Post by dodgy on Feb 4, 2010 9:38:54 GMT 10
(sorry about repeat post, but I must not have been logged on)
I've been reading Black Roots, White Flowers, Andrew Bissett's history of jazz in Australia. It has some fascinating insights into how jazz was regarded:
In 1926 The Argus said -- in an editorial, no less -- that jazz represented: ``an imported vogue of sheer barbarism, jazz is a direct expression of the negroid spirit ... it affronts the ear at every turn. ... It is a matter for anything but pride that British people should have turned from their own delightful heritage of song and dance to a noisily concealed perversion of the musical instinct.''
Jazz was seen as divine retribution on the white race for the horrors of the slave trade. The Sydney Morning Herald in 1934 ran an article purporting to defend jazz:
"[The American Negro] has impregnated the whole American people, and through them the civilised world, with the barbaric culture of the jungle through the medium of jazz. ... Thus it has come to pass that these African exiles have wrought terrible and far-reaching revenge for the unspeakable enormities of the slave trade. And quite justly, this infection ... has spread to every nation which profited by that lucrative, loathsome traffic in human flesh and blood."
As Bissett states, "with friends like that jazz did not need enemies".
I've been reading Black Roots, White Flowers, Andrew Bissett's history of jazz in Australia. It has some fascinating insights into how jazz was regarded:
In 1926 The Argus said -- in an editorial, no less -- that jazz represented: ``an imported vogue of sheer barbarism, jazz is a direct expression of the negroid spirit ... it affronts the ear at every turn. ... It is a matter for anything but pride that British people should have turned from their own delightful heritage of song and dance to a noisily concealed perversion of the musical instinct.''
Jazz was seen as divine retribution on the white race for the horrors of the slave trade. The Sydney Morning Herald in 1934 ran an article purporting to defend jazz:
"[The American Negro] has impregnated the whole American people, and through them the civilised world, with the barbaric culture of the jungle through the medium of jazz. ... Thus it has come to pass that these African exiles have wrought terrible and far-reaching revenge for the unspeakable enormities of the slave trade. And quite justly, this infection ... has spread to every nation which profited by that lucrative, loathsome traffic in human flesh and blood."
As Bissett states, "with friends like that jazz did not need enemies".