An insightful examination of the impact of the Civil Rights
Movement and African Independence on jazz in the 1950s and 60s,
Freedom Sounds traces the complex relationships among music,
politics, aesthetics, and activism through the lens of the hot
button racial and economic issues of the time. Ingrid Monson
illustrates how the contentious and soul-searching debates in the
Civil Rights, African Independence, and Black Power movements
shaped aesthetic debates and exerted a moral pressure on musicians
to take action. Throughout, her arguments show how jazz musicians'
quest for self-determination as artists and human beings also led
to fascinating and far reaching musical explorations and a lasting
ethos of social critique and transcendence.
Across a broad body of issues of cultural and political relevance,
Freedom Sounds considers the discursive, structural, and practical
aspects of life in the jazz world in the 1950s and 1960s. In
domestic politics, Monson explores the desegregation of the
American Federation of Musicians, the politics of playing to
segregated performance venues in the 1950s, the participation of
jazz musicians in benefit concerts, and strategies of economic
empowerment. Issues of transatlantic importance such as the effects
of anti-colonialism and African nationalism on the politics and
aesthetics of the music are also examined, from Paul Robeson's
interest in Africa, to the State Department jazz tours, to the
interaction of jazz musicians such Art Blakey and Randy Weston with
African and African diasporic aesthetics.
Monson deftly explores musicians' aesthetic agency in synthesizing
influential forms of musical expression from a multiplicity of
stylistic and cultural influences--African American music, popular
song, classical music, African diasporic aesthetics, and other
world musics--through examples from cool jazz, hard bop, modal
jazz, and the avant-garde. By considering the differences between
aesthetic and socio-economic mobility, she presents a fresh
interpretation of debates over cultural ownership, racism, reverse
racism, and authenticity.
Freedom Sounds will be avidly read by students and academics in
musicology, ethnomusicology, anthropology, popular music, African
American Studies, and African diasporic studies, as well as fans of
jazz, hip hop, and African American music.
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