"In the context of a shifting domestic and international status quo that was evolving in the decades following World War II, French audiences used jazz as a means of negotiating a wide range of ...issues that were pressing to them and to their fellow citizens. Despite the fact that jazz was fundamentally linked to the multicultural through its origins in the hands of African-American musicians, happenings within the French jazz public reflected much about France's postwar society. In the minds of many, jazz was connected to youth culture, but instead of challenging traditional gender expectations, the music tended to reinforce long-held stereotypes. French critics, musicians, and fans contended with the reality of American superpower strength and often strove to elevate their own country's stature in relation to the United States by finding fault with American consumer society and foreign policy aims. Jazz audiences used this music to condemn American racism and to support the American civil rights movement, expressing strong reservations about the American way of life. French musicians lobbied to create professional opportunities for themselves, and some went so far as to create a union that endorsed preferential treatment for French nationals. As France became more ethnically and religiously diverse due immigration from Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean, French jazz critics and fans noted the insidious appearance of racism in their own country and had to contend with how their own citizens would address the changing demographics of the nation, even if they continued to insist that racism was more prevalent in the United States. As independence movements brought an end to the French empire, jazz enthusiasts from both former colonies and France had to reenvision their relationship to jazz and to the music's international audiences. In these postwar decades, the French were working to preserve a distinct national identity in the face of weakened global authority, most forcefully represented by decolonization and American hegemony. Through this originally African American music, French listeners, commentators, and musicians participated in a process that both challenged and reinforced ideas about their own culture and nation"--Back cover.
Emanuel Uggé (1900–1970) ranked among the most influential Czech writers on jazz in the first half of the 20th century. This study charts his impact on the reception of jazz in the Czech context, and ...draws parallels with Western exponents of purist approaches to jazz, including the likes of Hugues Panassié, Rudi Blesh or Charles Edward Smith. The text also challenges the oversimplifying narrative about the strictly repressive character of the communist regime’s attitude towards jazz: himself a diehard Marxist, Uggé loved jazz and publicly defended it not just in the 1930s, but as a member of the Czechoslovak Communist party still after the communist coup of 1948. He was convinced that the new order, and the country’s nationalized recording industry, would finally make possible the definitive triumph over “commercial concoctions”, and “pure jazz” would emerge as an authentically revolutionary force in the service of the proletariat. Uggé’s influence on subsequent generations of jazz writers was essential, and his arguments continued to serve for a long time as a theoretical basis in dealing with music production organizers and censors.
The influence of Miles Davis's “second great quintet, ” consisting of Davis, Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, and Tony Williams continues to resonate. Jazz musicians, historians, and ...critics have celebrated the group for its improvisational communication, openness, and its transitional status between hard bop and the emerging free jazz of the 1960s, creating a synthesis described by one quintet member as “controlled freedom.” The book provides a critical analytical study of the Davis quintet studio recordings released between 1965 and 1968, including E.S.P., Miles Smiles, Sorcerer, Nefertiti, Miles in the Sky, and Filles de Kilimanjaro. In contrast to the quintet's live recordings, which included performances of older jazz standards, the studio recordings offered an astonishing breadth of original compositions. Many of these compositions have since become jazz standards, and all of them played a central role in the development of contemporary jazz composition. Using transcription and analysis, the author illuminates the compositional, improvisational, and collective achievements of the group. With additional sourcesthe book shows how the group in the studio shaped and altered features of the compositions. Despite the earlier hard bop orientation of the players, the Davis quintet compositions offered different responses to questions of form, melody, and harmonic structure, and they often invited other improvisational paths, ones that relied on an uncanny degree of collective rapport. And given the spontaneity of the recorded performances—often undertaken with a minimum of rehearsal—the players responded with any number of techniques to address formal, harmonic, or metrical discrepancies that arose while the tape was rolling.
In the illustrious and richly documented history of American jazz, no figure has been more controversial than the jazz critic. Jazz critics can be revered or reviled—often both—but they should not be ...ignored. And while the tradition of jazz has been covered from seemingly every angle, nobody has ever turned the pen back on itself to chronicle the many writers who have helped define how we listen to and how we understand jazz. That is, of course, until now. In Blowin’ Hot and Cool, John Gennari provides a definitive history of jazz criticism from the 1920s to the present. The music itself is prominent in his account, as are the musicians—from Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington to Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Roscoe Mitchell, and beyond. But the work takes its shape from fascinating stories of the tradition’s key critics—Leonard Feather, Martin Williams, Whitney Balliett, Dan Morgenstern, Gary Giddins, and Stanley Crouch, among many others. Gennari is the first to show the many ways these critics have mediated the relationship between the musicians and the audience—not merely as writers, but in many cases as producers, broadcasters, concert organizers, and public intellectuals as well. For Gennari, the jazz tradition is not so much a collection of recordings and performances as it is a rancorous debate—the dissonant noise clamoring in response to the sounds of jazz. Against the backdrop of racial strife, class and gender issues, war, and protest that has defined the past seventy-five years in America, Blowin’ Hot and Cool brings to the fore jazz’s most vital critics and the role they have played not only in defining the history of jazz but also in shaping jazz’s significance in American culture and life.
Where the Dark and the Light Folks Meet tackles a controversial question: Is jazz the product of an insulated African-American environment, shut off from the rest of society by strictures of ...segregation and discrimination, or is it more properly understood as the juncture of a wide variety of influences under the broader umbrella of American culture? This book does not question that jazz was created and largely driven by African Americans, but rather posits that black culture has been more open to outside influences than most commentators are likely to admit. The majority of jazz writers, past and present, have embraced an exclusionary viewpoint. Where the Dark and the Light Folks Meet begins by looking at many of these writers, from the birth of jazz history up to the present day, to see how and why their views have strayed from the historical record. This book challenges many widely held beliefs regarding the history and nature of jazz in an attempt to free jazz of the socio-political baggage that has so encumbered it. The result is a truer appreciation of the music and a greater understanding of the positive influence racial interaction and jazz music have had on each other.
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.
Jazz/not jazz Ake, David; Garrett, Charles Hiroshi; Goldmark, Daniel
2012., 20120513, 2012, 2012-06-12
eBook
What is jazz? What is gained—and what is lost—when various communities close ranks around a particular definition of this quintessentially American music? Jazz/Not Jazz explores some of the ...musicians, concepts, places, and practices which, while deeply connected to established jazz institutions and aesthetics, have rarely appeared in traditional histories of the form. David Ake, Charles Hiroshi Garrett, and Daniel Goldmark have assembled a stellar group of writers to look beyond the canon of acknowledged jazz greats and address some of the big questions facing jazz today. More than just a history of jazz and its performers, this collections seeks out those people and pieces missing from the established narratives to explore what they can tell us about the way jazz has been defined and its history has been told.
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.
