Waltzing in the Dark: African American Vaudeville and Race Politics in the Swing Era

2001 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 128
Author(s):  
Thomas DeFrantz ◽  
Brenda Dixon Gottschild
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Race Politics ◽  
Swing Era

Waltzing in the Dark: African American Vaudeville and Race Politics in the Swing Era

2001 ◽  
Vol 88 (1) ◽  
pp. 248
Author(s):  
Robert W. Snyder ◽  
Brenda Dixon Gottschild
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Race Politics ◽  
Swing Era

“The Fools Don’t Think I Play Jazz”

2018 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 397-430
Author(s):  
Benjamin Givan
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Identity ◽  
Black American ◽  
Thought Processes ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Past ◽  
Swing Era ◽  
Historical Trajectory ◽  
Unpublished Manuscripts ◽  
Carnegie Hall

Cecil Taylor (1929–2018), who was associated with the postwar black musical avant-garde, and Mary Lou Williams (1910–81), who had roots in jazz’s swing era, met in a notorious 1977 Carnegie Hall recital. These two African American pianists possessed decidedly different temperaments and aesthetic sensibilities; their encounter offers a striking illustration of how conflicts between coexisting performance strategies can reveal a great deal about musicians’ thought processes and worldviews. Evidence from unpublished manuscripts and letters, published interviews and written commentary by the performers, the accounts of music critics, and musical transcriptions from a commercial recording (the album Embraced) reveals that, in addition to demonstrating the performers’ distinct musical idiolects, the concert engaged longstanding debates over jazz’s history and definition as well as broader issues of black American identity. In particular, it dispelled still potent notions of jazz as a genre with a unilinear historical trajectory, and it encapsulated the inherent ambivalence toward the past often exhibited by the jazz avant-garde.

African-American Mayors: Race, Politics, and the American City

2002 ◽  
Vol 89 (2) ◽  
pp. 724
Author(s):  
Michael W. Homel ◽  
David R. Colburn ◽  
Jeffrey S. Adler
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American City ◽  
Race Politics

Duke’s Day and First Features 1929–1940

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-38
Author(s):  
Kevin Whitehead
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
African American ◽  
The Other ◽  
African American Community ◽  
Feature Films ◽  
Swing Era ◽  
Duke Ellington ◽  
Bessie Smith ◽  
Musical Styles ◽  
Carnegie Hall

A survey and analysis of films taking jazz as a topic, from early talkies through the birth and development of the swing era. Such films include two innovative 1929 shorts by director Dudley Murphy, one featuring Bessie Smith and the other featuring Duke Ellington. Smith and Ellington play fictionalized versions of themselves. Paul Whiteman and Artie Shaw play their not-quite selves in feature films. Controversy over jazz in the African American community is explored in Broken Strings. Musicians “swing the classics” there and in another film. The 1937 feature Champagne Waltz includes an early instance of a stock jazz-film ending—a big New York concert that reconciles people and/or musical styles in conflict. That ending is tweaked by placing it at Carnegie Hall in 1938’s Alexander’s Ragtime Band. Other films are also discussed.

Studious drummers, selling drum outfits, standardization, and stardom

Kick It ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 105-152
Author(s):  
Matt Brennan
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
International Market ◽  
Literacy Education ◽  
The Past ◽  
Swing Era ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Self Assembled ◽  
Key Steps

Literacy, education, and standardization were key steps forward in consolidating the drum kit’s legitimacy in the 1930s. This chapter examines the biographies of many early drummers and how they learnt to play the drum kit. Arguments over how to play the drum kit were inseparable from the changing form of the drum kit itself, as manufacturers like Ludwig, Slingerland, Leedy, and Gretsch competed to sell standardized, pre-bundled drum kits in their catalogues rather than the hodge-podge, self-assembled drum kits of the past. This chapter discusses the creation of an international market for drum kits through a combination of instrument innovation, education, and old-fashioned hucksterism. Drum manufacturers created their own newsletters as a way of convincing drummers to buy their product. The chapter also examines the career of swing era drummer Gene Krupa, comparing him with African-American drummer Chick Webb, an influential but less well known drumming bandleader.

scholarly journals The Two Lives of Sara Baartman: Gender, “Race,” Politics and the Historiography of Mis/Representation

1969 ◽  
Vol 60 (1) ◽  
pp. 337-346 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew P. Lyons
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Scientific Racism ◽  
Race Politics ◽  
Pan African ◽  
The Right

The story of Sara Baartman, the so-called Hottentot Venus, who was exhibited in both London and Paris at the beginning of the nineteenth century, is part of the long narrative of scientific racism. In the years preceding and succeeding her return to South Africa from the museum in Paris where her brain and genitals were stored, her story has been told and retold countless times by anti-racist white (and predominantly male) scholars, Pan-African anti-apartheid activists, many of them feminists, African-American scholars, and scholars who claim a particular ethnic status within the Rainbow Nation. There has been much controversy concerning the right to tell Baartman's story and the images that may or may not accompany such narration. An attempt is made to explain why this is so.

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