Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies

by Robert G. O'Meally (Editor), Brent Hayes Edwards (Editor), Farah Jasmine Griffin (Editor)

Jackson Pollock dancing to the music as he painted; Romare Bearden's stage and costume designs for Alvin Ailey and Dianne McIntyre; Stanley Crouch stirring his high-powered essays in a room where a drumkit stands at the center: from the perspective of the new jazz studies, jazz is not only a music to define -- it is a culture. Considering musicians and filmmakers, painters and poets, the intellectual improvisations in Uptown Conversation reevaluate, reimagine, and riff on the music that has for more than a century initiated a call and response across art forms, geographies, and cultures.

Building on Robert G. O'Meally's acclaimed Jazz Cadence of American Culture, these original essays offer new insights in jazz historiography, highlighting the political stakes in telling the story of the music and evaluating its cultural import in the United States and worldwide. Articles contemplating the music's experimental wing -- such as Salim Washington's meditation on Charles Mingus and the avant-garde or George Lipsitz's polemical juxtaposition of Ken Burns's documentary Jazz and Horace Tapscott's autobiography Songs of the Unsung -- share the stage with revisionary takes on familiar figures in the canon: Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, and Louis Armstrong.

Genres: Music, Jazz, Nonfiction

544 pages, Paperback

First published June 9, 2004

Reviews

[Cecily Gubser · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the kind of book that I would recommend to someone who says they “hate academic writing” in order to (a) completely change their mind and (b) completely change their life. Theory not tested but I think I’d have a pretty high success rate…