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‘All Rock and Rhythm and Jazz’: Rock ‘n’ Roll Origin Stories and Race in Australia

2007; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 21; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/10304310701460730

1469-3666

Jon Stratton,

Diverse Musicological Studies

All Rock and Rhythm and Jazz': Rock'n'Roll Origin Stories and Race in Australia They had a high-fi phono Boy, did they let it blast 700 little records All rock and rhythm and jazz (Chuck Berry 'C'est La Vie (You Never Can Tell)' (1964)) Rock'n'Roll StoriesWhere did rock'n'roll come from?The Australian narrative was, and to some extent still is, that rock'n'roll was the debased progeny of jazz, as was rhythm and blues to the extent that Australians made a generic distinction.This answer suggests two further questions.First, how do Australians think about jazz?Second, what were the conditions that enabled jazz to occupy such a central position in Australian popular music that the next major, popular music form could be narrativised as having a heritage in jazz?These questions need to be set into a more general, overarching question: how did Australia's attitudes towards race affect people's understandings of jazz and of rock'n'roll?The difficulty in writing about the discursive connections between what is constructed as 'jazz' in and as 'rock'n'roll' in Australia is that here, as elsewhere, and most importantly in the United States, the critical discourses relating to jazz and rock'n'roll are divergent in significant ways.As Matt Brennan writes: 'In the first half of the twentieth century, conservative critics notoriously dismissed jazz on the grounds that it was primitive, vulgar and achieved popularity by appealing to the lowest common denominator of public taste.'Behind the claims was a racial argument: white critics attacking an African-American musical form and, by implication, African-Americans.However, around the 1940s, and especially with the advent of solo improvisation and bebop, those same critics 'reconceptualised [jazz] as a serious art music.' Jazz was repositioned as modern music and was understood as a part of the modernist avant-garde.