Download or read book What Is This Thing Called Jazz written by Eric Porter and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2002-01-31 with total page 442 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite the plethora of writing about jazz, little attention has been paid to what musicians themselves wrote and said about their practice. An implicit division of labor has emerged where, for the most part, black artists invent and play music while white writers provide the commentary. Eric Porter overturns this tendency in his creative intellectual history of African American musicians. He foregrounds the often-ignored ideas of these artists, analyzing them in the context of meanings circulating around jazz, as well as in relationship to broader currents in African American thought. Porter examines several crucial moments in the history of jazz: the formative years of the 1920s and 1930s; the emergence of bebop; the political and experimental projects of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s; and the debates surrounding Jazz at Lincoln Center under the direction of Wynton Marsalis. Louis Armstrong, Anthony Braxton, Marion Brown, Duke Ellington, W.C. Handy, Yusef Lateef, Abbey Lincoln, Charles Mingus, Archie Shepp, Wadada Leo Smith, Mary Lou Williams, and Reggie Workman also feature prominently in this book. The wealth of information Porter uncovers shows how these musicians have expressed themselves in print; actively shaped the institutional structures through which the music is created, distributed, and consumed, and how they aligned themselves with other artists and activists, and how they were influenced by forces of class and gender. What Is This Thing Called Jazz? challenges interpretive orthodoxies by showing how much black jazz musicians have struggled against both the racism of the dominant culture and the prescriptive definitions of racial authenticity propagated by the music's supporters, both white and black.
Download or read book Lift Every Voice and Swing written by Vaughn A. Booker and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2020-07-21 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores the role of jazz celebrities like Ella Fitzgerald, Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, and Mary Lou Williams as representatives of African American religion in the twentieth century Beginning in the 1920s, the Jazz Age propelled Black swing artists into national celebrity. Many took on the role of race representatives, and were able to leverage their popularity toward achieving social progress for other African Americans. In Lift Every Voice and Swing, Vaughn A. Booker argues that with the emergence of these popular jazz figures, who came from a culture shaped by Black Protestantism, religious authority for African Americans found a place and spokespeople outside of traditional Afro-Protestant institutions and religious life. Popular Black jazz professionals—such as Ella Fitzgerald, Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, and Mary Lou Williams—inherited religious authority though they were not official religious leaders. Some of these artists put forward a religious culture in the mid-twentieth century by releasing religious recordings and putting on religious concerts, and their work came to be seen as integral to the Black religious ethos. Booker documents this transformative era in religious expression, in which jazz musicians embodied religious beliefs and practices that echoed and diverged from the predominant African American religious culture. He draws on the heretofore unexamined private religious writings of Duke Ellington and Mary Lou Williams, and showcases the careers of female jazz artists alongside those of men, expanding our understanding of African American religious expression and decentering the Black church as the sole concept for understanding Black Protestant religiosity. Featuring gorgeous prose and insightful research, Lift Every Voice and Swing will change the way we understand the connections between jazz music and faith.
Download or read book African American Jazz Musicians in the Diaspora written by Larry Ross and published by Edwin Mellen Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study examines the migration of African American jazz musicians to other parts of the world from 1919 to the present. It provides evidence that African American jazz musicians fared better in the diaspora than they did in America where jazz and its inventors were born. Written by an anthropologist who is also a jazz musician, it provides a treatment of the cultural, historical, artistic, innovative, and aesthetic aspects of the migration of African American jazz musicians to the diaspora.
Download or read book Soundtrack to a Movement written by Richard Brent Turner and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2021-04-27 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: **FINALIST for the 2022 PROSE Award in Music & the Performing Arts** **Certificate of Merit, Best Historical Research on Recorded Jazz, given by the 2022 Association for Recorded Sounds Collection Awards for Excellence in Historical Sound Research** Explores how jazz helped propel the rise of African American Islam during the era of global Black liberation Amid the social change and liberation of the civil rights and Black Power movements, the tenor saxophonist Archie Shepp recorded a tribute to Malcolm X’s emancipatory political consciousness. Shepp saw similarities between his revolutionary hero and John Coltrane, one of the most influential jazz musicians of the era. Later, the esteemed trumpeter Miles Davis echoed Shepp’s sentiment, recognizing that Coltrane’s music represented the very passion, rage, rebellion, and love that Malcolm X preached. Soundtrack to a Movement examines the link between the revolutionary Black Islam of the post-WWII generation and jazz music. It argues that from the late 1940s and ’50s though the 1970s, Islam rose in prominence among African Americans in part because of the embrace of the religion among jazz musicians. The book demonstrates that the values that Islam and jazz shared—Black affirmation, freedom, and self-determination—were key to the growth of African American Islamic communities, and that it was jazz musicians who led the way in shaping encounters with Islam as they developed a Black Atlantic “cool” that shaped both Black religion and jazz styles. Soundtrack to a Movement demonstrates how by expressing their values through the rejection of systemic racism, the construction of Black notions of masculinity and femininity, and the development of an African American religious internationalism, both jazz musicians and Black Muslims engaged with a global Black consciousness and interconnected resistance movements in the African diaspora and Africa.
Download or read book Jazz and Justice written by Gerald Horne and published by Monthly Review 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 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 African American Jazz and Rap written by James L. Conyers, Jr. and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2015-11-03 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Music is an expressive voice of a culture, often more so than literature. While jazz and rap are musical genres popular among people of numerous racial and social backgrounds, they are truly important historically for their representation of and impact upon African American culture and traditions. Essays offer interdisciplinary study of jazz and rap as they relate to black culture in America. The essays are grouped under sections. One examines an Afrocentric approach to understanding jazz and rap; another, the history, culture, performers, instruments, and political role of jazz and rap. There are sections on the expressions of jazz in dance and literature; rap music as art, social commentary, and commodity; and the future. Each essay offers insight and thoughtful discourse on these popular musical styles and their roles within the black community and in American culture as a whole. References are included for each essay.
Download or read book A History of African American Jazz and Blues written by Joan Cartwright, M.A. and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2013-10-10 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Three essays and interviews with photographs by author and musician Joan Cartwright about the creation of blues in America by Africans captured for servitude on Euro-American plantations over a span of 400 years. This book should be read by music students and enthusiasts, alike.
Download or read book The Jazz Republic written by Jonathan O. Wipplinger and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2017-04-14 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reveals the wide-ranging influence of American jazz on German discussions of music, race, and culture in the early twentieth century
Download or read book Incredible African American Jazz Musicians written by Stephen Feinstein and published by Enslow Publishing, LLC. This book was released on 2012-07-01 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Readers will learn about a variety of African American jazz musicians including Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Herbie Hancock"--Provided by publisher.
Download or read book Jazz Griots written by Jean-Philippe Marcoux and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2012-06-27 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study is about how four representative African American poets in the 1960s, Langston Hughes, Umbra’s David Henderson, and the Black Arts Movement’s Sonia Sanchez, and Amiri Baraka engage, in the tradition of African griots, in poetic dialogues with aesthetics, music, politics, and Black History, and in so doing narrate, using jazz as meta-language, genealogies, etymologies, cultural legacies, and Black (hi)stories. In intersecting and complementary ways, Hughes, Henderson, Sanchez, and Baraka fashioned their griotism from theorizations of artistry as political engagement, and, in turn, formulated a Black aesthetic based on jazz performativity –a series of jazz-infused iterations that form a complex pattern of literary, musical, historical, and political moments in constant cross-fertilizing dialogues with one another. This form of poetic call-and-response is essential for it allows the possibility of intergenerational dialogues between poets and musicians as well as dialogical potential between song and politics, between Africa and Black America, within the poems. More importantly, these jazz dialogisms underline the construction of the Black Aesthetic as conceptualized respectively by the griotism of Hughes, of Henderson, and of Sanchez and Baraka.
Download or read book Father Of The Blues written by W. C. Handy and published by Da Capo Press. This book was released on 1991-03-22 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: W. C. Handy's blues—“Memphis Blues," "Beale Street Blues," "St. Louis Blues"—changed America's music forever. In Father of the Blues, Handy presents his own story: a vivid picture of American life now vanished. W. C. Handy (1873–1958) was a sensitive child who loved nature and music; but not until he had won a reputation did his father, a preacher of stern Calvinist faith, forgive him for following the "devilish" calling of black music and theater. Here Handy tells of this and other struggles: the lot of a black musician with entertainment groups in the turn-of-the-century South; his days in minstrel shows, and then in his own band; how he made his first 100 from "Memphis Blues"; how his orchestra came to grief with the First World War; his successful career in New York as publisher and song writer; his association with the literati of the Harlem Renaissance.Handy's remarkable tale—pervaded with his unique personality and humor—reveals not only the career of the man who brought the blues to the world's attention, but the whole scope of American music, from the days of the old popular songs of the South, through ragtime to the great era of jazz.
Download or read book The Black Musician and the White City written by Amy Absher and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2014-06-16 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exploration of the history of African American musicians in Chicago during the mid-20th century
Download or read book From Jazz to Swing written by Thomas J. Hennessey and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Black jazz musicians transformed their art - a series of regional musics - into America's most popular music. From Jazz to Swing examines the historical context of jazz within the changing situation of the African-American community and notes the tensions created by the structures of segregation, stereotypes, and prejudice. Making use of the files of African-American newspapers, such as the Chicago Defender, as well as published and archival oral history interviews, Thomas Hennessey explores the contradictions that musicians often faced as African Americans, as trained professional musicians, and as the products of differing regional experiences. From Jazz to Swing follows jazz from its beginnings in the regional black musics of the turn of the century in New Orleans, Chicago, New York, and the territories that make up the rest of the country. Superstars of jazz such as Louis Armstrong, Coleman Hawkins, and Duke Ellington come to life, as do James Reese Europe, King Oliver, Don Redman, Fletcher Henderson, and others.
Download or read book Half Blood Blues written by Esi Edugyan and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2012-02-28 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Scotiabank Giller Prize Man Booker Prize Finalist 2011 An Oprah Magazine Best Book of the Year Shortlisted for the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction Berlin, 1939. The Hot Time Swingers, a popular jazz band, has been forbidden to play by the Nazis. Their young trumpet-player Hieronymus Falk, declared a musical genius by none other than Louis Armstrong, is arrested in a Paris café. He is never heard from again. He was twenty years old, a German citizen. And he was black. Berlin, 1952. Falk is a jazz legend. Hot Time Swingers band members Sid Griffiths and Chip Jones, both African Americans from Baltimore, have appeared in a documentary about Falk. When they are invited to attend the film's premier, Sid's role in Falk's fate will be questioned and the two old musicians set off on a surprising and strange journey. From the smoky bars of pre-war Berlin to the salons of Paris, Sid leads the reader through a fascinating, little-known world as he describes the friendships, love affairs and treacheries that led to Falk's incarceration in Sachsenhausen. Esi Edugyan's Half-Blood Blues is a story about music and race, love and loyalty, and the sacrifices we ask of ourselves, and demand of others, in the name of art.
Download or read book African American Music Trails of Eastern North Carolina written by Sarah Bryan and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2013 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Includes CD with "music from artists in Edgecombe, Greene, Jones, Lenoir, Nash, Pitt, Wayne and Wilson Counties."
Download or read book Harlem in Montmartre written by William A. Shack and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2001-09-04 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Illuminates the expatriate African American community of jazz musicians that thrived in the Montmartre district of Paris in the '20s and '30s and helped turn the "city of lights" into the major jazz capital it remains today.
