The Prehistory of Jazz

This chapter explores the cultural and musical context for the birth of jazz. It examines the styles of music that influenced the early evolution of the music, including ragtime, blues, spirituals, and work songs. It also includes thumbnail sketches of the leading performers in these idioms, including Scott Joplin, Bessie Smith, Robert Johnson, and others. The chapter also describes the social context for early jazz, with special focus on African American culture in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Vocal Colour in Blue

This essay invokes a line of historical singing lessons that locate blues singers Bessie Smith and Ethel Waters in the lineage of Broadway belters. Contesting the idea that black women who sang the blues and performed on the musical stage in the early twentieth century possessed “untrained” voices—a pervasive narrative that retains currency in present-day voice pedagogy literature—I argue that singing is a sonic citational practice. In the act of producing vocal sound, one implicitly cites the vocal acts of the teacher from whom one has learned the song. And, I suggest, if performance is always “twice-behaved,” then the particular modes of doubleness present in voice point up this citationality, a condition of vocal sound that I name the “twice-heard.” In considering how vocal performances replicate and transmit knowledge, the “voice lesson” serves as a key site for analysis. My experiences as a voice coach and composer in New York City over two decades ground my approach of listening for the body in vocal sound. Foregrounding the perspective and embodied experience of voice practitioners of colour, I critique the myth of the “natural belter” that obscures the lessons Broadway performers have drawn from the blueswomen’s sound.

The Kinkiness of Turquoise

This chapter showcases Betty Davis’s transposition of women’s blues into rock-inflected version of funk. Bolden advances two key arguments. First, Davis reprised the sexual politics and rebellious spirit exemplified by singers Bessie Smith and Ida Cox, for instance, and reinterpreted those principles in modern America. Second, Davis’s eroticism and sui generis style of funk, which she expressed in her recordings and onstage, reflected a sexual politics that served as a counterpart to those of black feminists writers such as Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and many others who were publishing coextensively. But whereas black feminist writers often wrote about black women in previous generations, Davis not only addressed contradictions that black women encountered in contemporary street culture; she also represented such X-rated sexual desires as sadomasochism in her songwriting. In addition, the chapter provides biographical information that contextualizes Davis’s route to the music industry, and Bolden uses critical methods from scholarship on African American poetry to illuminate Davis’s vocal technique.

Duke’s Day and First Features 1929–1940

A survey and analysis of films taking jazz as a topic, from early talkies through the birth and development of the swing era. Such films include two innovative 1929 shorts by director Dudley Murphy, one featuring Bessie Smith and the other featuring Duke Ellington. Smith and Ellington play fictionalized versions of themselves. Paul Whiteman and Artie Shaw play their not-quite selves in feature films. Controversy over jazz in the African American community is explored in Broken Strings. Musicians “swing the classics” there and in another film. The 1937 feature Champagne Waltz includes an early instance of a stock jazz-film ending—a big New York concert that reconciles people and/or musical styles in conflict. That ending is tweaked by placing it at Carnegie Hall in 1938’s Alexander’s Ragtime Band. Other films are also discussed.

Movies within Movies and New Orleans Comes Back 2008–2019

In the 2000s and 2010s, screen jazz stories explored new forms to tell a new century’s jazz stories—longform television included. The surreal comedy Be Kind Rewind critiques jazz narrative conventions, with a movie within a movie: a new trend in jazz pictures. Born to Be Blue depicts a Chet Baker biopic within the biopic. A Miles Davis biopic is configured as a self-contained double feature, dividing his charming and evil personas. Nina Simone and Joe Albany biopics likewise focus on lulls in their careers. Queen Latifah plays Bessie Smith in a sexually frank biopic. Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash is hysterical like a too-fast drum solo, and his La La Land echoes Scorsese’s New York, New York in various particulars. As the jazz film approached the music’s centenary on record, new stories keep harking back to early ones—even the earliest, drawing connections back to The Jazz Singer.

Dama de Espadas

A canção “Dama de espadas”, de Ilessi e Iara Ferreira, é referência da produção de uma nova geração de compositoras residentes no Rio de Janeiro. Cantautoras intensamente atuantes no cenário artístico contemporâneo, ambas buscam construir novas narrativas na dimensão literária e musical da canção. Buscamos compreender o que as motivou a compor – o contexto de produção, performance e fruição – e observar como se construiu um diálogo com o blues enquanto gênero musical negro surgido nos Estados Unidos, constituindo dois territórios atravessados pelas lutas das mulheres e separados por aproximadamente um século. A análise conta como principais referências os trabalhos de (1) Angela Davis, com o seu panorama sobre a constituição do blues a partir de Bessie Smith e Ma Rainey, e (2) Silvia Federici, com sua abordagem sobre o surgimento do capitalismo e os diversos mecanismos de controle impostos às mulheres para servirem a essa lógica vigente.