Minor Stories: Jazz, Istanbul, and the War Years

This paper examines the transnational setting of black performance in the city as a product of war, modernity, and marginalities. In 1914, Karl K. Kitchen wrote of the district of Pera’s diverse nighttime performance schedule where “huge blacks in gorgeous uniforms” distributing handbills on the street mixed with a plethora of languages (Kitchen, 1914). Just a few years later and as a product of wartime migration, Black American trombonist and composer Earl B. Granstaff who had performed before U.S. and Turkish dignitaries in Constantinople remarked to a New York Amsterdam News correspondent that black musicians were “occupying more and higher positions in Constantinople than in any other place.” Although Granstaff’s comment addresses the post-Armistice realities, he references a performance circuit that had begun in the mid-nineteenth century and that highlighted black artists. In particular, the years of the Great War witnessed more Black American military musicians with James Reese Europe and the Hellfighters ragtime tunes gaining popularity throughout the continent. Constantinople was connected to the wartime landscape as a recipient of artists who were forced to leave other impacted European capitals as exemplified by the minstrel artists-cum-early jazz musicians George Duncan and Billy Brooks, who reported on this transoceanic network of performers while based in Cairo. Drawing upon a range of sources including foreign and Ottoman press, travel narratives, diaries, and visual materials, this paper localizes the performance to the district of Beyoğlu and situates Black performance as a form of transnational migrations. In particular, the paper considers ragtime and early jazz performance as part of overlapping diasporas, i.e. refugees, musicians, minority communities, into the city, that scripted difference onto the district’s social topography which can be expressed through “bodily metaphors (cultural, geographical, racial, ethnic, sensorial)” (Ramsay Burt: 1998).