Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780231123518)

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.

Author: Robert O'Meally
ISBN-10: 0231123515
ISBN-13: 9780231123518
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Language: English
Published: 06/30/2004
Pages: 544
Format: Paperback
Weight: 1.78lbs
Size: 9.98h x 7.02w x 0.95d

Review Citation(s):
Choice 03/01/2005 pg. 1237
Black Issues Book Review 05/01/2005 pg. 33