The Dawn of the Jazz Age in the Caribbean: Dance, Consumer Culture, and the Imperial Shape of Modern Entertainment

Abstract After 1917 the word ‘jazz’ disseminated rapidly throughout the world attaining, along the way, a multiplicity of meanings, sometimes related to musical practices from the United States, but often associated with a diverse array of things, objects, ideas, and situations in the worlds of music entertainment, dance, leisure, and fashion. In the Caribbean, this process entailed not only the constitution of jazz as a symbol of social modernity but also revealed a long history of exchanges between the United States and the Caribbean – not to mention the Afrodiasporic origins of jazz. By examining jazz as a by-product and an expression of Caribbean modernity, this article disentangles some of the cultural meanings of the word ‘jazz’ in the Caribbean between 1917 and 1920, considering, ultimately, how imagining jazz as Caribbean was inevitably intertwined with imagining it as modern.

On 19 September 1917, Havana's newspaper Diario de la Marina published an announcement of a 'Gran Baile'or Great Danceon behalf of 'Juventud Asturiana', the youth branch of a mutual society that served the Iberian Spanish community in Cuba.The announcement included the 'Programa del baile', that is, a list of the fourteen pieces that the orchestra was meant to perform, in two sets, during the party.More than half of them were 'danzones', one of the popular musics that had been dominating the public entertainment sphere and the discursive imagination in Cuba since the late nineteenth century.The rest of the programme comprised two one-steps, two pasodobles, one waltz, and one foxtrot.The name of one of the tunes, a one-step, was 'The Jazz' (written just like that, in English), one of the earliest appearances in printif not the firstof the word 'jazz' in Cuba.But before presenting the programme, the announcement set the scene for the party with a grandiloquent description of the modern, elitist, gendered, racialized, and youthful milieu of the event, meant to take place at the lavish Hotel Florida, in downtown Havana: 'Happiness, a lot of happiness, youth, tropical flowers, women with long eyelashes, black eyes, red lips, "pink" complexion, a happy smile, beautiful as the flowers that adorn the river's banks; these women with wonderful little wings of a thousand colors will enhance [the elegance of] the dance with their presence over the roses' candor.' 1 These kind of announcements became progressively common in Havana's newspapers; many of them featured similar descriptions, repertoires and, sometimes, even the same tunes.That one-step, 'The Jazz', soon became a favourite of both orchestras and dancers.But 'jazz' was not merely in the name of a catchy tune.As the word 'jazz' began to appear with increasing frequency across the city, it came to signify a whole range of meaningsas would also be the case in many other locales around the planet.Indeed, between 1917 and 1921, the word 'jazz' disseminated rapidly throughout the world attaining, along the way, a multiplicity of meanings, sometimes related to musical practices from New Orleans, Chicago, New York, and elsewhere in the United States, but quite often also associated with a diverse array of things, objects, ideas, and situations in the worlds of music entertainment, dance, leisure, and fashion.In 1917 Cuba, just as in Mexico, the Dominican Republic, and other places across the Caribbean at the time, the word 'jazz' referred in its first iterations, as we will see, to a modern dance style, assumed as inherently related to the foxtrot as well as to a wide realm of musical entertainment that included not only foxtrots but also one-steps, twosteps, tangos, waltzes, danzones, and other musics and dances of the era.Soon, however, it was not just about music nor just a new dance craze.
As it summoned an assortment of musics, dance steps, sounds, behaviours, attitudes, perspectives, desires, venues, and situations perceived or construed as 'modern', jazz was constituted as a symbol of social modernity.The globalizing ventures of jazz fostered the articulation of diverse ideas, structures of feeling, and cultural practices dealing with modernity in one way or another.In the early twentieth century, jazz was many things and so was modernity.They produced each other and that happened in a transnational scenario.The commodification of jazz as a modern dance was decisive for such symbolic configuration; a process framed and advanced by the leisure entertainment industry across imperial trade networks and by means of sound recordings, piano rolls, sheet music, dance manuals, and eventually radio and cinema.The idea of jazz as a modern dance and as a by-product of consumer culture was, perhaps more than any specific musical features, a defining factor towards shaping jazz and turning it, eventually, into a global phenomenon.
Music was a protagonist in these processes but not just on its ownindependent from other social and cultural processesor within the ideological coordinates of US American exceptionalism that have dominated jazz histories for a long time. 2 The symbolic configuration of jazz as 'modern' in the Caribbean, I believe, took shape at the crossroads of cultural sensibilities that perceived, imagined, and modelled jazz as something foreign and familiar at oncea commercial fad from the United States yet bound, by virtue of old and lasting Afrodiasporic networks, to Caribbean musical parameters.Thus, rather than conceiving jazz as a musical practice originating exclusively within the United States and then exported to the Caribbean, I focus on the various exchanges between the United States and the Caribbean by virtue of which the kind of music that came to be known as jazz in both places was developed.The musical contours of jazz were shaped by means of an Afrodiasporic network that extended throughout the Gulf of Mexico, Cuba, and beyond.Notwithstanding how visible or prominent, New Orleans was but one of the nodes in such a network.The African American musicians that so critically contributed to the sound of jazz in the United States were themselves part of a broader network of cultural currents that sprung out of the African diaspora. 3he global circulation of jazz was foreshadowed by the transnational scope of the African diaspora, and such a footprint of mobility helped shape jazz's modern condition.It is not only that, as Taylor Atkins puts it, jazz was from the beginning 'a transgressor of the idea of the nation' and 'an agent of globalization'. 4By virtue of its transnational circulations, jazz also emerged as an expression of musical modernism.Although it is not common to frame early jazzor Caribbean dance music for the same matteras modernist, it grew out of 'cultural performances . . .that translate [d] modernity into aesthetic terms (modernism)' just as other musical forms of the early twentieth century more commonly conceived within the umbrella of musical modernisms. 5While hegemonic notions of musical modernism from the art music worlds in Europe and North America may have informed the social and artistic milieu in which jazz emerged and thrived, jazz was also an altogether different modernist formation in its own right.Nevertheless, more than in any deliberate agenda of rupture with or refashioning of an aesthetic past, it was grounded on modernity as a social and everyday experience.It was only by means of its transnationaland eventually globalcirculations that jazz's modern character was truly made audible.Whether a category such as 'vernacular modernism' is needed to account for jazz and other musical practices more akin with popular sensibilities than with the art music world is beside the point.But I will address that issue later in this article.
Following Susan Friedman, we can conceive modernity and modernism not as periodspecific phenomena or as something developed first in Europe or North America and eventually replicated in other parts of the world.Rather than being the original, normative, or standard modernity, what we often regard as Western modernity is but one kind of modernity among many.As Friedman puts it, 'modernity is a planetary phenomenon across the millennia and is understood as multiple, polycentric, and recurrent instances of transformational rupture and rapid change across the full spectrum of political, economic, cultural, technological, demographic, and military arenas of interlocking societies and civilizations'.And the same goes for modernism, that is, 'the aesthetic dimension of any given modernity'. 6odernity and modernism can happenand have indeed happenedin many scenarios beyond Europe and even before 1500.Thus, it is not only that we could potentially conceive of older and younger modernities, but also that 'the meanings of modernity and modernism are perpetually unsettled, unsettling'. 7Rather than implying multiple modernities in isolation or independent from one another, it is more about conceiving a network of modern formations that expands across time and space.
Together, US American exceptionalism and canonical views of musical modernism have built too strong an intellectual fortress, which has prevented us from appreciating the transnational and modernist scope of jazz.The persistence of US American exceptionalism in jazz studies has been a barrier for considering the global arena of jazz outside a framework that establishes US jazz as the norm and ultimately disparages local jazz scenes around the world as inauthentic.In the same way, avant-garde art music composition has loomed so large in the scholarly universe of musical modernisms that it makes it hard to conceive of other musical words as modern or modernistespecially those closer to vernacular traditions or popular entertainment.But when examined according to their own logics, they are.8Thus, while a global perspective on musical modernisms is imperative, it needs to go beyond the efforts to make visible hitherto neglected composers and scenes of contemporary music around the planetnotwithstanding the significance of such efforts.If anything, engaging with globality is an opportunity to question cultural hierarchies, ideological genealogies, and artistic creeds rooted in colonialism and white supremacy.Hence, it is an opportunity to interrogate the canonicity of notions such as modernity and modernism as well as the parochialism of long-standing narratives, such as that of US American exceptionalism.By extension, it might be an opportunity to challenge the canonicity and parochialism of jazz studies.Doing so would certainly be a crucial step towards crafting a cultural history of jazz that does justice to the multiplicity of actors, scenes, and dimensions that have shaped the music but, more importantly, it is another way to resist the legacy of imperialism in our stories.This article is a contribution in that direction.
By digging into newspapers, sound recordings, and other archival vestiges from Havana, Santo Domingo, Mexico City, and Trinidad, in this article I disentangle some of the cultural meanings of the word 'jazz' in the Caribbean between 1917 and 1920; that is, before the Jazz Age proper.If towards the end of 1917 the word 'jazz' was just making its first appearances in Havana and elsewhere, either as the name of a tune or as a dance fad from other lands, by 1921 it had become a common presence in the newspapers and, considering the extent of its usefrom social reports to editorial columns to advertisements and classifiedsin everyday life.If typography could be taken as an index of sociability, a revealing pattern of increasing familiarity comes to light: the quotation marks that invariably enclosed the word 'jazz' in almost any itineration in print between 1917 and 1919 became less and less frequent after 1920.Once a foreign presence in a list of tunes for a party, jazz progressively found local niches by virtue of a growing demand for dance instructors, jazz bands, and leisure.However, it is not a straightforward tale of cultural importation or just a matter of frequency or repetition.As much as the word 'jazz' and the symbolic baggage that came with it were received as foreign, it also signalled a long history of exchanges between the United States and the Caribbean.Given its imperial standing, the United States inevitably looms large in the international picture of the Jazz Age.Yet the formation of local jazz scenes in various places across the Caribbean since the late 1910s was not a by-product of passive assimilation.It was more about the reinvigoration of long-standing musical parameters vis-à-vis a novel settingunambiguously transcultural and modernalbeit significantly mediated, as we will see, by the commercial activities of several entertainment businesses from New York City in the arenas of sound recording, player-pianos, music publishing, and dance.Furthermore, as it would also be the case in several places across Latin America, jazz soon came to be entangled in manifold debates about race, morality, modernity, and nationalism.
In the early twentieth century, I argue, jazz was an audible manifestation of modernity and the modern age, that is, of a cultural milieu defined by intersections of capitalism, imperialism political or otherwiseracial ideologies, new colonial modalities, anti-colonial struggles, mass consumer culture, and rapid global flows of information, people, and commodities.In the Caribbeanincluding Louisiana and other places in the South of the United States jazz emerged from these intersections but also pushed them forward.The announcement of that 'Gran Baile' in Havana in September 1917 could also be seen as a trace into an otherwise inaccessible cultural experience, one that shows how imagining jazz as Caribbean was intertwined with imagining it as modern.In a certain way, thinking of jazz as 'modern' is old news.Early in the day, before any jazz scholar, James P. Johnson issued it as a manifesto: Caribbean modernity.In the next two sections, devoted respectively to dance and music, I trace the presence of the word 'jazz' between September 1917 and June 1920mostly through sources in Spanish and with a greater emphasis on Havana.My purpose is to appreciate not only the transnational dimension of jazz but also the various contexts and ways in which it appeared as a marker of social modernityincluding issues of race and class as well as the activities of imperially minded corporations and local entrepreneurs in the world of music entertainment.Finally, in the closing segment, I return to the multifaceted character of modernity and jazz, the political contours of US American exceptionalism, and the retreading of history.

The meta-archipelago of the Caribbean
Although crucial processes pertaining to the origins of jazz as a musical form at the turn of the twentieth century took place on US soil, they were directly informed by cultural and musical practices from the Caribbeannot to mention the African diaspora at large. 9Considering the range of factors and peoples rooted in the Caribbean that shaped New Orleans society and that nourished jazz in its formative years, authors such as John Storm Roberts, Thomas Fiehrer, Leonardo Acosta, Alejandra Vazquez, Alejandro L. Madrid, Robin Moore, and Christopher Washburne have suggested that early jazz was as Caribbean as it was US American. 10Just by paying attention to the social history of New Orleans since the early eighteenth century and its cultural configuration up to this day, it is clear that, regardless of its 9 The Caribbean is usually conceived of as a vast geographic and cultural scenario that extends from the Gulf of Mexico to the northern littoral of South America, including not only the so called 'West Indies'that is, all of the islands in the 'Greater' and 'Lesser' Antilles as well as in the Bahama Archipelagobut also the Caribbean seaside of continental Central America and northern South America.However, more often than not, such a broad picture does not do justice to the social, linguistic, geopolitical, ethnic, and musical diversity of the Caribbean.Thus, some authors insist that it is paramount to specify what region of the Caribbean is being alluded to and the criteria for distinguishing a region from another in the meta-archipelago.Antonio Multiple instances and processes contributed to the cross-fertilization of musical practices in New Orleans, Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Mexico, and elsewhere in the northern Caribbean.These include confluences of styles and repertoires, a ceaseless flux of composers and performers, shared experiences of slavery, racism, and coloniality, and countless transactions around political, commercial, and musical mattersas Fiehrer, Acosta, Lomanno, Raeburn, Madrid and Moore, and many others have extensively documented. 12uilding on Jelly Roll Morton's famous comment about the 'Latin tinge' without which jazz would not have been possible in the first place, Washburne and Gebhardt have underscored the intercultural character of jazz.Jazz has been, Washburne writes, 'in an "in between" space where peoples from diverse cultures rub up against one another.This is an interstitial space of significance, the space between colonizers and the colonized, black and white, black and creole, European and African, and the Caribbean and the United States.' 13 Thus, it should be added, an interstitial space essentially modern.Indeed, while late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century modernity across the Americas was shaped by the incorporation into everyday life of a great assortment of technological and industrial artefactsfrom cars to phonographsas well as of unprecedented cultural practicesincluding mass-mediated listeningit was still grounded on imperial interventions and colonial relations. 14New Orleans, Washburne continues, was 'a creolized space' and jazz 'a creolized mode of expression'.But such a creolized environment was wrought at a modern 'confluence of slavery, colonialism, plantation life, postcolonialism, [and] emancipation'. 15This modern scenario of creolization at the turn of the twentieth century Ospina Romero The Dawn of the Jazz Age in the Caribbean 353 a kind of creolized modernitywould establish the conditions that would not only set in motion the original development of the kind of music that came to be known as 'jazz' but that would inform its subsequent developments throughout the twentieth century.Creolization here is not merely a metaphor to explain the confluence of multiple cultural constituencies.It underscores the predominance of creole identities in Louisiana and the Caribbean since the eighteenth century and particularly during the years leading into the emergence of jazz.The 'creole' category, broadly understood as a cultural formation at the intersection of Spanish and French colonial societies, encompassed a wide range of racial and ethnic identities for people of African, 'Latin' (read Hispanic, French, Sicilian), and Native American heritage.If jazz, as Fiehrer writes, 'is a metaphor for New Orleans' social history', modern creole culture was the 'agent' and 'the catalytic variable' that made it possible. 16his framing carries two powerful implications.On the one hand, the idea of Blackness, so central in jazz history, comes to be refashioned.Rather than the white vs Black binary that has dominated jazz discourses and historiography in the United States, it is about Blackness as it accounts for the experience and identities of African Americans in the United States as well as of Blacks, mulattos, creoles, mestizos, and other people of colour in Latin America and the Caribbean.On the other hand, it allows for a wider cultural geography pertaining the formation and dissemination of jazz in the early twentieth century; a cultural geography that spans across the Americas, which Antonio Benítez Rojo originally framed as the meta-archipelago of the Caribbean and that Washburne recently reframed as a hemispheric 'black archipelago'.17Nevertheless, while Washburne focuses on the creolized space of New York City, as it has been a critical node in the development of Latin jazz, I focus on the creolized space of the northern Caribbeanwith a few excursions to other places in the wider circum-Caribbean.Benítez Rojo's framing of the Caribbean and its cultural history is especially meaningful here: [A]s a meta-archipelago [the Caribbean] has the virtue of having neither a boundary nor a center.Thus the Caribbean flows outward past the limits of its own sea with a vengeance, and its ultima Thule may be found on the outskirts of Bombay, near the low and murmuring shores of Gambia, in a Cantonese tavern of circa 1850, at a Balinese temple, in an old Bristol pub, in a commercial warehouse in Bordeaux at the time of Colbert, in a windmill beside de Zuider Zee, at a café in a barrio of Manhattan, in the existential saudade of an old Portuguese lyric. 18e Caribbean, as a cultural space, was made out of globalization and has shaped the course of globalizationalthough the same could be said about modernity and jazz.That is, in a sense, what lies behind Benítez Rojo's profound idea of 'the repeating island': the extent to which the Caribbean experience followed suit on the connecting character of other archipelagos and meta-archipelagos and, in turn, became a paradigm of circulation and connectivity.What gets repeated, he writes, are 'tropisms, in series; movements in approximate direction'. 19he Caribbean is not merely a geographical space; it is a social formation produced amid the flows of imperial colonialism and the raptures of capitalism.Between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries, European powers created and set in motion a coordinated system of exploitation and extraction in the Caribbean, just asand in tandem withtheir colonial interventions elsewhere across the Americas.Benítez Rojo describes that system as an assemblage of different colonial 'machines', each one with a specific purpose, including, for instance, the efficient extraction and transatlantic transportation of gold, silver, and a plethora of other natural resources.Thus, the 'plantation machine' alone helped produce, on the one hand, millions of enslaved people from Africa and thousands of imported workers from Southeast Asia, and, on the other hand, mercantile and industrial capitalism, third-world underdevelopment, enclave societies, new forms of imperialism and, ultimately, modernity. 20he Caribbean keeps repeating but each copy is different, in a fashion that resonates with Amiri Baraka's notion of the changing samean idea eventually taken up by Paul Gilroy to account, precisely, for the rhizomatic happening of the African diaspora throughout the Atlantic Ocean. 21But the social formation of the Caribbeanjust as Gilroy and Myriam Chancy remind usis not exclusively a by-product of coloniality.It has also been a transcultural process, and so has been globalization.The Caribbean has been a historical community defined by cultural parameters in flux since long before colonization even if enhanced by colonization.Its character and condition as a 'middle passage' between Europe, Africa, and the Americas is not just a testimony of material and immaterial transits but of fluid identities and hybridity, that is, processes of ethnic, racial, and cultural formation in constant motion. 22hat is the cultural scenario and those are the historical processes out of which, I believe, jazz came into being.
Framing the Caribbean as a Black archipelago or as a meta-archipelago is crucial to underscore the circulations that have defined everyday life in the Caribbean for a long time, and which have also shaped a particular kind of Caribbean modernity.As Ifeona Fulani and Jessica Baker brilliantly explain, the 'archipelagic' character of the Caribbean accounts for the ways in which the sea serves as much for separating as for connecting islands, and thus, for the dynamic flow of peoples, objects, musics, ideas, and cultural practices.'[T]he sea', Fulani writes, 'has been the vector that linked the arcing islands and their clusters of Ospina Romero The Dawn of the Jazz Age in the Caribbean 355 population in a ceaseless flux'. 23Unlike the ontological fixity often ascribed to the continents and against the perception of islands as isolated places, 'archipelagic thinking' emphasizes the connecting, relational, and mobile nature of island-to-island assemblages. 24The globalizing, repeating, fluid, mobile, and circulating character of the Caribbean, I think, created the condition of possibility for an autonomous sense of modernitya Caribbean modernityin the vein of Antonio Benítez Rojo's frame of mind.The tale of how the word 'jazz' found a home in Havana in the late 1910sor of the Jazz Age in the Caribbean more broadlyis but one instance in a long history of Caribbean circulations and Caribbean modernity.While Caribbean modernity and jazz modernism should be conceived in relation to each other and according to their own cultural logics, they can also be portrayed in dialogue with and within the context of more conventional understandings of historical modernity and musical modernism.There are not all-encompassing criteria to account for modernist experiences in Latin America and the Caribbean.But as Alejandro L. Madrid shows, a 'great variety of aesthetic projects' in the last two centuries can certainly be framed as modernist, with varying degrees of alignment or disconnect with Western/European modernism. 25These include an eclectic panorama of musical enterprises based on the renovation of, the rupture with, or the restoration of certain traditions, whether local or foreign, academic or popular. 26he kind of musical practices that I will examine in the next sections of this article could be deemed as modernist according to this model but that is not the only way to account for them.
Categories such as Global Musical Modernisms or Friedman's notion of Planetary Modernisms are convenient, but their purpose cannot merely be making room for other modernities or modernismsnamely, alternative or peripheral.That would only legitimize, once more, Western modernity as normative while deeming all those other modernities and modernisms, ultimately, as 'anomalies'.On the contrary, what globality or planetarity allows for is breaking away with canonical and hierarchical perspectives regarding modernism and framing modernity 'beyond the contemporary and the now'. 27For me, then, Caribbean modernity is not a shorthand for an alternative, non-normative modernity but a way to understanding the Caribbean in its own terms.Still, I also find Benjamin Piekut's notion of 'vernacular modernism' appealing and aligned with many of the things that I have said so far about jazz, modernity, and the Caribbean.For Piekut, building on the work of Miriam Hansen, it accounts for 'mass-produced, mass-mediated and mass-consumed modernism', the kind of music that 'does not often ring out in concert halls.One experiences it in nightclubs, bars, DYI venues, dance halls, and improvised spaces such as church basements, cinemas, town halls, lofts, community centers, and various converted outdoor facilities.Above all and most importantly, one listens to it on the radio, the stereo, or the computer.' 28Rather than registering lesser aesthetic value than 'elite' or art music forms, the 'vernacular' signals popular sensibilities, broader accessibility, embeddedness in mass media, 'local adaptability', everyday life, familiarity, relatability, entertainment, orality, aurality, bodily engagement, spontaneity, and larger audiences. 29ow it is time to delve into a host of dance venues in Havana, Santo Domingo, Mexico City, and Trinidad in the late 1910s.Examining the early history of the word 'jazz' in the Caribbean is a way to show that jazz is much more than what jazz historiography has made of it in the United States.But it is also a way to disentangle a small segment in the historical production of Caribbean modernity.

Dancing 'The Jazz'
Despite the consolidation of musical scenes in the United States and abroad under the umbrella of 'jazz' through the 1920sincluding the profusion of jazz bands around the world and the very idea of 'the Jazz Age'the word 'jazz' congregated multiple meanings and music styles.As an idea, 'jazz' gathered a cohesive symbolic universe of night dance and modern entertainment associated with a seemingly distinct kind of ensemble that included a drum kit along with any combination of piano, banjo, guitar, bass, violin, and wind instruments.More often than not, the expression 'to jazz' meant simply 'to dance'.In fact, before jazz was consistently configured in any way as music, or while it was being configured as such, it was often regarded as a dance, even a dance step, to be danced to the music of one-step, two-step, foxtrot, ragtime, and other 'modern' musics of the late 1910s and early 1920s.As music, however, the word 'jazz', especially in its international ventures, summoned a rather eclectic array of sound events, from the New Orleans style of King Oliver, Louis Armstrong, or Jelly Roll Morton to the imperial pop of Tin Pan Alley and Paul Whiteman to almost any popular and dance music around the world fashioned according to the visual and symbolic imaginary of the jazz band.Sometimes the word 'jazz' also meant just the drum kit or the special sound effects played with the drum kit or other percussion instruments; by extension, it could be a way to describe almost anything that sounded new, chaotic, or noisy.And it was even a kind of musical cadence or tag: 5-6-5-1. 30Jazz was, indeed, many things, all of them related in one way or another with modernityin its vernacular senseand with dancing scenes.Ospina Romero The Dawn of the Jazz Age in the Caribbean 357 The 'Great Dance' in Havana with which I opened this article, and which included a onestep named 'The Jazz', was announced to take place on 20 September 1917.By then, the word 'jazz' was beginning to gain international traction.31On 23 December, another 'Great Dance' was announced in Havana's Diario de la Marina on behalf of the same youth organization behind the September party.This time the venue was the ballroom of the Antiguo Ateneo, a prominent building located at Prado and Neptuno, also in downtown Havana.Along with ten danzones, two pasodobles, one foxtrot, and one waltz, the dance programme included two one-steps, one of those being, again, 'The Jazz'. 32As a matter of fact, this tune was the only repeat from the September party.One week later, on 29 December, the newspaper El Mundo announced another dance to take place for New Year's Eve, featuring a similar repertoire, which included, one more time, that one-step 'The Jazz'. 33This time, the newspaper also mentioned the name of the orchestra in charge of the performance: La Orquesta de Corbacho, an ensemble led by the cornetist Domingo Corbacho and known for its danzones, some of which it had recorded for Victor in 1911. 34'The Jazz' was included in the dance programme of at least two more parties in the first semester of 1918, both featuring Corbacho's orchestra and sponsored by the Asociación de Dependientes del Comercio de la Habana, a trade organization that owned one of the biggest and most outstanding buildingsor 'palaces'in the city at the time; first, in the last week of February and then in the first week of May. 35Just like in the other events, this already conspicuous tune was entangled withor somewhat escorted bydanzones, waltzes, foxtrots, pasodobles, and other one-steps.
A legitimate and tough question, of course, is what did this one-step, 'The Jazz', sound like?While the possibilities in terms of arrangements and interpretations in 1917 Havana are maybe vast, there are at least two clues to imagine it sonically, each pointing to a whole different direction.To begin with, there was indeed a one-step named 'The Jazz'or 'The Jass'in the United States, of which there is a recording from 1917 made for Edison by the Jaudas' Society Orchestra. 36'The Jass' was an instrumental piece derived from the popular Tin Pan Alley song 'Hong Kong'known also as 'The Chinese Love Song'written by Richard Pascoe (lyrics) and Hans von Holstein and Alma Sanders (music), published by Leo Feist in New York in 1916. 37The song is about 'a boy from old Hong Kong' who 'sings the whole night long', yearning to return to his homeland for his honeymoon.Orientalist references, as we will continue to see, were a common ingredientanother sign that the foreign and global nature of jazz was also what made people imagine it to be modern.While the cylinder recording of 'The Jass' conveys more of a marching band type of performance than a dancing groove, a straightforward rendition of the piano score would do a bit more justice to the dancing-like fashion of Holstein and Sanders' one-step. 38he second clue towards tracing the sonority of the Domingo Corbacho orchestra's rendition of 'The Jazz' is less literal and requires more imagination, but it might be more productive for pondering the affinity between the sound of jazz in New Orleans and the rest of the northern Caribbean.On the one hand, it entails the consideration of other pieces from the United States that could have either been the direct source for or informed the making of the Cuban version of 'The Jazz'.One of those pieces could have been 'Dixie Jazz Band One-Step', recorded on 26 February 1917 by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band for Victor, in New York, and most likely available in Havana later that year.39 The Original Dixieland Jazz Band was a group of five white musicians from New Orleans, usually credited with having stirred a jazz craze in New York and various places in the United States during 1917, and then in England, continental Europe, and elsewhere in the following few yearshaving contributed also to the international dissemination of the word 'jazz'.Notwithstanding the dynamics of white appropriation of early jazz on the part of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, and the extent to which their popularity was heightened by the sound recording industry at the expense of circumventing vibrant jazz scenes led by African American performers in New Orleans, California, and Chicago, their sound was much closer to the style of Cuban orchestras than that of the Jaudas' Society Orchestraeven if it was Holstein and Sanders' tune which they were meant to play.41 Alejandro Madrid and Robin Moore have extensively documented the musical entanglements between Cuban danzón and New Orleans's music during the years prior to the consolidation of early jazz.42 Thus, the music of the danzones that Corbacho's orchestra played at those dance parties in Havana in 1917 and 1918 might also be indicative of the way in which they could have performed not only a one-step such as 'The Jazz' but also any of the waltzes, foxtrots, and other one-steps in the programmes.43 Although the overall configuration of Cuban and New Orleans music at the time would appear to be quite differentespecially when comparing the recordings made by Domingo Corbacho's orchestra with those by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band or any other creole jazz band in New Orleans for the same mattercertain musical parameters point, on the contrary, to a common ground.These include, as Madrid and Moore have also shown, the instrumentation, the pervasiveness of melodic simultaneity and polyphonic improvisation, and, more importantly, the centrality of dancing grooves.
Indeed, in Louisiana, Cuba, and elsewhere in the circum-Caribbean at the time, it was primarily about dancing.Announcements, classifieds, and columns about parties, concerts, dance lessons, or social matters pertaining the new fashion of 'jazz'always in relation to the foxtrot and other 'modern' dancesproliferated in newspapers across Havana, Santo Domingo, and Mexico City between 1917 and 1920.For instance, a long article in Havana's El Mundo by Carmela Nieto de Herrera, on 15 December 1917, and presented as a 'lectura del hogar'or family readingwas devoted to the issue of 'how to dance the jazz' (Figure 1). 44It begins by reporting how jazz took New York by storm that winter, referring to the craze that followed the performances and recordings of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band earlier that year; also, how jazz had gained acceptance even in elite circles, so much so that it was 'the last word of what is new and gracious', although dance teachers in New York recommended jazz 'as a spicy but innocent note in the dance programme for night parties'.
And that is probably how and why a one-step like 'The Jazz' was recurrently included in dance parties in Havana in those days.
While Nieto de Herrera's piece was clearly meant to introduceand in a way demystifyjazz dancing, it also exoticized jazz as a foreign fad: an 'extravagant' dance, 'the latest Ospina Romero The Dawn of the Jazz Age in the Caribbean 361 expression of [US] American Fox Trot', and one of the four most popular dances of the season.The other three were, as determined in a conference of dance teachers in the United States, the 'Chinese Toddle', the 'Ramble'that Nieto de Herrera believed to be 'a pleasant combination of one-step, fox trot, and waltz'and the tango.Presenting jazz as a subset of the foxtrot was, as we mentioned before, quite common.An announcement by a 'Dancing casino' published in Mexico City's El Universal in April 1918, for example, introduced jazz almost in the same way Nieto de Herrera did four months before in Havana: 'the most elegant dance that is becoming a sensation in New York's high-society ballrooms.The Jazz is the latest derivative of the Fox Trot, more animated, more enthusiastic, and more elegant than the first, because its rhythm makes the dancers shine in all their amplitude, grace, and kindness.' 45Curiously, unlike the United States at the time, where the words 'jazz' and 'ragtime' were often used almost interchangeably, in Caribbean newspapers between 1917 and 1920 the word 'ragtime' hardly ever appeared in relation to 'jazz', unless it was in the name of a particular tune. 46or Nieto de Herrera, it was clear that jazz, the dance, was the creation of a single individual, Oscar Duryea, a well-known dancer, choreographer, and dance instructor in New York at the time, who had contributed in 1914 to the standardization and popularization of the steps for the foxtrot and who apparently invented a new dance in 1916: the 'two-two'. 47Thus, the intricate set of dancing instructions that Nieto de Herrera presented in Spanish to her readers in Havana came from a set of instructions published previously in English by Duryea.All things considered, following the steps seems to make evident that jazz danceas prescribed by Duryea and amplified by Nieto de Herrerawas bounded within the stylistic realm of foxtrot, tango, waltz, one-step, two-step, and other 'society dances' of the 1910s.While the specificity and sophistication of the instructions reminds us, in a way, of much older society dancessuch as the contradancethey also point to social parameters defined by Victorian and bourgeois sensibilities: Walk slowly during three steps in the line of direction, starting with the left foot.Stop on the third step, balancing the weight of the body [bending?]over the left foot; count long 'one, two, three,' which should account for six [beats] in the music.Quickly bring the right foot next to the left foot, put the left foot forward and change the step so that it falls over the right foot.Count two and four.Repeat the last two steps starting with the right foot and stopping over the right foot when giving the third step forward and count two.Advance with the left foot and stop for an instant.
(1).Cross the right foot behind the left foot, closing suddenly to find the step of the left foot and change the weight of the body over this [the left foot] and (2) move forward with the right foot and stop for an instant as you did before (3), use the left foot to find the right foot quickly, advance towards the right and change the weight of the body, and count (4). 48ese are just the first few lines of a two-part section devoted to the particulars of jazz dancing in a long article meant, again, as a family reading and, presumably, as a guide for domestic practice.Other instructions, further down in the guide, included 'advance with the right foot diagonally towards the front, and [move] to the side to join up the left foot to the right foot' and 'make half a turn to the left with a waltz step, i.e., move forward with the left foot and turn to the left'.Among the various pieces to be performed that night by the 'orquesta del profesor Barba' there was one named simply 'Jazz', a foxtrot. 50The word 'jazz' would accrue many other meanings, but always grounded in modern entertainment and related, in one way or another, to the dance floor.
Playing jazz, or the transnational shape of consumer culture While introducing jazz as a dance, Duryea, but voiced in Havana by Carmen Nieto de Herrera, stated: 'This dance is a Fox Trot but with a rhythm somewhat strange and different from the Fox Trot . . . it is much slower.' 51But Nieto de Herrera also described jazz as 'today's 48 'Camine durante tres pasos despacio en la línea de dirección, empezando con el pie izquierdo.En el tercer paso deténgase balanceando el peso del cuerpo sobre el pie izquierdo, cuente uno, dos, tres, largos, lo que vale seis en la música.Aproxime pronto el pie derecho al izquierdo, adelante el pie izquierdo, y cambie el paso para que caiga sobre el pie derecho.Cuente dos y cuatro.Repita los dos pasos anteriores comenzando con el pie derecho y deteniéndose sobre el pie derecho al dar el tercer paso hacia adelante, y cuente dos.Salga con el pie izquierdo y deténgase por un instante.(1).Cruce el pie derecho detrás del izquierdo, cerrando de pronto para encontrar el paso del pie izquierdo y cambie el peso del cuerpo sobre éste y (2) salga con el pie derecho hacia adelante y deténgase por un instante como antes (3), una el pie izquierdo para encontrar el derecho pronto, adelante hacia la derecha y cambie el peso del cuerpo, y cuente (4).' Nieto de Herrera, 'Lectura del hogar.Mundo, 15 December 1917, 4. It is interesting to note how this perception of jazz as 'slower' in comparison to the foxtrot contradicts a common tale in the historiography of early jazz, namely that audiences perceived the music as 'fast' and hence the name 'jazz', which some have believed to derive from either a local slang or a word in an African language that meant 'speed', 'speed up', or simply 'fast'.See Merriam and Garner, 'Jazz -The Word', 381; Ken Burns, dir., Ospina Romero The Dawn of the Jazz Age in the Caribbean 363 most nervous music' and a 'strange music' with which 'happiness is born, vibrates, and prevails'.She went on to say that the music to which 'the jazz' was supposed to be danced was called 'crazy cadenza', and that it was available in New York.While no recording or sheet music under that name appears to exist in any available discographies or databases, an article from 18 November 1917, in New York's American used that expression when talking about the music of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band: The peculiar, somewhat discordant melody is said to be produced by tuning each of the instruments at a different pitch; and to end some of the strains they occasionally play [with] what we have termed a crazy cadenza. 52 a matter of fact, although Nieto de Herrera did not mention the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, some portions in her article, scattered in different places, were a literal translation from that article, published one month prior in New York.Likewise, when describing the instrumentation to play 'the jazz', she ultimately portrays the usual format of early creole bands in New Orleans, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York City, and elsewhere in the United States including the Original Dixieland Jazz Band: 'the music for this dance is made with piano, cornet, trombone, clarinet, and drums'. 53This format, as Madrid and Moore have established, was in many regards similar to the instrumental configuration of danzón orchestras in Cuba at the time; the kind of ensembles that, as we have seen, were the main attractions in the several dance parties publicized during those years and which playedalong with a profuse collection of danzonesa variety of foxtrots, one-steps, two-steps, waltzes, pasodobles, and other danceable musics related, in the dance-scape of the era, to jazz. 54Rather than implying a direct or simple diffusion of musical parameters from the United States to the Caribbean, this commonality in matters of instrumentation was grounded in the Afrodiasporic character of both kind of ensembles, the shared colonial legacies of Louisiana and Cuba (i.e., military brass bands as the basis of popular ensembles since the nineteenth century), and the increasing relevance of these instruments for the music cultures of the circum-Caribbean. 55urther south in the Caribbean, this instrumental format and the perception of jazz as modern and 'crazy' music also appears in relation to other early mentions of the word 'jazz'.On 21 November 1919, the Hotel McKinney in Trinidad 'presented a gala scene, the occasion being the introduction of Jazz music to local society'as reported by The Argos the following day. 56The event began with a series of pieces clearly not regarded as jazz, including 'a sweet waltz' performed by the famous ensemble lead by George R. L. Baillie's (aka Lovey), a few songs rendered in operatic style, an instrumental piece by a string quartet, and a comedic song. 57'Then came the Jazz', and the description of the scene is revealing in many respects, beginning with the answer to the question of 'What is Jazz?': It is musiccrazy, tumultuous music that is played in perfect syncopated harmony.Do you understand it?It is the tango à la Bedlam, as was invented to make the soldier forget the terrors of the trench feet.That's the music.The Jazz instruments, as played last night by Lovey and Lovey alone, are not too numerous to mention: bass drum, slide trombone, syren [sic], klaxon castanets which are wooden instruments hollowed out and worked together with the tambourine, Chinese cymbals, ordinary foot cymbals made of brass, and lastly, rattles.This conglomeration of instruments was worked with marvelous dexterity by Lovey while his well-known band with Mr. Palmer at the piano made the rafters ring and roar with rapture at the ripping riotous Jazz.The feet of men and maiden went shooting to and fro; and while many danced everybody voted the function from beginning to end a magnificent success. 58 for Carmen Nieto de Herrera and the writer of New York's American the 'crazy' aspect of jazz was, to begin with, a melodic issue, resulting from an outrageous way to tune the instruments and to thread the various lines and sounds, for the chronicler of the party at the Hotel McKinney in Trinidad it was an all-encompassing condition throughout the scene, from the music being played to the dance floor.The word 'condition' here is not innocent.Indeed, jazz is described as 'the tango à la Bedlam', a direct reference to either psychiatric hospitals in general or to the Bethlem Royal Hospital (aka Saint Mary of Bethlehem), an old and famous hospital for the mentally ill in London.Still, tangoan inseparable companion of foxtrot in the realm of social dance at least since 1913appears as the known musical reference jazz could be compared with, or which it deviated from.Furthermore, Lovey's 'marvelous dexterity' with such a 'conglomeration of [mostly percussion] instruments' seems to point towards another defining feature of jazz, especially in its transnational ventures in the early 1920s and that I briefly mentioned a few pages ago: the playing of unexpected, noisy, and 'chaotic' sound repeatedly for the next few days (Figure 3). 70The dance academy of the Prince' (Príncipe Cubano) boasted that he was 'the only ballroom teacher who has danced before the King of Spain, [and] awarded in Vienna, Paris, Bucarest, Barcelona, Havana'.Besides jazz, one-step, foxtrot, waltz, and tango, their list included 'Boston, Scottish, [and] Horse Trot'. 71Several classifieds presented the same incentivesforeign or internationally seasoned teachers, group and individual lessons, daily or almost daily sessionsand even the same tariffs: either $5 per week (if in a group class) or $3 daily (for a private class).Almost invariably, 'jazz' was part of the menu, accompanied not only by foxtrot, one-step, tango, waltz, schottische, and danzón, but also sometimes by pasodobles and other 'Spanish dances'. 72Jazz' generated a condition of opportunity for many businessesfrom imperially minded corporations such as the Victor Talking Machine Company to local dance instructors and academiesand was sustained by the novel and unmistakably modern scenario of consumer culture.As De Grazia, Jacobson, myself, and others have shown, more than records, phonographs, cars, vacuum cleaners, Gillette razors, Hollywood films, and maybe anything else, the main export of the United States in the early twentieth century was consumer culture.73 The cultural dispositions of the African diaspora made it so that some of the sonorities, rhythms, and dancing vibes of jazz felt already familiar in the Caribbean, but consumer culture brought forth an unprecedented set of social practices.Jazz was listened to, played, and danced, but it was primarily consumed.Sometimes, in fact, it was consumed literally as was the case with the $1 'Jazz cocktail' sold at the Hotel McKinney in Trinidad, and which the main ingredient 'was half a pint of dry sparkling champagne of purest vintage.Gee Whizz!! Jazz!' 74 The growing popularity of 'jazz' did not prevent the rise of social anxieties of various sortsor it was precisely its appeal which triggered some of those anxieties.Carmen Nieto de Herrera, the writer of the long article about 'how to dance the jazz' discussed previously, was also in charge of a regular section in the same newspaper: 'Contestaciones'or 'Responses'in which she answered questions from the readers about all kinds of things from medicine to history to literature to romance to weather to music and more.On 7 September 1918, she answered one about the new fad of jazz.Unlike the uncompromising celebration of cosmopolitanism in the article from nine months ago, this time Nieto de Herrera expressed her reservations unapologetically on moral grounds: 'The Fox dance in vogue is called "jazz" but it is not really a decent thing, just as the [recent] fad of dancing having one's head resting on the partner's forehead.'75 A year and a half later, someone writing on behalf of E. Bernarda famous Russian-French dance instructor visiting Cubapenned in a long article in the same newspaper: '"Jazz", that embryonic and syncopated product that couples dance by joining their chests together, must be expelled as soon as possible through the last and least honorable of the doors.' 76 That had been, reportedly, the verdict of the US National Association of Dance Teachers.Bernard and his colleagues' outrage was directed primarily at the 'shimmy', that 'brother of jazz-band's music', 'a depraved son of the dance', and 'nothing less than a Bolshevik descendant of the goddess Terpsichore'.Therefore, as Bernard urged, it was imperative to 'approve in every community special antishimmy and anti-jazz ordinances and to designate an inspector commissioned to chase both blunders'a sign that his allusion to communism was not an innocent metaphor.
Nieto de Herrera's reservations and Bernard's prejudices epitomize the flipside of the hedonistic modernity heralded by jazz in the Caribbean.But they were also an anticipation of the kind of moral anxieties and racial prejudices that would become common throughout Latin America and the Caribbean in the years to come as the Jazz Age settled in the region. 77urthermore, in more than one way, they are a symptom of the cultural appropriation of Black musics and dances on the part of the entertainment industry and of social sectors defined either by whiteness or whitening aspirations.The national and international popularity of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band at the dawn of the Jazz Age was just one of the first signs of such a trend.As Elijah Wald explains, '[m]ost of the earliest bands to whom the word "jazz" (or "jass") was applied [in the United States] seem to have been white, and although one can easily argue that the jazz craze was just a white discovery of music that had already been played by black musicians and danced to by black dancers for at least a decade, that does not change the fact that the word was instituted as part of that white craze'. 78otwithstanding the breadth of racial identities that participated of the early jazz craze in the Caribbean, such a craze was also informed by a whitening framework and by the whitening of local elites. 79ernard and his associates' call to police dancing practices and to 'purge public dancing . . . of all vulgarity and degradation'a call fraught with racial overtonescan be read also as yet another anticipation of the kind of interventions that, in the musical realm, bandleaders such as Paul Whiteman would make a few years later.The repercussions of such interventions would certainly reverberate and be felt all over the world during the Jazz Age and beyond. 80rly jazz, modernity, and the retreading of tradition Since the late 1910s, jazz became a pervasive phenomenon on a global scale.Notwithstanding the popular appeal of the various musics and dances associated in one way or another with the 'jazz' label, the widespread dissemination of jazz was contingent upon the political power and visibility of the United States at the time.As Frederick Schenker eloquently puts it, the US empire was a force of domination as well as 'a medium of possibility in the production of multiple social forums and fields', jazz included. 81Rather than something created exclusively in the United States and then exported to the world, jazz sprouted out of Afrodiasporic cultural networks that extended through various nodes across the Gulf of Mexico and the northern Caribbean.However, its early circulations took place throughout imperial webs dominated by the United States and according to ideas of modernity shaped significantly by US consumer culture.
Many of the musical parameters that would eventually make New Orleans jazz a distinct musical form had been around and in the making for a long time in the Caribbean before the turn of the twentieth century.What was certainly new in the 1910s with the commodification of jazz as a miscellaneous collection of musics and dances was the way in which it was wrapped up in an intricate ethos of modernity, hedonism, white appropriation, and sometimes either elitism or exoticism.Between 1917 and 1920 in the Caribbean, the idea of jazz seems to have emerged as an entanglement of unmistakable foreign elementsincluding dance steps, repertoires, social behaviours, and even the word 'jazz' itselfwith vernacular sensibilities in matters of music and dance that made jazz feel as something already somewhat familiar.As the Jazz Age would unfold in the United States in the next decade, so it would in the Caribbean and elsewhere, sometimes along the same aesthetic and racial coordinates and sometimes on seemingly distinct groundsyet always intricately related.In the United States and eventually in the Caribbean and elsewhere, the label 'jazz', more than the sound of jazz, was what first stirred dance crazes; musical and unique cultural formations, however, would soon follow Although many of the written vestiges examined in this article indicate that the ideas about what jazz wasor was supposed to bewere significantly informed by the perspective of society dancing and dance instructors in New York City, the musicality of the ensembles playing 'the jazz' in Havana was Caribbean, that is, much more akin to the style of creole bands in New Orleans than of dance society orchestras in New York City.Thus, rather than entailing necessarily a further departure from early jazz in New Orleans, the development of jazz scenes in the Caribbean since 1917 shows, in my view, a revitalization of the Afrodiasporic character of jazz.It might not be much of a surprise, then, to read what the reporter of the party at the Hotel McKinney had to say about the new life of jazz in the Caribbean: 'Jazz reigned in England and the States for many months.In the former country he is now unhappily dead, to be born again, however, in music loving Trinidad.' 82t the end of the 1910s, modernity and modernism in the Caribbean were defined and shaped by an entanglement of ideas, social practices, cultural parameters, aesthetic projects, material scenarios, local and transnational tendencies, and circulations of multiple kinds.Rather than being dictated by European, North American, or 'Western' standards, Caribbean modernity in the early twentieth century took place at the intersection of old, new, newer, repurposed, or wholly unprecedented historical settings, inevitably knotted into a broader scenario of increasingly global modernity and yet fashioned according to local cultural practices, ideas, and parameters.Such historical settings included everyday practices of social distinction, industrial capitalism, consumer culture, political and commercial imperialism, sound reproduction technologies, (neo)colonial and decolonial moves, unremitting processes of musical hybridity, nocturnal entertainment, fashion trends, intense advertisement, the defiance of social norms and expectations about gender, the category of leisure time, and more.Jazz was a protagonist in this scenario, both a by-product and an expression of Caribbean modernity.
Dismantling US American exceptionalism in jazz studies is a difficult endeavour, yet one worth pursuing.Several authors before me have insisted on the Caribbean origins of jazz and a few others have underscored the significance of jazz within the imperial agenda of the United States. 83Yet the idea of jazz as quintessentially 'American' persistswith 'American' here also implying the symbolic erasure of the rest of the continent. 84The reasons for this are more political than intellectual or aesthetic.Jazz has captivated musicians and audiences around the world, but its international reputation has also been contingent upon the imperial standing of the United States.Just as European imperialism set the stage for the 'universal' character of classical music over three centuries ago, US imperialism in the early twentieth century played a key role not only in the globalization of jazz but in its consolidation as a modern referent of musical respectability; all this, of course, according to the symbolic coordinates of US American exceptionalism.It is not only that the celebration of jazz as US American music has ensued at the expense of obliterating its Caribbean roots, engaging with the African past only selectively for aesthetic or political convenience, and invigorating old fantasies pertaining the manifest destiny of the United States.A canonical narrative of jazz historyspread in a plethora of books, infamous documentaries such as Ken Burns's Jazz, and pedagogical tenets about the 'right way' to play ithas also derived in stylistic hierarchies that set US jazz and US musicians as the standard and everything and everybody else as imitations or imitators, in a never-ending game of catching up, regardless of how influential they have actually been for the development of jazz, even in the United States. 85By exploring the dawn of the Jazz Age in the Caribbean, this article has been an attempt towards correcting those narratives.
Building once more on Susan Friedman's ideas, we can posit that modernity and modernism can be found anywhere in the world and at different moments in history.Thus, Caribbean modernity can be described as a unique formation in the sense that it developed out of archipelagic circulations in matters of culture and coloniality, but it also happened in relation to other modernities.Early jazz, as a social and cultural paradigm, was developed, on the one hand, via negotiations, transactions, and circulations of various sorts, and on the other, by virtue of modalities of modern entertainment crafted in the United Statesparticularly in New York City and through music entertainment businesses on the East Coastbut re-signified in the Caribbean; re-signified as the imperial ventures of these businesses helped shape an unmistakably modern panorama of jazz dancing, jazz tunes, and jazz bands.Despite how linguistic, sonic, and discursive references in the arena of 'jazz' were inextricably related to the United States and to US ideals of modernity, jazz in the Caribbean would be rather different from jazz in the United States.And so would be the Jazz Age.
Jazzor modernity for the same matterwas a product of coloniality and imperialism as much as it was a transcultural phenomenon.The musical unevenness of global jazz in the early twentieth century is only mirrored by the economical and geopolitical asymmetries that informed its transnational expansion.As Friedman so eloquently puts it: Modernity is divergent, discrepant, fissured . . .Modernity affects different peoples differently, unevenly.Modernity contains overlapping, contesting modernities.No matter its claims of universalism, modernity is never the same, uniform, or whole.It diverges from itself in its very constitution.Not only the result of accelerating ruptures, modernity emerges from ruptures within: its fissures crack open the contradictions of expanding and contracting possibilities of rapid change.Just think of the slaveowner and the slavethey are part of the same modernity but are situated differently within it . . .Modernity might enhance the prospects of elites and retard those 85 Sergio Ospina Romero, 'El jazz de Estados Unidos y los otros jazz', BanRep Cultural (blog), 6 December 2022, www. banrepcultural.org/noticias/el-jazz-de-estados-unidos-y-los-otros-jazz.
Ospina Romero The Dawn of the Jazz Age in the Caribbean 373 whom the society marginalizes.The effects of modernity uneven.The world split open can produce new freedoms, new slaveries, new lives, new deaths, all at once or in sequence. 86zz, as an expression of Caribbean modernity, happened at the intersection of Western and non-Western modernisms as the region continued to wrestle with the aftermath of European and North American colonialism, and the African diaspora continued to thrust every social and cultural process.The 'modern' character of jazz was construed on the basis of the interaction between old and new forms of imperialism as well as old and new cultural parametersnot to mention local and foreign elements.More often than not, making something new entails a re-makingor renovatingof something old, as when retreading a tire (a practice far more common in Latin America and the Caribbean than in the United States).Modernity is no different.Modernity produces tradition to separate itself from the past, but it is often made out of a retreading of tradition.As I have discussed elsewhere, modernity in Latin America and the Caribbean has not been a straightforward tale of superseding traditional ways, but an ongoing collision of values, cultural practices, and temporalities.It has been more a matter of negotiation between and refashioning of old and new paradigms.Artefacts and practices become 'traditional' only as new standards and performances of modernity gain cultural legitimacy. 87 said before that jazz felt somewhat familiar in the Caribbean, but the same could be said maybe about modernity and music at large.I would like to imagine a timeless voice in the archipelago uttering something along the lines of 'we've been through this before, only that now they call it jazz'.The Caribbean has been a scenario of circulations for a long time.These circulations shaped the cultural contours of Caribbean modernity, but their effects reverberated globally.The planetary dimensions of jazz set before us a puzzling scenery of sounds, projects, ideologies, and characters that we are just beginning to disentangle.
belonging to the United States, New Orleans is part of the Caribbeanas Ana María Ochoa, Timothy Brennan, Nicholas Gebhardt, Ned Sublette, and others have eloquently insisted. 11Thus, engaging with the origins of jazz entails the consideration of a wide, intricate, and diverse cultural scenario that extends as a network across the northern Caribbean, including New Orleans, and that differs in various ways from the rest of the United States.That is the scenario that I have in mind in this article. territorial
On 20 May 1919, for instance, El Mundo publicized another dance party sponsored by Sociedades Españolas and Juventud Asturiana that would include a dance demonstration of 'The Inner Ci[r]cle Toddle' by 'the teacher, señor Manuel Rizzo and his beautiful companion, the distinguished señorita Ana María Relaño', a dance number that probably resembled those commonly presented by Vernon and Irene Castle in New York.