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Jazz has had a peculiar and fascinating history in Germany. The influential but controversial German writer, broadcaster, and record producer, Joachim-Ernst Berendt (1922–2000), author of the world’s best-selling jazz book, labored to legitimize jazz in West Germany after its ideological renunciation during the Nazi era. German musicians began, in a highly productive way, to question their all-too-eager adoption of American culture and how they sought to make valid artistic statements reflecting their identity as Europeans. This book explores the significance of some of Berendt’s most important writings and record productions. Particular attention is given to the “Jazz Meets the World” encounters that he engineered with musicians from Japan, Tunisia, Brazil, Indonesia, and India. This proto-“world music” demonstrates how some West Germans went about creating a post-nationalist identity after the Third Reich. Berendt’s powerful role as the West German “Jazz Pope” is explored, as is the groundswell of criticism directed at him in the wake of 1968.
Covers styles and musicians along with blues, harmony, melody, and other elements of jazz, instruments, vocalists, big bands and combos.
The author draws on his studies of cultures around the world to demonstrate how dominance of the ear as the primary sense organ for gathering and processing information is directly linked to compassion and peacefulness
This book contains candid photographs of jazz greats both onstage and off, and chronicles the history of jazz from its earliest roots to the present day, reflecting the social, political, and cultural milieus out of which it evolved.
In 1960, photographer William Claxton and noted German musicologist Joachim Berendt traveled the United States hot on the trail of jazz music. The result of their collaboration was an amazing collection of photographs and recordings of legendary artists as well as unknown street musicians. The book Jazzlife, the original fruit of their labors, has become a collector's item that is highly treasured among jazz and photography fans. In 2003, TASCHEN began reassembling this important collection of material ? along with many never-before-seen color images from those trips. They are brought together in this updated volume, which includes a foreword by Claxton tracing his travels with Berendt and h...
Anti-Music examines the critical, literary, and political responses to African American jazz music in interwar Germany. During this time, jazz was the subject of overt political debate between left-wing and right-wing interests: for the left, jazz marked the death knell of authoritarian Prussian society; for the right, jazz was complicit as an American import threatening the chaos of modernization and mass politics. This conflict was resolved in the early 1930s as the left abandoned jazz in the face of Nazi victory, having come to see the music in collusion with the totalitarian culture industry. Mark Christian Thompson recounts the story of this intellectual trajectory and describes how jazz came to be associated with repressive, virulently racist fascism in Germany. By examining writings by Hermann Hesse, Bertolt Brecht, T.W. Adorno, and Klaus Mann, and archival photographs and images, Thompson brings together debates in German, African American, and jazz studies, and charts a new path for addressing antiblack racism in cultural criticism and theory.
Considering a wide range of early modern texts, performances and artworks, the essays in this collection demonstrate how attention to the senses illuminates the literature, art and culture of early modern England. The volume responds to burgeoning interest in the senses from both literary scholars and cultural historians, arguing that early modern ideas about the senses resonate significantly through texts, performances and artworks of the period, even as these art forms themselves provide invaluable suggestions about the place of the senses in early modern culture. Examining canonical and less familiar literary works alongside early modern texts ranging from medical treatises to conduct man...
Think of a zebra's stripes, the complexities of a spider's web, the uniformity of desert dunes, or the spirals in a sunflower head ... think of a snowflake. The Beauty of Numbers in Nature shows how life on Earth forms the principles of mathematics. Starting with the simplest patterns, each chapter looks at a different kind of patterning system and the mathematics that underlies it. In doing so the book also uncovers some universal patterns, both in nature and man-made, from the basic geometry of ancient Greece to the visually startling fractals that we are familiar with today. Elegantly illustrated, The Beauty of Numbers in Nature is an illuminating and engaging vision of how the apparently cold laws of mathematics find expression in the beauty of nature.
For fifty years The Jazz Book has been the most encyclopedic interpretive history of jazz available in one volume. In this new seventh edition, each chapter has been completely revised and expanded to incorporate the dominant styles and musicians since the book’s last publication in 1992, as well as the fruits of current research about earlier periods in the history of jazz. In addition, new chapters have been added on John Zorn, jazz in the 1990s and beyond, samplers, the tuba, the harmonica, non-Western instruments, postmodernist and repertory big bands, how the avant-garde has explored tradition, and many other subjects. With a widespread resurgence of interest in jazz, The Jazz Book will continue well into the 21st century to fill the need for information about an art form widely regarded as America’s greatest contribution to the world’s musical culture.