Content area
Full Text
The Charleston Jazz Initiative. http://charlestonjazz.net
Media Reviews
Jazz's origin story is contested terrain. Some scholars, fans, and musicians believe jazz started in Charleston, SC, where the city's proximity to the Gullah made the Africanization of European culture a palpable part of the its soundscape.1For them, Charleston did not just inspire the eponymously named rhythm and knee-knocking dance moves of the Jazz Era; Charleston created jazz.
The Charleston Jazz Initiative (CJI) supports such a notion. It was created in 2003 by Dr. Karen Chandler, Director of the Arts Management program at The College of Charleston, and jazz journalist Jack McCray, editor of Charleston's Post and Courier until his untimely death in 2011. Chandler, core staff members (videographer Tony Bell and musical director Quentin Baxter), and CJI advisors organize events and artistic projects to fulfill their research mission: to "[document] the African American jazz tradition in Charleston, the South Carolina Lowcountry, and its diasporic movement throughout the United States and Europe between the late nineteenth century through today." 2Their website, charlestonjazz.net, canvases local contemporary music while linking it to Charleston's vibrant black popular music scene at the turn of the twentieth century.
Although New Orleans occupies jazz history's popular imaginary, the CJI website shows Charleston has a longer and equally lively tradition of jazz. Users are treated to the following: 1) a summary of CJI's current events, publications, artistic projects, and community network; 2) oral histories and biographies of past and present Charleston musicians; and 3) a small digitized portion of the rich collections documenting early black jazz, held at the Avery Research Center of African American History and Culture at the College of Charleston. A majority of the site content focuses on the Jenkins Orphanage Band (JOB) from the 1890s through the 1930s and its contemporary legacy.
Introductory pages explain how integral JOB was to the...