Day 262:The Jazz Exiles

As the war raged on in Europe, a musical revolution, spearheaded by the standard-bearers of bebop, was taking place on New York's 52nd Street. Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Thelonious Monk led a brigade of experimenters who sought to free themselves from the confines of the big swing bands and into the more adventuresome harmonic and rhythmic complexities of what would become known as bebop. In Europe, the boom in traditional jazz continued, but even in America the new developments in jazz were obscured by an additional factor.

A recording ban, which went into effect on August 1, 1942, and lasted until the fall of 1944, prevented anything like a mass audience from hearing the bands of Earl "Fatha" Hines, singer-trumpeter Billy Eckstineboth of whom employed a number of bebop musiciansor the small groups of Gillespie and Parker.
   
By 1945, bebop was firmly entrenched, and its effects were already causing reverberations in the big dance bands that had been the mainstay of the swing era. The bebop innovators injected their own ideas into the big band format and forged an entirely new music. In addition to Gillespie, Parker, and Miles Davis, pianists Bud Powell and George Wallington, bassist Oscar Pettiford, and drummers Max Roach and Kenny Clarke all sought and found new outlets for a new music. Pianist Tadd Dameron would emerge as the most important arranger of this period. Of these key musicians, four would become exiles.   

Although there were a number of holdouts from the more traditional forms of jazz, many of the leading swing players found themselves working alongside the beboppers in the clubs that dotted 52nd Street. Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young were two such musicians, but it was tenor saxophonist Don Byas who was regarded as the best to bridge the gap between swing and bebop. For Byas, 52nd Street proved to be only a brief stopover on the road to Europe, where he would become the first important modern exile. Byas had come to New York with Eddie Mallory's band in 1937. He remained for eighteen months before brief stints with Don Redman, Lucky Millinder, and Andy Kirk. In 1941, Byas joined the Count Basie Band. When he got off the bus in 1943, he began to work with Gillespie, a number of all-star groups, and several small bands under his own name.

Byas's playing was much in the vein of Coleman Hawkins, and the early records with Gillespie clearly show Byas was at home with the demands of the new music. His already melodic lines were further enriched by the influence of Parker and his disciples. With the lifting of the recording ban, Byas recorded for several of the new, small jazz labels that were springing up everywhere. He even had a minor hit with his own version of "Laura" in 1946. The same year, he garnered first place honors in the Esquire jazz poll. But Byas was restless, and when Don Redman formed another band, Byas joined him for an extended European tour. When the tour ended, Byas stayed on in Europe to have a look around. He was still looking around a quarter of a century later. He was not seen or heard in the State again until 1970 when he appeared at the Newport Jazz Festival. His Newport appearance was to be the final scene in a documentary film on his life in jazz, produced by a Dutch production company.
   
As the first of the postwar exiles, Byas became a guiding figure in the careers of the many musicians who would follow in his footsteps. Living first in France, Byas later settled permanently in Holland and was regularly featured at jazz festivals throughout Europe as a soloist with visiting bands such as Duke Ellington, or with Norman Granz's Jazz at the Philharmonic tours with Coleman Hawkins and Stan Getz.

While in Europe, Byas took up skin diving and deep-sea fishing and became something of a physical fitness buff. He had left a drinking problem behind, which was one of the principal reasons he had left the States, but eventually encountered the hazards many of the exiles experienced. His stay in Europe was so lengthy that he began to be taken for granted and was considered a "local" by many promoters and club owners. The mushrooming number of exiles that followed Byas's lead made working conditions difficult and bruised his fierce ego. He began to drink heavily again and his physical condition deteriorated. Finally, he became almost inactive, playing only sporadically, but often losing jobs to other Americans who ironically had come to Europe after him.

At one point, Byas considered going home. "I may do that," he said. "One more trip, one grand tour. I'll make some money, come back, and then I'll lie down and die." He returned to the States for the 1970 Newport appearance and toured Japan with Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers in 1971. He returned to Holland the following year and at age fifty-nine died of cancer.

~~The Jazz Exiles : American Musicians Abroad -by- Bill Moody

Day 174: Book Excerpt: Crossing the Bay of Bengal

In early 1870 W. L. Hathaway, subcollector of the South Indian district of Thanjavur, condemned the “traffic” in people across the Bay of Bengal. He alleged that migration between South India and Malaya was “a regularly organized system of kidnapping.” Time and again, “captives were shipped from Negapatam for Penang and other countries, where the males were employed as coolies, and the females sold to a life of prostitution.” This “traffic,” Hathaway wrote, “is contrary to the law . . .[that] makes it illegal to assist any native of India in emigrating.” He insisted that the Madras government intervene to stop the traffic, and embarrassed the authorities in a long letter to the Friend of India, a journal read by British and Indian critics of imperial policy.

Hathaway made the “traffic” his personal mission. From his base in Nagapatnam he pursued shipowners and labor contractors. At the start of 1870’s “emigration season,” he ordered a raid on a ware house where migrants waited to board ships for Southeast Asia. The problem arose when their cases came before the local magistrate. Each migrant insisted that he acted of his own free will. Young boys declared that the labor recruiters were their “fathers” or “uncles”; they hadn’t signed contracts, so there was no evidence that they were “migrating for the purposes of labor.” “It is useless to attempt to unravel the real facts of the case,” Hathaway lamented; “people themselves will not reveal the truth.” This was an old problem. The local Police Weekly Circular had reported a similar case a few years earlier. On finding a ware house full of “coolies crowded together like beasts,” the police superintendent refused to let their ship depart. Questioning the detained men, he concluded, “I fancy they had got their stories cut and dried ready for use; for they answered satisfactorily enough; and they all produced parents, uncles, or guardians.” The superintendent thought, “This coolie trade has reached such large dimensions that there is plenty of room for an Emigration Agent here.” This goal was finally secured in 1873, when a protector of emigrants was appointed to oversee migration to Southeast Asia.

By 1870 circulation between South India and the Straits Settlements was entrenched, and it looked set to grow. Already cases of overcrowded ships and fugitive shipowners had come to the government’s attention. With the planters of the Straits crying for more labor, Hathaway and his colleagues in local government argued that it would be disastrous to lift legal restraints on movement between India and Malaya. British planters and their spokesmen in the Straits responded with the case for free migration. Connections across the Bay, they argued, were entirely natural. Malaya was really an extension of India; Indian laborers hardly thought it a “foreign” land. The tension between freedom and migration would resurface time and again in the years to come.

The last quarter of the nineteenth century was pivotal in the Bay of Bengal’s history. The slow intensification of “traffic” through the nineteenth century was jolted into expansion, and the trickle became a torrent. Steam energy made the crossing faster, easier, and cheaper. Imperial power charged into the interior. By treaty and by conquest, colonial states moved beyond their coastal strongholds, preceded or followed by European, Chinese, and Indian investors. Coffee. Sugar. Tea. Tobacco. Rubber. Southeast Asia’s frontiers promised vast profit. Wherever in the world they found local communities stubborn in their economic independence— cultivators who found wage labor unattractive, or people who resisted enslavement— European settlers perpetuated the “myth of the lazy native.” “No gain,” Alexander Kyd wrote from Penang, “will induce a Malay to constant and unremitted Industry.” So labor, like capital, had to be imported. Chinese capitalists had a ready source: through their brotherhoods and regional associations they mobilized men in ever greater numbers as steamships brought the China coast nearer. Europeans, without access to Chinese networks, turned where the sugar planters of Mauritius and the Caribbean had first resorted after the abolition of slavery— to British India.
...
Now consider this in a global context. Migration around the Bay was comparable in scale to transatlantic migration in the same era. Some 26 million people arrived in the United States between 1870 and 1930 from southern and eastern Europe, East Asia, and the Pacific. Add Chinese migration to Southeast Asia to the equation— around 19 million people in the century after 1840, more widely dispersed than their Indian counterparts— and it is clear that the region where the Indian Ocean met the South China Sea was home to one of the world’s great migrations. The main difference between the Asian and Atlantic circuits lies in the numbers of those who settled rather than returned. Between 6 million and 7 million people of Indian origin, and a similar number of Chinese, had settled overseas by the end of the 1930s; American demographer Kingsley Davis contrasted this with the 85 million people of British origin who lived outside the British Isles by that time.

~~Crossing the Bay of Bengal -by- Sunil S. Amrith

Day 166: Book Excerpt: Modernity At Large

As with mediation, so with motion. The story of mass migrations (voluntary and forced) is hardly a new feature of human history. But when it is juxtaposed with the rapid flow of mass-mediated images, scripts, and sensations, we have a new order of instability in the production of modern subjectivities. As Turkish guest workers in Germany watch Turkish films in their German flats, as Koreans in Philadelphia watch the 1988 Olympics in Seoul through satellite feeds from Korea, and as Pakistani cabdrivers in Chicago listen to cassettes of sermons recorded in mosques in Pakistan or Iran, we see moving images meet deterritorialized viewers. These create diasporic public spheres, phenomena that confound theories that depend on the continued salience of the nation-state as the key arbiter of important social changes.

Thus, to put it summarily, electronic mediation and mass migration mark the world of the present not as technically new forces but as ones that seem to impel (and sometimes compel) the work of the imagination. Together, they create specific irregularities because both viewers and images are in simultaneous circulation. Neither images nor viewers fit into circuits or audiences that are easily bound within local, national, or regional spaces. Of course, many viewers may not themselves migrate. And many mass-mediated events are highly local in scope, as with cable television in some parts of the United States. But few i mportant films, news broadcasts, or television spectacles are entirely unaffected by other media events that come from further afield. And few persons in the world today do not have a friend, relative, or coworker who is not on the road to somewhere else or already coming back home, bearing stories and possibilities. In this sense, both persons and images often meet unpredictably, outside the certainties of home and the cordon sanitaire of local and national media effects. This mobile and unforeseeable relationship between massmediated events and migratory audiences defines the core of the link between globalization and the modern. In the chapters that follow, I show that the work of the imagination, viewed in this context, is neither purely emancipatory nor entirely disciplined but is a space of contestation in which individuals and groups seek to annex the global into their own practices of the modern.

Ever since Durkheim, and the work of the Annees Sociologiques group, anthropologists have learned to regard collective representations as social facts-that is, to see them as transcending individual volition, as weighted with the force of social morality, and as objective social realities. What I wish to suggest is that there has been a shift in recent decades, building on technological changes over the past century or so, in which the imagination has become a collective, social fact. This development, in turn, is the basis of the plurality of imagined worlds.

On the face of it, it seems absurd to suggest that there is anything new about the role of the imagination in the contemporary world. After all, we are now accustomed to thinking about all societies as haVing produced their versions of art, myth, and legend, expressions that implied the potential evanescence of ordinary social life. In these expressions, all societies showed that they could both transcend and reframe ordinary social life by recourse to mythologics of various kinds in which social life was imaginatively deformed. In dreams, finally, individuals even in the most simple societies have found the space to refigure their social lives, live out proscribed emotional states and sensations, and see things that have then spilled over into their sense of ordinary life. All these expressions, further, have been the basis of a complex dialogue between the imagination and ritual in many human SOcieties, through which the force of ordinary social norms was somehow deepened, through inversion, irony, or the performative intensity and the collaborative work demanded by many kinds of ritual. All this is the surest sort of knowledge bequeathed to us by the best of canonical anthropology over the past century.

In suggesting that the imagination in the postelectronic world plays a newly significant role, I rest my case on three distinctions. First, the imagination has broken out of the special expressive space of art, myth, and ritual and has now become a part of the quotidian mental work of ordinary people in many societies. It has entered the logic of ordinary life from which it had largely been successfully sequestered. Of course, this has precedents in the great revolutions, cargo cults, and messianic movements of other times, in which forceful leaders implanted their visions into social life, thus creating powerful movements for social change. Now, however, it is no longer a matter of specially endowed (charismatic) individuals, injecting the imagination where it does not belong. Ordinary people have begun to deploy their imaginations in the practice of their everyday lives. This fact is exemplified in the mutual contextualizing of motion and mediation.

~~Modernity At Large -by- Arjun Appadurai