In August 2021, we conducted a virtual roundtable discussion with two musicians performing regularly in the traditions of Black American music to shed light on the realities of making and selling music in the twenty-first century in the context of nocoastjazz. Chaney Sims is a blues and jazz singer who lives in New Jersey. She cofounded the Heritage Blues Orchestra with her father, famous blues musician Bill Sims (1949–2019). Their debut album, And Still I Rise, received a Grammy nomination in 2012, thrusting the orchestra's four members into the spotlight of an international tour. The album is an homage to the blues traditions that each of the members hold dear, and—as Sims herself says—“honors African American roots music.” A self-described “songstress and storyteller,” Sims sings at the intersection of soul, blues, jazz, work songs, and rhythm and blues. In “C-Line Woman,” Sims makes the chanted phrases of this...
“Jazz Can Exist Anywhere”: A Virtual Roundtable with Chaney Sims and Kris Johnson
STEPHANIE DOKTOR is an assistant professor of music theory at Temple University, and her research and teaching ask, “How can we hear inequality?” Her most recent article, “Finding Florence Mills: The Voice of the Harlem Jazz Queen in the Compositions of William Grant Still and Edmund Thornton Jenkins,” published in the Journal of the Society for American Music (2020), was awarded the 2021 Best Essay in Popular Music Scholarship by the Popular Music Study Group of the American Musicological Society and the 2022 Irving Lowens Article Award by the Society for American Music. Her current book project, Reinventing Whiteness: Race in the Early Jazz Marketplace (under contract with University of California Press), evaluates the role of white supremacy in the unprecedented success of 1920s Black dance music.
CHARLES D. CARSON is currently associate professor of musicology/ethnomusicology at the University of Texas at Austin, where he teaches courses on contemporary art music, popular music, hip-hop, and jazz. His research interests include African American expressive cultures, American music, and music and tourism. He has presented and published on a variety of topics ranging from smooth jazz to theme park music.
Stephanie Doktor, Charles Carson; “Jazz Can Exist Anywhere”: A Virtual Roundtable with Chaney Sims and Kris Johnson. Jazz and Culture 1 December 2022; 5 (2): 65–74. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/25784773.5.2.04
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