Book Description
"The path the slave took to 'citizenship' is what I want to look at. And I make my analogy through the slave citizen's music -- through the music that is most closely associated with him: blues and a later, but parallel development, jazz... [If] the Negro represents, or is symbolic of, something in and about the nature of American culture, this certainly should be revealed by his characteristic music."
So says Amiri Baraka in the Introduction to Blues People, his classic work on the place of jazz and blues in American social, musical, economic, and cultural history. From the music of African slaves in the United States through the music scene of the 1960's, Baraka traces the influence of what he calls "negro music" on white America -- not only in the context of music and pop culture but also in terms of the values and perspectives passed on through the music. In tracing the music, he brilliantly illuminates the influence of African Americans on American culture and history.
Customer Reviews:
An American Treasure.......2007-06-29
This is one of the most important books on America and American history, culture and citizenship. It would benefit the world if it were incorporated into public education. Someone said that nations are judged by their art and this book examines that subject superlatively. This study of the blues examines the evolving cosmology of the Africans and their journey and creation: the blues, one of the singular most powerful beauties of America. He shows how from the blues came all and embraced all other peoples and cultures. Baraka's ability to live the thoughts of the originators enables us to understand the profoundity of their sorrow and sublimity of their joy.
gone where the Southern cross the yella dog.......2007-02-22
The other day a friend rashly claimed that art and music were equally hard to describe in words. I asked him to tell me about a certain painting of Picasso's. He did, but claimed it wasn't accurate. "OK," I said, "you're right, but now tell me about Mozart's Jupiter Symphony." He opened his mouth, closed it, looked at me, and said, "Yeah, I see what you mean." Writing a book about the blues would be equally hard, it seems to me. So, LeRoi Jones did what he could, back in 1963, to tie the indescribable to the more concrete. He wrote a social history of African-Americans in the USA through the prism of music or---maybe on the principle of red and yellow tile floors (are they red with yellow designs or yellow with red designs ?)---he wrote a book on African-American music through the prism of social history. It is one of the most important books on American music (and American society) that you can find. It has stood the test of time. He begins from the Africans who came to North America as slaves bearing very different cultures, confronted by an absolutely different view of the world emanating from their new masters. Here he tries to show how African music became transformed into African-AMERICAN music and then American. He continues then up through the generations of slavery, to Emancipation, migration to the cities, World War I, the Depression, World War II and the bebop age of the Fifties. The book is pre-Civil Rights movement, pre-Martin Luther King. Jones may have looked down on the NAACP and its allies as "white liberal supported organizations", I'm not sure, but they don't appear. The times are symbolized by the use of "Negro" throughout. I agree, the tome is dated, but don't reject it, don't pooh-pooh the man. This is a very intelligent, very worthwhile book. Anyone, particularly from outside the USA, who wants to know the history of African-American music within its social environment ought still to read BLUES PEOPLE. He writes, "If Negro music can be seen to be the result of certain attitudes, certain specific ways of thinking about the world (and only ultimately about the ways in which music can be made), then the basic hypothesis of this book is understood." [p.153] Jones goes to great lengths to get to the bottom of those attitudes and thoughts.
My main criticism, apart from the fact that history dictates that we must be left a half century behind contemporary realities, is that though Jones obviously knew and loved the blues and jazz and all the various styles ( if not swing), his approach is coldly academic, highly dispassionate. He may criticize people who tried to make money, he may downplay all those who "abandoned" their roots, but my disappointment is that there is nothing of himself in the work barring a few mentions of his family. He does not share his enthusiasm. Music is beauty after all. I am sure he wanted the book to be taken as a serious essay, which it is. But in keeping himself removed from the discussion, being so analytic and professional in the style of the day, he has robbed us "readers of the future" of many insights.
African-American experience in the USA expressed itself most particularly in the blues, only later did that musical mode become part of the general American culture, often watered down, sometimes imitated by those who didn't wish to fit in or who wished to cash in. When conditions have changed, when the black middle class has entered mainstream America, and the urban underclass is wrapped up in hip-hop, gangsta rap culture, which is relentlessly commercialized by the powerful media, talking about the blues may seem a matter for historians or ethnomusicologists. Still, BLUES PEOPLE resonates strongly if we try to understand where we have been. As for where we are going---that old line sums it up---we're goin where the Southern cross the yella dog.
Blues People.......2005-09-22
This is a really interesting look at the evolution of black culture through the lense of music. Some of the author's opinions about later music (50's-60's) may seem out of touch to today's readers, but overall it is well worth reading.
The Best Starting Point.......2005-08-24
I actually purchased the first paperback edition this book a long time ago, and I learned that it had been out of print for quite some time. It was a time when I was a casual listener of blues and jazz, and didn't think about the roots of the music I was listening to. The book was interesting enough, but it didn't have information about more contemporary stuff, as it was printed in 1963.
Recently, I found this book in the upper shelves of my library, having completely forgotten about it in spite of my infatuation with the blues for the better part of the last two decades. It was a most welcome surprise for me, as it contained a compact but comprehensive introduction to the time period from the first Africans came to America to the 1920s when their music was first recorded, and laid the groundwork to how this music evolved in a sociological context. The rural lifestyle, the reflections of the exodus from the south on the music and subsequent refined, urban sound are discussed in this framework.
Although it would not really appeal to the casual reader and listener, "Blues People" is invaluable for the serious blues and jazz fan for setting the music into the general context of social life and external effects that made this music what it is today.
Very honest&breaks all chains.......2003-01-16
this book not only puts the music into perspective but also the struggle that still goes on too this day.very upfront&honest about problems that still linger.it traces the journey&challenges it's reader too better understand the reason for the whys??one of the best Books that I have ever read from start too finish.
Book Description
Is jazz a universal idiom or is it an African-American art form? Although whites have been playing jazz almost since it first developed, the history of jazz has been forged by a series of African-American artists whose styles caught the interest of their musical generation--masters such as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, John Coltrane, and Charlie Parker. Whether or not white musicians deserve their secondary status in jazz history, one thing is clear: developments in jazz have been a result of black people's search for a meaningful identity as Americans and members of the African diaspora. Blacks are not alone in being deeply affected by these shifts in African-American racial attitudes and cultural strategies. Historically in closer contact with blacks than nearly any other group of white Americans, white jazz musicians have also felt these shifts. More importantly, their careers and musical interests have been deeply affected by them. The author, an active participant in the jazz world as composer, performer, and author of several books on jazz and Latin music, hopes that this book will encourage jazz lovers to take a rhetoric-free look at the charged issue of race as has affected the world of jazz. A work about the formulation of identity in the face of racial difference, the book considers topics such as the promotion of black Southern culture and inner-city styles like rhythm and blues and rap as a means of achieving black racial solidarity. It discusses the body of music fostered by an identification to Africa, the conversion of black jazz musicians to Islam and other Eastern religions, and the impact of a jazz community united by heroin use. White jazz musicians who identify with black culture in an unsettling form by speaking black dialect and calling themselves African-American is examined, as is the assimilation of jazz into the wider American culture.
Average customer rating:
- An amazingly comprehensive study
- Fun, but uncriticizing worship
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The Song of the Hawk: The Life and Recordings of Coleman Hawkins (The Michigan American Music Series)
John Chilton
Manufacturer: University of Michigan Press
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ASIN: 0472082019 |
Book Description
The first full-length biography of Coleman Hawkins
Customer Reviews:
An amazingly comprehensive study.......2004-06-16
John Chilton IS a professional jazz musician as well as a Coleman Hawkins fan (who could not be). Another reviewer has criticized the criticism for not being critical; I wish to criticize him! First off as a pioneer, Hawkins had NO contemporaries at the start of his career. Few reviews are gushing with praise, there are plenty of recordings that are (dare I use the word) criticized. What makes this book so great is the thoroughness: nearly every detail in a HUGE catalog of recordings is discussed. Many of the recordings are obscure and often out of print, yet I could only find a few he missed. I've had a great time reading his thoughts on a track and then going back and listening for the points mentioned. I've read many jazz musicians' biographies, this is my favorite. While it adequately covers the personal details, the focus is on the music. If I had any criticism at all, it would be that it's maybe a little too unemotionally scholastic.
Fun, but uncriticizing worship.......2002-02-18
This is a very entertaining book about this groundbreaking saxophone stylist. However, the analyses of his recordings are kind of nonsense. The author himself isn't a musician instead of a devoted fan? The author does not compare the Hawk with other players of the era very critically, ie. based on musical facts. Still, a very readable book.
Amazon.com
Columbia University professor Robert G. O'Meally--one of the most comprehensive essayists and cultural critics on the scene--has brought together diverse viewpoints on jazz's continuing influence over the culture of the United States. This superb collection takes its cue from the legendary Ralph Ellison's observation that American life is "jazz-based." As O'Meally writes, "The book is thus a teaching tool designed to open the way for a variety of new avenues in jazz studies as a growing interdisciplinary field of exploration."
Ann Douglas muses on the relationship between skyscrapers and the music of the swing era, while Alan P. Merriam and Fradley H. Garner trace the jumbled etymology of the very word jazz. Astute critic Albert Murray offers a brief but masterful and illuminating treatise, "Improvisation and the Creative Process," while James A. Snead explores the uses of riffs in "Repetition as a Figure of Black Culture." The book's scope is grand enough to include Stanley Crouch's affirmative "Blues to Be Constitutional," Amiri Baraka's scorching indictment "Jazz and the White Critic," and Michael Eric Dyson's take on basketball's jazz/dance-like Afro-American reinvention, "Be Like Mike: Michael Jordan and the Pedagogy of Desire." Interviews with saxophonist Benny Golson and trumpeter Wynton Marsalis round out an incredible work that reveals all of the multicolored hues and grooves that make the United States glow. --Eugene Holley Jr.
Book Description
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.
Customer Reviews:
intelligent and invigorating.......2000-05-23
The collection of essays gathered in this volume are exceptional--smart, insightful, and inspiring. Together they explore jazz as a cultural phenomenon, not only a musical genre. They are organized intelligently in a manner which makes the book both educational and very enjoyable.
Book Description
This Is Our Music, declared saxophonist Ornette Coleman's 1960 album title. But whose music was it? At various times during the 1950s and 1960s, musicians, critics, fans, politicians, and entrepreneurs claimed jazz as a national art form, an Afrocentric race music, an extension of modernist innovation in other genres, a music of mass consciousness, and the preserve of a cultural elite. This original and provocative book explores who makes decisions about the value of a cultural form and on what basis, taking as its example the impact of 1960s free improvisation on the changing status of jazz.
By examining the production, presentation, and reception of experimental music by Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, John Coltrane, and others, Iain Anderson traces the strange, unexpected, and at times deeply ironic intersections between free jazz, avant-garde artistic movements, Sixties politics, and patronage networks. Anderson emphasizes free improvisation's enormous impact on jazz music's institutional standing, despite ongoing resistance from some of its biggest beneficiaries. He concludes that attempts by African American artists and intellectuals to define a place for themselves in American life, structural changes in the music industry, and the rise of nonprofit sponsorship portended a significant transformation of established cultural standards. At the same time, free improvisation's growing prestige depended in part upon traditional highbrow criteria: increasingly esoteric styles, changing venues and audience behavior, European sanction, withdrawal from the marketplace, and the professionalization of criticism. Thus jazz music's performers and supporters--and potentially those in other arts--have both challenged and accommodated themselves to an ongoing process of cultural stratification.
Average customer rating:
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The Words and Songs of Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, and Nina Simone: Sound Motion, Blues Spirit, and African Memory (Studies in African American History and Culture)
Melanie E. Bratcher
Manufacturer: Routledge
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Binding: Hardcover
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ASIN: 0415980291 |
Book Description
This book explores the relationship between three African American women's dance-art-music sensibilities within the context of a Pan African aesthetic.
Book Description
American cinema has long been fascinated by jazz and jazz musicians. Yet most jazz films aren't really about jazz. Rather, as Krin Gabbard shows, they create images of racial and sexual identity, many of which have become inseparable from popular notions of the music itself. In Jammin' at the Margins, Gabbard scrutinizes these films, exploring the fundamental obsessions that American culture has brought to jazz in the cinema.
Gabbard's close look at jazz film biographies, from The Jazz Singer to Bird, reveals Hollywood's reluctance to acknowledge black subjectivity. Black and even white jazz artists have become vehicles for familiar Hollywood conceptions of race, gender, and sexuality. Even Scorsese's New York, New York and Spike Lee's Mo' Better Blues have failed to disentangle themselves from entrenched stereotypes and conventions.
Gabbard also examines Hollywood's confrontation with jazz as an elite art form, and the role of the jazz trumpet as a crucial signifier of masculinity. Finally, he considers the acting careers of Louis Armstrong, Nat King Cole, and Hoagy Carmichael; Duke Ellington's extraordinary work in films from 1929 until the late 1960s; and the forgotten career of Kay Kyser, star of nine Hollywood films and leader of a popular swing band.
This insightful look at the marriage of jazz and film is a major contribution to film, jazz, and cultural studies.
Average customer rating:
- Always interesting...
- First Amendment Rights Do Not Trump Everything
- You won't always agree with Nat Hentoff...
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The Nat Hentoff Reader
Nat Hentoff
Manufacturer: Da Capo
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The War On The Bill Of Rights - And The Gathering Resistance
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Jazz Is
ASIN: 0306810840
Release Date: 2001-10-16 |
Book Description
More than 20 years of Nat Hentoff's dazzling and provocative writings on jazz, politics, and American thought.
From the Bill of Rights, freedom of speech, and civil rights to jazz, blues, and country music, Nat Hentoff has written about American life for decades, in The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, the Village Voice, the Wall Street Journal, and JazzTimes, among countless other publications. The New York Times has hailed Hentoff's work as "an invigorating and entertaining reminder of why freedom of expression matters." The Washington Post Book World has called Hentoff "an old-fashioned music lover who likes, as Charlie Parker once put it, 'to listen to the stories' that good music tells." Nat Hentoff is a legend.
And now, for the first time, here are his most important writings of the past twenty years-the quintessential Hentoff on everything from Cardinal John O'Connor to Merle Haggard, racism and political correctness in the classroom to Lester Young, Dizzy Gillespie to the censorship of Huckleberry Finn. Controversial? You bet. Whatever the topic, The Nat Hentoff Reader shows a man of passion and insight, of streetwise wit and polished eloquence-a true American original.
Customer Reviews:
Always interesting..........2002-06-27
This book is an incredible source for understanding opposing views about controversial issues. With great literacy, Nat introduces points that one would not normally consider valid or plausible, and he does so fluidly and magnificently. I reccommend this reader highly, hence the 5 stars.
First Amendment Rights Do Not Trump Everything.......2002-06-10
It does not come easy for me to take issue with the renowned Nat Hentoff on the subject of First Amendment. But I must after reading several essays in this book.
The First Amendment is not an absolutist rule for all occasions. It is a compact between our government and us as to how the State may not make laws to abridge the freedom of speech, the free exercise of religion, etc.
The First Amendment protects ideas, in the sense that a citizen cannot be prosecuted for advancing an idea, however unpopular. It clearly does not sanction all acts of expressing an idea. The government does not allow a person to express his hate of another by murdering him, for example. So, freedom of expression, important as it is, does not trump everything else. (The hating person can distribute pamphlets or make a speech to denigrate his enemy. And that would be allowed by law.)
Further, the First Amendment's operative domain is the society at large, at the level of legislation and law-enforcement. Within an organization in that society, public or private, is not the place to practice First Amendment rights, unless that organization has adopted similar guidelines for its code of communication. An organization can and must set rules of governance in pursuit of the mission of the organization. The armed forces, for example, are a government, or public, organization. I doubt that a soldier should have the First Amendment rights to openly express his sympathy for the enemy at the time of combat, say by passing out pamphlets to glorify the enemy or to urge fellow soldiers not to fight a battle. Clearly, such expressions are protected by law within the society at large. Similarly, a school, even a public school, exists for the purpose of educating the young, those who are in charge of schools should and must set rules to ensure that the school is safe, effective, and its charge has good discipline. What those rules should be is open to debate, and even subject to administrative challenge. But I don't think that any person who is a member of a school, be he a teacher, or student, or whatever, even a teacher of the Constitution, can exercise his First Amendment rights as if the school were just open society. Anyone who violates a rule within the jurisdiction of an organization to express himself must be prepared to accept the consequence. Sometimes it makes the person a hero, other times it makes him an idiot, or even a criminal.
Finally, any organization that is in a position to allow, or disallow, a particular speech or a speaker in connection with its business must have the right to do that, that right to approve or disapprove is the First Amendment itself! The First Amendment guarantees the right to express; it does not guarantee approval by others. Disapproval within the confines of an organization is not the same as repudiation of the First Amendment exercisable in the society at large. The reputation of an organization is inevitably tied to what ideas that organization approves or disapproves of. The organization must certainly have the right to shape that. Whether it did the right thing or is up to others to judge.
So the glorification of a student who insisted on disregarding the rules of the school on the previewing of a speech, or the teacher who broke rules because of her fervent First Amendment belief, is misplaced. A government can, as seduced by good intention, use law or administrative power to take away the authority of organizations regarding rule making and enforcement. This good is purchased at the high cost of more government coercive power on how people may freely associate (or not.) Looking at the schools, one can see that taking away authority also takes away accountability. We have done too much of that and this is one reason why public school authorities cannot foster a disciplined environment.
The First Amendment is one of the most precious things we have in this country. We owe it to ourselves to understand it clearly and teach it correctly.
You won't always agree with Nat Hentoff..........2002-05-10
...but he will always make you think. He is the finest writer on free speech issues we have today. There is no one else out there who understands the First Amendment as well as he does, and knows how to make it come alive for his readers. His portraits of musicians are insightful, and will make you want to hear their music if you have never heard it before. His work is always thoughtful and thought provoking, and he is never afraid to take a poke at various sacred cows.
Mr. Hentoff neither of the left nor the right. His long association with the Village Voice, which some would use to label him as a leftie, is counterbalanced by his pro-life writings, which some may use to tar him as a reactionary. I think he just calls them as he sees them.
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- Control Systems for Live Entertainment
- Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide
- Creative Whack Pack
- Cultural Misunderstandings: The French-American Experience
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- Dropping the Ball: Baseball's Troubles and How We Can and Must Solve Them
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