Dartmouth Events

“Incantations From South to West: West Coast Blues Births ‘Cool Jazz’ and Rhythm and Blues,” considers how the migration of Black Southerners to California post-1930 profoundly shaped West Coast jazz, blues, and Rhythm and Blues (R&B) cultures. West Coast blues, with its distinctive smooth vocals and jazz-influenced style, laid the groundwork for the ‘cool’ aesthetic in West Coast “cool jazz,” as exemplified by musicians like Chet Baker and Gerry Mulligan. This migration, while giving birth to new sounds in American popular music, also intersected with antiblack antagonisms, as Black migrants navigated segregation and hostility in their new home. The talk proposes that California’s Black sound cultures are central to understanding the creation of popular music forms like R&B and jazz, asserting that the music both reflects and challenges the social and political realities of its time. By examining the musical lives of blues musicians like T-Bone Walker, it highlights the intimate connections between Black Southern traditions and the evolving cultural landscape of California, honoring the enduring legacies of these sound cultures.

About the speaker: 

Brittnay L. Proctor is a researcher and writer of performance, popular culture, and sound/visual culture at the nexus of blackness, gender, and sexuality. She is Assistant Professor of Race and Media in the School of Media Studies at The New School (NY, NY) and author of Minnie Riperton’s Come to My Garden (Bloomsbury Press: 33 1/3 Series). She is currently working on two book projects; one of which soundtrack’s black Southern migration to California during the Second Great Migration and the other, which draws on LP records and Compact Disc’s (CD’s), to trace the sonic and visual discourses of gender and sexuality in funk music.