New work: "Jazz Migrations" on To the Best of Our Knowledge
fieldnoise.substack.com
The story of jazz is a story of migrations: the transatlantic slave trade, the Great Migration, the exile of South African musicians during Apartheid. Many of these migrations, of course, were forced—part of the colonialist and capitalist projects that relied on people as property or defined them as being less than human. People carried music with them as they went, and much of this music is African in origin. It includes jazz, but is by no means limited to it—in fact, much of what we think of as popular music in the United States no longer points back to European musical traditions, but African ones. As Ron Radano has argued, “
New work: "Jazz Migrations" on To the Best of Our Knowledge
New work: "Jazz Migrations" on To the Best of…
New work: "Jazz Migrations" on To the Best of Our Knowledge
The story of jazz is a story of migrations: the transatlantic slave trade, the Great Migration, the exile of South African musicians during Apartheid. Many of these migrations, of course, were forced—part of the colonialist and capitalist projects that relied on people as property or defined them as being less than human. People carried music with them as they went, and much of this music is African in origin. It includes jazz, but is by no means limited to it—in fact, much of what we think of as popular music in the United States no longer points back to European musical traditions, but African ones. As Ron Radano has argued, “