| Description |
xii, 277 pages : illustrations, portraits ; 24 cm |
| Series |
Music in American life
|
|
Blacks in the New World
|
| Contents |
"I couldn't see anything but music" : African and rural roots -- "He should throw that club at you" : urban origins in New Orleans -- "Therefore, I got to go" : jazz and the great northern migration -- "Changing, changing" : the forging of northern black communities -- "The great travelers" : white jazz musicians of the 1920s -- "Turn the bitters into sweets" : the musical culture of jazz -- "Being crazy don't make music" : searching for a jazz subculture -- "Money-finding music" : jazz as a commodity -- "Wacky state of affairs" : the Depression, Swing Era, and Revolt -- "The wedding of the races"? : jazz and the color line |
| Summary |
As musicians, listeners, and scholars have sensed for many years, the story of jazz is more than a history of the music. Burton Peretti presents a fascinating account of how the racial and cultural dynamics of American cities created the music, life, and business that was jazz. From its origins in the jook joints of sharecroppers and the streets and dance halls of 1890s New Orleans, through its later metamorphoses in the cities of the North, Peretti charts the life of jazz culture to the eve of bebop and World War II. In the course of those fifty years, jazz was the story of players who made the transition from childhood spasm bands to Carnegie Hall and worldwide touring and fame. It became the music of the Twenties, a decade of Prohibition, of adolescent discontent, of Harlem pride, and of Americans hoping to preserve cultural traditions in an urban, commercial age. And jazz was where black and white musicians performed together, as uneasy partners, in the big bands of Artie Shaw and Benny Goodman. "Blacks fought back by using jazz," states Peretti, "with its unique cultural and intellectual properties, to prove, assess, and evade the "dynamic of minstrelsy." Drawing on newspaper reports of the times and on the firsthand testimony of more than seventy prominent musicians and singers (among them Benny Carter, Bud Freeman, Kid Ory, and Mary Lou Williams), The Creation of Jazz is the first comprehensive analysis of the role of early jazz in American social history. |
| Analysis |
African Americans Music History and criticism |
|
Geschichte 1880-1940 |
|
Jazz History and criticism |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references (pages 219-260) and index |
| Subject |
Jazz -- History and criticism
|
|
African Americans -- Music -- History and criticism
|
| Genre/Form |
Music.
|
|
Criticism, interpretation, etc.
|
| LC no. |
91034772 |
| ISBN |
0252017080 |
|
9780252017087 |
|
0252064216 |
|
9780252064210 |
|
