What Is This Thing Called Jazz?: African American Musicians as Artists, Critics, and Activists(6 Music of the African Diaspora)

Despite the plethora of writing about jazz, little attention has been paid to what musicians themselves wrote and said about their practice. An implicit division of labour has emerged where, for the most part, black artists invent and play music while white writers provide the commentary. Eric Porter overturns this tendency in his creative intellectual history of African American musicians. He foregrounds the often ignored ideas of these artists, analyzing them in the context of meanings circulating around jazz, as well as in relationship to broader currents in African American thought. Porter examines several crucial moments in the history of jazz: the formative years of the 1920s and 1930s; the emergence of bebop; the political and experimental projects of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s; and the debates surrounding Jazz at Lincoln Center under the direction of Wynton Marsalis. Louis Armstrong, Anthony Braxton, Marion Brown, Duke Ellington, W.C. Handy, Yusef Lateef, Abbey Lincoln, Charles Mingus, Archie Shepp, Wadada Leo Smith, Mary Lou Williams and Reggie Workman also feature prominently in this book. The wealth of information Porter uncovers shows how these musicians have expressed

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments Introduction 1 "A Marvel of Paradox": Jazz and African American Modernity 2 "Dizzy Atmosphere": The Challenge of Bebop 3 "Passions of a Man": The Poetics and Politics of Charles Mingus 4 "Straight Ahead": Abbey Lincoln and the Challenge of Jazz Singing 5 Practicing "Creative Music": The Black Arts Imperative in the Jazz Community 6 Writing "Creative Music": Theorizing the Art and Politics of Improvisation 7 "The Majesty of the Blues": Wynton Marsalis's Jazz Canon Epilogue Notes Acknowledgments of Permissions Index

About the Author :
Eric Porter is Assistant Professor in the Department of American Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Review :
"Among the many books on the history of jazz, most document the interpretations of white critics....But now, Eric Porter's brilliant book seeks to trace the ways in which black jazz musicians have made verbal sense of their accomplishments, demonstrating the profound self-awareness of the artists themselves as they engaged in discourse about their enterprise." - Susan McClary, author of Conventional Wisdom: The Content of Musical Form