While the rock'n'roll era, dance bands, country and the blues have been the subject of detailed and analytical histories, the 1890s, those formative years of music-recording, still await adequate and rigorous scrutiny. The standard (and only) history of the recording process remains Roland Gelatt's The Fabulous Phonograph, whose first edition appeared in 1955. But while Gelatt's foreword promisingly notes that ‘the history of the phonograph is at once the history of an invention, an industry and a musical instrument’, his book seldom rises above a journalistic narrative. It is also marred by an ill-concealed bias towards the classical repertoire and against popular musics.

‘And this, after all, we do know with certainty: that in the 1880s in and around New Orleans and in other parts of the South, they were beginning to play the music we call jazz.’ So wrote Barry Ulanov who was convinced that jazz ‘reached back to the twelve bar form of the folk tune … and evolved that most durable and most thoroughly adaptable of jazz forms, the blues’. Picked out by ‘men and women in the backwoods and the front parlors making the delicate little changes, insisting upon the famous “blue notes”’, it took shape ‘long before the famous early names of jazz – before Buddy Bolden and Freddie Keppard and Papa Laine’ (Ulanov 1958a, p. 17). Ulanov was writing in 1957, more than thirty years closer to the origins of jazz, when a number of the veteran musicians of the first and second generations were still living. His ‘certainty’ implied that the blues was the wellspring of jazz from which it drew its inspiration and its improvisation.

The purpose here is at once simple and complex – to show that both academic and popular perceptions of the origins of jazz are wide of the mark, though still sustained by both scholarly and musical communities. On a very general level jazz is construed as a quintessentially Afro—American music form that originated in widely disparate locales across the United States at roughly the same time, and perhaps the only indigenous American art form of world significance. My purpose is not to challenge this vague characterisation in all its particulars, but to elaborate upon a query occasionally broached in social history, namely – what kind of society could have produced the phenomenon of pre-recorded jazz music? I shall suggest that in its early stages, during the late nineteenth century, jazz could not be accurately characterised as even ‘American’.

Although known as the ‘Naughty Nineties’, the last years of the nineteenth century are characterised by a succession of anti-liberal backlashes most notoriously including the Vizetelly prosecution of 1889 (principally involving Emile Zola's novels), Oscar Wilde's trials of 1895 (indirectly about homosexuality) and the pillorying of feminist reformers. Instead of becoming more sexually permissive, the English fin de siècle was in many respects deeply conservative, not only in bureaucratic responses to these sexual controversies but also in the creation of political organisations to represent and lobby for conventional moral values. Social purity campaigners' efforts to eradicate indecency in music-hall performance fits into this pattern, and provides insight into the continuity between the class politics of leisure reforms, control of artistic production and hegemonic sexual mores.

In the early 1970s, in the American Island State of Hawaii, popular music began a transformation that was, to some extent, similar in form to what occurred on the American mainland ten to fifteen years earlier, when popular music first merged with the civil rights movement and then with the anti-Vietnam movement. Hawaiian popular musicians, reacting to the commercially slick music of the tourist trade and the Wai Ki Ki nightclubs, reached back to embrace the few ethnic artists still alive and performing. They searched their island past for traditional material and, as the movement consolidated, merged this material with their own pressing social and cultural concerns to create a new type of music – part contemporary, part traditional and all wrapped in a cloak of strong social protest against non-native Hawaiians who they saw as having nearly totally destroyed their culture, their selfidentity, their pride and their sacred land. As Haunai-Kay Trask (1982, p. C2), a spokesperson for the movement, put it:

Any society that has experienced the kind of impact the Hawaiian culture and Hawaiian people have experienced wind up being on the bottom because they are inundated with another culture … High rises, fancy clothes, and freeways – that's what United States culture stands for. It's grotesque. They have no feeling for the fragility of life. Or flora or fauna. Part of me hates the haoles with a passion, but part of me doesn't care. They're just stupid and I want them to stay away.

Over the course of the past several years the use of digital audio-sampling by composers, musicians, engineers and producers has increased to a point where the sampler is now as common in the recording studio as the microphone. Digital samplers allow one to encode a fragment of sound, from one to several seconds in duration, in a digitised binary form which can then be stored in computer memory. This stored sound may be played back through a keyboard, with its pitch and tonal qualities accurately reproduced or, as is often the case, manipulated through electronic editing. Because of its unsurpassed mimetic capabilities, one common use of the sampler has been to store in computer memory a note or set of notes played by an individual who has a unique playing style. When played back through a keyboard, one could construct an entire solo line which would potentially sound as if that person were playing it. Another common use of the sampler is to extract a fragment of sound from one context and place it in a new one, with no appreciable loss of sound quality over each generation of extraction and repositioning. These three capabilities of the sampler – the mimetic/reproductive, the manipulative and the extractive – are crucial to understanding both the sampler's popularity and its potential to disrupt the production process in the music industry.