Pub Date : 2013-09-22DOI: 10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.33.2.0207
Yoko Suzuki
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
{"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}
Pub Date : 2013-06-28DOI: 10.1515/9781501754067-005
Kenneth Bilby
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
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Pub Date : 2013-03-22DOI: 10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.33.1.0001
J. Toynbee
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.
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Pub Date : 2013-03-22DOI: 10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.33.1.0071
Mark Doffman
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,
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Pub Date : 2013-03-22DOI: 10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.33.1.0091
Byron Dueck
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.
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Pub Date : 2013-03-22DOI: 10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.33.1.0027
J. Toynbee, Linda Wilks
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
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Pub Date : 2013-03-22DOI: 10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.33.1.0049
Nathan C. Bakkum
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
我认为关键是我们要认真思考我们在做什么。我想很多乐队都没有。我们在游戏内容上投入了大量的思考，并且在概念或我们想要表达的内容上非常谨慎。每首曲子都有自己的身份。这都是经过深思熟虑的。这完全不是偶然。机会降临在舞台上。在他们2009年专辑Out 'n' In的结尾曲“Bowden Out”的开头，伦敦爵士四重奏乐团Empirical创造了一个既新鲜又熟悉的声音世界。原声低音，中音萨克斯管和低音单簧管编织了一个开放的伴奏织物，拨动的和弦和温柔的呼吸双音。在这个持续起伏的基础上，颤音琴跳过了一段轻盈的旋律。鼓声响起，加上铙钹和大鼓上木槌的铿锵声。整个团队在假死状态下漂浮。录音提供了令人钦佩的空间和清晰度，让听者专注于木管键的安静滴答声，低音弦的肉感攻击，颤音琴马达的缓慢旋转。这一安静的反思时刻出现在一张专辑的末尾，这张专辑致力于对芦笛家和作曲家埃里克·多尔菲的音乐进行现代的重新想象。“Bowden Out”呈现了他合奏音乐的反思抽象，揭示了Empirical在多大程度上吸收和个性化了Dolphy的录音《Out to Lunch》的核心组成和互动过程。经纬的过程——仔细研究一系列录音，作为四重奏集体即兴创作的基础——当然不是什么新鲜事。上个世纪，无数年轻音乐家将旧唱片作为新作品的基础，这种模仿方式在爵士乐界广泛存在。然而，Empirical的特殊结果对他们来说是独一无二的，而且它与爵士传统的关系是独一无二的——传统的故事是被讲述的，传统是由音乐家们生活的。1964年2月，在新泽西州，Rudy Van Gelder的Englewood Cliffs录音室，通过他们对Dolphy五人组所经历的过程的集体想象，Empirical乐队的成员已经拼凑出了他们自己对20世纪60年代中期美国后波普音乐社区的实践和关系的理解。他们对占主导地位的爵士话语的内化，使得经验主义乐队的成员把自己——一个由年轻的英国即兴演奏者组成的种族多样化的乐团——描绘成局外人，在时间和地域上都与爵士传统融合的最优越的地方分离开来。然而，他们与录音导师的真诚、专注的接触，使这个群体能够克服他们认为自己与传统话语核心之间存在距离的限制。在《Out 'n' In》中，Empirical非常直接地探讨了Dolphy的音乐，尤其是《Out To Lunch》。虽然《Out 'n' In》包含了两首Dolphy的作品(《Hat and Beard》和《Gazzelloni》)，但这张专辑的大部分内容都是对Dolphy的创作过程和材料的抽象和重新想象。正如贝斯手Tom Farmer所描述的那样，“每首歌都至少涉及到Dolphy和Dolphy同事的一个特定想法”(Empirical 2010)。与利用传统的比波普音乐形式，松散地根据Dolphy的音乐风格创作新作品不同，Empirical在一组指令中构建了融合明确材料和表演过程的空间。《Out 'n' In》收录的作品不仅是由乐队成员之一创作的旋律和和声进行;作品本身也包含了集体协商的指导方针，为每个表演的互动和表达形式。这些共同的理解是广泛的和可协商的，但它们构成了季度参与每一个组成部分的重要基础。．．．
{"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}
Pub Date : 2012-10-14DOI: 10.5406/blacmusiresej.32.1.0113
David Brackett
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.
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Pub Date : 2012-10-14DOI: 10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.32.1.0069
Joseph M. Murphy
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
七十多年前，梅尔维尔·赫斯科维茨(Melville Herskovits，[1941] 1990,8)认为，如果不参照其他非洲人，就无法理解散居海外的任何非洲人的非洲遗产。他看到并记录了从达荷美到苏里南、特立尼达、海地和美国的文化传承。令赫斯科维茨以及此后的许多游客和学者感到震惊的是，他所说的非洲裔社区宗教生活中的“情感表达”惊人的相似(210)。他认为，这些“高度情绪化的宗教和狂喜”的经历可以归因于非洲共同的传统，其中音乐、舞蹈和恍惚联系在一起。这篇文章的重点是这种灵性的体现，神圣的存在通过打击乐，歌唱和舞蹈被“召唤”，在一个启动的媒介的身体和整个会众的身体中显现。我们的社区是一个非裔古巴人社区，被称为Lucumi、Santeria或regla de ocha，在命名法和历史记录中，直接来自非洲是显而易见的。然而，在描述了召唤灵魂的巴塔鼓和使之显现的本贝仪式之后，我们将会问，音乐、身体和神的同在是否同样是整个非洲侨民的宗教体验和文化记忆的试金石。古巴民族学家费尔南多·奥尔蒂斯(Fernando Ortiz, 1955)在他20世纪50年代的权威著作《非洲音乐》(Los Instrumentos de la Musica Afrocubana)中记录了数百种来自非洲的乐器。在欧洲殖民的头四个世纪里，至少有80万非洲人被奴役并带到古巴，他们的文化影响在这个国家的每个角落都可以看到和听到。奥尔蒂斯把一种叫做bata的鼓放在了最重要的位置，因为它们的节奏在古巴重建非洲宗教文化方面发挥了重要作用。巴塔表演是一个更大的仪式的一部分，包括击鼓、跳舞和唱歌，通常被称为bembe，是为了崇拜被称为orishas的非洲神而组织的。这篇文章中介绍的仪式有各种各样的名字，代表不同的社区和不同的口语用法。虽然bembe这个词在这里被概括为包括所有的Lucumi鼓节，但它的使用通常更有限制性。我在纽约和古巴遇到的大多数人都把这个仪式称为tambor(鼓)，尽管我也听说过tambor bata和bembe。术语上的差异有时可以指使用的不同种类的鼓和演奏的不同节奏。如果参与者更精确的话，bembe可以指一种带有特定的bembe鼓的仪式，这种鼓是圆锥形的，底部打开，是“康加”风格的，而不是沙漏形的双头bata。本贝式鼓也可以叫orishas，尽管仪式的结构不那么正式，技术也不像巴塔仪式那样成熟。在这一层次的话语中，人们可能会用bata来指代仪式，称之为toque de bata (bata rhythm)。John Amira和Stephen Cornelius(1992,21)认识到参与者对bembe的使用不严格，但更倾向于区分bembe和guemilere, bembe应该用bembe鼓来庆祝，而guemilere则用bata鼓来表演。每一个都为奥里萨斯建立了不同的赞美模式，并唤起了对仪式事件展开的不同期望。这篇文章探讨了本贝在美洲体现非洲精神方面的作用，即巴塔鼓，对唱和表达舞蹈。巴塔:尚哥的皇家鼓巴塔鼓起源于今天尼日利亚西南部和贝宁东部的约鲁巴人。音乐学家Akin Euba(2003, 54)引用了约鲁巴口述历史学家的话，他们推测巴塔是在大约500年前从北方传入约鲁巴兰的(另见Thieme 1969,183 -186)。…
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Pub Date : 2012-09-22DOI: 10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.32.2.0025
E. Mcalister
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
{"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}
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