The presentation, titled "Sobre Las Olas: a Mexican Genesis in Borderlands Jazz," examined Mexican influence on early jazz musicians. Johnson read an excerpt from an article that will be printed in the Comparative American Studies journal this fall.
Johnson looked at the cultural exchange between Mexican and black musicians through "borderlands theory," an academic framework that studies how culture, knowledge and identity are created at the border between two societies. These two cultures came together in New Orleans and other areas across the South around the turn of the 20th century to create the new musical form of jazz, Johnson said. The exchange is part of a larger pattern of interaction and migration across the borders of two interwoven societies, she added.
"Mexican instrumentalists and instrumentalism left unquestionable influence on the formation of jazz," Johnson said.
Johnson critiqued the current scholarship on the history of jazz, saying that there has been an unwillingness to recognize Mexican influences on the music.
Johnson quoted University of California, Los Angeles professor Christopher Waterman's argument that both scholars and popular culture often ignore musical histories that do not fit well into bounded concepts of race. In the case of jazz, scholars have ignored the contributions of Mexican musicians because the dominant framework perceives jazz as a solely black art form rather than as a collaboration between the two cultures, Johnson argued.
Johnson described how woodwind instruments were popularized in New Orleans through the performance of a waltz entitled "Sobre Las Olas," which in English means "Over the Waves." Though the piece is now more commonly associated with amusement parks and fairs, it first came to America as a classical piece played by a military band sent by the Mexican government to the 1884 World's Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition in New Orleans, she said.
Many members of this band stayed in New Orleans, and, along with other Mexican immigrants, fundamentally influenced the development of jazz and other music in New Orleans, Johnson said. For example, the band's saxophonist, Florencio Ramos, founded the city's first musician's union.
Another Mexican immigrant, the clarinetist Lorenzo "Papa" Tio, taught fifteen pupils who went on to become professional jazz musicians, including Jelly Roll Morton and the trumpeter Don Albert. Other leading black and Hispanic musicians in jazz and blues got their starts playing with multi-ethnic "territorial" bands that toured cafes, vaudeville and minstrel shows throughout the south.
"The history presented here recalls century-long parallels and meeting points between black and Mexicano suppression and cultural expression and the inevitable exchanges that occur through migration and culture among marginalized communities," Johnson said.
Johnson said her inspiration for writing the article was rooted in research she was doing for another project. She came across a collection of interviews with jazz musicians on their death beds, she explained, and was struck by how many of them credited Mexican teachers with starting their careers.
Johnson then questioned why the scholarship on jazz has been so homogenous and why so little focus has been placed on Mexican music teachers.
