Saidiya Hartman’s 2021 Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments literally re-imagines the experience of young black women in 1910s New York, employing a method Hartman calls ‘critical fabulation’, in which—rather in the form of retconned speculative fiction—she teases out gaps in the archival record. Employing Hartman’s own call-and-response technique of rhetorical questions which spotlight the uncertain answers to questions about minoritized human experience, I ask: ‘How did the “light-skinned chorines” in multi-racial 1930s nightclub and theater culture create spaces of “beautiful experiment” within their day-to-day? How did the “noisy” dance of jazz reinscribe—or subtly subvert—the white racist gaze? What did the chorines think about all this?’ This creative non-fiction essay imagines responses.
{"title":"Wayward lives and beautiful experiments","authors":"Christopher J. Smith","doi":"10.1558/jazz.22895","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1558/jazz.22895","url":null,"abstract":"Saidiya Hartman’s 2021 Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments literally re-imagines the experience of young black women in 1910s New York, employing a method Hartman calls ‘critical fabulation’, in which—rather in the form of retconned speculative fiction—she teases out gaps in the archival record. Employing Hartman’s own call-and-response technique of rhetorical questions which spotlight the uncertain answers to questions about minoritized human experience, I ask: ‘How did the “light-skinned chorines” in multi-racial 1930s nightclub and theater culture create spaces of “beautiful experiment” within their day-to-day? How did the “noisy” dance of jazz reinscribe—or subtly subvert—the white racist gaze? What did the chorines think about all this?’ This creative non-fiction essay imagines responses.","PeriodicalId":40438,"journal":{"name":"Jazz Research Journal","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43779842","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}
In Both Directions at Once, an album lost for almost 40 years, John Coltrane presents a constellation of musical tradition, themes, composition and improvisation, in dialectical opposition. This article imagines Coltrane as a sonic philosopher of oppositions and the album—named after Coltrane’s quote in which he attempts ‘starting a sentence in the middle, and then going to the beginning and the end of it at the same time… both directions at once’—as his philosophical treatise. Borrowing from biographers, musicologists and jazz critics, this contribution argues that in the album, the music engages with itself rather than seeking resolution or finality. In other words, Coltrane’s dialectical aesthetic drives the aesthetic. Both Directions at Once is sound focused on sonically opposing forces. It is an attempt by a deep thinker to present contradictions and oppositions between musical polarities that may create new potentialities. What listeners hear is Coltrane, the philosopher, striving toward a multidirectional aesthetic that furnishes music unshackled from the conditions of possibility.
{"title":"Both Directions at Once","authors":"Bryan Banker","doi":"10.1558/jazz.23072","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1558/jazz.23072","url":null,"abstract":"In Both Directions at Once, an album lost for almost 40 years, John Coltrane presents a constellation of musical tradition, themes, composition and improvisation, in dialectical opposition. This article imagines Coltrane as a sonic philosopher of oppositions and the album—named after Coltrane’s quote in which he attempts ‘starting a sentence in the middle, and then going to the beginning and the end of it at the same time… both directions at once’—as his philosophical treatise. Borrowing from biographers, musicologists and jazz critics, this contribution argues that in the album, the music engages with itself rather than seeking resolution or finality. In other words, Coltrane’s dialectical aesthetic drives the aesthetic. Both Directions at Once is sound focused on sonically opposing forces. It is an attempt by a deep thinker to present contradictions and oppositions between musical polarities that may create new potentialities. What listeners hear is Coltrane, the philosopher, striving toward a multidirectional aesthetic that furnishes music unshackled from the conditions of possibility.","PeriodicalId":40438,"journal":{"name":"Jazz Research Journal","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41820116","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}
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.
{"title":"Gabe Jones","authors":"Jesús Jiménez-Varea","doi":"10.1558/jazz.22911","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1558/jazz.22911","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":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46985673","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}
Amy: Beyond the Stage, Design Museum, London, 26 November 2021–10 April 2022
艾米:超越舞台，设计博物馆，伦敦，2021年11月26日至2022年4月10日
{"title":"Amy: Beyond the Stage","authors":"L. Weston","doi":"10.1558/jazz.24224","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1558/jazz.24224","url":null,"abstract":"Amy: Beyond the Stage, Design Museum, London, 26 November 2021–10 April 2022","PeriodicalId":40438,"journal":{"name":"Jazz Research Journal","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41687401","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}
Travelling the space-ways, two figures. One from Saturn, one from Sirius: brought together in a speculative conversation that crosses space and time. A message to Earth: ‘Get your house in order!’ Sun Ra (1914–1993) wrote extensively throughout his life. Of his over 350 prose-poems, nearly half are directly concerned with exploring concepts of meta-reality, astro-Black identity, and lost time via the coming and consequences of ‘the cosmic age’. For Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928–2007), the ‘astro’ played out through the interpenetration of the micro and the macro in text and music. Interplanetary vibrations mingle with earthly micro-particles, the celestial and the fantastic combine in music’s transformative ability to bring profound change. Using a combination of Jacques Derrida’s (1930–2004) deconstructive technique of the animadversion, and the interview ‘cut-up’, as employed by Christian Marclay (b. 1955), this provocation will take the form of a ‘sampled cosmic conversation’ of Ra and Stockhausen’s own words.
{"title":"Calling Planet Earth!!! Is anybody listening…?","authors":"Clare Lesser","doi":"10.1558/jazz.22954","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1558/jazz.22954","url":null,"abstract":"Travelling the space-ways, two figures. One from Saturn, one from Sirius: brought together in a speculative conversation that crosses space and time. A message to Earth: ‘Get your house in order!’ Sun Ra (1914–1993) wrote extensively throughout his life. Of his over 350 prose-poems, nearly half are directly concerned with exploring concepts of meta-reality, astro-Black identity, and lost time via the coming and consequences of ‘the cosmic age’. For Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928–2007), the ‘astro’ played out through the interpenetration of the micro and the macro in text and music. Interplanetary vibrations mingle with earthly micro-particles, the celestial and the fantastic combine in music’s transformative ability to bring profound change. Using a combination of Jacques Derrida’s (1930–2004) deconstructive technique of the animadversion, and the interview ‘cut-up’, as employed by Christian Marclay (b. 1955), this provocation will take the form of a ‘sampled cosmic conversation’ of Ra and Stockhausen’s own words.","PeriodicalId":40438,"journal":{"name":"Jazz Research Journal","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45096053","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}
This article proposes Nina Simone as an Afrofuturist artist who explores themes of utopia and dystopia in connection to posthuman discourses. Having established three main ways in which this is a speculative approach, it then explores gaps in existing theories of posthumanism and Afrofuturism. It also considers work that addresses the omission of female musicians in Afrofuturist theory and proposes alternative theories in the form of speculative fiction and Black utopias. The article discusses Simone’s frequent allusions to Egyptian myth, her self-identification as a ‘robot’ and her interest in other planets, planes and spheres. It argues that, beyond the unexplored parallels with ‘classic’ Afrofuturism, there is a sense of dystopianism, apocalypse and reterritorialization throughout Simone’s mature work. To explore these connections, three case studies are used: the 1969 album Nina Simone and Piano!, the song ‘22nd Century’, and Simone’s performance at the 1976 Montreux Jazz Festival.
{"title":"reincarnation of an Egyptian queen","authors":"Richard Elliott","doi":"10.1558/jazz.22863","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1558/jazz.22863","url":null,"abstract":"This article proposes Nina Simone as an Afrofuturist artist who explores themes of utopia and dystopia in connection to posthuman discourses. Having established three main ways in which this is a speculative approach, it then explores gaps in existing theories of posthumanism and Afrofuturism. It also considers work that addresses the omission of female musicians in Afrofuturist theory and proposes alternative theories in the form of speculative fiction and Black utopias. The article discusses Simone’s frequent allusions to Egyptian myth, her self-identification as a ‘robot’ and her interest in other planets, planes and spheres. It argues that, beyond the unexplored parallels with ‘classic’ Afrofuturism, there is a sense of dystopianism, apocalypse and reterritorialization throughout Simone’s mature work. To explore these connections, three case studies are used: the 1969 album Nina Simone and Piano!, the song ‘22nd Century’, and Simone’s performance at the 1976 Montreux Jazz Festival.","PeriodicalId":40438,"journal":{"name":"Jazz Research Journal","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43754340","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}
This short play dramatizes the myth-making around a lost episode of the BBC’s Jazz Goes to College series—‘The Albert Ayler Quintet’ recorded by an Outside Broadcast unit at the London School of Economics on 15 November 1966. I use the event to explore questions of cultural ownership, institutional racism and academic hierarchy. The content of the play is based upon the archival, ethnographic and television production elements of my 2017–2019 Arts and Humanities Research Council project ‘Jazz on BBC-TV 1960–1969’ (AH/P007376/1). The play is an experiment in scholarly form, a challenge to the exclusionary structures of academia (including language) and an acknowledgment of the subjective and autobiographical impulses that inform historical narrative.
{"title":"Albert Ayler’s Ghost","authors":"Nicolas Pillai","doi":"10.1558/jazz.22906","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1558/jazz.22906","url":null,"abstract":"This short play dramatizes the myth-making around a lost episode of the BBC’s Jazz Goes to College series—‘The Albert Ayler Quintet’ recorded by an Outside Broadcast unit at the London School of Economics on 15 November 1966. I use the event to explore questions of cultural ownership, institutional racism and academic hierarchy. The content of the play is based upon the archival, ethnographic and television production elements of my 2017–2019 Arts and Humanities Research Council project ‘Jazz on BBC-TV 1960–1969’ (AH/P007376/1). The play is an experiment in scholarly form, a challenge to the exclusionary structures of academia (including language) and an acknowledgment of the subjective and autobiographical impulses that inform historical narrative.","PeriodicalId":40438,"journal":{"name":"Jazz Research Journal","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48922324","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}
This article explores Afrofuturist countermemory and alternative history, and the potential of these concepts to be applied to the legacy of Miles Davis’s final fusion concept. Through artistic practice and investigations into the role of such practice in musicological research, Kodwo Eshun’s ‘sonic fictions’ are leveraged as a lens to reclaim Davis’s experiments in jazz-hip hop fusion. Afrofuturism and its relation to speculative modalities is discussed, particularly in terms of its capacity for cultural recovery and historical disruption with a focus on recorded music via sonic fictions and their attendant considerations. The practice-led research brings the ‘conceptual collaboration’ paradigm of Amerigo Gazaway to bear on Davis’s work; four guiding principles in Gazaway’s concept are identified and discussed. The culmination of this research, an original album titled Hip Bop, imagines an alternative future for Miles Davis post-1992 that continues and expands the jazz-hip hop fusion of his final album. This new album is then discussed with reference to sonic fiction, and its relationship to authenticity and techno-political expression is questioned.
{"title":"Hip Bop","authors":"Liam Maloney","doi":"10.1558/jazz.23613","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1558/jazz.23613","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores Afrofuturist countermemory and alternative history, and the potential of these concepts to be applied to the legacy of Miles Davis’s final fusion concept. Through artistic practice and investigations into the role of such practice in musicological research, Kodwo Eshun’s ‘sonic fictions’ are leveraged as a lens to reclaim Davis’s experiments in jazz-hip hop fusion. Afrofuturism and its relation to speculative modalities is discussed, particularly in terms of its capacity for cultural recovery and historical disruption with a focus on recorded music via sonic fictions and their attendant considerations. The practice-led research brings the ‘conceptual collaboration’ paradigm of Amerigo Gazaway to bear on Davis’s work; four guiding principles in Gazaway’s concept are identified and discussed. The culmination of this research, an original album titled Hip Bop, imagines an alternative future for Miles Davis post-1992 that continues and expands the jazz-hip hop fusion of his final album. This new album is then discussed with reference to sonic fiction, and its relationship to authenticity and techno-political expression is questioned.","PeriodicalId":40438,"journal":{"name":"Jazz Research Journal","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47275740","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}
This short critical-creative piece originates in an EU-funded project on heritage in improvised music festivals (CHIME). It is a supplement to other recently published research by the author exploring the relation between the touristic offer of certain British jazz festivals and their lack of engagement with the significance of their own civic setting and heritage, focused on festivals held in Georgian or Regency locations (i.e., ones with strong links to the transatlantic slave trade). It explores and metaphorizes the double bass and its transatlantic resonances. It concludes with a small provocation in the form of a manifesto, aimed primarily at jazz festival directors.
{"title":"Further thoughts, and a maniFESTo, on jazz (festivals) and the decolonization of music","authors":"G. McKay","doi":"10.1558/jazz.43867","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1558/jazz.43867","url":null,"abstract":"This short critical-creative piece originates in an EU-funded project on heritage in improvised music festivals (CHIME). It is a supplement to other recently published research by the author exploring the relation between the touristic offer of certain British jazz festivals and their lack of engagement with the significance of their own civic setting and heritage, focused on festivals held in Georgian or Regency locations (i.e., ones with strong links to the transatlantic slave trade). It explores and metaphorizes the double bass and its transatlantic resonances. It concludes with a small provocation in the form of a manifesto, aimed primarily at jazz festival directors.","PeriodicalId":40438,"journal":{"name":"Jazz Research Journal","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48163156","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}
京公网安备 11010802042870号
京ICP备2023020795号-1
扫码关注我们
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：