Browsing by Subject "Jazz"
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Item April in Paris, Autumn in New York: Whiteness and the Racial Formation of European Jazz in the US, 1940s–1970s(2022-04) Vad, MikkelThis dissertation charts the US reception and dissemination of European jazz and how ideas of European jazz were shaped through racialized narratives in the meeting of African American culture and European whiteness. In a series of roughly chronological of case studies, it traces how Americans wrote and thought about European jazz and explore the lives of Europeans jazz critics and musicians who went to the US.As a historiographical intervention, the dissertation responds to the fact that histories of transnational jazz in large part locate “the transnational” outside the US. The histories told in this dissertation show that the idea of “European jazz” was not only created in Eu-rope, but was also defined by discourses and music created in the US. Mobilizing critical race studies, the dissertation also argues that scholarship on European jazz has avoided the question of its overwhelming whiteness at the expense of colorblind cosmopolitan univer-salism. By focusing on how European jazz fared in the US, this dissertation highlights how the unavoidable fact of jazz’s Blackness came to set the whiteness of European jazz in re-lief. This also shows that the account of whiteness and jazz, even within the US, cannot be bounded by strict national frameworks. Chapter 1 shows how European critics were positioned in the US press as culturally superior to American jazz critics and audiences, through discourses of high-art class hierar-chies and racial whiteness. Chapter 2 explores of the US careers of the European singers Alice Babs and Caterina Valente, whose gendered whiteness was positioned as a form of exoticized Europeanness in the US. Chapter 3 is a portrait of the Austrian pianist and key-board player Joe Zawinul, who used narratives of miscegenation, racial passing, and “soul” in ways that rely on the fundamental instability of racial markers but also on his white privi-lege to tell such stories. Chapter 4 is a case study of the most prominent European jazz rec-ord label, ECM, which built an identity as a European label upon the already established American ideas of European jazz, specifically its high-art status, “serious” approach to mu-sic, “pure” sound production, and whiteness. The research presented herein reveals that Americans used the specter of Europeanness for their own purposes, reshaping American jazz discourse through transatlantic juxtaposi-tions. Most consistently, American critics and musicians saw these fault lines as one marked by class and race, associating European critics with intellectualism and European jazz with the idea of high art (for instance, through the comparison with European classical music). European ethnicities functioned as a white privileged position from which musi-cians could negotiate their identities with African Americans, claiming both solidarity and difference. American notions of an intrinsic white, highbrow European sensibility worked to uplift jazz in the cultural hierarchy.Item Cultural Colonialism in the Twin Cities Jazz Scene(2023) Garmoe, RyanThis paper explores the relationship between jazz, white supremacy, and colonialism, and how that relationship manifests in the Twin Cities jazz community. Jazz' s interaction with complex sociological concepts is well documented throughout the music's history. However, the discussion of jazz's racialized and exploited past rarely informs decision-making in everyday jazz happenings. How are current jazz systems the result of colonial history? The data to answer such questions, in the context of the Twin Cities in Minnesota, was gathered through musician-to-musician interviews and a survey created and distributed in conjunction with a local jazz non-profit, Jazz Central Studios. While drawing exact parallels to colonial action is difficult, preliminary findings suggest the Twin Cities jazz community continues to struggle with race and gender dynamics, despite the area's pride as a progressive bastion. Furthermore, the presence of robust state arts funding provides important context on why certain genres thrive and others are left grasping for straws. The Twin Cities jazz scene is well positioned for growth. Strong local musicians and the area's positive disposition towards the arts suggest there is space for jazz to flourish in the coming years, despite generally agreed-upon challenges. This paper aims to spark productive dialogue between key stakeholders and create more equitable, fair, and vibrant jazz systems in the Twin Cities.Item Perilous pop: ragtime, jazz and progressive social thought in the early 20th Century Press, 1900-1930.(2009-11) Marchiselli, ChaniThis dissertation is a discursive history of the early twentieth century music controversy as it appeared in the popular press and as it articulated the assumptions and contradictions of progressive social thought. Through close textual analysis, the author illustrates the ways in which musical spaces, musical sounds, and dance practices, operated as the fulcrum for debates about how to reconstitute an "ideal" public in the wake of industrial modernity. For some progressives, the popularization of syncopated pop music signaled the dangerous public incursion of black and working-class cultures, and immigrant groups. For others, ragtime and jazz threatened to dismantle the aesthetic hierarchies to which the project of political "progress" had been hitched. Ultimately, this dissertation argues that progressive social reformers, in an effort to create a public culture that more closely resembled the bourgeois ideals of the liberal tradition, used the newly prolific print media as a vehicle through which to counter the pervasive influence of ragtime and jazz music and dance.