Listening for Africa: Freedom, Modernity, and the Logic of Black Music’s African Origins by David F. Garcia (2017)

The period roughly between the 1930s and the 1950s is at the center of this study. That is, how writers, academics, but mostly dancers and musicians back then explained, or rather performed their idea of Africa as the most important impulse in shaping their respective art forms.

In those meaningful years, fascism and racism shaped long periods of time and one idea to put those tendencies to an end was to foster democratic and after all aesthetic values connected with equality and spirituality that would serve true modernism. The connection of “all-things-African” with egalitarian impulses, pure and aesthetically refined expressions such as (jazz) music, dance, and the mambo should – so the initial idea – provide enough positive energy and convincing proof so that African nations, the US and Europe would embrace those highly democratic and moreover “just” values together and start a real dialogue that would not exclude Africa from developmental processes anymore. Unfortunately, it did not work out.

So it is a bit difficult to tell what the book is really about. It focuses on musicology, anthropology, African Studies, dance and modernism a lot. It is also a great deal about the mambo and musics of Latin America. Nevertheless, the sturdy ties of all of those ingredients are expertly explained and give a strong impression of what the African Diaspora invented, transported, influenced and what firm impulses it gave to modernism in the US. Without it, almost anything post-1910s in music, dance or design may have taken a different course. Garcia shows and puts the spotlight right on those powerful connections between dance, jazz, Afro-Cuban music, modernism and the Diaspora in that particular period.

So naturally, here are many links to Melville J. Herskovits, Katherine Dunham, Harold Courlander, Asadata Dafora, Dámaso Pérez Prado and others, who played a crucial role in distributing and promoting their respective precious art forms and intellectual finds.

Interestingly enough, the field recordings of the early 1940s in Haiti or Havana mentioned here in great detail show the huge influence the phonograph recordings, film and radio broadcasts had on the local music scenes there since the recorded outfits and individuals were already reproducing modernity or were at least incorporating certain aspects of it into their traditional styles. (A website with audio files of at least some of the important field recordings mentioned by Melville Herskovits or Harold Courlander may have come in handy here.) Which shows the ease and energy of originally African music styles to assimilate new musical influences.
Author David F. Garcia is Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and has published on the music of Latin America before.

Review by Dr. A. Ebert © 2018

David F. Garcia. Listening for Africa: Freedom, Modernity, and the Logic of Black Music’s African Origins. Duke University Press, 2017, 376 p.