Between Montmartre And The Mudd Club

Download or read book Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club written by Bernard Gendron and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2023-08-31 with total page 399 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, popular music was considered nothing but vulgar entertainment. Today, jazz and rock music are seen as forms of art, and their practitioners are regularly accorded a status on par with the cultural and political elite. To take just one recent example, Bono, lead singer and lyricist of the rock band U2, got equal and sometimes higher billing than Pope John Paul II on their shared efforts in the Jubilee 2000 debt-relief project. When and how did popular music earn so much cultural capital? To find out, Bernard Gendron investigates five key historical moments when popular music and avant-garde art transgressed the rigid boundaries separating high and low culture to form friendly alliances. He begins at the end of the nineteenth century in Paris's Montmartre district, where cabarets showcased popular music alongside poetry readings in spaces decorated with modernist art works. Two decades later, Parisian poets and musicians "slumming" in jazz clubs assimilated jazz's aesthetics in their performances and compositions. In the bebop revolution in mid-1940s America, jazz returned the compliment by absorbing modernist devices and postures, in effect transforming itself into an avant-garde art form. Mid-1960s rock music, under the leadership of the Beatles, went from being reviled as vulgar music to being acclaimed as a cutting-edge art form. Finally, Gendron takes us to the Mudd Club in the late 1970s, where New York punk and new wave rockers were setting the aesthetic agenda for a new generation of artists. Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club should be on the shelves of anyone interested in the intersections between high and low culture, art and music, or history and aesthetics.

Download or read book Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club written by Bernard Gendron and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2002-02 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When and how did pop music earn so much cultural capital? This text investigates five key moments when popular music and avant-garde art transgressed the rigid boundaries separating high and low culture to form friendly alliances.

Download or read book The Amazing Bud Powell written by Guthrie P. Ramsey and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2013-05-28 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bud Powell was not only one of the greatest bebop pianists of all time, he stands as one of the twentieth century’s most dynamic and fiercely adventurous musical minds. His expansive musicianship, riveting performances, and inventive compositions expanded the bebop idiom and pushed jazz musicians of all stripes to higher standards of performance. Yet Powell remains one of American music’s most misunderstood figures, and the story of his exceptional talent is often overshadowed by his history of alcohol abuse, mental instability, and brutalization at the hands of white authorities. In this first extended study of the social significance of Powell’s place in the American musical landscape, Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr. shows how the pianist expanded his own artistic horizons and moved his chosen idiom into new realms. Illuminating and multi-layered, The Amazing Bud Powell centralizes Powell’s contributions as it details the collision of two vibrant political economies: the discourses of art and the practice of blackness.

Download or read book Blackening Europe written by Heike Raphael-Hernandez and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-11-12 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traditional Scholars have often looked at African American studies through the lens of European theories, resulting in the secondarization of the African American presence in Europe and its contributions to European culture. Blackening Europe reverses this pattern by using African American culture as the starting point for a discussion of its influences over traditional European structures. Evidence of Europe's blackening abound, form French ministers of Hip-hop and British incarnations of "Shaft" to slavery memorial in the Netherlands and German youth sporting dreadlocks. Collecting essays by scholars from both sides of the Atlantic and fields as diverse as history, literature, politics, social studies, art, film and music, Blackening Europe explores the implications of these cultural hybrids and extends the growing dialogues about Europe's fascination with African America.

Download or read book The Relentless Pursuit of Tone written by Robert Fink and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-18 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Relentless Pursuit of Tone: Timbre in Popular Music assembles a broad spectrum of contemporary perspectives on how "sound" functions in an equally wide array of popular music. Ranging from the twang of country banjoes and the sheen of hip-hop strings to the crunch of amplified guitars and the thump of subwoofers on the dance floor, this volume bridges the gap between timbre, our name for the purely acoustic characteristics of sound waves, and tone, an emergent musical construct that straddles the borderline between the perceptual and the political. Essays engage with the entire history of popular music as recorded sound, from the 1930s to the present day, under four large categories. "Genre" asks how sonic signatures define musical identities and publics; "Voice" considers the most naturalized musical instrument, the human voice, as racial and gendered signifier, as property or likeness, and as raw material for algorithmic perfection through software; "Instrument" tells stories of the way some iconic pop music machines-guitars, strings, synthesizers-got (or lost) their distinctive sounds; "Production" then puts it all together, asking structural questions about what happens in a recording studio, what is produced (sonic cartoons? rockist authenticity? empty space?) and what it all might mean.

Download or read book Uncovering Paris written by Lela F. Kerley and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2017-06-07 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From 1889 to 1914 nude spectacles increased at an astonishing rate as a result of burgeoning artistic experimentation, the commercialization of the female body, and the rise of urban nightlife. In particular, artists’ balls and music halls provided creative spaces in which women, artists, impresarios, and the illustrated press could cast the natural body as a source of sexual pleasure, identity, and reform. Emphasizing the role of erotic entertainment as an outlet and agent of modern sensibilities, Uncovering Paris: Scandals and Nude Spectacles in the Belle Époque offers a fresh approach to important topics of the period—Bohemian artists, the New Woman, and press censorship—and reinterprets them through the lens of la femme nue. Having inherited her name from the pictorial female Nude and the Nude’s real-life counterpart, the artist’s model, la femme nue operated as a screen onto which various groups projected their artistic drives, sexual desires, monetary interests, and cultural anxieties. A struggle to define pornography and art, freedom and censorship, and public and private spheres ensued among artists, theater directors, and moral leagues as a century-long tradition of equating civilization with clothing broke down in the face of performative challenges. In posing, singing, acting, and dancing in naturalist presentations, the artist’s model-turned-erotic entertainer engendered crises in ways of seeing the female body that contributed to and was indicative of a changing moral climate within which women were accorded more freedom to corporeally express themselves. Once denigrated and denounced as a sign of vulgar working-class sexuality, the revelation of female flesh became an integral aspect of twentieth-century French body culture. Drawing upon a range of colorful commentaries, dramatic debates, and evocative photos, Lela F. Kerley highlights the importance of nudity in the redrawing of moral boundaries as she uncovers key moments that amounted to a “culture war” in the years leading up to World War I. Through an investigation of street riots, court cases, and anti-pornography campaigns, Uncovering Paris offers an interdisciplinary approach to the scholarship on Belle Époque sexual politics and a rich glimpse into the social construction of morality in Belle Époque France.

Download or read book Modern Lusts written by Detlef Siegfried and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2020-07-01 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As a jazz musician, filmmaker, anthropologist, sexologist, and crime novelist, the boundlessly curious German autodidact Ernest Borneman exemplified the conflicting cultural and intellectual currents of the twentieth century. In this long-awaited English translation, acclaimed historian Detlef Siegfried chronicles Borneman’s journey from a young Jewish Communist in Nazi Berlin to his emergence as a celebrated (and reliably controversial) transatlantic polymath. Through an innovative structure organized around the human senses, this biography memorably portrays a figure whose far-flung obsessions comprised a microcosm of postwar intellectual life.