In his new book, Richard Brent Turner explores the history and contemporary significance of the popular religious traditions, identities, and performance forms celebrated in the second lines of the ...jazz street parades of black New Orleans. The second line is the group of dancers who follow the first procession of church and club members, brass bands, and grand marshals. Here musical and religious traditions interplay. Jazz Religion, the Second Line, and Black New Orleans examines the relationship of jazz to indigenous religion and spirituality. It explores how the African diasporist religious identities and musical traditions -- from Haiti and West and Central Africa -- are reinterpreted in New Orleans jazz and popular religious performances, while describing how the participants in the second line create their own social space and become proficient in the arts of political disguise, resistance, and performance.
Miles Davis's Bitches Brew is one of the most iconic albums in American music, the preeminent landmark and fertile seedbed of jazz-fusion. Fans have been fortunate in the past few years to gain ...access to Davis's live recordings from this time, when he was working with an ensemble that has come to be known as the Lost Quintet. In this book, jazz historian and musician Bob Gluck explores the performances of this revolutionary group—Davis's first electric band—to illuminate the thinking of one of our rarest geniuses and, by extension, the extraordinary transition in American music that he and his fellow players ushered in.Gluck listens deeply to the uneasy tension between this group's driving rhythmic groove and the sonic and structural openness, surprise, and experimentation they were always pushing toward. There he hears—and outlines—a fascinating web of musical interconnection that brings Davis's funk-inflected sensibilities into conversation with the avant-garde worlds that players like Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane were developing. Going on to analyze the little-known experimental groups Circle and the Revolutionary Ensemble, Gluck traces deep resonances across a commercial gap between the celebrity Miles Davis and his less famous but profoundly innovative peers. The result is a deeply attuned look at a pivotal moment when once-disparate worlds of American music came together in explosively creative combinations.
Typically a photograph of a jazz musician has several formal prerequisites: black and white film, an urban setting in the mid-twentieth century, and a black man standing, playing, or sitting next to ...his instrument. That's the jazz archetype that photography created. Author K. Heather Pinson discovers how such a steadfast script developed visually and what this convention meant for the music. Album covers, magazines, books, documentaries, art photographs, posters, and various other visual extensions of popular culture formed the commonly held image of the jazz player. Through assimilation, there emerged a generalized composite of how mainstream jazz looked and sounded. Pinson evaluates representations of jazz musicians from 1945 to 1959, concentrating on the seminal role played by Herman Leonard (b. 1923). Leonard's photographic depictions of African American jazz musicians in New York not only created a visual template of a black musician of the 1950s, but also became the standard configuration of the music's neoclassical sound today. To discover how the image of the musician affected mainstream jazz, Pinson examines readings from critics, musicians, and educators, as well as interviews, musical scores, recordings, transcriptions, liner notes, and oral narratives.
This book reclaims for Wales the history and culture of a music
that eventually emerged as jazz in the 1920s, its tendrils and
roots extending back to slave songs and abolition campaign songs,
and ...Swansea's long-forgotten connection with Cincinnati, Ohio. The
main themes of the book are to illustrate and emphasise the strong
links between emerging African American music in the USA and the
development of jazz in mainstream popular culture in Wales; the
emancipation and contribution of Welsh women to the music and its
social-cultural heritage; and an historical appraisal as the music
journeyed towards the Second World War and into living memory. The
jazz story is set amid the politics, socio-cultural and feminist
history of the time from whence the music emerged - which begs the
question 'When Was Jazz?' (to echo Gwyn A. Williams in 1985, who
asked 'When Was Wales?'). If jazz is described as 'the music of
protest and rebellion', then there was certainly plenty going on
during the jazz age in Wales.
Leonard Bernstein's gifts for drama and connecting with popular audiences made him a central figure in twentieth century American music. Though a Bernstein work might reference anything from ...modernism to cartoon ditties, jazz permeated every part of his musical identity as a performer, educator, and intellectual. Katherine Baber investigates how jazz in its many styles served Bernstein as a flexible, indeed protean, musical idea. As she shows, Bernstein used jazz to signify American identity with all its tensions and contradictions and to articulate community and conflict, irony and parody, and timely issues of race and gender. Baber provides a thoughtful look at how Bernstein's use of jazz grew out of his belief in the primacy of tonality, music's value as a unique form of human communication, and the formation of national identity in music. She also offers in-depth analyses of On the Town, West Side Story, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and other works to explore fascinating links between Bernstein's art and issues like eclecticism, music's relationship to social engagement, black-Jewish relations, and his own musical identity.
The Jazz Age. The phrase conjures images of Louis Armstrong holding court at the Sunset Cafe in Chicago, Duke Ellington dazzling crowds at the Cotton Club in Harlem, and star singers like Bessie ...Smith and Ma Rainey. But the Jazz Age was every bit as much of a Paris phenomenon as it was a Chicago and New York scene.In Paris Blues, Andy Fry provides an alternative history of African American music and musicians in France, one that looks beyond familiar personalities and well-rehearsed stories. He pinpoints key issues of race and nation in France's complicated jazz history from the 1920s through the 1950s. While he deals with many of the traditional icons—such as Josephine Baker, Django Reinhardt, and Sidney Bechet, among others—what he asks is how they came to be so iconic, and what their stories hide as well as what they preserve. Fry focuses throughout on early jazz and swing but includes its re- creation—reinvention—in the 1950s. Along the way, he pays tribute to forgotten traditions such as black musical theater, white show bands, and French wartime swing. Paris Blues provides a nuanced account of the French reception of African Americans and their music and contributes greatly to a growing literature on jazz, race, and nation in France.
Epistrophies Edwards, Brent Hayes
2017, 2017-06-30, 2017-06-05
eBook
In 1941 Thelonious Monk and Kenny Clarke copyrighted "Epistrophy, " one of the best-known compositions of the bebop era. The song's title refers to a literary device—the repetition of a word or ...phrase at the end of successive clauses—that is echoed in the construction of the melody. Written two decades later, Amiri Baraka's poem "Epistrophe" alludes slyly to Monk's tune. Whether it is composers finding formal inspiration in verse or a poet invoking the sound of music, hearing across media is the source of innovation in black art. Epistrophies explores this fertile interface through case studies in jazz literature—both writings informed by music and the surprisingly large body of writing by jazz musicians themselves. From James Weldon Johnson's vernacular transcriptions to Sun Ra's liner note poems, from Henry Threadgill's arresting song titles to Nathaniel Mackey's "Song of the Andoumboulou, " there is an unending back-and-forth between music that hovers at the edge of language and writing that strives for the propulsive energy and melodic contours of music.At times this results in art that gravitates into multiple media. In Duke Ellington's "social significance" suites, or in the striking parallels between Louis Armstrong's inventiveness as a singer and trumpeter on the one hand and his idiosyncratic creativity as a letter writer and collagist on the other, one encounters an aesthetic that takes up both literature and music as components of a unique—and uniquely African American—sphere of art-making and performance.
Italy has always been a land enamored of music, but in the early 20th century it was jazz that seduced many Italian music lovers. Loud, brash and syncopated, it was an imported passion that came from ...across the Atlantic; it was first performed by visiting American troupes and returning emigrants. Eventually Italians began creating their own jazz. From ragtime to big bands, Italy has foxtrotted and boogie-woogied through periods of war and peace, poverty and prosperity, Fascism and democracy. Italy often had a mixed opinion of jazz, and that suspicion and active hatred of foreign musical novelties reached its apex during Mussolini's era - and yet jazz survived and even flourished despite political and social disapproval. This illustrated book records the story of Italian jazz from the early period of imitation to the time when the country's own jazz geniuses made the genre uniquely Italian. Musicologists, historians and jazz lovers will find much to enjoy here.
Behind the iconic jazz orchestras, vocalists, and stage productions of the Swing Era lay the talents of popular music's unsung heroes: the arrangers. John Wriggle takes you behind the scenes of New ...York City's vibrant entertainment industry of the 1930s and 1940s to uncover the lives and work of jazz arrangers, both black and white, who left an indelible mark on American music and culture. Blue Rhythm Fantasy traces the extraordinary career of arranger Chappie Willet--a collaborator of Louis Armstrong, Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, Gene Krupa, and many others--to revisit legendary Swing Era venues and performers from Harlem to Times Square. Wriggle's insightful music analyses of big band arranging techniques explore representations of cultural modernism, discourses on art and commercialism, conceptions of race and cultural identity, music industry marketing strategies, and stage entertainment variety genres. Drawing on archives, obscure recordings, untapped sources in the African American press, and interviews with participants, Blue Rhythm Fantasy is a long-overdue study of the arranger during this dynamic era of American music history.