![]() On the other, white jazz is often understood as the creation of a rag-tag group of outsiders, misfit individuals forced together by and alienated from an equally unified but incurably unhip meta-culture (Bix Beiderbecke, that “tragic” early cornetist from Davenport, Iowa, appears as the quintessential example here). On the one hand, black jazz is most typically seen as an expression of a unified community (“the people”). Yet critics dealing with these issues generally characterize jazz in terms of two mutating but self-contained worlds: black and white. Indeed, the vast majority of critical discourse placing the music in broader cultural and social contexts has emphasized matters of race and, given the complex and contentious history of racial interaction in this country, this emphasis is neither surprising nor misplaced. ![]() This is hardly the first study to explore racial issues in jazz. Not that racial politics weren’t a part of that environment, or even that the situation was always less malevolent than in other settings-bassist Pops Foster ruefully recalled the hierarchy of colors when he remarked that “The worst Jim Crow around New Orleans was what the colored did to themselves.” 4 But recognizing that jazz musicians and audiences have configured identities outside of our all-too-sedimented understandings of race should make us reconsider our past (musical and social) as well as alternative, hopefully more equitable and constructive, possibilities for the future. In fact, two distinct Afro-diasporic communities-the Francocentric gens du couleur, or “Creoles of color,” 3 and the English-speaking slaves and their descendants-have coexisted in the Crescent City for centuries, each group embodying very different norms and ideals.Īlthough the subject of racial/cultural identity in jazz has been conceived largely in terms of a black and white binary, this essay will look to the New Orleans Creole community’s participation in and attitudes toward early jazz as a moment when alternative understandings were in play. Historian Gwendolyn Midlo Hall has noted that “New Orleans remains, in spirit, the most African city in the United States.” 2 At the same time, however, cultural identity among peoples of African extraction in that city has remained anything but uniform. That’s where the music was that day–it was taking him through the door he was coming home.” –Sidney Bechet 1 ![]() He stands in front of it and he crosses the door, going inside. But then something happens to him and he finds a place, his place. He wanders the world and he’s a stranger wherever he is he’s a stranger right in the place where he was born. It’s like a man with no place of his own. “But that’s what the music is…a lost thing finding itself.
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