Voicing Silence: The Legend of Buddy Bolden

2007 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
John and Joanne Saul
Keyword(s):  
New Orleans ◽  
Michael Ondaatje ◽  
Jazz Improvisation ◽  
Music Making ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Mike Davis ◽  
The City

This article focuses on the legendary Buddy Bolden, a putative godfather of jazz improvisation in the very earliest days of jazz-like music–making in New Orleans. We first seek to position him both within the New Orleans of his time and within the broader tradition of jazz’ development to which he is deemed to have made such a singular contribution. But we soon discover that, despite his legendary status, we have in fact no aural record of Bolden’s actual playing and only fragmentary, often contradictory, accounts of his life. It becomes necessary to “improvise the improvisor” – to, in effect, give voice to Bolden’s silence. We then examine several efforts to imagine Bolden both as player and as person: by Michael Ondaatje, on the printed page, in his highly regarded “novel” Coming Through Slaughter and on disk, aurally, by players like Jerry Granelli and Malachi Thompson. We conclude that Bolden’s rather shadowy person and performance make him especially available, in both song and story, for the kinds of improvisation of person we have pinpointed. Indeed, this may again prove true as those in post-Katrina New Orleans who may wish to rebuild the city in the terms of its own history find they must once more “talk back” to power, to those who now choose merely to further (in Mike Davis’ chilling phrase) the “killing of New Orleans.”

Downtown Mardi Gras

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leslie A. Wade ◽  
Robin Roberts ◽  
Frank de Caro
Keyword(s):  
Hurricane Katrina ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Performance Studies ◽  
Age And Gender ◽  
Mardi Gras ◽  
Cultural Life ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Performance ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The City

After Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and the surrounding region in 2005, the city debated whether to press on with Mardi Gras or cancel the parades. Ultimately, they decided to proceed. New Orleans’s recovery certainly has resulted from a complex of factors, but the city’s unique cultural life—perhaps its greatest capital—has been instrumental in bringing the city back from the brink of extinction. Voicing a civic fervor, local writer Chris Rose spoke for the importance of Carnival when he argued to carry on with the celebration of Mardi Gras following Katrina: “We are still New Orleans. We are the soul of America. We embody the triumph of the human spirit. Hell. We ARE Mardi Gras”. Since 2006, a number of new Mardi Gras practices have gained prominence. The new parade organizations or krewes, as they are called, interpret and revise the city’s Carnival traditions but bring innovative practices to Mardi Gras. The history of each parade reveals the convergence of race, class, age, and gender dynamics in these new Carnival organizations. Downtown Mardi Gras: New Carnival Practices in Post-Katrina New Orleans examines six unique, offbeat, Downtown celebrations. Using ethnography, folklore, cultural, and performance studies, the authors analyze new Mardi Gras’s connection to traditional Mardi Gras. The narrative of each krewe’s development is fascinating and unique, illustrating participants’ shared desire to contribute to New Orleans’s rich and vibrant culture.

A minor theory of direct action politics and performance in New Orleans’ economic justice movement

2021 ◽  
pp. 026377582110626
Author(s):  
Caroline Keegan
Keyword(s):  
New Orleans ◽  
Participant Observation ◽  
Direct Action ◽  
Economic Justice ◽  
Immigration Reform ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Performance ◽  
A Minor ◽  
Dominant Narratives ◽  
The City

In this paper, I develop a minor theory that blurs boundaries between prefigurative direct action and symbolic performance to reconsider strategies for resistance and world-building. Drawing on participant observation and interviews of economic justice organizers and activists in New Orleans in 2015, I examine two events through this minor theory: an immigration reform protest and a collaboratively written skit about income inequality. By emphasizing the performance of protest and the potential for protest through performance, I consider how these events empowered activists to make claims on spaces of the city, develop long-term embodied solidarities, disrupt dominant narratives, and en act more just alternatives. These events took place against the backdrop of intensifying racial and economic inequalities in post-Katrina New Orleans, following a long history of both repression and resistance in the city. Through performance-based direct actions, New Orleans’s economic justice movement moves beyond a reactive politics rooted in outrage and anguish toward a direct action politics constructive of a more just world.

Hygienic assessment of learning environment conditions (by the example of higher educational institutions of the city of Ufa)

2020 ◽  
Vol 99 (4) ◽  
pp. 405-411
Author(s):  
Elena Ju. Gorbatkova
Keyword(s):  
Ionizing Radiation ◽  
Educational Institutions ◽  
Higher Educational Institutions ◽  
Factors Affecting ◽  
Republic Of Bashkortostan ◽  
Average Relative Humidity ◽  
Higher Educational ◽  
The Republic ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The City

Introduction. The important factors affecting health and performance of young people are the conditions of education, in particular, a comfortable microclimate in the classrooms of higher educational institutions. Materials and methods. In view of the urgency of this problem, an analysis was made of the microclimate parameters of educational organizations of different profiles (Ufa city, the Republic of Bashkortostan). 294 classrooms were studied in 22 buildings of 4 leading universities in Ufa. A total of 3,822 measurements were taken to determine the parameters of the microclimate. The analysis of ionizing radiation in the aerial environment of classrooms. There was performed determination of radon and its affiliated products content. In order to assess the conditions and lifestyle of students of 4 higher educational institutions of the city of Ufa, we conducted an anonymous survey of 1,820 students of I and IV years of education. Results. The average temperature in the classrooms of all universities studied was 23.9±0.09 C. The average relative humidity in all classrooms was 34.2 ± 0.42%. Analysis of ionizing radiation (radon and its daughter products decay) in the aerial environment of the classrooms and sports halls located in the basement determined that the average annual equivalent equilibrium volumetric activity of the radon daughter products (EROA ± Δ222Rn) ranged from 28 ± 14 to 69 ± 34.5 meter, which meets the requirements established by SanPiN. Conclusion. The hygienic assessment of the microclimate parameters of educational institutions of various profile revealed a number of deviations from the regulated norms. The results indicate the need to control the parameters of the microclimate, both from the administration of universities, and from the professors. According to the results of the study, recommendations were prepared for the management of higher educational institutions in Ufa.

Music of Tragedy

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Naomi A. Weiss
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Context ◽  
Musical Language ◽  
New Approach ◽  
Late Work ◽  
Music Making ◽  
Dramatic Action ◽  
Instrumental Accompaniment ◽  
And Performance

The Music of Tragedy offers a new approach to the study of classical Greek theater by examining the use of musical language, imagery, and performance in the late work of Euripides. Drawing on the ancient conception of mousikē, in which words, song, dance, and instrumental accompaniment were closely linked, Naomi Weiss emphasizes the interplay of performance and imagination—the connection between the chorus’s own live singing and dancing in the theater and the images of music-making that frequently appear in their songs. Through detailed readings of four plays, she argues that the mousikē referred to and imagined in these plays is central to the progression of the dramatic action and to ancient audiences’ experiences of tragedy itself. She situates Euripides’s experimentation with the dramaturgical effects of mousikē within a broader cultural context, and in doing so, she shows how he both continues the practices of his tragic predecessors and also departs from them, reinventing traditional lyric styles and motifs for the tragic stage.

Dreaming New Orleans

2021 ◽  
Vol 65 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-39
Author(s):  
Joseph Roach
Keyword(s):  
New Orleans ◽  
Streetcar Named Desire ◽  
A Streetcar Named Desire ◽  
The City

Having passed the tercentenary of the “Mississippi Bubble” of 1720, the financial fiasco that accompanied the founding of New Orleans, the city continues to risk everything by gambling on the collateral of its dreams. Like Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, “The City that Care Forgot” is playing out a mortgage melodrama under constant threat of dispossession, dreading the last stop on an itinerary that begins with Desire, changes at Cemeteries, and dead ends in Elysian Fields.

That Certain Feeling: Mike Davis, Truth and the City

Geography ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 89 (3) ◽  
pp. 254-268
Author(s):  
Kevin Stannard
Keyword(s):  
Mike Davis ◽  
The City

Bill Dixon's Voice (Letter)

2015 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 204-231
Author(s):  
ERIC PORTER
Keyword(s):  
Experimental Music ◽  
Artistic Production ◽  
Improvised Music ◽  
Wage Employment ◽  
Nuanced Understanding ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Critical Intervention ◽  
The City ◽  
The Voice

AbstractIn November 1966 composer and improviser Bill Dixon recorded a seventeen-minute-long “voice letter” to jazz writer Frank Kofsky. This letter may be analyzed as a critical intervention by Dixon, an attempt to change the context of interpretation around improvised music. But the voice letter may also be heard and analyzed as a kind of performance. As Dixon speaks, one can hear the rumbling and roar of the city as well as the staccato sounds of car and truck horns unfolding in dynamic counterpoint to his words. In this essay, I put the voice letter into dialogue with Dixon's personal history, his writings and interview statements, and some of his contemporaneous musical and multi-generic projects, especially his collaboration with dancer and choreographer Judith Dunn. I show how the letter maps Dixon's and Dunn's positions within a geography of intellectual circles, experimental artistic communities, and low-wage employment networks. By extension, I examine how the voice letter, as critical intervention and performance, points us to a nuanced understanding of black experimental music of the 1960s as a socially inflected, self-conscious and, ultimately, serious engagement with various modes of artistic production and thought, carried out under conditions of both precarity and inspiration.

The Fiery Pacific: Volcanic Eruptions and Settler-State Theatricality in Oceania, 1780–1900

2014 ◽  
Vol 55 (3) ◽  
pp. 362-392
Author(s):  
Diana Looser
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Performance Studies ◽  
Art History ◽  
Volcanic Eruptions ◽  
The Body ◽  
Red Color ◽  
Form Part ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Grand Opera ◽  
The City

In the closing scene of René-Charles Guilbert de Pixérécourt's melodramaLa Tête de mort; ou, Les Ruines de Pompeïa(1827), audiences at Paris's Théâtre de la Gaîté were presented with the spectacular cataclysm of an erupting Mount Vesuvius that invaded the city and engulfed the hapless characters in its fiery embrace. “The theatre,” Pixérécourt writes, “is completely inundated by this sea of bitumen and lava. A shower of blazing and transparent stones and red ash falls on all sides…. The red color with which everything is struck, the terrible noise of the volcano, the screaming, the agitation and despair of the characters … all combine to form this terrible convulsion of nature, a horrible picture, and altogether worthy of being compared to Hell.” A few years later, in 1830, Daniel Auber's grand operaLa Muette de Portici(1828), which yoked a seventeenth-century eruption of Vesuvius with a popular revolt against Spanish rule in Naples, opened at the Théâtre de Monnaie in Brussels. The Belgian spectators, inspired by the opera's revolutionary sentiments, poured out into the streets and seized their country's independence from the Dutch. These two famous examples, which form part of a long genealogy of representing volcanic eruptions through various artistic means, highlight not only the compelling, immersive spectacle of nature in extremis but also the ability of stage scenery to intervene materially in the narrative action and assimilate affective and political meanings. As these two examples also indicate, however, the body of scholarship in literary studies, art history, and theatre and performance studies that attends to the mechanical strategies and symbolic purchase of volcanic representations has tended to focus mainly on Europe; more research remains to be undertaken into how volcanic spectacles have engaged with non-European topographies and sociopolitical dynamics and how this wider view might illuminate our understanding of theatre's social roles.

“You're Only Ever A Block From The ‘Hood”

2021 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
pp. 152-170
Author(s):  
Alex Blue V
Keyword(s):  
Identity Formation ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
Participant Observation ◽  
Automobile Plant ◽  
Original Intent ◽  
Spatial Reorientation ◽  
Field Notes ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Forms Of Violence ◽  
The City

This article explores the use of sound, lyrics, and performance as tools for spatial reorientation and reimagining, identity formation and affirmation, and counternarrative or counterarchive in a rapidly gentrifying contemporary Detroit, Michigan. Two discrete, yet discursively linked case studies are presented—performances by the same artist in two different spaces—that exhibit various modes of “flipping,” slang that can refer to multiple transformative practices in contemporary Detroit. These practices include the use of overdetermined spaces, or spaces that have been declared abandoned or vacant, for something other than their original intent—i.e. using a decommissioned automobile plant as a music video set; sampling, which can be understood as using sonic components from previously recorded songs in the creation of new hip-hop beats; buying homes in a state of disrepair, fixing and reselling them at large profits; and inverting meaning itself, via slang or coded language. Additionally Black techniques of sounding and performance are illuminated, with a focus on echo as a mode of co-creation. These various practices are all responses to the growing wave of gentrification that gains momentum in the city daily. The analysis draws primarily from ethnographic research conducted from 2016 to 2018, culling data from participant observation, recorded interviews, informal conversations, field notes, lyrical and video analysis, and the analysis of mediated accounts, both print and online. As the analysis shows, the strategies utilized by artists in Detroit ensure that no matter how much the spaces in Detroit continue to change, and no matter how much an attempt is made to provide racially curated space through various forms of violence, you’re only ever a block from the ‘hood.

The Steel Heard ‘Round the World: Exposing the Global Reach of Indigenous Musical Journeys with the Hawaiian Steel Guitar

Itinerario ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 253-274
Author(s):  
John W. Troutman
Keyword(s):  
New Orleans ◽  
International Markets ◽  
Native Hawaiians ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Commercial Music ◽  
Kanaka Maoli ◽  
Music Making ◽  
The World ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
A New Technique

In the late nineteenth century, Kānaka Maoli (Native Hawaiians) physically modified guitars and created a new technique for playing them. In the years that followed, hundreds of Hawaiian troupes, engaging new entertainment circuits that crisscrossed the globe, introduced the world to their “Hawaiian steel guitar,” from Shanghai to London, Kolkata to New Orleans. While performing Hawaiianmele, or songs, with their instrument, they demonstrated new virtues for the guitar’s potential in vernacular and commercial music making in these international markets. Based upon archival research, this essay considers the careers of several Hawaiian guitarists who travelled the world in the early twentieth century, connecting local soundscapes through the proliferation of an indigenous technology.

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