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This chapter introduces Andy Kirk and His Clouds of Joy and establishes how their recordings represent a usefully troublesome body of work for illuminating prevailing conceptions of jazz that articulate notions of race with those of musical style. A survey of the extant literature which has previously considered the band’s records, together with that which has broached the entwined topics of race and jazz, suggests the value of the study in reflecting the vital role of the recordings of such interwar black jazz musicians in shaping jazz as a practice and conception. The notion of manipulating stylistic masks, which are donned by the musicians to Signify on racialized styles and identities in creative and often subversive ways, is introduced as the central means for illuminating the records and their musical-racial discourse. That approach is contextualized with reference to Andy Kirk’s upbringing and musical background before the materials, method, and structure for the study are outlined.

This chapter explores the earliest recordings of Andy Kirk and His Clouds of Joy that were made during the period 1929–1931. The chapter shows how Kirk inherited the Clouds of Joy from the Texan trumpeter Terrence ‘T.’ Holder and how he worked hard to develop the band to become a versatile and appealing ensemble that played music suited to the tastes of white audiences. When they came to record, however, the Clouds of Joy did not use much of the repertoire that they played for white social dancers in the Southwestern Territories but they offered hotter styled jazz that better fitted racist expectations of what a black band should sound like. Thus, the chapter argues that Kirk’s band effectively donned a stylistic mask of black-sounding jazz that was at odds with the dance-band character that can also be heard in their first records. Recording thereby engaged them in a musical form of masked performance that played with and on prevailing racist stereotypes of blackness and whiteness in jazz.

This concluding chapter considers the 1957 album, A Mellow Bit of Rhythm, as a Signifyin(g) form of musical recollection. It rounded off the recorded output of Kirk as a bandleader in a way that re-illuminated the earlier recordings made by his Clouds of Joy within a 1950s hot-jazz context. The retrospective album is shown to be as much a form of stylistic mask-play as the original recordings, as it served to represent a particular kind of ‘authentic’ black-jazz legacy for Andy Kirk and His Clouds of Joy within contemporary stylistic parameters and expectations. The bigger band and its more voluminous sound are considered relative to contemporary audio technologies and tastes and the louder big-band style is shown to re-present Kirk’s recordings of the previous two decades in fresh stylistic and racial garb. Exploring that album ultimately presents an opportunity to reflect on the whole race-political enterprise of the records of Kirk and his band.