In late 1932, after a run of hard luck on tour – jobs that evaporated, buses that broke down, and money that ran out – the Kansas City orchestra of Bennie Moten headed for Camden, New Jersey to record for Victor. The session produced ten sides, among them a piece bearing the leader's name: ‘Moten Swing’. Guitarist and trombonist Eddie Durham had come up with the arrangement in Philadelphia not long before, constructing a series of brass and reed riffs over the chord changes of Walter Donaldson's hit song of 1930, ‘You're Driving Me Crazy’. The opening of ‘Moten Swing’ featured the band's pianist, William ‘Bill’ Basie.

This paper on Soviet Estonian jazz explores the dynamics of the processes which temporarily extinguished jazz from the public arena during late-Stalinism. This microhistory inflected study draws on the conception of ‘rupture’ through a close reading of the way jazz was constructed in the official narratives of the Estonian cultural newspaper Sirp ja Vasar. Jazz in Estonia experienced no rupture during the first postwar years, but then the three successive Stalinist campaigns, each with gradually decreasing tolerance towards jazz, led finally to the temporary public disappearance of the music in 1950. The strategies enforced in the late 1940s, such as anti-jazz orchestra reform, dance reforms that banned the foxtrot and the other modern dances, and the eradication of the word jazz from public discourse, all served to silence the ‘formalistic’ musical form by framing it with negative connotations and by shaping the taste of the masses according to Soviet ideological paradigms.

This article considers emergent musical dialogues and official cultural collaborations between Brazil and Angola in light of recent literature theorizing the Lusophone Atlantic. As Angola restructures following a long civil war and Brazil takes a leading role among the rapidly developing BRIC nations, new questions arise pertaining to the African heritage in Brazilian music, and to Brazil's role in Angolan cultural initiatives and musical markets. Through examination of Brazilian discourse about such exchanges, combined with a comparative analysis of three versions of Angolan musician Teta Lando’s 1974 song, ‘Angolano segue em frente’ (Landos original, a recent Brazilian rerecording, and a Brazilian remix), I reveal a South-South dialogue that builds on historical connections yet also establishes new resonances in musical evocations of Atlantic affinities and flows.

The late 20th century in Sweden saw the growth of music solely aimed at an elderly audience. This article discusses music within pensioner organisations, first assessing a cassette compilation marketed through the members' magazine of Sweden's largest pensioner organisation and, second, embarking on ethnographies of meetings within a study circle in music-listening arranged through a pensioner organisation, conducted in 1999–2000. The music selection in the cassette compilation diminishes certain genres of the included period and foregrounds others, adding up to a specific homogeneous national memoryscape. A central theme in the study circle was the production and negotiation of generational and individual memoryscapes. The two mediascapes produced different memoryscapes, one being nationally and temporally bounded, the other being at the same time local, transnational and transtemporal. To conclude, the article claims that if we wish to understand the nexus of ageing and music in contemporary society, we need to listen not only to musicians, entrepreneurs and care institutions, but also to their intended audiences.

At the level of micro-intonation, singing provides an object for intimate corporeal identification for the listener. In fact, the listener can, by way of vocal identification, achieve a direct corporeal relationship with the vocal performance. Similarly, the researcher can use his/her own purposeful identification and imitation as a means of observation. ‘Once in a century’ is a description often attached to the legendary singer Olavi Virta (1915–1972), who had a significant impact on Finnish popular music during the 1950s and is considered a cultural icon by many Finns. In this article, the vocal performance on the novelty recording ‘Luonasi jos oisin (‘If I were there with you’)/Isn’t it Romantic?’ is studied in order to map out its gestural content. Olavi Virta was in possession of a rich arsenal of vocal gestures. The gestures shared a relationship with the semantic content of the lyrics – not always mimetic but often contrapuntal, polarising, or estranging.

DH: Perhaps I could begin in the present and ask you how you see the status of the blues today in the black community in the US.

PO: There are a number of black writers who are interested in the arts, but I don't think blues has any significance for the black community as a whole, as gospel still has. Gospel is held together by the religious side, it's a different kind of structure. Rap seems to have taken over, at least as far as the younger generations are concerned.

DH: Do you sense any connection between rap and hip hop and the blues?

PO: There are connections, certainly, but I don't know how significant they are. There are superficial connections – for example the ‘Stackolee’ theme runs through several rap songs – but I'm not sure that is of any depth of significance. But rap songs do provide opportunities for people to express themselves as individuals; otherwise, there isn't a music that does that. As much as anything it's a functional connection, therefore, rather than a stylistic one.

DH: Rap lyrics are more outspoken in many ways than blues lyrics.

During the 1960s bossa nova was the trademark of Brazilian popular music. In the 1980s a second wave of Brazilian popular artists, such as Milton Nascimento, Djavan, Ivan Lins and Caetano Veloso, has emerged on to the international popular music scene. These artists have been issuing and distributing their records through international labels, and have also had their music recorded by other artists and groups like Pat Metheny and Manhattan Transfer (recipient of a Grammy for their album Brasil). Milton Nascimento, who since 1968 has been playing in concerts around the world with jazz musicians such as saxophonist Wayne Shorter, also receives good reviews in Europe. The Observer describes Milton Nascimento as ‘one of the top musicians in the world’, whose poetry ‘… fuses emotion, feeling, experience, dreams, [and] hopes’ with ‘a burnished voice … tempered with a taut edge at times’, and ‘beautiful melodies which are deceptively intense and powerful even when surrounded by funky keyboards or lush strings’. For the reviewer: ‘His songs have summed up the collective feelings of a nation’. And for Brazilians what is the meaning of Milton Nascimento's music?