Category: Uncategorized

  • Swinging at the Savoy

    Big band jazz was also known as swing. Swing dance developed in the segregated dance halls and ballrooms of New York City, such as the famous Savoy Ballroom on Lenox Avenue and 140th Street. Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers, who you see in the film below, were the professional dance team at the Savoy. Note that the…

  • Jazz 59

    In 1959, African-American composer Ed Bland made the influential short semi-documentary film The Cry of Jazz, which explains jazz for the newbie, and situates the music in the history of black life in America. Bland used the music of avant-garde Afrofuturist composer and pianist Sun Ra as the soundtrack. 1959 was also the year that…

  • Butterfly Resources, part III: Critical Responses

    The Japanese Fan (Gustave de Jonghe, 1880s). Read “Madama Butterfly: A Study in Ambiguity” by Jordan Serchuk. Read “The Heartless GIs Who Inspired Madame Butterfly“ by Rupert Christiansen. Read “Washington National Opera’s Madama Butterfly, Reviewed,” by Mike Paarlberg. Read “Past vs. Present: Puccini’s Madame Butterfly vs. Weezer’s Pinkerton” by Maxime Scraire. Weezer’s “Across the Sea”: Read “What About Yellowface?”…

  • Butterfly Resources, part II

    The opera in a nutshell. Maestro Antonio Pappano and the cast of the Royal Opera production discuss the rehearsal process. English National Opera presented Butterfly two years ago with a puppet as Trouble, Butterfly’s son. Do you think it works? A short animated film to Butterfly’s Act II aria “Un bel dì vedremo.” Glyndebourne Opera updated the…

  • Butterfly Resources, part I

    Read the complete libretto in English translation here. Orientalism: “La Japonaise (Mme. Monet in Kimono” (Claude Monet, 1875). Photo from Operation Babylift, Saigon, 1975: a U.S. Naval officer about to take a Vietnamese orphan, one of thousands, onboard a plane to be adopted in America. For more on Operation Babylift, go here: https://www.fordlibrarymuseum.gov/museum/exhibits/babylift/# A French…

  • What is Hip?

    A playlist/watchlist/reading list to accompany your reading by Scott Saul from his book Freedom Is, Freedom Ain’t: Jazz and the Making of the Sixties. Oscar Brown, Jr.: “But I Was Cool” Lenny Bruce: Norman Mailer’s essay “The White Negro,” published in Dissent in 1957. One of the “jazz” excerpts from Jack Kerouac’s beat novel, On the Road: Boom, kick,…

  • The Evolution of Bebop

    (Bird on Money, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s tribute to Charlie Parker.) The song “Cherokee,” a fox-trot by the English dance-band leader Ray Noble: Charlie Parker’s version: Parker said that, when playing “Cherokee,” he realized that the 12 semitones in any scale could take a piece of music from one key into any other, a realization that Arnold…

  • Beneath the Underdog

    Trigger/content warning: disturbing video imagery, offensive language. When I was working on my doctorate and teaching a writing class for music majors, I wanted to assign my students a passage from the great jazz bass player, composer, and bandleader Charles Mingus’s 1971 memoir, Beneath the Underdog. The fiftieth anniversary of the desegregation of Little Rock Central…

  • Ossian in Italy

    How did the poetry of Ossian (really, James MacPherson) influence Italian opera in the nineteenth century? Why was Ossian — later acknowledged to be a fraud — so important to the Romantic generation in Italy? Could it be because these supposedly ancient poems spoke to the longing for a unified culture and community, one based…

  • Mood Indigo

    In addition to blues tonality, improvisation, virtuosity, freedom in melodic phrasing, propulsive rhythm, and harmonic complexity, one of the defining characteristic of jazz is the way the standard jazz ensembles — the particular mix of instruments — sound together. This sound is called timbre. The distinctive timbre of early jazz comes from the use of brass…