The southern syncopated orchestra

H Rye - Black Music Research Journal, 2009 - JSTOR
H Rye
Black Music Research Journal, 2009JSTOR
The Southern Syncopated Orchestra has exercised an enduring fascina tion for European
enthusiasts and researchers, and understandably so. It brought to Europe the first of the
New Orleans" jazz greats" to cross the Atlantic and provoked some of the earliest serious
public commentary on jazz outside the pages of the African-American press. Furthermore, it
was the ultimate jazz nursery. Many of the non-American members of the African diaspora
who were to play jazz in Europe during the first jazz age, and some of their white …
The Southern Syncopated Orchestra has exercised an enduring fascina tion for European enthusiasts and researchers, and understandably so. It brought to Europe the first of the New Orleans" jazz greats" to cross the Atlantic and provoked some of the earliest serious public commentary on jazz outside the pages of the African-American press. Furthermore, it was the ultimate jazz nursery. Many of the non-American members of the African diaspora who were to play jazz in Europe during the first jazz age, and some of their white contemporaries, learned their trade in its ever-changing ranks.
This very large musical aggregation, which was said to have a reper toire of about five hundred songs (" Kings Bench Division" 1920), played a mixture of jazz, ragtime, spirituals, minstrelsy, light classical music, and anything else which could be given a credible African-American cast in a climate which at first sight was one of almost total public ignorance. In reality, it is not quite that simple. It is not an accident that the original prime mover of the Southern Syncopated Orchestra (SSO), Will Marion Cook, had also been involved with the high profile London presentation of In Dahomey back in 1903 (Green 1983; Parsonage 2005, 81-104). This also was only one incident, though a very important one, in a long line of presentations of music with a distinctively African-American content extending back into the nineteenth century. The evolution from" minstrelsy" to" ragtime" to" jazz" was all traceable in the comings and goings of performers on the music-hall circuits throughout Europe (Pickering 1990; L? tz 1997a). Catherine Parsonage (2005) has recently written at length on the context and significance of the Southern Syncopated Orchestra, making brilliant use, with full acknowledgment, of many of the facts presented in the original version of this study. It would be quite difficult to improve on her inter pretation. The important point is to set aside notions of jazz development drawn from the dream picture developed by the young jazz enthusiasts of
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