Rehearsing the 'Éthnik-Jazz Aesthetic'
Insights from Practices with Athenian Musicians
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/jwpm.38564Keywords:
jazz, performance, Greek music, power dynamicsAbstract
Academic analyses of music aesthetics often privilege the intellectual process of creating symbolic connections over the practical negotiation between performing musicians in a rehearsal setting. In contrast, this article examines the way in which aesthetic elements (styles of improvisation, instrumental riffs, basslines, rhythm grooves, and so on) emerge as a result of power struggles, personal rivalries, and competing stylistic sensibilities. Drawing on my research among ethnic-jazz music groups in Athens, who experimented with cross-overs between funk rhythms, Eastern Mediterranean modal melodies, and jazz harmonization, this article will reveal how musical hybridity can become a contested terrain during rehearsals, creating social dramas of different magnitudes. The first part of the article examines ethnographic vignettes from rehearsals with Athenian musicians, while the second part analyses written testimonies from musicians on their perception of rehearsals and their role in collective music-making.
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Berliner, Paul. 1994. Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1986. “The Forms of Capital”. In Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, edited by John G. Richardson, 46–58. New York: Greenwood Press.
Dawe, Kevin. 1996. “The Engendered Lyra: Music, Poetry and Manhood in Crete”. British Journal of Ethnomusicology 5: 93–112. https://doi.org/10.1080/09681229608567249
—1999. “Minotaurs or Musonauts? World Music and Cretan Music”. Popular Music 18/2: 209–225. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0261143000009053
Duranti, Alessandro. 2010. “Husserl, Intersubjectivity and Anthropology”. Theoretical Anthropology 10/1–2: 16–35.
Fabbri, Franco, and Ioannis Tsioulakis. 2016. “Italian canzone d’autore and Greek entechno tragoudi: A Comparative Overview”. In The Cambridge Companion to Singer-Songwriters, edited by K. Williams and J. A. Williams, 317–28. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/cco9781316569207.029
Faulkner, Robert and Howard Becker. 2009. Do You Know...? The Jazz Repertoire in Action. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. https://doi.org/10.1558/jazz.v6i2.228
Feld, Simon. 2000. “A Sweet Lullaby for World Music”. Public Culture 12/1: 145–71.
Frith, Simon. 1996. Performing Rites: Evaluating Popular Music. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0261143002222084
—2000. “The Discourse of World Music”. In Western Music and Its Others: Difference, Representation, and Appropriation in Music, edited by G. Born and D. Hesmondhalgh, 305–22. Berkeley: University of California Press. https://doi.org/10.3138/topia.6.105
Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Doubleday Anchor.
Guilbault, Jocelyn. 1997. “Interpreting World Music: A Challenge in Theory and Practice”. Popular Music 16/1: 31–44. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0261143000000684
Hall, Stuart. 1997. Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. London: SAGE.
Hamm, Charles. 1989. “Graceland Revisited”. Popular Music 8/3: 299–304.
Holt, Fabian. 2007. Genre in Popular Music. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Johnson, Bruce. 2017. “In the Body of the Audience”. In Musicians and their Audiences: New Approaches to a Timeless Division, edited by I. Tsioulakis and E. Hytonen-Ng, 15–33. London: Routledge.
Kallimopoulou, Eleni. 2009. Paradosiaka: Music, Meaning and Identity in Modern Greece. Farnham, UK and Burlington, VT: Ashgate. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315247397
Keil, Charles. 1987. “Participatory Discrepancies and the Power of Music”. Cultural Anthropology 2/3: 275–83.
Middleton, Richard. 1990. Studying Popular Music. Milton Keynes: Open University Press.
Monson, Ingrid. 1996. Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Rice, Timothy. 2003. “The Ethnomusicology of Music Learning and Teaching”. College Music Symposium 43: 65–85.
Schechner, Richard. 2002. Performance Studies: An Introduction. London: Routledge.
Silverman, Carol. 2007. “Trafficking the Exotic ‘Gypsy’ Music: Balkan Roma, Cosmopolitanism, and ‘World Music’ Festivals”. In Balkan Popular Culture and the Ottoman Ecumene: Music, Image, and Regional Political Discourse, edited by D. A. Buchanan, 335–64. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/27697979
Smith, Christopher. 1995. “A Sense of the Possible: Miles Davis and the Semiotics of Improvised Performance”. TDR: The Drama Review 39/3: 41–55. https://doi.org/10.2307/1146463
Stokes, Miles. 2004. “Music and the Global Order”. Annual Review of Anthropology 33: 47–72.
Stokes, W. Royal. 2002. Living the Jazz Life: Conversations with Forty Musicians about Their Careers in Jazz. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Tsioulakis, Ioannis. 2011. “Jazz in Athens: Frustrated Cosmopolitans in a Music Subculture”. Ethnomusicology Forum 20/2: 175–99. https://doi.org/10.1080/17411912.2011.592670
—2013. “The Quality of Mutuality: Jazz Musicians in the Athenian Popular Music Industry”. In Musical Performance and the Changing City, edited by C. Wergin and F. Holt, 200–25. New York: Routledge.
Turino, Thomas. 2008. Music as Social Life: The Politics of Participation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Turner, Victor. W. 1987. The Anthropology of Performance. New York: PAJ Publications.
Varelopoulos, Dimitris. 2018. “Producing Entechno: Amalgamation and Hybridization in a Controversial Musical Style”. In Made in Greece: Studies in Popular Music, edited by Dafni Tragaki, 83–100. New York: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315749075-9
Published
2019-06-18
Issue
Section
Articles
How to Cite
Tsioulakis, I. (2019). Rehearsing the ’Éthnik-Jazz Aesthetic’: Insights from Practices with Athenian Musicians. Journal of World Popular Music, 6(1), 85-102. https://doi.org/10.1558/jwpm.38564
