Gramophone Concert “Jazz Summit (48) – The Color Line”

2018.03.30
ACADEMIA

[Date] Friday, March 30 2018　18:00 (expected to end at 19:15)
[Venue] Intermediatheque 2F Lecture Theatre ACADEMIA
[Admission] Free
The number of seats is limited to 48. We request your comprehension.
[Organization] The University Museum, the University of Tokyo
[Cooperation] Hideki Umeda + Mac Sugisaki
[Program Conception] Intermediatheque Department, The University Museum, the University of Tokyo (UMUT)

A cycle of gramophone concerts is regularly held within the lecture theatre ACADEMIA of the Intermediatheque. This concert series focuses on the Satoshi Yuze record collection, from which we select famous 1920-1940s jazz recordings. We play them on the illustrious E.M.G. Mark IX and other gramophones, in order to share a quality of sound which has now vanished from public spaces.
Wait a minute, wait a minute, you ain't heard nothin' yet… With these famous words, the film The Jazz Singer (1927) precociously introduced jazz in the film world at the early stages of the talkie. However, the protagonist was a white actor, Al Jolson, in blackface. Ten years earlier when the first jazz record was made, it was again a white band which was featured. Although jazz was becoming a central pillar of American culture, segregation barred its representatives’ access to studios. This concert will cover the history of the Color Line from the ODJB’s first recording in 1917 to the late years of the SP record in the 1950s, from such varied points of view as the tunes’ theme, the bands’ composition, the labels’ management policy or the jazzmen’s political stance.



On the Cycle of Gramophone Concerts
“Gramophone”, “Phonograph”, “Graphophone”, “Zonophone”… After the invention and diffusion of a mechanical system capable of recording and playing back sound, it took several decades before the terminology designating this device took root. It is said that meanwhile, the perplexity of people discovering this enigmatic piece of furniture emitting wonderful sounds was beyond imagination, ranging from curiosity to fear. However, with the generalization of LPs, CDs and digital audio files, gramophones have fallen out of use, and those remaining in museums simply exist as exhibition items. This concert series aims at activating the gramophone again as a playback device, in order to appreciate its possibilities anew.
The University Museum, the University of Tokyo These gramophones will play a wide range of music, and various types of records. Among them, a most precious source of music is the Satoshi Yuze collection, donated to the University Museum in 2012. This private record collection, focusing on jazz music, contains ten thousand SP records. By playing on luxurious gramophones the collection constituted by Satoshi Yuze, which is the work of a lifetime, we will not only introduce rare recordings, but we will also share the quality and deepness of a sound lost with the advent of the digital era. In the iPod age, by getting together within the Intermediatheque lecture theatre and experiencing musical gatherings from another era, we intend to develop the museum space into a site for synaesthesia.