Jazz Diaspora

Music and Globalisation

Bruce Johnson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351266666
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Musik

Jazz Diaspora: Music and Globalisation is about the international diaspora of jazz, well underway within a year of the first jazz recordings in 1917. This book studies the processes of the global jazz diaspora and its implications for jazz historiography in general, arguing for its relevance to the fields of sonic studies and cognitive theory. Until the late twentieth century, the historiography and analysis of jazz were centred on the US to the almost complete exclusion of any other region. The driving premise of this book is that jazz was not 'invented' and then exported: it was invented in the process of being disseminated.

Jazz Diaspora is a sustained argument for an alternative historiography, based on a shift from a US-centric to a diasporic perspective on the music. The rationale is double-edged. It appears that most of the world's jazz is experienced (performed and consumed) in diasporic sites – that is, outside its agreed geographical point of origin – and to ignore diasporic jazz is thus to ignore most jazz activity. It is also widely felt that the balance has shifted, as jazz in its homeland has become increasingly conservative.

There has been an assumption that only the 'authentic' version of the music--as represented in its country of origin--was of aesthetic and historical interest in the jazz narrative; that the forms that emerged in other countries were simply rather pallid and enervated echoes of the 'real thing'. This has been accompanied by challenges to the criterion of place- and race-based authenticity as a way of assessing the value of popular music forms in general. As the prototype for the globalisation of popular music, diasporic jazz provides a richly instructive template for the study of the history of modernity as played out musically.

PART 1

First Eight

Global Jazz Diaspora

1

GLOBAL JAZZ DIASPORA

A Chronicle

Introduction

A chronicle is an account of historical events in the order of their occurrence. I begin with what is primarily a chronicle of the international jazz diaspora, to provide a foundation on which to build subsequent arguments about the cultural and political dynamics of that process. Given the recent spate of books on jazz in Europe listed above, I have tended to provide examples from regions that have been receiving less attention. Much of my supplementary material arises from one of the arguments prosecuted in this study and articulated explicitly below. That is, that one of the most serious deficiencies in the standard jazz historiography is that in the interests of a ‘grand narrative’ it elides the crucial importance of micro-histories and local dynamics in the formation and dispersal of the music. I therefore pause in my narrative from time to time for exemplification.

The diverse landscape of jazz outside the US exhibits both general patterns and regional variations at key moments in the internationalisation of the music. For the sake of coherence it is necessary to invoke various taxonomies, such as the concept of nation or blackness. But the investigation itself will disclose problems with such models, and these will be explored in more detail in later sections, as will other implications of a diasporic frame of reference. This opening chronicle will be structured around apparently unitary episodes which have framed the music, such as the Great Depression, two World Wars and the Cold War, reflecting the fact that the internationalisation of jazz has been aligned with the trajectory of various Euro-US imperialist enterprises, and these can therefore be seen as reference points in the exploration of its history. Jazz has also been in continuous exchange with antecedent and collateral streams of American music such as minstrelsy, gospel and ragtime, and although these are beyond the scope of this discussion occasional cross-referencing is useful.

International Migration – The First Phase

Both discursively and as a social practice, jazz was internationalised with a rapidity unprecedented for any music. ‘The jazz audience, from the very beginning, has been global’ (Rasula 2002: 68; Johnson 2017C: 10). This proposition, which only a couple of decades ago would have required considerable citation from primary sources, can now be succinctly reviewed with a festoon of secondary citations, the dates of which testify to the extent to which the field has been recently populated.

The year 1917 is pivotal. It was the year of Passchendaele which, for many, marked the point beyond which World War One could no longer be justified by reference to the idealisms of the nineteenth century. The French army mutinied, the generals began to realise that the heart had gone out of the armies and the Pope called for an end to hostilities (McDonald 1993: 166; Johnson 2000: 20). Germany’s declaration of unrestricted submarine warfare and its first air-raids on London herald the unchivalric era of total war. It was the year proclaiming a revolutionary new order, literally in the case of Russia, but also in the publication of T. S. Eliot’s ‘Prufrock’ collection, the coining of the word ‘surrealism’ and the foundation of Mondrian’s journal De Stijl, in Europe, and the advent of female suffrage in the ‘New World’. The entry of the US into the war in 1917 helped to end it, and also led to the closure of the red-light area in Storyville in New Orleans, laying the foundations for one of the central mythologies in the dissemination of the music. In 1917 the Original Dixieland Jazz Band (ODJB), from New Orleans via Chicago, famously opened at Reisenweber’s Restaurant in New York, converting a puzzled crowd by declaring that jazz was for dancing. It was the year that the band made what are regarded as the first jazz recordings. It is thus an appropriate year from which to date the international jazz diaspora.

Intimations of the new music were circulating internationally before the cessation of hostilities in November 1918. An account of the Arras offensive of April 1917, only months after the first jazz recordings were made by the ODJB, includes mention of a Royal Flying Corps squadron mess with its own jazz band to boost morale (Hart 2005: 288). By 1920 jazz had become a pervasive presence in Europe, including in Spain, France, Germany, Italy and the Nordic regions (Iglesias 2013: 101; Plastino 2016: 315; Johnson Forthcoming B). In the UK it now supplanted the fashion for ragtime, and in London song-writer Ivor Weir, a member of the service entertainment unit the New Zealand Pierrots, was enjoying great success with his ‘Mad Jazz Razz’ (Parsonage 2005: 27; Bourke 2010: 7). The antipodean connection proclaims the geographical extent of the new craze. In August 1919 the New Zealand Dominion announced that a group of Wellington musicians had formed a jazz band, whose rehearsals produced ‘the weirdest effects imaginable’, which could scarcely be termed music, but nonetheless, could ‘make people dance to its quaint rhythms and amazing pauses’ (Bourke 2010: 7). In Finland references to jazz, and the ODJB in particular, were appearing in the press as early as May 1919 (Johnson Forthcoming B). The first ‘echoes of jazz’ in Brazil had been in 1917 when The American Rag Time Revue, presented in Rio de Janeiro, featured the shape of things to come in the form of ‘imposing drums that took centre stage’, the ‘show-stopper’ according to a press review, ‘the most fascinating part of the show’ (Fléchet 2016:16). The following year the word ‘jazz’ first appeared, with the announcement that ‘the famous American dancer Miss Della Martell would perform a traditional dance ‘and American Jazz Music’ at Rio’s Moderno theatre (Fléchet 2016: 17). By 1926 the music was being advertised in Azerbaijan as performed by ‘the first Caucasus Eastern Folk Symphonic Orchestra’ (Naroditskaya 2016: 100). In 1922, in an article published in New York Times Book Review and Magazine, journalist Burnet Hershey reported that in his recent journey around the world he found the ‘zump-zump-zump and toodle-oodle-doo’ of jazz everywhere (Walser 1999: 26). The speed of its international circulation tells us as much about modernity itself as about the music which became its anthem.

Physical Migrations

The dispersal of jazz through physical migrations was crucial in internationalising models of a music so rooted in live performance. In spite of the perceived connection between jazz, blackness, Africa and primitivism, in many cases, especially Anglophone countries and regions like the UK and Australasia, the first live exposures to US acts presented as jazz musicians was to white performers. The ODJB in London in 1919 is generally cited as the benchmark, but I want to consider the case of Sophie Tucker, because it carries our attention forward to a number of issues to be explored later regarding the diaspora narrative, all of which cast light on later elisions relating to vaudeville, Jewishness, dance and gender, and how the historian is to deploy the term jazz. Tucker’s New York formal performance debut was in 1906, in blackface coon singing with a thick southern accent (Tucker 1948: 44). In 1910 or 1911 she had shared a bill with Art Hickman, referred to above, in San Francisco on the Pantages Circuit, and she recalled also visiting Purcell’s, ‘the hot coloured joint’ (Tucker 1948: 102).

In her memoir Tucker recalls the beginning, in what must have been about 1916, of what she referred to as her ‘jazz’ period, billed as ‘The Queen of Jazz’ with her band, ‘Five Kings of Syncopation’, recruited from local New York musicians (Tucker 1948: 137), including drummer Dan Alvin who ‘could do a mean shimmy and still beat his drum … [and] … could throw the sticks up in the air and catch them without losing a beat’ (Tucker 1948: 143). Following an Orpheum circuit tour which included Chicago, where they enjoyed outstanding reviews (Tucker 1948: 140), her agent booked her for an eight-month season at Reisenweber’s, opening on 23 December 1916, playing both as a show and for dancing (Tucker 1948: 152). By this account, Tucker’s ‘Queen of Jazz’ season, with white New York musicians led by a Jewish woman, opened before the ODJB’s season at the same café began in January 1917, often mythologised as New York’s first exposure to jazz. Regarding the international diaspora, Tucker left for England in March 1922, taking with her two pianists, Ted Shapiro and Jack Carroll (Tucker 1948: 181, 197): ‘I wouldn’t risk being stranded and having to break in a British piano player who might not be up on American jazz rhythms. I would show the folks over there what American jazz was like’ (Tucker 1948: 171). To open one of her programmes, she decided on what was felt to be ‘a jazz song’, ‘Dapper Dan’ (interestingly, this music hall item was also in the repertoire of the Australian Graeme Bell band in the UK several decades later); the ‘audience liked the jazz’ (Tucker 1948: 182). Her Jewishness was a prominent feature of her presentation, especially the song ‘My Yiddisher Mama’; she identified as a ‘Jewish’ performer and she attracted a large proportion of Jews in her audiences (Tucker 1948: 195). She recalls that the English audiences ‘seemed crazy about everything American and eager to take up American jazz, American dance steps, American slang, and American mannerisms’ (Tucker 1948: 189, see also 193). She also toured Europe, and returned to London in August 1925, following Ted Lewis at the Kit Kat Club, then in 1928 and 1930 (Tucker 1948: 203, 230, 237). She identified herself as a jazz performer, and audiences, promoters and reviewers evidently agreed. But we will look in vain for reference to Sophie Tucker in histories of jazz and its diaspora. There was at one time a humorous website that explained how to play the blues, and it included the injunction that if your name is Damien and you live in an ashram, then it doesn’t matter how many men you killed in St. Louis, you can’t be a blues singer. Nor, it seems, if you are a female Jewish vaudevillian from New York, can you be a pioneer jazz performer, no matter how many people thought you were. I spend time on this case at the outset to prepare the ground for arguments running through the following chapters about the inadequacy of the canonical ‘who’s who’.

The physical and cultural mobilisations of World War One played a significant role in the music’s migration. James Reese Europe’s sixty-piece black band of the 369th US Infantry (‘The Hellfighters’) was both embodiment and instrument of the multi-directional migrations feeding into all jazz. The nineteen among its musicians recruited in Puerto Rico by its leader included many who would settle in New York, the vanguard of a greater influx from the 1930s (Shepherd et al. 2005: III: 88). In 1917 Europe’s orchestra arrived in France where it presented jazz and ragtime repertoire to civilians, allied soldiers and even German POWs. They were followed by similar US military bands, one of which included Sam Wooding, who returned with his own jazz group in 1925 to tour Europe including Sweden (van Kan 2016: 39). Louis Mitchell’s Jazz Kings (1917), the ODJB (1919), Will Marion Cook’s Southern Syncopated Orchestra with Sidney Bechet (1919) and Paul Whiteman (1923, 1925), were all seen by British and European audiences. Wooding also visited Tunis and South America, and Josephine Baker visited Finland with a sixteen-piece orchestra in 1933 (Kernfeld 1988: I: 502; Nettelbeck 2004: 16–28, 37–41; Goddard 1979: 9–78; Shepherd et al. 2005: VII: 263; Nettelbeck 2004: 37–41; Johnson Forthcoming B). Baker had electrified Paris with the Revue Nègre company in 1925 (Nettelbeck 2004: 37–41), and the same company had also premiered its show Black People in Berlin in 1926, and under the name Black Follies in Lisbon in 1928, with music composed by Spencer Williams and Joe Solmer and performed by the Neger Jazz Orchestra (Roxo and Castelo-Branco 2016: 205–207; Cravinho 2016: 90–91). Other early European exposures to visiting US jazz-oriented performers included in 1923 in London the revues The Rainbow of which James P. Johnson was a member, and Dover Street to Dixie which included Johnny Dunn (Parsonage 2005: 179). Parsonage provides a detailed account of similar visits and their impact (see also Parsonage 2012). She argues that the ODJB and the Southern Syncopated Orchestra in particular were ‘vital to the evolution of jazz in Britain’ (Parsonage 2005: 160).

By the 1920s there were well-established Southeast Asian dance band circuits used by musicians from the Philippines, Russia, Britain and Japan, as well as the US. Sidney Bechet and Buck Clayton were heard in the Soviet Union and Shanghai, which boasted its own highly paid black American jazz community servicing its prolific entertainment industry. Teddy Weatherford settled in India and performed in Japan, China and Southeast Asia (Atkins 2003: xv; Jones 2003: 231; Pinckney 2003: 62, 231). White US Jazz bands began touring Australasia in the early 1920s and were extremely important as models for a less frantic and chaotic performance style than earlier vaudeville-based local acts that had been based on second-hand exposure in print formats (Johnson 1987: 3–13, 64–73). Under the influence of the first US jazz group, Frank Ellis and his Californians, Frank Coughlan recalled that sax players began to use vibrato, bass players more often played pizzicato, and the rhythm section began to include ‘drumming for rhythm instead of noise’ (Boden 2016: 112). In New Zealand early personal contact with US performers came in 1923 with the arrival of ex-US navy musician Dick Richards who joined the Ambassador Musical Trio, billed as a jazz specialist, creating a sensation with his ‘stomp arrangements’ and ‘eccentric’ banjo style (Bourke 2010: 21). Of particular importance was Sammy Lee and his Americanadians, who arrived in 1938 and stayed for 18 months of residencies in Wellington and Auckland, whence they also broadcast (Bourke 2010: 91). Lee later settled in Australia where he became a very successful nightclub entrepreneur.

An invaluable first-hand account of early contacts between US jazz musicians and Europe is provided in reed player Garvin Bushell’s memoir Jazz from the Beginning (Bushell 1988; the page references below are to this edition). Few if any jazz musicians could have a broader panorama of the history of the music, ranging from participation on what are regarded as the first jazz/blues recordings with Mamie Smith in 1920, through work with Ethel Waters, the bands of Fletcher Henderson and Cab Calloway, and the ‘rediscovered’ Bunk Johnson in the 1940s, to Eric Dolphy, John Coltrane and Gil Evans in the 1960s. His career spanned early black vaudeville and circuses to orchestral settings on double reed instruments. He also accompanied an international tour that lasted just over two years from May 1925 to July 1927 in Sam Wooding’s band with the Chocolate Kiddies revue. It opened in Berlin and took in Sweden, Denmark, Czechoslovakia, Spain, France, Switzerland and Russia, then back to Germany where the band split from the revue to become a touring orchestra that went on to England, France and then Argentina. As a further reminder of the international dispersal of his colleagues, in the course of his travels he met other expatriate US musicians. In Budapest he heard Palmer Jones and his black American band playing at the Moulin Rouge (61). In Vienna he first heard the now largely forgotten Arthur Briggs: ‘What a beautiful trumpet player! He was in an orchestra with some Austrians, some French, and a couple of Senegalese. His trumpets made ours sound like beginners’ (62; on Briggs’s importance in Europe see also Johnson 2017C: 10). And he met the ‘great clarinet player from Florida’, J. Paul Wyer, aka The Pensacola Kid in Argentina where Wyer had bought a huge ranch (70). Bushell also recorded some of the impressions he formed and that the band left. In Prague Bushell was also engaged to play in a Czech dance band which played US dance music: ‘they were interested in knowing how American jazz musicians played. They were a few years behind our things in New York. Rudolph Friml’s “Indian Love Call” was very popular then, also “Whispering,” “Avalon,” and “St. Louis Blues.”’ (61). And it is an instructive disclosure of the stereotypification of early black jazz that the band (sans revue) did not go over well in London; Bushell speculates that it was because they were a ‘classy organization’; that the British ‘would have accepted a black orchestra doing comedy and slapstick’ (68).

But what exactly were these ‘jazz’ audiences responding to? It is worth taking some time to discuss this, as it throws so much light on these early diasporic dynamics. The revue troupe consisted of an eleven-piece orchestra and more than thirty chorus girls, dancers and comedians. The revue, which was in two sections, ‘with sketches, dance numbers, and comedy bits’ (55), including: a plantation sketch; a ‘jungle number’ which gave the opportunity for ‘jungle music: tom-toms and hoochie-coochie’; the interior of a Harlem cabaret, in which Adelaide Hall sang and an Apache dance was presented (55–56). The show ‘was built around the team of Greenlee and Drayton, “a big-time” US vaudeville act who had been in Europe pre-war. They would dance and talk in Hungarian, Russian, French, Yiddish, English and German’ (56). Willie Robbins and Chick Horsey did a blackface act that included very popular trumpet novelty imitations of their singing; Three Eddies did a comedy song and dancing routine in blackface; Jessie Crawford did a ‘strut dance and drill with a chorus line’ (56). Lest it be thought that all this was ‘for export only’, many of these acts had been presented at New York’s Club Alabam (56), where Bushell had worked with Sam Wooding in 1924. The band played in the pit for the first half, then on stage for the second, without written music; the programme order would be changed according to audience response (56). They would use a wide range of instrumental combinations, including even an oboe trio (57). This ‘revue’ format was the norm. When Ellington toured France in 1933 the concerts were in two parts, the first music, the second dancers and comedy. It was not until his 1939 tour that the format was what we would now recognise as a jazz concert (Hasse 2012: 192). The format of a tour by a black US jazz act as we are now accustomed to is very unlike the interwar period, when the vaudeville and variety roots of jazz were still much in evidence, as documented further below.

The importance of such direct contacts is reflected in the cases where it was not available. Finland was generally bypassed in early American tours of Scandinavia. Finnish jazz recordings as late as 1939, when compared with those of Swedish bandleader Thor Ehrling of the same year, indicate a much closer correspondence between Ehrling’s work and US source materials (Johnson 2002A: 35). In Australia the deportation of Sonny Clay’s Plantation Orchestra from the visiting revue The Colored Idea (see further below) was the last official live exposure for the general public to black US jazz musicians until 1954, and over the same period there was a dearth of any visiting US musicians (Johnson 2004: 10). England received a steady stream of major US jazz performers until 1935 when the Ministry of Labour placed a ban on US groups without appropriate reciprocity (see further on the Australian and UK bans below). The effects of these proscriptions were ambiguous, starving locals of up-to-the-minute exposure except for contacts during the periods of activity of US service musicians during World War Two, but also fostering locally serviced jazz scenes. Some sense of the significance of these circumstances can be gained by reference to the mirror image of France, which suffered no prohibitions on imported US musicians except during the period of German occupation (Johnson 1987: 23–32; Godbolt 1984: 236–274; Nettelbeck 2004: 37–80). The tours of visiting US bands, and of a local, albeit small visiting and expatriate community of US jazz musicians including a high proportion of African-Americans, affected interwar Parisian culture in a range of ways. Apart from simply being visible as a stimulating (if often ambiguous) presence, they ‘coloured’ the local jazz scene, and particularly its emerging discourses (see below). As metropolitan cohabitants they nuanced the music’s exoticism and became a significant element in the city’s radical intellectual life (see for example Nettelbeck 2004: 31–52). The significance of protracted and close exposure would be dramatically confirmed from the late 1950s in the case of the Montmartre Jazzhuset in Copenhagen, where front-rank US jazz musicians were available as models for musicians and audiences on a nightly basis over s...