Can Jazz Be Rid of the Racial Imagination? Creolization, Racial Discourses, and Semiology of Music

Denis-Constant Martin
French ethnomusicologist Bernard Lortat-Jacob likes to proclaim: "Music is always much more than music" (Lortat-Jacob 1996). In the same vein, one could declare that today "black music is always much more than black music." If by black music we mean a diversity of genres that appeared in the Americas, fashioned by the ordeals of slavery and racism, it is universally acknowledged that the creative processes through which they were invented were fueled by mixing and blending, and that these musics thereby incorporated elements coming from traditions which were not "black." Then, as early as the mid-nineteenth century, black American music began to travel, under the guise of blackface minstrel shows or in the form of jubilee choirs (Erlman 1999; Gilroy 1991), and it was not long before they became popular in many countries around the world.