Culture, concept, aesthetics: the phenomenon of the African musical universe in Western musical culture.

African music has been a resilient but partially unacknowledged force in Western popular music for at least four hundred years. Each century, each decade throws up a new African or African-derived musical influence which perpetuates itself in Western popular music and becomes integrated into the cultural musical style or pattern of Western culture to such an extent that its originators are ignored, or relegated to a secondary, "primitive" role and its imitators are considered the originators. This essay attempts to cast some light on the significance, intelligibility, and symbolism of African music in order to help reduce the possibility of misinterpretation, ethnocentrism, and disfiguration.(1)

The Clash of Modes of Production and Cultures

The historical mode of production in Europe has been based upon slavery; that is, the mechanism by which wealth was accrued depended on the existence of classes. This foundation goes back to the Greek city states, where free citizens subjugated the masses, who were slaves. In Africa, slavery, as we understand its application from Greece, was non-existent: A "slave" could become a leading and influential citizen in the society, and no African legislation enforced slavery. In Greece, however, slavery was a legal condition, and any attempt to alter this mode by Solon in the sixth century B.C., for example led to vilification and attack (Aristotle 43). In Rome, this mode of production persisted until slaves numbered 2 to 3 million (Watson 2), or 35 to 40 per cent of the population. In Africa, a system of gift exchange among the king, the state, and the general population did not lead to slavery until the sixteenth century, when the arrival of the European's colonization policies led to total confiscation of the land and enforced labor to derive material benefits from the land.

The basis of all wealth is land. In Europe land was private property, while in Africa, up to this century, land was entrusted to the monarchy for use by the majority. No settler could be refused the use of land. Referring to the right of land allotment of an African prince, Diop says:

This singular personage . . ., still the master of the soil, in the ritual sense of that term[,] he is the one who allots land to newcomers. . . . He has received the land in trust; he never sells it - he would not dare to do so for religious reasons. So that private property never became a reality until the notorious European laws during the period of colonization in this century. (149-50)(2)

Moreover, the presence of both class and ethnic identity throughout European ancient, medieval, and contemporary times is an expression of a particular rabid form of racism which the system of Caucasian economic modes produced. In sum, ethnocentrism and racism were endemic in the Indo-European cradle before the existence of African slavery.

The fundamental differences between African and Caucasian modes of production reemerge when we examine the music of the two cultures. In the African context, music making was an aesthetic attempt to express the sounds in nature. These sounds - from the lion, the elephant, the bird, the wind, the river, thunder, etc. - became the principle for artistic formulation and expression. Francis Bebey states that African musicians "do not attempt to combine sounds pleasing to the ear. Their aim is simply to express life in all its aspects through the medium of sound" (3).

Jazz musicians also use this model. Compare the "singing" of an African dove (which I witnessed in Ibadan, Nigeria) in which the dove's riff is repeated endlessly; the jazz musician, as well as other African musicians globally, organize music from the fundamental concept of chordal, melodic, or rhythmic repetition. Thus, a musically illiterate Caucasian such as James Phillippo, the 18th-century cleric and landowner, could refer to African musical practices in Jamaica as "rude music," "hideous yells, discordant sounds," etc. (242-43).

This base ignorance has been perpetuated in the 20th century by no less respectable a music journal than The Melody Maker. In 1926, a John B. Southar painting, The Breakdown - of a jazz musician performing before a naked Caucasian woman, and above the shattered body of the Roman goddess Minerva - elicited an hysterical response toward the painting's creator because of the association of jazz with the African musician. The editor, who wrote the article, clearly perceived Southar's work as a threat to the moral fabric of the young, an affront to the Caucasian female, and a condemnation of jazz musicians. The article begins rationally by praising the painter for his realism and artistic ability, making laudatory remarks about the hanging committee of the Royal Academy (where it was exhibited), and protesting that, although jazz musicians are not thin-skinned, the public would inevitably draw inferences from the picture that jazz musicians did not deserve. The writer is obviously warming up to something which becomes ominously apparent beginning in the fourth paragraph:

It is not our intention to labour the point, and so to give this picture a publicity disproportionate to its value, but we state emphatically that we protest against, and repudiate the juxtaposition of an undraped white girl with a black man. Such a study is straining beyond breaking point the normal clean interferences of allegory. We demand also that the habit of associating our music with the primitive and barbarous negro derivation shall cease forthwith, in justice to the obvious fact that we have outgrown such comparison.

. . . We see Minerva lying shattered and neglected in the background. It is said that, for the purpose of this picture, she presented the "old order of things" which the iconoclasm of jazz has hewn down. Minerva, however, was the Roman goddess of wisdom, and the neglect of wisdom . . . is not the indiscretion of our modern dance-loving girlhood . . . but the un-wisdom of the artist himself who so thoughtlessly stressed and unconsciously perpetuated a phase of human association in its repugnant and least representative form.

"Breakdown" is not only a picture entirely nude of respect to the chastity and morality of the greater part of the younger generation, but in the degradation it implies to modern white women there is a perversive danger to the community, and the best thing that can be done is to have it burnt. (Melody 1; emphasis added)

The irrational nature of the article is clearly directed toward the baser nature of a white readership. In addition, however, to the racial superiority that the writer assumes, we also see his assumption of Christian morality: that the "white" woman is of innate moral quality and could only be debased by the association with a repugnant African jazz musician. The pioneering role of the jazz musician becomes subsidiary to the cultural prestige the music has gained as a result of Caucasian involvement: What the African invented, the Caucasian "refined."

We can make further observations about this notion of the "low-class" cultural origins of jazz: Jazz was in fact the creation of the most socially stigmatized African group in the United States. The late ragtime pianist Eubie Blake, born in 1883, said of his mother that she "was very religious and hated ragtime like all the high-class Negroes. . . . I played it in the houses of ill-repute when I was fifteen" (7). Yet, by the turn of the century, ragtime was considered to have the "unselfconscious charm and good manners of late-Victorianism" (Gammond 11). By then it had been appropriated, sanitized, and finally regurgitated to the world in an acceptable Caucasian style. This transformation parallels Paul Whiteman's demelanized jazz - popularized in the U.S. and Britain in the 1920s - which he claimed represented a refinement from "the crude jazz of the past" (Jones 100).

Consonant with this perception, the editor of The Melody Maker proceeds to define jazz as "our music." He constructs distinctions between the appropriators and the originators, who are still in the primitive and repugnant phase of, supposedly, anthropithecus erectus, an argument which draws upon all the prejudices and symptoms of the late Victorian world, where representations of the "primitive" society were rampant. Thus the editor espouses an insidious precept of racism: Creativity can only have meaning and significance when expressed by Caucasians. He both defends the creativity of the Caucasian jazz musician and the morality of chaste youth. Southar, obviously a politically conscious painter, successfully organized the symbolism of European culture to express the colonial arrangement of British society, but the Royal Academy, that bastion of good taste and mainstream tinkerers, faced with widespread protest (supported by the Musicians Union), removed the offending picture from public view.

Understanding ethnocentrism and racism as motivational forces in Euro-American society must also be combined with an interpretation of culture, since cultural conditioning affects sensory perception. We know, for example, that Theodor Adorno has viewed jazz not as a source of cultural influence and regeneration, but as "shabby," "worn out," and "infantile" (25). This perception of African music cannot be blamed on any historical period or any "scarcity" of an African population. It is an innate and automatic reflex built into Euro-American society, which delineates the binary features of class and race.

Racist features are entirely absent in the work of a scholar such as Bruno Nettl, who uses the comparative historical method at all times. Nettl understands that

the study of music requires us to take a certain view of the total repertory from which it comes. A tune such as "Lord Randall" is really all of its variants, past and present, known and unknown, for the total identity of a piece is also its history. In the case of music in oral tradition, one is usually limited to extrapolating history from recent manifestations, and only in the rarest instances have brave souls tried to reconstruct parent versions from a comparison of the variants recently extant. (110)

This simply means that generalizations about music cannot be made without serious and methodical scrutiny of its progenitive culture. Perceptions of different musical codes are usually expressed as unconscious or conscious comparisons using the vocabulary of the music of our own culture. This limited lexicon becomes particularly distorted in societies - like those in most of the Caucasian Western world - where colonialism has denied or destroyed the Other's culture.

This brings us back to the invented genealogies of historical and contemporary European societies which identify Greco-Roman civilization as the foundation stone of European culture.(3) As Pierre Bourdieu points out, the notion of cultural influence and absorption is usually "integrated into the pantheon of the Greek or Roman as a particularly successful achievement of 'human nature' in its universality" (590). Bourdieu confirms that this process of appropriation appears to be the "sole right of the middle class" and that it emerges as "the relic of an aristocratic past" (612). In today's world, however, appropriation is not confined to the middle class, and continues to assert itself in all segments of British popular life, especially where the mainstream still dominates and thus sets the tone for the behavior and conformity (in spite of so-called radical appearances) of those contributing to the imagined pantheon of innovation.

Consider, for example, the obvious cultural difference in dress between Africans and Euro-Americans. Before the late 1960s, a road sweeper in England wore a tie to clean the streets. In the Caribbean, people who did this job were dressed as everyday people. If we did not know that the Englishman was a road sweeper, we would logically assume that he was an office worker. Clothes, therefore, are the simplest indicator of cultural style. Africans, no matter where they are born, have a penchant for brightly colored clothes, for bright ornamentation. Gold, for example, can be worn on all fingers; teeth (in the Caribbean and the Americas) can be fully gold-capped. In Europe, not only is this fashion viewed as ostentatious but as gaudy and exhibitive. This vision helps maintain the rabid class system; modes of dress help define our class position.

Language can be interpreted in a similar way. In the Caribbean, greetings of long lost friends can commence with curses - "Yuh bitch! Where yuh was all this time!" Sometimes people actually swear at each other, talking in loud voices, then fall into each other's arms! The exuberance of these codes can produce a corresponding response of horror in the Euro-American. He/she may even go so far as to call the police! In Britain today, Africans' parties - particularly among young people - can be loud and can run from midnight until the following evening. Then British neighbors often inform the police.

Emphasis on the bass in African music can be contrasted with pop musical styles before the advent of reggae, in which treble was far more significant. In rock or heavy metal, mixed down music focuses on "top" or treble sounds. Even in European classical music, violins - the treble - dominate. In African-derived music the bass is given the heaviest emphasis to express rhythm and emotionality rather than cerebrality.

Consider dance. Ballet is based upon an unnatural dance posture - point - and rigorous exercises which require artificial physical development, and constant diet to maintain slimness and small breasts.(4) At ballet - and European classical music - performances, the audience is not expected to participate in the experience, but to applaud politely at certain high points, or preferably at the end of the performance. The posture and training of the African dancer contradicts all European expectations. Among the Akan, for example, there is the belief that good dancers must not hold themselves "as erect as the stalk of a plantain." In Africa, the Caribbean, and the Americas, audience participation is an integral part of the performance: "The presence and participation of an audience influence the animation of a performance, the spontaneous selection of music, the range and textual improvisation, and other details; and this stimulus to creative activity is welcomed, and even sought, by the performers" (Nketia, Music 33).

The opposite is true in European classical music: The conductor selects the range of the repertoire and controls the playing of the performer and the flow of the music with a baton. To an African such an unnatural performance of music would be inconceivable.

How the two cultures train their musicians also reveals intrinsic differences. In Africa, music is learned through a physical relationship between teacher and pupil, and through oral presentation. In Europe (at least over the last 200 years), the musician is taught from notation and printed texts. Different musical canons, in teaching and in performance, yield very different art forms:

The child who will grow up to become a player on the talking drum is helped by the master drummer who taps the rhythms on his shoulder blade for him to get the sensation of the motor-feeling involved. When he has to learn musical rhythms, he is taught appropriate sentences or nonsense syllables which convey the same sort of rhythm. (Nketia, "Musician" 89)

Charlie Mingus, the late jazz composer, said that he played the instrumental parts of his compositions to the different musicians:

I decided to memorize the compositions and then phrase them on the piano part by part to the musicians. I wanted them to learn the music so it would be in their ears, rather than on paper, so they'd play the compositional parts with as much spontaneity and soul as if they'd play a solo. (Mingus)

At a rehearsal in New York, bassist David Williams responded to the band leader's criticism that he was playing out of rhythm: "I was looking at your feet!" He was accessing the pace of the composition by the rhythm tapped out by the leader's feet. Different cultures follow different musical and aesthetic canons:

Since antiquity, Yoruba have adorned their cheeks with lines. They associate line with civilization. "This country has become civilized" literally means in Yoruba "This earth has lines upon its face." Civilization in Yoruba is ilaju - face with lined marks. (Robert F. Thompson 35; emphasis added).

In the Euro-American context, civilization has a plethora of associations embodying forms of dress, language, literacy, buildings, financial status, concepts of mythology and history, etc.(5) These contrasting examples of aesthetic considerations in the African and Euro-American world view exemplify the dilemma of the music critic or historian in his or her response to a seemingly disorganized and arbitrary musical culture.

I have tried to outline the contrasting aesthetic paradigms or canons that animate the inner organism of musical cultures without which a proper appreciation of musical style or form would inevitably be lost. A cursory glance at the history of popular music reveals the mask of appropriation which has been paraded as the genuine article - or, in the name of the African-American inventor, the real McCoy.

The African Origin of Western Popular Music

The process of naming is a fundamental aspect of African philosophy and religion. The Dogon's concept of Nommo, the word, is fundamental to an understanding of the development of the universe. Similarly, naming in Kemit (ancient Egypt) initiated the advent of the present world. Atum-Ra says, "I the evolver of the evolutions evolved myself . . . which came forth from my mouth" (Budge xcix). This concept runs through the spectrum of Black African thought.

Symbolism is widely understood to have particular meaning within the context of African art, and in relation to music it expresses itself in the processes and procedures which structurally define African music. Mveng writes:

Symbolism has as its mission the transformation of the world into a language. . . . Rhythmical art subordinates this transformation to rational laws and recreates the world according to the will of Negro-African genius. (15; emphasis added)

Kwabena Nketia, in defining the broad areas of continuity of the structural paradigm of African music in the Americas and the Caribbean, says

. . . it appears that the primary value of what exists in Africa is that it provides a basis for the development of tradition, for exploring new directions without loss of musical identity. . . . That is why African roots must be viewed in terms of creative processes which allow for continuity and change. ("African" 17; emphasis added)

We are beginning to understand the context within which New World African music develops: By naming what this music is we understand its special language of symbolism, and communication; and we can appreciate its transformation of traditions, as well as new encounters, and the resulting processes which develop from this. That is to say, in recreating a language of communication, the music as we now understand it renews itself from its traditions incubated in Africa.

The final phase of my argument is to demonstrate that, in spite of new encounters and the obvious influences which result from them, maintaining an African identifying base has prevented African New World music from becoming, as is the norm, part of the cultural melting pot. By briefly surveying the historical implantation of African music - in spite of new instrumentation, which is merely a technical development of tradition - within Euro-American music, we can derive some idea of its generative and renewing function in contact with different cultures.

(a) Military Music

H. G. Farmer shows that by 1753 the instruments which characterize military bands in Britain and the rest of Western Europe were composed of wind instruments. This, he argues, was based on the influence of Germany, on a genre he refers to as "the old Harmonie Musik," which consisted of "two oboes, two clarinets, two horns and two bassoons, which was not unlike the arrangement of the Royal Artillery Band at its formation in 1762" (History 51-52). Farmer attributes the absence of percussion instrument to the attitude of the German band masters and officers "who would consider drumming as quite alien to their conception of the time[-]honored Harmonie Musik" (52). Beyond the prejudice against percussion instruments, Farmer cites the actual military code which prohibited specific forms of instrumentation: "The use of Drums, or Trumpets [is] . . . to be avoided as much as possible" (53). The next prohibition (1788) shows that some form of percussion was already in use which varied "the times of march"; these instruments "create[d] noise, prevent[ed] that equal step which habit alone can give the troops, and tend[ed] to destroy the very end they mean[t] to promote" (53).

These prohibitions were soon to change with the introduction of Janitscharen Musik, which originated in Turkey and became popular in Eastern - and then in Western - Europe: Russia, Poland, Prussia (Germany), then Britain. According to Farmer, this popularity came via stage musicals which featured lively Turkish musicians and dancers. The instruments used were bass drum, kettledrum, cymbals, triangle - from which developed a number of small bells whose appellation was "jingling Johnnie," the predecessor of the glockenspiel. "Originally, genuine Turkish performers were engaged to play these instruments, but as these died or were discharged, negroes took their place" (Farmer, History 53).

The introduction of African musicianship completely changed the status of military music in Britain:

The effect on the general public was astounding. For the handful of onlookers which had hitherto been attracted by the marching army band, crowds now thronged to see the latest craze . . . the forbiddance of the "Band," as the Horse Guards had laid it down, became a dead letter. . . . No other music necessitates so solid, determinate and striking a beat. It is almost impossible to get out of step. (Farmer, History 102; emphasis added, except for last sentence)

Farmer goes on to show that tempo was strictly enforced in the army: Drum-majors were ordered to conform the number of steps taken by the band members exactly to the percussionist. "With such aids we may be sure that tempi were regulated to perfection in the Royal Artillery by the 'Blacks'" (102).

The introduction of percussion instruments into the British military definitively altered its music. Although introduced by Turkish musicians, African musicians added a new style of playing, from the African model, which won true popularity and appreciation. The extent of this popularity, as Farmer shows, can be measured by the fantastic number of percussionists rival bands used - sometimes one-third - to the unbalance of the music.

(b) Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark

This innovation was to have had some effect upon British and European music in general, and we can point specifically, as Farmer shows, to the incorporation of new rhythmic ideas into European classical music:

It is true that the cymbals and bass dram had been used once or twice earlier, but it was not until Mozart in Seraglio (1781) and Haydn in the Military Symphony (1794) employed these implements for the "colorization of rhythm," as Berlioz said, that these alien instruments came to stay. Today they take their place quite naturally in orchestral scores. . . . (Military 37)

The range of African-derived influences in European classical music is wide, and only passing mention can be made to them. Mozart and Haydn responded to the musical demands of their times by incorporating new rhythmic concepts in their music; Debussy, in his Golliwogg Cakewalk (1905), "bounces along in typical ragtime song with a syncopated melody in the right hand and 'um-pah' accompaniment on the left" (Southern 329). In addition,

Stravinsky wrote Piano Rag-Music (1920), Ragtime for eleven instruments (1918), and included a ragtime movement in the popular L'Histoire du soldat (The Soldier's Tale, 1918). The French composer Erik Satie (1866-1925) wrote a ballet, Parade (1917), in which the American Girl's Dance is in ragtime style. . . . All of this music reflects the captivating but rather vapid style of the ragtime song rather than the essence of serious rag music. (Southern 329)

A note needs to be added to this last from the master himself, Stravinsky:

I felt so weak after my long bout with influenza that I found it impossible at the moment to undertake anything at all fatiguing, and therefore occupied myself with work that I imagined would not overtax my strength. . . . As the work progressed, I saw that my task was by no means so simple as I had imagined, and it took me six months to complete it (78-79; emphasis added)

The work in question? Ragtime.

We need, however, to state that genuine innovation has always been mediated by perverse (commercial, financial) considerations: The oscillating definition of commercial has accumulated a meaning which veers from the traditional. Commercial music, during the 18th century, merely meant popular; i.e., the composer lived professionally off the earnings provided by popular patronage of this new music. However, with the incipient center-staging of African-derived music, and the concomitant revival of traditions, new popular musics were less accepted as "serious" for a variety of reasons. Adherence to the status quo, and the identification in later times of the middle class with classical music, repressed their responses to Africans and their musical creativity. Thus, serious music = good = classical; and popular music = vulgar = jazz or other African-derived music.(6)

(c) The Plantation/Minstrelsy Model

Although African-derived songs are popularly believed to have emerged from the United States, they were notated, published, and performed in England as early as the mid-18th century. Mungo Park "took" one song down in Africa (the inaccuracy of notation was notorious amongst Europeans) and sent it to the Duchess of Devonshire, who promptly conformed it to the popular rhyme, and tampered with its natural phrasing. In addition, she sent the song The Negro's Humanity or A Negro Song to a composer friend, Giacomo Ferrari, who continued the "doctoring." It became so famous that several other composers created their own versions of it (Southern 89). This trend created stereotyped interpretations of African life on the plantation. Figures such as Zip Coon, the city slicker, and Jim Crow, the field hand, provided commercial entertainment for Americans and prepared their audience for blacking up: the imitation of African song, dance, and mannerisms. These satirical and caustic images pandered to the racist proclivities of the Euro-American and satisfied a tremendous taste for this type of performance. Many Euro-American careers were made this way.

"For more than four decades," writes Southern, "Ethiopian minstrelsy was the most popular form of theatrical entertainment in the United States and, to the rest of the world, America's unique contribution to the stage" (91; emphasis added). The source of these songs, of course, continued to be African. Authentic African songs or melodies were recast in the mold of Euro-American cultural style, a style seriously modified by its African contact. Thus, the reflection of African music was a dilution of it. Eventually the African himself became a performer of his own imprisoned image, but with the possibility of displaying an authentic, uniquely thrilling cultural style. One of the most famous of these African American performers was William Henry Lane, popularly known as Master Juba, who has been canonized in African American folklore. According to Southern, novelist Charles Dickens, on seeing him perform, remarked that he was "the greatest dancer known" (95). These performers - both Euro- and African American - inevitably implanted and sustained an image of the African which promoted the popular stereotype: happy-go-lucky, indolent, criminally inclined, etc. However, the style and form of the music transcended its racial origin; the songs' popularity is reflected in the national folk repertoire of the United States.

(d) The Jazz Craze & Development in Britain

George Melly, that popular fixture in British popular culture, openly stated on a television program that "black" music and culture were a magnet for people of his generation, that he felt he could sing, speak, and affect the mannerisms of the African American singer. In an instructive series of articles during the 1970s, Harry Francis, former musician and journalist, wrote:

In Britain we had little knowledge of jazz history. True, some of us had heard of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band and others at work during the few years following the first world war, but we had then tended to think of it as a new development in popular music. (One 4; emphasis added)(7)

Francis was correct to think of jazz as a trend in popular music. What is significant about the growth of jazz in Britain, however, is the fact that, once the original, African American, sources had been located and listened to, only the likes of Paul Whiteman could hold a middle-of-the-road interest. The quality and value of the original innovators as cultural indicators did not necessarily make them marketable.

The African creator, who on the one hand was acknowledged as the source of invention and innovation, was confined to a limited circuit and ambiance, without the concomitant financial rewards reaped by his lesser copyists. For example, compare the very early success of Spike Hughes who, enjoying the exposure of the Caucasian imitator, "soon switched his allegiance to the work of Ellington and Fletcher Henderson" (Francis, Six 8). Francis describes Hughes's role in the development of British jazz as a "milestone," and says that

we were not therefore surprised when, in the Spring of 1933, Hughes went to New York to organize three recording sessions with a Negro orchestra, that there were to be found among its personnel many of those who had worked with Henderson. (Six 8; emphasis added)

Current Euro-American musical styles capture the spirit and feeling of the African American model but express it in the vocal style of the Euro-American: Paul Simon with reggae, samba, and South African musical styles; David Bowie, who set a trend in the middle 1970s by recording with the Philly sound of Gamble and Huff; Peter Gabriel and his African flirtation; Vanilla Ice with his African American rap musicians and dancers; Sting in his former role as lead singer of the Police, a reggae act, and his later excursions with jazz players; Lisa Stansfield, whose voice is indistinguishable from the African American performer's; and George Michael, the Greco-British sex model of house music. These are only a few modern examples of the innovator-imitator model whose history in music stretches back to the mid-18th century.

The other important feature that we ought to note in the development of British jazz is the role of the Caucasian musician as sideman in the book of the African American musical stars. Francis records one such incident when Louis Armstrong toured Britain in 1932:

. . . he was, in fact, persuaded by his advisors (ill-advisors would perhaps be a better description) to replace the West Indians by a band of British white stars. . . . The result was disastrous. . . . (Eight)

On his return in 1933, with the assistance of multi-instrumentalist Leslie Thompson, Armstrong formed a band comprised mainly of African Caribbeans. Clarinettist Rudolph Dunbar told me that he was the person who had arranged Armstrong's band. Regardless of the arranger, the band, was "excellent" (Francis, Eight).

It is obvious that African Caribbean musicians played a seminal, but hardly acknowledged, role in British jazz development. Consider the following scenario: The Southern Syncopated Orchestra, led by Marion Cook, famous African American musician/composer, toured Britain in 1919 and played before King George V at Buckingham Palace. When some thirty-six members of the band died in a boat which sank on the way to Dublin, the orchestra reorganized in 1921 and included several African Caribbeans, among whom were Cyril and George "Happy" Blake and the distinguished organist Wendell Bruce-James. The British bandleader Ted Heath, who also played with the band, wrote of "the assistance given by members of the group to the British contingent on aspects of jazz playing" (Francis, Eight 309).

In 1928 Bruce-James, who was by no means a jazzer - nor was the band acknowledged to be, strictly speaking (it did perform several jazz numbers) - wrote a series of articles for The Melody Maker on the Kinema organ. He was followed in 1931 by Rudolph Dunbar, who wrote a similar series for The Melody Maker on how to play the clarinet. Dunbar subsequently printed a course book on the clarinet and opened a school for clarinet playing in the mid-1930s. Students came from as far away as northern Europe and Germany; and the book went through thirteen impressions until as late as 1961. Dunbar was followed in 1933 by Reginald Foresythe, bandleader, composer, and arranger, who authored a series on the piano.

The African musicians who pushed the threshold of musicianship in Britain to a higher level, both theoretically and practically, cannot be done justice in this essay; I can only point to some of the highlights and the personalities.(8)

Ken "Snakehips" Johnson was regarded as a pioneer in British jazz history; the fact that he was not a musician but a dancer and bandleader tells us something of his charismatic personality. A band organized and led by saxophonist Leslie Thompson won a contract for a night club through Johnson. Thompson, who was the first to front an African jazz band in Britain, auditioned and was employed. It seems that the band, being successful, had its contract renewed, but by Johnson. Two of Thompson's band members subsequently left and joined up with Johnson (Thompson and Green 92-93). Johnson's name became synonymous with jazz - his brilliant dancing and showmanship established the band's reputation as one of the best in Britain. However, Johnson died tragically in 1941 on the stage of the Cafe de Paris in London. A eulogy in The Melody Maker announced "THE KING IS DEAD - LONG LIVE THE KING!" (Cassell-Gerard 5).

African musicians also showed up significantly in popularity polls. In 1944 Carl Barriteau and his band, Joe Deniz, Leslie "Jiver" Hutchinson, and Yorke de Souza appeared in The Melody Maker popularity polls. In 1949 Ray Ellington (no relation to the Duke) appeared, as did bassist Coolridge Goode. In 1960 Joe Harriott appeared ahead of Johnny Dankworth as the best alto-saxophonist. And in 1962 Cleo Laine, Shirley Bassey, Elaine Delmar, Joe Harriott, Harold McNair, Shake Keene, and Frankie Holder were recognized.

African musicians - from the United States, the Caribbean, Europe, and Africa - have made important contributions to the development of popular music in Britain. In military music, the records clearly demonstrate the specific areas affected by African innovation. In jazz, the impact of African American recorded music on the consciousness of the Caucasian musician is significant. Caucasian musicians employed African Americans, enhancing their work and reputation at home. New African Caribbean musicians as they entered Britain injected a new standard of musicality into British dance music (jazz). Racism, which created a tremendous management hazard for African musicians in England, confined prestigious artists to the club circuit in London, and limited tours in the provinces. Such bands as Jiver Hutchinson's and Reginald Foresythe's were reported to have broken up as a result of racism.

In the 1960s musicians like John Myall, John Mc Laughlin, and Georgie Fame received their inspiration not only from African popular music, but from African musicians who, because of the racist orientation of the popular press and the music industry itself, never made it to "stardom." Reggae, soul, funk, rap, house, and West African music have definitively shaped the contours and path of Western popular music. Pop artists themselves - from Mick Jagger and John Lennon to the latest crop - acknowledge that they were shaped and defined by African popular music.

The significance of these trends cannot be lost upon us, nor can the changing fortunes of the African musician/performer in the Western world be put down to the modification of racism. We must clearly understand these trends from the formidable role that African-owned record companies (Trojan in London, Gamble & Huff, Stax, and Motown in America, before their sell-out or conspiratorial collapse) played in the fortunes of the multi-nationals - CBS, Warner Bros., Polygram, etc. The presence, therefore, of the African in the recording industry has added an important competitive edge psychologically and financially, which has forced the multi-nationals to deal with the success and popularity of new musical trends.(9)

The African musical universe continues to inject and infuse enough new areas of innovation into Western popular music to warrant the fundamental question: Is Western popular music really Western? A thorough examination of this question inevitably leads the scientific researcher to the conclusion that the African musical universe, beginning with Kemit (ancient Egypt), which haunted and influenced the Greek philosophers, has always been a part of the phenomenon and canon of what we consider to be Western popular music.

Notes

1. Before beginning such an exploration, a note about the term African: Euro-American scholars have nominally alienated continental Africans from diasporan Africans in their specific interpretations of musical phenomena. In this essay the word is used generically to include all those who are descended from people born on the African continent, just as the term Caucasian is generally understood in Euro-American scholarship.

2. See Nzula et al.

3. We cannot but ponder, however, the virtue derived from the canonization and celebration of the Romans, a society which once colonized Britain and expressed utter contempt for its culture. We can only understand this phenomenon in the context of invented genealogies, where, through colonial education, the colonized identifies with his colonizer!

4. For an excellent discussion of this and the problems of anorexia and constant physical injury, see Cavendish 19.

5. For a deeper discussion of this, see Saakana, ch. 1.

6. For a discussion of these ideas, couched in the language of jazz/classical music, see Pleasants 129-30.

7. A large part on jazz history in Britain was researched by Ricky Smith on a project we started jointly in 1984. I owe a great deal to Ricky's painstaking research, including far more information than what is barely summarized here. The results of this joint research may be published later in book form.

8. For further information, see Bruce-James 1034; Dunbar 917; Foresythe 17.

9. In 1926, for example, as Jones points out, race records were confined to anonymity until giant corporations saw the selling power of this music and intervened to expand their own profits (100-01).

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Amon Saba Saakana holds a Ph.D. in Cultural Studies from the Universities of East London and London University (Goldsmiths College) and has two books forthcoming in 1996. He is the Managing Director of Kamak House, a progressive pan-African publisher, and Director of the Antef Institute, specializing in courses for higher education.