The Jazz Cadence of American Culture
Title | The Jazz Cadence of American Culture PDF eBook |
Author | Robert G. O'Meally |
Publisher | Columbia University Press |
Total Pages | 692 |
Release | 1998 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 9780231104494 |
Taking to heart Ralph Ellison's remark that much in American life is "jazz-shaped," The Jazz Cadence of American Culture offers a wide range of eloquent statements about the influence of this art form. Robert G. O'Meally has gathered a comprehensive collection of important essays, speeches, and interviews on the impact of jazz on other arts, on politics, and on the rhythm of everyday life. Focusing mainly on American artistic expression from 1920 to 1970, O'Meally confronts a long era of political and artistic turbulence and change in which American art forms influenced one another in unexpected ways. Organized thematically, these provocative pieces include an essay considering poet and novelist James Weldon Johnson as a cultural critic, an interview with Wynton Marsalis, a speech on the heroic image in jazz, and a newspaper review of a recent melding of jazz music and dance, Bring in 'Da Noise, Bring in 'Da Funk. From Stanley Crouch to August Wilson to Jacqui Malone, the plurality of voices gathered here reflects the variety of expression within jazz. The book's opening section sketches the overall place of jazz in America. Alan P. Merriam and Fradley H. Garner unpack the word jazz and its register, Albert Murray considers improvisation in music and life, Amiri Baraka argues that white critics misunderstand jazz, and Stanley Crouch cogently dissects the intersections of jazz and mainstream American democratic institutions. After this, the book takes an interdisciplinary approach, exploring jazz and the visual arts, dance, sports, history, memory, and literature. Ann Douglas writes on jazz's influence on the design and construction of skyscrapers in the 1920s and '30s, Zora Neale Hurston considers the significance of African-American dance, Michael Eric Dyson looks at the jazz of Michael Jordan's basketball game, and Hazel Carby takes on the sexual politics of Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith's blues. The Jazz Cadence offers a wealth of insight and information for scholars, students, jazz aficionados, and any reader wishing to know more about this music form that has put its stamp on American culture more profoundly than any other in the twentieth century.
Antagonistic Cooperation
Title | Antagonistic Cooperation PDF eBook |
Author | Robert G. O'Meally |
Publisher | Columbia University Press |
Total Pages | 455 |
Release | 2022-03-15 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 0231548214 |
Winner, 2023 Columbia University Press Distinguished Book Award Finalist, 2023 Pauli Murray Book Prize in Black Intellectual History, African American Intellectual History Society Shortlisted, Historical Nonfiction Legacy Award, Hurston / Wright Foundation Ralph Ellison famously characterized ensemble jazz improvisation as “antagonistic cooperation.” Both collaborative and competitive, musicians play with and against one another to create art and community. In Antagonistic Cooperation, Robert G. O’Meally shows how this idea runs throughout twentieth-century African American culture to provide a new history of Black creativity and aesthetics. From the collages of Romare Bearden and paintings of Jean-Michel Basquiat to the fiction of Ralph Ellison and Toni Morrison to the music of Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, O’Meally explores how the worlds of African American jazz, art, and literature have informed one another. He argues that these artists drew on the improvisatory nature of jazz and the techniques of collage not as a way to depict a fractured or broken sense of Blackness but rather to see the Black self as beautifully layered and complex. They developed a shared set of methods and motives driven by the belief that art must involve a sense of community. O’Meally’s readings of these artists and their work emphasize how they have not only contributed to understanding of Black history and culture but also provided hope for fulfilling the broken promises of American democracy.
Jazz in American Culture
Title | Jazz in American Culture PDF eBook |
Author | Burton W. Peretti |
Publisher | Ivan R. Dee |
Total Pages | 209 |
Release | 1998-02-01 |
Genre | Music |
ISBN | 1461713048 |
This history of jazz, spanning the twentieth century, is the first to place it within the broad context of American culture. Burton Peretti argues persuasively that this distinctive American music has been a key thread in the tapestry of the nation’s culture. The music itself, its players and its audience, and the critical debates it has prompted, tell us much about changes in American life since 1910. Mr. Peretti traces the emergence of jazz out of ragtime during a time of tumultuous growth of cites and industries. In the 1920s jazz flourished and symbolized the cultural struggle between modernists and traditionalists. As American sought reassurance and self-esteem during the Great Depression, jazz reached new levels of sophistication in the Swing Era. World War II encouraged rapid changes in popular tastes, and in the postwar decades jazz became both a voice of a globally dominant America and an avant-garde music reflecting social and political turmoil. Today, Mr. Peretti concludes, jazz symbolizes important cultural trends and enjoys a new prestige in a complex musical scene. Jazz in American Culture tells a peculiarly American story, evaluating the music as well as those who created it, and opening new perspectives on our cultural history.
Jazz in American Culture
Title | Jazz in American Culture PDF eBook |
Author | Peter Townsend |
Publisher | Univ. Press of Mississippi |
Total Pages | 222 |
Release | 2000 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 9781578063246 |
A persuasive appreciation of what jazz is and of how it has permeated and enriched the culture of America
Uptown Conversation
Title | Uptown Conversation PDF eBook |
Author | Robert G. O'Meally |
Publisher | Columbia University Press |
Total Pages | 455 |
Release | 2004 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 0231123507 |
'Uptown Conversation' asserts that jazz is not only a music to define, it is a culture. The essays illustrate how for more than a century jazz has initiated a call and response across art forms, geographies, and cultures, inspiring musicians, filmmakers,painters and poets.
Antagonistic Cooperation
Title | Antagonistic Cooperation PDF eBook |
Author | Robert G. O'Meally |
Publisher | |
Total Pages | 0 |
Release | 2022 |
Genre | MUSIC |
ISBN | 9780231189187 |
This Music Demanded Action : Ellison, Armstrong, and the Imperatives of Jazz -- We Are All a Collage : Armstrong's Operatic Blues, Bearden's Black Odyssey, and Morrison's Jazz -- The "Open Corner" of Black Community and Creativity : From Romare Bearden to Duke Ellington and Toni Morrison -- Hare and Bear : The Racial Profiles of Satchmo's Smile -- The White Trombone and the Unruly Black Cosmopolitan Trumpet, or How Paris Blues Came to Be Unfinished.
Jazz/Not Jazz
Title | Jazz/Not Jazz PDF eBook |
Author | David Ake |
Publisher | Univ of California Press |
Total Pages | 312 |
Release | 2012-06-12 |
Genre | Music |
ISBN | 0520271041 |
“Jazz/Not Jazz is an innovative and inspiring investigation of jazz as it is practiced, theorized and taught today. Taking their cues from current debates within jazz scholarship, the contributors to this collection open up jazz studies to a transdisciplinarity that is rich in its diversity of approaches, candid in its appraisals of critical worth, transparent in its ideological suppositions, and catholic in its subjects/objects of inquiry.”—Kevin Fellezs, author of Birds of Fire: Jazz, Rock, Funk and the Creation of Fusion. “This collection is a delight. Each essay opens up some previously ignored aspect of jazz history. Anyone who knows the New Jazz Studies and is wise enough to acquire this book will immediately devour it.”—Krin Gabbard, author of Hotter Than That: The Trumpet, Jazz, and American Culture. “This volume is truly one of a kind, eminently readable and filled with new insights. It will make an extremely important contribution to jazz literature.”—Jeffrey Taylor, Director, H. Wiley Hitchcock Institute for Studies in American Music, Brooklyn College.