{"title":"《不自吹自擂:梅尔巴·利斯顿的口述历史和课堂演讲》","authors":"M. H. O’Connell, S. Tucker","doi":"10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.34.1.0121","DOIUrl":null,"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 personal memory in the construction of public [national] histories\" (Cvetkovich 2003, 57)? How do these ways-of-telling help us to understand the range of social and institutional interventions created across these instances? And how does listening aurally and to multiple tellings help us to envision modes of jazz life-story telling, not only beyond hagiography, but beyond transcription? And how might Liston's emphasis on collaborative aspects of jazz-as-work bring nuance, affect, and dynamic interaction into our collaborative work as jazz historians, oral historians, ethnographers, ethnomusicologists, educators, and archivists? The interview scenarios we examine generally compel Liston to compose a narrative of her life and career in music. If the way a jazz musician references the melodic contours of a standard says much about her or his artistic priorities, process, and style, we can similarly learn from the ways in which Liston riffs across presentations and oral histories on the contours of professional guideposts that appear across narrative events. …","PeriodicalId":354930,"journal":{"name":"Black Music Research Journal","volume":"106 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0000,"publicationDate":"2014-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"1","resultStr":"{\"title\":\"Not One to Toot Her Own Horn(?): Melba Liston’s Oral Histories and Classroom Presentations\",\"authors\":\"M. H. O’Connell, S. 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(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 personal memory in the construction of public [national] histories\\\" (Cvetkovich 2003, 57)? How do these ways-of-telling help us to understand the range of social and institutional interventions created across these instances? And how does listening aurally and to multiple tellings help us to envision modes of jazz life-story telling, not only beyond hagiography, but beyond transcription? 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If the way a jazz musician references the melodic contours of a standard says much about her or his artistic priorities, process, and style, we can similarly learn from the ways in which Liston riffs across presentations and oral histories on the contours of professional guideposts that appear across narrative events. …\",\"PeriodicalId\":354930,\"journal\":{\"name\":\"Black Music Research Journal\",\"volume\":\"106 1\",\"pages\":\"0\"},\"PeriodicalIF\":0.0000,\"publicationDate\":\"2014-03-22\",\"publicationTypes\":\"Journal Article\",\"fieldsOfStudy\":null,\"isOpenAccess\":false,\"openAccessPdf\":\"\",\"citationCount\":\"1\",\"resultStr\":null,\"platform\":\"Semanticscholar\",\"paperid\":null,\"PeriodicalName\":\"Black Music Research Journal\",\"FirstCategoryId\":\"1085\",\"ListUrlMain\":\"https://doi.org/10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.34.1.0121\",\"RegionNum\":0,\"RegionCategory\":null,\"ArticlePicture\":[],\"TitleCN\":null,\"AbstractTextCN\":null,\"PMCID\":null,\"EPubDate\":\"\",\"PubModel\":\"\",\"JCR\":\"\",\"JCRName\":\"\",\"Score\":null,\"Total\":0}","platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Black Music Research Journal","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.34.1.0121","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"","JCRName":"","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 1
摘要
在2008年美国国家公共电台的爵士乐简介中,南希·威尔逊讲述了梅尔巴·利斯顿年轻时的一个关键时刻,当时路易斯·阿姆斯特朗发现了这位16岁的林肯剧院乐队长号手的才华,并鼓励她独唱。威尔逊说:“但这位腼腆、轻声细语的长号手一直对作曲更感兴趣,而不是演奏和独奏。”接下来我们听到的是老得多的利斯顿的声音:“我不想独唱。我甚至不想这么做。不,不,不。我不是一个人的类型。”这是利斯顿经常给采访者和乐队领导的关于独奏话题的回答。这通常被解释为她害羞、谦虚的表现,有时也被解释为爵士独奏家男性化主体地位的性别衰落。于是,她在演出和唱片中的独奏成为观众、音乐家同行和学者们惊叹这位内向的演奏家的机会,她宁愿呆在“背景”中,但她的天赋是如此之大,以至于在被要求时,她能克服沉默,演奏出精彩的独奏。在这篇文章中,我们仔细聆听的不是利斯顿录制的长号独奏(这也值得专门的奖学金),而是她对自己在爵士乐中的工作和生活的看法。我们为这篇论文构建了我们的档案,其中有录音记录:1973年至1996年间的课堂演讲、口述历史和访谈的选择。我们听着利斯顿对她生活的许多讲述,听到她如何在面对面的互动中重新定位和重新谈判——在彼此紧张的爵士乐理想中相遇。我们的仔细聆听不仅为利斯顿对她的生活和事业的理解开辟了新的视角,而且还帮助我们对爵士乐实践、爵士乐史学和爵士乐档案的多个维度有了更全面的理解。我们还认为,听她对爵士乐作为工作的生活的口头指导,可以为写作和档案建设中的爵士乐知识生产提供方法,我们在这篇合著的文章中采用了这些方法,梅尔巴·利斯顿研究小组(Melba Liston Research Collective)作为一个正在进行的工作组也采用了这些方法。在我们开始聆听利斯顿的录音生活故事之前,我们想强调一些对我们来说特别令人兴奋的问题和方法。我们首先考虑的是,利斯顿的故事是如何在爵士乐作为一种合作的努力和爵士乐作为一种独奏家的艺术的理想之间产生重要的相互作用的。她的经历——以及向他人讲述这些经历的叙事和表演策略——能让我们了解“工作中的爵士”中的性别爵士乐社会吗?关于爵士乐的历史,这能告诉我们什么?他们如何帮助我们聆听其他爵士口述历史作为爵士互动,他们如何可能干预我们实践和解释爵士口述历史的方式?关于“个人记忆在公共[国家]历史建构中的作用”(Cvetkovich 2003, 57),他们告诉了我们什么?这些叙述方式如何帮助我们理解在这些实例中产生的社会和制度干预的范围?从听觉和多种讲述方式中聆听如何帮助我们想象爵士生活故事的讲述模式,不仅超越了圣徒传记,而且超越了抄写?利斯顿对爵士乐作为工作的合作方面的强调如何将细微差别、影响和动态互动带入我们作为爵士乐历史学家、口述历史学家、民族志学家、民族音乐学家、教育家和档案学家的合作工作中?我们考察的采访场景通常迫使利斯顿对她的生活和音乐事业进行叙述。如果一个爵士音乐家引用一个标准的旋律轮廓的方式说明了她或他的艺术优先级、过程和风格,那么我们同样可以从利斯顿在叙事事件中出现的专业路标的轮廓上重复表演和口述历史的方式中学习。…
Not One to Toot Her Own Horn(?): Melba Liston’s Oral Histories and Classroom Presentations
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 personal memory in the construction of public [national] histories" (Cvetkovich 2003, 57)? How do these ways-of-telling help us to understand the range of social and institutional interventions created across these instances? And how does listening aurally and to multiple tellings help us to envision modes of jazz life-story telling, not only beyond hagiography, but beyond transcription? And how might Liston's emphasis on collaborative aspects of jazz-as-work bring nuance, affect, and dynamic interaction into our collaborative work as jazz historians, oral historians, ethnographers, ethnomusicologists, educators, and archivists? The interview scenarios we examine generally compel Liston to compose a narrative of her life and career in music. If the way a jazz musician references the melodic contours of a standard says much about her or his artistic priorities, process, and style, we can similarly learn from the ways in which Liston riffs across presentations and oral histories on the contours of professional guideposts that appear across narrative events. …