No open-access location is known for this record yet.
No open-access location is known for this record yet.
French ethnomusicologist Bernard Lortat-Jacob likes to proclaim: Music is always much more than (Lortat-Jacob 1996). In the same vein, one could declare that today music is always much more than black If by black music we mean a diversity of genres that appeared in the Americas, fashioned by the ordeals of slavery and racism, it is universally acknowledged that the creative processes through which they were invented were fueled by mixing and blending, and that these musics thereby incorporated elements coming from traditions which were not black. Then, as early as the mid-nineteenth century, black American music began to travel, under the guise of blackface minstrel shows or in the form of jubilee choirs (Erlman 1999; Gilroy 1991), and it was not long before they became popular in many countries around the world. In the twentieth century, jazz followed suit, opening the way for Caribbean and South American genres such as calypso, samba, reggae, and salsa, to name but a few. Blackface minstrels and jubilee singers were emulated far from the United States and significantly contributed to refashioning local traditions, as happened in Cape Town, South Africa (Martin 1999). In North America, white musicians participated in the jazz life almost from the beginning (Jones 1968, 13), and as soon as jazz reached the shores of Europe local musicians started appropriating it and developed new ways of playing it, to the point that, in the 1960s, they claimed that as much as they drew inspiration from black American musicians, they were now developing their own brand of improvised music. (2) Jazz is nowadays played almost everywhere, in an infinity of styles influenced by other musical genres: from Brazil to China, from Denmark to Japan, from Russia to South Africa. Whatever differences may distinguish these types of black-American-inspired non-American music from the original model, most often they still referred to as a qualifier being sometimes added to underline that a particular style is also rooted in a particular society: bossa jazz, gipsy jazz, and township jazz, among others. Ska, reggae, salsa, rap have similarly been adopted, and transformed, all around the world. From their mixed origins to their contemporary universalization, black American musics have permanently exceeded their blackness. This assertion does not by any means amount to underplaying the decisive role of black experiences in the emergence of totally original musical forms and expressive modes. On the contrary, it locates these experiences, to use a metaphor popular in Trinidad's steel bands, in the engine room; it stresses their motor function. Linking mixed origins to universalization emphasizes the uniqueness, the power of attraction, and the capacity to link various musics and fertilize local genres in such a manner that new genres may emerge. But the entanglement of blackness, blending (metissage), and universality actually presents anyone who wishes to analyze as a scholar or comment as a journalist, upon African-American or African-American inspired musics, and especially jazz, with a challenge: how to account for innovative mixing, universalization, and relocation without concealing the centrality of African-American experiences in the creation and evolution of black musics? (3) I would like to suggest that introducing into the current debates the theories of creolization proposed by Martiniquean philosopher Edouard Glissant and the analytical approach formalized by musicologist Jean-Jacques Nattiez as semiology of music could contribute to elaborating new answers to this question. Jazz in the Perspective of Creolization In Glissant's polymorphous works, (4) there a few references to music, or, more specifically, to jazz. He first affirms the modernity of Negro spirituals and blues, jazz, beguines and calypsos, salsas and reggaes. These musics delivered from silence are the cry of the Plantation, transfigured in world speech. …
Loading…
Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 3 citations exist upstream.
Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.
Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.