[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.Floyd Jr.advances our understanding with his analysis of how their music islinked to the West African roots of the Gede spirits, how it maintainsthe healing wisdom of the Congo Square beat and ring ceremonies, and how it encompasses the African diasporic rituals of jazz funerals.Floyd writes:In New Orleans, and in other cities, African Americans practiced ringceremonies, accompanied funeral processions with marching bands, andorganized secret societies.Some aspects of these activities merged to helpcreate the environment for and the character of the music that would becalled jazz.And in spite of the fact that the presence of marching bandsand secret societies among African Americans is usually a ributed bysome scholars.to European influences, they are as much African asthey are European, and the primary influences on black jazzmen weremost likely the African antecedents.As for the secret societies, I havealready noted their presence in Africa before the slave trade, and the exis-tence of African secret societies has long been known among some folk-lore scholars.54Floyd cites the black musician Bunk Johnson s description of theinteraction between music and ecstatic dance in the second line of anearly-twentieth-century jazz funeral as a rich example of the West Africaroots of black brass bands and the influence of the Congo Square drumbeat:On the way to the cemetery with an Odd Fellow or a Mason they[were] always buried with music you see we would always use slow, slownumbers such as Nearer My God to Thee, Flee as a Bird to the Moun-tains, Come Thee Disconsolate. We would use almost any 4, played4very slow; they walked very slow behind the body.After we would get to the cemetery, and after that particular personwere put away, the band would come to the front, out of the graveyard.And then we d march away from the cemetery by the snare drum onlyuntil we got about a block or two blocks from the cemetery.Then we d goright into ragtime.We would play Didn t He Ramble, or we d take all of those spiri- 108 · Ja z z R e l i g i o n, t h e S e c o n d L i n e , a n d B l a c k N e w O r l e a n stual hymns and turned them into ragtime 2 movements, you know, step4lively everybody. When the Saints Go Marching In, . Ain t GonnaStudy War No More, and several others we would have and we d playthem just for that effect.We would have a second line there that was the most equivalent toKing Rex parade Mardi Gras Carnival parade.The police were unable tokeep the second line back all in the street, all on the sidewalks, in frontof the band, and behind the lodge, in front of the lodge.We d have someimmense crowds following.55Finally, Floyd s commentary on the fragments of African historicalmemory in Johnson s aforementioned funeral narrative traces the ori-gins of second lines and black brass band music in contemporary NewOrleanian jazz funerals to ring ceremonies in West Africa and AfricanAmerican slave communities and line dances to the Congo Squarebeat:Cultural and motor memories of the mass, circle, and line dances ofAfrican societies and of slave culture were operative.The second-line.was not a new invention.Akan children watch and imitate their el-ders in ring ceremonies, moving along the fringes of the ring and behindit, .as do the children, youth, and adults in the second line of New Or-leans jazz funerals.This mythic call to Dance, Drum, and Song in the form of paradesgoes back to the African processions.with trumpets and drums andback to the burial rites of Africans and African-American slaves.Fromthese ceremonies, because of the necessity of the participants to move to aremote destination, the ring straightened to become the second-line BunkJohnson described in his account; and the change from the slow dirge tothe short spiritual on the return remarkably mimics the walk-to-shout,slow to quick progression of the ring shout.There can be no mistakingthe fact that the beginnings of jazz in the ring as partial as it may havebeen was a direct result of the transference of the structure and char-acter of the shout to funeral parades of black bands and community par-ticipants.What I am saying is that the impetus for the development of thismusic was ritual, the ring ritual of transplanted Africans extended andelaborated through spirituals and folk rags.They converged in the ringthese spirituals and this ragtime and awaited the blues, which joinedthem directly.In these early jazz funerals were found the trope of the ring,including the heterogenous sound ideal, which was creatively extendedin the form of two rhythmic groups: the front line of cornet, clarinet, andtrombone and a rhythm section of drums and tuba
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]