Jazz in the Hill
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A01=Colter Harper
African American
American Federation of Musicians
Author_Colter Harper
blight
cabarets
Category=AVLP
Category=JBSD
Category=JBSL
Category=NHK
Category=NHTB
Category=WQH
Civil Rights Era
community
culture
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_music
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
History
Jazz
labor
Music
nightclubs
Pennsylvania
performance
place
Popular music
race
redevelopment
rust belt
space
United States
urban
urban crisis
vice
Product details
- ISBN 9781496849861
- Weight: 237g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 11 Mar 2024
- Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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From the 1920s through the 1960s, Pittsburgh’s Hill District was the heart of the city’s Black cultural life and home to a vibrant jazz scene. In Jazz in the Hill: Nightlife and Narratives of a Pittsburgh Neighborhood, Colter Harper looks at how jazz shaped the neighborhood and created a way of life. Beyond backdrops for remarkable careers, jazz clubs sparked the development of a self-determined African American community. In delving into the history of entrepreneurialism, placemaking, labor organizing, and critical listening in the Hill District, Harper forges connections to larger political contexts, processes of urban development, and civil rights struggles.
Harper adopts a broad approach in thinking about jazz clubs, foregrounding the network of patrons, business owners, and musicians who were actively invested in community building. Jazz in the Hill provides a valuable case study detailing the intersections of music, political and cultural history, public policy, labor, and law. The book addresses distinctive eras and issues of twentieth century American urban history, including notions of "vice" during the Prohibition Era (1920–1934); "blight" during the mid-twentieth century boom in urban redevelopment (1946–1973); and workplace integration during the civil rights era (1954–1968). Throughout, Harper demonstrates how the clubs, as a nexus of music, politics, economy, labor, and social relations, supported the livelihood of residents and artists while developing cultures of listening and learning. Though the neighborhood has undergone an extensive socioeconomic transformation that has muted its nightlife, this musical legacy continues to guide current development visions for the Hill on the cusp of its remaking.
Harper adopts a broad approach in thinking about jazz clubs, foregrounding the network of patrons, business owners, and musicians who were actively invested in community building. Jazz in the Hill provides a valuable case study detailing the intersections of music, political and cultural history, public policy, labor, and law. The book addresses distinctive eras and issues of twentieth century American urban history, including notions of "vice" during the Prohibition Era (1920–1934); "blight" during the mid-twentieth century boom in urban redevelopment (1946–1973); and workplace integration during the civil rights era (1954–1968). Throughout, Harper demonstrates how the clubs, as a nexus of music, politics, economy, labor, and social relations, supported the livelihood of residents and artists while developing cultures of listening and learning. Though the neighborhood has undergone an extensive socioeconomic transformation that has muted its nightlife, this musical legacy continues to guide current development visions for the Hill on the cusp of its remaking.
Colter Harper is an ethnomusicologist and musician whose creative and scholarly work explores jazz, American nightlife, and the music of West Africa. Harper served as a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Ghana from 2018 to 2020 and has performed as a guitarist, including with the rock band Rusted Root. He is currently a teaching assistant professor in the Department of Music at the University at Buffalo.
