Sandke tackles the stubborn and controversial question of whether jazz is the product of an insulated African-American environment, shut off from the rest of society by strictures of segregation and ...discrimination; or whether it is more properly understood as the juncture of a variety of influences under the broader umbrella of American culture.
This book is a study of religions in the history of American jazz, and of jazz’s contributions to American religions. Going beyond extant biographical studies of individual exemplars, or cursory ...attention to either “spirituality” or jazz in the civil rights movement, the book argues for the centrality of religious experiences to any legitimate understanding of jazz, while also suggesting that attention to jazz opens up new interpretations of American religious history. Focusing on the outer reaches of its key categories, “religion” and “jazz,” the book explores jazz in specific religious traditions, musical histories of American culture and religion, religio-musical communities, improvisational ritual, jazz and meditation, and even metaphysical systems. The book links the music’s visionaries (from Duke Ellington to Anthony Braxton, among dozens explored) to those of American religions (from Madame Helena Blavatsky to Elijah Muhammad). It situates jazz’s communities like the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians in a history of religious experimentalism populated by the Transcendentalists and the Shakers. It listens for the resonances shared by jazz’s ritualists and practitioners of Santéria, Pentecostalism, or Qi Gong. The book connects religious studies to jazz studies through thematic portraits, historical setting, thick description of the music, and a vast number of interviews to propose a new, improvisationally fluid archive for thinking about religion, race, and sound in the United States.
Jeremy F. Lane’s Jazz and Machine-Age Imperialism is a bold challenge to the existing homogenous picture of the reception of American jazz in world-war era France. Lane’s book closely examines the ...reception of jazz among French-speaking intellectuals between 1918 and 1945 and is the first study to consider the relationships, sometimes symbiotic, sometimes antagonistic, between early white French jazz critics and those French-speaking intellectuals of color whose first encounters with the music in those years played a catalytic role in their emerging black or Creole consciousness. Jazz’s first arrival in France in 1918 coincided with a series of profound shocks to received notions of French national identity and cultural and moral superiority. These shocks, characteristic of the era of machine-age imperialism, had been provoked by the first total mechanized war, the accelerated introduction of Taylorist and Fordist production techniques into European factories, and the more frequent encounters with primitive “Others” in the imperial metropolis engendered by interwar imperialism. Through close readings of the work of early white French jazz critics, alongside the essays and poems of intellectuals of color such as the Nardal sisters, Léon-Gontran Damas, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and René Ménil, Jazz and Machine-Age Imperialism highlights the ways in which the French reception of jazz was bound up with a series of urgent contemporary debates about primitivism, imperialism, anti-imperialism, black and Creole consciousness, and the effects of American machine-age technologies on the minds and bodies of French citizens.
The coal fields of West Virginia would seem an unlikely market for big band jazz during the Great Depression. That a prosperous African American audience dominated by those involved with the coal ...industry was there for jazz tours would seem equally improbable. Big Band Jazz in Black West Virginia, 1930-1942 shows that, contrary to expectations, black Mountaineers flocked to dances by the hundreds, in many instances traveling considerable distances to hear bands led by Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Andy Kirk, Jimmie Lunceford, and Chick Webb, among numerous others. Indeed, as one musician who toured the state would recall, "All the bands were goin' to West Virginia."The comparative prosperity of the coal miners, thanks to New Deal industrial policies, was what attracted the bands to the state. This study discusses that prosperity as well as the larger political environment that provided black Mountaineers with a degree of autonomy not experienced further south. Author Christopher Wilkinson demonstrates the importance of radio and the black press both in introducing this music and in keeping black West Virginians up to date with its latest developments. The book explores connections between local entrepreneurs who staged the dances and the national management of the bands that played those engagements. In analyzing black audiences' aesthetic preferences, the author reveals that many black West Virginians preferred dancing to a variety of music, not just jazz. Finally, the book shows bands now associated almost exclusively with jazz were more than willing to satisfy those audience preferences with arrangements in other styles of dance music.
On January 16, 1938 Benny Goodman brought his swing orchestra to America’s venerated home of European classical music, Carnegie Hall. The resulting concert—widely considered one of the most ...significant events in American music history—helped to usher jazz and swing music into the American cultural mainstream. This reputation has been perpetuated by Columbia Records’ 1950 release of the concert on LP. This book provides the first in-depth, scholarly study of this seminal concert and recording. Combining rigorous documentary and archival research with close analysis of the recording, the author strips back the accumulated layers of interpretation and meaning to assess the performance in its original context, and explore what the material has come to represent in its recorded form. Taking a complete view of the concert, she examines the rich cultural setting in which it took place, and analyzes the compositions, arrangements and performances themselves, before discussing the immediate reception, and lasting legacy and impact of this storied event and album. As the definitive study of one of the most important recordings of the twentieth century, this book is a must-read for all serious jazz fans, musicians and scholars.
Jazz Age Barcelona Davidson, Robert A
Jazz Age Barcelona,
c2009, 20090827, 2005, 2000, 2009, 2005-01-01, 2009-08-20
eBook
Using periodicals and recently rediscovered archival material, Davidson considers the relationship between the political pressures of a brutal class war, the grasp of a repressive dictatorship, and ...the engagement of the city's young intellectuals with Barcelona's culture and environment.
Jazz: The Australian Accent explores the unique developments in Australian jazz over the last twenty years. Through interviews, anecdotes, analysis, and a companion CD, leading music journalist John ...Shand provides a fascinating insight into the innovative, cutting-edge scene that is Australian jazz. He argues that the jazz has become a defining force in our cultural landscape and that it is as lively and innovative as any overseas.
In Louis Armstrong's Hot Five and Hot Seven Recordings, Brian Harker strikes a unique balance between 1920s views of jazz and those of today. For the first time Armstrong's technical achievements are ...placed in a meaningful cultural context, yielding unexpected insights into these seminal documents of early jazz.
Big Ears Rustin, Nichole T; Tucker, Sherrie; Radano, Ronald ...
2008, 2008-11-07
eBook
In jazz circles, players and listeners with "big ears" hear and engage complexity in the moment, as it unfolds. Taking gender as part of the intricate, unpredictable action in jazz culture, this ...interdisciplinary collection explores the terrain opened up by listening, with big ears, for gender in jazz. Essays range from a reflection on the female boogie-woogie pianists who played at Café Society in New York during the 1930s and 1940s to interpretations of how the jazzman is represented in Dorothy Baker's novel Young Man with a Horn (1938) and Michael Curtiz's film adaptation (1950). Taken together, the essays enrich the field of jazz studies by showing how gender dynamics have shaped the production, reception, and criticism of jazz culture. Scholars of music, ethnomusicology, American studies, literature, anthropology, and cultural studies approach the question of gender in jazz from multiple perspectives. One contributor scrutinizes the tendency of jazz historiography to treat singing as subordinate to the predominantly male domain of instrumental music, while another reflects on her doubly inappropriate position as a female trumpet player and a white jazz musician and scholar. Other essays explore the composer George Russell's Lydian Chromatic Concept as a critique of mid-twentieth-century discourses of embodiment, madness, and black masculinity; performances of "female hysteria" by Les Diaboliques, a feminist improvising trio; and the BBC radio broadcasts of Ivy Benson and Her Ladies' Dance Orchestra during the Second World War. By incorporating gender analysis into jazz studies, Big Ears transforms ideas of who counts as a subject of study and even of what counts as jazz. Contributors: Christina Baade, Jayna Brown, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Monica Hairston, Kristin McGee, Tracy McMullen, Ingrid Monson, Lara Pellegrinelli, Eric Porter, Nichole T. Rustin, Ursel Schlicht, Julie Dawn Smith, Jeffrey Taylor, Sherrie Tucker, João H. Costa Vargas
This book is a study of a crucial period in the life of American jazz and popular music.Pearl Harbor Jazzanalyses the changes in the world of the professional musician brought about both by the ...outbreak of World War II and by long-term changes in the music business, in popular taste and in American society itself. It describes how the infrastructure of American music, the interdependent fields of recording, touring, live engagements, radio and the movies, was experiencing change in the conditions of wartime, and how this impacted upon musical styles, and hence upon the later history of popular music. Successive chapters of the book examine the impact of these changed conditions upon the songwriting and music publishing industries, upon the world of the touring big bands, and upon changing conceptions of the role of jazz and popular music.
Not only the economic conditions but also ideas were changing; the book traces a movement among writers and critics which created new definitions of 'jazz' and other terms that had a permanent influence on the way musical styles were thought of for the rest of the century. The book deals in some depth with the work of a number of important artists in these various fields, including, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Johnny Mercer and Frank Sinatra, looks at the growing presence of bebop, the rise of country music, and the contemporary musical scenes in such locations as New York and Los Angeles. The book combines detail of the day to day working lives of musicians with challenging views of the long-term development of musical style in jazz and popular music.
Peter Townsend lectures at Manchester Metropolitan University and in the School of Music at the University of Huddersfield, England
