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DAVID
MELTZER
(EDITOR) |
READING JAZZ WRITING JAZZ |
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READING
JAZZ
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READING JAZZ
“This work ... presents aspects of the way jazz was mythologized, colonialized, demonized, defended, and ultimately neutralized by white Americans and Europeans. This is about the white invention of jazz as subject and object.”
An unusual source book of jazz history, Reading Jazz examines its roots and future, as well as its links to and influence on other forms of modern cultural expression. David Meltzer artfully juxtaposes a variety of texts to explore the paradox of jazz as an art fom preceived as both primative and modern, to consider the use of jazz as a metaphor for new attitudes, to show how it was mythopoeticized and demonized, to view jazz as a focus for a variety of cultural attitudes, and to probe its relation to other aspects of modern culture.
Arranged historically, both literary and popular texts are included, reflecting the interplay of jazz with both high and low culture, from such contributors as Hoagy Carmichael, Artie Shaw, Norman Mailer, Art Pepper, Simone de Beauvoir, Julio Cortázar, William Carlos Williams, Robert Creeley, and many more. Reading Jazz will be indispensible not only for jazz enthusiasts but also for anyone interested in the evolution of modern culture.
“Meltzer has produced an essential and important anthology—valuable as a reference work as well as being a significant slice of twentieth-century American social history.”
— Philip Elwood, San Francisco Examiner
“The crux of this book contains a fascinating cross-section of writings pertaining to jazz that aficionados are sure to find alternately engrossing, enlightening, humorous, and sometimes downright appalling.”
“A browser’s delight and a source book to die for.” “A revealing and, at times, disturbing look at the issue of race
and the homogenization of jazz.” |
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WRITING
JAZZ
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WRITING JAZZ
A companion volume to the critically acclaimed Reading Jazz, Writing Jazz is the
first comprehensive historical anthology of writings on jazz by African-American
musicians, critics, writers, and poets. Arranged historically with equal attention
paid to both essay and lyric, this collection encompasses voices from the Spirituals
and the Blues to Free Jazz and the Black Arts Movement. It includes selections
from Louis Armstrong, Amiri Baraka, Sidney Bechet, Miles Davis, Ralph Ellison,
Dizzie Gillespie, Nikki Giovanni, Billie Holiday, Son House, Langston Hughes,
Furry Lewis, Albert Murray, Ishmael Reed, Sonia Sanchez, Willie “The Lion”
Smith, Wole Soyinka, Ethel Waters, Booker White, Richard Wright, and others.
Challenging and no doubt controversial, Writing Jazz, like its companion,
is a valuable historical sourcebook and a provocative read.
“Writing Jazz [is] Reading’s companion volume (or better, its rebuttal, its discourse flip, its knowledge inversion, its racial table turn), wherein black musicians and critics take the reins and do their own writing about jazz.... [A] big living, breathing resource glob overflowing with chunks of stories and histories, some familiar, some arcane. We hear from usual suspects like Eileen Southern, Richard Wright, and Duke Ellington, but Meltzer also nabs jazzspeak from Richard Abrams, C.L.R. James, Archie Shepp, and Wanda Coleman.... In true Meltzer style, the anthology is a rich and fulfilling mess... Like Borges running amok in a jazz library.” This publication
was made possible thanks to a generous grants by THE LANNAN FOUNDATION
and THE REVA & DAVID LOGAN FOUNDATION.
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DAVID MELTZER began his literary career during the Beat heyday in San Francisco, reading poetry to jazz accompaniment at the famous Jazz Cellar. He is the editor of The Secret Garden: The Classical Kabbalah; Birth: Hymns, Prayers, Documents, Myths, Amulets; and Death: An Anthology of Ancient Texts, Songs, Prayers, and Stories, as well as the author of many books of poetry, including Arrows: Selected Poetry 1982–1992. He teaches in the Humanities and graduate Poetics programs at the New College of California. He lives in the Bay Area.
Out of his studio in San Francisco’s beat-historic North Beach, WARD SCHUMAKER (cover artist) draws for clients around the globe, from Japan’s Esquire and Playboy magazines to Macworld and the New Yorker. He has created two children’s books, Dance! and Sing a Song of Circus, as well as illustrated volumes as diverse in subject matter as Julia Child’s Baking and Véronique Vienne’s French Style. He lives on Potrero Hill with his whining twenty-four-year-old cat, Sylvester. |