during this period that the gaucho were re-positioned in the Argentine cultural imagination from a doggedly hands-on figure to one very much ousted to the margins as he contemptuously stood against the modernization that encroached, indeed threatened, the pastoral life that he treasured.

Still, the gaucho’s chided position as lawless, nomadic, trouble-brewing gamblers shifted yet again early in the twentieth century as the learned elite seized the figure to serve as a rallying emblem to represent ideals of Argentina as a nation (self-sufficient and rebellious) and Argentines as a people (tenacious) (Umphrey 1918; Pinnell 1984). This is also when payador balladeers shifted from the countryside to the city. While early and mid-nineteenth century payadores performed for rural crowds, burgeoning urban metropoles such as Buenos Aires became perfect venues in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In relocating, the urban payador became “ambassadors of a gaucho culture [that] appeared so authentic that when…elite composers sought to give Argentine classical music a national [authentic] edge, they unwittingly turned to the reworked songs of the urban payadores as genuine folk music” (Bockelman 2011: 593). 

Co-Opting the Gaucho Identity

In examining the musical propaganda potential of the gaucho, an important gauchesca duality emerges: the notion that though a gaucho’s life is “savage like”, and the idea that his “luxury is liberty” (Sarmiento 1961:52). Crudity is a trait that the gaucho inherited honestly very early during pampa settlement due to the “absence of towns…not settl[ing] in groups, clustered round a church or village…but in isolated families, living often far out of reach of one another…practically the sole inhabitants” (Cunninghame Graham 1924:288). It was the result of these circumstances that the gaucho became “adept at capturing horses for himself…He learned to attend to many of his affairs on horseback—even fishing and cooking…there were neither churches nor schools, nor other establishments in which to socialize” (Pinnell 1984:244). Liberty was luxury indeed as the gaucho was his own overlord from inception.

For decades, Argentina had grappled with the consequences and challenges of liberation from Spain. The gaucho became the unfortunate reminder of old ways that “one hoped to destroy and replace” as the foundling nation propelled itself toward yet to be determined new identifiers (Roggiano and Straub 1974:39). Yet, transitioning to a period of industrialization, urbanization, and mass immigration brought with it a nostalgia, or rather a gussied up reinterpreted version of these “old ways”, prompting a call to reclaim and reposition the gaucho of yesteryear as representative of a type of Argentine purity that was being lost with the influx of technologies and newcomers. Songs about the gaucho essentially became the way that people “made sense of contradictions in their culture” at a time when conflicts such as “masters and serfs, exploiters and the exploited, rich and poor, learned and uneducated, foreigners and natives” were persistent and irreconcilable (Taylor 1997:217; Roggiano and Straub 1974:38-39). The gaucho embodied this by simultaneously occupying a societal space of rejection and veneration.

Such cultural duality—­forsaken yet cherished, coarse yet fashionable, lawless yet role model­—and the manner in which these themes were leveraged in cultural and socio-political spheres is what makes the Argentine nacionalismo musical, so imbued with the gauchesca genre, effective as a tool to aid in the process of national identity formation, to dissent, and to educate. Because of how well nacionalismo musical absorbed traits of such a variety of social sects and economic and education levels, there were few who did not find at least some aspect (some “spin”) of the gaucho in which they saw themselves reflected. 

Reconstructing de Gaucho

Vulgar and rustic style of speech is a distinctive trait of the gaucho genre. It would be logical to assume that since gauchos were nomadic Argentine country folk of the pampa, prideful yet penniless, that the writing style simply reflected the words (and education level) of the authors. Given the preponderance of illiteracy among these cowboy wanderers, this is more than likely not the case. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the words were more often written by educated and urban poets who enjoyed a lifestyle completely different from that of their muses. These men of “high literary ability” were often involved in politics and participated in society, something that moved them further away from the gaucho reality—a self-respecting gaucho would never have been invited to partake or collaborate in the politics of his time (Umphrey 1918:147). It was not uncommon for these writers to collect works first authored by payadores to seek “material for their own poetic compositions” about the gaucho that they would then publish, giving a permanent niche for the “versified moralizings” and musicalized storytelling that would subsequently be “handed down from generation to generation” (Umphrey 1918:147-149).

Debating appropriation is not the objective here, suffice to say that by adopting payador material and launching it into a more erudite spheres some think that these poets preserved a genre that otherwise would have been lost. That without these “great men of letters” extolling the “spirit and style of the payador” and the “gaucho’s heroism,” the “words and music,” and oral tradition would perhaps not have survived the period of rapid change that ushered in the 1900s (Pinnell 1984:251).

Urbanite poets knowingly selected one of the most polarizing social sects to make come alive the socio-political concerns and discontent that was brewing in Argentina during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In their eyes, gauchos made the perfect intermediary between the supposed civilized and uncivilized worlds. They could manipulate the personal stories, situations, conflicts, treatment, and discourses of the gauchos in order to politicize their existence and use them as tools to facilitate the “emergence of patriotic dialogue” in a way that other social groups or cultural personalities could not (Ludmer 1996:608). For example, as a presidential candidate, Juan Domingo Perón would often “pepper his political speeches with phrases culled from popular old gauchesque poems…giving him an ability to communicate to working-class audiences that his rivals lacked” (Bockelman 2011:578). While Perón himself certainly did not make the gaucho“fashionable”, he did know how to “rework” it in new and compelling ways that socially and politically very much worked in his favor (Bockelman 2011:578).

Manipulation of the gaucho also lent itself to moralizing endeavors. When the famed epic poem Martín Fierro (perhaps the most famous representative of the genre) concludes by “taking leave of [the] hero at the frontier with the hope that someday he might return”, the result was a surge in novels, plays, and song sequels that glorified the more criminal components of the gaucho character (Umphrey 1918:154). Having the hero ride off into the sunset left the vulnerable audience to muse on its own about what Fierro’s (and other gaucho peers) future might look like, and the debauched world that they created reflected the social, political, and economic uncertainties of the time. Gangster gaucho storylines were an exceedingly negative sociological influence so much so that the author of Martín Fierro, José Hernández, took up his pen to write a sequel titled La Vuelta de Martín Fierro“in which the outlaw, now peaceful and law abiding, returns to take his place in the new life of the campo”, renouncing his bad boy bandido ways (Umphrey 1918:155). 

Nacionalismo Musical

It is difficult to dispute the widely held notion that gauchos played an extremely important role in the development of an Argentine nationality. While a gaucho rejected society, he was also jilted and cherished by it. The educated class that co-opted the gaucho and consciously gave him a refurbished socio-political voice and cultural image is also the one that would not allow him to enjoy a true participatory role in society or politics unless he was filtered through a more refined gaze and he served a purpose for their socio-political needs. Fierro and his fictional gaucho peers must have been aware of this since they preserved their divine right to seek independence, live according to their own agency, and to break laws that they felt to be ridiculous, inappropriate or most importantly, inapplicable to their situation. It is not just the decision to live on the margins and to take a particularly social-moral stance against the government that cultivates a sense of mystery around the gaucho persona by the end of the nineteenth century but also the seeming permission to do so granted by the lumpenbourgeoisie.

The musicality of gaucho prose contributed to two very crucial aspects of its successful distribution: it made poetry more attractive so that it would fit into the mainstream, and it made it much more accessible to a variety of different social demographics. As Bockelman explains:

The typical payador songbook was thirty-two pages long and consisted of multiple lyrics organized around a common urban theme or the life of a popular gaucho…In their focus on legendary rural stories and contemporary urban curiosities, they more closely resembled nineteenth-century American dime novels--only in this case the narratives were rendered in song verse, not prose (2011:583).

Putting written words to song results in the message becoming understandable to anyone, regardless of education level or social status. With a melodious accompaniment “now the interpretation is guided by the musical context” (Figueredo 2002:308), meaning that even the illiterate masses could be exposed to stories about the gauchos and follow along with their exploits. The common man and woman did not need to share written versions of such tales but could sing the words to spread them far and wide. The lives and adventures, policies and opinions, rejection and independence that punctuated a gaucho life were things that undoubtedly would have had an impact on those in seriously dire situations, desperate, worried, or who felt confused, angry, or simply fed up with the socio-political reality in which they lived. It gave the impression that the poems, with their catchy rhythms easily set to music, were of the people and for the people while at the same time totally relevant to national concerns and events.

Gaucho poetry coupled with payador balladry essentially oralized and popularized a new euphonious aural genre. Figueredo believes that a political-social crisis generates the perfect environment for music and poetry to interact (2002:299), a stance supported by Plesch who believes that gaucho poetry became exemplar of “musical nationalism” in action (2009:242). Particularly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when politics and society strained under the immense pressure of nationalistic growing pains, these particular niches of prose were tapped as perfect partners to accompany the fabrication of a sense of “Argentineness” (Plesch 2009:243). We see this in play during the 1880s when the image (or rather the marketing of it) of the gaucho and his “badly strung and out of tune” instrument morphed to become emblematic of Argentine guitar and singing styles. Once an embarrassment, the gaucho is now peaceful, noble even, as he strums on the declared guitarra nacional (national guitar) (Plesch 2009: 244).[2] In the cultural imagination of the time it was perhaps not too far of a leap to imagine this balladeer as dashingly macho and gentlemanly to boot. The gaucho’s metamorphosis from a position of civilization-opposing and barbarous “Other” to the “quintessence of all things Argentine” occurs in part by shifting mediums from the elite-oriented genre of poetry to a more encompassing musical one.

And so, at the end of the nineteenth century, as Argentine composers heeded the call to throw their hat in the ring to craft an Argentine (musical) identity that would complement other modes of “Argentineness” being pushed, they “stylized, homogenized, and reorganized” elements from gaucho poetry and the payador tradition resulting in a particular Argentinian brand of nacionalismo musical, the first cannon of modern Argentina in which the gaucho (and his patriotism) were a main fixture (Plesch 2009:247). By writing a song in verses that can be easily divided, the prose could become personal or political mantras. Experiencing the poem in a musical form “arouses other senses for interpretation and reception ... the auditory, the tactile, the kinetic, as well as the visual, are involved. Essentially, what we see with the gaucho genre is how the musicalizing of poetry transforms the text-audience-participant relationship.

Musical Narratives: the Transmission of Knowledge, Propaganda, and Dissent

The strategy to use gaucho poetry and payador balladry illustrates how collective dialogue and information dissemination does not have to be limited to newspapers, pamphlets, or booklets. To use the combination of popular writing with popular music styles as a new distribution technique ensured that whatever socio-political or moral message of the moment reached a wider audience. As Plesch so aptly points out, “constructing a nation involves a considerable amount of political and ideological manipulations” (2009:246). Knowingly and pointedly crafting symbols that are marketed to represent supposedly shared values help to both “reinforce feelings of belonging” and to “internalize a collective identity”, even when a duality as opposing as civilization versus barbarism (an extremely Argentine trope) is present (Plesch 2009:246).

An example of this in action is how the gaucho was so effectively used to “otherize” a different social sect: immigrants. Previously, it was the gaucho who was accused of drunken lawlessness, fornication, and other ills but discomfort with the mass influx of foreigners evoked panic among elite who felt that a “cultural incoherence” was cancerous to the “Argentineness” so carefully being crafted. These traits were thus reaffixed to the immigrant class, a political move executed by way of a cultural tool (music). For decades after it was the immigrant’s burden to be the “new site of barbarism…made responsible for the perceived fragmentation of the culture, debasement of the language, and loss of traditional values”, all things previously ascribed to the gaucho (Plesch 2009:246).

Just as the gaucho found comfort in his music so can the listener. A significant connection develops by listening to the gaucho as he laments, bemoans, or celebrates. Consider the following excerpt: Con la guitarra en la mano Ni las moscas se me arriman, Nadie me pone el pie encima, (Hernández 2004:9). Here, our gaucho character suggests that his music (voice, lyrics and song) are his greatest weapons against the annoying and relentless moscas (flies). It could be that the flies and overall scene that he describes are as they literally seem. That one’s guitar and music protect against the boredom and filthiness of the rural and homeless life. But even more likely is that the “flies” are the socio-political figures that try to control or force him to do something he does not want, or to live a life that is not what he wanted to live (figures such as the army, the government, the upper class, etc.) As long as he continues to sing, that is to keep proclaiming his truth, it cannot bring him closer or harm him; music is his greatest protection and security against adversity.

If we consider nacionalismo musical not just as a device to educate and persuade but also to dissent, it is possible that during the nineteenth century the dissemination of more anarchistic gaucho tunes was not entirely safe due to intense agitation and repression. Yet censorship along with the use of fear and force would not have diminished the need for artistic expression to narrate current events according to a more counterculture take as well. As Figueredo says, “the socio-political challenges and ideological questioning that predominate in society... influence not only the creation of the phenomenon but also the way it is expressed” (2002:302).

Conclusion

A vagabond cowboy, the gaucho is representative of fundamental aspects of national and individual Argentine identity. He cannot be defined as merely a spineless deserter who had abandoned society but rather must also be understood as the most patriotic figure due to his independent and extremely individual position in the face of intense repression and submission to the hands of the government and the bourgeoisie. For these reasons the gaucho became the voice and image of internal conflicts of a nation that was grappling with rapid industrialization, immigration, and urbanization Writers, poets, composers and the like (who occupied positions in which they could exert social and cultural influence) seized the payador style and the gaucho character to be used for their own nation-building and identity-forming interests. Nacionalismo musical has become one of the most iconic genres of national and political discourse in Argentina vis-à-vis gaucho representations that simultaneously criminalize and glorify life on the margins, by virtue of functioning as a literary device with a strong foothold in poetry and a musical genre with mass appeal.

Bibliography

Bockelman, Brian. “Between the Gaucho and the Tango: Popular Songs and the Shifting Landscape of Modern Argentine Identity, 1895-1915.” The American Historical Review 116(3): 577-601.

Hernández, José. 2004. Martin Fierro. Buenos Aires: Stockcero.

Ludmer, Josefina. 1996. “The Gaucho Genre”. In The Cambridge History of Latin American Literature: Discovery to Modernism, edited by Roberto González Echevarría and Enrique Pupo-Walker, 608-631. New York: Cambridge UP.

Figueredo, María L. 2002. “El eterno retorno entre la poesía y el canto popular: Uruguay, 1960-1985.” Revista canadiense de estudios hispánicos 26(1/2): 299-321.

Pinnell, Richard. 1984. “The Guitarist-Singer of Pre-1900 Gaucho Literature.” Latin American Music Review/Revista de Música Latinoamericana 5(2): 243-262.

Plesch, Melanie. 2009. “The Topos of the Guitar in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Argentina.” The Musical Quarterly 92(3/4): 242-278.

Roggiano, Alfredo A. and William J. Straub. 1974. “Personal Destiny and National Destiny in Martin Fierro.” In Latin American Literary Review 3(5): 37-49.