Tag Archives: New Orleans

Activism: A Rant on Music, Minstrelsy, New Orleans, and Today’s Racism

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“Minstrelsy is thing of the past!” my old high school teacher once told me. Is it actually a thing of the past? Just because it is no longer featured and accepted in mainstream media it does not mean that the racism in the United States has ended. It has only evolved. We still hear remnants of this racist entertainment culture in sing-along songs that have been played to many children growing up. There are still references made to minstrelsy through the use of costumes in cartoons such as Mickey Mouse. Have African-Americans, or minorities in general, ever been put first when it comes to economic and emergency aid from the United States government or population? If so, why did Cesar Chavez or Martin Luther King, Jr. ever have to step on that soapbox to put minorities first themselves?

Martin Luther King. Jr. Quote

Is it a cultural norm for the United States to be considered a nation that puts their people last? Unlike the Swiss and Germans, who have helped their people in times of need, New Orleans says a lot about the reality of the United States and the government’s attitude towards affirmative action aimed at minorities, specifically African Americans.

“While Swiss and German governments have paid reparations to Holocaust survivors and those killed in the Holocaust, black intellectuals have pointed out that there has been no such concentrated effort by the United States to repay African Americans for the unpaid labor required under slavery” (The American Mosaic: The African American Experience).

Looters make their way into and out of a grocery store in New Orleans on Tuesday, Aug. 30, 2005. Flood waters continue to rise in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina did extensive damage when it made landfall on Monday. (AP Photo/Dave Martin)

In 2005, Hurricane Katrina killed over 1,800 people and changed the lives over millions of others. One of the cities most affected by this hurricane was New Orleans, LA. The majority of the people affected by this disaster were African-Americans. According to DataUSA.io, the 75.8% of the New Orleans population is Black, 18.9% is White, and 5.3% is Hispanic.

New Orleans, LA Population Bar Chart of Ethnicity

“The problems that plague the urban poor, who are disproportionately African American, were tangible throughout Louisiana—especially in New Orleans, which sustained the most damage—and in Mississippi near where the storm made landfall. The catastrophic storm only amplified ways the black urban and rural poor in the American South had been ignored” (The American Mosaic: The African American Experience).

It is clear that a disproportionate amount of African-Americans in this part of the South were left without sufficient aid by the US Government emergency systems. According to the article about “New Leadership,” Sanders states that there are many African American intellectuals today drawing on evolving conversations about black identity to “reignite a debate on the need for reparations to African Americans” (Sanders). This debate is similar to that of minstrelsy in the context of African American reparations. What can the United States offer to African Americans as reparations in a post-slavery world? Does the United States do enough for African Americans today? This question is complicated because we must define “United States”. The United States as in: government, citizens, immigrants, and companies. There are many different ways the United States can act as an entity.

The Black Law in Missouri, 1861

Minstrelsy poses the same concerns because it requires reparations in its own context. The question posed with regard to minstrelsy is, “Should minstrel songs and culture be erased from history or should we educate our following generations on its history?” For lack of a better way to state this, I will say it as it is: The United States as a whole is not doing everything it can do to owe reparations to African Americans today.

 

Sources:

  1. Sanders, Joshunda. “New Leadership, 2001–2008.” In The American Mosaic: The African American Experience, ABC-CLIO, 2018. Accessed March 7, 2018. https://africanamerican2.abc-clio.com/Topics/Display/39.
  2. The Black Law in Missouri. The National Era (Washington D. C., United States), Thursday, January 26, 1860; pg. 15; Issue 682 (224 words (1860/01/26/): https://goo.gl/P7Ahw6
  3.  https://datausa.io/profile/geo/new-orleans-la/#ethnicity
  4. Simpson, George. “Disney race shock: Mickey Mouse ‘was based on blackface minstrels’.” Express.co.uk. February 3, 2017. Accessed March 7, 2018. https://www.express.co.uk/entertainment/films/762722/Disney-racist-Mickey-Mouse-gloves-blackface-minstrels-Vaudeville-The-Opry-House.

A New Music Born in New Orleans

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New Orleans at the beginning of the 20th century was a hotbed of musical innovation. The rich oral traditions of African Americans and the upbeat, commercial dance music of the day collided in the city’s thriving nightlife, ultimately giving rise to a new style of dance music that melded the harmonic and formal idioms of the blues with the rhythmic vitality of ragtime.  This new music was called “jazz.”

The 1917 recording of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band playing Livery Stable Blues (linked below) clearly illustrates the blending of ragtime and blues styles that forms the basis for jazz music.  Each “stanza” basically follows a standard 12-bar blues progression: four bars of tonic harmony, two bars predominant paired with two bars of tonic, concluding with two bars of dominant harmony leading back to the tonic.  This harmonic scheme is paired with catchy melodic material that is reminiscent of popular song.  Clearly meant for dancing, Livery Stable Blues features the driving pulse and jaunty syncopations of ragtime.

http://ezproxy.stolaf.edu/login?url=https://search.alexanderstreet.com/view/work/be|recorded_cd|li_upc_888831096023

Another key element of jazz music is improvisation; it is likely that most of the music played by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band was improvised.  In his 1946 article entitled “This is Genuine Jazz,” Douglas S Enefer claims that “real jazz is composed by the executants – both individually and collectively – as they play . . . often the theme may be stated only once; thereafter the melodic line is implied rather than stated.”  This melodic treatment can be heard in Livery Stable Blues: melody lines are clearly stated in the clarinet and trombone at the very beginning, and are varied, embellished, and commented upon in subsequent verses.  Improvising variations in this way is an integral part of the jazz style.

Finally, jazz music is often associated with a spirit of free-spiritedness and abandon.  In Livery Stable Blues, the ODJB takes this freedom to an extreme degree, with rooster crows on the clarinet, horse whinnies on the trumpet, and cow moos on the trombone.  This musical evocation of a barnyard could be understood as a simple comedic gimmick, or could be interpreted as a critique of the extreme formality and stuffiness of classical concert culture.  Either way, it is clear that light-heartedness and subversion are central tenets of the ODJB’s musical style and public image.

New Orleans may have been the birthplace of jazz, but the music quickly spread throughout the nation.  The ODJB itself played in many major cities, including Chicago and New York.  The new style took hold, and jazz continued to evolve and proliferate throughout the world.  Today jazz is studied, performed and enjoyed by a global audience.  

 

Sources

Charters, Samuel. Trumpet around the Corner: The Story of New Orleans Jazz. University Press of Mississippi, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, accessed 8 October 2017.

Crawford, Richard. America’s Musical Life: a History. 1st ed., New York, Norton, 2001.

Enefer, Douglas S. “This is Genuine Jazz.” The Negro, 1 Feb. 1946.

Livery Stable Blues. Rec. March 1917. Vintage Vinyl, 2014. Music Online: Jazz Music Library. Accessed 9 Oct. 2017.

Jazz at St. Olaf

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Lentjazz It seems St. Olaf has been hesitant to embrace Jazz as a sound musical genre, especially in regard to liturgical music. In this 1968 article of the Manitou Messenger, Ms. Berglund summarized a student jazz liturgy setting performed in chapel and asks questions that point to Jazz as a potentially profane and intrusive art form for worship. “Is jazz profaned by its association with night-clubs or can it also be a song of praise?”[1]

jazzarticle

Contrast this with an article from 1977, when The Preservation Hall Jazz Band visited St. Olaf in what the Manitou Messenger calls the “most enthusiastically received concert at St. Olaf.”[2] The Preservation Hall Jazz Band is made up of a pool of musicians that rotate over the years, but was started by Allan and Sandra Jaffe in 1961 New Orleans, who were interested in preserving the traditional jazz style free from commercial imperatives.[3] Becoming famous by touring and recording, Preservation Hall is internationally known and remains one of the popular tourist sites of New Orleans, so of course it was a big deal that they came to our humble little bubble at St. Olaf.

jazzstolaf

The writer goes on to say that “everybody has heard Dixieland jazz before, but this concert gave us all a chance to see and hear a jazz band doing it the way it was originally done. This style influenced every form of American music since 1900, from Joplin’s rags to Chicago’s rock.” Perhaps due to a lack of curriculum on jazz at St. Olaf at the time, or general lack of scholarship, the writer has a misconception that jazz influenced ragtime, when in reality the syncopated rhythms of ragtime along with the blues style are cited as the origins of jazz. In addition, to assume that the concert of 1977 was a presentation of how jazz was originally done is a pretty bold claim, considering any time a performance claims some kind of authenticity, there are certain details/styles included and excluded. These two examples suggest St. Olaf is not a little bubble, filled with scholarly prowess and immune to the world’s ideals. The stereotypes about the origins of jazz and its perceived development as a “profane” style pervade music history as well as St. Olaf history. We can’t say St. Olaf, as an academic and music institution, was above these problematic notions about Jazz then, so my question is, has much changed?

[1] Marcie Berglund, “Lent services feature Heckman’s jazz liturgy,” Manitou Messenger, March 1, 1968.

[2] Mike Stiegler, “Original Jazz Preserved for Olaf Audience,” Manitou Messenger, March 4, 1977.

[3]  Grove Dictionary of American Music, 2nd ed, s.v. “Preservation Hall Jazz Band.”