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Michael Titlestad has suggested that jazz serves "to mediate, manage and contest" what he terms a "staggered, but also cruel and unusual South African modernity." His volume Making the Changes (2004) uses the "pedestrian" as a chronotope to describe the "local peripatetic appropriations of global symbolic possibilities" that jazz affords there. This paper proposes a different "chronotope": that of the train. This substitution facilitates the reading of jazz history in South Africa in tandem with histories of labour migration and other forms of displacement - including trajectories of exile that intersect my account elsewhere of the "global itinerary" of South African cultural formations under apartheid. The deterritorialisation of South African works of expressive culture and social actors associated with antiapartheid resistance, I have argued, affords the cultural historian strong historiographic purchase over conjunctures outside of South Africa. The present discussion explores this claim in relation to Miriam Makeba's memoir Makeba, My Story (1988), written during her stay in Guinea. Makeba's life-writing shows the strategies of the black South African performer in exile to be embedded in the conviviality that shaped jazz performance culture during its emergence in urban South African. Conviviality can be shown to offer an implicit critique of nativist imaginaries in decolonising Africa -- including in this instance, the doctrine of authenticité promulgated by Guinea's controversial leader, Ahmed Sékou Touré. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The archives of African American jazz musicians demonstrate rich sites for studying expressions of religious belief and daily religious practice in public and private arenas, in professional and personal capacities. Highlighting print material from the archives of Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington (1899-1974) and Mary LouWilliams (1910-1981), this article examines the ways that these musicians worked to articulate their beliefs in print and to make meaning of their routine practices. Ellington and Williams produced written records of their aspirations for non-clerical religious authority and leadership, novel notions of religious community, and conceptions of quotidian writing tasks as practices with devotional value in the middle decades of the twentieth century. In preparation for his Sacred Concert tours of American andWestern European religious congregations, Ellington theologized about the nature of God and the proper language to address God through private hotel stationery. Following her conversion to Roman Catholicism, Williams managed a Harlem thrift shop and worked to create the Bel Canto Foundation for musicians struggling with substance abuse and unemployment. This study of the religious subjectivity of African Americans with status as race representatives employs archival historical methods in the effort to vividly approximate complex religious interiority. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented which explores the departure of African American and Creole jazz musicians from the district of Storyville in New Orleans, Louisiana. Emphasis is given to topics such as the closing of cabarets and dance halls, relocation to Chicago, Illinois, and the travels and touring of musicians such as Jelly Roll Morton, Lizzie Miles, Louis Armstrong, and Joe Oliver.

Purpose -- I argue that one can articulate a historically attuned and analytically rich model for understanding jazz in its various inflections. That is, on the one hand, such a model permits us to affirm jazz as a historically conditioned, dynamic hybridity. On the other hand, to acknowledge jazz's open and multiple character in no way negates our ability to identify discernible features of various styles and esthetic traditions. Additionally, my model affirms the sociopolitical, legal (Jim Crow and copyright laws), and economic structures that shaped jazz. Consequently, my articulation of bebop as an inflection of Afro-modernism highlights the sociopolitical, and highly racialized context in which this music was created. Without a recognition of the sociopolitical import of bebop, one's understanding of the music is impoverished, as one fails to grasp the strategic uses to which the music and discourses about the music were put. Design methodology/approach -- I engage in an interdisciplinary study of jazz via analyses and commentary on selected texts from several scholarly disciplines. Findings -- To acknowledge the hybridity and social construction of jazz esthetics in no way nullifies the innovations and leadership of African American jazz musicians whose artistic contributions not only significantly shaped modern jazz in the mid-twentieth century but also whose musical voices continue to sound and set esthetical standards in contemporary expressions of jazz (and beyond). Originality and value -- My chapter is highly interdisciplinary, bringing philosophical explanations of race, discourse, and the ontology of music into conversation with numerous sociological and (ethno)musicological insights about jazz. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An interview with African American jazz musician Randy Weston is presented. He reveals that he grew up at Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, New York City, which he considered a very powerful, spiritual, cultural area. He recalls the musicians he met as a member of the rhythm-and-blues band Bullmoose Jackson, which include Louis Armstrong, Count Basie and Earl Hines. He thinks that Fela Kuti was the most courageous musician he ever met.

John Coltrane's compositional repertory ranges from the conservative to the radical, from 12-bar blues based on simple riffs to avant-garde creations that push the boundaries of form and tonality. This paper analyzes a selection of Coltrane's works that exhibit ingenious departures from convention, but arguably remain tonal. Building on an earlier article (Martin 2011) that analyzes a group of jazz standards written before 1950, this study also explores the concept of prolongation by arrival (PBA), a technique that allows one to posit prolongations over 4- and 8-bar units in which conventional techniques are lacking. The paper concludes with Coltrane's well-known "Giant Steps," in which I argue that despite its famous use of three tonics related by major third (G, B, and B), the piece is in El major. From the analyses of these pieces, we see Coltrane in the 1950s and 1950s extending the traditional jazz repertory to include richly imaginative tunes with varying degrees of tonal centricity, intriguing prolongational structures, and creative adaptation of form. I conclude with a summary of the background forms suggested by this group of Coltrane tunes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article emphasizes the importance of Jazz and the Jazz environment in Saint-Germain-des-Prés (France). Even though the popularity of Jazz among customers who patronized the caves should not be overestimated, other types of music were favored such as the rumba or the tango. In Saint-Germain-des-Prés, New Orleans (Louisiana) Jazz was much more popular than modern Jazz, which also limited the professional opportunities of musicians who interpreted a contemporary repertoire. This article demonstrates that there was a lot of rivalry among musicians looking for jobs as those were rare at the end of the 1940s. Amateur musicians often took jobs away from professional musicians who accused them to take less money for their services. The professional musicians considered themselves victims of the disloyal competition from African American musicians who lived in or were traveling through France. [TRANSLATION]

The article examines the Clef Club, a baseball team of African American jazz musicians working in Paris, France, following World War I. The author discusses the social atmosphere of France for African Americans and their integration into French society. He explores the Paris Baseball League (also called the Paris International League) formed by American-born Gaston François, athletic director of the Methodist Memorial Center, in 1924. The article analyzes the success of the Clef Club, initially known as the Syncopated Stars, and the participation of Clef Club players Louis Mitchell and Bobby Jones on an all-star team that played a demonstration game at the 1924 Olympic Games in Paris. According to the author, the Clef Club folded permanently in 1925.

The article features Barkley L. Hendricks, an African American photographer, landscape painter, watercolorist, draftsman, assemblage artist, carpenter, and jazz musician. He was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1945 and studied art at Yale University. At a young age, he learned to navigate the streets of North Philadelphia but his interests in art, basketball and music had kept him out of trouble. It highlights his life as a student and how his teachers inspired him to maximize his potential as an artist. It also mentions Hendrick's first portrait "My Black Nun."

The article describes the relationships between African Americans and Cubans, Puerto Ricans, and Panamanians in New York and Westchester County, New York, from the 1930s through the 1960s. The musicians from Latin America and South Africa began their career and collaborated in New York's jazz community in 1930s. Jazz artists such as Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Chano Pozo shared bandstands, restaurants, hotel, and transportation. In the 1950s and 1960s, Latino and African American laborers belonged to the same unions and shared eateries during lunch hour. Relationships and courtships across the racial divide were fostered through the Motown and Latin Jazz culture of Harlem, Brooklyn, and the Bronx.

Arriving in India in the mid-1930s seeking performance opportunities and an improved quality of life, African American jazz musicians were active in expanding the presentation and consumption of jazz and Western popular music. Finding appeal in the power and success that African American musicians commanded, Anglo-Indian and Goan musicians also performed jazz in cosmopolitan centres throughout India. In Bombay, Goan musicians integrated Western popular music into local live performances in cabarets, and eventually into some early film songs. This article outlines the role of African American musicians in increasing the terrain of Western popular music in India beginning in the 1930s, and concludes by speculating on the artists' influence on early Bombay cabaret songs and the 'hybrid' music of the early film industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses various reports published within the issue, including one by Bradley Shope about the African American jazz musicians in India and another by Ratnakar Tripathy on a sociological analysis of Bhojpuri cinema.

This article discusses African Americans that appeared in motion pictures in the 1940s and 1950s. The article explains how social activists fought for filmmakers to cast African Americans as something other than the stereotypical roles. The use of African Americans as Jazz musicians in films became a common theme in noir films, which utilized talents such as Nat "King" Cole, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Hazel Scott. The book "Jazz Noir: Listening to Music from Phantom Lady to The Last Seduction" by David Butler is also discussed.

The article examines the composition and character of American jazz musicians at the Onyx Club in New York in 1930's. This primarily scrutinizes on the origin of hip white masculinity over the African American jazz musicians. It also demonstrates the impact of concrete social spaces and labor conditions to complex notions of musical identity. In addition, the composition of "Onyx Club Revue" is further considered relevant to the notions of race and gender in musical performances.

Deals with the musical development of selected African American jazz musicians in Indianapolis, Indiana in 1930 and 1940. Jazz musicians who developed their talents in Indianapolis; Discussion on formal and informal music education in the city; Information on political, social and cultural environment in Indianapolis.

Examines a study called the Charleston Jazz Initiative (CJI) aimed at exploring the sociohistorical, musical, and institutional contributions of African American jazz musicians called the Jenkins Orphanage Bands from Charleston, South Carolina. Elements of African musics in the U.S.; Background of the CJI; Training and professional careers of the Jenkins Orphanage Bands.