Jazz Country

Horace Porter is the chair of African American World Studies and professor of English at the University of Iowa. He is the author of Stealing Fire: The Art and Protest of James Baldwin and one of the editors of Call and Response: The Riverside Anthology of the African American Literary Tradition. The first book to reassess Ralph Ellison after his death and the posthumous publication ofJuneteenth, his second novel, Jazz Country: Ralph Ellison in America explores Ellison's writings and views on American culture through the lens of jazz music. Horace Porter's groundbreaking study addresses Ellison's jazz background, including his essays and comments about jazz musicians such as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Charlie Parker. Porter further examines the influences of Ellington and Armstrong as sources of the writer's personal and artistic inspiration and highlights the significance of Ellison's camaraderie with two African American friends and fellow jazz fans—the writer Albert Murray and the painter Romare Bearden. Most notably, Jazz Country demonstrates how Ellison appropriated jazz techniques in his two novels, Invisible Man and Juneteenth. Using jazz as the key metaphor, Porter refocuses old interpretations of Ellison by placing jazz in the foreground and by emphasizing, especially as revealed in his essays, the power of Ellison's thought and cultural perception. The self-proclaimed “custodian of American culture,” Ellison offers a vision of “jazz-shaped” America—a world of improvisation, individualism, and infinite possibility.

Collectors of illustrator R. Crumb's work prize the music-oriented trading card sets he created in the 1980s. Now they appear together for the first time in book form, along with a CD of music selected and compiled by Crumb himself.

As the first organic overview of the history of jazz in Europe and covering the subject from its inception to the present day, the volume provides a unique, authoritative addition to the musicological literature.

Southwest Shuffle documents an important period in country music history. During the '30s and early '40s, hundreds of thousands of "Okies," "Arkies," and other rural folks from around the Southwest resettled in California, in search of work. A country music scene quickly blossomed there, with performers playing Western Swing, Cowboy, and Honky Tonk country. After World War II, these styles rocked country music, leading to the innovations of '60s performers like Buck Owens and Merle Haggard in creating the so-called "Bakersfield Sound." These stories are based on original interviews and archival research by one of the most respected writers on this period of country history. Kienzle writes in a vibrant style, reflecting his long-time love for these musical styles.

An interpretive history of America's pre-rock, popular commercial music spanning 1900-1950. The author examines both popular music stars who ruled the airwaves, sold the most records, and were featured in major motion pictures, and performers in the musical underground: jazz, blues, and country. Chapters are arranged chronologically, with biographies of important musicians and numerous photographs. Contains a discography and videography as well as indexes of musical performers, contributors and music titles. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

A white youth from New York's East 70's discovers that although trumpet technique is not enough to gain entrance to the soul musician's world, freindship with a top jazzman gives him a broader perspective of his environment as well as of the alternatives the future offers.

What, where, and when is jazz? To most of us jazz means small combos, made up mostly of men, performing improvisationally in urban club venues. But jazz has been through many changes in the decades since World War II, emerging in unexpected places and incorporating a wide range of new styles. In this engrossing new book, David Ake expands on the discussion he began in Jazz Cultures, lending his engaging, thoughtful, and stimulating perspective to post-1940s jazz. Ake investigates such issues as improvisational analysis, pedagogy, American exceptionalism, and sense of place in jazz. He uses provocative case studies to illustrate how some of the values ascribed to the postwar jazz culture are reflected in and fundamentally shaped by aspects of sound, location, and time.

From the mid-1950s to the late 1970s, jazz was harnessed as America’s "sonic weapon" to promote an image to the world of a free and democratic America. Dizzy Gillespie, Dave Brubeck, Duke Ellington and other well-known jazz musicians were sent around the world – including to an array of Communist countries – as "jazz ambassadors" in order to mitigate the negative image associated with domestic racial problems. While many non-Americans embraced the Americanism behind this jazz diplomacy without question, others criticized American domestic and foreign policies while still appreciating jazz – thus jazz, despite its popularity, also became a medium for expressing anti-Americanism. This book examines the development of jazz outside America, including across diverse historical periods and geographies – shedding light on the effectiveness of jazz as an instrument of state power within a global political context. Saito examines jazz across a wide range of regions, including America, Europe, Japan and Communist countries. His research also draws heavily upon a variety of sources, primary as well as secondary, which are accessible in these diverse countries: all had their unique and culturally specific domestic jazz scenes, but also interacted with each other in an interesting dimension of early globalization. This comparative analysis on the range of unique jazz scenes and cultures offers a detailed understanding as to how jazz has been interpreted in various ways, according to the changing contexts of politics and society around it, often providing a basis for criticizing America itself. Furthering our appreciation of the organic relationship between jazz and global politics, Saito reconsiders the uniqueness of jazz as an exclusively "American music." This book will be of interest to students and scholars of international relations, the history of popular music, and global politics. The Introduction of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

"This book is an interdisciplinary discussion of popular music performed and created by American Indian musicians, providing an important window into history, politics, and tribal communities as it simultaneously complements literary, historiographic, anthropological, and sociological discussions of Native culture"--Provided by publisher.

An exploration of the pervasive influence of jazz on all forms of American music, this work maps the unexpected musical and cultural links between Louis Armstrong, Willie Nelson, Bob Dylan, Herbie Hancock and many others.