"Hold tight. The way to go mad without losing your mind is sometimes unruly." So begins La Marr Jurelle Bruce's urgent provocation and poignant meditation on madness in black radical art. Bruce theorizes four overlapping meanings of madness: the lived experience of an unruly mind, the psychiatric category of serious mental illness, the emotional ......
Although in 2000 he became the first sideman inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, "King Curtis" Ousley never lived to accept his award. Tragically, he was murdered outside his New York City home in 1971. At that moment, thirty-seven-year-old King Curtis was widely regarded as the greatest R & B saxophone player of all time. He also may have ......
Original jelly roll blues -- What did I do to be so black and blue? -- One o'clock jump -- Hothouse -- We speak African! -- Lullabye of birdland -- Haitian fight song -- Kind of blue -- I wish I knew how it would feel to be free -- Song for Che -- The blues and the abstract truth.
Japan's jazz community - both musicians and audience - has been begrudgingly recognised for its talent, knowledge, and level of appreciation. Underpinning this tentative admiration, however, has been a tacit agreement that, for cultural reasons, Japanese jazz "can't swing." In Blue Nippon E. Taylor Atkins shows how, strangely, Japan's own attitude ......
The jazz musician-composer-arranger Mary Lou Williams spent her sixty-year career working in—and stretching beyond—a dizzying range of musical styles. Her integration of classical music into her works helped expand jazz's compositional language. Her generosity made her a valued ......
In Thriving on a Riff, Presbyterian minister and jazz pianist Bill Carter traces the meaning and spirituality of jazz, inviting us to meet a God who not only embraces syncopation but blesses the swing.
What does jazz have to do with human spirituality?
Outside and Inside: Representations of Race and Identity in White Jazz Autobiography is the first full-length study of key autobiographies of white jazz musicians. White musicians from a wide range of musical, social, and economic backgrounds looked to black music and culture as the model on which to form their personal identities and their ......
African American Islam, Jazz, and Black Internationalism
"Black Fundamentalists illuminates how early twentieth century fundamentalism manifested in unique ways across the color line, illustrating how racial context, racial identity, and concerns for racial justice can shape religious expression even within theologically conservative traditions"--
Adrian Rollini (1903-1956), an American jazz multi-instrumentalist, played the bass saxophone, piano, vibraphone, and an array of other instruments. He even introduced some, such as the harmonica-like cuesnophone, called Goofus, never before wielded in jazz. Adrian Rollini: The Life and Music of a Jazz Rambler draws on oral history, countless ......
