Black Music Research Journal articles from March 22 2005

Black Music Research Journal archives from March 22 2005

Editor's note.
March 22, 2005... With this issue, a new period in the history of the Black Music Research Journal begins. Samuel A. Floyd Jr., founder of both BMRJ and the Center for Black Music Research, has retired as editor of BMRJ. Before doing so, he asked that I succeed...

Representing America, instructing Europe: the Hampton choir tours Europe.
March 22, 2005... This is a story about a choir trip. It might seem to offer little of historical significance: we have all been taught that real history is made up by the gradual accretion of data from which, atom by atom, year by year, meaningful patterns...

This house, this music: exploring the interdependent interpretive relationship between the contemporary black church and contemporary gospel music.
March 22, 2005... In his groundbreaking work Somebody's Calling My Name: Black Sacred Music and Social Change, the Rev. Dr. Wyatt Tee Walker (1979, 17) sets forth the thesis that "what black people are singing religiously will provide a clue to what is happening...

Bebop: a case in point. (The African Matrix in Jazz Harmonic Practices.(Critical essay)
March 22, 2005... The literature on bebop is vast, from contemporaneous accounts such as that by Leonard Feather (1949) to Dizzy Gillespie's memoirs (1979), from detailed musicological and stylistic studies (Owens 1974, 1995) to postmodernist constructions of...

The African matrix in jazz harmonic practices.
March 22, 2005... In 1998, a flyer was circulated announcing the appearance of the Garland Encyclopedia of World Music. On that leaflet, the publishers subjected readers to a test with five questions under this heading: "How Well Do You Know World Music?" The...

Reflexive ethnography: an ethnomusicologist's experience as a jazz musician in Zimbabwe.
March 22, 2005... As ethnomusicologists, we often bring our own history to the fieldwork experience, and we express ourselves through unions of the past and present. Although for the past twenty years I have worked extensively as a jazz saxophonist with...

Current research twelve years after the William Grant still centennial.(Biography)
March 22, 2005... In 1995, the world celebrated William Grant Still's centennial. The centennial of a composer's birth date or death date offers an opportunity for retrospection. Customarily, numerous concerts devoted to the honored composer are slated, bringing...

The disappearing dance: maxixe's imperial erasure.
March 22, 2005... "category crisis"... not the exception but rather the ground of culture itself." (Garber 1992, 16) In 1914, a revue at New York City's Winter Garden celebrated a fabulous dance, just then all the rage: The other night a dear,...

Questions of genre in black popular music.(Viewpoint essay)
March 22, 2005... In the movie The Jerk (1979), Steve Martin plays Navin Johnson, a white man raised by an African-American family in rural Mississippi. The opening credits have barely concluded when it becomes clear that the development of Navin's personality...