A01=Nicholas M. Evans
African American literature
atlantic
Author_Nicholas M. Evans
black
bohemian subcultures
bois
Bourgeois Whiteness
Cabaret Girl
Camel's Back
Carl Van Vechten
Category=NH
center
criticism
cultural hybridity
culture
early
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Ex-Colored Man
Fine Art Music
George Gershwin
Georgia Roads
Harlem Renaissance
history
Hughes's Work
interwar American society
Jack Robin
Jazz Criticism
jazz criticism and social change
Jazz Fiddler
Jazz Singer
Jewish Composers
Jewish Performers
Le Vat
Le Vot
Lenox Avenue
lincoln
Lincoln Center
minority representation
music and identity
Nigger Heaven
Offshore Pirate
orleans
Van Vechten
Weary Blues
Young Man
Product details
- ISBN 9781138987388
- Weight: 453g
- Dimensions: 138 x 216mm
- Publication Date: 20 Jan 2016
- Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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This study examines how early writers of jazz criticism (such as Gilbert Seldes and Carl Van Vechten) and literature (F. Scott Fitzgerald and Langston Hughes)--as well as jazz performers and composers (such as Al Jolson, Sophie Tucker, and George Gershwin)--associated the music directly with questions about identity (racial, ethnic, national, gendered, and sexual) and with historical developments like industrialization. Going beyond the study of melody, harmony, and rhythm, this book's interdisciplinary approach takes seriously the cultural beliefs about jazz that inspired interracial contact, moralistic panic, bohemian slumming, visions of American democracy, and much more. Detailed textual analysis of fiction, nonfiction, film, and musical performance illustrates the complexity of these cultural beliefs in the 1920s and also shows their survival to the present day. In part, jazz absorbed the U.S. cultural imagination due to the nineteenth-century artistic search for music that would define the national character. To the chagrin of Anglo-Saxon nativists, jazz ascended as an exemplar of cultural hybridity and pluralism. The writers and entertainers studied in this volume--most of whom were minorities of Jewish Irish or African heritage--hailed the new social possibilities that they heard and felt in jazz. Yet most of them also qualified their enthusiasm by remaining wary of both the seductions of jazz's commercialization and the loss of ethnic identity in the melting pot.
