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"jazz history"
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Freedom Sounds
An insightful examination of the impact of the Civil Rights Movement and African Independence on jazz in the 1950s and 60s, this book traces the complex relationships among music, politics, aesthetics, and activism through the lens of the hot button racial and economic issues of the time. It illustrates how the contentious and soul-searching debates in the Civil Rights, African Independence, and Black Power movements shaped aesthetic debates and exerted a moral pressure on musicians to take action. Throughout, its arguments show how jazz musicians' quest for self-determination as artists and human beings also led to fascinating and far-reaching musical explorations and a lasting ethos of social critique and transcendence. Across a broad body of issues of cultural and political relevance, the book considers the discursive, structural, and practical aspects of life in the jazz world of the 1950s and 1960s. In domestic politics, the book explores the desegregation of the American Federation of Musicians, the politics of playing to segregated performance venues in the 1950s, the participation of jazz musicians in benefit concerts, and strategies of economic empowerment. Issues of transatlantic importance such as the effects of anticolonialism and African nationalism on the politics and aesthetics of the music are also examined, from Paul Robeson's interest in Africa, to the State Department jazz tours, to the interaction of jazz musicians such as Art Blakey and Randy Weston with African diasporic aesthetics. It explores musicians' aesthetic agency in synthesizing influential forms of musical expression from a multiplicity of stylistic and cultural influences—African American music, popular song, classical music, African diasporic aesthetics, and other world music—through examples from cool jazz, hard bop, modal jazz, and the avant-garde. By considering the differences between aesthetic and socio-economic mobility, it presents a fresh interpretation of debates over cultural ownership, racism, reverse racism, and authenticity.
eBook
The Penguin jazz guide : the history of the music in the 1,001 best albums
Offers a chronologically arranged survey of jazz recordings, including biographical details and lineups.
Book
The amazing Bud Powell
Bud Powell was not only one of the greatest bebop pianists of all time, he stands as one of the twentieth century’s most dynamic and fiercely adventurous musical minds. His expansive musicianship, riveting performances, and inventive compositions expanded the bebop idiom and pushed jazz musicians of all stripes to higher standards of performance. Yet Powell remains one of American music’s most misunderstood figures, and the story of his exceptional talent is often overshadowed by his history of alcohol abuse, mental instability, and brutalization at the hands of white authorities. In this first extended study of the social significance of Powell’s place in the American musical landscape, Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr. shows how the pianist expanded his own artistic horizons and moved his chosen idiom into new realms. Illuminating and multi-layered, The Amazing Bud Powell centralizes Powell’s contributions as it details the collision of two vibrant political economies: the discourses of art and the practice of blackness.
eBook
Why jazz happened
Why Jazz Happened is the first comprehensive social history of jazz. It provides an intimate and compelling look at the many forces that shaped this most American of art forms and the many influences that gave rise to jazz's post-war styles. Rich with the voices of musicians, producers, promoters, and others on the scene during the decades following World War II, this book views jazz's evolution through the prism of technological advances, social transformations, changes in the law, economic trends, and much more. In an absorbing narrative enlivened by the commentary of key personalities, Marc Myers describes the myriad of events and trends that affected the music's evolution, among them, the American Federation of Musicians strike in the early 1940s, changes in radio and concert-promotion, the introduction of the long-playing record, the suburbanization of Los Angeles, the Civil Rights movement, the \"British invasion\" and the rise of electronic instruments. This groundbreaking book deepens our appreciation of this music by identifying many of the developments outside of jazz itself that contributed most to its texture, complexity, and growth.
eBook
Beyond A Love Supreme
Recorded by his quartet in a single session in 1964, John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme is widely considered one of the greatest jazz albums of all time. A significant record of Coltrane’s transition from the bebop and hard bop of his earlier recordings to the free jazz style perfected throughout the rest of his career, the album is also an embodiment of the deep spirituality that characterized the final years of his life. The album itself comprises a four-part suite; the titles of the four parts-“Acknowledgment,” “Resolution,” “Pursuance,” and “Psalm,”-along with the poem Coltrane composed for inclusion in the liner notes, which he “recites” instrumentally in “Psalm” reflect the religious aspect of the album, a quality that contributes to its mystique and symbolic importance within the canon of seminal jazz recordings. This book explores both the musical aspects of A Love Supreme, and the album’s seminal importance in jazz history. Using criticism of late Coltrane recordings as a starting point, the author suggests ways of listening to these recordings that can be considered outside the conventional ideologies of mainstream jazz practice. The book concludes with a study of the broad musical and cultural impact of the album, examining the relationship between the recording and music, literature, poetry and film.
eBook
Jazz worlds, world jazz
\"Many regard jazz as the soundtrack of America, born and raised in its cities and echoing throughout its tumultuous century of progress. So when Ernest Hemingway wrote about seeing jazz in 1920s Paris, and when British colonial officials danced to jazz in the clubs of Calcutta in the waning years of the Raj, how, exactly, had it gotten there? Jazz Worlds/World Jazz aims to answer these questions and more, bringing together voices from countries as far flung as Azerbaijan, Armenia, and India to show that the story of jazz is not trapped in American history books but alive in global modernity. Monumental in scope, this book explores the relationship between jazz and culture and how they influence each other across a range of themes and settings. Contributors offer an analysis of the social meaning of jazz in Iran, a look at the genesis of Ethiopian jazz and at Indian fusion, and chapters on jazz diplomacy, Balkan swing, and that French export par excellence: Django Reinhardt. Altogether the contributors approach jazz-in these global iterations-through the themes that have always characterized it at home: place, history, mobility, media, and race. The result is a first-of-its-kind map of jazz around the globe that pays tribute to the players who have given the form its seemingly infinite possibilities\"--Publisher's website.
Book
Jazz matters
What, where, and when is jazz? To most of us jazz means small combos, made up mostly of men, performing improvisationally in urban club venues. But jazz has been through many changes in the decades since World War II, emerging in unexpected places and incorporating a wide range of new styles. In this engrossing new book, David Ake expands on the discussion he began in Jazz Cultures, lending his engaging, thoughtful, and stimulating perspective to post-1940s jazz. Ake investigates such issues as improvisational analysis, pedagogy, American exceptionalism, and sense of place in jazz. He uses provocative case studies to illustrate how some of the values ascribed to the postwar jazz culture are reflected in and fundamentally shaped by aspects of sound, location, and time.
eBook