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The effect of jazz upon American culture and the American character has been all-pervasive. This superlative history is the first and the most renowned systematic outline of the evolution of this unique American musical phenomenon. Stearns begins with the joining of the African Negro's musical heritage with European forms and the birth of jazz in New Orleans then follows its course through the era of swing and bop to the beginnings of rock in the 50s, vividly depicting the great innovators, and covering such technical elements as the music's form and structure.
"The phrase jazz dance has a special meaning for professionals who dance to jazz music (they use it to describe non-tap body movement); and another meaning for studios coast to coast teaching 'Modern Jazz Dance' (a blend of Euro-American styles that owes little to jazz and less to jazz rhythms). However, we are dealing here with what may eventually be referred to as jazz dance, and we could not think of a more suitable title. "The characteristic that distinguishes American vernacular dance--as does jazz music--is swing, which can be heard, felt, and seen, but defined only with great difficulty. . . ." --from the Introduction
The Oxford Handbook of Music and the Middlebrow takes a fresh look at the history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century music. Offering an alternative to the traditional focus on either highbrow modernism on the one hand or lowbrow popular music on the other, its novel view centers on the wealth of previously overlooked products and practices that bridged the space between these cultural extremes. While seminal attempts to recover middlebrow culture came from literary critics and historians, middlebrow studies is now a burgeoning field within musicology. As the first essay collection on this topic, this handbook has two aims: first, it seeks to explore the middlebrow as a historical phenomeno...
Between Beats: The Jazz Tradition and Black Vernacular Dance offers a new look at the complex intersections between jazz music and popular dance over the last hundred-plus years. Author Christi Jay Wells shows how popular entertainment and cultures of social dancing were crucial to jazz music's formation and development even as 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. It also...
Masaya Yamaguchi is Japanese-born musician and educator, who lives in the US. This book grew out of research Yamaguchi did on Miles' autobiography, which was written by Quincy Troupe from hours of transcribed interviews with Miles. Yamaguchi obtained 1200 pages of the transcripts and has meticulously and painstakingly researched and checked the contents. He finds various errors and anomalies, and corrects the information with strong evidence. The book is full of images of transcript pages (which include content not seen in the autobiography), letters and memos. There's plenty of stuff about Miles'1980s music, especially on the guitarists Miles used during this era (thelastmiles.com/library_milesdavis_4/).
Have records, compact discs, and other sound reproduction equipment merely provided American listeners with pleasant diversions, or have more important historical and cultural influences flowed through them? Do recording machines simply capture what's already out there, or is the music somehow transformed in the dual process of documentation and dissemination? How would our lives be different without these machines? Such are the questions that arise when we stop taking for granted the phenomenon of recorded music and the phonograph itself. Now comes an in-depth cultural history of the phonograph in the United States from 1890 to 1945. William Howland Kenney offers a full account of what he c...
African Rhythms is the autobiography of the important jazz pianist, composer and band leader Randy Weston. He tells of his childhood in Brooklyn, his six decades long musical career, his time living in Morocco, and his lifelong quest to learn about the musical and cultural traditions of Africa.
This book explores jazz as a cultural lodestone and source of critical inquiry for over a century.
In the illustrious and richly documented history of American jazz, no figure has been more controversial than the jazz critic. Jazz critics can be revered or reviled—often both—but they should not be ignored. And while the tradition of jazz has been covered from seemingly every angle, nobody has ever turned the pen back on itself to chronicle the many writers who have helped define how we listen to and how we understand jazz. That is, of course, until now. In Blowin’ Hot and Cool, John Gennari provides a definitive history of jazz criticism from the 1920s to the present. The music itself is prominent in his account, as are the musicians—from Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington to Char...