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Who Can Afford to Improvise? - James Baldwin and Black Music, the Lyric and the Listeners (Paperback)
Loot Price: R576
Discovery Miles 5 760
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Who Can Afford to Improvise? - James Baldwin and Black Music, the Lyric and the Listeners (Paperback)
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Loot Price R576
Discovery Miles 5 760
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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Donate to Against Period Poverty
Total price: R596
Discovery Miles: 5 960
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More than a quarter-century after his death, James Baldwin remains
an unparalleled figure in American literature and African American
cultural politics. In Who Can Afford to Improvise? Ed Pavlic offers
an unconventional, lyrical, and accessible meditation on the life,
writings, and legacy of James Baldwin and their relationship to the
lyric tradition in black music, from gospel and blues to jazz and
R&B. Based on unprecedented access to private correspondence,
unpublished manuscripts and attuned to a musically inclined poet's
skill in close listening, Who Can Afford to Improvise? frames a new
narrative of James Baldwin's work and life. The route retraces the
full arc of Baldwin's passage across the pages and stages of his
career according to his constant interactions with black musical
styles, recordings, and musicians. Presented in three books - or
movements - the first listens to Baldwin, in the initial months of
his most intense visibility in May 1963 and the publication of The
Fire Next Time. It introduces the key terms of his lyrical
aesthetic and identifies the shifting contours of Baldwin's career
from his early work as a reviewer for left-leaning journals in the
1940s to his last published and unpublished works from the
mid-1980s. Book II listens with Baldwin and ruminates on the
recorded performances of Billie Holiday and Dinah Washington,
singers whose message and methods were closely related to his
developing world view. It concludes with the first detailed account
of "The Hallelujah Chorus," a performance from July 1, 1973, in
which Baldwin shared the stage at Carnegie Hall with Ray Charles.
Finally, in Book III, Pavlic reverses our musically inflected
reconsideration of Baldwin's voice, projecting it into the
contemporary moment and reading its impact on everything from the
music of Amy Winehouse, to the street performances of Turf Feinz,
and the fire of racial oppression and militarization against black
Americans in the 21st century. Always with an ear close to the
music, and avoiding the safe box of celebration, Who Can Afford to
Improvise? enables a new kind of "lyrical travel" with the
instructive clarity and the open-ended mystery Baldwin's work
invokes into the world.
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