Jazz 101

Download or read book Jazz written by Ronald D. Lankford, Jr. and published by Greenhaven Publishing LLC. This book was released on 2011-04-27 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jazz's influence on music in the twentieth century is unparalleled, with derivatives including bebop, funk, hip-hop, psychedelic rock, reggae, Latin soul, and ska. This comprehensive survey of jazz music dives deep into the origins of the genre and explores the history of jazz from its early roots in West African drumming to its modern interpretations. Readers will learn about the defining eras of jazz, pioneering jazz musicians, and the political and historical legacy of this music style.

Download or read book Jazz written by James Lincoln Collier and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1995-07-13 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Praised by the Washington Post as a "tough, unblinkered critic," James Lincoln Collier is probably the most controversial writer on jazz today. His acclaimed biographies of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Benny Goodman continue to spark debate in jazz circles, and his iconoclastic articles on jazz over the past 30 years have attracted even more attention. With the publication of Jazz: The American Theme Song, Collier does nothing to soften his reputation for hard-hitting, incisive commentary. Questioning everything we think we know about jazz--its origins, its innovative geniuses, the importance of improvisation and spontaneous inspiration in a performance--and the jazz world, these ten provocative essays on the music and its place in American culture overturn tired assumptions and will alternately enrage, enlighten, and entertain. Jazz: The American Theme Song offers music lovers razor-sharp analysis of musical trends and styles, and fearless explorations of the most potentially explosive issues in jazz today. In "Black, White, and Blue," Collier traces African and European influences on the evolution of jazz in a free-ranging discussion that takes him from the French colony of Saint Domingue (now Haiti) to the orderly classrooms where most music students study jazz today. He argues that although jazz was originally devised by blacks from black folk music, jazz has long been a part of the cultural heritage of musicians and audiences of all races and classes, and is not black music per se. In another essay, Collier provides a penetrating analysis of the evolution of jazz criticism, and casts a skeptical eye on the credibility of the emerging "jazz canon" of critical writing and popular history. "The problem is that even the best jazz scholars keep reverting to the fan mentality, suddenly bursting out of the confines of rigorous analysis into sentimental encomiums in which Hot Lips Smithers is presented as some combination of Santa Claus and the Virgin Mary," he maintains. "It is a simple truth that there are thousands of high school music students around the country who know more music theory than our leading jazz critics." Other, less inflammatory but no less intriguing, essays include explorations of jazz as an intrinsic and fundamental source of inspiration for American dance music, rock, and pop; the influence of show business on jazz, and vice versa; and the link between the rise of the jazz soloist and the new emphasis on individuality in the 1920s. Impeccably researched and informed by Collier's wide-ranging intellect, Jazz: The American Theme Song is an important look at jazz's past, its present, and its uncertain future. It is a book everyone who cares about the music will want to read.

Download or read book Knowing Jazz written by Ken Prouty and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2011-12-06 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ken Prouty argues that knowledge of jazz, or more to the point, claims to knowledge of jazz, are the prime movers in forming jazz's identity, its canon, and its community. Every jazz artist, critic, or fan understands jazz differently, based on each individual's unique experiences and insights. Through playing, listening, reading, and talking about jazz, both as a form of musical expression and as a marker of identity, each aficionado develops a personalized relationship to the larger jazz world. Through the increasingly important role of media, listeners also engage in the formation of different communities that not only transcend traditional boundaries of geography, but increasingly exist only in the virtual world. The relationships of "jazz people" within and between these communities is at the center of Knowing Jazz. Some groups, such as those in academia, reflect a clash of sensibilities between historical traditions. Others, particularly online communities, represent new and exciting avenues for everyday fans, whose involvement in jazz has often been ignored. Other communities seek to define themselves as expressions of national or global sensibility, pointing to the ever-changing nature of jazz's identity as an American art form in an international setting. What all these communities share, however, is an intimate, visceral link to the music and the artists who make it, brought to life through the medium of recording. Informed by an interdisciplinary approach and approaching the topic from a number of perspectives, Knowing Jazz charts a philosophical course in which many disparate perspectives and varied opinions on jazz can find common ground.

Download or read book Between Beats written by Christi Jay Wells and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-04-02 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 unpacks the aesthetic and political negotiations through which jazz music supposedly distanced itself from dancing bodies. Fusing little-discussed material from diverse historical and contemporary sources with the author's own years of experience as a social jazz dancer, it advances participatory dance and embodied practice as central topics of analysis in jazz studies. As it explores the fascinating history of jazz as popular dance music, it exposes how American anxieties about bodies and a broad cultural privileging of the cerebral over the corporeal have shaped efforts to "elevate" expressive forms such as jazz to elite status.

Download or read book Jazz and Totalitarianism written by Bruce Johnson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-08-12 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jazz and Totalitarianism examines jazz in a range of regimes that in significant ways may be described as totalitarian, historically covering the period from the Franco regime in Spain beginning in the 1930s to present day Iran and China. The book presents an overview of the two central terms and their development since their contemporaneous appearance in cultural and historiographical discourses in the early twentieth century, comprising fifteen essays written by specialists on particular regimes situated in a wide variety of time periods and places. Interdisciplinary in nature, this compelling work will appeal to students from Music and Jazz Studies to Political Science, Sociology, and Cultural Theory.

Download or read book Billboard written by and published by . This book was released on 2009-10-03 with total page 904 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In its 114th year, Billboard remains the world's premier weekly music publication and a diverse digital, events, brand, content and data licensing platform. Billboard publishes the most trusted charts and offers unrivaled reporting about the latest music, video, gaming, media, digital and mobile entertainment issues and trends.

Download or read book How to Listen to Jazz written by Ted Gioia and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2016-05-17 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A "radiantly accomplished" music scholar presents an accessible introduction to the art of listening to jazz (Wall Street Journal) In How to Listen to Jazz, award-winning music scholar Ted Gioia presents a lively introduction to one of America's premier art forms. He tells us what to listen for in a performance and includes a guide to today's leading jazz musicians. From Louis Armstrong's innovative sounds to the jazz-rock fusion of Miles Davis, Gioia covers the music's history and reveals the building blocks of improvisation. A true love letter to jazz by a foremost expert, How to Listen to Jazz is a must-read for anyone who's ever wanted to understand and better appreciate America's greatest contribution to music. "Mr. Gioia could not have done a better job. Through him, jazz might even find new devotees." -- Economist