His Jelly Roll Soul: Revising and reclaiming the past, the minstrel mask, and the communal blast in Charles Mingus's Jazz Workshop
Item
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Title
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His Jelly Roll Soul: Revising and reclaiming the past, the minstrel mask, and the communal blast in Charles Mingus's Jazz Workshop
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:b095ae8827a0:10709
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identifier
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10690
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Creator
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Griffith, Jennifer,
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Contributor
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Jeffrey J. Taylor | Tania Leon
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Date
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2010
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Music | African American studies | Black history | Black Pentecostal church | Collective Improvisation | Jelly Roll Morton | Minstrelsy | New Orleans jazz | Opera
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Abstract
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Composer, bandleader, and bassist Charles Mingus was among the earliest modern jazz figures to dialogue with New Orleans-style jazz. His musical language included the idiom in a continuum of jazz, linking New Orleans collective improvisation to the avant-garde players of the 1960s. During the mid-century jazz wars between modernist and moldy fig, Mingus invoked the early era's heritage through Jelly Roll Morton in "My Jelly Roll Soul," (Atlantic, 1959), "Jelly Roll" (Columbia, 1959), and an arrangement of Morton's "Wolverine Blues" (Gennett, 1923). Mingus commented on contemporary attitudes toward his predecessors within an environment not well-disposed to them. Yet, even as the legacies of minstrelsy in the entertainment styles of Morton, Louis Armstrong, and Fats Waller shaped Mingus's performative identity, his unpublished writings and onstage manner reflect an alternative black male performativity. The testimony of Jazz Workshop members and Mingus's own statements reveal his philosophy and identity as leader and teacher, and emphasize a reverence for the collective spirit. In the intersection of compositional and improvisational techniques in mid-to late-1950s recordings ("Dizzy's Moods," "Jump Monk," and "Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting"), this emphasis shows a progression from short sections of group interplay reminiscent of early jazz to improvisation within extended forms that invoke the ecstatic communal events he heard as a youth in the Holiness church.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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D.M.A.
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Program
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Music
