What is jazz? What is gained—and what is lost—when various communities close ranks around a particular definition of this quintessentially American music? Jazz/Not Jazz explores some of the musicians, concepts, places, and practices which, while deeply connected to established jazz institutions and aesthetics, have rarely appeared in traditional histories of the form. David Ake, Charles Hiroshi Garrett, and Daniel Goldmark have assembled a stellar group of writers to look beyond the canon of acknowledged jazz greats and address some of the big questions facing jazz today. More than just a history of jazz and its performers, this collections seeks out those people and pieces missing from the established narratives to explore what they can tell us about the way jazz has been defined and its history has been told.
David Ake is Professor and Chair of the Department of Musicology at the Frost School of Music, University of Miami. Charles Hiroshi Garrett is Associate Professor of Music at the University of Michigan and the author of Struggling to Define a Nation: American Music in the Twentieth Century, (UC Press). Daniel Goldmark is Associate Professor of Music at Case Western Reserve University. He is the author and co-author of three books for UC Press: Tunes for ‘Toons, Beyond the Soundtrack, and Funny Pictures: Animation and Comedy in Hollywood
“Jazz/Not Jazz is an innovative and inspiring investigation of jazz as it is practiced, theorized and taught today. Taking their cues from current debates within jazz scholarship, the contributors to this collection open up jazz studies to a transdisciplinarity that is rich in its diversity of approaches, candid in its appraisals of critical worth, transparent in its ideological suppositions, and catholic in its subjects/objects of inquiry.”—Kevin Fellezs, author of Birds of Fire: Jazz, Rock, Funk and the Creation of Fusion.
“This collection is a delight. Each essay opens up some previously ignored aspect of jazz history. Anyone who knows the New Jazz Studies and is wise enough to acquire this book will immediately devour it.”—Krin Gabbard, author of Hotter Than That: The Trumpet, Jazz, and American Culture.
“This volume is truly one of a kind, eminently readable and filled with new insights. It will make an extremely important contribution to jazz literature.”—Jeffrey Taylor, Director, H. Wiley Hitchcock Institute for Studies in American Music, Brooklyn College.
312 pp.6 x 9Illus: 8 b/w photographs, 5 tables, 4 music examples
9780520271043$36.95|£31.00Paper
Jun 2012