Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies

by Robert O'Meally (Editor), Brent Hayes Edwards (Editor), Farah Jasmine Griffin (Editor)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231508360
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	06/30/2004
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	544
File size:	28 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Robert G. O'Meally is Zora Neale Hurston Professor of American Literature at Columbia University. He is the author of numerous books, including The Jazz Cadence of American Culture and Lady Day: The Many Faces of Billie Holiday.Brent Hayes Edwards is an associate professor of English at Rutgers University and the author of The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism.Farah Jasmine Griffin is a professor of English, comparative literature, and African American studies at Columbia University. She is the author of If You Can't Be Free, Be a Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday.

Table of Contents

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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What People are Saying About This

Ann Douglas

Richly detailed, often inspired, Uptown Conversations is itself a jam session in which a wide array of distinguished writers, scholars, and artists repsond to each other as well as to the music which is their subject. A communal project, spanning multiple disciplines and forms, that brilliantly illuminates every aspect of America's greatest ongoing communal project--jazz.

— Ann Douglas, Columbia University

Sherrie Tucker

Uptown Conversation allows us to eavesdrop on one of the most exciting intellectual jam sessions of our times, the dynamic dialogue bubbling out of Robert O'Meally's Jazz Study Group at Columbia. There is a sparky interconnectedness in this collection, stemming no doubt from the fact that the authors are not only grouped together on paper, but regularly gather off the page to exchange ideas. Uptown Conversation invites its readers to participate in a sustained and refreshingly diverse dialogue on such questions as 'How do we look at jazz in a global context?' and 'How should historians narrate the jazz past?' Let me off uptown! This is new jazz studies at its best.

— Sherrie Tucker, University of Kansas

Ingrid Monson

The fruit of years of cutting edge interdisciplinary conversations under the leadership Columbia University's Jazz Study Group, these essays chart new territory, set new standards, and are essential reading for anyone seriously interested in the history and future of the music. Professors O'Meally, Griffin and Edwards have put together an intellectual jam session of the highest order.

— Ingrid Monson, Harvard University

Editorial Reviews

This collection of erudite essarys aptly captures the spirit of those conversations...This must-have tome ups the ante on jazz banter.

Jazz Times - John Murph

Uptown Conversations... continue[s] this trajectory by moving away from jazz as a static object to be stylistically described, explained, and celebrated through the heroic and larger-than-life individual towards an understanding of jazz as a music in continual dialogue with the historical, social, political, racial, gendered process governing its creation.

Current Musicology - Niko Higgins

The international community of serious jazz enthusiasts who pick up the book will be impressed.

Ellingtonia - Theodore R. Hudson

An intellectually stimulating discussion of jazz and its many variations.

Black Issues Book Review - Justin Adewale Collins

It is also a delightful, accessible, and provocative read—a book that how jazz studies can contribute to a host of other fields.

Choice

Uptown Conversation gives us that crystallized vision and is destined to become an important source of research and reflection for many years to come.

Jazz Notes - Anne Farnsworth

The focus and depth of these essays prove that this chorus can sing - and not just standards.

Jazziz - Larry Blumenfeld

The international community of serious jazz enthusiasts who pick up the book will be impressed.

— Theodore R. Hudson

Ellingtonia

Uptown Conversations... continue[s] this trajectory by moving away from jazz as a static object to be stylistically described, explained, and celebrated through the heroic and larger-than-life individual towards an understanding of jazz as a music in continual dialogue with the historical, social, political, racial, gendered process governing its creation.

— Niko Higgins

Current Musicology

Uptown Conversation gives us that crystallized vision and is destined to become an important source of research and reflection for many years to come.

— Anne Farnsworth

Jazz Notes

The focus and depth of these essays prove that this chorus can sing - and not just standards.

— Larry Blumenfeld

Jazziz

An intellectually stimulating discussion of jazz and its many variations.

— Justin Adewale Collins

Black Issues Book Review

This collection of erudite essarys aptly captures the spirit of those conversations...This must-have tome ups the ante on jazz banter.

— John Murph

Jazz Times