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Books > Arts & Architecture > Music > Contemporary popular music > Rock & pop > Soul & Gospel
In Crossing Bar Lines: The Politics and Practices of Black Musical
Space James Gordon Williams reframes the nature and purpose of jazz
improvisation to illuminate the cultural work being done by five
creative musicians between 2005 and 2019. The political thought of
five African American improvisers-trumpeters Terence Blanchard and
Ambrose Akinmusire, drummers Billy Higgins and Terri Lyne
Carrington, and pianist Andrew Hill-is documented through
insightful, multilayered case studies that make explicit how these
musicians articulate their positionality in broader society.
Informed by Black feminist thought, these case studies unite around
the theory of Black musical space that comes from the lived
experiences of African Americans as they improvise through daily
life. The central argument builds upon the idea of space-making and
the geographic imagination in Black Geographies theory. Williams
considers how these musicians interface with contemporary social
movements like Black Lives Matter, build alternative institutional
models that challenge gender imbalance in improvisation culture,
and practice improvisation as joyful affirmation of Black value and
mobility. Both Terence Blanchard and Ambrose Akinmusire innovate
musical strategies to address systemic violence. Billy Higgins's
performance is discussed through the framework of breath to
understand his politics of inclusive space. Terri Lyne Carrington
confronts patriarchy in jazz culture through her Social Science
music project. The work of Andrew Hill is examined through the
context of his street theory, revealing his political stance on
performance and pedagogy. All readers will be elevated by this
innovative and timely book that speaks to issues that continue to
shape the lives of African Americans today.
Soul music remains the biggest 'underground' music scene in the
world with each weekend, pre-Covid19, seeing countless soul nights
and weekenders fill the diaries. Records, on often obscure labels,
change hands regularly for four figure sums, while many artists
come to Britain countless years after they first stepped into a
recording studio to sing tracks that they had to re-learn the words
to as it had been so long since they last sung it to an
appreciative audience. But for many to learn about those
'four-figure' tracks and those who recorded them, they have had to
rely on countless diehards on the scene, the 'anoraks' so to speak.
Those who seek out details of an artist's career and compile
discographies of the labels on which they recorded and then take
the time to put it all into print in the form of a fanzine, or if
finances allow, a fully-fledged magazine. Some of those
publications failed to last beyond one issue, others slightly
longer, and although they do not command the same monetary value as
the records, many will fetch considerably more than the music
publications found on magazine shelves today. There have been books
on the artists, the record labels and the venues and now 'Soul In
Print' fills a gap, covering the fanzines and magazines which did
much to keep the scene alive and maintain the interest which
continues today?
Aretha Franklin begain life as the golden daughter of a progressive
and promiscuous Baptist preacher. Raised without her mother, she
was a gospel prodigy who have birth to two sons in her teens and
left them and her native Detriot for New York, where she struggled
to find her true voice. It was not until 1967, when a white Jewish
producer insisted she return to her gospel-soul roots, that fame
and fortune finally came via 'Respect' and a rapidfire string of
hits. She has evolved ever since, amidst personal tragedy, surprise
Grammy performances and career reinventions. Again and again,
Aretha stubbornly finds a way to triumph over troubles, even as
they continue to build. Her hold on the crown is tenacious, and in
RESPECT, David Ritz gives us the definitive life of one of the
greatest talents in all American culture.
In January of 1979, the great soul artist Donny Hathaway fell
fifteen stories from a window of Manhattan's Essex House Hotel in
an alleged suicide. He was 33 years old and everyone he worked with
called him a genius. Best known for "A Song for You," "This
Christmas," and classic duets with Roberta Flack, Hathaway was a
composer, pianist, and singer committed to exploring "music in its
totality." His velvet melisma and vibrant sincerity set him apart
from other soul men of his era while influencing generations of
singers and fans whose love affair with him continues to this day.
The first nonfiction book about Hathaway, Donny Hathaway Live uses
original interviews, archival material, musical analysis, cultural
history, and poetry to tell the story of Hathaway's life, from his
beginnings as a gospel wonder child to his final years. But its
focus is the brutally honest, daringly gorgeous music he created as
he raced the clock of mental illness-especially in the performances
captured on his 1972 album Donny Hathaway Live. That album
testifies to Hathaway's uncanny ability to amplify the power and
beauty of his songs in the moment of live performance. By exploring
that album, we see how he generated a spiritual experience for
those present at his shows, and for those with the privilege to
listen in now.
In Crossing Bar Lines: The Politics and Practices of Black Musical
Space James Gordon Williams reframes the nature and purpose of jazz
improvisation to illuminate the cultural work being done by five
creative musicians between 2005 and 2019. The political thought of
five African American improvisers-trumpeters Terence Blanchard and
Ambrose Akinmusire, drummers Billy Higgins and Terri Lyne
Carrington, and pianist Andrew Hill-is documented through
insightful, multilayered case studies that make explicit how these
musicians articulate their positionality in broader society.
Informed by Black feminist thought, these case studies unite around
the theory of Black musical space that comes from the lived
experiences of African Americans as they improvise through daily
life. The central argument builds upon the idea of space-making and
the geographic imagination in Black Geographies theory. Williams
considers how these musicians interface with contemporary social
movements like Black Lives Matter, build alternative institutional
models that challenge gender imbalance in improvisation culture,
and practice improvisation as joyful affirmation of Black value and
mobility. Both Terence Blanchard and Ambrose Akinmusire innovate
musical strategies to address systemic violence. Billy Higgins's
performance is discussed through the framework of breath to
understand his politics of inclusive space. Terri Lyne Carrington
confronts patriarchy in jazz culture through her Social Science
music project. The work of Andrew Hill is examined through the
context of his street theory, revealing his political stance on
performance and pedagogy. All readers will be elevated by this
innovative and timely book that speaks to issues that continue to
shape the lives of African Americans today.
Tony Bolden presents an innovative history of funk music focused on
the performers, regarding them as intellectuals who fashioned a new
aesthetic. Utilizing musicology, literary studies, performance
studies, and African American intellectual history, Bolden explores
what it means for music, or any cultural artifact, to be funky.
Multitudes of African American musicians and dancers created
aesthetic frameworks with artistic principles and cultural politics
that proved transformative. Bolden approaches the study of funk and
black musicians by examining aesthetics, poetics, cultural history,
and intellectual history. The study traces the concept of funk from
early blues culture to a metamorphosis into a full-fledged artistic
framework and a named musical genre in the 1970s, and thereby
Bolden presents an alternative reading of the blues tradition. In
part one of this two-part book, Bolden undertakes a theoretical
examination of the development of funk and the historical
conditions in which black artists reimagined their music. In part
two, he provides historical and biographical studies of key funk
artists, all of whom transfigured elements of blues tradition into
new styles and visions. Funk artists, like their blues relatives,
tended to contest and contextualize racialized notions of
blackness, sexualized notions of gender, and bourgeois notions of
artistic value. Funk artists displayed contempt for the status quo
and conveyed alternative stylistic concepts and social perspectives
through multimedia expression. Bolden argues that on this road to
cultural recognition, funk accentuated many of the qualities of
black expression that had been stigmatized throughout much of
American history.
2020 marks the 60th anniversary of Tamla Motown, arguably the
greatest recording label in the history of African American soul
music. Detroit Motor City 1960 and with racial tensions simmering
and with only eight thousand dollars, Berry Gordy, a man with an
unshakeable detrmination and vision moved into a modest building
that was to become HITSVILLA USA from where he and his close inner
circle gave the world the unique Motown sound. The first person
Berry Gordy hired at Motown was a white jewish boy called Al
Abrams, who got The Supremes on the cover of a magazine, as the
first black group ever. From the plantations of the Deep South
where African American music was born to Gordy's early successes
with Diana Ross, Smokey Robinson, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder and
Martha Reeves, to his involvement with the Black Mafia and his move
to Los Angeles following the race riots and the departure of his
legendary songwriting team of Holland Dozier Holland. This is the
story of Berry Gordy and Motown who changed the face and sound of
African American soul music forever more.
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