Harlem Nocturne

Download or read book Harlem Nocturne written by Farah Jasmine Griffin and published by Civitas Books. This book was released on 2013-09-10 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As World War II raged overseas, Harlem witnessed a battle of its own. Brimming with creative and political energy, the neighborhood's diverse array of artists and activists took advantage of a brief period of progressivism during the war years to launch a bold cultural offensive aimed at winning democracy for all Americans, regardless of race or gender. Ardent believers in America's promise, these men and women helped to lay the groundwork for the Civil Rights Movement before Cold War politics and anti-Communist fervor temporarily froze their dreams at the dawn of the postwar era. In Harlem Nocturne, esteemed scholar Farah Jasmine Griffin tells the stories of three black female artists whose creative and political efforts fueled this historic movement for change: choreographer and dancer Pearl Primus, composer and pianist Mary Lou Williams, and novelist Ann Petry. Like many African Americans in the city at the time, these women weren't't native New Yorkers, but the metropolis and its vibrant cultural scene gave them the space to flourish and the freedom to express their political concerns. Pearl Primus performed nightly at the legendary Cafe Society, the first racially integrated club in New York, where she debuted dances of social protest that drew on long-buried African traditions and the dances of former slaves in the South. Williams, meanwhile, was a major figure in the emergence of bebop, collaborating with Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, and Bud Powell and premiering her groundbreaking Zodiac Suite at the legendary performance space Town Hall. And Ann Petry conveyed the struggles of working-class black women to a national audience with her acclaimed novel The Street, which sold over a million copies -- a first for a female African American author. A rich biography of three artists and the city that inspired them, Harlem Nocturne captures a period of unprecedented vitality and progress for African Americans and women, revealing a cultural movement and a historical moment whose influence endures today.

Download or read book Harlem Nocturne written by Farah Jasmine Griffin and published by Civitas Books. This book was released on 2013-09-10 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As World War II raged overseas, Harlem witnessed a battle of its own. Brimming with creative and political energy, the neighborhood’s diverse array of artists and activists took advantage of a brief period of progressivism during the war years to launch a bold cultural offensive aimed at winning democracy for all Americans, regardless of race or gender. Ardent believers in America’s promise, these men and women helped to lay the groundwork for the Civil Rights Movement before Cold War politics and anti-Communist fervor temporarily froze their dreams at the dawn of the postwar era. In Harlem Nocturne, esteemed scholar Farah Jasmine Griffin tells the stories of three black female artists whose creative and political efforts fueled this historic movement for change: choreographer and dancer Pearl Primus, composer and pianist Mary Lou Williams, and novelist Ann Petry. Like many African Americans in the city at the time, these women weren’t native New Yorkers, but the metropolis and its vibrant cultural scene gave them the space to flourish and the freedom to express their political concerns. Pearl Primus performed nightly at the legendary Café Society, the first racially integrated club in New York, where she débuted dances of social protest that drew on long-buried African traditions and the dances of former slaves in the South. Williams, meanwhile, was a major figure in the emergence of bebop, collaborating with Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, and Bud Powell and premiering her groundbreaking Zodiac Suite at the legendary performance space Town Hall. And Ann Petry conveyed the struggles of working-class black women to a national audience with her acclaimed novel The Street, which sold over a million copies—a first for a female African American author. A rich biography of three artists and the city that inspired them, Harlem Nocturne captures a period of unprecedented vitality and progress for African Americans and women, revealing a cultural movement and a historical moment whose influence endures today.

Download or read book Esquivel! written by Susan Wood and published by Lerner Publishing Group. This book was released on 2018-08-01 with total page 32 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Juan Garcia Esquivel was born in Mexico and grew up to the sounds of mariachi bands. He loved music and became a musical explorer. Defying convention, he created music that made people laugh and planted images in their minds. Juan's space-age lounge music popular in the fifties and sixties has found a new generation of listeners.

Download or read book Harlem written by Jonathan Gill and published by Open Road + Grove/Atlantic. This book was released on 2011-02-01 with total page 529 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “An exquisitely detailed account of the 400-year history of Harlem.” —Booklist, starred review Harlem is perhaps the most famous, iconic neighborhood in the United States. A bastion of freedom and the capital of Black America, Harlem’s twentieth-century renaissance changed our arts, culture, and politics forever. But this is only one of the many chapters in a wonderfully rich and varied history. In Harlem, historian Jonathan Gill presents the first complete chronicle of this remarkable place. From Henry Hudson’s first contact with native Harlemites, through Harlem’s years as a colonial outpost on the edge of the known world, Gill traces the neighborhood’s story, marshaling a tremendous wealth of detail and a host of fascinating figures from George Washington to Langston Hughes. Harlem was an agricultural center under British rule and the site of a key early battle in the Revolutionary War. Later, wealthy elites including Alexander Hamilton built great estates there for entertainment and respite from the epidemics ravaging downtown. In the nineteenth century, transportation urbanized Harlem and brought waves of immigrants from Germany, Italy, Ireland, and elsewhere. Harlem’s mix of cultures, extraordinary wealth, and extreme poverty was electrifying and explosive. Extensively researched, impressively synthesized, eminently readable, and overflowing with captivating characters, Harlem is a “vibrant history” and an impressive achievement (Publishers Weekly). “Comprehensive and compassionate—an essential text of American history and culture.” —Kirkus Reviews, starred review “It’s bound to become a classic or I’ll eat my hat!” —Edwin G. Burrows, Pulitzer Prize–winning coauthor of Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898

Download or read book Read Until You Understand: The Profound Wisdom of Black Life and Literature written by Farah Jasmine Griffin and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2021-09-14 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A PBS NewsHour Best Book of the Year A Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year in Nonfiction A brilliant scholar imparts the lessons bequeathed by the Black community and its remarkable artists and thinkers. Farah Jasmine Griffin has taken to her heart the phrase "read until you understand," a line her father, who died when she was nine, wrote in a note to her. She has made it central to this book about love of the majestic power of words and love of the magnificence of Black life. Griffin has spent years rooted in the culture of Black genius and the legacy of books that her father left her. A beloved professor, she has devoted herself to passing these works and their wisdom on to generations of students. Here, she shares a lifetime of discoveries: the ideas that inspired the stunning oratory of Frederick Douglass and Malcolm X, the soulful music of Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder, the daring literature of Phillis Wheatley and Toni Morrison, the inventive artistry of Romare Bearden, and many more. Exploring these works through such themes as justice, rage, self-determination, beauty, joy, and mercy allows her to move from her aunt’s love of yellow roses to Gil Scott-Heron’s "Winter in America." Griffin entwines memoir, history, and art while she keeps her finger on the pulse of the present, asking us to grapple with the continuing struggle for Black freedom and the ongoing project that is American democracy. She challenges us to reckon with our commitment to all the nation’s inhabitants and our responsibilities to all humanity.

Download or read book Burlesque West written by Becki Ross and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2009-07-25 with total page 818 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After the Second World War, Vancouver emerged as a hotbed of striptease talent. In Burlesque West,the first critical history of this notorious striptease scene, Becki Ross delves into the erotic entertainment industry at the northern end of the dancers' west coast tour - the North-South route from Los Angeles to Vancouver that provided rotating work for dancers and variety for club clientele. Drawing on extensive archival materials and fifty first-person accounts of former dancers, strip-club owners, booking agents, choreographers, and musicians, Ross reveals stories that are deeply flavoured with an era before "striptease fell from grace because the world stopped dreaming," in the words of ex-dancer Lindalee Tracey. Though jobs in this particular industry are often perceived as having little in common with other sorts of work, retired dancers' accounts resonate surprisingly with those of contemporary service workers, including perceptions of unionization and workplace benefits and hazards. Ross also traces the sanitization and subsequent integration of striptease style and neo-burlesque trends into mass culture, examining continuity and change to ultimately demonstrate that Vancouver's glitzy nightclub scene, often condemned as a quasi-legal strain of urban blight, in fact greased the economic engine of the post-war city. Provocative and challenging, Burlesque West combines the economic, the social, the sexual, and the personal, and is sure to intellectually tantalize.

Download or read book If You Can't be Free, be a Mystery written by Farah Jasmine Griffin and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2001 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The threads of Billie Holiday's mystique are unraveled in this study of a woman who needed to create art at any cost. Griffin liberates Holiday from stereotypes of black women and pries her away from the male tradition of jazz criticism while presenting Holiday's independent spirit. of photos.