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laurent cugny To Karl Koenig 14 / DID EUROPE ‘‘DISCOVER’’ JAZZ? Just asking. Am I missed? After fifteen years of expatriatism, I miss the AfroAmerican swing of New York streets. It had been central in my life. It may have triumphed throughout the world but it gets into French heads, not under their skin. It has not triumphed in France. mike zwerin, Swing under the Nazis: Jazz as a Metaphor for Freedom O ne of the most commonly accepted notions about the relationship between Europe and jazz is that the Europeans had recognized jazz as an important music right at the outset, while the Americans had dismissed it as a minor form of entertainment, not worth taking seriously, let alone studying. This idea derives partly from the belief that the issues of race and racism account for this disparity: with racism far less virulent in Europe, people were better able to recognize a black contribution. However, the preliminary results of the large-scale research project in which I am engaged, examining early commentaries on jazz and pre-jazz, encourage me to believe that this claim is largely unfounded, or at least needs to be substantially revised and reformulated. To discuss this question, we need first to distinguish between two phases in the reception of jazz: pre-jazz and jazz. I have chosen to set the dividing line somewhere around the end of the 1910s. The Pre-Jazz Reception Before considering what the initial response to jazz was—both within and outside the United States—we should ask whether there was any reception for pre-jazz music, that is, for Negro spirituals, ragtime, blues, and what was sometimes known as folklore. The answer is clearly that there was a significant reception. As early as 1856, articles were published addressing the music of slaves (Anonymous 1856a, b, and c). In 1863, the very year of the Emancipation Proclamation, the Continental Monthly published an article by H. G. Spaulding that included song transcriptions with words and music (Spaulding 1863). From this moment on, writings on this topic became more and more frequent. After the famous Slave Songs of the United States (Allen, Ware, and McKim 1867), which included some transcriptions of African American songs, other collections of Negro spirituals appeared (Fenner, Rathburn 1874; Barton 1898, 1899a, 1899b), extending as far as St. Helena Island Spirituals, Recorded and Transcribed at Penn Normal, Industrial and Agricultural School, St. Helena Island, Beaufort County, 302 l a u r e n t c u g n y South Carolina (Ballanta-Taylor 1925) and both The Book of American Negro Spirituals and The Second Book of Negro Spirituals (Johnson and Johnson 1925 and 1926). Next were pieces on ragtime, apparently starting with the Ragtime Instructor by Ben Harney in 1897 (Harney 1897). In 1899 two articles were published under the same simple title ‘‘Ragtime’’ (Anonymous 1899a, Crozat Converse 1899). We should note that in the same year an article appeared, the title of which showed a grasp of what would become one of the first descriptions of jazz: ‘‘Syncopated Music’’ (Anonymous 1899b). The frequency of articles on ragtime reached a peak around the middle of the 1910s. Writings about the blues emerged later, as the music itself was not well known at this time in the 1910s. One of the very first printed instances of the word used to designate the music apparently dates from 1915 and in fact happens to be a very early article on jazz. Both kinds of music are explicitly linked in the title: ‘‘Blues Is Jazz and Jazz Is Blues’’ (Seagrove 1915). Dorothy Scarborough would publish her ‘‘The ‘Blues’ as Folk-Songs’’ the following year (Scarborough 1916). In 1926, Abbe Niles provided an extended analysis of the blues in his introduction to the anthology by W. C. Handy (Handy 1926). What do these pre-jazz texts say? Here is an extract from one of the earlier examples, ‘‘Under the Palmetto,’’ published in the Continental Monthly in 1863 (Spaulding 1863): The words of the shout songs are a singular medley of things sacred and profane, and are the natural outgrowth of the imperfect and fragmentary knowledge of the Scriptures which the Negroes have picked up. The substitution for these crude productions of appropriate hymns, would remove from the shout that which is now the chief objection to it in intelligent minds, and would make of the dance, to which the Negroes are so much attached, a useful auxiliary in their religious culture. The tunes...

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