Representing Black Music Culture

Representing Black Music Culture PDF Author: Bill Banfield
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
ISBN: 0810877872
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
In this collection of essays, interviews, and profiles, William Banfield reflects on his life as a musician and educator, as he weaves together pieces of cultural criticism and artistry, all the while paying homage to Black music of the last 40 years and beyond. In Representing Black Music Culture: Then, Now, and When Again?, Banfield honors the legacy of artists who have graced us with their work for more than half a century. The essays and interviews in this collection are enhanced by seven years of daily diary entries, which reflect on some of the country's most respected Black composers, recording artists, authors, and cultural icons. These include Ornette Coleman, Bobby McFerrin, Toni Morrison, Amiri Baraka, Gordon Parks, the Marsalis brothers, Spike Lee, Maya Angelou, Patrice Rushen, and many others. Though many of the individuals Banfield lauds are well-known to most readers, he also turns his attention to musicians and artists whose work, while perhaps unheralded by the world at large, are no less deserving of praise and respect for their contributions to the culture. In addition, this volume is filled with candid photographs of many of these fellow artists as they participate in expressive culture, whether on stage, on tour, in clubs, behind the scenes, in rehearsal, or even during meals and teaching class. This unique book of essays, interviews, diary entries, and Banfield's personal photographs will be of interest to scholars and students, of course, but also to general readers interested in absorbing and appreciating the beauty of Black culture.

Representing Black Music Culture

Representing Black Music Culture PDF Author: Bill Banfield
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
ISBN: 0810877872
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 313

Get Book Here

Book Description
In this collection of essays, interviews, and profiles, William Banfield reflects on his life as a musician and educator, as he weaves together pieces of cultural criticism and artistry, all the while paying homage to Black music of the last 40 years and beyond. In Representing Black Music Culture: Then, Now, and When Again?, Banfield honors the legacy of artists who have graced us with their work for more than half a century. The essays and interviews in this collection are enhanced by seven years of daily diary entries, which reflect on some of the country's most respected Black composers, recording artists, authors, and cultural icons. These include Ornette Coleman, Bobby McFerrin, Toni Morrison, Amiri Baraka, Gordon Parks, the Marsalis brothers, Spike Lee, Maya Angelou, Patrice Rushen, and many others. Though many of the individuals Banfield lauds are well-known to most readers, he also turns his attention to musicians and artists whose work, while perhaps unheralded by the world at large, are no less deserving of praise and respect for their contributions to the culture. In addition, this volume is filled with candid photographs of many of these fellow artists as they participate in expressive culture, whether on stage, on tour, in clubs, behind the scenes, in rehearsal, or even during meals and teaching class. This unique book of essays, interviews, diary entries, and Banfield's personal photographs will be of interest to scholars and students, of course, but also to general readers interested in absorbing and appreciating the beauty of Black culture.

Race Music

Race Music PDF Author: Guthrie P. Ramsey
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520243331
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
Covering the vast and various terrain of African American music, this text begins with an account of the author's own musical experiences with family and friends on the South Side of Chicago. It goes on to explore the global influence and social relevance of African American music.

Representing Black Culture

Representing Black Culture PDF Author: Richard M. Merelman
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9780415910750
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 330

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Book Description
Representing Black Culture provides an innovative and comprehensive analysis of the role that black culture plays in American race realtions. By analyzing films, literature, popular music, education, television, and governmental cultural policy, Richard M. Merelman looks carefuly at how African-Americans as well as whites have represented and projected balck culture into the mainstream. He then goes on to examine how this representation can change American national identity and reduce racial conflict.

Hidden in the Mix

Hidden in the Mix PDF Author: Diane Pecknold
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822351633
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 391

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Book Description
Country music's debt to African American music has long been recognized. Black musicians have helped to shape the styles of many of the most important performers in the country canon. The partnership between Lesley Riddle and A. P. Carter produced much of the Carter Family's repertoire; the street musician Tee Tot Payne taught a young Hank Williams Sr.; the guitar playing of Arnold Schultz influenced western Kentuckians, including Bill Monroe and Ike Everly. Yet attention to how these and other African Americans enriched the music played by whites has obscured the achievements of black country-music performers and the enjoyment of black listeners. The contributors to Hidden in the Mix examine how country music became "white," how that fictive racialization has been maintained, and how African American artists and fans have used country music to elaborate their own identities. They investigate topics as diverse as the role of race in shaping old-time record catalogues, the transracial West of the hick-hopper Cowboy Troy, and the place of U.S. country music in postcolonial debates about race and resistance. Revealing how music mediates both the ideology and the lived experience of race, Hidden in the Mix challenges the status of country music as "the white man’s blues." Contributors. Michael Awkward, Erika Brady, Barbara Ching, Adam Gussow, Patrick Huber, Charles Hughes, Jeffrey A. Keith, Kip Lornell, Diane Pecknold, David Sanjek, Tony Thomas, Jerry Wever

Ethnomusicologizing

Ethnomusicologizing PDF Author: Bill Banfield
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1442229721
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 447

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Book Description
In Ethnomusicologizing: Essays on Music in the New Paradigms, composer and musicologist brings together a series of essays on music making in contemporary culture. More specifically, it focuses on the myriad ways we engage with music—as makers, as listeners, as consumers, as producers. Banfield labels this fully engaged process as “ethnomusicologizing,” as he explores the ways we create, share, teach, and discuss music. Throughout he argues that music is more than the experience of structured sound. It is rather a way of being more critically present as musicians and as citizens of sharing in the world itself. Ethnomusicologizing contains writings on contemporary music and culture studies, offering glimpses on more than just music history through reflective essays, interviews with contemporary artists, and exercises in the analysis and criticism of popular culture. In this work, Banfield instructs readers in the ways by which we may better appreciate and understand creative artistry and process, and their relation to history and its meaning. The essays comprise a choir of voices and perspectives that provide insight into contemporary music culture that provide readers a text that uses his own experiences as a musician—and in particular his travels through the musical world of Cuba—as well as his takes on contemporary popular recording artists, American music traditions, and music education to explore every aspect of creating, performing, and being in music. Offering many points of entry into the idea that musical experience, global citizenship and community-mindedness are all parts of a greater whole, Ethnomusicologizing encourages artists and readers to talk about the meaning of music—and art more generally—in entirely new ways.

Music and the Racial Imagination

Music and the Racial Imagination PDF Author: Ronald M. Radano
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226701998
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 728

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Book Description
"A specter lurks in the house of music, and it goes by the name of race," write Ronald Radano and Philip Bohlman in their introduction. Yet the intimate relationship between race and music has rarely been examined by contemporary scholars, most of whom have abandoned it for the more enlightened notions of ethnicity and culture. Here, a distinguished group of contributors confront the issue head on. Representing an unusually broad range of academic disciplines and geographic regions, they critically examine how the imagination of race has influenced musical production, reception, and scholarly analysis, even as they reject the objectivity of the concept itself. Each essay follows the lead of the substantial introduction, which reviews the history of race in European and American, non-Western and global musics, placing it within the contexts of the colonial experience and the more recent formation of "world music." Offering a bold, new revisionist agenda for musicology in a postmodern, postcolonial world, this book will appeal to students of culture and race across the humanities and social sciences.

What Is This Thing Called Jazz?

What Is This Thing Called Jazz? PDF Author: Eric Porter
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520928404
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 442

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Book Description
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 labor 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 themselves in print; actively shaped the institutional structures through which the music is created, distributed, and consumed, and how they aligned themselves with other artists and activists, and how they were influenced by forces of class and gender. What Is This Thing Called Jazz? challenges interpretive orthodoxies by showing how much black jazz musicians have struggled against both the racism of the dominant culture and the prescriptive definitions of racial authenticity propagated by the music's supporters, both white and black.

Representing Black Music Culture

Representing Black Music Culture PDF Author: William C. Banfield
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
ISBN: 0810877864
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
In this collection of essays, interviews, and profiles, William C. Banfield reflects on his life as a musician and educator, weaving together pieces of cultural criticism and artistry and paying homage to Black music of the last forty years and beyond. The essays and interviews in Representing Black Music Culture: Then, Now, and When Again? are enhanced by seven years of daily diary entries that reflect on some of the country's most respected Black composers, recording artists, authors, and cultural icons, including Ornette Coleman, Bobby McFerrin, Toni Morrison, Amiri Baraka, Gordon Parks, the Marsalis brothers, Maya Angelou, Patrice Rushen, Billy Taylor, Herbie Hancock, and Quincy Jones. Although many of the individuals Banfield lauds are well known to most readers, he also turns his attention to musicians and artists whose work, while perhaps unheralded by the world at large, is no less deserving of praise and respect for their contributions. In addition, this volume is filled with candid photographs of many artists participating in expressive culture, whether on stage, on tour, in clubs, in rehearsal, or teaching class. This unique book will be of interest to scholars and students, as well as general readers interested in absorbing and appreciating Black culture. Book jacket.

Paris Blues

Paris Blues PDF Author: Andy Fry
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022613895X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 291

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Book Description
The Jazz Age. The phrase conjures images of Louis Armstrong holding court at the Sunset Cafe in Chicago, Duke Ellington dazzling crowds at the Cotton Club in Harlem, and star singers like Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey. But the Jazz Age was every bit as much of a Paris phenomenon as it was a Chicago and New York scene. In Paris Blues, Andy Fry provides an alternative history of African American music and musicians in France, one that looks beyond familiar personalities and well-rehearsed stories. He pinpoints key issues of race and nation in France’s complicated jazz history from the 1920s through the 1950s. While he deals with many of the traditional icons—such as Josephine Baker, Django Reinhardt, and Sidney Bechet, among others—what he asks is how they came to be so iconic, and what their stories hide as well as what they preserve. Fry focuses throughout on early jazz and swing but includes its re-creation—reinvention—in the 1950s. Along the way, he pays tribute to forgotten traditions such as black musical theater, white show bands, and French wartime swing. Paris Blues provides a nuanced account of the French reception of African Americans and their music and contributes greatly to a growing literature on jazz, race, and nation in France.

Music, Culture, and Experience

Music, Culture, and Experience PDF Author: John Blacking
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226088308
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
One of the most important ethnomusicologists of the century, John Blacking achieved international recognition for his book, How Musical Is Man? Known for his interest in the relationship of music to biology, psychology, dance, and politics, Blacking was deeply committed to the idea that music-making is a fundamental and universal attribute of the human species. He attempted to document the ways in which music-making expresses the human condition, how it transcends social divisions, and how it can be used to improve the quality of human life. This volume brings together in one convenient source eight of Blacking's most important theoretical papers along with an extensive introduction by the editor. Drawing heavily on his fieldwork among the Venda people of South Africa, these essays reveal his most important theoretical themes such as the innateness of musical ability, the properties of music as a symbolic or quasi-linguistic system, the complex relation between music and social institutions, and the relation between scientific musical analysis and cultural understanding.