An insightful examination of the impact of the Civil Rights Movement and African Independence on jazz in the 1950s and 60s, this book traces the complex relationships among music, politics, ...aesthetics, and activism through the lens of the hot button racial and economic issues of the time. It illustrates how the contentious and soul-searching debates in the Civil Rights, African Independence, and Black Power movements shaped aesthetic debates and exerted a moral pressure on musicians to take action. Throughout, its arguments show how jazz musicians' quest for self-determination as artists and human beings also led to fascinating and far-reaching musical explorations and a lasting ethos of social critique and transcendence. Across a broad body of issues of cultural and political relevance, the book considers the discursive, structural, and practical aspects of life in the jazz world of the 1950s and 1960s. In domestic politics, the book explores the desegregation of the American Federation of Musicians, the politics of playing to segregated performance venues in the 1950s, the participation of jazz musicians in benefit concerts, and strategies of economic empowerment. Issues of transatlantic importance such as the effects of anticolonialism and African nationalism on the politics and aesthetics of the music are also examined, from Paul Robeson's interest in Africa, to the State Department jazz tours, to the interaction of jazz musicians such as Art Blakey and Randy Weston with African diasporic aesthetics. It explores musicians' aesthetic agency in synthesizing influential forms of musical expression from a multiplicity of stylistic and cultural influences—African American music, popular song, classical music, African diasporic aesthetics, and other world music—through examples from cool jazz, hard bop, modal jazz, and the avant-garde. By considering the differences between aesthetic and socio-economic mobility, it presents a fresh interpretation of debates over cultural ownership, racism, reverse racism, and authenticity.
This collective biography of four jazz musicians from Brooklyn, Ghana, and South Africa demonstrates how modern Africa reshaped jazz, how modern jazz helped form a new African identity, and how ...musical convergences and crossings altered the politics and culture of both continents.
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.
The age of Roach's Freedom Now Suite, Coltrane's A Love Supreme, and Mingus's The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady was a time when jazz became newly militant and newly seductive, its example shaping ...the social dramas of the Civil Rights movement, the Black Power movement, and the counterculture. Saul tells the broader story of this period.
Congo Masquerade is about mismanagement, hypocrisy and powerlessness in what has proved to be one of Africa's most troublesome and volatile states. In this scathing study of catastrophic aid ...inefficiency, Trefon argues that whilst others have examined war and plunder in the Great Lakes region, none have yet evaluated the imported 'template format' reform package pieced together to introduce democracy and improve the well-being of ordinary Congolese. It has, the book demonstrates, been for years an almost unmitigated failure due to the ingrained political culture of corruption amongst the Congolese elite, abetted by the complicity and incompetence of international partners. Startling and provocative, Congo Masquerade offers a critical examination of why aid is not helping the Congo.
Before Elvis Birnbaum, Larry
2013., 2012, 2012-12-14
eBook
An essential work for rock fans and scholars, Before Elvis: The Prehistory of Rock ‘n’ Roll surveys the origins of rock ’n’ roll from the minstrel era to the emergence of Bill Haley and Elvis ...Presley. Unlike other histories of rock, Before Elvis offers a far broader and deeper analysis of the influences on rock music. Dispelling common misconceptions, it examines rock’s origins in hokum songs and big-band boogies as well as Delta blues, detailing the embrace by white artists of African-American styles long before rock ’n’ roll appeared. This unique study ranges far and wide, highlighting not only the contributions of obscure but key precursors like Hardrock Gunter and Sam Theard but also the influence of celebrity performers like Gene Autry and Ella Fitzgerald. Too often, rock historians treat the genesis of rock ’n’ roll as a bolt from the blue, an overnight revolution provoked by the bland pop music that immediately preceded it and created through the white appropriation of music till then played only by and for black audiences. In Before Elvis, Birnbaum daringly argues a more complicated history of rock’s evolution from a heady mix of ragtime, boogie-woogie, swing, country music, mainstream pop, and rhythm-and-blues—a melange that influenced one another along the way, from the absorption of blues and boogies into jazz and pop to the integration of country and Caribbean music into rhythm-and-blues. Written in an easy style, Before Elvis presents a bold argument about rock’s origins and required reading for fans and scholars of rock ’n’ roll history.
Beckett is acknowledged as one of the greatest playwrights and most innovative fiction writers of the twentieth century with an international appeal that bridges both general and more specialist ...readers. This collection of essays by renowned Beckett scholar Enoch Brater offers a delightfully original, playful and intriguing series of approaches to Beckett's drama, fiction and poetry. Beginning with a chapter entitled 'Things to Ponder While Waiting for Godot', each essay deftly illuminates aspects of Beckett's thinking and craft, making astute and often surprising discoveries along the way. In a series of beguiling discussions such as 'From Dada to Didi: Beckett and the Art of His Century', 'Beckett's Devious Interventions, or Fun with Cube Roots' and 'The Seated Figure on Beckett's Stage', Brater proves the perfect companion and commentator on Beckett's work, helping readers to approach it with fresh eyes and a renewed sense of the author's unique aesthetic. 'An eloquent, witty and erudite collection of essays that illuminates Beckett's drama and prose fiction from a number of complementary perspectives. Brater's precise explication of the interwoven tropes of language and mise-en-scène is combined with a fine grasp of the overarching structure of work ... to create a rich and suggestive series of reflections on Beckett's aesthetics.' - Robert Gordon, Professor of Drama, Goldsmiths, University of London
Look Back in Anger is one of the few works of drama that are indisputably central to British culture in general, and its name is one of the most well-known in postwar cultural history. Its premiere ...in 1956 sparked off the first "new wave" of kitchen-sink drama and the cultural phenomenon of the angry young man. The play's anti-hero, Jimmy Porter, became the spokesman of a generation. Osborne's play is a key milestone in "new writing" for British theatre, and the Royal Court - which produced the play - has since become one of the most important new writing theatres in the UK.
Die vom Institut für Zeitgeschichte München-Berlin herausgegebene Reihe existiert seit 1970. In ihr erscheinen pro Jahr ca. zwei Monographien. Dabei handelt es sich meist um Dissertationen, seltener ...um Habilitationsschriften oder um Darstellungen, die von Mitarbeitern des Instituts erstellt wurden.
