The Velvet Lounge: On Late Chicago Jazz

by Gerald Majer

Overview

Troubled urban neighborhoods and jazz-club havens were the backdrop of Gerald Majer's life growing up in sixties and seventies Chicago. The Velvet Lounge, an original hybrid of memoir, biography, and musical description, reflects this history and pursues a sustained meditation on jazz along with a probing exploration of race and class and how they defined the material and psychic divides of a city. With the instrument of a supple, lyrical prose style, Majer elaborates the book's themes through literary and intellectual forays as carefully constructed and as passionately articulated as a jazz master's solo. Throughout the work, issues of identity and culture, art and politics achieve a rare immediacy, as does the music itself.

In portraits of Jimmy Smith, Gene Ammons, Sonny Stitt, Sun Ra, and others, Gerald Majer conveys the drama and artistry of their music as well as the personal hardships many of them endured. Vivid descriptions and telling historical anecdotes explore the music's richness through a variety of political, social, and philosophical contexts. The Velvet Lounge, named after the famous Chicago club, is also one of the few works to consider the music of such avant-garde jazz musicians as Fred Anderson, Andrew Hill, and Roscoe Mitchell. In doing so, Majer builds a bridge from the traditionalist view of jazz to the world of contemporary innovators, casts a new light on the music and its makers, and traces connections between jazz art and postmodernist thought.

Present throughout Majer's spirited encounters with the worlds of jazz is Majer himself. We hear and appreciate the music through his individual sensibilities and experiences. Majer recounts growing up in racially divided Chicago—his trips to the famed Maxwell Street market, his wanderings among its legendary jazz clubs, his riding the El, and his working in a jukebox factory. We witness his awakening to the music at a crossroads of the intimately personal and the intellectually provocative.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231510127
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	08/24/2005
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	224
File size:	22 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Gerald Majer is professor of English at Villa Julie College. His poetry and essays have appeared in a variety of journals including, Callaloo, The Georgia Review, and The Yale Review.

Table of Contents

Jug Eyes
Stitt's Time
Proxima Ra
Monstrosioso
Batterie
The Velvet Lounge
Le Serpent Qui Danse
Dreaming of Roscoe Mitchell
Intuitive Research Beings
Discography

What People are Saying About This

Sascha Feinstein

Gerald Majer's propulsive, rhythmic essays celebrate the history and spirit of jazz. Like a seasoned improviser, he varies and syncopates his delivery, casting rim-shot fragments against long, slalomlike sentences -- pushing, probing, and staying on the run through fast-track narrative and lyric measure. The prose fluidly shifts between earthy vernacular and reflective mood swing. And yet Majer's technical gifts as an essayist never betray or eclipse the emotional heart of these engaging, memorable meditations.

— Sascha Feinstein, author, Misterioso; editor, Brilliant Corners: A Journal of Jazz and Literature

J. D. McClatchy

The Velvet Lounge is a book like none other. Part memoir, part homage, Gerald Majer's remarkable odyssey through the world of late Chicago jazz is a haunted, vertiginous account of both the music and the lives it was made from. This is finally a book about soul -- no, about the soul -- rapt by essence and experiment. Majer writes with an exhilarating passion and a rare elegance, and his book is sure to be a classic.

— J. D. McClatchy, author of Hazmat: Poems

Editorial Reviews

A quietly visionary autobiography, the story of a life and of a complex, ugly/beautiful city.

Sunday Herald

A deeply moving memoir in tune with the rhythms of jazz music itself and its influence on American society.

James A. Cox

Masterfully crafted.

Multicultural Review - Marsha Walker

Far closer to capturing the experience of listening to music than any jazz book you've read this year.

Time Out Chicago - Matthew Lurie

His descriptions actually make you want to hear again—or listen to for the first time—the music described.

jazzword.com - Ken Waxman

He is a virtuoso writer, wrapping the reader in his lush descriptions of concerts.

Chicago Tribune - Elizabeth Hoover

A quietly visionary autobiography, the story of a life and of a complex, ugly/beautiful city.

Sunday Herald (Scotland) - Brian Morton

Masterfully crafted.

— Marsha Walker

Multicultural Review

A deeply moving memoir in tune with the rhythms of music itself and its influence on society.

— James A. Cox

Wisconsin Bookwatch

A deeply moving memoir in tune with the rhythms of jazz music itself and its influence on American society.

— James A. Cox

Midwest Book Review

A quietly visionary autobiography, the story of a life and of a complex, ugly/beautiful city.

— Brian Morton

Sunday Herald (Scotland)

He is a virtuoso writer, wrapping the reader in his lush descriptions of concerts.

— Elizabeth Hoover

Chicago Tribune

Far closer to capturing the experience of listening to music than any jazz book you've read this year.

— Matthew Lurie

Time Out Chicago

His descriptions actually make you want to hear again—or listen to for the first time—the music described.

— Ken Waxman

jazzword.com