|
Books > Arts & Architecture > Music > Contemporary popular music > Jazz
Hearing Luxe Pop explores a deluxe-production aesthetic that has
long thrived in American popular music, in which popular-music
idioms are merged with lush string orchestrations and big-band
instrumentation. John Howland presents an alternative music history
that centers on shifts in timbre and sound through innovative uses
of orchestration and arranging, traveling from symphonic jazz to
the Great American Songbook, the teenage symphonies of Motown to
the "countrypolitan" sound of Nashville, the sunshine pop of the
Beach Boys to the blending of soul and funk into 1970s disco, and
Jay-Z's hip-hop-orchestra events to indie rock bands performing
with the Brooklyn Philharmonic. This book attunes readers to hear
the discourses gathered around the music and its associated images
as it examines pop's relations to aspirational consumer culture,
theatricality, sophistication, cosmopolitanism, and glamorous
lifestyles.
"Enka," a sentimental ballad genre, epitomizes for many the
"nihonjin no kokoro" (heart/soul of Japanese). To older members of
the Japanese public, who constitute "enka"'s primary audience, this
music--of parted lovers, long unseen rural hometowns, and
self-sacrificing mothers--evokes a direct connection to the
traditional roots of "Japaneseness." Overlooked in this emotional
invocation of the past, however, are the powerful commercial forces
that, since the 1970s, have shaped the consumption of "enka" and
its version of national identity. Informed by theories of
nostalgia, collective memory, cultural nationalism, and gender,
this book draws on the author's extensive fieldwork in probing the
practice of identity-making and the processes at work when Japan
becomes "Japan."
Django Generations shows how relationships between racial
identities, jazz, and national belonging become entangled in
France. Jazz manouche-a genre known best for its energetic,
guitar-centric swing tunes-is among France's most celebrated
musical practices of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It
centers on the recorded work of famed guitarist Django Reinhardt
and is named for the ethnoracial subgroup of Romanies (also known,
often pejoratively, as "Gypsies") to which Reinhardt belonged.
French Manouches are publicly lauded as bearers of this jazz
tradition, and many take pleasure and pride in the practice while
at the same time facing pervasive discrimination. Jazz manouche
uncovers a contradiction at the heart of France's assimilationist
republican ideals: the music is portrayed as quintessentially
French even as Manouches themselves endure treatment as racial
others. In this book, Siv B. Lie explores how this music is used to
construct divergent ethnoracial and national identities in a
context where discussions of race are otherwise censured. Weaving
together ethnographic and historical analysis, Lie shows that jazz
manouche becomes a source of profound ambivalence as it generates
ethnoracial difference and socioeconomic exclusion. As the first
full-length ethnographic study of French jazz to be published in
English, this book enriches anthropological, ethnomusicological,
and historical scholarship on global jazz, race and ethnicity, and
citizenship while showing how music can be an important but
insufficient tool in struggles for racial and economic justice.
Hailed by corporate, philanthropic, and governmental organizations
as a metaphor for democratic interaction and business dynamics,
contemporary jazz culture has a story to tell about the
relationship between political economy and social practice in the
era of neoliberal capitalism. The Jazz Bubble approaches the
emergence of the neoclassical jazz aesthetic since the 1980s as a
powerful, if unexpected, point of departure for a wide-ranging
investigation of important social trends during this period,
extending from the effects of financialization in the music
industry to the structural upheaval created by urban redevelopment
in major American cities. Dale Chapman draws from political and
critical theory, oral history, and the public and trade press,
making this a persuasive and compelling work for scholars across
music, industry, and cultural studies.
During World War II, jazz embodied everything that was appealing
about a democratic society as envisioned by the Western Allied
powers. Labelled 'degenerate' by Hitler's cultural apparatus, jazz
was adopted by the Allies to win the hearts and minds of the German
public. It was also used by the Nazi Minister for Propaganda,
Joseph Goebbels, to deliver a message of Nazi cultural and military
superiority. When Goebbels co-opted young German and foreign
musicians into 'Charlie and his Orchestra' and broadcast their
anti-Allied lyrics across the English Channel, jazz took centre
stage in the propaganda war that accompanied World War II on the
ground. The Jazz War is based on the largely unheard oral testimony
of the personalities behind the German and British wartime radio
broadcasts, and chronicles the evolving relationship between jazz
music and the Axis and Allied war efforts. Studdert shows how jazz
both helped and hindered the Allied cause as Nazi soldiers secretly
tuned in to British radio shows while London party-goers danced the
night away in demimonde `bottle parties', leading them to be
branded a `menace' in Parliament. This book will appeal to students
of the history of jazz, broadcasting, cultural studies, and the
history of World War II.
A Rothschild by birth and a Baroness by marriage, beautiful,
spirited Pannonica - known as Nica - seemed to have it all:
children, a handsome husband and a trust fund. But in the early
1950s she heard a piece by the jazz legend Thelonious Monk. The
music overtook her like a magic spell, and she abandoned her
marriage to go and find him. Arriving in New York, Nica was shunned
by society but accepted by the musicians. They gave her friendship;
she gave them material and emotional support. Her convertible
Bentley was a familiar sight outside the clubs and she drank whisky
from a hip flask disguised as a Bible. Her notoriety was sealed
when drug-addicted saxophonist Charlie Parker died in her
apartment. But her real love was reserved for Monk, whom she cared
for until his death in 1982. The Baroness traces Nica's
extraordinary, thrilling journey - from England's stately homes to
the battlefields of Africa, passing under the shadow of the
Holocaust, and finally to the creative ferment of the New York jazz
scene. Hannah Rothschild's search to solve the mystery of her
rebellious great aunt draws on their long friendship and years of
meticulous research and interviews. It is part musical odyssey,
part dazzling love story.
The drum kit has provided the pulse of popular music from before
the dawn of jazz up to the present day pop charts. Kick It, a
provocative social history of the instrument, looks closely at key
innovators in the development of the drum kit: inventors and
manufacturers like the Ludwig and Zildjian dynasties, jazz icons
like Gene Krupa and Max Roach, rock stars from Ringo Starr to Keith
Moon, and popular artists who haven't always got their dues as
drummers, such as Karen Carpenter and J Dilla. Tackling the history
of race relations, global migration, and the changing tension
between high and low culture, author Matt Brennan makes the case
for the drum kit's role as one of the most transformative musical
inventions of the modern era. Kick It shows how the drum kit and
drummers helped change modern music-and society as a whole-from the
bottom up.
This ground-breaking biography is as much about Sun Ra's music as
it is about his passionate, often wildly unorthodox views on the
galaxy, black people and spiritual matters. With the various
incarnations of his inimitable Arkestra, his repertoire ranged from
boogie-woogie to swing to be-bop to fusion to New Age, and his
influence extended throughout the jazz and rock worlds. While Sun
Ra made a lifelong effort to obscure many of the facts of his early
years, he did acknowledge that he was born on the planet Saturn.
John Szwed has succeeded brilliantly in delving into and evoking
the life and work of this extraordinary artist.
(Real Book Play-Along). These three CDs contain rhythm section
backing tracks for all 60 songs in the popular Charlie Parker
Omnibook lead sheet books.
|
You may like...
Washington, Dc, Jazz
Regennia N Williams, Sandra Butler-truesdale
Paperback
R657
R541
Discovery Miles 5 410
Plainspeak
Astrid Alben
Paperback
R363
R293
Discovery Miles 2 930
Red Groove
Chris Searle
Paperback
R381
Discovery Miles 3 810
|