Review of Eric Porter. What Is This Thing Called Jazz?: African American Musicians as Artists, Critics, and Activists. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. XXI, 404 pp.

For too long, jazz writers, including the handful of academics who can legitimately be called 'Jazz scholars," promoted myths of the music's autonomy. According to this myth, the identity of the musicians, the venues where they performed, and what they said off the bandstand were of little or no importance. It was all about the music. This conviction led the esteemed jazz scholar Gunther Schuller to write a huge book on the Swing Era that consists almost entirely of record reviews. Writing on Louis Armstrong in The Swing Era, Schuller goes out on a limb and says that "one must eventually come to grips with the totality of his life and work. This can only be done in a dispassionate way, which also takes into account Louis's personality and temperament, and the social-economic conditions within which he labored" (1989:160). This call, however, is in a footnote, and there is virtually nothing in Schuller's book that follows through on his own suggestions about how to understand Armstrong's life and work. It is also significant that Schuller omits any reference to what Armstrong, a highly prolific writer himself (see Armstrong 1999), may have had to say about those "social-economic conditions." Many of us in the jazz studies community are now likely to agree that it's never just about the music. The music only means what it is allowed to mean. For most of its one hundred year history, jazz has been colonized by critics, most of them white, who have imposed their own meanings on the music. And during much of this period, jazz artists, most of them African American, have struggled to combine their words with their musical utterances in order to create their own meanings

Review of Eric Porter. 2002. What Is This Thing Called Jazz?: African American Musicians as Artists, Critics, and Activists. Berkeley: University of California Press

For too long, jazz writers, including the handful of academics who can legitimately be called ‘Jazz scholars,” promoted myths of the music’s autonomy. According to this myth, the identity of the musicians, the venues where they performed, and what they said off the bandstand were of little or no importance. It was all about the music. This conviction led the esteemed jazz scholar Gunther Schuller to write a huge book on the Swing Era that consists almost entirely of record reviews. Writing on Louis Armstrong in The Swing Era, Schuller goes out on a limb and says that “one must eventually come to grips with the totality of his life and work. This can only be done in a dispassionate way, which also takes into account Louis’s personality and temperament, and the social-economic conditions within which he labored” (1989:160). This call, however, is in a footnote, and there is virtually nothing in Schuller’s book that follows through on his own suggestions about how to understand Armstrong’s life and work. It is also significant that Schuller omits any reference to what Armstrong, a highly prolific writer himself (see Armstrong 1999), may have had to say about those “social-economic conditions.” Many of us in the jazz studies community are now likely to agree that it’s never just about the music. The music only means what it is allowed to mean. For most of its one hundred year history, jazz has been colonized by critics, most of them white, who have imposed their own meanings on the music. And during much of this period, jazz artists, most of them African American, have struggled to combine their words with their musical utterances in order to create their own meanings

Postcolonial Theory in Film

Postcolonial theory has hardly been a defining paradigm in the field of film studies. Postcolonial theory originally emerged from comparative literature departments and film from film and media studies departments, and despite the many intersections postcolonial theory has not been explicitly foregrounded. However, there are more similarities and natural points of intersections between the two areas than it would at first appear. For example, both postcolonial theory and film studies emerged at the end of the 1970s with the development of semiotic theory and poststructuralist thought. Both areas engage intensively with the field of representation, implying the ways in which a language, be it cinematic or otherwise, manages to convey reality as “mediated” and “discursive,” and therefore influenced by power relations. An example could be the notion of the gendered gaze by Laura Mulvey and her concept of looked-at-ness and how it also applies to the screening and representation of black and colonized bodies in films, which bell hooks later theorized as black looks, to which she proposed the response of an oppositional gaze. Despite their different genealogies, it is therefore not only very natural but also necessary to combine postcolonial theory and film in order to unearth how the visual field is inherently hegemonizing and hierarchical and therefore in need of critical appraisal and a deconstructive take, such as postcolonial theory. Postcolonial theory has critically contributed to revisiting the representation of the Other, addressing long-standing tropes and stereotypes about cultural difference and racial otherness. This implies new interventions on how visual representations are implicated in the policing of boundaries between East and West, between Europe and the Rest, the self and the other, undoing or rethinking the ways in which the visual field conveys operation of a mastery that needs to be undone and decoded. For example, empire cinema contributed to specific ways of seeing, making films that legitimated the domination of colonies by the colonial powers. Colonial images of gender, race, and class carried ideological connotations that confirmed imperial epistemologies and racial taxonomies, depicting natives, in documentary or fictional films, as savages, primitive, and outside modernity. More recent cinema genres such as border cinema, transnational cinema, accented cinema, haptic cinema, migrant cinema, diasporic cinema, and world cinema can be considered affiliated with the postcolonial paradigm as they all embrace ethnic, immigrant, hyphenated counter-narratives. Yet the field of postcolonial cinema studies, which relates postcolonial theory to film, is a false friend to all these categories as it connects with but also departs from the projects they name in order to pursue the tense power asymmetries generated by the legacies of conquest and colonialism.</p

Dig that Lick: Exploring Patterns in Jazz Solos

International audienceWe give an overview of outcomes from the recently completed project "Dig that lick: Analysing large-scale data for melodic patterns in jazz performances", involving a multidisciplinary and international team of researchers. On the technical side, the project built infrastructure and tools for extraction, discovery, search and visualisation of melodic patterns and associated metadata. These outcomes facilitate analysis on the musicological side of the use of melodic patterns in improvisation, to answer questions about the origins, evolution and transmission of such patterns. This in turn gives insight into the extent to which improvisers rely on patterns, the development of individual and shared styles, and the level of influence of individual musicians, based on the amount of reuse of their improvised material by later musicians