Jazz in the Harlem moment : performing race and place at the cotton club
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- As a whites-only venue in the heart of Harlem that capitalized on exotic and stereotyped conceptions of black culture, predicated on the "slumming" economy of Harlem nightlife, the Cotton Club (active 1923-1936) has met its share of censure and reprobation. As home to some of the most influential jazz musicians, performers and songwriters of the 1920s and 30s, however—Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, Harold Arlen, Ethel Waters, Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, Adelaide Hall, to name a few—the significance of this singular institution cannot be denied. I argue that training a spatial lens on interwar Harlem jazz provides access to this complex musical world, bypassing valuations of the Cotton Club's "good and bad" cultural aspects or perceived musical authenticity and focusing instead on the everyday lives of the musicians and audiences who labored in and consumed the Harlem nightlife industry. Triangulating the performance of music, race and space over a decade of Harlem life, through a single institution, reveals not a monolithic Harlem scene but a multivalent "Harlem moment." The oral histories of Cotton Club performers, rare press materials, and the reporting of historic black newspapers together reveal another side of Harlem, beyond the spectacle of the Jazz Age. Close studies of the Cotton Club tenures of Ellington, Calloway and Arlen in the three core chapters of this dissertation examine the early careers of these seminal figures by treating their output not as "pure" musical expression but as a negotiation between competing pressures of art and commerce; modernism and primitivism; high and low culture; racial fact and fiction. In doing so, paradigmatic compositions such as "The Mooche" (1928), "Minnie the Moocher" (1931) and "Stormy Weather" (1933) take on new meaning and resonance, while a host of forgotten music assumes relevance.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2016 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Sloan, Nathaniel |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Music. |
| Primary advisor | Kronengold, Charles (Charles Stewart) |
| Thesis advisor | Kronengold, Charles (Charles Stewart) |
| Thesis advisor | Grey, Thomas S |
| Thesis advisor | Schultz, Anna |
| Advisor | Grey, Thomas S |
| Advisor | Schultz, Anna |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Nathaniel Sloan. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Music. |
| Thesis | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2016. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2016 by Nathaniel Sloan
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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