Writing Jazz

by Meltzer, David

• ISBN13: 9781562790967
• ISBN10: 156279096X
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1999-10-01
• Publisher: Mercury House

Summary

"Writing Jazz [is] Reading's companion volume (or better, its rebuttal, its discourse flip, its knowledge inversion, its racial table turn), wherein black musicians and critics take the reins and do their own writing about jazz.... [A] big living, breathing resource glob overflowing with chunks of stories and histories, some familiar, some arcane. We hear from usual suspects like Eileen Southern, Richard Wright, and Duke Ellington, but Meltzer also nabs jazzspeak from Richard Abrams, C.L.R. James, Archie Shepp, and Wanda Coleman.... In true Meltzer style, the anthology is a rich and fulfilling mess... Like Borges running amok in a jazz library."--Boston Phoenix Excerpt: "Pre-Text" by David Meltzer Jazz is paradox, certainty and uncertainty, stability and flux, fixed and fluid, the hidden revealed in an instant, a sequence of instances words fail to translate but remain memorable nevertheless, and whose performances are told, re-told, and then written into works that become a kind of folklore. The greatest jazz is conservative and radical, reactionary and revolutionary, at the same time. Alain Locke and Langston Hughes initiate the African-American response to jazz and blues as art forms challenging the Euro-American "classical" musics. Locke, like DuBois, often frames his appreciations of black culture in relation to white high culture terms of approval. Hughes provides a more radical stance as does Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka. Baraka proclaims (and celebrates) black music and performance styles as modernist and ancient earthquakes which crack apart white empires built on the backs of slaves. A ruling class secretly desires and fears rebellion's fusion and confusion, the elevated energy of a crowd surging forth and, rage's fury, leveling all distinctions. Baraka, my contemporary, the unacknowledged maestro of postwar poetry and paterfamilas of the Black Arts movement, has produced the most compelling and engaged writing on jazz. His Blues People, published in 1963, was the first full-length study and history of jazz written by an African-American.

Table of Contents

Pre-Text	ix
Definitions, Myths	1	(40)
Blues, Roots	41	(42)
Early Jazz and The Jazz Age	83	(48)
The Thirties and Forties	131	(44)
Bebop	175	(44)
Postbop, Free Jazz and Onward	219	(60)
Sub-Text	279	(15)
Notes	294	(3)
Con-Text	297	(1)
Books on Parade	298	(8)
Permissions	306	(8)
Index of Anthologized Material	314