In 1912 James Reese Europe made history by conducting his 125-member Clef Club Orchestra at Carnegie Hall. The first concert by an African American ensemble at the esteemed venue was more than just a concert--it was a political act of desegregation, a defiant challenge to the status quo in American music. In this book, David Gilbert explores how Europe and other African American performers, at the height of Jim Crow, transformed their racial difference into the mass-market commodity known as ""black music."" Gilbert shows how Europe and others used the rhythmic sounds of ragtime, blues, and jazz to construct new representations of black identity, challenging many of the nation's preconceived ideas about race, culture, and modernity and setting off a musical craze in the process. Gilbert sheds new light on the little-known era of African American music and culture between the heyday of minstrelsy and the Harlem Renaissance. He demonstrates how black performers played a pioneering role in establishing New York City as the center of American popular music, from Tin Pan Alley to Broadway, and shows how African Americans shaped American mass culture in their own image.

An examination of the musical, religious, and political landscape of black New Orleans before and after Hurricane Katrina, this revised edition looks at how these factors play out in a new millennium of global apartheid. Richard Brent Turner explores the history and contemporary significance of second lines-the group of dancers who follow the first procession of church and club members, brass bands, and grand marshals in black New Orleans's jazz street parades. Here music and religion interplay, and Turner's study reveals how these identities and traditions from Haiti and West and Central Africa are reinterpreted. He also describes how second line participants create their own social space and become proficient in the arts of political disguise, resistance, and performance.

Songs of the Unsung is the autobiography of Los Angeles jazz musician and activist Horace Tapscott (1934-1999). A pianist who ardently believed in the power of music to connect people, Tapscott was a beloved and influential character who touched many yet has remained unknown to the majority of Americans. In addition to being "his" story, Songs of the Unsung is the story of Los Angeles's cultural and political evolution over the last half of the twentieth century, of the origins of many of the most important avant-garde musicians still on the scene today, and of a rich and varied body of music. Tapscott's narrative covers his early life in segregated Houston, his move to California in 1943, life as a player in the Air Force band in the early fifties, and his travels with the Lionel Hampton Band. He reflects on how the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra (the "Ark"), an organization he founded in 1961 to preserve and spread African and African-American music, eventually became the Union of God's Musicians and Artists Ascension-a group that not only performed musically but was active in the civil rights movement, youth education, and community programs. Songs of the Unsung also includes Tapscott's vivid descriptions of the Watts neighborhood insurrection of 1965 and the L.A. upheavals of 1992, interactions with both the Black Panthers and the L.A.P.D., his involvement in Motown's West Coast scene, the growth of his musical reputation abroad, and stories about many of his musician-activist friends, including Billy Higgins, Don Cherry, Buddy Collette, Arthur Blythe, Lawrence and Wilber Morris, Linda Hill, Elaine Brown, Stanley Crouch, and Sun Ra. With a foreword by Steven Isoardi, a brief introduction by actor William Marshall, a full discography of Tapscott's recordings, and many fine photographs, Songs of the Unsung is the inspiring story of one of America's most unassuming twentieth-century heroes.

African Roots of the Jazz Evolution discusses how jazz style evolved from its original source - traditional African music. Reflecting the continental interaction and cultural development that took place over centuries, the book explores how melodic, structural, rhythmic, and other musical elements from Africa are manifested in African-American spirituals, the blues, and various jazz forms. The book moves chronologically from the roots of blues music through the advent of recording technology and into the incorporation of new musical styles and electronic media. Beginning with traditional African music, the text examines the sociocultural context in which African-American music emerged and the ways it was traditionally expressed. It also discusses the jazz innovators who emerged in each decade of the 20th Century and their contributions to jazz genres. Featuring reserve and in-class recording, discussion questions, and listening exams African Roots of the Jazz Evolution is an informed exploration of the African-America jazz evolution within a broad sociopolitical context. It can be used in a variety of courses in music, humanities, and ethnic studies.

An black Iraq war veteran and an Iraqi-American Muslim teenager form an unlikely friendship through their shared love of John Coltrane. A supreme coming-of-age story of friendship, forgiveness - and jazz. Tariq is is a young Iraqi-American Muslim man, beset by danger on the streets and conflict at home. Music is his only consolation. When he forms a friendship with the volatile but intriguing record-store owner and Iraq war veteran, Jamal, Tariq discovers the world of jazz - and the man he could become. Jamal is exciting, eloquent, and troubled. He suffers from PTSD, is always on edge. Tariq wants to learn from Jamal's knowledge of music, but can he afford to get close to this volatile veteran? When violence that has long threatened finally erupts, things suddenly clarify for Tariq. He takes the ultimate risk - not on behalf of his friend but his enemy - and the disparate worlds of modern America and traditional Islam come together in an unexpected and gripping resolution.

The contributors to Negotiated Moments explore how subjectivity is formed and expressed through musical improvisation, tracing the ways the transmission and reception of sound occur within and between bodies in real and virtual time and across memory, history, and space. They place the gendered, sexed, raced, classed, disabled, and technologized body at the center of critical improvisation studies and move beyond the field's tendency toward celebrating improvisation's utopian and democratic ideals by highlighting the improvisation of marginalized subjects. Rejecting a singular theory of improvisational agency, the contributors show how improvisation helps people gain hard-won and highly contingent agency. Essays include analyses of the role of the body and technology in performance, improvisation's ability to disrupt power relations, Pauline Oliveros's ideas about listening, flautist Nicole Mitchell's compositions based on Octavia Butler's science fiction, and an interview with Judith Butler about the relationship between her work and improvisation. The contributors' close attention to improvisation provides a touchstone for examining subjectivities and offers ways to hear the full spectrum of ideas that sound out from and resonate within and across bodies. Contributors. George Blake, David Borgo, Judith Butler, Rebecca Caines, Louise Campbell, Illa Carrillo Rodriguez, Berenice Corti, Andrew Raffo Dewar, Nina Eidsheim, Tomie Hahn, Jaclyn Heyen, Christine Sun Kim, Catherine Lee, Andra McCartney, Tracy McMullen, Kevin McNeilly, Leaf Miller, Jovana Milovic, Francois Mouillot, Pauline Oliveros, Jason Robinson, Neil Rolnick, Simon Rose, Gillian Siddall, Julie Dawn Smith, Jesse Stewart, Clara Tomaz, Sherrie Tucker, Lindsay Vogt, Zachary Wallmark, Ellen Waterman, David Whalen, Pete Williams, Deborah Wong, Mandy-Suzanne Wong

From his emergence in the 1950s - when an uncannily beautiful young man from Oklahoma appeared in the West Coast and became, seemingly overnight, the prince of 'cool' jazz - until his violent, drug-related death in Amsterdam in 1988, Chet Baker lived a life that has become an American myth. At once sexy and forbidding, the so-called 'James Dean of Jazz' struck a note of menace in the staid fifties. In this first major biography, the story of Baker's demise is finally revealed. So is the truth behind his tormented childhood. Behind Baker's icy facade lay something ominous, unspoken. The mystery drove both sexes crazy. But his only real romance, apart from music, was with drugs. Gavin brilliantly recreates the life of a man whose journey from golden promise to eventual destruction mirrored America's fall from post-war innocence - but whose music has never lost the power to enchant and seduce us.