Hamp in Detroit
Snowed in with the Society for American Music
I’m in Detroit for two days participating in the 50th annual conference of the Society for American Music. Academic conferences can be dry, daunting, a little desperate even. SAM is different. It’s not too big. People are friendly, unpretentious. Everyone digs American music. Duh.
I was nervous to present. Would my talk be too long, too short? Light on details or overburdened with irrelevant historical details? Would people think I was smart, or poke my work full of holes once I finally shut up? Then I stood up in front of a room full of music teachers and listeners eager to learn more about Lionel Hampton and I was like, “Oh! These are my people.” Let’s roll.
I got to see some wonderful presentations before it was my turn. Cisco Bradley spoke about the links between free jazz and the Black Power movements in Detroit and Chicago. He’s the guy behind the Free Jazz Oral History Project, which includes hundreds of interviews. Very inspiring in my line of work. Ben Barson shared research on the social-political links between New Orleans dockworkers union organizing and jazz in the Crescent City. Stay tuned for his upcoming book Brassroots Democracy. This is exactly what the amorphous field of “jazz studies” is for, in my opinion. Check it out.
Cisco was followed by the saxophonist and scholar Salim Washington of UCLA’s Global Jazz Studies program, whose talk on the “jazz imaginary” was deep and thought provoking. He argued that “jazz is a repository of Black modernity” and that the Middle Passage was the beginning of modernism—Pan-African and existential. It shaped the aesthetic boundaries of Black music in America before jazz. He called the drum kit “the greatest musical invention of the United States” and noted that the foundation for 20th century music is the rhythm section that was created by jazz musicians. I was reminded of the recent discussion here at COJ about segregated education and a significant misunderstanding of John Coltrane’s sacred music when Washington pointed out that “the great conservatory for African American musicians is the church.”
What did I have to offer? I spoke about an article in progress on vibraphonist and bandleader Lionel Hampton, in particular, his little-known journalistic endeavors. Watch this space, as it’s still in the workshop phase and not quite ready for primetime. Some of my background research on Jay Peters, who you can read about in my second COJ post, comes from this deep well of knowledge. I would be interested to see if I can verify Hampton’s claim (clipped above) that he was “the first colored person to appear on the same stage there [in Richmond, Va.] with a white band.” Research is a journey, not a destination.
As I depart this blustery conference destination to return home to Lionel’s old neighborhood of Harlem, NYC, I can’t do much better than Hamp’s sign off:
Right on!