Abstract“How can America import ‘American’ jazz?,” asked the music editor of Good Housekeeping, George Marek, in 1956. Marek answered, “Singers, particularly if they are very female, give the home-grown music the allure of a foreign aura.” Taking these statements as a starting point, this article gives an account of the US careers of Alice Babs and Caterina Valente. Gender, class, and ethnicity were key elements in the US construction of Babs's and Valente's musical personae, which was especially heard in their vocality, with an emphasis on high-pitched vocal stylings, melismas, and “white” timbres to signify gender and European exoticism. The US careers of Babs and Valente show us that musical Americanness or Europeanness are not created separately on either side of the Atlantic. Their European identities were not created in Europe and then imported to the United States but were created in the process of transmission into the United States. Importantly, the article argues that race and ethnicity were used by musicians, critics, and listeners to position Babs and Valente as Europeans. Their whiteness was transposed in a US context and their stories tell us as much about US ideologies of whiteness as it does about European ethnicities.

Despite the fact that they are not in the strictest sense making sound themselves, album covers are profoundly musical. Album covers represent the music contained inside them and, even further, they mediate our listening experience. Conversely, our viewing experience is mediated by the music. Looking at an album we are reminded of the art historian W.J.T. Mitchell's assertion that "there are no visual media," by which he means that all media are mixed media. 1 Likewise, we can say, there are no sonic media, and covers are exemplary of the audiovisual dialectics of records.Scholars have used generally four parameters to explain the album cover: a) as protection for the record inside; b) advertisement for the music; c) accompaniment or visual aid to the musical sound and text; and d) commodity and collector's item in its own right. 2 These categories are, however, more descriptive than conceptual. Similarly, many studies of album covers describe a history of sleeve design and offer case studies with an emphasis on-or even bias toward-the LP and rock music. 3 Despite these descriptions and histories, few scholars have attempted to theorize the album cover. Indeed, historicizing the album cover is only one of four ways to think about the sleeve and its design, the other three being paratext, audiovisuality, and materiality. Rather than merely chronicling the history of the album cover, we can reconsider it as an example of what media theorists term device convergence (even before the time of digital media). 4 This can be approached through what Emily Dolan calls a "musicology of interfaces," which suggests that the album cover can be thought of as an instrument through which we interface with sound. 5

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There is something highly ironic in exploring the use of Carl Nielsen's music in the jazz repertoire. He was, to say the least, not a fan:My opinion is that it [jazz] spoils the young musician's ear and individuality, it is a nasty and deathlike music, always the same, because they steal from one another. I also think that jazz is a direct sin against the people, who by instinct love good music and much prefer it to this impudent, depraving skeleton-rattling noise.