Black Music Research Journal最新文献

{"title":"Taking Care of Music: Gender, Arranging, and Collaboration in the Weston-Liston Partnership","authors":"L. Barg","doi":"10.5406/blacmusiresej.34.1.0097","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5406/blacmusiresej.34.1.0097","url":null,"abstract":"\"If you take care of your music, the music will take care of you\": that was the advice that vocalist Leon Thomas remembered receiving from Melba Liston (Kaplan 1999, 424). Thomas's first professional encounter with Liston occurred at a rehearsal with Art Blakey sometime in the late 1950s. (1) As he recalled it, Liston arrived to \"save the day\": arrangements in-hand, accompanied by her instrumental \"team\" of Walter Davis (piano) and Sahib Shihab (baritone saxophone). Liston gave the following directions to an unprepared Thomas: \"You do the singing, I'll do the arrangements!\" (424). Thomas's remembrances of Liston--her advice and the story of their first meeting--provide a useful starting point for exploring issues of gender, arranging, and collaboration in Liston's career. To \"take care of your music\" in the professional sense refers to musical activities and personal qualities historically coded as masculine in discourses on aesthetics and culture, such as discipline, autonomy, efficiency, and mastery. However, the phrase \"to take care of\" evokes feminine-coded practices and values: nurturing, selfless devotion, interdependence, and attention to detail. In her roles as arranger, composer, trombonist, musical director, and educator, Liston's career was defined by \"taking care of music\" in all senses of the phrase. Perhaps the most striking instance of how Liston took care of her music, however, is the Melba Liston Collection at the Center for Black Music Research. Liston's material legacy--as she meticulously collected, arranged, and donated it to the CBMR--consists almost entirely of music. Scores, to be precise: forty-three boxes of music manuscripts (scores, parts, lead sheets), and only a single letterbox of papers. The score-centered nature of Liston's archive, as well as the nature of the scores themselves, showcases her body of work as an arranger and composer working behind the scenes in jazz and popular music. Liston's collection reverses the historical conditions in which she produced her scores, making visible for the public the products of creative labor that were sources for musical performances, sources largely invisible to audiences and listeners during her lifetime. The forms the scores take perform another kind of reversal, marking practices and histories of collaboration, interaction, and co-creation rather than romantic notions of authorship and autonomy, which are commonly assumed when dealing with notated music. As such, Liston's notated archive--or more precisely, the performance-centered musical events they participated in shaping--also troubles gendered and raced narratives of heroic creation and individualism in jazz. This essay focuses on one musical moment from Liston's career, namely, her work with composer and pianist Randy Weston on the groundbreaking 1960 recording of the four-movement suite Uhuru Afrika. I examine issues of gender and collaboration in Liston's work as arranger, musical director, co-researcher, and c","PeriodicalId":354930,"journal":{"name":"Black Music Research Journal","volume":"4 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129407490","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Melba Liston: “Renaissance Woman”","authors":"Emmett G. Price","doi":"10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.34.1.0159","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.34.1.0159","url":null,"abstract":"The new Negro is a sober, sensible creature, conscious of his environment, knowing that not all is right, but trying hard to become adjusted to this civilization in which he finds himself by no will or choice of his own. He is not the shallow, vain, showy creature which he is sometimes advertised to be. He still hopes that the unreasonable opposition to his forward and upward progress will relent. But, at any rate, he is resolved to fight, and live or die, on the side of God and the Eternal Verities. --William Pickens \"The New Negro\" 1916 (1) (Gates, and Jarrett 2007, 84) All your life you have heard of the debt you owe 'Your People' because you have managed to have the things they have not largely had. --Marita O. Bonner \"On Being Young-- A Woman--and Colored\" 1925 (Wall 1995, 9) Melba Doretta Liston, the brilliant self-taught trombonist, composer/ arranger, and educator who challenged the gender status quo in jazz must be counted among those Black women whose tremendous accomplishments within the American musical landscape lay dormant for far too many years. A cultural nationalist, Liston utilized her own internal challenges as well as the pain and suffering of her people as muse, meaning, and manuscript for her artistic endeavors. This essay posits that we might better understand Liston's achievements, importance, influence, as well as her artistic and political motivations by viewing her and her work through the lens of the Harlem Renaissance. The movement's terms and cultural politics provide insight into Liston's personal experiences and professional realities. I hope to reveal Melba Liston as a \"renaissance woman\" as defined by an expanded reading of the intellectual Zeitgeist of the \"New Negro\" and glean historiographical insight about Liston (and by extension other jazz women) through the experiences of better-, but still under-documented Renaissance women writers. One may ask why it is important to understand Liston as a \"renaissance woman.\" The answer is simple: in order to correct the historical chronicle, it is not enough to cut and paste missing biographical details or to quietly insert the comprehensive accomplishments and accolades of hidden or forgotten voices. Just as Liston influenced and supported many of the voices that have been chronicled as significant contributors to jazz and black music, her dynamic contributions should be equally visible and included within the historical narrative of the music that she loved, nurtured, and nourished. The term \"renaissance woman\" references comprehensive influence across a multitude of expressions or fields and reflects a life-long legacy of impact. Liston exemplifies the term, and as a practitioner, teacher, and leading voice of her generation, deserves placement among the ranks of those who have reached the upper echelons of black cultural expression. Renowned author, educator, actress, and activist Dr. Maya Angelou proudly referred to herself as a \"global renaissance woman\" (http://m","PeriodicalId":354930,"journal":{"name":"Black Music Research Journal","volume":"31 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129194748","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"“We Never Kissed”: A Date with Melba and Strings","authors":"C. Keyes","doi":"10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.34.1.0057","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.34.1.0057","url":null,"abstract":"Pianist, composer/arranger, and former bandleader Raymond Scott discovered up-and-coming jazz/pop vocalist Gloria Lynne in the late 1950s. (1) Gloria Lynne recorded her debut album Miss Gloria Lynne on the Everest Record label in 1958, and it quickly garnered the attention of noted music critics. Jazz critics Nat Hentoff and Leonard Feather gave Miss Gloria Lynne \"thumbs up,\" which led to bookings at well-known jazz clubs in Manhattan, including the Village Gate and Birdland (see Lynne and Chilton 2000, 86). In 1959, following the success of her debut album, Lynne's label not only gave her the green light to record a sophomore album, Lonely and Sentimental, but also handed over complete artistic control. In response, she did something that was somewhat unprecedented for the time: request that a woman serve as the musical arranger for the project. Gloria Lynne's choice of arrangers was none other than another up-and-coming artist, Melba Liston. Musical collaboration between women artists was certainly a rarity, particularly for African-American women during the 1950s; most artistic decision making lay in the hands of white male producers and record executives. As Gloria Lynne reminisced, this type of partnership \"was unheard of in that day\" (Lynne interview, 2013). A history-making moment like this one deserves special attention. This essay explores the musical collaboration between vocalist Gloria Lynne and trombonist-composer-arranger Melba Liston for the album Lonely and Sentimental. In assessing the contributions that Melba Liston made in crafting the musical arrangements for Lonely and Sentimental, I draw extensively from oral history including personal experience narratives or \"conversational narratives,\" memoirs, and personal interviews. Prior to her recording date with Gloria Lynne, Melba Liston was performing with Dizzy Gillespie's orchestra around New York City. Her visibility as the lone female in the band, her proficiency on the trombone, an instrument perceived as masculine, and her role as arranger for the band, one often dominated by men, soon caught the attention of many observers, among them Gloria Lynne. Gloria Lynne recalls her first time meeting Melba Liston amidst the New York jazz scene of the 1950s: \"I met Melba and I was so impressed, because she was a girl. Melba Liston was just somebody [who] you really wanted to meet and be around all the time, because, she was just that sweet, and just that nice and outgoing, and very, very talented\" (ibid.). Soon after that initial meeting, Lynne was approached by Liston to perform one of her original songs, \"We Never Kissed,\" with the singer's trio. Liston's song became a fixture in the repertoire for Gloria Lynne's trio. When Lynne's sophomore album project transpired, with the idea to record it with strings, she requested Liston as musical arranger for the entire album: \"I asked her [Liston], 'Can you do strings?' It was her first string date, my first string date. I requested her; ","PeriodicalId":354930,"journal":{"name":"Black Music Research Journal","volume":"79 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131738180","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Black Women Working Together: Jazz, Gender, and the Politics of Validation","authors":"Tammy L. Kernodle","doi":"10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.34.1.0027","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.34.1.0027","url":null,"abstract":"In the essay \"Black Women and Music: A Historical Legacy of Struggle\" (2001), Angela Davis chronicles the cultural and historic trajectory black women musicians have advanced through music in their transition from free people to enslaved persons to free but oppressed people in relation to the context of their lives in Africa and America. While Davis situates her discussion in how black women have used spirituals and the blues as a means of developing social and political consciousness, her theoretical scope could easily be enlarged to include other forms of black music, most notably jazz. One of the arguments Davis raises concerns the common reading of black women's relationships with each other in the larger scope of popular culture. These relationships are often framed as competitive and antagonistic. Rarely has the complex and layered engagement between black women been acknowledged. In recent years, popular culture has perpetuated the trope of competitiveness, hostility, and violence between black women through social networks (e.g., Facebook, Twitter) and reality television (e.g., \"Basketball Wives,\" \"Real Housewives of Atlanta\"). These depictions have been used to stereotype black women, discredit their viability in certain social environments, and reject them as intellectual beings. But close examination of the social and familial relationships between women exposes a complex culture of engagement and socialization. These relationships are at times defined by layered and multifarious praxes through which collectives of black women have engaged in self-definition; created systems of knowledge that provided the skills to navigate political, social, and economic spheres; and formed \"safe spaces\" that have supported their process of brokering power. Why has this competitive narrative permeated popular culture and our readings of how black women engage with one another? One reason is that this narrative has been defined by emotional responses generated from the engagement between black men and women in public and private spheres. The supposed lack of \"good\" black men who can sustain \"good\" relationships with \"good\" black women serves as the undercurrent for competitive and sometimes toxic relationships between black women. This is furthered with the proliferation of the mythology of the \"strong black woman\" and her engagement with \"weak black men\" and the supposed subversion of social and power structures that define masculinity. These ideological beliefs raise a number of questions when considered in relation to the interactions between black women and men in larger contexts of popular culture. How has the competitive narrative framed how black women musicians are read and defined within popular culture history and criticism? To understand this we must interrogate how the narrative of competition and the engagement of black women musicians have been documented in the historiography of jazz. The narrative of the competitive personality or the i","PeriodicalId":354930,"journal":{"name":"Black Music Research Journal","volume":"23 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128933656","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Smile Orange: Melba Liston in Jamaica","authors":"D. Spencer","doi":"10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.34.1.0065","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.34.1.0065","url":null,"abstract":"A switchboard operator answers calls while applying eye shadow. Two waiters exchange stories in the kitchen backroom. The new busboy learns to use deodorant while proudly wearing a bright orange vest. An assistant manager telephones home to speak to his wife who casually converses while lying in bed stroking the family gardener. Welcome to the Mocho Beach Hotel that serves as the setting for Smile Orange (1971), Trevor D. Rhone's (1940-2009) comedy stage play about Jamaican tourism. The fictional third-rate hotel is located on the north coast of Jamaica where, as a New York Times reviewer put it, the \"tourists are funny and crass and the natives who serve and exploit them are crass and funny\" (Eder 1976). However, Jamaican author Rhone wrote Smile Orange in an auspicious moment that was not at all \"crass\" or \"funny\" in the minds of most Jamaicans. Signs were already abundant that political tides would turn in the next national election, when People's National Party candidate Michael Manley would become the next Prime Minister. Indeed, the plot of Smile Orange reflects the urgency of one priority of Manley's platform: the need for Jamaica to resist economic domination of western superpowers. Interactions between workers and tourists in Smile Orange expose the plight of black Jamaicans seeking economic advancement in spite of the imbalance of power emblematic of the tourist economy of a formerly colonized nation. In 1976, the same year Manley was elected to a second term, Smile Orange was adapted as a film, Smile Orange: The Jamaican Experience. Shot in the style of a U.S. blaxploitation film, Smile Orange was, nevertheless, distinctly Jamaican, with some aspects reflecting the flowering of Jamaican culture that accompanied Manley's broader social and economic programs for national autonomy. Not only was it filmed entirely in Jamaica, but its score veered from those of other films in the genre by featuring Jamaican folk music forms and newer Jamaican popular music styles, including reggae and ska. The composer, however, was not Jamaican, but an African-American woman with a very different relationship to Jamaican culture than to the tourists represented in the film, whose asymmetrical power relations mirrored those of the respective nations. Melba Liston had moved from Los Angeles to Kingston in 1973, the year after Manley's ascendance to Prime Minister, to accept a position as director of a contemporary performing arts program. She was soon busy contributing to the national celebration of Jamaican culture of the 1970s in a number of roles. Three years after composing the musical score for Smile Orange: The Jamaican Experience (1976), she served as composer/arranger and musical director for The Dread Mikado (1979), a historically significant theater production that would be celebrated as emblematic of the Jamaican cultural revolution, though it ran during a less optimistic moment in the Manley government. With the economy crumbling around him, Manl","PeriodicalId":354930,"journal":{"name":"Black Music Research Journal","volume":"21 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122207748","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Not One to Toot Her Own Horn(?): Melba Liston’s Oral Histories and Classroom Presentations","authors":"M. H. O’Connell, S. Tucker","doi":"10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.34.1.0121","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.34.1.0121","url":null,"abstract":"In a 2008 NPR Jazz Profile, Nancy Wilson narrates a pivotal moment in Melba Liston's youth when Louis Armstrong recognized the talents of the sixteen-year-old trombonist in the Lincoln Theatre house band and encouraged her to take a solo. Wilson states: \"But the shy, soft spoken trombonist has always been more interested in writing music, than in playing and soloing.\" The next voice we hear is that of a much older Liston reflecting back: \"I didn't want to solo. I didn't even desire to. No, No, No. I was not the solo type.\" This is the kind of response Liston often gave to interviewers and band leaders on the topic of soloing. It is often interpreted as an expression of her shy, modest demeanor, and sometimes as a gendered decline of the masculinized subject position of the jazz soloist. (1) Her solos in performance, and on record, then, become occasions for audiences, fellow musicians, and scholars to marvel at this introverted player, who preferred to remain in the \"background,\" but whose talent was so great that she could, when pressed, overcome her reticence to produce a brilliant solo. In this article, we listen carefully--not to Liston's trombone solos on record (which also deserve dedicated scholarship)--but to what she said about her work and life in jazz. We construct our archive for this paper out of tellings for which audio recordings are available: a selection of class presentations, oral histories, and interviews between 1973 and 1996. We listen across Liston's many tellings of her life to hear how she renavigated and renegotiated--in face-to-face interaction--situated encounters with jazz ideals in tension with one another. Our close listening not only opens new perspectives on Liston's understanding of her life and career but also helps us to tune in to fuller understandings of multiple dimensions of jazz practice, jazz historiography, and the jazz archive. We also argue that listening to her oral navigations of a life in jazz-as-work suggests methodologies for jazz knowledge production in writing and archive building, which are employed by us in this coauthored article, and also by the Melba Liston Research Collective as a working group in-progress. Listening Guide Before we embark on our tour of aural engagement with Liston's audio-recorded life-story tellings, we would like to highlight some of the questions and approaches that emerged as especially exciting to us. We begin with a consideration of how Liston's tellings engage a critical interplay between the ideals of jazz as a collaborative endeavor and jazz as a soloist's art. What can her experiences--and narrative and performative strategies for telling them to others--teach us about gendered jazz sociality in jazz-as-work? What can this teach us about jazz-as-history? How can they help us to listen to other jazz oral histories as jazz interactions and how might they intervene in the ways we practice and interpret jazz oral history? What do they tell us about \"the role of per","PeriodicalId":354930,"journal":{"name":"Black Music Research Journal","volume":"106 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116855916","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Prince, Miles, and Maceo: Horns, Masculinity, and the Anxiety of Influence","authors":"Griffin Woodworth","doi":"10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.33.2.0117","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.33.2.0117","url":null,"abstract":"It is New Year's Eve of 1987; Prince is performing his Sign 'O' The Times stage show on the new soundstage of his recently completed recording complex, Paisley Park. The event, a two-hundred-dollar-a-plate benefit for a local charity, is one of only a handful of occasions when Prince will perform this show in America (having done his Sign 'O' the Times tour in Europe during the summer of 1987, Prince elected not to mount an American leg of the tour). Nonetheless, the night will be remembered primarily as the only time that Prince and Miles Davis performed together, the zenith of their on-again, off-again collaboration (Nilsen 1999, 251). Even though he is performing within a framework completely controlled by Prince--Prince's song, his stage show, his band, even his own building--Miles Davis's presence shifts the center of gravity for the short time he is onstage. Davis takes the stage only once, during a half-hour extended jam on the song \"Beautiful Night,\" and the two artists have a tense interaction. Davis begins tentatively: he strolls on without introduction and begins getting a feel for the groove (a harmonically static D-dorian vamp) by playing and repeating a simple two-bar motive, little more than the flat seventh, fifth, and root. Prince stands downstage, facing away from the audience, his attention focused on his band. Davis paces back and forth across the upstage space between Prince and the band, his horn and eyes angled inscrutably downward. After a twelve-bar elaboration of his initial motive, Davis starts exploring, trilling in his middle register before breaking out some high notes, allowing a few to sound dirty and cracked as he pushes toward a breakthrough. Throughout their time onstage together, Prince seems to lack the patience required to allow Davis to explore the groove and develop an interesting solo. Just as Davis begins pushing into his upper register, Prince calls an audible, cuing a six-beat turnaround--one of several prearranged riffs that the band plays on Prince's cue--that interrupts the development of Davis's solo. Davis is silent for the next six bars, then reenters with a more aggressive version of his first motive, shifted off the beat and played at a higher intensity, full of cracked notes. Two bars later Prince cues a single \"hit\" on the downbeat of a measure (a trick that he adapted years earlier from James Brown's live show); three bars after that Prince again cues the six-bar turnaround. This time Davis enters hard on the heels of the turnaround, playing the most aggressive phrase of his solo, sixteenth-note runs that thrust upward and then double back. But after four bars of what could be a spectacular display by Davis, Prince cues another down-beat \"hit\" and Davis breaks off his sixteenth-note motion, returning to his original motive, during which Prince again cues the turnaround. Prince is hyperkinetic, cuing his band to play more hits and turnarounds during Davis's solo: first one, then a double, then","PeriodicalId":354930,"journal":{"name":"Black Music Research Journal","volume":"30 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126364864","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"National Symbol or “a Black Thing”?: Rumba and Racial Politics in Cuba in the Era of Cultural Tourism","authors":"Rebecca M. Bodenheimer","doi":"10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.33.2.0177","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.33.2.0177","url":null,"abstract":"The Afro-Cuban music and dance genre rumba has historically been considered una cosa de negros (a black thing) and reviled due to racialized stereotypes that link the practice with el bajo mundo (the low life), excessive alcohol use, and violence. Nevertheless, the socialist Revolutionary government has sought to elevate rumba's status during the past half century as part of a larger goal of foregrounding and valorizing the African contributions to Cuban identity and culture. In addition to rumba's association with blackness, it is often portrayed as a particularly potent symbol of the masses and working-class identity, which constitutes another, perhaps more significant, reason why the Revolution has aimed to harness rumba to its cultural nationalist discourse. Finally, unlike Afro-Cuban religious practices, which until the early 1990s were heavily marginalized within the context of an official policy of \"scientific atheism,\" rumba is a secular practice. In short, it is the most significant and popular black-identified tradition on the island. In this article, I discuss the contemporary situation of rumba performance in various Cuban cities, highlighting the impact of the cultural tourism industry and arguing that it reinforces, with both positive and negative effects for musicians, the long-standing racialization of rumba as una cosa de negros. I believe that despite the discursive valorization of the practice found in much Cuban scholarship and political rhetoric, rumba continues to be identified with a particular and marginalized sector of the population. In many ways, the complex situation of rumba performance conforms to the more general trend of contemporary racial politics on the island. While it would be very difficult to prove that rumba faces racial bias in the era of cultural tourism, particularly as this would be a politically sensitive issue for an American researcher to raise with representatives of the Cuban state, my primary aim is to foreground the experiences and perceptions of musicians vis-a-vis the continuing racialization of rumba. Rumba's Place within the National Cultural Imaginary Primarily influenced by the instruments, rhythmic patterns, formal features, and dances from Central and West African traditions, rumba has always been a hybrid musical practice that also integrates elements of European melody and Spanish language and poetic forms. Rumba emerged as the main musical accompaniment for parties and secular festivities in poor black and racially mixed communities in western Cuba in the mid-to-late nineteenth century. Although a decidedly secular performance tradition, rumba was influenced by percussion ensembles and dances associated with both sacred and profane African traditions, primarily those of Bantu origin such as yuka and makuta (Leon 1991; Crook 1992). This close association with Afro-Cuban sacred practices stems from rumba's probable emergence within cabildos de nation (Martinez Rodriguez 1998), colonial-e","PeriodicalId":354930,"journal":{"name":"Black Music Research Journal","volume":"07 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128994198","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"U.S. Army Black Regimental Bands and the Appointments of Their First Black Bandmasters","authors":"Peter M. Lefferts","doi":"10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.33.2.0151","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.33.2.0151","url":null,"abstract":"The black regimental bands and their bandmasters in U.S. Army service between the Civil War and World War I comprised a fluid yet tight little community of soldier-musicians. Conspicuous in their own day, these units and their leadership teams are by no means familiar to modern readers. Replacement of white by black bandmasters in this community in the first decade of the twentieth century represented in its day an important public battle in the struggle for civil rights and racial fairness in the military. The following narrative offers a fuller account of this battle than has previously been available, but--full warning--the story is going to get a little dense. A bit of necessary background will begin to set the stage. Some Necessary Background There were only four regular regiments of African-American soldiers in the U.S. Army from 1870 to 1917. These were the Ninth and Tenth Cavalry Regiments (the men of the Tenth were the original Buffalo Soldiers) and the Twenty-Fourth and Twenty-Fifth Infantry Regiments. (1) They were primarily stationed far from major white centers of population in the American South and West for most of their history before 1920, and they were mainly deployed against those perceived to be people of color: Native Americans, Mexicans, the Spanish in Cuba, and the Spanish and natives in the Philippines. These regiments had white officers, and each had a regimental band under an enlisted man--a sergeant, who was appointed chief musician. From the bands' inception, the latter was a position held by a white man. He was the lowest-ranking white soldier in the unit and the only white soldier who was not a commissioned officer. (2) Before 1907, the highest rank to which a black bandsman in the regular army could aspire was the number two spot--principal musician in the infantry and chief trumpeter in the cavalry (a terminological distinction that began to fade in the records after the turn of the century in favor of principal musician or assistant band leader). Other secondary musical leadership roles for black sergeants were as chief trumpeter in the infantry and drum major. (The bandmasters of the four regular black regiments over the entire history of each unit are listed in Appendix I.) The post of chief musician was a particularly desirable one simply in financial terms, and thus the injustice of reserving the position for whites was economic as well as racial. The key point here is that monthly base pay and total monthly earnings could be substantially different amounts for an army musician. To begin with, remuneration could be significantly increased by private income from the band's outside engagements, which could sometimes equal the amount earned in base pay. And, in addition, bandsmen also had sufficient free time to work at a second trade if they had skills that were in demand, such as barber, baker, carpenter, or mason, earning extra-duty pay directly from the army that could also equal or exceed their base pay. (Th","PeriodicalId":354930,"journal":{"name":"Black Music Research Journal","volume":"294 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121375761","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Rhythms of Culture: Djembe and African Memory in African-American Cultural Traditions","authors":"Tanya Y. Price","doi":"10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.33.2.0227","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.33.2.0227","url":null,"abstract":"An intriguing cultural phenomenon has been developing over the past forty years in dance studios and festivals in the United States and abroad: traditional African culture is being diffused through formal and informal instruction in the African arts. Among the most notable of the cultural arts being taught are drum and dance traditions. Because of the efforts of Africans who have migrated to other countries and the work of their students, the djembe drum has grown from relatively obscure origins (among the Mandingue people of West Africa) to become the most popular African drum of thousands worldwide (Charry 2000). (Master drummer Mamady Keita estimated that \"not just a thousand but a million\" people listened to his teaching regarding the djembe [Keita 2011]). This phenomenon has not only exposed non-African populations to traditional African cultural practices, it has also become a vehicle by which people of African descent have reconnected with African roots--values of ancestors from which there has been significant separation due to the transatlantic slave trade. In the United States, few African Americans are aware of the extent to which they participate in the \"stream of African culture.\" However, through African-American musical forms, African musical idioms have become dominant in world music (Chernoff 1985,3). African Americans have taken a leading role in establishing African cultural influences in the world. One reason for this is that many musical realizations contain elements that are directly related to African cultural practices. In addition, many connections with core values of the culture were established through early involvement with movements that emphasized African drum and dance in the United States. By examining certain developments in African-American music with an emphasis on African drumming (and an added emphasis on the djembe), I will substantiate some of the recognized connections between African and African-American musical practices. My perspective will be that of a cultural anthropologist who studies the cultural products of the African Diaspora and who is also a practitioner--one who has performed as a drummer for the better part of her life, with experiences ranging from playing drum set (gospel, jazz, and reggae) to intense studies with a renowned master drummer from the Malinke tradition. This perspective has informed my readings of African cultural continuities in significant ways. The History and Location of Mandingue Djembe and Dunun Drumming Traditions In West Africa, the contemporary center of the djembe and dunun (three bass drum) orchestra runs along the upper Niger River from Faranah, Guinea, to Segou, Mali, with extensions stretching east into Burkina Faso; south into Cote D'Ivoire, southwest into Conakry, Guinea; and west toward the Malian cities of Kita and Kayes (Charry 2000,214). The primary urban centers of djembe drumming are the capital cities of Guinea (Conakry) and Mali (Bamako); however, one a","PeriodicalId":354930,"journal":{"name":"Black Music Research Journal","volume":"116 47","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"120827723","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}