The jazz storyteller: Improvisers’ perspectives on music and narrative

The term ‘storytelling’ has a long history of prominence in descriptive and prescriptive talk about jazz improvisation. The main aim of this article is to point out that the ways in which jazz musicians themselves employ the ‘storytelling’ metaphor with reference to jazz improvisation display several important perspectives on perennial and fundamental prob- lems in the field of musical narrativity and offer very efficient ways of dealing with these issues. The empirical interview study summarized in this article constitutes an attempt to decipher the full potential of this intermedial conceptual loan, jazz improvisation as story- telling, based on how it is used by a number of highly accomplished Swedish jazz musi- cians. From a theoretical point of view, there are severe difficulties involved in viewing any music as narrative. The aim of the empirical study is to provide means for understand- ing jazz musicians’ conceptualizations of their art form; to investigate how they deal with such difficulties. The interviewees favour a metaphorical rather than literal interpretation of the concept of storytelling: for instance, as communication, expression, mission or vision. Their understanding of storytelling tends to focus on the how—rather than the what—of narrative. In their view, the narrative potential of jazz is connected in significant ways to the music’s ontological status as situated activity, including perspectives that concern the con- struction of musical meaning through narrativization of intra-musical patterns, as well as the significance of cultural competence. In sum, jazz practitioners’ understanding of jazz ‘storytelling’ emerges as an important way of dealing with issues of meaning in mu

Angy Palumbo: The pen name that was real – Further glimpses

This article presents further biographical information about a little-known composer of mandolin and guitar pieces, the Italian-British musician and music teacher Angelo (Angy) Palumbo (1883–1960)

Swedish stories? Culturally dependent perspectives on jazz improvisation as storytelling

The concept of storytelling as a description (or prescription) regarding jazz music is a very old and very common trope in jazz discourses. Arguably, however, this usage seems to have been taken for granted, and has not been sufficiently investigated and problematized. One of several important aspects of the concept of storytelling as applied to jazz music has to do with the music’s semantic potentiality and the ways in which it may be used to present references that are relevant to performers and audiences. To an extent, this relevance may be described as a form of authenticity. The aim of this article is to contrast perspectives on jazz improvisation, storytelling, and authenticity as presented in American jazz literature with statements on these topics made by a number of Sweden’s leading jazz musicians in recent qualitative interviews. The picture that emerges, it is argued, includes interesting interconnections between two kinds of authenticity: tradition-authenticity and self-authenticity

Musical marginalization processes: Problematizing the marginalization concept through an example from early 20th century American popular culture.

The author sets out to analyse a number of representations of the biblical Hagar figure in African American and white American culture. Spivak (1988) has problematized the marginalization concept with regard to the study of the third world subject, arguing that knowledge always expresses the interests of the knowledge producers, and that Western academic research is always colonial. The aim of the present analysis is to demonstrate that a certain doubleness and instability may be intrinsic to the concept of marginalization and may become visible through processes of transculturation. The Hagar figure of the Old Testament is arguably an archtypical symbol of definitive marginalization. In W. C. Handy's song "Aunt Hagar's Blues", her central symbolic function in African American culture is manifest. This study focuses on a couple of early 20th century popular culture representations of Handy's song: a 1922 sheet music cover and a 1958 Hollywood film plot. These two representations of Aunt Hagar are studied and analysed with concepts such as identity, meaning production and ideological power as a point of departure. The author argues that these popular culture representations have watered down completely several thousand years worth of cultural/mythological meaning production and that this phenomenon gives rise to interesting questions regarding the marginalization concept in relation to a deconstruction of the central/peripheral dichotomy

Med bredd och lekfullhet

Recension av Christer Borg, "Östen med rösten – sångare, musikant och underhållare