The Evolution of Jazz in Britain, 1880–1935
The Evolution of Jazz in Britain, 1880–1935

Author: Catherine Tackley (née Parsonage)

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-07-05

Total Pages: 322

ISBN-13: 1351544756

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As a popular music, the evolution of jazz is tied to the contemporary sociological situation. Jazz was brought from America into a very different environment in Britain and resulted in the establishment of parallel worlds of jazz by the end of the 1920s: within the realms of institutionalized culture and within the subversive underworld. Tackley (n Parsonage) demonstrates the importance of image and racial stereotyping in shaping perceptions of jazz, and leads to the significant conclusion that the evolution of jazz in Britain was so much more than merely an extension or reflection of that in America. The book examines the cultural and musical antecedents of the genre, including minstrel shows and black musical theatre, within the context of musical life in Britain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Tackley is particularly concerned with the public perception of jazz in Britain and provides close analysis of the early European critical writing on the subject. The processes through which an evolution took place are considered by looking at the methods of introducing jazz in Britain, through imported revue shows, sheet music, and visits by American musicians. Subsequent developments are analysed through the consideration of modernism and the Jazz Age as theoretical constructs and through the detailed study of dance music on the BBC and jazz in the underworld of London. The book concludes in the 1930s by which time the availability of records enabled the spread of 'hot' music, affecting the live repertoire in Britain. Tackley therefore sheds entirely new light on the development of jazz in Britain, and provides a deep social and cultural understanding of the early history of the genre.

British Music and Modernism, 1895-1960
British Music and Modernism, 1895-1960

Author: Matthew Riley

Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 350

ISBN-13: 9780754665854

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Imaginative analytical and critical work on British music of the early twentieth century has been hindered by perceptions of the repertory as insular in its references and backward in its style and syntax, escaping the modernity that surrounded its composers. Recent research has begun to break down these perceptions and has found intriguing links between British music and modernism. This book brings together contributions from scholars working in analysis, hermeneutics, reception history, critical theory and the history of ideas. Three overall themes emerge from its chapters: accounts of British reactions to Continental modernism and the forms they took; links between music and the visual arts; and analysis and interpretation of compositions in the light of recent theoretical work on form, tonality and pitch organization

The Jazz Republic
The Jazz Republic

Author: Jonathan O. Wipplinger

Publisher: University of Michigan Press

Published: 2017-05-16

Total Pages: 325

ISBN-13: 0472900811

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The Jazz Republic examines jazz music and the jazz artists who shaped Germany’s exposure to this African American art form from 1919 through 1933. Jonathan O. Wipplinger explores the history of jazz in Germany as well as the roles that music, race (especially Blackness), and America played in German culture and follows the debate over jazz through the fourteen years of Germany’s first democracy. He explores visiting jazz musicians including the African American Sam Wooding and the white American Paul Whiteman and how their performances were received by German critics and artists. The Jazz Republic also engages with the meaning of jazz in debates over changing gender norms and jazz’s status between paradigms of high and low culture. By looking at German translations of Langston Hughes’s poetry, as well as Theodor W. Adorno’s controversial rejection of jazz in light of racial persecution, Wipplinger examines how jazz came to be part of German cultural production more broadly in both the US and Germany, in the early 1930s. Using a wide array of sources from newspapers, modernist and popular journals, as well as items from the music press, this work intervenes in the debate over the German encounter with jazz by arguing that the music was no mere “symbol” of Weimar’s modernism and modernity. Rather than reflecting intra-German and/or European debates, it suggests that jazz and its practitioners, African American, white American, Afro-European, German and otherwise, shaped Weimar culture in a central way.

Jazz as Visual Language
Jazz as Visual Language

Author: Nicolas Pillai

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2016-11-30

Total Pages: 175

ISBN-13: 1786721007

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This book provides a timely analysis of the relationship between jazz and recording and broadcast technologies in the early twentieth century. Jazz histories have traditionally privileged qualities such as authenticity, naturalness and spontaneity, but to do so overlooks jazz's status as a modernist, mechanised art form that evolved alongside the moving image and visual cultures. Jazz as Visual Language shows that the moving image is crucial to our understanding of what the materiality of jazz really is. Focusing on Len Lye's direct animation, Gjon Mili's experimental footage of musicians performing and the BBC's Jazz 625 series, this book places emphasis on film and television that conveys the 'sound of surprise' through formal innovation, rather than narrative structure. Nicolas Pillai seeks to refine a critical vocabulary of jazz and visual culture whilst arguing that jazz was never just a new sound; it was also a new way of seeing the world.

Americanizing Britain
Americanizing Britain

Author: Genevieve Abravanel

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2012-04-06

Total Pages: 221

ISBN-13: 0199942668

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How did Great Britain, which entered the twentieth century as a dominant empire, reinvent itself in reaction to its fears and fantasies about the United States? Investigating the anxieties caused by the invasion of American culture-from jazz to Ford motorcars to Hollywood films-during the first half of the twentieth century, Genevieve Abravanel theorizes the rise of the American Entertainment Empire as a new style of imperialism that threatened Britain's own. In the early twentieth century, the United States excited a range of utopian and dystopian energies in Britain. Authors who might ordinarily seem to have little in common-H.G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, and Virginia Woolf-began to imagine Britain's future through America. Abravanel explores how these novelists fashioned transatlantic fictions as a response to the encroaching presence of Uncle Sam. She then turns her attention to the arrival of jazz after World War I, showing how a range of writers, from Elizabeth Bowen to W.H. Auden, deployed the new music as a metaphor for the modernization of England. The global phenomenon of Hollywood film proved even more menacing than the jazz craze, prompting nostalgia for English folk culture and a lament for Britain's literary heritage. Abravanel then refracts British debates about America through the writing of two key cultural critics: F.R. Leavis and T.S. Eliot. In so doing, she demonstrates the interdependencies of some of the most cherished categories of literary study-language, nation, and artistic value-by situating the high-low debates within a transatlantic framework.

Historical Dictionary of Jazz
Historical Dictionary of Jazz

Author: John S. Davis

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2020-09-15

Total Pages: 559

ISBN-13: 1538128152

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Jazz is a music born in the United States and formed by a combination of influences. In its infancy, jazz was a melting pot of military brass bands, work songs and field hollers of the United States slaves during the 19th century, European harmonies and forms, and the rhythms of Africa and the Caribbean. Later, the blues and the influence of Spanish and French Creoles with European classical training nudged jazz further along in its development. As it moved through the swing era of the 1930s, bebop of the 1940s, and cool jazz of the 1950s, jazz continued to serve as a reflection of societal changes. During the turbulent 1960s, freedom and unrest were expressed through Free Jazz and the Avant Garde. Popular and world music have been incorporated and continue to expand the impact and reach of jazz. Today, jazz is truly an international art form. This second edition of Historical Dictionary of Jazz contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 1,500 cross-referenced entries on musicians, styles of jazz, instruments, recording labels, bands and band leaders, and more. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Jazz.

The History of Live Music in Britain, Volume I: 1950-1967
The History of Live Music in Britain, Volume I: 1950-1967

Author: Simon Frith

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-03-09

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 1317028864

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The social history of music in Britain since 1950 has long been the subject of nostalgic articles in newspapers and magazines, nostalgic programmes on radio and television and collective memories on music websites, but to date there has been no proper scholarly study. The three volumes of The History of Live Music in Britain address this gap, and do so from the unique perspective of the music promoter: the key theme is the changing nature of the live music industry. The books are focused upon popular music but cover all musical genres and the authors offer new insights into a variety of issues, including changes in musical fashions and tastes; the impact of developing technologies; the balance of power between live and recorded music businesses; the role of the state as regulator and promoter; the effects of demographic and other social changes on music culture; and the continuing importance of do-it-yourself enthusiasts. Drawing on archival research, a wide range of academic and non-academic secondary sources, participant observation and industry interviews, the books are likely to become landmark works within Popular Music Studies and broader cultural history.

American Popular Music in Britain's Raj
American Popular Music in Britain's Raj

Author: Bradley Shope

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 254

ISBN-13: 158046548X

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The first systematic study to address the character and scope of American popular music in India during British rule.

White Drug Cultures and Regulation in London, 1916–1960
White Drug Cultures and Regulation in London, 1916–1960

Author: Christopher Hallam

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2018-08-09

Total Pages: 254

ISBN-13: 3319947702

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This book traces the history of the London ‘white drugs’ (opiate and cocaine) subculture from the First World War to the end of the classic ‘British System’ of drug prescribing in the 1960s. It also examines the regulatory forces that tried to suppress non-medical drug use, in both their medical and juridical forms. Drugs subcultures were previously thought to have begun as part of the post-war youth culture, but in fact they existed from at least the 1930s. In this book, two networks of drug users are explored, one emerging from the disaffected youth of the aristocracy, the other from the night-time economy of London’s West End. Their drug use was caught up in a kind of dance whose steps represented cultural conflicts over identity and the modernism and Victorianism that coexisted in interwar Britain.

Eurojazzland
Eurojazzland

Author: Luca Cerchiari

Publisher: UPNE

Published: 2012-07-10

Total Pages: 504

ISBN-13: 1584658649

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The critical role of Europe in the music, personalities, and analysis of jazz