Download or read book Central Avenue Sounds written by Clora Bryant and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 502 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Here too are recollections of Hollywood's effects on local culture, the precedent-setting merger of the black and white musicians' unions, and the repercussions from the racism in the Los Angeles Police Department in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
Download or read book Los Angeles s Central Avenue Jazz written by Sean J. O'Connell and published by Arcadia Publishing. This book was released on 2014 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the late 1910s until the early 1950s, a series of aggressive segregation policies toward Los Angeles's rapidly expanding African American community inadvertently led to one of the most culturally rich avenues in the United States. From Downtown Los Angeles to the largely undeveloped city of Watts to the south, Central Avenue became the center of the West Coast jazz scene, nurturing homegrown talents like Charles Mingus, Dexter Gordon, and Buddy Collette while also hosting countless touring jazz legends such as Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Billie Holiday. Twenty-four hours a day, the sound of live jazz wafted out of nightclubs, restaurants, hotel lobbies, music schools, and anywhere else a jazz combo could squeeze in its instruments for nearly 50 years, helping to advance and define the sound of America's greatest musical contribution.
Download or read book Swingin on Central Avenue written by Peter Vacher and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2015-09-17 with total page 375 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The development of jazz and swing in the African-American community in Los Angeles in the years before the second World War received a boost from the arrival of a significant numbers of musicians from Chicago and the southwestern states. In Swingin’ on Central: African-American Jazz in Los Angeles, a new study of that vibrant jazz community, music historian and jazz journalist Peter Vacher traveled between Los Angeles and London over several years in order to track down key figures and interview them for this oral history of one of the most swinging jazz scenes in the United States. Vacher recreates the energy and vibrancy of the Central Avenue scene through first-hand accounts from such West Coast notables as trumpeters Andy Blakeney , George Orendorff, and McLure “Red Mack” Morris; pianists Betty Hall Jones, Chester Lane, and Gideon Honore, saxophonists Chuck Thomas, Jack McVea, and Caughey Roberts Jr; drummers Jesse Sailes, Red Minor Robinson, and Nathaniel “Monk” McFay; and others. Throughout, readers learn the story behind the formative years of these musicians, most of whom have never been interviewed until now. While not exactly headliners—nor heavily recorded—this community of jazz musicians was among the most talented in pre-war America. Arriving in Los Angeles at a time when black Americans faced restrictions on where they could live and work, jazz artists of color commonly found themselves limited to the Central Avenue area. This scene, supplemented by road travel, constituted their daily bread as players—with none of them making it to New York. Through their own words, Vacher tells their story in Los Angeles, offering along the way a close look at the role the black musicians union played in their lives while also taking on jazz historiography’s comparative neglect of these West Coast players. Music historians with a particular interest in pre-bop jazz in California will find much new material here as Vacher paints a world of luxurious white nightclubs with black bands, ghetto clubs and after-hours joints, a world within a world that resulted from the migration of black musicians to the West Coast.
Download or read book Sittin In written by Jeff Gold and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2020-11-17 with total page 835 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A visual history of America’s jazz nightclubs of the 1940s and 1950s, featuring exclusive interviews and over 200 souvenir photos. In the two decades before the Civil Rights movement, jazz nightclubs were among the first places that opened their doors to both Black and white performers and club goers in Jim Crow America. In this extraordinary collection, Grammy Award-winning record executive and music historian Jeff Gold looks back at this explosive moment in the history of Jazz and American culture, and the spaces at the center of artistic and social change. Sittin’ In is a visual history of jazz clubs during these crucial decades when some of the greatest names in in the genre—Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, Ella Fitzgerald, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Louis Armstrong, Oscar Peterson, and many others—were headlining acts across the country. In many of the clubs, Black and white musicians played together and more significantly, people of all races gathered together to enjoy an evening’s entertainment. House photographers roamed the floor and for a dollar, took picture of patrons that were developed on site and could be taken home in a keepsake folder with the club’s name and logo. Sittin’ In tells the story of the most popular club in these cities through striking images, first-hand anecdotes, true tales about the musicians who performed their unforgettable shows, notes on important music recorded live there, and more. All of this is supplemented by colorful club memorabilia, including posters, handbills, menus, branded matchbooks, and more. Inside you’ll also find exclusive, in-depth interviews conducted specifically for this book with the legendary Quincy Jones; jazz great tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins; Pulitzer Prize-winning fashion critic Robin Givhan; jazz musician and creative director of the Kennedy Center, Jason Moran; and jazz critic Dan Morgenstern. Gold surveys America’s jazz scene and its intersection with racism during segregation, focusing on three crucial regions: the East Coast (New York, Atlantic City, Boston, Washington, D.C.); the Midwest (Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, St. Louis, Kansas City); and the West Coast (Los Angeles, San Francisco). This collection of ephemeral snapshots tells the story of an era that helped transform American life, beginning the move from traditional Dixieland jazz to bebop, from conservatism to the push for personal freedom.
Download or read book California Soul written by Jacqueline Cogdell DjeDje and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1998-05-12 with total page 524 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Documented with great care and affection, this book is filled with revelations about the intermingling of peoples, styles of music, business interests, night-life pleasures, and the strange ways lived experience shaped black music as America's music in California." —Charles Keil, co-author of Music Grooves
Download or read book Upside Your Head written by Johnny Otis and published by Wesleyan University Press. This book was released on 1993-11-19 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An intriguing memoir by the legendary bandleader.
Download or read book City of Segregation written by Andrea Gibbons and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2018-09-18 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A majestic one-hundred-year study of segregation in Los Angeles City of Segregation documents one hundred years of struggle against the enforced separation of racial groups through property markets, constructions of community, and the growth of neoliberalism. This movement history covers the decades of work to end legal support for segregation in 1948; the 1960s Civil Rights movement and CORE’s efforts to integrate LA’s white suburbs; and the 2006 victory preserving 10,000 downtown residential hotel units from gentrification enfolded within ongoing resistance to the criminalization and displacement of the homeless. Andrea Gibbons reveals the shape and nature of the racist ideology that must be fought, in Los Angeles and across the United States, if we hope to found just cities.
Download or read book Songs of the Unsung written by Horace Tapscott and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2001-01-29 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite his importance and influence, jazz musician, educator, and community leader Horace Tapscott remains relatively unknown to most Americans. In Songs of the Unsung Tapscott shares his life story, recalling his childhood in Houston, moving with his family to Los Angeles in 1943, learning music, and his early professional career. He describes forming the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra in 1961 and later the Union of God's Musicians and Artists Ascension to preserve African American music and serve the community. Tapscott also recounts his interactions with the Black Panthers and law enforcement, the Watts riots, his work in Hollywood movie studios, and stories about his famous musician-activist friends. Songs of the Unsung is the captivating story of one of America’s most unassuming heroes as well as the story of L.A.'s cultural and political evolution over the last half of the twentieth century.
Download or read book Central Avenue Sounds written by and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Los Angeles s Angels Flight written by Jim Dawson and published by Arcadia Publishing. This book was released on 2008 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From 1901 to 1969, Angels Flight was America's most famous incline railway, familiar from its many appearances on postcards and in pulp fiction and film noir. It inspired the titles of five novels, including a 1999 best seller, and three films. Angels Flight's two colorful trolleys glided up and down the side of Bunker Hill in the heart of Los Angeles, carrying 100 million passengers between a downtown business district and a Victorian aerie that gradually deteriorated into a gritty slum. When the city turned Bunker Hill into an acropolis of skyscrapers, Angels Flight was packed up like a boy's electric train set and stored away for nearly 30 years. After a restoration in the mid-1990s that led to a fatal accident, Angels Flight has reopened and is now ready to claim its next chapters in Los Angeles history.
Download or read book The Dark Tree written by Steven L. Isoardi and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2023-08-07 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the early 1960s, pianist Horace Tapscott gave up a successful career in Lionel Hampton’s band and returned to his home in Los Angeles to found the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra, a community arts group that focused on providing community-oriented jazz and jazz training. Over the course of almost forty years, the Arkestra, together with the related Union of God’s Musicians and Artists Ascension collective, was at the forefront of the vital community-based arts movement in Black Los Angeles. Some three hundred artists—musicians, vocalists, poets, playwrights, painters, sculptors, and graphic artists—passed through these organizations, many ultimately remaining within the community and others moving on to achieve international fame. In The Dark Tree, Steven L. Isoardi draws on one hundred in-depth interviews with the Arkestra’s participants to tell the history of the important and largely overlooked community arts movement of Black Los Angeles. This revised and updated edition brings the story of the Arkestra up to date, as its ethos and aesthetic remain vital forces in jazz and popular music to this day.
Download or read book Overground Railroad written by Candacy A. Taylor and published by Abrams. This book was released on 2020-01-07 with total page 460 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This historical exploration of the Green Book offers “a fascinating [and] sweeping story of black travel within Jim Crow America across four decades” (The New York Times Book Review). Published from 1936 to 1966, the Green Book was hailed as the “black travel guide to America.” At that time, it was very dangerous and difficult for African-Americans to travel because they couldn’t eat, sleep, or buy gas at most white-owned businesses. The Green Book listed hotels, restaurants, gas stations, and other businesses that were safe for black travelers. It was a resourceful and innovative solution to a horrific problem. It took courage to be listed in the Green Book, and Overground Railroad celebrates the stories of those who put their names in the book and stood up against segregation. Author Candacy A. Taylor shows the history of the Green Book, how we arrived at our present historical moment, and how far we still have to go when it comes to race relations in America. A New York Times Notable Book of 2020
Download or read book African Americans in Los Angeles written by Karin L. Stanford and published by Arcadia Publishing. This book was released on 2010 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The notion of Los Angeles as a wonderful place of opportunity contributed to the western migration of thousands of Americans, including African Americans escaping racism and violence in the South. But Los Angeles blacks encountered a white backlash, and the doors of opportunity were closed in the form of housing covenants, job discrimination, and school segregation. African Americans fought for equality, building strength in community and collective identity that became their ongoing Los Angeles legacy. This story, encapsulated here in vintage photographs, encompasses the settlers of African descent, antislavery and antidiscrimination efforts, and their cultural contributions on Central Avenue and in Hollywood. Also shown are important flash points, including the 1965 Watts uprising and the O. J. Simpson murder trial. The story of African Americans in Los Angeles is one of promise, dreams, and opportunity realized through survival, willfulness, and foresight.
Download or read book City of Inmates written by Kelly Lytle Hernández and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2017-02-15 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Los Angeles incarcerates more people than any other city in the United States, which imprisons more people than any other nation on Earth. This book explains how the City of Angels became the capital city of the world's leading incarcerator. Marshaling more than two centuries of evidence, historian Kelly Lytle Hernandez unmasks how histories of native elimination, immigrant exclusion, and black disappearance drove the rise of incarceration in Los Angeles. In this telling, which spans from the Spanish colonial era to the outbreak of the 1965 Watts Rebellion, Hernandez documents the persistent historical bond between the racial fantasies of conquest, namely its settler colonial form, and the eliminatory capacities of incarceration. But City of Inmates is also a chronicle of resilience and rebellion, documenting how targeted peoples and communities have always fought back. They busted out of jail, forced Supreme Court rulings, advanced revolution across bars and borders, and, as in the summer of 1965, set fire to the belly of the city. With these acts those who fought the rise of incarceration in Los Angeles altered the course of history in the city, the borderlands, and beyond. This book recounts how the dynamics of conquest met deep reservoirs of rebellion as Los Angeles became the City of Inmates, the nation's carceral core. It is a story that is far from over.
Download or read book Dead Man Blues written by Phil Pastras and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2001-07-02 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Ferdinand "Jelly Roll" Morton sat at the piano in the Library of Congress in May of 1938 to begin his monumental series of interviews with Alan Lomax, he spoke of his years on the West Coast with the nostalgia of a man recalling a golden age, a lost Eden. He had arrived in Los Angeles more than twenty years earlier, but he recounted his losses as vividly as though they had occurred just recently. The greatest loss was his separation from Anita Gonzales, by his own account "the only woman I ever loved," to whom he left almost all of his royalties in his will. In Dead Man Blues, Phil Pastras sets the record straight on the two periods (1917-1923 and 1940-1941) that Jelly Roll Morton spent on the West Coast. In addition to rechecking sources, correcting mistakes in scholarly accounts, and situating eyewitness narratives within the histories of New Orleans or Los Angeles, Pastras offers a fresh interpretation of the life and work of Morton, one of the most important and influential early practitioners of jazz. Pastras's discovery of a previously unknown collection of memorabilia—including a 58-page scrapbook compiled by Morton himself—sheds new light on Morton's personal and artistic development, as well as on the crucial role played by Anita Gonzales. In a rich, fast-moving, and fascinating narrative, Pastras traces Morton's artistic development as a pianist, composer, and bandleader. Among many other topics, Pastras discusses the complexities of racial identity for Morton and his circle, his belief in voodoo, his relationships with women, his style of performance, and his roots in black musical traditions. Not only does Dead Man Blues restore to the historical record invaluable information about one of the great innovators of jazz, it also brings to life one of the most colorful and fascinating periods of musical transformation on the West Coast.
Download or read book California Polyphony written by Mina Yang and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2010-10-01 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What does it mean to be Californian? To find out, Mina Yang delves into multicultural nature of musics in the state that has launched musical and cultural trends for decades. In the early twentieth century, an orientalist fascination with Asian music and culture dominated the popular imagination of white Californians and influenced their interactions with the Asian Other. Several decades later, tensions between the Los Angeles Police Department and the African American community made the thriving jazz and blues nightclub scene of 1940s Central Avenue a target for the LAPD's anti-vice crusade. The musical scores for Hollywood's noir films confirmed reactionary notions of the threat to white female sexuality in the face of black culture and urban corruption while Mexican Americans faced a conflicted assimilation into the white American mainstream. Finally, Korean Americans in the twenty-first century turned to hip-hop to express their cultural and national identities. A compelling journey into the origins of musical identity, California Polyphony explores the intersection of musicology, cultural history, and politics to define Californian.
Download or read book Blowin Up written by Jooyoung Lee and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2016-03-22 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What many readers have wished for is now reality: a richly descriptive ethnography of street rappers. "Blowing up” refers to rappers’ dream of becoming rich and famous, or, at the least, successful as recording artists. Jooyoung Lee adds a shape to his story of Flawliis, VerBS, E. Crimsin, Psychosiz, and Tick-a-Lott: how do young black men from the inner city navigate their twenties? Blowin’ Up is a vibrant look at the young-adult stage of people who grow up in the shadow of gangs, dead-end jobs, and a glittering entertainment industry (the setting is Los Angeles). No other account of ghetto youth affords us this particular angle of vision. Lee discovers that in South Central L.A., rap can create bridges that bring young men together with peers from different neighborhoods (underscoring the importance of a healthy alternative to gangs). A rapper’s underground artistic career is rooted in battle skills and crowd appeal, and, to boot, is meritocratic (whereas mainstream career success is based on branding, timing, funding, networks, and gimmicks). Rapping is an embodied art--it takes much practice to learn, and requires body skills in dance, stance, and voice. Lee homes in on the skills and personalities of individual rappers, but he also illuminates the complex hip-hop scene around which these young men orbit, giving us detailed understandings of how young men navigate the intricate, tightly-wound world of tragedy and opportunity in the city. Lee balances the prospect of risk and existential uncertainty for youth entering a young adult life-stage with the hope for a big break in forging an entertainment career. In the end, Lee shows us how the arts can shape the lives of at-risk youth.
