Centre for Cultural and Creative Research (CCCR)
CCCR Researchers Present...
Location: St George's SG1.12
Ted Heath's Transatlantic Nationalism: Reworking Fats Waller's London Suite
Dr George Burrows
This paper explores Ted Heath's recordings of Thomas "Fats" Waller's most ambitious work: a suite depicting six districts of London in music. Waller wrote and recorded his London Suite while he was in London during a European tour, which was curtailed by the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939. The master of Waller's recording was lost during the first bombings of London, but a copy was eventually discovered and released in 1951. By that time Waller had died (in 1943) and the sheet music of the suite was published posthumously by London-based publisher Peter Maurice in 1947. This prompted British bandleader Ted Heath to have Waller's suite arranged for his band, who recorded the work in November 1947 and again, in slightly different arrangements, in December 1953. Heath's reworking of Waller's suite could be read as an attempt to reclaim this depiction of London by and for the British but, paradoxically, Heath's recording helped secure the reputation of his band in the United States. Thus, an exploration of the complex nationalism articulated in Waller's suite opens a rich discursive vein that illuminates the transatlantic formation of jazz that began decades before but was maintained in the late forties and early fifties. This questions anynotion that the movement of jazz across the Atlantic was all one way (from America to Europe) and suggests that jazz relied at least as much on European national tastes for its identity as it did on its presumed African-American heritage.
National cinema, transnational production – the case of Palestinian filmmaking
Dr Yael Friedman
Based on the findings of my PhD. research this paper will discuss the contexts of production of contemporary Palestinian films. Generally understood as a project of counter-representation, I suggest that the context of production of Palestinian cinema complicates the categories of both ‘national cinema’ and of ‘transnational cinema’. On the one hand seeking to reconstruct a cinematic national body and on the other hand working under conditions of political dispersion and transnational production, Palestinian filmmakers are caught up in a set of intrinsic tensions.