Tom Perchard

How did French musicians and critics interpret jazz--that quintessentially American music--in the mid-twentieth century? How far did players reshape what they learned from records and visitors into more local jazz forms, and how did the music figure in those angry debates that so often suffused French cultural and political life? After Django begins with the famous interwar triumphs of Josephine Baker and Django Reinhardt, but, for the first time, the focus here falls on the French jazz practices of the postwar era. The work of important but neglected French musicians such as Andr Hodeir and Barney Wilen is examined in depth, as are native responses to Americans such as Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk. The book provides an original intertwining of musical and historical narrative, supported by extensive archival work; in clear and compelling prose, Perchard describes the problematic efforts towards aesthetic assimilation and transformation made by those concerned with jazz in fact and in idea, listening to the music as it sounded in discourses around local identity, art, 1968 radicalism, social democracy, and post colonial politics.

Making Jazz in Postwar France

After Django

Stephen Graham

Holly Rogers

Tim Rutherford-Johnson

"Introduction Steve Reich pitched up in San Francisco in September 1961. He was a young musician, one who had been taken by the early-century work of the Hungarian composer and folklorist Béla Bartók, and he had journeyed west from New York in the hope of studying with Leon Kirchner, a composer in the rough-lyric Bartók tradition who'd been teaching at Mills College. But Kirchner had just left for Harvard, so Reich ended up working at Mills under Luciano Berio. Over the course of the previous decade, Berio had become identified as a figurehead of the European post-war avant-garde: his ultramodern serialist work was quite a different proposition to Kirchner's own"--

Twentieth-Century Music in the West

The essays contained in this volume address some of the most visible, durable and influential of African American musical styles as they developed from the mid-1960s into the 21st-century. Soul, funk, pop, R&B and hip hop practices are explored both singly and in their many convergences, and in writings that have often become regarded as landmarks in black musical scholarship. These works employ a wide range of methodologies, and taken together they show the themes and concerns of academic black musical study developing over three decades. While much of the writing here is focused on music and musicians in the United States, the book also documents important and emergent trends in the study of these styles as they have spread across the world. The volume maintains the original publication format and pagination of each essay, making for easy and accurate cross-reference and citation. Tom Perchards introduction gives a detailed overview of the books contents, and of the field as a whole, situating the present essays in a longer and wider tradition of African American music studies. In bringing together and contextualising works that are always valuable but sometimes difficult to access, the volume forms an excellent introductory resource for university music students and researchers.

From Soul to Hip Hop

Presents the events of the jazz trumpeter, Lee Morgan's life not just as items of biography, but also as points of departure for historical investigations that aim to situate the musician and his contemporaries in changing aesthetic, social and economic contexts. This work draws on many original interviews with Morgan's colleagues and friends.

Tom Perchard

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