EPSOM & EWELL JAZZ NEWSLETTER

October 2019

We meet on the Second Tuesday afternoon each month at All Saints Church Hall, Fulford Road, West Ewell, KT19 9QY

Tuesday 8 October - The O’Keh All Stars a seven piece band led by John Goddard with

Enrico Tomasso, Geoff Cole and Hugh Crozier. The concert will be held in the church starting at 2pm through to 4.30pm with a half hour break at 3pm. Doors open at 1.30pm. Tickets at the door are £10 with free tea/coffee and cakes. Church £10 Tuesday 12 November – Ewan Bleach’s Cable Street Rag Band and Louisa Jones’ Whiskey Moon Face with Dakota Jim Ydstie (USA) and John Kelly Hall £10

Saturday 9 November – Keith Nichols’ Blue Devils Orchestra at Menuhin Hall, Stoke d’Abernon, Cobham (arranged by the Watermill Jazz Club, Dorking).

https://themenuhinhall.co.uk/ Or call the box office:08700 842020 Tickets £25

The Box Office is open for telephone bookings Monday to Friday 10am - 3pm, except Wednesday 10am - 12.30pm.Closed for lunch 12.30-1.00pm daily. Tuesday 10 December – Keith Nichols’ New Orleans Band – Christmas Party With Enrico Tomasso, Ewan Bleach, Martin Wheatley & Graham Hughes.

Mulled wine & mince pies £20 at the door (£15 pre-paid) Hall Tickets now on sale.

Jill Spencer (1932-2019) – A “New Orleans” style celebration of Jill’s life was held at

Kingston on 25th September with some great jazz – view at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxJoRcX4QIM

Who’s Afraid of the Jazz Monsters? Here is an interesting article just published on the internet by”History Today”

For many Americans, jazz was the music of demons, devils and things that go bump in the night.

By Carrie Allen Tipton |

Published 20 September 2019

King Oliver and his Creole Jazz Band, Chicago, 1923, showing Louis Armstrong and his wife, Lil Hardin

© Gilles Petard/Redferns/Getty Images

Moral panic in 1920s’ America was expressed in headlines such as one from the Kansas City

Kansan of 16 January 1922 that trumpeted the perils of ‘Vampires, Jazz, Joyrides [and] Turkish

Immorality’.

While ‘vamps’, motorcars and Eastern influences were favourite targets of the press, the fiercest

language was reserved for jazz. By the early 1920s, jazz was all the rage, bringing not only a new

musical language, but a new way of life. The censorious public discourse connected jazz with

insanity, drug addiction, chaos, the primitive and bestial, criminality, infectious disease, the

infantile, the supernatural and the diabolical. Across the United States, writers, politicians, music

educators, critics and ministers framed jazz as a monstrous threat.

Vampires (‘vamp’ in its less alarming form) were one type of monster associated with the jazz

lifestyle. Vamps were dangerous, liberated women, who, just as in postwar France, Germany and

Britain, embraced the dances, underworld, daring fashion and openly seductive behaviour that

critics associated with jazz. This change of ‘vampire’ from folkloric monsters to human women was

rooted in Rudyard Kipling’s 1898 poem ‘A Fool There Was’. Often reprinted in American

newspapers as ‘The Vampire’, the poem about an irresistibly seductive woman was written as

promotional material for Philip Burne-Jones’ painting of the same name. Soon shortened to

‘vamp’, the image was widely adopted in silent film, eliding exoticism, Orientalism and the

supernatural. By the 1920s, vamps were closely connected to the emerging jazz culture. As early as

1919, the Oakland Tribune ran a lighthearted column declaring that ‘jazz vampires’ were the ‘new

thing’, the ‘antithesis’ of the silent film vamp Theda Bara’s ‘soulful’ version.

The Jazz Age vamp was more detached from the Orientalist and supernatural overtones of her

silent film incarnation, but the term – sometimes with its sinister origins – persisted in popular

culture. Although many Americans playfully embraced the vamp concept, critics of Jazz Age

culture still found her (and occasionally, him) disruptive. The popular film vamp Nita Naldi

summed up the figure in a 1924 Los Angeles newspaper interview, using the term in its startling

entirety: ‘Upon jazz music, vampires and a natural restlessness inherent in the American people

rests the blame for the spirit of disquietude which has inundated the country.’

Other, more heavy-handed public rhetoric framed 1920s’ jazz not merely as a source of disquiet, but of terror. Katherine Willard Eddy of the Young Women’s Christian Association stated in a 1920 address at the University of Wisconsin that ‘We are in deadly fear of the Jazz Devil, the demon which is consuming the country.’ A 1921 notice in the Logansport Pharos-Tribune assured readers that ‘the whole world is rising in arms against the monstrous jazz and its finish is not far removed’. In 1922, noted Denver lawyer and Prohibition crusader John Hipp described jazz dance halls as ‘ticket offices to hell’. That same year, a Charlotte Observer columnist moaned, ‘Where can we hear music that is not of the hellish jazz?’ And in 1925 the American

music critic Carl B. Adams declared that, before the bandleader Paul Whiteman’s interventions, ‘a jazz band formerly was a diabolic contraption for the production of weird notes and heinous discords’, a collection of sonic ‘terrors’. Whiteman, Adams noted, had ‘removed the deadly fangs from the mouth of the monster jazz’. By Carrie Allen Tipton who writes about American history, pop culture and music. See

https://www.historytoday.com/history-matters/whos-afraid-jazz-monsters for the remainder of her fascinating article.