{"title":"Gabe Jones","authors":"Jesús Jiménez-Varea","doi":"10.1558/jazz.22911","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Introduced in the 1963 Marvel comic Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos, Gabe Jones is ‘one of the first “normal” black people in comics. […] I mean not a racist caricature’, in the words of African-American writer Reginald Hudlin. The Harlem-born Jones was written as a professional jazz trumpeter who had learned to play from none other than Louis Armstrong. At some point during the Second World War, the Howling Commandos help repel a Nazi invasion of Wakanda, the African nation ruled by Marvel superhero Black Panther, with whom Jones strikes up a personal friendship. This piece takes the form of a 1000-word entry on Jones for a fictional Encyclopedia of Jazz Marvels. It speculates the effect that contact with an Afrofuturist utopia like Wakanda might have had on the subsequent evolution of an African-American jazz musician, leading to the birth of an imagined genre—Vibop—in the early 1950s. By parodying the formal qualities of journalistic writing on music and comics, the piece speculates on the boundaries of fiction in jazz life-writing.","PeriodicalId":40438,"journal":{"name":"Jazz Research Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1000,"publicationDate":"2022-12-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Jazz Research Journal","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1558/jazz.22911","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"MUSIC","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Introduced in the 1963 Marvel comic Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos, Gabe Jones is ‘one of the first “normal” black people in comics. […] I mean not a racist caricature’, in the words of African-American writer Reginald Hudlin. The Harlem-born Jones was written as a professional jazz trumpeter who had learned to play from none other than Louis Armstrong. At some point during the Second World War, the Howling Commandos help repel a Nazi invasion of Wakanda, the African nation ruled by Marvel superhero Black Panther, with whom Jones strikes up a personal friendship. This piece takes the form of a 1000-word entry on Jones for a fictional Encyclopedia of Jazz Marvels. It speculates the effect that contact with an Afrofuturist utopia like Wakanda might have had on the subsequent evolution of an African-American jazz musician, leading to the birth of an imagined genre—Vibop—in the early 1950s. By parodying the formal qualities of journalistic writing on music and comics, the piece speculates on the boundaries of fiction in jazz life-writing.
期刊介绍:
Jazz Research Journal explores a range of cultural and critical views on jazz. The journal celebrates the diversity of approaches found in jazz scholarship and provides a forum for interaction and the cross-fertilisation of ideas. It is a development and extension of The Source: Challenging Jazz Criticism founded in 2004 at the Leeds College of Music. The journal aims to represent a range of disciplinary perspectives on jazz, from musicology to film studies, sociology to cultural studies, and offers a platform for new thinking on jazz. In this respect, the editors particularly welcome articles that challenge traditional approaches to jazz and encourage writings that engage with jazz as a discursive practice. Jazz Research Journal publishes original and innovative research that either extends the boundaries of jazz scholarship or explores themes which are central to a critical understanding of the music, including the politics of race and gender, the shifting cultural representation of jazz, and the complexity of canon formation and dissolution. In addition to articles, the journal features a reviews section that publishes critical articles on a variety of media, including recordings, film, books, educational products and multimedia publications.