Download or read book Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance K Y written by Cary D. Wintz and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2004 with total page 708 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An interdisciplinary look at the Harlem Renaissance, it includes essays on the principal participants, those who defined the political, intellectual and cultural milieu in which the Renaissance existed; on important events and places.

Download or read book Subversive Sounds written by Charles B. Hersch and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2008-09-15 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Subversive Sounds probes New Orleans’s history, uncovering a web of racial interconnections and animosities that was instrumental to the creation of a vital American art form—jazz. Drawing on oral histories, police reports, newspaper accounts, and vintage recordings, Charles Hersch brings to vivid life the neighborhoods and nightspots where jazz was born. This volume shows how musicians such as Jelly Roll Morton, Nick La Rocca, and Louis Armstrong negotiated New Orleans’s complex racial rules to pursue their craft and how, in order to widen their audiences, they became fluent in a variety of musical traditions from diverse ethnic sources. These encounters with other music and races subverted their own racial identities and changed the way they played—a musical miscegenation that, in the shadow of Jim Crow, undermined the pursuit of racial purity and indelibly transformed American culture. “More than timely . . . Hersch orchestrates voices of musicians on both sides of the racial divide in underscoring how porous the music made the boundaries of race and class.”—New Orleans Times-Picayune

Download or read book Oh Mister Jelly written by and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 730 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

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 Mr Jelly s Business written by Arthur W. Upfield and published by ETT Imprint. This book was released on 2020-06-01 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Murder down under. The car lies wrecked and abandoned near the world's longest fence, the "rabbit-proof fence" in the wheat belt of Western Australia. There is no sign of its owner. Has George Loftus simply decamped, for reasons of his own? Or was it murder? Bonaparte suspects the worst and is determined to find the body - and the murderer. This novel is filled with Upfield's own philosophy about what creates murderers. We also find out a lot about Aboriginal tracking methods, as well as more information about Bony's family background. - Mysteries in Paradise

Download or read book Struggling to Define a Nation written by Charles Hiroshi Garrett and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2008-10-12 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Identifying music as a vital site of cultural debate, this book captures the dynamic, contested nature of musical life in the United States. It examines an array of genres - including art music, jazz, popular song, ragtime, and Hawaiian music - and well-known musicians, such as Charles Ives, Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong, and Irving Berlin.

Download or read book Classic Jazz written by Floyd Levin and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2002-04-30 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Floyd Levin's half-century collection of reportage, reviews and recollections are an irreplaceable and totally enjoyable trove of writing about the vibrancy, past and still-present, of traditional American jazz."—Charles Champlin, author of Back There Where the Past Was "I've known Floyd and his wife Lucille for more than fifty years. Floyd's book is a colorful, intimate account of his lifelong love affair with jazz. I'm especially fascinated when he writes about his personal encounters with some of the jazz legends of the Century. This book is essential reading for anyone concerned about jazz - its present, its past, and his evolution."—Milt Hinton "Floyd Levin's dedicated and unselfish life-long work for the cause of jazz has illuminated many a corner that would otherwise have remained in the dark. All who care about the music are in his debt. Classic Jazz, like Floyd himself, is a classic."—Dan Morgenstern, Director, Institute of Jazz Studies, Rutgers University "What a rich, passionate and human book this is! Drawing on fifty years of devotion to classic, New Orleans jazz and the artists who performed it, Floyd Levin brilliantly weaves anecdotal material, primary research, intimate personal observations, and analyses to create an historical goldmine of the music's evolution in New Orleans and on the West Coast. In rendering portraits of legendary musicians in such a beautifully moving, honest way, he offers not just standard history, but a strong sense of the emotional core of the music as well."—Steve Isoardi, co-author of Central Avenue Sounds

Download or read book Creating Jazz Counterpoint written by Vic Hobson and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2014-03-19 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book Jazzmen (1939) claimed New Orleans as the birthplace of jazz and introduced the legend of Buddy Bolden as the "First Man of Jazz." Much of the information that the book relied on came from a highly controversial source: Bunk Johnson. He claimed to have played with Bolden and that together they had pioneered jazz. Johnson made many recordings talking about and playing the music of the Bolden era. These recordings have been treated with skepticism because of doubts about Johnson's credibility. Using oral histories, the Jazzmen interview notes, and unpublished archive material, this book confirms that Bunk Johnson did play with Bolden. This confirmation, in turn, has profound implications for Johnson's recorded legacy in describing the music of the early years of New Orleans jazz. New Orleans jazz was different from ragtime in a number of ways. It was a music that was collectively improvised, and it carried a new tonality--the tonality of the blues. How early jazz musicians improvised together and how the blues became a part of jazz has until now been a mystery. Part of the reason New Orleans jazz developed as it did is that all the prominent jazz pioneers, including Buddy Bolden, Bunk Johnson, Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, Johnny Dodds, and Kid Ory, sang in barbershop (or barroom) quartets. This book describes in both historical and musical terms how the practices of quartet singing were converted to the instruments of a jazz band, and how this, in turn, produced collectively improvised, blues-inflected jazz, that unique sound of New Orleans.

Download or read book Keeping the Beat on the Street written by Mick Burns and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2008-02-01 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Told in the words of the musicians themselves, Keeping the Beat on the Street celebrates the renewed passion and pageantry among black brass bands in New Orleans. Mick Burns introduces the people who play the music and shares their insights, showing why New Orleans is the place where jazz continues to grow. Brass bands waned during the civil rights era but revived around 1970 and then flourished in the 1980s when the music became cool with the younger generation. In the only book to cover this revival, Burns interviews members from a variety of bands, including the Fairview Baptist Church Brass Band, the Dirty Dozen, Tuba Fats' Chosen Few, and the Rebirth Brass Band. He captures their thoughts about the music, their careers, audiences, influences from rap and hip-hop, the resurgence of New Orleans social and pleasure clubs and second lines, traditional versus funk style, recording deals, and touring. For anyone who loves jazz and the city where it was born, Keeping the Beat on the Street is a book to savor. "We should be grateful to Mick Burns for undertaking the task of producing... the only book to cover the subject of what he rightly calls the brass band renaissance." -- New Orleans Music"A welcome look at the history of brass bands. These oral histories provide a valuable contribution to New Orleans musical history.... What shines through the musicians' words is love of craft, love of culture." -- New Orleans Times-Picayune "A seminal work about the Brass Bands of New Orleans." -- Louisiana Libraries

Download or read book A R Pioneers written by Brian Ward and published by Vanderbilt University Press. This book was released on 2018-06-26 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Association for Recorded Sound Collections Certificate of Merit for the Best Historical Research in Recorded Roots or World Music, 2019 A&R Pioneers offers the first comprehensive account of the diverse group of men and women who pioneered artists-and-repertoire (A&R) work in the early US recording industry. In the process, they helped create much of what we now think of as American roots music. Resourceful, innovative, and, at times, shockingly unscrupulous, they scouted and signed many of the singers and musicians who came to define American roots music between the two world wars. They also shaped the repertoires and musical styles of their discoveries, supervised recording sessions, and then devised marketing campaigns to sell the resulting records. By World War II, they had helped redefine the canons of American popular music and established the basic structure and practices of the modern recording industry. Moreover, though their musical interests, talents, and sensibilities varied enormously, these A&R pioneers created the template for the job that would subsequently become known as "record producer." Without Ralph Peer, Art Satherley, Frank Walker, Polk C. Brockman, Eli Oberstein, Don Law, Lester Melrose, J. Mayo Williams, John Hammond, Helen Oakley Dance, and a whole army of lesser known but often hugely influential A&R representatives, the music of Bessie Smith and Bob Wills, of the Carter Family and Count Basie, of Robert Johnson and Jimmie Rodgers may never have found its way onto commercial records and into the heart of America's musical heritage. This is their story.

Download or read book Jazz Transatlantic Volume I written by Gerhard Kubik and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2017-10-17 with total page 529 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A CHOICE 2018 Outstanding Academic Title In Jazz Transatlantic, Volume I, renowned scholar Gerhard Kubik takes the reader across the Atlantic from Africa to the Americas and then back in pursuit of the music we call jazz. This first volume explores the term itself and how jazz has been defined and redefined. It also celebrates the phenomena of jazz performance and uncovers hidden gems of jazz history. The volume offers insights gathered during Kubik's extensive field work and based on in-depth interviews with jazz musicians around the Atlantic world. Languages, world views, beliefs, experiences, attitudes, and commodities all play a role. Kubik reveals what is most important--the expertise of individual musical innovators on both sides of the Atlantic, and hidden relationships in their thoughts. Besides the common African origins of much vocabulary and structure, all the expressions of jazz in Africa share transatlantic family relationships. Within that framework, musicians are creating and re-creating jazz in never-ending contacts and exchanges. The first of two volumes, Jazz Transatlantic, Volume I examines this transatlantic history, sociolinguistics, musicology, and the biographical study of personalities in jazz during the twentieth century. This volume traces the African and African American influences on the creation of the jazz sound and traces specific African traditions as they transform into American jazz. Kubik seeks to describe the constant mixing of sources and traditions, so he includes influences of European music in both volumes. These works will become essential and indelible parts of jazz history.

Download or read book The Original Blues written by Lynn Abbott and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2017-02-27 with total page 866 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Blues Book of the Year —Living Blues Association of Recorded Sound Collections Awards for Excellence Best Historical Research in Recorded Blues, Gospel, Soul, or R&B–Certificate of Merit (2018) 2023 Blues Hall of Fame Inductee - Classic of Blues Literature category With this volume, Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff complete their groundbreaking trilogy on the development of African American popular music. Fortified by decades of research, the authors bring to life the performers, entrepreneurs, critics, venues, and institutions that were most crucial to the emergence of the blues in black southern vaudeville theaters; the shadowy prehistory and early development of the blues is illuminated, detailed, and given substance. At the end of the nineteenth century, vaudeville began to replace minstrelsy as America’s favorite form of stage entertainment. Segregation necessitated the creation of discrete African American vaudeville theaters. When these venues first gained popularity, ragtime coon songs were the standard fare. Insular black southern theaters provided a safe haven, where coon songs underwent rehabilitation and blues songs suitable for the professional stage were formulated. The process was energized by dynamic interaction between the performers and their racially-exclusive audience. The first blues star of black vaudeville was Butler “String Beans” May, a blackface comedian from Montgomery, Alabama. Before his bizarre, senseless death in 1917, String Beans was recognized as the “blues master piano player of the world.” His musical legacy, elusive and previously unacknowledged, is preserved in the repertoire of country blues singer-guitarists and pianists of the race recording era. While male blues singers remained tethered to the role of blackface comedian, female “coon shouters” acquired a more dignified aura in the emergent persona of the “blues queen.” Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and most of their contemporaries came through this portal; while others, such as forgotten blues heroine Ora Criswell and her protégé Trixie Smith, ingeniously reconfigured the blackface mask for their own subversive purposes. In 1921 black vaudeville activity was effectively nationalized by the Theater Owners Booking Association (T.O.B.A.). In collaboration with the emergent race record industry, T.O.B.A. theaters featured touring companies headed by blues queens with records to sell. By this time the blues had moved beyond the confines of entertainment for an exclusively black audience. Small-time black vaudeville became something it had never been before—a gateway to big-time white vaudeville circuits, burlesque wheels, and fancy metropolitan cabarets. While the 1920s was the most glamorous and remunerative period of vaudeville blues, the prior decade was arguably even more creative, having witnessed the emergence, popularization, and early development of the original blues on the African American vaudeville stage.

Download or read book Louis Armstrong Duke Ellington and Miles Davis written by Aaron Lefkovitz and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2018-06-20 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Miles Davis as distinctively global symbols of threatening and nonthreatening black masculinity. It centers them in debates over U.S. cultural exceptionalism, noting how they have been part of the definition of jazz as a jingoistic and exclusively American form of popular culture.

Download or read book In Search of The Blues Volume 2 of 2 EasyRead Super Large 24pt Edition written by and published by ReadHowYouWant.com. This book was released on with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Jazz and Justice written by Gerald Horne and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2019-06-18 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A galvanizing history of how jazz and jazz musicians flourished despite rampant cultural exploitation The music we call “jazz” arose in late nineteenth century North America—most likely in New Orleans—based on the musical traditions of Africans, newly freed from slavery. Grounded in the music known as the “blues,” which expressed the pain, sufferings, and hopes of Black folk then pulverized by Jim Crow, this new music entered the world via the instruments that had been abandoned by departing military bands after the Civil War. Jazz and Justice examines the economic, social, and political forces that shaped this music into a phenomenal US—and Black American—contribution to global arts and culture. Horne assembles a galvanic story depicting what may have been the era’s most virulent economic—and racist—exploitation, as jazz musicians battled organized crime, the Ku Klux Klan, and other variously malignant forces dominating the nightclub scene where jazz became known. Horne pays particular attention to women artists, such as pianist Mary Lou Williams and trombonist Melba Liston, and limns the contributions of musicians with Native American roots. This is the story of a beautiful lotus, growing from the filth of the crassest form of human immiseration.

Download or read book Encyclopedia of African American Popular Culture 4 volumes written by Jessie Smith and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2010-12-17 with total page 1916 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This four-volume encyclopedia contains compelling and comprehensive information on African American popular culture that will be valuable to high school students and undergraduates, college instructors, researchers, and general readers. From the Apollo Theater to the Harlem Renaissance, from barber shop and beauty shop culture to African American holidays, family reunions, and festivals, and from the days of black baseball to the era of a black president, the culture of African Americans is truly unique and diverse. This diversity is the result of intricate customs forged in tightly woven communities—not only in the United States, but in many cases also stemming from the traditions of another continent. Encyclopedia of African American Popular Culture presents information in a traditional A–Z organization, capturing the essence of the customs of African Americans and presenting this rich cultural heritage through the lens of popular culture. Each entry includes historical and current information to provide a meaningful background for the topic and the perspective to appreciate its significance in a modern context. This encyclopedia is a valuable research tool that provides easy access to a wealth of information on the African American experience.

Download or read book The Carceral City written by John Bardes and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2024-03-27 with total page 622 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Americans often assume that slave societies had little use for prisons and police because slaveholders only ever inflicted violence directly or through overseers. Mustering tens of thousands of previously overlooked arrest and prison records, John K. Bardes demonstrates the opposite: in parts of the South, enslaved and free people were jailed at astronomical rates. Slaveholders were deeply reliant on coercive state action. Authorities built massive slave prisons and devised specialized slave penal systems to maintain control and maximize profit. Indeed, in New Orleans—for most of the past half-century, the city with the highest incarceration rate in the United States—enslaved people were jailed at higher rates during the antebellum era than are Black residents today. Moreover, some slave prisons remained in use well after Emancipation: in these forgotten institutions lie the hidden origins of state violence under Jim Crow. With powerful and evocative prose, Bardes boldly reinterprets relations between slavery and prison development in American history. Racialized policing and mass incarceration are among the gravest moral crises of our age, but they are not new: slavery, the prison, and race are deeply interwoven into the history of American governance.