Big Ears: Listening for Gender in Jazz Studies (Refiguring American Music) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822343207 ISBN 13: 9780822343202

Verlag: Duke University Press, 2008

Inhaltsangabe

In jazz circles, players and listeners with "big ears" hear and engage complexity in the moment, as it unfolds. Taking gender as part of the intricate, unpredictable action in jazz culture, this interdisciplinary collection explores the terrain opened up by listening, with big ears, for gender in jazz. Essays range from a reflection on the female boogie-woogie pianists who played at Café Society in New York during the 1930s and 1940s to interpretations of how the jazzman is represented in Dorothy Baker's novel Young Man with a Horn (1938) and Michael Curtiz's film adaptation (1950). Taken together, the essays enrich the field of jazz studies by showing how gender dynamics have shaped the production, reception, and criticism of jazz culture.

Scholars of music, ethnomusicology, American studies, literature, anthropology, and cultural studies approach the question of gender in jazz from multiple perspectives. One contributor scrutinizes the tendency of jazz historiography to treat singing as subordinate to the predominantly male domain of instrumental music, while another reflects on her doubly inappropriate position as a female trumpet player and a white jazz musician and scholar. Other essays explore the composer George Russell's Lydian Chromatic Concept as a critique of mid-twentieth-century discourses of embodiment, madness, and black masculinity; performances of "female hysteria" by Les Diaboliques, a feminist improvising trio; and the BBC radio broadcasts of Ivy Benson and Her Ladies' Dance Orchestra during the Second World War. By incorporating gender analysis into jazz studies, Big Ears transforms ideas of who counts as a subject of study and even of what counts as jazz.

Contributors: Christina Baade, Jayna Brown, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Monica Hairston, Kristin McGee, Tracy McMullen, Ingrid Monson, Lara Pellegrinelli, Eric Porter, Nichole T. Rustin, Ursel Schlicht, Julie Dawn Smith, Jeffrey Taylor, Sherrie Tucker, João H. Costa Vargas

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Nichole T. Rustin is completing a book titled Jazz Men: Race, Masculine Difference, and the Emotions in 1950s America.

Sherrie Tucker is Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Kansas. She is the author of Swing Shift: "All-Girl" Bands of the 1940s, also published by Duke University Press.

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"Opening new vistas upon the study of jazz in the humanities, Nichole T. Rustin and Sherrie Tucker guide a vibrant and profound conversation at the nexus of performance studies, film and literary studies, gender studies, and many other fields. The unprecedented range and scope of this essential new collection affirm the centrality of improvisation to our understanding of culture."--George E. Lewis, author of "A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music"

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BIG EARS

LISTENING FOR GENDER IN JAZZ STUDIES

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2008 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4320-2

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS...............................................................................................................................................................................viiINTRODUCTION Nichole T. Rustin and Sherrie Tucker............................................................................................................................................1SEPARATED AT "BIRTH": SINGING AND THE HISTORY OF JAZZ Lara Pellegrinelli.....................................................................................................................31WITH LOVIE AND LIL: REDISCOVERING TWO CHICAGO PIANISTS OF THE 1920s Jeffrey Taylor...........................................................................................................48GENDER, JAZZ, AND THE POPULAR FRONT Monica Hairston..........................................................................................................................................64"THE BATTLE OF THE SAXES": GENDER, DANCE BANDS, AND BRITISH NATIONALISM IN THE SECOND WORLD WAR Christina Baade..............................................................................90IDENTITY FOR SALE: GLENN MILLER, WYNTON MARSALIS, AND CULTURAL REPLAY IN MUSIC Tracy McMullen................................................................................................129FROM THE POINT OF VIEW OF THE PAVEMENT: A GEOPOLITICS OF BLACK DANCE Jayna Brown.............................................................................................................157PERVERSE HYSTERICS: THE NOISY CRI OF LES DIABOLIQUES Julie Dawn Smith........................................................................................................................180"BORN OUT OF JAZZ ... YET EMBRACING ALL MUSIC": RACE, GENDER, AND TECHNOLOGY IN GEORGE RUSSELL'S LYDIAN CHROMATIC CONCEPT Eric Porter........................................................210"BUT THIS MUSIC IS MINE ALREADY!": "WHITE WOMAN" AS JAZZ COLLECTOR IN THE FILM NEW ORLEANS (1947) Sherrie Tucker.............................................................................235FITTING THE PART Ingrid Monson...............................................................................................................................................................267"BETTER A JAZZ ALBUM THAN LIPSTICK" (LIEBER JAZZPLATTE ALS LIPPENSTIFT): THE 1956 JAZZ PODIUM SERIES REVEALS IMAGES OF JAZZ AND GENDER IN POSTWAR GERMANY Ursel Schlicht.....................291EXCLUSION, OPENNESS, AND UTOPIA IN BLACK MALE PERFORMANCE AT THE WORLD STAGE JAZZ JAM SESSIONS Joo H. Costa Vargas..........................................................................320"IT TAKES TWO PEOPLE TO CONFIRM THE TRUTH": THE JAZZ FICTION OF SHERLEY ANN WILLIAMS AND TONI CADE BAMBARA Farah Jasmine Griffin.............................................................348"BLOW, MAN, BLOW!": REPRESENTING GENDER, WHITE PRIMITIVES, AND JAZZ MELODRAMA THROUGH A YOUNG MAN WITH A HORN Nichole T. Rustin..............................................................361THE GENDERED JAZZ AESTHETICS OF THAT MAN OF MINE: THE INTERNATIONAL SWEETHEARTS OF RHYTHM AND INDEPENDENT BLACK SOUND FILM Kristin McGee.....................................................393BIBLIOGRAPHY..................................................................................................................................................................................423CONTRIBUTORS..................................................................................................................................................................................435INDEX.........................................................................................................................................................................................441

Chapter One

Lara Pellegrinelli

SEPARATED AT "BIRTH": SINGING AND THE HISTORY OF JAZZ

In the context of studies that address issues of gender in jazz, singing presents its own unique challenges. Although the vast majority of women in jazz have been and continue to be vocalists, a role that can provide them with tremendous visibility and widespread recognition from audiences, surprisingly little has been done to investigate singing as a gendered domain. The scholarly literature on "women in jazz" has focused almost entirely on instrumentalists: compensatory histories have documented the work of neglected artists, challenged the hegemonic nature of jazz historiography, and raised a host of complex issues faced by women working in a male-dominated field. Indeed, the marginalization of singers by scholars of women in jazz may very well occur because the singers' mainstream popularity complicates or perhaps even eclipses altogether the "stories of devaluation and absence" with which such scholars have primarily been concerned.

Nonetheless, the exclusion of singers from musical canons, scholarship, and the serious press coverage that often provides a critical foundation for these other projects is as deeply entrenched as that of their female instrumental counterparts. For example, some histories, including the most popular textbook for undergraduate jazz courses, completely erase singers. Paul Berliner's landmark ethnography on improvisation, Thinking in Jazz, lists only three among his fifty-two interview subjects. Merely a handful of academic articles and biographical studies take singers as their subject, leaving their written documentation in disparate sources: brief encyclopedia articles, album liner notes, magazine and newspaper articles, and publicity materials generated by the music industry. Given the historiographic focus on vocal forms within African-American music broadly speaking-from spirituals and the blues to soul and hip-hop-jazz's almost exclusive emphasis on instrumental music is certainly distinctive, if not peculiar or anomalous.

Aside from the grudging nods afforded a few Swing Era "canaries," ones so prominent that they would be difficult to ignore, singing only factors into the majority of histories as a musical practice common to many forms that comprise jazz's nineteenth-century precursors. An exploration of the ways that historians have represented jazz's so-called birth reveals how gender is embedded in the narratives surrounding this mythical event, ones that contribute to normative concepts, politics, and subject formation in jazz overall. As Edward Said asserts, "beginnings carry weight because they function as sites for the conscious production of meaning, a result of their departure from pre-existing traditions of discourse." In jazz historiography, they effectively fix the marginalized status of women early in a tradition of representation as well as in the musical chronologies themselves. Despite its symbolic and practical importance in jazz's parentage, singing is dropped from historical narratives soon after the music's birth. Having waited for her to deliver her offspring, historians cut the umbilical cord, separating mother from child and enabling the yowling infant to toddle off on his own down the streets of New Orleans.

Most general histories of jazz begin by presenting a variety of precursors, a shadowy morass of genres that goes back to the nineteenth century: spirituals, ring shouts, work songs, field cries, and plantation songs; the European dance forms and operas performed by New Orleans creoles; minstrelsy, the blues,...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2008
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0822343207
• ISBN 13: 9780822343202
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 472
• Herausgeber: Rustin
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Mare Nostrum Group B.V.; gpsr@mare-nostrum.co.uk; ; Doelen 72; Breda; 4831 GR; Niederlande