Thomas "Fats" Waller's London Suite was composed and recorded by the African-American pianist, entertainer and bandleader during his 1939
Thomas "Fats" Waller's London Suite was composed and recorded by the African-American pianist, entertainer and bandleader during his 1939 visit to Britain. This article is the first to examine the suite for its representation of a hybrid musical style. Its mix of stylistic markers of "hot" jazz with melancholic "sweet" music that references European classical music made the suite distinctive in Waller's output and reflective of a different sort of hybrid musical aesthetic that came with his transatlantic musical tourism. Some original archival research is presented to help document the wartime circumstances that prevented the release of Waller's recording until 1951. In the period between 1939 and 1951 Ted Heath's all white British band released an orchestrated swing version of Waller's piano suite. This is shown to be in many ways "hotter" in its swing than Waller's original recording and the album was widely distributed in the United States. Analysis of contemporary reviews shows only when Waller's recordings resurfaced was there a change in critical attitudes towards the hot jazz identity of Heath and Waller. Thus, the travel of Waller's suite, back and forth across the Atlantic, shaped and reshaped not only its musical style but also perceptions of Waller and Heath with respect to apparently essential concepts of race and nation that were bound up with stylistic definitions of hot authenticity in jazz. Ultimately, Waller's suite suggests the operation of a Jazz Atlantic, an outer-national critical conception founded on Paul Gilroy's notion of the Black Atlantic,
This article argues that the ocean-liner setting of the 1934 Broadway musical Anything Goes provides a rich place from which to explore how such seemingly frivolous musical comedy can otherwise be viewed as socially discursive and critical. It explores the way Anything Goes can be viewed as a typical product of the Great Depression and suggests its function in re-envisioning identities in the face of the apparent failure of the "American Dream". The nature of the carnivalistic comedy offered in the shipboard narrative of Anything Goes further suggests that it offers an important salve for Depression-era anxiety. From this Bakhtinian perspective, Anything Goes is figured as a subversive space for the performance of social deviance of one sort or another. Bakhtin"s vision of carnival spaces suggests that musical comedy has an important function in social renewal but it might be too utopian to articulate to "real" society. However, Michel Foucault"s notion of heterotopias allows for a re-connection of Bakhtin"s utopianism with the "real" world and thus serves to show that Anything Goes and, indeed, musical comedy more generally might be as vital a location as passenger ships for functional socio-critical discourse.
Welcome to issue 6.2 of Studies in Musical Theatre. The contents of this issue are organised chronologically by their subject matter, taking us from early twentieth-century revue to twenty-first century musical film by way of Cole Porter, Stephen Sondheim, Jonathan Larson, George C. Wolfe and Savion Glover. Meanwhile, the journal continues to celebrate a diverse and burgeoning array of scholarship, and in this issue you will find a rich panoply of different approaches ranging from the traditional to the interdisciplinary.Jonas Westover's article on the now little-known song-hit 'Omar Khayyam' from The Passing Show of 1914 explores the way that producers of revue in the early twentieth century began to exploit marketable tunes as commodities. Despite our assumptions about the way in which songs may have been used in the revue format, Westover reveals just how careful the producers and writers were to weave the recognisable hooks of a song throughout a revue's score. This created what he calls a 'webbing' effect, whereby the song could be made to resonate with audiences and promote the lucrative marketability of the song product. This article is a sample of Jonas Westover's ongoing work on early twentieth century revue which, incidentally, will provide the focus of a forthcoming special issue of Studies in Musical Theatre guest-edited by this author.Cole Porter's 1948 musical, Kiss Me, Kate, is an ever-popular adaptation of Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew with a script by Bella and Sam Spewack. John Severn considers the adaptation of the play, which is ridden with gender conflict, within the broader context of post-war gender politics. The era was marked by considerable masculine anxiety and discourses that attempted to restore 'normal' gender relations in the face of troops returning from overseas to work in industries that had been manned by women in their absence. Severn illuminates how the show-within-a-show form of Kiss Me, Kate enables the representation of alternative possibilities of resistance to the
Editorial Dominic Symonds and George BurrowsAs regular readers will know, we have mentioned previously the fact that similar themes and coinciding resonances coalesce in the pages of the journal. This issue offers several articles that we might see bound together under the theme of 'languages of performance'.The issue begins with a consideration of Carmen Jones, Oscar Hammerstein's 'other' show from 1943, which relocated the 'myth' of Carmen to an African-American setting. Benoit Depardieu's probing article considers the dynamics of race that surrounded this production and its subsequent filmed version, particularly in reference to the language used by Oscar Hammerstein in press correspondence of the era. Depardieu's psychoanalytic reading of language reminds us how vocabulary both exists within society and constructs it.In a second psychoanalytic discussion of language, Ben Macpherson discusses the performance of Henry Higgins by Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady (1956). Although notoriously unmusical, Rex Harrison exploited an idiosyncratic style of performing song in the show, which Macpherson interprets using the notion of 'transformative identification'. Whilst Higgins' character is an arrogant and pompous snob, in performance Harrison created a charming and engaging persona through his unique detextualising of the formal musical elements. Macpherson cleverly reveals the tensions and possibilities at play between the text of a musical and its performance.Continuing a linguistic theme, Dominic Symonds' article, 'The Story of "Oh"', looks at the way that non-lexical sounds are used in song. He suggests that their deliberate placement within a composition or performance reveals the confidence with which we use non-linguistic signifiers to communicate, and how the 'languages' of musical theatre(s) appropriate this use of conversational sound. He concentrates on the sound 'Oh', looking briefly at Cathy Berberian's vocal tricks before moving to the performance of identity in popular music, and finally the way in which the sound is used poetically to construct the identity of society in Oklahoma! (1943).Where shows such as Oklahoma! receive considerable attention from scholars, Millie Taylor's article, on The Clod Ensemble's The Overcoat (1998), offers one of those vital pieces of scholarship on a less high-profile example of music theatre. Taylor considers how music is used as a consistent aspect of this production's aesthetic language to 'draw attention to the significant'. She equates the contemporary use of music in the show with the traditions of melodrama, and invites us to see her work here as a starting point from which to develop ways of considering the use of music in a broad range of theatrical productions. 221 SMT 2 (3) pp. 221-222
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