Welcome to our book review site go-pdf.online!
You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Subversive Sounds
Subversive Sounds probes New Orleans’s history, uncovering a web of racial interconnections and animosities that was instrumental to the creation of a vital American art form—jazz. Drawing on oral histories, police reports, newspaper accounts, and vintage recordings, Charles Hersch brings to vivid life the neighborhoods and nightspots where jazz was born. This volume shows how musicians such as Jelly Roll Morton, Nick La Rocca, and Louis Armstrong negotiated New Orleans’s complex racial rules to pursue their craft and how, in order to widen their audiences, they became fluent in a variety of musical traditions from diverse ethnic sources. These encounters with other music and races subverted their own racial identities and changed the way they played—a musical miscegenation that, in the shadow of Jim Crow, undermined the pursuit of racial purity and indelibly transformed American culture. “More than timely . . . Hersch orchestrates voices of musicians on both sides of the racial divide in underscoring how porous the music made the boundaries of race and class.”—New Orleans Times-Picayune
Jews and Jazz
Jews and Jazz: Improvising Ethnicity explores the meaning of Jewish involvement in the world of American jazz. It focuses on the ways prominent jazz musicians like Stan Getz, Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, Lee Konitz, Dave Liebman, Michael Brecker, and Red Rodney have engaged with jazz in order to explore and construct ethnic identities. The author looks at Jewish identity through jazz in the context of the surrounding American culture, believing that American Jews have used jazz to construct three kinds of identities: to become more American, to emphasize their minority outsider status, and to become more Jewish. From the beginning, Jewish musicians have used jazz for all three of these purpose...
Democratic Artworks
Focusing on a period in which the meaning of democracy came to the forefront of public debate, the fifties and sixties, the author argues that the arts can strengthen democracy by politically educating citizens. Hersch addresses this issue by first looking at the ideas of Lionel Trilling and the New York Intellectuals in the 1950s, as expressed through literature and social commentary, and then by showing how jazz and rock musicians in the 1960s, through their individual songs and performances, expressed the ideas and ideals of the political movements of that decade. Democratic Artworks is the first to consider the New York Intellectuals, sixties jazz, or Bob Dylan from the perspective of political theory and to focus on their contributions to democracy.
The Nonconformists
How risky encounters between American and Czech writers behind the Iron Curtain shaped the art and politics of the Cold War and helped define an era of dissent. “In some indescribable way, we are each other’s continuation,” Arthur Miller wrote of the imprisoned Czech playwright Václav Havel. After a Soviet-led invasion ended the Prague Spring, many US-based writers experienced a similar shock of solidarity. Brian Goodman examines the surprising and consequential connections between American and Czech literary cultures during the Cold War—connections that influenced art and politics on both sides of the Iron Curtain. American writers had long been attracted to Prague, a city they ass...
Jazz and American Culture
This book explores jazz as a cultural lodestone and source of critical inquiry for over a century.
The Killing of Osama Bin Laden
In 2011, an elite group of US Navy SEALS stormed an enclosure in the Pakistani city of Abbottabad and killed Osama bin Laden, the man the United States had begun chasing before the devastating attacks of 9/11. The news did much to boost President Obama's first term and played a major part in his reelection victory of the following year. But much of the story of that night, as presented to the world, was incomplete, or a lie. The evidence of what actually went on remains hidden. At the same time, the full story of the United States' involvement in the Syrian civil war has been kept behind a diplomatic curtain, concealed by doublespeak. It is a policy of obfuscation that has compelled the Whit...
Jazz Matters
"Ake offers an engaging and eclectic alternative to much jazz studies fare by examining seldom-considered subjects and reading familiar ones through unconventional means. I came away from Jazz Matters knowing that I had learned something new regarding the practices of writing about, listening to, and playing jazz."--Eric Porter, author of What Is This Thing Called Jazz? "Smart, interesting, engaging, thoughtful, and stimulating, this book opens up a lot of what we often take for granted about jazz. A fitting sequel to Jazz Cultures, Jazz Matters will no doubt be just as important to jazz scholarship."--Gabriel Solis, author of Monk's Music: Thelonious Monk and Jazz History in the Making "Jazz Matters is intellectually stimulating as much as emotionally involving. It deals with sides of the acts of creating jazz and listening to it that were hitherto little or no discussed, and does it with first-hand knowledge, empathy, and a wide range of references to literature, philosophy and art, adding something deeply valuable at the vast literature on jazz currently available."--Francesco Martinelli, Director of Centro Studi sul Jazz "Arrigo Polillo" - Fondazione Siena Jazz
Aesthetics of Resistance
This book illuminates the various ways in which Charles Mingus's music interacted with the sociocultural movements of the late 1950s and early 1960s. It explores the artist as a pioneer of an idiomatic aesthetics of resistance in jazz music that is rooted in African American traditions and is much more than merely a form of protest. Mingus's music presents a continuous challenge to an unimaginative, streamlined culture built on racism and conformity by openly protesting against it, by questioning its historical foundations, and by exemplifying its countercultural antithesis. (Series: MasteRResearch - Vol. 4)
