Antipodean Riffs - Essays on Australasian Jazz - Bruce Johnson
1. Demons of Discord Down Under: 'Jump Jim Crow' and 'Australia's First Jazz Band'
Antipodean Riffs - Essays on Australasian Jazz - Bruce Johnson
John Whiteoak
Monash University
Description
The 1918-19 vaudeville act called 'Australia’s First Jazz Band' is the most appropriate metaphor for the commencement of an ‘Australian jazz’ tradition where this tradition is considered from the present-day perspective of a self-aware, long established Australian jazz movement. Yet improvisatory African-American-inflected antecedents of jazz can be traced back at least to the first colonial Australian performance of the blackface minstrel song and dance act Jump Jim Crow in 1838 and though black-face and, later, African-American minstrel show music and dance and two decades of ragtime music and dance before 'Australia’s First Jazz Band'. Taking its cue from Bruce Johnson's statement that early ‘jazz’ in Australia was an example of an ‘oppositional subculture’ that led back to our foundation criminality and ‘took over the spirit of convict and treason songs’(Johnson, 2004: 9), the article seeks to show that a continuum of African-American-inflected popular entertainment and its performance practices from Jump Jim Crow to Australia’s First Jazz Band functioned as the 'medium' for an oppositional 'spirit' that combined globalized oppositional values with others that are, arguably, traceable to colonial ' foundation criminality'.