Demons of discord down under: 'Jump Jim Crow' and 'Australia's first jazz band'

The 1918-19 vaudeville act called Australia s First Jazz Band is the most appropriate metaphor for the commencement of an Australian jazz tradition if this tradition is considered from the present-day perspective of a self-aware, long-established Australian jazz movement. Yet improvisatory African-American-inflected antecedents of jazz can be traced back at least to the first colonial Australian performance of the blackface minstrel song and dance act Jump Jim Crow in 1838 and through blackface and, later, African-American minstrel show music and dance and two decades of ragtime music and dance before Australia s First Jazz Band . Taking its cue from Bruce Johnson s statement that early jazz in Australia was an example of an oppositional subculture that led back to our foundational criminality and took over the spirit of convict and treason songs (Johnson 2004: 9), the article seeks to show that a continuum of African-American-inflected popular entertainment and its performance practices from Jump Jim Crow to Australia s First Jazz Band functioned as the medium for an oppositional spirit that combined globalized oppositional values with others that are, arguably, traceable to colonial foundational criminality .