Jazz Cultures (review)
2004; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 27; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/cal.2004.0055
ISSN1080-6512
Autores Tópico(s)Music History and Culture
ResumoIf you haven't seen A Great Day in Harlem, the film about the photo, you've seen the photo: Art Kane's casually iconic shot of fifty-seven jazz stars and cult legends, dressed in suits, shirtsleeves, or summer dresses, draped around the stoop of a Harlem brownstone in 1958. Jo Jones and Gene Krupa hover on the stairs, drummers gravitating to the riser even on their day off. Pianists Marian McPartland and Mary Lou Williams share a confidence and a cigarette at street level. Count Basie crouches at the curb, contemplating a pick-up orchestra of neighborhood kids. The most pointed annotation of the photo in jazz literature can be found in Albert Murray's Stomping the Blues (1976), the sui generis meditation that anticipated most of the respectable ideas in present-day jazz neoclassicism. Murray provided his readers with a numbered key identifying every musician in the image; as far as this key is concerned, Sonny Rollins, the hard-bop improviser, and Miff Mole, the Paul Whiteman veteran, occupy the same plane in the photo's guide to the jazz world. But Murray's commentary also divided the photo's population into three unequal classes, presumably on the basis of varying degrees of "familiarity with the special syntax of the blues convention." The black musicians in the photo are named to the all-star band proper; the black kids on the curb become, in traditional New Orleans terms, the "second line" of dancing fans and disciples; while the white musicians are consigned, one and all, to an obscure "third line," removed from bona fide jazz reception as well as from syntactically correct jazz production. In Murray's judgment, the photo illustrates a great day in Harlem, to be sure, but great thanks to only some of those pictured.
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