Black Music Research Journal最新文献

{"title":"Two Strikes and the Double Negative: The Intersections of Gender and Race in the Cases of Female Jazz Saxophonists","authors":"Yoko Suzuki","doi":"10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.33.2.0207","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.33.2.0207","url":null,"abstract":"On January 1,2012,1 was invited to a party at my friend's house in Brooklyn, New York, where about ten jazz musicians gathered and celebrated the New Year over food and drinks. They knew me both as a jazz saxophonist who worked from the late 1990s to the early 2000s and as a researcher who conducted fieldwork in the late 2000s in New York City. Some of them helped me to connect with female jazz saxophonists to interview for my dissertation research. After talking about my research and several female saxophonists' remarkable success in recent years, a white male (and friend) mentioned, \"You know, white guys are the least favored in the scene.\" \"Yes, that's very true,\" another white male immediately responded. According to those two men, black musicians are more appreciated and female musicians attract more attention. In a similar way, one of my musician friends in Pittsburgh told me recently, \"You're a hot commodity because you're a woman sax player. I'm a white guy, nobody cares.\" These white male musicians' comments suggest that two different systems of preference are at work here: black musicians over white musicians because of authenticity, and female musicians over male musicians because of novelty. As a result, they perceive a certain hierarchy in the jazz scene: black men, black women, white (nonblack) women, and white (nonblack) men. This grading, whether valid or not, is different from the ones seen in many areas in American society where white males are often ranked the highest. More importantly, their comments demonstrate that the instrumental jazz scene is a site where both gender and race merge in complex dialogues that involve authenticity, belonging, and career advancement. This article explores how such issues, surrounding gender and race, intersect in the experiences of female jazz saxophonists. Based on interviews with female jazz saxophonists who are active in New York City, I draw attention to how African-American cultural identity affects female saxophonists' employment and the way they perform gender in the context of jazz. Specifically, I examine the meanings of these racial and cultural issues for African-American and non-African-American women who play jazz. How do these women talk about these issues in the context of their lives as performers? Why are there so few African-American female jazz instrumentalists in the current jazz scene? These questions and interviews frame this study, which shows the complexity of how African-American and white women experience jazz and demonstrates how gender issues in jazz can be shaped by race, especially various notions about \"blackness.\" The first part of the article focuses on issues of authenticity and jazz performance, especially as viewed by white female saxophonists, both American and European. The second part addresses practical, employment matters, chiefly the roles race and gender play in the employment of white female musicians and their interactions with male musicians. The ","PeriodicalId":354930,"journal":{"name":"Black Music Research Journal","volume":"23 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":"133921316","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":"Editor’s Introduction","authors":"Kenneth Bilby","doi":"10.1515/9781501754067-005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501754067-005","url":null,"abstract":"The genesis of this special issue of the Black Music Research Journal can be traced back to a number of discussions between Samuel Floyd Jr. and myself in 2007. What, we asked ourselves, were some of the prominent theoretical concerns in recent interdisciplinary scholarship that connected current research on black music most clearly with ongoing work in a broad variety of other fields? Near the top of the list was the concept of diaspora and its theorization. This topic, we agreed, was more than substantial enough to merit not just an entire conference, but a series of conferences and/or conference sessions designed to stimulate further thinking and writing about the intersection between black music research and the theorization of “diaspora.” With this in view, Dr. Floyd and I crafted a one-paragraph statement (actually, a series of questions), giving it the title, “Reassessing the Black Music Diaspora: What Is It, Why Is It Important, and How Should It Be Understood?” Among the questions posed was the following: “Is it worth the effort to define the black music diaspora in a way that sets it apart from its semantic neighbors [e.g., “migration,” “Pan-Africanism,” “transnationalism,” and “globalization”] and allows it to become a true field of intellectual study, rather than the empty designator that it now sometimes appears to be?” Another question centered on the importance of distinctly “musical” concerns: “If we attempt to theorize the concept of diaspora from a specifically musical perspective, how might our understandings differ from, or converge with, those emerging in other contexts and disciplines?” This brief document served as the point of departure for a projected series of conferences and sessions meant to address the theme of “black music diaspora” from multiple perspectives, to be held in a number of musically important diasporal locations. During 2008–09, the Center for Black Music Research brought this projected series of events to fruition, assigning several special sessions in","PeriodicalId":354930,"journal":{"name":"Black Music Research Journal","volume":"21 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-06-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126752810","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":"Race, History, and Black British Jazz","authors":"J. Toynbee","doi":"10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.33.1.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.33.1.0001","url":null,"abstract":"This article traces the history of black British jazz across five moments from 1920 to the present. It also makes a theoretical argument about the nature of race and its connection both with music and belonging to the nation. Race is indeed a musical-discursive construction, as has been argued in the literature about culture and ethnicity over the last thirty years or so. But it is a social structure too, and the contradictions that result are key to understanding the race-music relationship.","PeriodicalId":354930,"journal":{"name":"Black Music Research Journal","volume":"221 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121284501","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":"The Tomorrow’s Warriors Jam Sessions: Repertoires of Transmission and Hospitality","authors":"Mark Doffman","doi":"10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.33.1.0071","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.33.1.0071","url":null,"abstract":"While jam sessions in London do not enjoy a centrality in jazz lore comparable to the New York scene, there has been a tradition of jamming (albeit a discontinuous one) since the beginnings of the music in the United Kingdom. In the years since the development of modern jazz in the UK, jam sessions have gradually become a steady if rather uneven fixture on the London scene. In this study, I document a number of jam sessions organized by the Tomorrow's Warriors (TW) educational program, a program developed by the black arts organization, Dune Music. Through this article I open a particular window on the theme of this issue, black British jazz, examining how these jam sessions offered ways into jazz for the black participants and articulated a particular vision of affiliation to jazz more generally. Data for the article were taken from audiovisual recordings of jam sessions in 2009 and numerous interviews with jam session participants as well as black British musicians who were interviewed as part of the overall project, \"What is Black British Jazz?,\" of which this piece of research forms a part. Before looking at the TW sessions, it is worth considering the nature and function of the jam session more generally. Gunter Schuller describes the jam session as \"an informal gathering of jazz or rock musicians playing for their own pleasure.... The idea of a jam session, or simply jamming, has come to mean any meeting of musicians in private or public, where the emphasis is on unrehearsed material or improvisation\" (2011). He goes on to describe how the nature of this type of performance has changed since the 1930s from being a private pleasure for musicians away from the rigors of public performance to a more formally managed mode of public performance. According to this description, the public face of the jam gradually undermined another function of the original sessions, which was as a training ground for aspiring musicians. Schuller's (2011) brief entry in Grove Music Online, however, points to a rather less recondite and complex performance mode than seems to me to be the case. At once improvised and regulated, at a boundary point between public entertainment and personal development, caught between the formal and informal, the jam offers important insights into the nature of musical sociability and communication, although it has been a focus of attention for only a small number of scholars (Cameron 1954, Kisliuk 1988, Dempsey 2008, Doffman 2012). The article approaches the TW sessions through two lenses, then: first through understanding them as a form of cultural transmission, and second, through a claim for the sessions to be seen as a site of a hospitality. For black British jazz musicians, hospitality and cultural transmission (and its stewardship) are not necessarily to be taken for granted (Toynbee and Banks, forthcoming). Cultural transmission in jazz has long been a blend of informal absorption of practice through listening, attending gigs,","PeriodicalId":354930,"journal":{"name":"Black Music Research Journal","volume":"4 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131794095","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":"Jazz Endings, Aesthetic Discourse, and Musical Publics","authors":"Byron Dueck","doi":"10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.33.1.0091","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.33.1.0091","url":null,"abstract":"The title above contains a melodic fragment from the closing bars of Billy Strayhorn's \"Take the A Train\". It is often called the \"Ellington ending\" after the composer and musician for whom the piece became a signature tune. Despite its close motivic relationship to the rest of the piece, it long ago began circulating on its own as a musical tag, and musicians still employ it in a range of contexts to signal musical closure. There are many such concluding patterns, and in the account that follows I will examine how one group of young instrumentalists mobilizes some of them (including the Ellington ending) while collectively arranging a tune. In part, then, this article explores an instance of musical bricolage, as musicians experiment with an array of formulas and come to an agreement regarding how they will establish musical closure with them.","PeriodicalId":354930,"journal":{"name":"Black Music Research Journal","volume":"12 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130602645","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":"Audiences, Cosmopolitanism, and Inequality in Black British Jazz","authors":"J. Toynbee, Linda Wilks","doi":"10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.33.1.0027","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.33.1.0027","url":null,"abstract":"In one sense, jazz is a marginal cultural form in Britain. Poised uneasily between high and low culture, state subsidy and commerce, and youthful and aging cohorts, jazz has a relatively small listenership. Jazz is also an imported genre, and whereas in the country of its origin, the United States, black musicians have played a central, even defining role in its development, it is not clear at first glance how far jazz made by black Britons can be identified as a specifically black tradition or as simply the contribution of individual black musicians, always a minority, to the larger British scene (see Toynbee in this issue). Still, precisely because of its ambiguous position on the cusp of a number of key sociocultural divides, black British jazz, as we will tentatively call it, raises important issues to do with cultural values, race, and class. We want to suggest that its location makes it symptomatic, if not typical, of certain contradictions in contemporary British culture and beyond. In particular, it makes an illuminating case study in the cosmopolitanism that, among others, the sociologists Ulrich Beck and Natan Snzaider (2006) argue characterizes the present conjuncture. A key point for these writers is that cosmopolitanism is unremarkable and \"unfolds beneath the surface or behind the facades of persisting national spaces, jurisdiction and labelling\" (8). Generated by increasing migration, global trade, and cultural exchange, it is an emergent social process that involves \"really-existing relations of interdependence\" between different peoples. We would suggest that black British jazz encapsulates just this kind of practical cosmopolitanism. Nevertheless, our central argument is that it is also riven in important ways by inequality. Indeed, what is so significant is that inequality, across both race and class, impacts strongly on a musical culture that seems to carry the promise of cosmopolitan encounter and mutual understanding between black and white, high art and popular culture. The present article aims to explore how this is so through a study of audiences at jazz concerts in the United Kingdom featuring black British musicians. Perhaps we ought to begin by examining some of the historical context through which black British jazz has emerged in the present moment. When, during the mid-1980s, a new generation of British-born black musicians turned to jazz from reggae and funk (the Jazz Warriors orchestra was crucial here), they were hailed by the media and record companies. Performances and recordings soon found a new and relatively young white audience in addition to the peer group of the musicians themselves. For a while, black British jazz was strongly correlated with \"subcultural capital\" (Thornton 1995). In the context of the times, shortly after the New Cross fire and the inner city riots of the early 1980s in the UK, (1) this was on the face of it at least a moment of hope, emblematic of what Stuart Hall (1988) saw as a turn ","PeriodicalId":354930,"journal":{"name":"Black Music Research Journal","volume":"2015 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121603412","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":"Out But In: Between Discourse and Practice in a London Jazz Quartet","authors":"Nathan C. Bakkum","doi":"10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.33.1.0049","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.33.1.0049","url":null,"abstract":"I think the key is that we really try to think about what we're doing. I think a lot of bands don't. We put so much thought into what we're playing--and really deliberately in terms of concept or what we're trying to express. Each tune has an identity. It's all very considered. It's not chance, so much. Chance comes on the bandstand. Tom Farmer (Empirical 2010) At the start of \"Bowden Out,\" the concluding track on their 2009 album Out 'n' In, London jazz quartet Empirical generates a sound world that is both new and familiar. Acoustic bass, alto saxophone, and bass clarinet weave an accompanimental fabric of open, strummed chords and gentle breathy dyads. Over this consistently undulating foundation, a vibraphone skips a weightless melody. Drums enter, adding the wash and rumble of mallets on cymbals and tom-toms. Together, the ensemble floats in suspended animation. The recording offers admirable space and clarity, allowing the listener to focus on the quiet click of woodwind keys, the fleshy attack of bass strings, the slow rotation of vibraphone motors. This moment of quiet reflection comes at the end of an album dedicated to a modern reimagining of the music of reedist and composer Eric Dolphy. \"Bowden Out\" presents a reflective abstraction of his ensemble's music, revealing the extent to which Empirical has assimilated and personalized the compositional and interactive processes at the heart of Dolphy's recording, Out To Lunch. Empirical's process--careful study of a series of recordings as the foundation of the quartet's collective work as improvisers--is certainly nothing new. This imitative approach has been broadly distributed across the jazz landscape for the last century as countless young musicians have used old recordings as the foundation of new work. Empirical's particular result, however, is unique to them, and it is uniquely informed by their relationship to the jazz tradition--both as the tradition's story has been told and as the tradition has been lived by musicians. Through their collective imagination of the processes undertaken by the Dolphy quintet in Rudy Van Gelder's Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, recording studio in February 1964, the members of Empirical have pieced together their own understanding of the practices and relationships animating the American post-bop community of the mid-1960s. Their internalization of the dominant jazz discourse has led the members of Empirical to paint themselves--a racially diverse ensemble of young British improvisers--as outsiders, separated both in time and in locality from the most privileged sites at which the jazz tradition has coalesced. Their sincere, focused engagement with their recorded mentors, however, has enabled the group to overcome the limitations that they have associated with the distance they perceive between themselves and the tradition's discursive core. On Out 'n' In, Empirical explores Dolphy's music quite directly, focusing on Out To Lunch in particular. While O","PeriodicalId":354930,"journal":{"name":"Black Music Research Journal","volume":"29 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116597263","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":"Preaching Blues","authors":"David Brackett","doi":"10.5406/blacmusiresej.32.1.0113","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5406/blacmusiresej.32.1.0113","url":null,"abstract":"For viewers/listeners who remember Robert Johnson’s 1936 recording of “Cross Road Blues,” this performance is eerily familiar—the guitar playing rings with authority and with greater clarity than ever, yet something about the voice seems a bit amiss. It gradually dawns on the viewer/listener that this voice must not actually belong to Robert Johnson, the great bluesman with whom “Cross Road Blues” is indelibly linked. The camera pans again, to another figure playing a guitar in silhouette from whence the voice appears to emanate. The silhouette emerges from darkness to reveal . . . John Hammond Jr.","PeriodicalId":354930,"journal":{"name":"Black Music Research Journal","volume":"22 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-10-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115997533","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":"“Chango ’ta veni’/Chango has come”: Spiritual Embodiment in the Afro-Cuban Ceremony, Bembé","authors":"Joseph M. Murphy","doi":"10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.32.1.0069","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.32.1.0069","url":null,"abstract":"Over seventy years ago, Melville Herskovits ([1941] 1990, 8) argued that the African heritage of any people of the African diaspora could not be understood without reference to the others. He saw and documented cultural continuities from Dahomey to Suriname, Trinidad, Haiti, and the United States. What struck Herskovits, and many visitors and scholars since, is a remarkable similarity in what he called \"emotional expression\" in the religious life of communities of African descent (210). These \"highly emotionalized religious and ecstatic\" experiences, he argued, could be attributed to a shared African heritage in which music, dance, and trance were linked. The focus of this essay is this spirituality of embodiment, where the divine being is \"called\" by percussion, singing, and dancing to become manifest in the body of an initiated medium and in the body of the congregation as whole. Our community is that of Afro-Cuban variously called Lucumi, Santeria, or regla de ocha, where direct African provenance is apparent in nomenclature and the historical record. Yet, after a description of the bata drums that invoke the spirit, and the bembe ceremony that makes it manifest, we will ask whether the same isomorphism of music, body, and divine presence is the touchstone of religious experience and cultural memory throughout the African diaspora. In his magisterial work of the 1950s, Los Instrumentos de la Musica Afrocubana, the Cuban ethnographer Fernando Ortiz (1955) documented several hundred musical instruments of African derivation on the island. At least 800,000 Africans had been enslaved and taken to Cuba during its first four centuries of European colonization, and their cultural impact could be seen and heard in every corner of the country. Ortiz gave pride of place to a set of drums called bata, since their rhythms played an essential role in the reconstruction of an African religious culture in Cuba. Bata performances are part of a larger ritual complex of drumming, dancing, and singing often called bembe that is organized for the veneration of African divinities called orishas. The ceremony profiled in this essay is known by a variety of names that represent different communities and different kinds of colloquial usage. While the word bembe has been generalized here to encompass all Lucumi drum fiestas, it is often used more restrictively. Most people that I have met in New York and in Cuba referred to the ceremony as a tambor (drum), although I've heard tambor bata and bembe, as well. The differences in terminology can sometimes refer to different kinds of drums used and rhythms played. If participants are more precise, bembe can refer to a ceremony with specific bembe drums that are conical and open at the bottom in the \"conga\" style as opposed to the hourglass-shaped, double-headed bata. Bembe-type drums may also call the orishas, though the structure of the ceremony is less formal and the technique less learned than that of the bata rite. Peo","PeriodicalId":354930,"journal":{"name":"Black Music Research Journal","volume":"9 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-10-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128390551","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":"Listening for Geographies: Music as Sonic Compass Pointing Toward African and Christian Diasporic Horizons in the Caribbean","authors":"E. Mcalister","doi":"10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.32.2.0025","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.32.2.0025","url":null,"abstract":"I met my partner in Haiti while I was doing field research on Vodou and music. At the time he was a sound tech for his sister's band, Boukman Eksperyans. We were introduced at the Rex Theater in downtown Port-au-Prince, right on the stage, a few hours before the show. The band usually set up to a soundtrack of its own music or to Bob Marley and the Wailers pumped up to a volume I found uncomfortable but that the musicians loved. Loud music made the air thicker, and it shaped the space into a pulsating, vibrating, energized place. Hand-carved drums thundered during the sound check. The band members of Boukman Eksperyans were self-conscious researchers of the musical legacy of the African Diaspora that had brought their forebears to Haiti during colonial slavery. Taking ethnographic forays into the countryside to historic religious compounds, the band learned the rhythms, songs, and dances associated with the eighteenth-century diasporic strands: the Dahome, the Nago, the Kongo, and the Ibo. They blended these styles, along with elements of Protestant and Rastafari thought, into their own rock fusion and toured the Antilles, the United States, Canada, Europe, and Japan on Chris Blackwell's Island record label (and its subsidiary, Mango). Traveling through the networks of the contemporary Haitian Diaspora, the band sang of the Afro-Creole history of Haiti. They crafted a religious message and a politics of a creole past even as they leaned into a globalizing future, heaving their Dahomean-derived drums through airport metal detectors together with digital music players slung from their back pockets. Music makes a place where my husband can live in his body. Now that we have moved to a university town in Connecticut, my husband has become adept at streaming live Haitian radio broadcasts over the Internet and through the many speakers in our house. He pumps up the volume just like in the old sound check days, playing his favorite style, konpa. Our daily activities in New England are punctuated by the lively advertising jingles and the radio news in Port-au-Prince. In these moments the soundtrack of our lives echoes the soundscape of a household in Haiti (when there is electricity there, that is). Living away from his extended family and friends, outside his country and culture, my partner tells our children that he came to the U.S. too late, when he was too old to be remade here. Yet when we return to Haiti, he is clearly marked as a partial outsider, a \"dyaspora,\" by his clothing, his physical fitness, and an Americanness readable in other subtle ways. He has become like many transmigrants who are no longer quite fully at home anywhere. For him, I think, Haitian music and radio ads move him to a psychic space closer to home. In fact, for my husband, music itself is a kind of home and hearing it makes him feel he is \"in his skin\" (see Ramnarine 2007). When the devastating earthquake struck Haiti on January 12, 2010, he lived in an in-between netherwor","PeriodicalId":354930,"journal":{"name":"Black Music Research Journal","volume":"32 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129693247","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}