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Jackson Pollock dancing to the music as he painted; Romare Bearden's 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 define—it 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. O'Meally's 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 music's experimental wing—such as Salim Washington's meditation on Charles Mingus and the avant-garde or George Lipsitz's polemical juxtaposition of Ken Burns's documentary Jazz and Horace Tapscott's autobiography Songs of the Unsung—share the stage with revisionary takes on familiar figures in the canon: Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, and Louis Armstrong.
Introductory Notes, by Robert G. O'Meally, Brent Hayes Edwards, and Farah Jasmine Griffin
Songs of the Unsung: The Darby Hicks History of Jazz, by George Lipsitz
"All the Things You Could Be by Now": Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus and the Limits of Avant-Garde Jazz, by Salim Washington
Experimental Music in Black and White: The AACM in New York, 1970-1985, by George Lewis
When Malindy Sings: A Meditation on Black Women's Vocality, by Farah Jasmine Griffin
Hipsters, Bluebloods, Rebels, and Hooligans: The Cultural Politics of the Newport Jazz Festival, 1954-1960, by John Gennari
Mainstreaming Monk: The Ellington Album, by Mark Tucker
The Man, by John Szwed
The Real Ambassadors, by Penny M. Von Eschen
Artistic Othering in Black Diaspora Musics: Preliminary Thoughts on Time, Culture, and Politics, by Kevin Gaines
Notes on Jazz in Senegal, by Timothy R. Mangin
Revisiting Romare Bearden's Art of Improvisation, by Diedra Harris-Kelley
Louis Armstrong, Bricolage, and the Aesthetics of Swing, by Jorge Daniel Veneciano
Checking Our Balances: Louis Armstrong, Ralph Ellison, and Betty Boop, by Robert G. O'Meally
Paris Blues: Ellington, Armstrong, and Saying It with Music, by Krin Gabbard
"How You Sound??": Amiri Baraka Writes Free Jazz, by William J. Harris
The Literary Ellington, by Brent Hayes Edwards
"Always New and Centuries Old": Jazz, Poetry and Tradition as Creative Adaptation, by Travis Jackson
A Space We're All Immigrants From: Othering and Communitas in Nathaniel Mackey's Bedouin Hornbook, by Herman Beavers
Exploding the Narrative in Jazz Improvisation, by Vijay Iyer
Beneath the Underground: Exploring New Currents in "Jazz", by Robin D. G. Kelley
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