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Darren Mueller examines how musicians used the jazz industry's adoption of the long-playing record to redefine the uneven power relations of the heavily segregated music business.
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2023 Jazz Journalists Association (JJA) Jazz Awards for Books of the Year—Honorable Mention Recipient On December 4, 1957, Miles Davis revolutionized film soundtrack production, improvising the score for Louis Malle’s Ascenseur pour l’échafaud. A cinematic harbinger of the French New Wave, Ascenseur challenged mainstream filmmaking conventions, emphasizing experimentation and creative collaboration. It was in this environment during the late 1950s to 1960s, a brief “golden age” for jazz in film, that many independent filmmakers valued improvisational techniques, featuring soundtracks from such seminal figures as John Lewis, Thelonious Monk, and Duke Ellington. But what of jazz in ...
When Americans mamboed in the kitchen, waltzed in the living room, polkaed in the pavilion, and tangoed at the club; with glorious, full-color record cover art. In midcentury America, eager dancers mamboed in the kitchen, waltzed in the living room, Watusied at the nightclub, and polkaed in the pavilion, instructed (and inspired) by dance records. Glorious, full-color record covers encouraged them: Let’s Cha Cha Cha, Dance and Stay Young, Dancing in the Street!, Limbo Party, High Society Twist. In Designed for Dancing, vinyl record aficionados and collectors Janet Borgerson and Jonathan Schroeder examine dance records of the 1950s and 1960s as expressions of midcentury culture, identity, f...
The social connotation of jazz in American popular culture has shifted dramatically since its emergence in the early twentieth century. Once considered youthful and even rebellious, jazz music is now a firmly established American artistic tradition. As jazz in American life has shifted, so too has the kind of venue in which it is performed. In Jazz Places, Kimberly Hannon Teal traces the history of jazz performance from private jazz clubs to public, high-art venues often associated with charitable institutions. As live jazz performance has become more closely tied to nonprofit institutions, the music's heritage has become increasingly important, serving as a means of defining jazz as a social good worthy of charitable support. Though different jazz spaces present jazz and its heritage in various and sometimes conflicting terms, ties between the music and the past play an important role in defining the value of present-day music in a diverse range of jazz venues, from the Village Vanguard in New York to SFJazz on the West Coast to Preservation Hall in New Orleans.
Introduction -- Part I. Musical Privilege. Legal Privilège and Musical Production ; Social Privilège and Musician-Masons -- Part II. Property. Private Property : Music and Authorship ; Public Servants ; Cultural Heritage : Music as Work of Art ; National Industry : Music as a "Useful" Art and Science -- Postlude : A "Detractor" Breaks his "Silence" -- Conclusion : Privilege by Any Other Name.
Learning Jazz: Jazz Education, History, and Public Pedagogy addresses a debate that has consumed practitioners and advocates since the music's early days. Studies on jazz learning typically focus on one of two methods: institutional education or the kinds of informal mentoring relationships long associated with the tradition. Ken Prouty argues that this distinction works against a common identity for audiences and communities. Rather, what happens within the institution impacts—and is impacted by—events and practices outside institutional contexts. While formal institutions are well-defined in educational and civic contexts, informal institutions have profoundly influenced the developmen...
"The Jazz Tradition and Black Vernacular Dance explores the complex intersections between jazz music and popular dance over the last hundred-plus years. It aims to show how popular entertainment and cultures of social dancing were crucial to jazz music's formation and development, but it also investigates the processes through which jazz music came to earn a reputation as a "legitimate" art form better suited for still, seated listening. Through the concept of "choreographies of listening," the book explores amateur and professional jazz dancers' relationships with jazz music and musicians as jazz's soundscapes and choreoscapes were forged through close contact and mutual creative exchange. ...
The Bastard Instrument chronicles the history of the electric bass and the musicians who played it, from the instrument’s invention through its widespread acceptance at the end of the 1960s. Although their contributions have often gone unsung, electric bassists helped shape the sound of a wide range of genres, including jazz, rhythm & blues, rock, country, soul, funk, and more. Their innovations are preserved in performances from artists as diverse as Lionel Hampton, Liberace, Elvis Presley, Patsy Cline, the Supremes, the Beatles, James Brown, Bob Dylan, Aretha Franklin, Jefferson Airplane, and Sly and the Family Stone, all of whom are discussed in this volume. At long last, The Bastard Instrument gives these early electric bassists credit for the significance of their accomplishments and demonstrates how they fundamentally altered the trajectory of popular music.
Whose Book is it Anyway? is a provocative collection of essays that opens out the copyright debate to questions of open access, ethics, and creativity. It includes views – such as artist’s perspectives, writer’s perspectives, feminist, and international perspectives – that are too often marginalized or elided altogether. The diverse range of contributors take various approaches, from the scholarly and the essayistic to the graphic, to explore the future of publishing based on their experiences as publishers, artists, writers and academics. Considering issues such as intellectual property, copyright and comics, digital publishing and remixing, and what it means (not) to say one is an author, these vibrant essays urge us to view central aspects of writing and publishing in a new light. Whose Book is it Anyway? is a timely and varied collection of essays. It asks us to reconceive our understanding of publishing, copyright and open access, and it is essential reading for anyone invested in the future of publishing.