Politics

I Love You with an Asterisk: African-American Experimental Composers and the French Jazz Press, 1970-1980

Despite the favorable environment for jazz in France, African-American musicians’ turn toward using intellectual and formal techniques of European art music during the 1970s met with a cool reception in the French jazz press. Lehman suggests that a genuine fascination with this new music was tempered by received notions about race and musical idiom, which viewed through-notated forms and intellectualism as uniquely French or European.

Review—Minute Particulars: Meanings in Music-Making in the Wake of Hierarchical Realignments and Other Essays

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To Scott Thompson, Prévost "nail[s] to the mast" the idea that musical practice can help to foster communitarianism. For Prévost, music at its root is comprised of the social relationships between those involved in its creation. By championing communitarian social relations in particular, Prévost identifies operational aspects of improvisation as the means by which to enact such relations in the process of music-making, during which musicians actively search for appropriate musical responses in dialogue with those around them.

“’How You Sound??’: Amiri Baraka Writes Free Jazz.”

Harris' essay examines the ways authors Amiri Baraka and Ishmael Reed translated elements of jazz-particularly free jazz-into literary expression. Baraka believed that free jazz captured what was most valuable in the black tradition and updated it to respond to contemporary phenomena. Harris makes reference to the authors' written work and to Baraka's actual spoken performances.

 

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Stitt's Time (from The Velvet Lounge)

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Gerald Majer, a native of Chicago's racially segregated South Side, has written a book about its musical life. The Velvet Lounge combines his personal experiences with the story, or stories, of his community, merging his account of the music and with the difficult conditions that shaped it. The result is an innovative combination of history, subjective experience of that history, and reflection on its meaning--that is, of fact, literature, and criticism.

Monstrosioso (from The Velvet Lounge)

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Gerald Majer, a native of Chicago's racially segregated South Side, has written a book about its musical life. Majer combines his personal experiences with the story, or stories, of his community, merging his account of the music and with the difficult conditions that shaped it. The result is an innovative combination of history, subjective experience of that history, and reflection on its meaning-that is, of fact, literature, and criticism. In the first portion of this wide-ranging chapter, Majer discusses the music of Hammond organ players Wild Bill Davis and Jimmy Smith.

Jug Eyes (from The Velvet Lounge)

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Gerald Majer, a native of Chicago's racially segregated South Side, has written a book about its musical life. The Velvet Lounge combines his personal experiences with the story, or stories, of his community, merging his account of the music and with the difficult conditions that shaped it. The result is an innovative combination of history, subjective experience of that history, and reflection on its meaning-that is, of fact, literature, and criticism.

The Ear of the Behearer: A Conversation in Jazz

This dialogue was initiated by literary journal New Ohio Review between two professors of literature who have explored the meaning of jazz and improvisation for their craft. Rasula and Edwards begin by discussing how they happened to become interested in jazz in the first place and who sparked that interest. From that starting point the conversation ranges to how audiences for jazz may emerge and how communities may form around it (particularly those of various ethnic diaspora).

Three Viewpoints on Robt. O'Meally's "Blues for Huckleberry"

Three professors of English and experts in African-American studies, Jonathan Arac, Susan K. Harris, and David L. Smith, present their views on Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and on Robert O'Meally's interpretation of it in "Blues for Huckleberry," the Introduction to the Barnes and Noble Classics version of Twain's work.

Current Musicology Special Issue - Jazz Studies

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In this special issue (Nos. 71-72, Spring 2001-Spring 2002), Current Musicology drew together some of the most prominent scholars in the nascent field of jazz studies to deal with important and provocative questions the subject has raised. The volume was dedicated to Columbia professor Mark Tucker, whose untimely death on December 6, 2000 robbed the field of one of its leading lights. This JSO special feature presents selected articles from the issue. © Used by permission of Current Musicology and the authors of specific excerpts.

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