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
This fresh look at the neglected rhythm section in jazz ensembles shows that the improvisational interplay among drums, bass, and piano is just as innovative, complex, and spontaneous as the solo. ...Ingrid Monson juxtaposes musicians' talk and musical examples to ask how musicians go about "saying something" through music in a way that articulates identity, politics, and race. Through interviews with Jaki Byard, Richard Davis, Sir Roland Hanna, Billy Higgins, Cecil McBee, and others, she develops a perspective on jazz improvisation that has "interactiveness" at its core, in the creation of music through improvisational interaction, in the shaping of social communities and networks through music, and in the development of cultural meanings and ideologies that inform the interpretation of jazz in twentieth-century American cultural life. Replete with original musical transcriptions, this broad view of jazz improvisation and its emotional and cultural power will have a wide audience among jazz fans, ethnomusicologists, and anthropologists.
Norman Granz Hershorn, Tad
2011., 20110917, 2011, 2011-10-17
eBook
"Any book on my life would start with my basic philosophy of fighting racial prejudice. I loved jazz, and jazz was my way of doing that," Norman Granz told Tad Hershorn during the final interviews ...given for this book. Granz, who died in 2001, was iconoclastic, independent, immensely influential, often thoroughly unpleasant—and one of jazz's true giants. Granz played an essential part in bringing jazz to audiences around the world, defying racial and social prejudice as he did so, and demanding that African-American performers be treated equally everywhere they toured. In this definitive biography, Hershorn recounts Granz's story: creator of the legendary jam session concerts known as Jazz at the Philharmonic; founder of the Verve record label; pioneer of live recordings and worldwide jazz concert tours; manager and recording producer for numerous stars, including Ella Fitzgerald and Oscar Peterson.
Michael Dregni expertly traces the development of Gypsy Jazz not through straight musical history, but instead in a fascinating travelogue and detective story, following its birth with Django and its ...subsequent legacy, including all of the famous guitarists who have followed in Django's footsteps-Bir?li Lagr?ne, Boulou Ferr?, Dorado Schmitt, and others.
