Taking to heart Ralph Ellison's remark that much in American
life is "jazz-shaped," "The Jazz Cadence of American Culture"
offers a wide range of eloquent statements about the influence of
this art form. Robert G. O'Meally has gathered a comprehensive
collection of important essays, speeches, and interviews on the
impact of jazz on other arts, on politics, and on the rhythm of
everyday life. Focusing mainly on American artistic expression from
1920 to 1970, O'Meally confronts a long era of political and
artistic turbulence and change in which American art forms
influenced one another in unexpected ways.
Organized thematically, these provocative pieces include an
essay considering poet and novelist James Weldon Johnson as a
cultural critic, an interview with Wynton Marsalis, a speech on the
heroic image in jazz, and a newspaper review of a recent melding of
jazz music and dance, "Bring in 'Da Noise, Bring in 'Da Funk." From
Stanley Crouch to August Wilson to Jacqui Malone, the plurality of
voices gathered here reflects the variety of expression within
jazz.
The book's opening section sketches the overall place of jazz in
America. Alan P. Merriam and Fradley H. Garner unpack the word
"jazz" and its register, Albert Murray considers improvisation in
music and life, Amiri Baraka argues that white critics
misunderstand jazz, and Stanley Crouch cogently dissects the
intersections of jazz and mainstream American democratic
institutions. After this, the book takes an interdisciplinary
approach, exploring jazz and the visual arts, dance, sports,
history, memory, and literature. Ann Douglas writes on jazz's
influence on the design and construction of skyscrapers in the
1920s and '30s, Zora Neale Hurston considers the significance of
African-American dance, Michael Eric Dyson looks at the jazz of
Michael Jordan's basketball game, and Hazel Carby takes on the
sexual politics of Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith's blues.
"The Jazz Cadence" offers a wealth of insight and information
for scholars, students, jazz aficionados, and any reader wishing to
know more about this music form that has put its stamp on American
culture more profoundly than any other in the twentieth
century.
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