Sunday, June 30, 2019

Where white musicians in on New Orleans jazz from the beginning?

Terry Teachout discusses Samuel Charters’s A Trumpet Around the Corner: The Story of New Orleans Jazz in "All That (White) Jazz", Commentary, Nov. 8, 2008. From the review:
As a result of Jim Crow laws passed in the late 19th century, black and white dance musicians active in New Orleans in and after 1900 were blocked from playing together or socializing. Consequently, two different jazz dialects, one black and one white, emerged out of the musical ferment that led to the music now known as jazz.

The majority of modern-day critics judge the music of such early white ensembles as the Original Dixieland Jazz Band to be derivative of and inferior to the playing of their black contemporaries. By contrast, Charters has come to regard these groups as fully the equals of their black counterparts. For him—as well as for many early black jazzmen, prominently including Louis Armstrong—the music performed by white New Orleans players was distinct in character but comparable in both quality and influence to that played by blacks.

Why did Charters not discuss these white musicians in Jazz: New Orleans? His answer is again admirably straightforward: “In the 1950’s many of us writing about jazz and blues reacted against the institutionalized racism we experienced in the South by placing special emphasis on the African American musical achievement.”

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