Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies

About this book

Jackson Pollock dancing to the music as he painted; Romare Beardens stage and costume designs for Alvin Ailey and Dianne McIntyre; Stanley Crouch stirring his high-powered essays in a room where a drumkit stands at the center: from the perspective of the new jazz studies jazz is not only a music to defineit is a culture. Considering musicians and filmmakers painters and poets the intellectual improvisations in Uptown Conversation reevaluate reimagine and riff on the music that has for more than a century initiated a call and response across art forms geographies and cultures. Building on Robert G. OMeallys acclaimed Jazz Cadence of American Culture these original essays offer new insights in jazz historiography highlighting the political stakes in telling the story of the music and evaluating its cultural import in the United States and worldwide. Articles contemplating the musics experimental wingsuch as Salim Washingtons meditation on Charles Mingus and the avant-garde or George Lipsitzs polemical juxtaposition of Ken Burnss documentary Jazz and Horace Tapscotts autobiography Songs of the Unsungshare the stage with revisionary takes on familiar figures in the canon: Thelonious Monk Miles Davis Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong.