Demons of discord down under
‘Jump Jim Crow’ and ‘Australia’s first jazz band’
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/jazz.v8i1-2.26775Keywords:
Minstrelsy, ragtime, early jazz, popular stageAbstract
The 1918-19 vaudeville act called 'Australia’s First Jazz Band' is the most appropriate metaphor for the commencement of an ‘Australian jazz’ tradition where this tradition is considered from the present-day perspective of a self-aware, long established Australian jazz movement. Yet improvisatory African-American-inflected antecedents of jazz can be traced back at least to the first colonial Australian performance of the blackface minstrel song and dance act Jump Jim Crow in 1838 and though blackface and, later, African-American minstrel show music and dance and two decades of ragtime music and dance before 'Australia’s First Jazz Band'. Taking its cue from Bruce Johnson's statement that early ‘jazz’ in Australia was an example of an ‘oppositional subculture’ that led back to our foundation criminality and ‘took over the spirit of convict and treason songs’(Johnson, 2004: 9), the article seeks to show that a continuum of African-American-inflected popular entertainment and its performance practices from Jump Jim Crow to Australia’s First Jazz Band functioned as the 'medium' for an oppositional 'spirit' that combined globalized oppositional values with others that are, arguably, traceable to colonial 'foundation criminality'.
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——(2014) ‘The Tango in Australia as Popular Entertainment and Music of “Place” before 1970s Latin-American Immigration’. In Communities, Places, Ecologies Proceedings of the 2013 IASPM-ANZ Conference (Dunedin), ed. Jadey O’Regan and Toby Wren, 39–55. Brisbane: IASPM Australia/New Zealand.
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Bellanta, Melissa (2012) Larrikins: A History. St Lucia, Queensland: University of Queensland Press.
Bisset, Andrew (1974) ‘The First Ten Years of Jazz in Australia’. 4th Year thesis. Canberra: National University of Australia.
——(1979) Black Roots, White Flowers: A History of Jazz in Australia. Sydney: Golden Press.
Breen, Marcus (1987) ‘Bruce Clarke’. In Missing in Action: Australian Popular Music in Perspective, vol. 1, ed. Marcus Breen, 107–112. Kensington, Victoria: Verbal Graphics.
Breen, Marcus, ed. (1989) Our Place Our Music: Aboriginal Music in Perspective Volume 2. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press.
Clunies-Ross, Bruce (1979) ‘An Australian Sound: Jazz in Melbourne and Adelaide 1941–51’. In Australian Popular Culture, ed. P. Spearritt and D. Walker, 62–80. Sydney: Allen & Unwin.
Cockrell, Dale (1997) Demons of Disorder, Early Blackface Minstrels and their World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Emery, Lynne Fauley (1988) Black Dance from 1619 to Today, 2nd revised ed. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Book Company.
Johnson, Bruce (1987) The Oxford Companion to Australian Jazz. Melbourne: Oxford University Press.
——(2000) The Inaudible Music: Jazz Gender and Australian Modernity. Sydney: Currency Press.
——(2002) ‘The Jazz Diaspora’. In The Cambridge Companion to Jazz, ed. Mervyn Cooke and David Horn, 33–54. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
——(2004) ‘Tools of Our Own Making: Shaping Australian Jazz History’. In The History and Future of Jazz in the Asia Pacific Region: Refereed Proceeding of the Inaugural Asia-Pacific Jazz Conference (September 12th–14th 2003), ed. Philip Hayward and Glen Hodges, 6–15. McKay: Central Queensland Conservatorium of Music.
——(2010) ‘Deportation Blues: Black Jazz and White Australia in the 1920s’. Journal for the International Society for the Study of Popular Music 1/1: 1–13, http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/84896/7/84896.pdf (accessed 7 June 2014).
Keil, Charles (1994) ‘Participatory Discrepancies and the Power of Music’. In Music Grooves: Essays and Dialogues, ed. Charles Keil and Steven Feld, 96–108. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Lhamon, William (2003) Jump Jim Crow: Lost Plays, Lyrics, and Street Prose of the First Atlantic Popular Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Lott, Eric (1993) Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. New York: Oxford University Press.
McKay, Kenneth (1895) The Yellow Wave: A Romance of the Asiatic Invasion of Australia. London: Richard Bentley & Son.
Nathan, Hans (1962) Dan Emmett and the Rise of Early Negro Minstrelsy. Norman, OK: Oklahoma University Press.
Pickering, Michael (2007) Blackface Minstrelsy in Britain. Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate.
Roberts, Henry (1912) Robert’s Manual of Fashionable Dancing. Sydney: Albert & Son.
Salinger, George (1914) How to Learn the Turkey Trot, Hesitation Waltz and Tango. Sydney: Albert & Son.
Sanjek, Russell (1988) American Popular Music and its Business: The First Four Hundred Years: From 1790–1909. New York: Oxford University Press.
Sheldon, Eric (1933) ‘Where Will it All End? Dance Music in Retrospect from Jazz to…?’. Australian Music Maker and Dance Band News, 1 December: 14–15, 25.
Toll, Robert (1974) Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press.
Ward, Russell (1958) The Australian Legend. Melbourne: Oxford University Press.
Waterhouse, Richard (1990) From Minstrel Show to Vaudeville: The Australian Popular Stage 1788–1914. Kensington, NSW: New South Wales University Press.
Whitcomb, Ian (1987) Irving Berlin and Ragtime America. London: Century Hutchinson.
Whiteoak, John (1993) ‘Australian Approaches to Improvisatory Musical Practice, 1836–1970: A Melbourne Perspective’. PhD thesis. Bundoora, Victoria: Department of Music, La Trobe University.
——(1994) ‘“Jazzing” and Australia’s First Jazz Band’. Popular Music 13/3: 279–95. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0261143000007200
——(1999) Playing Ad Lib: Improvisatory Music in Australia, 1836–1970. Sydney: Currency Press.
——(2014) ‘The Tango in Australia as Popular Entertainment and Music of “Place” before 1970s Latin-American Immigration’. In Communities, Places, Ecologies Proceedings of the 2013 IASPM-ANZ Conference (Dunedin), ed. Jadey O’Regan and Toby Wren, 39–55. Brisbane: IASPM Australia/New Zealand.
Winans, Robert (1984) ‘Early Minstrel Show Music, 1843–1852’. In Musical Theatre in America: Papers and Proceedings of the Conference on the Musical Theatre in America, ed. Glen Lonney, 71–97. Westport, CN: Greenwood Press.
Published
2015-06-16
Issue
Section
Articles
How to Cite
Whiteoak, J. (2015). Demons of discord down under: ‘Jump Jim Crow’ and ‘Australia’s first jazz band’. Jazz Research Journal, 8(1-2), 23-51. https://doi.org/10.1558/jazz.v8i1-2.26775
