Foto do autor

DEIRDRE O CONNELL

Autor(a) de The ballad of Blind Tom, slave pianist

11+ Works 34 Membros 5 Reviews

About the Author

Includes the name: O'Connell Deirdre

Obras de DEIRDRE O CONNELL

Associated Works

Secondhand Lions [2003 film] (2003) — Actor — 544 cópias

Etiquetado

Conhecimento Comum

There is no Common Knowledge data for this author yet. You can help.

Membros

Resenhas

Harlem Nights, the Secret History of Australia's Jazz Age is a book for anyone interested in yes, of course, jazz, but also the history of Australia's entertainment industry; the delayed take-up of modernism in the arts in Australia; the pernicious influence of the White Australia Policy beyond immigration issues; the impact of an unholy alliance of unionism and opportunist politics; and the surprising difference that could be made by just one man. And for anyone interested in the politics of race and power...

And that's just what I've absorbed from reading one-third of it.

Some may not know that I have a (very) minor role in broadcasting jazz on a community radio station. The Spouse (whose impressive professional CV includes what started as a hobby i.e. being leader and arranger of the Australian Cotton Club Orchestra) has been presenting Swing and Sway on 3CR for decades, and he has recently stepped into the shoes of the late Ralph Knight who presented Steam Radio for over forty years. Since he's also presenting a jazz program on Radio 3RPP in Mornington, and all this has to be prepared offsite since the pandemic, I have resumed doing the very occasional program to give him a break. I mention this because my interest in jazz is specific to big band jazz of the 20s, 30s and 40s, and although this is heresy to aficionados, I prefer the melodic style and rhythms of British Dance Bands to hot jazz from America. One of the aspects that I've found interesting in Harlem Nights is the way these differences have been framed in terms of race.
This fantasy of Blackness found voice in the literary prose of a generation of White bohemians and cosmopolitans who experienced Black music as a psychodrama where primitive 'African' musicians rescued 'over-civilised' White dancers from generations of Victorian sexual repression. Black rhythm, in this formulation, was a brand of bodily and psychic liberation— a Freudian antidote for a generation of Whites crushed and constrained by the narrow rules of 'correct' behaviour. But what felt and looked like 'the new' reprised old familiar themes, grounded in dubious theories of biologically inscribed racial difference.

Music critic Roger Pryor Dodge, for instance, believed that 'Negro' jazz players did 'not consciously' plot and compose, but derived their musical inventiveness from 'uncontrolled frantic moments of 'subconscious improvisation'. In other words, an ability independent of artistry and skill but contingent on the spontaneous outpourings of an inescapably primitive Black essence. (p.31)


As O'Connell explains further in the chapter 'The Jazzing Spheres', when the Australian promoter of Sonny Clay's Colored Idea subscribed to the fashionably cosmopolitan view that 'jazz as played by a European' and a 'real Negro' were 'entirely different' he was conforming to this primitivist fantasy.
'It's all in the syncopation,' he explained. 'One, brought to America by the original African Negroes—is natural—the other, as acquirement, is artificial'. (p.76)

Today, we can see how racist that framing is.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2021/12/08/harlem-nights-the-secret-history-of-australi...
… (mais)
 
Marcado
anzlitlovers | Dec 9, 2021 |
Excellent research and writing, informative and at the same time, a heartbreaking story - there is a CD of his music that was interpreted and recorded by John Davis, John Davis Plays Blind Tom - The Eighth Wonder - Newport Classics, 1999
 
Marcado
Cantsaywhy | outras 3 resenhas | Jul 11, 2021 |
The life of the blind musical savant Thomas Wiggins (b. 1849) is fantastical even as straightforward storytelling. The last American slave and the most popular black entertainer of the 19th c. (and the first ever to perform at the White House), Blind Tom made three separate fortunes for white people. His stage show included piano concertos, spirituals and sentimental ballads, along with the sounds of thunderstorms, weapons, trains, sermons, political speeches, bits of overheard conversation and eccentric convulsive gymnastics. Before he died in Hoboken in 1908, his death had been reported several times—first during a harrowing flight from Union armies after Sherman’s march through Georgia, another time after the Johnstown flood.

Such a life, according to Deirdre O’Connell, is ripe for reconsideration in the 21st c. Impressively researched and beautifully written, The Ballad of Blind Tom pays heed to the impressions and recollections of Tom’s contemporaries and the historical context of his life while persuasively demonstrating that the 19th c. imagination was ill-equipped to comprehend just who Tom was and what he was up to. O’Connell engages the more interesting themes raised by the life of Blind Tom: the contradiction between whites’ view of Tom as a bestial ‘moronic genius’ and the African-American concept of the Spirit Child, born with second sight and endowed with a gift for music and mimicry; the indentured man’s defiance and self-assertion despite his constant sense of insecurity and his absolute dependence on his self-serving handlers—a dependence that to black intellectuals looked like allegiance to the Confederate cause during the war and dedication to the master-slave relationship afterwards; Blind Tom as a symbol of Americans’ conflicting devotions to both white supremacy and democracy. Written with insight and empathy, The Ballad of Blind Tom may not be the last word on the man, but O’Connell makes it hard for anyone any longer to disregard the complex humanity that was denied Tom during his own lifetime.
… (mais)
 
Marcado
HectorSwell | outras 3 resenhas | Nov 10, 2017 |
A fascinating story and vivid chronicle of America's most famous 19th pianist - an eccentric oddball, if there ever was one - who today is virtually forgotten.
 
Marcado
didjryan | outras 3 resenhas | Nov 13, 2009 |

Prêmios

You May Also Like

Associated Authors

Estatísticas

Obras
11
Also by
1
Membros
34
Popularidade
#413,653
Avaliação
4.0
Resenhas
5
ISBNs
4