JAZZ JOURNEYS

Inhalt / Contents:

Alan Stanbridge

Travel Stories: Metaphors of Journeying in Jazz

Abstract
Throughout its often complex and contested history, jazz has been metaphorized in a variety of ways. But it is perhaps the metaphor of the journey that has been the most prevalent and persistent in the history of jazz, with jazz performers consistently drawing inspiration from metaphors and allegories of travelling, of voyaging, of wayfaring, of exploring, of border-crossing. Beyond issues of touring, life on the road, and the iconography of transportation, the broader metaphors of the journey, of travelling, and of exploration have been common themes in jazz discourse, especially as expressed in album titles, employed to signify new musical styles and approaches, and new forms of experimentation and innovation. Jazz has also engaged with the iconography of space and space travel, which was often employed by artists and record labels as an indicator of modish topicality and ‘futuristic’ ambitions. A common thread running throughout these metaphorical concepts is that they have most often been associated with teleological, goal-directed narratives in which allegories of journeying and exploring almost inevitably involve affirmative visions of arrival and discovery.
Against this background, the article concludes with a brief consideration of those metaphors that might be regarded as corollaries or complements to these linear narratives, acknowledging a less tidy but perhaps more nuanced conceptualization of creativity and originality – namely, metaphors of paths not followed, of roads not taken, of unexpected detours, of unexplored regions.

Þorbjörg Daphne Hall, Ásbjörg Jónsdóttir

Musical Journeys to Iceland: Foreign Impact on Local Music Life, 1920–1960

Abstract
The article examines the various journeys jazz musicians took to Iceland between 1930 and 1960. The early 20th century was colored by Iceland’s struggle for independence from Denmark, and cultural leaders were reoccupied with ‘modernizing’ the culture, showing that it belonged to the ‘civilized’ Western world as a nation among nations. The music scene in Iceland was underdeveloped compared with mainland Europe (which was the role model), and foreign musicians took on numerous musical roles to compensate for the lack of local specialization. These musicians mainly came from Denmark, the UK, Germany, Austria, and Hungary, and they influenced the scene in various ways. Foreign influence also came with Icelandic musicians who returned to the country after studying abroad. Jazz appreciation societies invited touring musicians to the country to ensure a higher quality of concerts than local musicians could provide. The occupation by the Allied Forces during WWII had an immense impact on the establishment of jazz and fueled its development. The troops brought jazz records and bands and took part in local entertainment. Among the military staff were jazz musicians who taught and performed with local musicians at military dances, on TV, and on the radio. After the war, the US military kept its base and continued to impact the jazz scene. However, because of Iceland’s fledgling national identity, authorities saw certain foreign influences as a threat to Icelandic culture and society. While European high culture was valued, jazz was onsidered uncivilized and even barbaric due to its African and American roots.

Lawrence Davies

Ambassador of the Blues: Performing Diaspora with Memphis Slim in Europe

Abstract
Memphis Slim (1915–1988) was one of America’s leading postwar blues performers. Beginning his career as a “race” recording artist after World War II, Slim moved to France in 1962, where he became a regular sight in European jazz clubs, concert halls, and on screen. Yet, despite this long and varied career, existing accounts of his music are overwhelmingly American-centric: historians neglect the 26 years – more than half his professional life – that the pianist spent in Europe. Drawing on recordings, interviews, and film, this article traces Memphis Slim’s expatriate life and work. I argue that Slim performed a diaspora identity, one that combined his audiences’ expectations of him as an “authentic” blues singer with personal and collective aspirations of African American international mobility. Addressing both the promise and precarity of the migrant experience, Slim became an ambassador for an emerging diasporic blues culture, one that counters existing scholarly accounts of the blues’s international dissemination and reception.

Dan Cahn

Forecasting Influences of Israeli, Jewish, and Arab Music on Israeli Jazz: Albert Piamenta and the First Israeli Ethno-Jazz Record, Mezare Israel Yekabtzenu

Abstract
The international recognition of Israeli jazz musicians and their unique style – which was influenced by Israeli, Jewish and Arabic music – began in 1996, when bass player Avishai Cohen joined Chick Corea’s sextet. Yet these types of influences on Israeli jazz were already apparent in Israel during the 1960s. Most Israeli jazz musicians at that time were of European Ashkenazi descent. In contrast, Albert Piamenta came from a family of Spanish descent known as Sephardim, a sub sect of the Mizrachi Jews, who had immigrated to Israel from Arabic and Muslim countries. Piamenta began his professional career at the age of 12 accompanying folk dances on accordion, later switching to saxophone and clarinet. Due to his unique musical upbringing immersed in Jewish and Arabic music, Piamenta played jazz that incorporated these musical inf luences, as heard on the first instrumental Israeli ethno-jazz record, Mezare Israel Yekabtzenu (1973).
Piamenta’s quartet with Dan Gottfried on piano recorded three melodies of Israeli songs, two Yiddish songs, and an Arabic folk song. The recording jazz renditions of local melodies coincides with the global phenomenon of non-American jazz musicians incorporating local music of their countries into their jazz repertoire, thus producing a localized jazz hybrid. The importance of Piamenta’s recording lies in documenting the glocalization process amongst Israeli jazz musicians in the 1970s, which continues in the music of many Israeli jazz musicians today.

Kira Dralle

The Historiography of Myths & the Racial Imagination: Recontextualizing Joséphine Baker in the Jim Crow South and the Third Reich

Abstract
This paper brings into question the historiography of Joséphine Baker, who has repeatedly been described as the image of the jazz age, yet who rarely receives serious consideration as a musician or vocalist in music scholarship. Through a critique of positivism and paranoid readings, this paper argues for reparative readings of lived experience, while also demonstrating the ways in which jazz historiography and scholarship are dictated by myths of nationalism, irreconcilable “facts,” and the racial imagination in social consciousness. Following the work of Andy Fry and Christopher Moore, this paper weaves together non-traditional primary and secondary source material to understand how Baker understood and manipulated her positionality in Weimar-era Austria and Nazi-occupied Paris in order to survive and flourish within a hostile society. I argue that Baker achieved this directly through a virtuosic manipulation of her voice, as she understood the ways in which national myth as well as the gendered racial imaginary would distort its reception.

Marie Buscatto

Jazz as a Way to Escape One’s Social “Destiny”: Lessons from Professional Japanese Jazz Musicians

Abstract

In the past, jazz has often been associated with social emancipation and political criticism. But this association seems long gone: jazz has mostly become a niche music for an educated upper middle class. However, even if jazz is not an obvious social emancipation tool anymore, it still enables professional jazz musicians to resist their social fate and find ways to express themselves despite economic and social hurdles. This is what my recent sociological research in Japan has revealed. Jazz is a unique way for male and female Japanese upper-middle-class musicians to resist their social “destinies,” a personal resistance implicitly and quietly developed through their daily actions. A jazz life thus appears as a way to express oneself through music. Based on extensive digital and in-person ethnography conducted in Japan since 2017, this paper explores how jazz enables professional Japanese musicians to escape middle-class conventions and expectations and to find ways to express their individual selves openly. This is not about changing society, but more about changing their own destiny and expressing themselves through music. When compared with French, Spanish, or English jazz musicians, to name a few empirically based contemporary examples, professional Japanese jazz musicians are not unique. In the early 21st century, jazz may have become one way for some members of the upper middle class to develop their self-expression and to escape their social fate around the world.

Scott Currie

No Jazz Without Festival? Reconsidering the Festivalization of Jazz as Pilgrimage

Abstract

For the few first decades of this past jazz century – during the period of its greatest commercial popularity – the music resounded most characteristically within thoroughly quotidian socio-cultural contexts of predominantly commodified leisure. Since 1948, however, when the first international festivals heralded the emergence of an increasingly globalized jazz world enduring through tumult and transformation to the present, the inexorably increasing geographic ubiquity and economic importance of festivals has made it rather difficult even to conceive the question: why would thousands of artists and audience members have journeyed the whole world over for ephemeral events in places where, in most cases, nothing notable in jazz history ever happened, except of course for previous festivals?

Laura Emmery

The Bad Plus Stravinsky: Metrical Displacement, Segmentation, and Stratification in the Jazz Trio’s Original Works

Abstract

In this article, I examine how Igor Stravinsky’s techniques permeate the expression and aesthetic of the modernist jazz trio the Bad Plus. Transcending their obvious homage to Stravinsky with their arrangements of “Variation d’Apollon” (2008) and The Rite of Spring (2014), Stravinsky’s influence extends into the trio’s original compositions. I will focus on their three original works, “Pound for Pound” (2012), “Seven Minute Mind” (2012), and “Prehensile Dream” (2005), and analyze their use of Stravinskian techniques, such as segmentation, metrical displacement, and stratification.

Francesco Martinelli

The First Journey Back: The International Youth Band, Newport 1958

Abstract

This essay discusses the contrasting dialogue in the field of jazz in the US and Europe, using the specific example of the International Youth Band, which performed at Newport in 1958. The author examines the respective attitudes, the roles of different agents in the field, and both the inception and the long-term consequences of the event. In the mid-1950s there was some talk of creating an all-European band, but no Continental forum for modern jazz that was comparable to North America actually emerged until the Newport Jazz Festival’s initiative to create a European big band showcasing nascent talent. Despite its name, the International Youth Big Band only featured players from Europe. The band’s promoter and musical director traversed the Continent to audition musicians, who then convened in New York to rehearse. The venture was fraught with problems from the outset, but the band ultimately gave a successful performance in Newport before returning to Europe to play in the Netherlands and in Belgium. A live recording was also released of the Newport concert. Using contemporary press articles in several languages along with interviews with surviving personnel, the article discusses the ideology behind the project, the practical challenge of collecting information not previously available in English, the problems encountered, the musicians involved, and the event’s aftermath.

Harri Heinilä

Jazz Dance, Jazz Music, and Cultural Transference: Changing Meanings of Jazz Across Generations

Abstract
Since its inception in 1928, Harlem’s Lindy Hop has arguably been the most important jazz dance. In this essay, I compare the terminology of the Lindy Hop used by the older African American Harlem-based jazz dance generations to the terminology used among younger, mostly white, jazz dancers. The first of these newer generations emerged in the early 1980s with the revival of interest in the Lindy Hop. Unsurprisingly, my research reveals differences between the generations in their use of the terminology but also some surprising similarities. I have also explored reasons for these shifts and connected them to the larger dance scene of the time. I conclude that the main difference between the older Harlem jazz dancers, who were connected with the legacy of the Savoy Ballroom, and the mainly white newcomers of the 1980s, who mostly resided outside Harlem, was their use of “swing dance”-related terms with reference to the lindy hop. This terminology took off in New York in the 1980s and later also in Harlem, which is striking because these terms were rarely used in Harlem in the past.

Lucas Henry, Klaus Frieler, Gabriel Solis, Martin Pfleiderer, Simon Dixon, Frank Höger, Tillman Weyde, Hélène-Camille Crayencour

Dig That Lick: Exploring Patterns in Jazz with Computational Methods

Abstract
The importance of musical patterns to jazz is well established in the scholarly literature, in musicians’ discourse, and in fan lore. However, research into pattern usage has so far mostly been based on manual analyses of jazz recordings and transcriptions. This paper reports on some findings of a collaborative project on pattern usage in jazz improvisation that uses computational methods for transcription and analysis of recordings and a large database. After outlining the concept and existing research on patterns and licks in jazz improvisation, the paper introduces the approach of the project, the interactive analysis webtools, and the database that covers one hundred years of US jazz history. The authors then present three case studies: The first traces the transmission of a particular epitomic bebop lick. This lick originated with the main bebop musicians (Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie) but is still used by modern post-bop players (Michael Brecker, Chris Potter). The second case study investigates a short cadential formula that is used frequently throughout jazz history and is a common building-block for longer patterns. The third example scrutinizes the concept of ‘post-Coltrane’ improvisation by looking at an extended ascending diatonic scale, which was played by Coltrane in his solo on “Blue Train” (1957) and later by other soloists, who are often described as ‘post-Coltrane’ or Coltrane-influenced.

Magdalena Fuernkranz

Gladys Bentley: From “Brown Bomber of Sophisticated Songs” to “Gender Nonconforming, Lesbian Superstar” of the Harlem Renaissance

Abstract

Dressed in a white tuxedo and top hat, Gladys Bentley sang lewd parodies of popular songs and scatted original blues songs, eventually becoming one of the most ambiguous protagonists of the Harlem Renaissance. The entertainer was not only famous for accompanying herself on the piano, she was also reportedly flirting with women in the audience, calling out men, openly singing about sexual relationships, and even marrying a woman in 1928. During the ultra-conservative McCarthy era, however, Bentley renounced her homosexuality and reconciled her image with heteronormative standards. This paper discusses Gladys Bentley’s biography and performance of sexual identities, focusing on how her public images and performance personas were represented during her career and historicized.
The aim is to show what role the representation of Gladys Bentley plays in jazz history, in popular culture, and for the LGBTQ+ community. Beyond the focus on gender in questioning socially produced differences and resulting social inequalities, I also reflect on other categories such as class, race, body, and sexuality, which have contributed to the myth of Gladys Bentley.

Emiliano Sampaio

Artistic Research in Jazz: A Case Study in Jazz Composition for Large Ensemble

Abstract
Artistic research is a research discipline in which the creative process serves as the main methodology for conducting research. In music, artistic research is generally interdisciplinary and executed systematically, with doctoral projects conducted by artists, whose focus of interest can be either an art object or a process. Through artistic experimentation and academic research, the artist deepens their understanding of the research object and ideally generates both artistic and scholarly results. My doctoral research focused on the composition and performance of music for a large ensemble combining two important traditions: the symphony orchestra and the jazz big band. The inspiration for the research project was the question: how can we foster communication between jazz and classical musicians, empowering them to collaborate in large ensemble contexts?
The research comprised four distinct artistic experiences (from 2017 to 2021), which can be found in my dissertation. This paper contributes to the debate on artistic research in jazz, examining the methodology and evaluation criteria of the discipline, as well as its possible benefits to jazz studies. To do this, I focus on the first practical case study conducted during the project, which was the first step in my artistic exploration.

Bernd Hoffmann

Pyramids on the Red Square: The Tours of the Kurt Edelhagen Orchestra behind the Iron Curtain and to the Middle East (1964–1966)

Abstract

The two international tours of the Kurt Edelhagen All Star Band in 1964 and 1965/66 add a new facet to the ensemble’s diverse activities as a “multi-purpose orchestra”: Alongside performing as a jazz orchestra for the radio of the West German Broadcasting Corporation (Landesrundfunkanstalt für Nordrhein-Westfalen), teaching jazz at the Cologne Music Academy, and working in film and TV, travelling as a “ jazz ambassador” for the Federal Republic of Germany offers a new and unusual occupation. Using the tours to the USSR/GDR and – one and a half years later – to the Middle East as examples, I discuss their various political implications by looking at musical repertoires, the contact with foreign audiences, and the censorship measures of the host countries. Edelhagen’s band was a “salaried” jazz orchestra at a public radio station; thus, their tours were accompanied by intensive media coverage. Detailed sources, including internal debates at the West German Radio station about such travel activities, illuminate an unfamiliar chapter of the politically colored West German jazz representation.
The response to the two tours was extremely different: The journey behind the Iron Curtain thrilled tens of thousands of Soviet and East German jazz fans, and later, the press in the jazz orchestra’s home country. By contrast, the trip to the Middle East, planned as an attraction by West German cultural institutes, met with no response at all. All that remains as a memory is the performance of a Beatles song on the steps of the Cheops pyramid.

Nicolas Pillai
Lessons from the Studio Floor: New Critical Approaches to Jazz Television

Abstract
By comparing experiential accounts of making Jazz 625 (BBC, tx. 1964–1966), Jazz at the Maltings (BBC2, tx. 1968–1969), Jazz 1080 (2018), and Jazz 625 Live! For One Night Only (tx. 3 May 2019), the article argues that (a) jazz on television can best be understood through a detailed understanding of invisible labor and institutionalized processes onset; and (b) that jazz on television is limited by the systemic inequalities of the current broadcasting environment. As an account of the author’s fellowship project, the article is written in a self-ref lexive mode to highlight movement through different methodological approaches, characterized as journeys.