Jazz and American Culture

Author:   Michael Borshuk (Texas Tech University)
Publisher:   Cambridge University Press
ISBN:  

9781009420198


Pages:   400
Publication Date:   30 November 2023
Format:   Hardback
Availability:   In stock   Availability explained
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Jazz and American Culture


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Overview

Almost immediately after jazz became popular nationally in the United States in the early 20th century, American writers responded to what this exciting art form signified for listeners. This book takes an expansive view of the relationship between this uniquely American music and other aspects of American life, including books, films, language, and politics. Observing how jazz has become a cultural institution, widely celebrated as 'America's classical music,' the book also never loses sight of its beginnings in Black expressive culture and its enduring ability to critique problems of democracy or speak back to violence and inequality, from Jim Crow to George Floyd. Taking the reader through time and across expressive forms, this volume traces jazz as an aesthetic influence, a political force, and a representational focus in American literature and culture. It shows how Jazz has long been a rich source of aesthetic stimulation, influencing writers as stylistically wide-ranging as Langston Hughes, Eudora Welty, and James Baldwin, or artists as diverse as Aaron Douglas, Jackson Pollock, and Gordon Parks.

Full Product Details

Author:   Michael Borshuk (Texas Tech University)
Publisher:   Cambridge University Press
Imprint:   Cambridge University Press
Dimensions:   Width: 15.80cm , Height: 2.70cm , Length: 23.60cm
Weight:   0.730kg
ISBN:  

9781009420198


ISBN 10:   1009420194
Pages:   400
Publication Date:   30 November 2023
Audience:   General/trade ,  General
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   In stock   Availability explained
We have confirmation that this item is in stock with the supplier. It will be ordered in for you and dispatched immediately.

Table of Contents

Introduction: a brief history of jazz in American culture Michael Borshuk; Part I. Elements of Sound and Style: 1. Improvisation Ajay Heble; 2. Scat and vocalese Chris Tonelli; 3. Jazz as intertextual expression Charles Hersch; 4. How to watch jazz: the importance of performance Michael Borshuk; Part II. Aesthetic Movements: 5. Jazz age Harlem Fiona Ngo; 6. 'Hard Times Don't Worry Me': the blues in Black music and literature in the 1930s Steven Tracy; 7. A fool for beauty: modernism and the racial semiotics of crooning Michael Coyle; 8. Free Jazz, critical performativity, and 1968 Michael Hrebeniak; Part III. Cultural Contexts: 9. Jazz slang, jazz speak Amor Kohli; 10. Jazz cool Joel Dinerstein; 11. The institutionalization of jazz Dale Chapman; 12. Jazz abroad Jurgen Grandt; Part IV. Literary Genres: 13. Orchestrating chaos: othering and the politics of contingency in jazz fiction Herman Beavers; 14. 'Wail, wop': jazz poetry on the page and in performance Jessica Teague; 15. Jazz criticism and liner notes Timothy Gray; 16. Jazz autobiography Daniel Stein; 17. Jazz and the American songbook Katherine Williams; Part V. Images and Screens: 18. 'The Sound I Saw': jazz and visual culture Amy Abugo Ongiri; 19. Love, theft, and transcendence: jazz and narrative cinema Krin Gabbard; 20. Reinstating televisual histories of jazz Nicolas Pillai; 21. Documentary jazz/jazz documentary Will Finch; 22. Two dark rooms: jazz and photography Benjamin Cawthra.

Reviews

'In this elegant, bold, ambitious, and much-needed intervention in the standard histories of Jazz, Borshuk brings together an all-star cast of leading scholars on a comprehensive set of topics that together enable us all to make a great leap forward in understanding the music's essential relation to American culture. The book begins with several insightful discussions of the specific aesthetic features that define jazz in the context of improvisation, race, literature, and performance, then situates the music historically in terms of Harlem, Modernism, and the watershed upheaval that peaked in 1968; from there, it connects jazz to American vernacular, the personal style of “cool,” and the music's eventual and always fraught relations with institutions of various kinds, its representation in poetry, autobiography, liner notes, and in the visual realm from cinema to TV to photography. An invaluable resource, a stunning achievement.' T. R. Johnson, Tulane University, Author of New Orleans: A Writer's City


Author Information

Michael Borshuk is the author of Swinging the Vernacular: Jazz and African American Modernist Literature (2006), which won the Texas Tech University President's Book Award for Outstanding Faculty Publication. He has written widely on African American literature, American modernism, and music. For ten years, he wrote on jazz for Coda magazine.

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