Introduction

The commercial Hindi language cinema is among the largest and oldest music film traditions on the planet. One of the most widely remarked and inflexible conventions of this highly stylised popular film genre is the regular appearance of song and dance scenes in almost every commercial Hindi film. A huge body of over 40,000 film songs (filmī gīt, as they are known in Hindi) has grown along with the thousands of Hindi sound films produced since 1931; unlike the more recent development of music video in the west, Hindi film songs have been intimately connected with larger narrative traditions and visual images from their very inception. Filmī gīt comprise one of the most intensely consumed popular music repertoires on the planet. Across the range of visual and sound media and on into live performance, the audience for film song must be numbered in the hundreds of millions throughout the South Asian subcontinent and diaspora.

In recent work in film and cultural studies, the set of social configurations, practices of everyday life, and ideological formations that constitute twentieth-century ‘modernity’ have been increasingly the subject of research and debate. Fuelled by a renewed interest in critical phenomenologies of modernity, most prominently the work of Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer, scholars have focused the debate on the specific historicity of visual culture in the early years of the twentieth century, in order to illuminate the contradictory and fragmented nature of modern mass cultural experience. Fusing the theoretical traditions of critical theory with the empirical and theoretical interest in contradiction and contestation typical of cultural studies, not only does this debate open new perspectives for considering the problem of mass and/or ‘popular’ visual culture, it can also contribute to rethinking the way we discuss the historicity of popular music. Conversely, a more precise understanding of the historicity of popular music practice in modern mass culture, its institutions and modes of experience, can broaden the scope of this debate beyond the spectacles of visual culture to the ‘attractions’ of the acoustic.

Introduction: Irishness and the ‘gift of song’

A key element in the range of stereotypes characteristically assigned to the Irish has been their natural proclivity for music and song, a feature of colonial discourse that can be traced back even to the Norman invasions of the twelfth century. However, the powerful link between the Irish and musicality (along with a host of other, considerably less attractive traits) was finally consolidated in the Victorian era at the height of the British imperial project (Curtis 1971; Busteed 1998). Irish music by this stage was constructed as a specific ethnic category based on the assumption that there was an identifiably Irish musical style that existed as an expression of the people, a reflection of their innate feelings and sensibilities. Music, therefore, became a feature of ‘race’, taking on properties for the coloniser that appeared to transcend the passage of time, that remained fixed and unchanging.

ROY BREWER

Introduction

From the mid-1960s to mid-1970s, Memphis, Tennessee was home of one of the most successful recording industries in the USA and its popular recorded releases began to rival those of Nashville, Los Angeles, New York and Detroit. Solo artists, song writers, session musicians and arrangers became overnight successes and a rebellious and influential upstart recording industry emerged. But the growth was too fast and, fuelled by zealous egos and competition, an infrastructure was never formed resulting in a musical and financial cataclysm from which the Memphis music community has yet to recover. This article is about those classically trained string musicians who were hired to play in the studios of Memphis during that era.

The fact is, if you want to make a difference in music, you have to change the machine. (Christie 1998)

In my book Rock Formation I borrowed from Walter Ong and Jacques Attali when I noted that, ‘The ability to record sound is power over sound.’ (Jones 1992, p. 51) I continue to believe that statement to be true. Arguments that I then made about the increasing role computers would play in the production of music have been borne out. They were not hard forecasts to make: one only had to imagine that the processing power of computer chips would continue to increase according to Moore's Law and then extrapolate the possibilities such increases would create for sound recording and reproduction. Even comments I made, vaguely tongue-in-cheek, expecting that we would have, in addition to the ability to record high-quality digital audio in the home, the ability to press CDs at home, and print colour inserts for CD jewel boxes, thus creating not only home studios but home pressing plants, have become a reality. However, with but a few years' hindsight, I want to append to these an argument that recording sound matters less and less, and distributing it matters more and more, or, in other words, the ability to record and transport sound is power over sound. Consequently, technology is an even more important element to which popular music scholars must attend.

In an article entitled ‘Sexist Pulp ads attacked’, the Independent on Sunday (IoS) reported public reaction to the posters advertising Pulp's new album This is Hardcore (posters had been defaced with the words ‘this is sexist’), and described the advertisements as part of a turn away from political correctness towards a new ‘anything goes’ realism (Kelly and Clay 1998). The poster shows the naked upper torso of a woman face down on a red leather cushion, in an awkward and ambivalent posture, with lipsticked, half-open mouth. Emblazoned across the centre of the image (which is a reproduction of the album cover) are the words ‘This is Hardcore’ in pink capitals. A leader in the paper on the same day, under the heading ‘This is violent. This is offensive’, interprets the image as a demeaning, sexist and violent representation of women and as an offence to the record-buying public. The leader asserts that ‘Just to sell a few songs, it shows a woman violated’, and concludes with the words: ‘To ban it [the poster] now would only generate more publicity for Pulp. So the only advice we have is for anyone thinking of buying the album. Don't bother.’ (IoS Leader, 1998, p. 4)

A seriously misleading error has crept into almost all the literature on the origins of New Orleans jazz. The error mistakenly attributes to the Jim Crow laws of the 1890s a significant role in the formation of the city's jazz tradition.

Jazz historians have done a reasonably good job of depicting the two black communities that existed in new Orleans from the time of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 until the twentieth century. One community comprised a French-speaking Catholic group who lived mostly in downtown New Orleans, i.e. the area of the city down-river from Canal Street. Before the Civil War this group, commonly called Creoles, or Black Creoles, but more accurately called Franco-Africans, comprised free people of colour as well as slaves, and after the war consisted of their descendants who perpetuated the group's language, religion and musical tradition, which combined French, African and Caribbean elements.

Members of the other black community were English-speaking Protestants who lived mostly in uptown new Orleans. That group, before the Civil War, was made up largely of slaves brought to New Orleans by Americans who flooded into Louisiana after the 1803 Purchase, though it also included some free people of colour. After the war, the descendants of these immigrants continued their language, religion and musical tradition, which came mostly from the rural South. There Anglo-Africans were generally less prosperous and less educated than the downtown Franco-African or Creole community.

The Festival International de Jazz de Montréal (Montreal International Jazz Festival), which celebrated its twentieth anniversary in 1999, has become one of the most popular music festivals in the world, attracting in just twelve days more than a million and a half people. Most visitors are Canadians and Americans, but Europeans are attending in greater numbers each year.

The first Festival, held in the summer of 1979, lasted less than a week. Since then, it has progressively expanded and has moved from one site to another several times to accommodate the growing number of visitors. At its current site in downtown Montreal, in the neighbourhood of the Place des Arts, it now lasts a full twelve days. In 1998, thirty-six concert series and two film series were offered for a total of 411 events. Of these, 103 were paying concerts, and 298 were free concerts held for the most part out of doors. Jazz presented in more than twelve bars all over the city also forms part of the event.

From noon to 6 pm, a free outdoor concert is held every hour. From 6 pm to midnight, two more free concerts are performed simultaneously. During the day, street bands give strollers a taste of a wide range of musical styles. For more than twelve hours the public can hear music nonstop by moving from one venue to the other. The downtown site is big enough to avoid the overlapping of music from simultaneous performances. At the end of the afternoon and in the evening, Festival-goers can enjoy the indoor paying concerts.