Jazz Places: How Performance Spaces Shape Jazz History by Kimberly Hannon Teal (review)

Abstract

past, and class structures, even when the attendees represent a variety of direct experiences with the language or culture. With several vignettes, she shows that music and dance play a role in these assertions of identity. She suggests that a “strongexoticimperialism is at work in conveying Old Russia” in these social events (185). Each vignette takes as its subject the performance of Georgian and socalled “gypsy” musics; costume, status, and the masking of Self; and the kinetic persuasion of dance in social contexts. Such displays interact with Orientalism and notions of the Russian folk to create an enchanted, mythical, and idyllic Russia that is partly built on the older tropes that First Wave Russians had established. Musics and dances of various types connect with this idealism and unite this nowheterogenous community, which contains more diverse Russian American identities than it did a hundred years earlier. Zelensky concludes the text with a brief epilogue that quickly summarizes the book’s main points. She succeeds in arguing that First Wave Russian émigrés created a foundation for Russian American identity and American imaginings of Russianness, while also navigating and incorporating culturalpolitical happenings over the course of the century. Ultimately, Zelensky convincingly asserts that music was an intrinsic part of this continually revised and reconstituted Russian American subcultural identity, and she persuasively provides an equally important history of how First Wave Russian émigrés are an integral part of mainstream American identity formation.