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An iconic symbol and sound of the Lucumí/Santería religion, Afro-Cuban batá are talking drums that express the epic mythological narratives of the West African Yoruba deities known as orisha. By imitating aspects of speech and song, and by metaphorically referencing salient attributes of the deities, batá drummers facilitate the communal praising of orisha in a music ritual known as a toque de santo. This book blends musical transcription, musical analysis, interviews, ethnographic descriptions, and observations from his own experience as a ritual drummer to highlight the complex variables at work during a live Lucumí performance. Integral in enabling trance possessions by the orisha, by far the most dramatic expressions of Lucumí faith, batá drummers are also entrusted with controlling the overall ebb and flow of the four- to six-hour toque de santo. During these events, batá drummers combine their knowledge of ritual with an extensive repertoire of rhythms and songs. Musicians focus on the many thematic acts that unfold both concurrently and in quick succession. In addition to creating an emotionally charged environment, playing salute rhythms for the orisha, and supporting the playful song competitions that erupt between singers, batá drummers are equally dedicated to nurturing their own drumming community by creating a variety of opportunities for the musicians to grow artistically and creatively.

The Brazilian berimbau, a musical bow, is most commonly associated with the energetic martial art/dance/game of capoeira. This study explores its stature from the 1950s to the present in diverse musical genres including bossa nova, samba-reggae, MPB (Popular Brazilian Music), electronic dance music, Brazilian art music, and more. Berimbau music spans oral and recorded historical traditions, connects Latin America to Africa, juxtaposes the sacred and profane, and unites nationally constructed notions of Brazilian identity across seemingly impenetrable barriers. This book considers the berimbau beyond the context of capoeira, and explores the bow’s emergence as a national symbol. Throughout, it engages and analyzes intersections of musical traditions in the Black Atlantic, North American popular music, and the rise of global jazz. The book is an introduction to Brazilian music for musicians, Latin American scholars, capoeira practitioners, and other people who are interested in Brazil’s music and culture.

Queen Ida. Danny Poullard. Documentary filmmaker Les Blank. Chris Strachwitz and Arhoolie Records. These are names that are familiar to many fans of Cajun music and zydeco, and they have one other thing in common: longtime residence in the San Francisco Bay Area. They are all part of a vibrant scene of dancing and live Louisiana-French music that has evolved over several decades. This book traces how this region of California has been able to develop and sustain dances several times a week with more than a dozen bands. Description of this active regional scene opens into a discussion of several historical trends that have affected life and music in Louisiana and the nation. The book portrays the diversity of people who have come together to adopt Cajun and Creole dance music as a way to cope with a globalized, media-saturated world. The author weaves together interviews with musicians and dancers (some from Louisiana, some not), analysis of popular media, participant observation as a musician and dancer, and historical perspectives from wartime black migration patterns, the civil rights movement, American folk and blues revivals, California counterculture, and the rise of cultural tourism in “Cajun Country.” In so doing, he reveals the multifaceted appeal of celebrating life on the dance floor, Louisiana-French style.

Chocolate Surrealism: Music, Movement, Memory and History is a (w)holistic historiography of the circum-Caribbean region. The book highlights connections among the production, performance, and reception of popular music at critical historical junctures in the late 19^th and 20^th centuries. The book moves through different sites and styles to place socio-musical movements into a larger historical framework: Calypso during the turbulent interwar period and the ensuing crises of capitalism; the Cuban rumba/son complex of the postwar era of American empire; jazz in the Bandung period and the rise of decolonization; and, lastly, Nuyorican Salsa coinciding with the period of the civil rights movement and the beginnings of black/brown power. The book thinks about the circum-Caribbean region as integrated culturally and conceptually while paying close attention to the fractures, fragmentations, and historical particularities that both unite and divide the region. At the same time, the book engages with a larger discussion of the Atlantic world. The project interrogates the interrelation between music, movement, memory, and history, a ‘contrapuntal’ analysis that treats the music of the African diaspora as both epistemological anchor and as a mode of expression and representation of both black identities and political cultures. Music and performance offer ways to re-theorize the politics of race, nationalism and musical practice, geopolitical conjunctures, as well as re-assess the historical development of the modern world system, through the examination of local, popular responses to the global age. In short, the book utilizes different styles, times, and politics to render a brief history of Black Atlantic sound.

This book provides an interpretive framework for understanding how African American creative improvisers think of musical space. Featuring a Foreword by eminent scholar Robin D.G. Kelley, this is the first critical improvisation studies book that uses Black Geographies theory to examine the spatial values of musical expression in the improvisational and compositional practices of trumpeters Terence Blanchard and Ambrose Akinmusire, drummers Billy Higgins and Terri Lyne Carrington, and pianist Andrew Hill. Bar lines in this book serve as a notational and spatial metaphor for social constraints connected to systemic and structural white supremacy. Crossing them therefore applies not only to conceptions of Black spatiality in musical practices but also to how African American musicians address structural barriers to fight the social injustices that obstruct freedom and full citizenship for African Americans and other marginalized groups. Defined by both liminal and quotidian reality, Black musical space, like Black feminist thought, is about theorizing through the lived experiences of Black people which reflect different genders, sexual identities, political stances, across improvisational eras. Using this theory of Black musical space, the book explains how these dynamic musicians explicitly and implicitly articulate humanity through compositional and improvisational practices, some of which interface with contemporary social movements like Black Lives Matter. Consequently, Crossing Bar Lines not only fills a significant gap in the literature on African American, activist musical improvisation and contemporary social movements, but it gives the reader an understanding of the complexity of African American musical practices relative to fluid political identities and sensibilities.

Derived from the nationalist writings of José Martí, the concept of Cubanidad (Cubanness) has always imagined a unified hybrid nation where racial difference is nonexistent and nationality trumps all other axes of identity. Scholars have critiqued this celebration of racial mixture, highlighting a gap between the claim of racial harmony and the realities of inequality faced by Afro-Cubans since Independence in 1898. This book argues that it is not only the recognition of racial difference that threatens to divide the nation, but that popular regional sentiment further contests the hegemonic nationalist discourse. Given that music is a prominent symbol of Cubanidad, musical practices play an important role in constructing regional and local, as well as national, identities, and the book thus suggests that regional identity exerts a significant influence on the aesthetic choices Cuban musicians make. Through the examination of several genres, the book explores the various ways that race and the politics of place are entangled in contemporary Cuban music-making. It argues that racialized discourses that circulate about different cities affect both the formation of local identity and musical performance. Thus, the musical practices discussed—including rumba, timba, eastern Cuban folklore, and son—are examples of the intersections between regional identity formation, racialized notions of place, and music-making.

Greek Music in America: A Reader provides a foundation for understanding the scope, practice, and development of Greek music in America through essays by the principal scholars in the field. This is the first book to offer a comprehensive view of the subject; despite the richness, diversity, and longevity of Greek music in America, there has been relatively little available on the topic. The volume includes several previously published essays, as well as recent work by contemporary specialists on the Greek diaspora. The book opens with a sociohistorical overview of Greek music in America, followed by four major sections. The essays brought together in Musical Genre, Style, and Content cover topics ranging from changes in sacred music in the United States to Café Aman, rebetika, amanedes, Turkish influences, and verbal interjections in musical performances. In the Places section, authors interrogate the musical culture of specific Greek American communities. Delivering the Music: Recording Companies and Performance Venues examines the many ways that music was made available. Profiles provides biographical sketches of noteworthy individuals or entities that shaped the course of Greek music in America or contributed to its allure and perpetuation through their exceptional skills. An additional essay on publicly available Greek music collections completes the book.

Tony Bolden presents an innovative history of funk music focused on the performers, regarding them as intellectuals who fashioned a new aesthetic. Utilizing musicology, literary studies, performance studies, and African American intellectual history, Bolden explores what it means for music, or any cultural artifact, to be funky. Multitudes of African American musicians and dancers created aesthetic frameworks with artistic principles and cultural politics that proved transformative. Bolden approaches the study of funk and black musicians by examining aesthetics, poetics, cultural history, and intellectual history. The study traces the concept of funk from early blues culture to a metamorphosis into a full-fledged artistic framework and a named musical genre in the 1970s, and thereby Bolden presents an alternative reading of the blues tradition. Funk artists, like their blues relatives, tended to contest and contextualize racialized notions of blackness, sexualized notions of gender, and bourgeois notions of artistic value. Funk artists displayed contempt for the status quo and conveyed alternative stylistic concepts and social perspectives through multimedia expression. Bolden argues that on this road to cultural recognition, funk accentuated many of the qualities of black expression that had been stigmatized throughout much of American history.

Harmony and Normalization explores cultural relations between Cuba and the United States during the Presidency of Barack Obama, who restored diplomatic relations with the island. Musical exchanges during this period act as a lens through which to view not only US-Cuban musical relations but also the larger political, economic, and cultural implications of musical dialogue between these two nations. Policy shifts allowed US and Cuban performers to more easily traverse the Florida Straits than in the recent past and encouraged them to act as musical diplomats, and their performances served as a testing ground for political change that anticipated normalized diplomatic relations. While government actors debated these changes, music created connections between individuals on both sides of the Florida Straits. This book describes how musicians were among the first individuals to take advantage of new opportunities for travel, push the boundaries of new regulations, and expose both the possibilities and limitations of licensing musical exchange. Through the analysis of both official and unofficial musical diplomacy efforts, including the Havana Jazz Festival, the National Symphony Orchestra of Cuba’s first US tour, the Minnesota Orchestra’s trip to Havana, and the author’s own experiences in Cuba, this ethnography demonstrates how performances reflect aspirations for stronger transnational ties and the common desire to restore the once thriving US-Cuban musical relationship.

The term ‘salsa’ has come to stand for a particular standardized set of performance practices and the dominant narrative of its origins, particularly through the lens of the Fania Records story, has tended to over-simplify Latin music history in the USA. This book documents an understudied period of Latin music history across the divide of the Cuban Revolution of 1959 to demonstrate a wider narrative which includes the history of the influential charanga orquestas of 1960s New York. A típico aesthetic is shown to be an important one with the combination of charanga and conjunto stylings giving rise to a plurality of ensemble types, each with a distinctive sabor and varying degrees of cubanía. In this book Miller thus examines the New York contexts for Cuban dance music performance in the first part of the twentieth century before considering the mid twentieth-century developments. The text makes its argument for a distinctive New York sabor through interviews with performers and through the sensitive transcription and analysis of recordings by Orquesta Broadway, Pacheco y su Charanga, Charlie Palmieri’s Charanga Duboney, Eddie Palmieri’s La Perfecta, and Ray Barretto’s Charanga Moderna, amongst others. Analytical transcriptions of improvisations, in dialogue with musicians’ own perspectives, highlight a specific Latin music performance aesthetic or sabor that is rooted in both Cuban dance music forms and the rich performance culture of Latin New York.

At the turn of the twentieth century, the United States extended its empire into the Philippines while subjugating Black Americans in the Jim Crow South. And yet, one of the most popular musical acts was a band of “little brown men,” Filipino musicians led by an African American conductor playing European and American music. The Philippine Constabulary Band and Lt. Walter H. Loving entertained thousands in concert halls and world’s fairs, held a place of honor in William Howard Taft’s presidential parade, and garnered praise by bandmaster John Philip Sousa—all the while facing beliefs and policies that Filipinos and African Americans were “uncivilized.” Author Mary Talusan draws on hundreds of newspaper accounts and exclusive interviews with band members and their descendants to compose the story from the band’s own voices. She sounds out the meanings of Americans’ responses to the band and identifies a desire to mitigate racial and cultural anxieties during an era of overseas expansion and increasing immigration of nonwhites, and the growing “threat” of ragtime with its roots in Black culture. The spectacle of the band, its performance and promotion, emphasized a racial stereotype of Filipinos as “natural musicians” and the beneficiaries of benevolent assimilation and colonial tutelage. Unable to fit Loving’s leadership of the band into this narrative, newspapers dodged and erased his identity as a Black American officer. The untold story of the Philippine Constabulary Band offers a unique opportunity to examine the limits and porousness of America’s racial ideologies, exploring musical pleasure at the intersection of Euro-American cultural hegemony, racialization, and US colonization of the Philippines.

This book traces China's introduction to jazz in the early 1920s, its interruption by Chinese leadership under Mao in 1949, and its rejuvenation in the early 1980s with the start of China's opening to the world under Premier Deng Xiaoping. Covering a span of almost one hundred years, the book focuses on a variety of subjects—the musicians who initiated jazz performances in China, the means by which jazz was incorporated into Chinese culture, and the musicians and venues that now present jazz performances. Featuring unique, face-to-face interviews with leading indigenous jazz musicians in Beijing and Shanghai, plus interviews with club owners, promoters, expatriates, and even diplomats, the book marks the evolution of jazz in China as it parallels China's social, economic, and political evolution through the twentieth and into the twenty-first century. Also featured is an interview with one of the extant members of the Jimmy King Big Band of the 1940s, one of the first major all-Chinese jazz big bands in Shanghai. Ultimately, the book is a cultural history that reveals the inexorable evolution of a democratic form of music in a Communist state.

This book is the culmination of several years of field research on sacred and secular influences of àsé, the West African Yoruba concept that spread to Brazil and throughout the African Diaspora. Àsé is imagined as power and creative energy bestowed upon human beings by ancestral spirits acting as guardians. In Brazil, the West African Yoruba concept of àsé is known as axé and has been reinvented, transmitted, and nurtured in Candomblé, an Afro-Brazilian religion that is practiced in Salvador, Bahia. The author examines how the concepts of axé and Candomblé religion have been appropriated and reinvented in Brazilian popular music and culture. Featuring interviews with practitioners and local musicians, the book explains how many Brazilian popular music styles such as samba, bossa nova, samba-reggae, ijexá, and axé have musical and stylistic elements that stem from Afro-Brazilian religion. It also discusses how young Afro-Brazilians combine Candomblé religious music with African American music such as blues, jazz, gospel, soul, funk, and rap. The author argues for the importance of axé as a unifying force tying together the secular and sacred Afro-Brazilian musical landscape.

Why Eleven Antilleans Knelt Before Chopin's Heart is not your usual music handbook. The book’s curious title refers to the presence of eleven Antilleans at the service held in the Warsaw church to commemorate the 150th anniversary of Fryderyk Chopin’s death in October 1999 where the composer’s heart is kept in an urn, whilst the rest of his mortal remains lie in Paris. The item which Brokken had read in a German newspaper triggered him to start writing the book based on notes he had been taking while living on Curacao from 1993 to 2002. Anyone interested in discovering an overlooked chapter of Caribbean music and music history will be amply rewarded with a Dutch Caribbean perspective on the pan- Caribbean process of Creolization and the history and legacy of slavery in shaping culture and music in the New World. Brokken’s portraits of prominent Dutch Antillean composers, are interspersed with anecdotes, and forays into cultural and music history. Brokken puts the Dutch Caribbean’s contributions into a broader context by also examining the 19^th century phenomenon, pianist Louis Moreau Gottschalk from New Orleans and Manuel Samuel from Martinique. Brokken explores the African component of Dutch Antillean music – examining the history of the rhythm and music known as tambú as well as American jazz pianist Chick Corea's fascination with the tumba rhythm from Curacao. The book ends with a discussion of how recent Dutch Caribbean adaptations of European dance forms has shifted from a classical musical approach to contemporary forms of Latin jazz.

This book is the first in-depth study of Guyanese musical life. It is also a detailed description of the social, economic, and political conditions that have encouraged and sometimes discouraged musical and cultural creativity in Guyana. It explores these interactions in Guyana during the three political eras that the society experienced as it moved from being a British colony to an independent nation. The first era to be considered is the period of mature colonial governance, guided by the dictates of “new imperialism,” which extended from 1900 to 1953. The second era, the period of internal self-government and the preparation for independence, extends from 1953, the year of the first general elections under universal adult suffrage, to 1966, the year when the colony gained its political independence. The third phase, 1966 to 2000, describes the early postcolonial era. The book reveals how the issues of race, class, gender, and ideology deeply influenced who in Guyanese multicultural society obtained access to musical instruction and media outlets and thus who received recognition. It also describes the close connections between Guyanese musicians and Caribbean artists from throughout the region and traces the exodus of Guyanese musicians to the great cities of the world, a theme often neglected in Caribbean studies. The book concludes that the practices of governance across the twentieth century exerted disproportionate influence in the creation, production, distribution, and consumption of music.

This book explores the role of music in negotiating difference. It brings to light processes of differentiation and social stereotypes and hierarchies at at work in the evolving French Louisiana musical field. It also draws attention to the interactions between binary oppositions such as black and white, urban and rural, differentiation and creolization, traditional and modern, and local, national and global. The book argues for the importance of desegregating the understanding of French Louisiana music by situating it beyond ethnic or racial identifications, bringing to light the importance of regional identification. The musical genealogy and categories in use are legitimized through an omnipresent racial imaginary that frames African and European lineage as a foundational difference. Instead of seeing the discourses of origins and mixing as contradictory, the field and the way music is practiced show that they continually interact. French Louisiana musicians navigate between multiple identifications, music styles and legacies while market forces, outsider’s interest and geographical mobility also contribute to shape their career strategies and musical choices. This work also demonstrates the decisive role of non-natives’ interest and mobility in the validation, evolution, and reconfiguration of French Louisiana music. Finally, the distinctiveness of South Louisiana with respect to the rest of the country appears both nurtured and endured, revealing the intricacies of political domination and regionalism.

New York City has long been a generative nexus for the transnational Latin music scene. Currently, there is no other place in the Americas where such large numbers of people from throughout the Caribbean come together to make music. This book seeks to recognize all of those musicians under one mighty musical sound, especially those who have historically gone unnoticed. Based on archival research, oral histories, interviews, and musicological analysis, the book examines how interethnic collaboration among musicians, composers, dancers, instrument builders, and music teachers in New York City set a standard for the study, creation, performance, and innovation of Latin music. Musicians specializing in Spanish Caribbean music in New York cultivated a sound that was grounded in tradition, including classical, jazz, and Spanish Caribbean folkloric music. The book studies this sound in detail and in its context. It offers a fresh understanding of how musicians made and formally transmitted Spanish Caribbean popular music in New York City from 1940 to 1990. Without diminishing the historical facts of segregation and racism the musicians experienced, the book treats music as a unifying force. By giving recognition to those musicians who helped bridge the gap between cultural and musical backgrounds, it recognizes the impact of entire ethnic groups who helped change music in New York. The study of these individual musicians through interviews and musical transcriptions helps to characterize the specific and identifiable New York City Latin music aesthetic that has come to be emulated internationally.

Is there jazz in socialist Vietnam? The answer is “yes,” even though jazz was once perceived as “music of the enemy.” Playing Jazz in Socialist Vietnam tells the story of saxophonist, Quyền Văn Minh, who helped to give jazz a place in socialist Vietnam. This is an intimate account of a life in jazz under socialism in Vietnam, set in the broader contexts of radical social revolution, war, and uncertainty of political change when peace returned.  After accidentally encountering jazz on the transistor radio as a child, Minh embarked on a life-long quest to learn and play the music. From a self-taught musician who played at wedding gigs, he rose to become a respectable professional musician in successive song and dance troupes. Minh’s desire to play jazz motivated him to present the genre in socialist Vietnam’s public sphere, which inadvertently led to a teaching career at the national conservatoire. In 1994, he premiered three original jazz compositions in the first jazz concert performed by Vietnamese musicians at the Hà Nội Opera House. Releasing his debut jazz album, Birth ’99, Minh helped to give shape to the nascent genre of “Vietnamese jazz.” Eventually, he founded Minh’s Jazz Club to create a space for musicians to play jazz and Vietnamese audience to learn about jazz.   Written in a creative melange of autoethnography, analytical interventions, and broad contextualizations that faithfully projects the voice of the protagonist, readers could see how the complex political and social contexts of socialist Vietnam are actually experienced by real people. Through the story of Minh, we show how jazz in socialist Vietnam, as we believe in many other Asian countries and formerly socialist Eastern European countries, is mediated by passion, tenacity, and innovation of devoted musicians who saw in jazz the power of artistic self-expression. 

This book brings together eleven chapters on the musics of migrant and diaspora populations around the globe. Their authors are engaged with and sensitive to the nuances of struggles over identities and representations through musical expression, and they give account of some of the ways in which musicians, fans, promoters, and others use music and other media (including social media) to negotiate, transcend, or create solidarities with different normativities and nationalisms. How have diasporas transformed the musical expressions of their home countries as well as those in the host communities? How do musical performances provide a space for play in seeking to understand one’s identity? How do some communities recreate home away from home in musical performances, and how do some use music to critique and refine their senses of home? What are some of the ways in which musical performance can help reconstruct and redefine collective memory and a collective sense of place? With chapters by ethnomusicologists, sociologists, historians artists, and others, Scattered Musics is an interdisciplinary plunge into these questions.

“Maybe you won't like steel band. It's possible. But it's been said that the Pied Piper had a steel band helping him on his famous visit to Hamelin.” When the US Navy distributed this press release, anxieties and tensions of the impending Cold War felt palpable. As President Eisenhower cast his gaze toward Russia, the American people cast their ears to the Atlantic South, infatuated with the international currents of Caribbean music. Today, steel bands have become a global phenomenon; yet, in 1957 the exotic sound and the unique image of the US Navy Steel Band was one-of-a-kind. From 1957 until their disbandment in 1999, the US Navy Steel Band performed over 20,000 concerts worldwide. In 1973, the band officially moved headquarters from Puerto Rico to New Orleans and found the city and annual Mardi Gras tradition an apt musical and cultural fit. The band brought a significant piece of Caribbean artistic capital—calypso and steelband music—to the American mainstream. Its impact on the growth and development of steelpan music in America is enormous. This book uncovers the lost history of the US Navy Steel Band and provides an in-depth study of its role in the development of the US military's public relations, its promotion of goodwill, its recruitment efforts after the Korean and Vietnam wars, its musical and technological innovations, and its percussive propulsion of the American fascination with Latin and Caribbean music over the past century.