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Adrian Rollini (1904-1956)was as a child prodigy, playing piano when he was four. This book describes how job opportunities came to him easily at first and that his versatility helped him when they became rare.At the age of 16 he became a professional musician and, in New York, recorded piano rolls. In 1922, at the start of the jazz age, he joined the California Ramblers. He moved to the bass saxophone and gave it its definite place in early jazz. He had no serious competition and was highly appreciated by his colleagues. His style became the instrument's standard and his new sound was one reason why the band became a success. At the top of his fame Rollini became leader of his own band, with a.o. Bix Beiderbecke, Frank Trumbauer, Eddie Lang, and Joe Venuti. It was star-studded but short-lived. In late 1927, he moved to London to join Fred Eizalde's progressive dance band. A year later he became the band's practical leader. Back in the USA in 1930, Rollini joined Bert Lown's hotel band, but the bass saxophone was phasing out, so he moved to the vibraphone. Bands such as Lown's and, later, Richard Himber's did not satisfy him, and he decided to start a club, Adrian's Tap Room, as well as an instrument shop. He was one of the first to go for a jazz trio, consisting of himself,a guitarist, and a bass player. During the 40s, Rollini added another venture, a fishing lodge in Florida.

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.

The coal fields of West Virginia would seem an unlikely market for big band jazz during the Great Depression. That a prosperous African American audience, dominated by those involved with the coal industry, was there for jazz tours would seem equally improbable. This book shows that, contrary to expectations, black Mountaineers flocked to dances by the hundreds, in many instances traveling considerable distances to hear bands led by Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Andy Kirk, Jimmie Lunceford, and Chick Webb, among numerous others. Indeed, as one musician who toured the state would recall, “All the bands were goin’ to West Virginia.” The comparative prosperity of the coal miners, thanks to New Deal industrial policies, was what attracted the bands to the state. This study discusses that prosperity, as well as the larger political environment that provided black Mountaineers with a degree of autonomy not experienced further south. The author demonstrates the importance of radio and the black press both in introducing this music and in keeping black West Virginians up to date with its latest developments. The book explores connections between local entrepreneurs who staged the dances and the national management of the bands that played those engagements. In analyzing black audiences’ aesthetic preferences, the author reveals that many black West Virginians preferred dancing to a variety of music, not just jazz. Finally, the book shows that bands now associated almost exclusively with jazz were more than willing to satisfy those audience preferences with arrangements in other styles of dance music.

When record men first traveled from Chicago or invited musicians to studios in New York, these entrepreneurs had no conception how their technology would change the dynamics of what constituted a musical performance. This book covers a revolution in artist performance and audience perception through close examination of hundreds of key “hillbilly” and “race” records released between the 1920s and World War II. In the postwar period, regional strains recorded on pioneering 78 r.p.m. discs exploded into urban blues and R&B, honky-tonk and western swing, gospel, soul, and rock ‘n’ roll. These old-time records preserve the work of some of America’s greatest musical geniuses, such as Jimmie Rodgers, Robert Johnson, Charlie Poole, and Blind Lemon Jefferson. They are also crucial mile markers in the course of American popular music and the growth of the modern recording industry. When these records first circulated, the very notion of recorded music was still a novelty. All music had been created live and tied to particular, intimate occasions. How were listeners to understand an impersonal technology such as the phonograph record as a musical event? How could they reconcile firsthand interactions and traditional customs with technological innovations and mass media? The records themselves, several hundred of which are explored fully in this book, offer answers in scores of spoken commentaries and skits, in song lyrics and monologues, or other more subtle means.

This book stands as both a remarkable biography of J. Frank G. Boom (1920–1953) and a recovery of his incredible contribution to blues scholarship originally titled The Blues: Satirical Songs of the North American Negro. The book tells how and when the Netherlands was introduced to African American blues music and describes the equally dramatic and peculiar friendship that existed between Boom and jazz critic and musicologist Will Gilbert, who worked for the Kultuurkamer during World War II and had been charged with the task of formulating the Nazi's Jazzverbod, the decree prohibiting the public performance of jazz. The book ends with the annotated and complete text of Boom's The Blues, providing the international world at last with an English version of the first book-length study of the blues. At the end of the 1960s, a series of 13 blues paperbacks edited by Paul Oliver for the London publisher November Books began appearing. One manuscript landed on his desk that had been written in 1943 by a then 23-year-old Frank (Frans) Boom. Its publication was announced on the back jacket of the last three Blues Paperbacks in 1971 and 1972. Yet it never was published and the manuscript once more disappeared. In October 1996, Dutch blues expert and publicist Verbei went in search of the presumably lost manuscript and the story behind its author. It only took him a couple of months to track down the manuscript, but it took another ten years to glean the full story behind the extraordinary Frans Boom, who passed away in 1953 in Indonesia.

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.

Fifty years after Charley Patton's death in 1934, a team of blues experts gathered five thousand miles from Dockery Farms at the University of Liege in Belgium to honor the life and music of the most influential artist of the Mississippi Delta blues. This book brings together essays from that international symposium on Charley Patton and Mississippi blues traditions, influences, and comparisons. Originally published by Presses Universitaires de Liège in Belgium, this edition has been revised and updated with a new foreword, new images added, and some chapters translated into English for the first time. Patton's personal life and his recorded music bear witness to how he endured and prevailed in his struggle as a black man during the early twentieth century. Within this book, that story offers hope and wonder. Organized in two parts, the chapters create an invaluable resource on the life and music of this early master. The book secures the legacy of Charley Patton as the fountainhead of Mississippi Delta blues.

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 explores how the blues became a part of New Orleans jazz. In so doing it demonstrates how the principles of barbershop harmony were applied to the instrumentation of a jazz band to produce jazz counterpoint. Using unpublished archive material and existing scholarship this book discuses the role that Buddy Bolden and Bunk Johnson played in the early years of jazz. It also clarifies the role that the white musicians and Creole musicians played both historically and musically in the development of jazz, the blues, and ragtime, in New Orleans.

Throughout his life, Louis Armstrong tried to explain how singing on the streets of New Orleans with a barbershop quartet was foundational to his musicianship. However, up to now, there has been no in-depth inquiry into what he meant when he said “I Figure Singing and Playing is the Same, “or “Singing was more into my blood than the trumpet.” This book shows that Armstrong understood exactly the relationship between what he sang and what he played, and that he meant these comments to be taken literally: he was singing through his horn. To describe the relationship between what Armstrong sang and played the book discusses elements of music theory. This is done in an approachable way for readers with little or no musical background. Jazz is a music that is often performed by people with a very limited musical education. Armstrong did not analyse what he played in theoretical terms, he thought about in terms of the voices in a barbershop quartet. This book describes Armstrong playing in term he would have understood. Understanding how Armstrong, and other pioneer jazz musicians of his generation, learned to play jazz, and how he used this background of singing in a quartet to develop the jazz solo, has fundamental implications for the teaching of jazz performance today. This book provides a foundation for today’s musicians to learn to play jazz the Louis Armstrong way.

Edward “Kid” Ory (1886–1973) was a trombonist, composer, recording artist, and early New Orleans jazz band leader. This book tells his story from birth on a rural sugar cane plantation in a French-speaking, ethnically mixed family, to his emergence in New Orleans as the city’s hottest band leader. The Ory band featured such future jazz stars as Louis Armstrong and King Oliver, and was widely considered New Orleans’s top “hot” band. Ory’s career took him from New Orleans to California, where he and his band created the first African American New Orleans jazz recordings ever made. In 1925 Ory moved to Chicago, where he made records with Oliver, Armstrong, and Jelly Roll Morton, and captured the spirit of the jazz age. His most famous composition from that period, “Muskrat Ramble,” is a jazz standard. Retired from music during the Depression, Ory returned in the 1940s and enjoyed a reignited career. Drawing on oral history and Ory’s unpublished autobiography, the book is a story that is told in large measure by Ory himself. The author reveals Ory’s personality to the reader and shares remarkable stories of incredible innovations of the jazz pioneer. The book also features unpublished Ory compositions, photographs, and a selected discography of Ory’s most significant recordings.

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.

From the late 1960s to the early 1980s, American punk developed as a distinct musical style that reflected the tremendous upheaval in American society during this period. Raw and direct, punk presented an unvarnished view of changing ideas of race, the growth of American suburbia, and the heightened stakes of musical expressions of whiteness and Blackness. Damaged: Musicality and Race in Early American Punk traces the main factors at play in the punk style, including transformations to blues resources, experimental visions of the American musical past, and bold reworkings of the rock and roll and R&B sounds of the late 1950s and early 1960s—all in all, a historically oriented approach to rock that is strikingly different from the common myths and conceptions about punk. Eventually punk became a forum for new versions of older exchanges between the US and the UK, and the style reflected even more changes to American metropolitan areas and a shift from the expressions of older baby boomers to that of younger musicians belonging to Generation X. The book also explores the discourses and contradictory narratives of punk history, which are often in direct conflict with the world that is captured in historical documents and revealed through musical analysis.

This book explores sacred music and spiritual activism in a little-known region of the South, the Wiregrass Country of Georgia, Alabama, and North Florida. It examines African American sacred music outside of Sunday church-related activities, showing that singing conventions and anniversary programs fortify spiritual as well as social needs. In this region African Americans maintain a social world of their own creation. Their cultural performances embrace some of the most pervasive forms of African American sacred music—spirituals, common meter, Sacred Harp, shape-note, traditional, and contemporary gospel. Moreover, the contexts in which African Americans sing include present-day observations such as the Twentieth of May (Emancipation Day), Burial League Turnouts, and Fifth Sunday. Rather than tracing the evolution of African American sacred music, this ethnographic study focuses on contemporary cultural performances, almost all by women, which embrace all forms. These women promote a female-centered theology to ensure the survival of their communities and personal networks, and function in leadership roles that withstand the test of time. Their spiritual activism presents itself as a way of life. In Wiregrass Country, “You don’t have to sing like an angel” is a frequently expressed sentiment. To these women, “good” music is God’s music regardless of the manner delivered.

In 2015 University Press of Mississippi published Mississippi Fiddle Tunes and Songs from the 1930s by Harry Bolick and Stephen T. Austin to critical acclaim and commercial success. Roughly half of Mississippi’s rich, old-time fiddle tradition was documented in that volume and Harry Bolick has spent the intervening years working on this book, its sequel. Beginning with Tony Russell’s original mid-1970s fieldwork as a reference, and later working with Russell, Bolick located and transcribed all of the Mississippi 78 rpm string band recordings. Some of the recording artists like the Leake County Revelers, Hoyt Ming and His Pep Steppers, and Narmour & Smith had been well known in the state. Others, like the Collier Trio, were obscure. This collecting work was followed by many field trips to Mississippi searching for and locating the children and grandchildren of the musicians. Previously unheard recordings and stories, unseen photographs and discoveries of nearly unknown local fiddlers, such as Jabe Dillon, John Gatwood, Claude Kennedy, and Homer Grice, followed. The results are now available in this second, companion volume, Fiddle Tunes from Mississippi: Commercial and Informal Recordings, 1920–2018. Two hundred and seventy musical examples supplement the biographies and photographs of the thirty-five artists documented here. Music comes from commercial recordings and small pressings of 78 rpm, 45 rpm, and LP records; collectors’ field recordings; and the musicians’ own home tape and disc recordings. Taken together, these two volumes represent a delightfully comprehensive survey of Mississippi’s fiddle tunes.

Free Jazz/Black Power is a treatise on the racial and political implications of jazz and jazz criticism published in 1971 by two French jazz critics, Philippe Carles and Jean-Louis Comolli. The goal of the book was to show that the strong and mostly negative reactions provoked by free jazz among classic jazz critics on both sides of the Atlantic could be better understood by analyzing the social, cultural and political origins of jazz itself, exposing its ties to African American culture, history, and the political struggle that was still raging in early 1970s USA. The authors analyze the circumstances of the production of jazz criticism as discourse, a work of cultural studies in a time and place where the practice as such was completely unknown. The book owes much to African American cultural and political thought. Carles and Comolli suggest that the African American struggle had to be seen as a singular branch of a worldwide class struggle, echoing more famous figures of the French Left of the time, such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, or Jean Genêt. Yet few were those that had articulated this de rigueur political backing with an in-depth cultural critique and analysis of the condition of African Americans informed by African Americans themselves.

This ethnography examines songwriters Bill and Gloria Gaithers’ Homecoming video and concert series. The Homecomings re-present the “southern gospel” subgenre of gospel music—a musical style popular among white evangelical Christians in the American South and Midwest. The book explores how the Gaithers negotiate the tension between preservation and modification of community norms as they seek simultaneously to maintain and expand their audience, and to initiate and respond to ideological shifts within their fan base’s culture. Using data he collected from his immersion in the Homecoming catalogue, his attendance of numerous concerts and tapings, and his extensive conversations with Homecoming fans and the Gaithers themselves, Harper reveals the Homecomings to be a crucible of American religious, racial, sexual and regional identity formation.

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.

George P. Knauff's Virginia Reels (1839) was the first collection of southern fiddle tunes and the only substantial one published in the nineteenth century. Knauff's activity could not anticipate our modern contest-driven fiddle subcultures. But the fate of the Virginia Reels pointed in that direction, suggesting that southern fiddling, after his time, would happen outside of commercial popular culture even though it would sporadically engage that culture. This book uses this seminal collection as the springboard for a fresh exploration of fiddling in America, past and present. It first discusses the life of the arranger. Then it explains how this collection was meant to fit into the broad stream of early nineteenth-century music publishing. The book describes the character of these fiddle tunes' names (and such titles in general), what we can learn about antebellum oral tradition from this collection, and how fiddling relates to blackface minstrelsy. Throughout, the book connects the evidence concerning both repertoire and practice found in the Virginia Reels with current southern fiddling, encompassing styles ranging from straightforward to fancy—old-time styles of the Upper South, exuberant West Virginia styles, and the melodic improvisations of modern contest fiddling. Twenty-six song sheets assist in this discovery. The book incorporates performance descriptions and music terminology into his accessible, engaging prose. The book presents an extended look at the history of southern fiddling and a close examination of current practices.