Lecture by Dr. Traci Lombré
Department of American Culture
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Abstract: The traditional “Louis Armstrong to Duke Ellington to Minton’s Playhouse” jazz history narrative that exists in both mainstream and academic circles assigns the origins of the aesthetics of blues-based swing and bebop to New York City. Blues-based swing, generally associated with New York’s Cotton Club performances, and the music of Duke Ellington and Count Basie, and bebop, created during the 1940s and popularized at Harlem’s Minton’s Playhouse, have been assumed to be an organic development of Harlem’s cultural landscape. This presentation explores the connection between this music and the cultural production of the Black Kansas area communities from which several jazz musicians, such as Count Basie, Mary Lou Williams, Ben Webster, Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins, Buck Clayton and Charlie Parker, came. Gathered through the use of ethnography, archives, and oral history, this research challenges this music as being indigenous to Harlem. Dr. Traci Lombré explains why Kansas’ Black communities became incubators that nurtured key contributors to blues-based swing, and bebop before they garnered national acclaim in Harlem, to show that these musics’ aesthetic and the performance practices of key contributors, originated in the socioeconomic and intellectual progress of Black Kansas.
Long-term Chicago South Side resident and Kansas City, Kansas native Dr. Traci Lombré is a cultural historian and ethnomusicologist specializing in the culture, performance, and pedagogy of Kansas City and Chicago’s Black community-based jazz traditions. She obtained a master’s degree in Middle East Studies from the University of Chicago, and recently completed her Ph.D in American Culture at the University of Michigan. Dr. Lombré is the co-author of a forthcoming book on the role of Black song in American culture, under contract with the University of Michigan Press. Her cultural commentary has been featured on NPR’s 1A with Jenn White. She has written for the award-winning 2023 Toledo Public Radio series, Conversations in African American Music with Dr. Louise Toppin, and from 2021-2023 was an official photographer for the internationally renowned Chicago-based Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) Great Black Music Ensemble.
Part of the Nazir Ali Jairazbhoy Colloquium Series, this event is sponsored by The UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music Department of Ethnomusicology