Download or read book Clawing at the Limits of Cool written by Farah Jasmine Griffin and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2013-10-22 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When the renowned trumpeter and bandleader Miles Davis chose the members of his quintet in 1955, he passed over well-known, respected saxophonists such as Sonny Rollins to pick out the young, still untested John Coltrane. What might have seemed like a minor decision at the time would instead set the course not just for each of their careers but for jazz itself. Clawing at the Limits of Cool is the first book to focus on Davis and Coltrane's musical interaction and its historical context, on the ways they influenced each other and the tremendous impact they've had on culture since then. It chronicles the drama of their collaboration, from their initial historic partnership to the interlude of their breakup, during which each man made tremendous progress toward his personal artistic goals. And it continues with the last leg of their journey together, a time when the Miles Davis group, featuring John Coltrane, forever changed the landscape of jazz. Authors Farah Jasmine Griffin and Salim Washington examine the profound implications that the Davis/Coltrane collaboration would have for jazz and African American culture, drawing parallels to the changing standards of African American identity with their public personas and private difficulties. With vastly different personal and musical styles, the two men could not have been more different. One exemplified the tough, closemouthed cool of the fifties while the other made the transition during this time from unfocused junkie to a religious pilgrim who would inspire others to pursue spiritual enlightenment in the coming decade. Their years together mark a watershed moment, and Clawing at the Limits of Cool draws on both cultural history and precise musical detail to illuminate the importance that their collaboration would have for jazz and American history as a whole.
Download or read book Harlem Nocturne written by Farah Jasmine Griffin and published by Civitas Books. This book was released on 2013-09-10 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As World War II raged overseas, Harlem witnessed a battle of its own. Brimming with creative and political energy, the neighborhood's diverse array of artists and activists took advantage of a brief period of progressivism during the war years to launch a bold cultural offensive aimed at winning democracy for all Americans, regardless of race or gender. Ardent believers in America's promise, these men and women helped to lay the groundwork for the Civil Rights Movement before Cold War politics and anti-Communist fervor temporarily froze their dreams at the dawn of the postwar era. In Harlem Nocturne, esteemed scholar Farah Jasmine Griffin tells the stories of three black female artists whose creative and political efforts fueled this historic movement for change: choreographer and dancer Pearl Primus, composer and pianist Mary Lou Williams, and novelist Ann Petry. Like many African Americans in the city at the time, these women weren't't native New Yorkers, but the metropolis and its vibrant cultural scene gave them the space to flourish and the freedom to express their political concerns. Pearl Primus performed nightly at the legendary Cafe Society, the first racially integrated club in New York, where she debuted dances of social protest that drew on long-buried African traditions and the dances of former slaves in the South. Williams, meanwhile, was a major figure in the emergence of bebop, collaborating with Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, and Bud Powell and premiering her groundbreaking Zodiac Suite at the legendary performance space Town Hall. And Ann Petry conveyed the struggles of working-class black women to a national audience with her acclaimed novel The Street, which sold over a million copies -- a first for a female African American author. A rich biography of three artists and the city that inspired them, Harlem Nocturne captures a period of unprecedented vitality and progress for African Americans and women, revealing a cultural movement and a historical moment whose influence endures today.
Download or read book Clawing at the Limits of Cool written by Salim Washington and published by Thomas Dunne Books. This book was released on 2008-08-05 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When the renowned trumpeter and bandleader Miles Davis chose the members of his quintet in 1955, he passed over well-known, respected saxophonists such as Sonny Rollins to pick out the young, still untested John Coltrane. What might have seemed like a minor decision at the time would instead set the course not just for each of their careers but for jazz itself. Clawing at the Limits of Cool is the first book to focus on Davis and Coltrane’s musical interaction and its historical context, on the ways they influenced each other and the tremendous impact they’ve had on culture since then. It chronicles the drama of their collaboration, from their initial historic partnership to the interlude of their breakup, during which each man made tremendous progress toward his personal artistic goals. And it continues with the last leg of their journey together, a time when the Miles Davis group, featuring John Coltrane, forever changed the landscape of jazz. Authors Farah Jasmine Griffin and Salim Washington examine the profound implications that the Davis/Coltrane collaboration would have for jazz and African American culture, drawing parallels to the changing standards of African American identity with their public personas and private difficulties. With vastly different personal and musical styles, the two men could not have been more different. One exemplified the tough, closemouthed cool of the fifties while the other made the transition during this time from unfocused junkie to a religious pilgrim who would inspire others to pursue spiritual enlightenment in the coming decade. Their years together mark a watershed moment, and Clawing at the Limits of Cool draws on both cultural history and precise musical detail to illuminate the importance that their collaboration would have for jazz and American history as a whole.
Download or read book Is It Cause It s Cool written by Astrid M. Fellner and published by LIT Verlag Münster. This book was released on 2014 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Even a global political watershed, such as the end of the Cold War, seems to have left a fundamental characteristic of cultural relations between the US and the rest of the world unchanged: American popular culture still stirs up emotion. American popular culture's products, artifacts, and practices entangle their consumers in affective encounters characterized by feelings of fascination, excitement, or even wholesale rejection. What is it that continues to make 'American' popular culture 'cool?' Which role does 'cool' play in the consumers' affective encounters with 'America?' This volume of essays offers new insights on the post-Cold War dissemination of American popular culture, exploring the manifold ways in which 'cool' has emerged as an elusive, yet determining, factor of an American culture gone global. (Series: American Studies in Austria - Vol. 13)
Download or read book Blowin the Blues Away written by Travis A. Jackson and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2012-06-12 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New York City has always been a mecca in the history of jazz, and in many ways the city’s jazz scene is more important now than ever before. Blowin’ the Blues Away examines how jazz has thrived in New York following its popular resurgence in the 1980s. Using interviews, in-person observation, and analysis of live and recorded events, ethnomusicologist Travis A. Jackson explores both the ways in which various participants in the New York City jazz scene interpret and evaluate performance, and the criteria on which those interpretations and evaluations are based. Through the notes and words of its most accomplished performers and most ardent fans, jazz appears not simply as a musical style, but as a cultural form intimately influenced by and influential upon American concepts of race, place, and spirituality.
Download or read book Sounding Like a No No written by Francesca T. Royster and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2012-12-26 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sounding Like a No-No traces a rebellious spirit in post–civil rights black music by focusing on a range of offbeat, eccentric, queer, or slippery performances by leading musicians influenced by the cultural changes brought about by the civil rights, black nationalist, feminist, and LGBTQ movements, who through reinvention created a repertoire of performances that have left a lasting mark on popular music. The book's innovative readings of performers including Michael Jackson, Grace Jones, Stevie Wonder, Eartha Kitt, and Meshell Ndegeocello demonstrate how embodied sound and performance became a means for creativity, transgression, and social critique, a way to reclaim imaginative and corporeal freedom from the social death of slavery and its legacy of racism, to engender new sexualities and desires, to escape the sometimes constrictive codes of respectability and uplift from within the black community, and to make space for new futures for their listeners. The book's perspective on music as a form of black corporeality and identity, creativity, and political engagement will appeal to those in African American studies, popular music studies, queer theory, and black performance studies; general readers will welcome its engaging, accessible, and sometimes playful writing style, including elements of memoir.
Download or read book If You Can t be Free be a Mystery written by Farah Jasmine Griffin and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2001 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The threads of Billie Holiday's mystique are unraveled in this study of a woman who needed to create art at any cost. Griffin liberates Holiday from stereotypes of black women and pries her away from the male tradition of jazz criticism while presenting Holiday's independent spirit. of photos.
Download or read book The Whiskey of Our Discontent written by Quraysh Ali Lansana and published by Haymarket Books. This book was released on 2017-05-15 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “[A] superb tribute . . . [an] essential collection” of essays analyzing the works of the preeminent twentieth-century poet and voice of social justice (Booklist). Winner of the Central New York Book Award for Nonfiction Finalist for the Chicago Review of Books Award Poet, educator, and social activist Gwendolyn Brooks was a singular force in American culture. The first black woman to be named United States poet laureate, Brook’s poetry, fiction, and social commentary shed light on the beauty of humanity, the distinct qualities of black life and community, and the destructive effects of racism, sexism, and class inequality. A collection of thirty essays combining critical analysis and personal reflection, The Whiskey of Our Discontent, presents essential elements of Brooks’ oeuvre—on race, gender, class, community, and poetic craft, while also examining her life as poet, reporter, mentor, sage, activist, and educator. “Gwendolyn Brooks wrote and performed her magnificent poetry for and about the Black people of Chicago, and yet it was also read with anguish, delight, and awe by white people, successive waves of immigrants, and ultimately the world.” —Bill Ayers, from the Introduction
Download or read book Read Until You Understand The Profound Wisdom of Black Life and Literature written by Farah Jasmine Griffin and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2021-09-14 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A PBS NewsHour Best Book of the Year A Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year in Nonfiction A brilliant scholar imparts the lessons bequeathed by the Black community and its remarkable artists and thinkers. Farah Jasmine Griffin has taken to her heart the phrase "read until you understand," a line her father, who died when she was nine, wrote in a note to her. She has made it central to this book about love of the majestic power of words and love of the magnificence of Black life. Griffin has spent years rooted in the culture of Black genius and the legacy of books that her father left her. A beloved professor, she has devoted herself to passing these works and their wisdom on to generations of students. Here, she shares a lifetime of discoveries: the ideas that inspired the stunning oratory of Frederick Douglass and Malcolm X, the soulful music of Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder, the daring literature of Phillis Wheatley and Toni Morrison, the inventive artistry of Romare Bearden, and many more. Exploring these works through such themes as justice, rage, self-determination, beauty, joy, and mercy allows her to move from her aunt’s love of yellow roses to Gil Scott-Heron’s "Winter in America." Griffin entwines memoir, history, and art while she keeps her finger on the pulse of the present, asking us to grapple with the continuing struggle for Black freedom and the ongoing project that is American democracy. She challenges us to reckon with our commitment to all the nation’s inhabitants and our responsibilities to all humanity.
Download or read book The Cultural Career of Coolness written by Ulla Haselstein and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2013-10-10 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cool is a word of American English that has been integrated into the vocabulary of numerous languages around the globe. Today it is a term most often used in advertising trendy commodities, or, more generally, in promoting urban lifestyles in our postmodern age. But what is the history of the term “cool?" When has coolness come to be associated with certain modes of contemporary self-fashioning? On what grounds do certain nations claim a privilege to be recognized as “cool?" These are some of the questions that served as a starting-point for a comparative cultural inquiry which brought together specialists from American Studies and Japanese Studies, but also from Classics, Philosophy and Sociology. The conceptual grid of the volume can be described as follows: (1) Coolness is a metaphorical term for affect-control. It is tied in with cultural discourses on the emotions and the norms of their public display, and with gendered cultural practices of subjectivity. (2) In the course of the cultural transformations of modernity, the term acquired new importance as a concept referring to practices of individual, ethnic, and national difference. (3) Depending on cultural context, coolness is defined in terms of aesthetic detachment and self-irony, of withdrawal, dissidence and even latent rebellion. (4) Coolness often carries undertones of ambivalence. The situational adequacy of cool behavior becomes an issue for contending ethical and aesthetic discourses since an ethical ideal of self-control and a strategy of performing self-control are inextricably intertwined. (5) In literature and film, coolness as a character trait is portrayed as a personal strength, as a lack of emotion, as an effect of trauma, as a mask for suffering or rage, as precious behavior, or as savvyness. This wide spectrum is significant: artistic productions offer valid insights into contradictions of cultural discourses on affect-control. (6) American and Japanese cultural productions show that twentieth-century notions of coolness hybridize different cultural traditions of affect-control.
Download or read book Jazz and American Culture written by Michael Borshuk and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-11-30 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers an entry point for understanding the comprehensive way this uniquely American artistic form has influenced literature, art, film, and other art forms, while also providing a cultural space for political commentary or social critique.
Download or read book Habits of Distraction written by Michael Wood and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2018-07-01 with total page 139 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Starting with Walter Benjamin's idea of 'reception in a state of distraction' and looking briefly at some antecedents for Benjamin's thinking, this book develops a working model of distraction in interpretation. It includes examples that are taken from film (Benjamin's test case), literature, music, painting and photography.
Download or read book The Muse is Music written by Meta DuEwa Jones and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This wide-ranging, ambitiously interdisciplinary study traces jazz's influence on African American poetry from the Harlem Renaissance to contemporary spoken word poetry. Examining established poets such as Langston Hughes, Ntozake Shange, and Nathaniel Mackey as well as a generation of up-and-coming contemporary writers and performers, Meta DuEwa Jones highlights the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality within the jazz tradition and its representation in poetry. Applying prosodic analysis to emphasize the musicality of African American poetic performance, she examines the gendered meanings evident in collaborative performances and in the criticism, images, and sounds circulating within jazz cultures. Jones also considers poets who participated in contemporary venues for black writing such as the Dark Room Collective and the Cave Canem Foundation, including Harryette Mullen, Elizabeth Alexander, and Carl Phillips. Incorporating a finely honed discussion of the Black Arts Movement, the poetry-jazz fusion of the late 1950s, and slam and spoken word performance milieus such as Def Poetry Jam, she focuses on jazz and hip hop-influenced performance artists including Tracie Morris, Saul Williams, and Jessica Care Moore. Through attention to cadence, rhythm, and structure, The Muse is Music fills a gap in literary scholarship by attending to issues of gender in jazz and poetry and by analyzing recordings of poets both with and without musical accompaniment. Applying the methodology of textual close reading to a critical "close listening" of American poetry's resonant soundscape, Jones's analyses include exploring the formal innovation and queer performance of Langston Hughes's recorded collaboration with jazz musicians, delineating the relationship between punctuation and performance in the post-soul John Coltrane poem, and closely examining jazz improvisation and hip-hop stylization. An elaborate articulation of the connections between jazz, poetry and spoken word, and gender, The Muse Is Music offers valuable criticism of specific texts and performances and a convincing argument about the shape of jazz and African-American poetic performance in the contemporary era.
Download or read book A Stranger in the Village written by Farah J. Griffin and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 1999-05-01 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dispatches, diaries, memoirs, and letters by African-American travelers in search of home, justice, and adventure-from the Wild West to Australia.
Download or read book Tooth and Claw written by T. C. Boyle and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2011-07-01 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This new collection of short stories from T.C. Boyle finds him at his mercurial best. Inventive, wickedly funny, sometimes disturbing, these are stories about drop-outs, deadbeats and kooks. Take the man who shares his apartment with a wildcat won in a drunken bet; the drive-time shock jock hallucinating from sleep deprivation for a publicity stunt; the suburban woman who joins a pack of dogs, eating rabbits and baying at the moon. With a unique deftness of touch and a keen eye for the telling detail, Boyle has mapped the strange underworld of America.
Download or read book Ebony written by and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 980 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book John Coltrane and Black America s Quest for Freedom written by Leonard Lewis Brown and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through a diverse collection of essays and interviews featuring leading Black media personalities, musicians and scholars, this volume presents the "insiders' view" - Black perspectives on Coltrane's powerful and lasting legacy viewed in contemporary times within the context of Black strivings for freedom.
