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Burford, trained in musicology at Columbia University, came up in a black Seventh Day Adventist church that did not practice gospel music. [...]he came to the music a bit later in life, first as an avid fan and then as a devoted scholar. Burford ends his story with the city’s 1955 birthday salute to Jackson, hosted by Studs Terkel, and featuring testimonies by a cadre of influential church leaders, journalists, and civic leaders including Chicago Mayor Richard Daley. Burford concludes that Jackson served as something of a “cultural interpreter” as she “shuttled between the church and the world of popular culture, to negotiate and mediate the visceral pleasures new audiences took from the sound of gospel music…” LP audio recordings, radio, and the emerging medium of television came together mid-century to usher black gospel music beyond the confines of the African-Ameican church and into the realm of American popular culture.

American performance traditions and music industry trends have historically denigrated religious practices and spaces that African descended people considered sacred or worthy of regard. This legacy of sacrilege is an extension of colonialism wherein the cultural traditions of those conquered are marked primitive, strange, or laughable. Mahalia Jackson resisted such colonial systems of meaning through her discursive song and narratives incorporating both sacred and vernacular Black American traditions across the United States of America and Europe. It was her European success in the early 1950s that boosted her domestic career and distinguished her from peers with equal or greater talent. This critical hearing of her performance, together with a brief archeology of the term \"gospel,\" reveals how Jackson's decolonial song labor disrupted structures that had previously excluded the African descended practices and people, and Negro women in particular, from the realm of the sacred.

African American gospel music is a unique and distinctive idiom that has had a pervasive influence upon the development of contemporary popular music. While there are now many sources available on African American gospel music, the focus of the vast majority of these studies is on the sociological, historical and stylistic aspects of the genre, rather than on identifying and codifying specific musical characteristics and performance practices. This paper extends the discussion of gospel singing techniques in Andrew Legg's 2010 article ‘A taxonomy of musical gesture in African American gospel music’ (Popular Music, 29/1) by examining some of the key performance practices associated with rhythm and lyric treatment in African American gospel music, as well as common structures in gospel music improvisation and accompaniment. Through analysis of selected recordings, this research proposes a codified frame of reference for the definition and discussion of terminologies and performance practice techniques inherent within African American gospel music.

* VARiOUS ARTİST/ JAZZ FROM AMERİCA ON DiSQUES VOGUE2 (Sony Music/Disques Vogue/Legacy 88875140962) 1) Duke Ellington & Billy Strayhorn (Mercer), Oscar Pettiford Quartet (Mercer), Serge Chaloff & the Herdsmen (Futurama - 10\" LPs); 2) Stan Getz Quartet/Quintet (Roost - 10\"LPs, 78 singles); 3) Art Tatum (Vogue [Fr]), Gene Norman \"Just Jazz\" and \"Blues Jubilee\" concerts (Modern, Jazz Selection, Discovery - 10\" LPs, 78 singles); 4) Charlie Christian @ Minton's, w/Dizzy @ Minton's (Esoteric - 10\" LPs); 5) \"Dixieland Jubilee\", Lu Watters, Kid Ory, Albert Nicholas, Bob Scobey (Down Home, Dixieland Jubilee, Ragtime - 78 singles); 6) Charlie Parker (Dial - 10\", 12\" LPs, 78 singles); 7) Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Fats Navarro, Red Norvo, Hank Jones [\"Originators of Modern Jazz\"], James Moody, Buck Clayton, Hot Lips Page, Howard McGhee [A Date With...] (Dial, Comet, Black & White, Melrose - 10\" LPs, 78 singles); 8) Errol Garner (3 Deuces, Roost - 78 singles); 9) Albert Ammons, Meade Lux Lewis, Blind John Davis (Blue Note, Vogue [Fr] - 78 singles); 10) Mahalia Jackson (Apollo - 78 singles); 11) The Spirit of Memphis Quartet, John Lee Hooker (King - 78 singles); 12) Wynonie Harris, Slim Gaillard, Tiny Bradshaw, Little Esther, The Dominos, Earl Bostic (King, Federal, Queen - 78 singles); 13) Jelly Roll Morton (Commodore, General - 78 singles); 14) Dave Brubeck Quartet (Fantasy - 10\" LPs, EPs, 78 singles); 15) Miles Davis, Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk (Blue Note - 10\" LPs, 78 singles); 16) Red Norvo Trio, George Shearing Quintet (Discovery - 10\" LPs); 17) Gerry Mulligan Quartet (Pacific Jazz - 10\" LPs); 18) Chet Baker Quartet (Pacific Jazz - 10\" LPs, 78 excerpt); 19) Sidney Bechet, Bechet/Spanier Big Four (Blue Note, HRS - 10\" LPs, 78 single); 20) Lester Young (Philo/Aladdin - 78 singles). Once again, the CDs are encased in accurate reproductions of the original LP jackets and all are held in a sturdy box with a serious booklet of notes, which has another introductory essay by Alain Tercinet, followed by session, personnel, and selection details, plus a final page on dating the albums chosen. [...]up is a collection of \"Gene Norman Presents - 'Just Jazz', or 'Blues Jubilee'\" concert recordings made in '47, '49 and '50 in California.

“The Black Church” is a popular phrase, often uttered with little consideration of the historical dissonances that make up Black Christianity. Despite the ways Black Christianity has shared in the common aim of dignity, humanity, and freedom asserted throughout the broader history of Black religion, there has never been one monolithic Black Church. However, when viewed as a “tree with many branches,” to borrow Christopher Small’s terminology for describing the tradition of Black music making, the Black Church represents a tradition with multiple performance practices and politics that have changed throughout history. Today, many young Black activists have turned to the Black church for political support only to find most clergy unwilling to make the kind of bold gestures of resistance seen in the Civil Rights era of the 1960s. Also, younger Black activists have found the current church particularly hostile toward queer identities. The church they face, however, is not the sum total of the Black Church as a tradition. This essay is a mediation in and meditation on the Black Church’s interaction with contemporary Black activism and the tradition of Black working-class church activism as a “usable past,” a spiritual resource for the current crossroads in Black citizenship. I speak of Black working-class churches as a descriptive frame rather than in the exclusively demographic sense. Black working-class communities brought Black labor activism into churches, but further investigation is needed to adequately describe the membership of congregations discussed here. As an alternative to traditional Black Church historiography, viewing some of the connections among class, culture, and queerness can reveal how Black spirituality thrives beyond the view of the church from the top down, but it also demonstrates how and why this version of the Black church had to be sacrificed in the onslaught of neoliberalism.

As a church-based vocalist, as a recording artist who specialized in a form of black vernacular music, and as a pop-cultural celebrity, Mahalia Jackson (1911-72) had the unusual distinction of being discovered three times. Migrating to Chicago in late 1931 at the age of twenty, she sang in the choir at Greater Salem Baptist Church and in a pioneering gospel group, the Johnson Singers, before going on to perform almost exclusively as a soloist. She made her first commercial recordings for Decca in 1937, but her true breakthrough came in Jan 1948 with the unprecedented success of her double-sided single for Apollo Records, \"Move on up a Little Higher,\" which outsold Apollo's better promoted jazz, rhythm and blues, and pop releases on the way to becoming black gospel's first million-seller.

The author wants to begin his remarks by thanking Anita for asking him to take part in this forum. As it turns out, the invitation came just he was feeling frustrated by the fact that he had a manuscript on his desk in need of external peer review. So this made him realize how the administrative attack on Salaita had implications that reached far and wide in some not-so-immediately-apparent ways as well as the many glaringly obvious ones. This callous and calculated decision by Chancellor Phyllis Wise was interfering with his work. Like many Asian Americanists as well as scholars and activists from across the country and various parts of the world, he registered his concern and disapproval with the UIUC Board of Trustees. The Imperial University casts a pretty big shadow, and university presses are oftentimes silent and invisible entities within their parent institutions.

[...] we would like to thank the Arts Council of New Orleans and Ned Sublette for giving us permission to reproduce their photos on the cover.