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Improvisation,
Rights, and the Ethics of Cocreation
Daniel Fischlin, Ajay Heble & George Lipsitz
"The Fierce Urgency of Now is a groundbreaking and, in many instances, breathtaking book. It should be read by scholars and students working on social justice and the political, social, and visionary importance of expressive cultures
all over the world.” — Tricia Rose, Professor, Brown University, and author of
The Hip Hop Wars: What We Talk About When We Talk About Hip Hop - and Why It Matters
The Fierce Urgency of Now links musical improvisation to struggles for social change, focusing on the connections between the improvisation associated with jazz and the dynamics of human rights struggles and discourses. The authors
acknowledge that at first glance improvisation and rights seem to belong to incommensurable areas of human endeavour. Improvisation connotes practices that are spontaneous, personal, local, immediate, expressive, ephemeral, and even accidental, while rights
refer to formal standards of acceptable human conduct, rules that are permanent, impersonal, universal, abstract, and inflexible. Yet the authors not only suggest that improvisation and rights can be connected. They insist that they must be connected.
Improvisation is the creation and development of new, unexpected, and productive co-creative relations among people. It cultivates the capacity to discern elements of possibility, potential, hope, and promise where none are readily apparent.
Improvisers work with the tools they have in the arenas that are open to them. Proceeding without a written score or script, they collaborate to envision and enact something new, to enrich their experience in the world by acting on it and changing it. By analysing
the dynamics of particular artistic improvisations, mostly by contemporary American jazz musicians, the authors reveal improvisation as a viable and urgently needed model for social change. In the process, they rethink politics, music, and the connections
between them.
Duke University Press
June 2013 328pp 9780822354789 PB £15.99
now only £11.19 when you quote
CS1013JAZZ when you order
Jazz
Poetry from the Harlem Renaissance to Spoken Word
Meta Duewa Jones
Honorable Mention by the William Sanders Scarborough Prize from the Modern Language Association 2012
"An important addition to the growing literature about jazz poetry. Recommended.”—
Choice
This wide-ranging, ambitiously interdisciplinary study traces jazz’s influence on African American poetry from the Harlem Renaissance to contemporary spoken word poetry. Examining established poets such as Langston Hughes, Ntozake Shange,
and Nathaniel Mackey as well as a generation of up-and-coming contemporary writers and performers, Meta DuEwa Jones highlights how the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality shape the jazz tradition and its representation in poetry. She applies prosodic
analysis to emphasize the musicality of African American poetic performance and examines the gendered meanings evident in such performances and in the criticism, images, and sounds circulating within jazz cultures.
Jones also considers poets who have participated in contemporary venues for black writing, including Harryette Mullen, Elizabeth Alexander, and Carl Phillips. Incorporating a finely honed discussion of the Black Arts Movement, the poetry-jazz
fusion of the late 1950s, and slam and spoken word performance milieus, she also focuses on jazz and hip hop-influenced performance artists such as Tracie Morris, Saul Williams, and Carl Hancock Rux. Illuminating how innovations in American poetry have been
linked to jazz as musical performance and as literary representation, The Muse Is Music
deftly applies the methodology of textual close reading to a critical “close listening” of American poetry’s resonant sound-scape.
Meta DuEwa Jones is an assistant professor of English at the University of Texas, Austin.
University of Illinois Press
8 b&w photographs, 2 tables
March 2013 304pp 9780252079269 PB £18.99
now only £13.29 when you quote CS1013JAZZ
when you order
Edited by Ajay Heble & Robert Wallace
"If you thought jazz was dead, think again. As this remarkable collection of essays makes crystal clear, jazz is alive, loud, messy, sprawling, old and wise, born again, and playful.
People Get Ready makes an essential contribution to jazz studies, cultural studies, and our increasingly global understanding of modern music. And it demonstrates what discerning readers and listeners already know: that 'hip' is both an adjective and
a verb."—Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original
"Reader Get Ready! This lovely collection blasts past pessimism and uncertainty to showcase the resonant vibrancy of jazz today. From history to technology and from improvisation to politics,
People Get Ready constitutes mandatory reading for anyone with a serious interest in answering Marvin Gaye's perennial question—'What's Going On?'"—Daniel Widener, author of
Black Arts West: Culture and Struggle in Postwar Los Angeles
“This collection of thought-provoking essays is as much about inclusion, looking at jazz as a genre relevant to all, as it is futurism. Evolved from the
Guelph Jazz Festival Colloquium, the publication is like a breath of fresh air in the scholarship pertaining to the music, first and foremost because it looks at it from new angles, and, perhaps more importantly, provides a platform for artists who simply
have not been lionised according to their full worth.” — Kevin L Gendre, Jazzwise
In People Get Ready, musicians, scholars, and journalists write about jazz since 1965, the year that Curtis Mayfield composed the famous civil-rights anthem that gives this collection its title. The contributors emphasize how the political consciousness that infused jazz in the 1960s and early 1970s has informed jazz in the years since then. They bring nuance to historical accounts of the avant-garde, the New Thing, Free Jazz, "non-idiomatic" improvisation, fusion, and other forms of jazz that have flourished since the 1960s, and they reveal the contemporary relevance of those musical practices. Many of the participants in the jazz scenes discussed are still active performers. A photographic essay captures some of them in candid moments before performances. Other pieces revise standard accounts of well-known jazz figures, such as Duke Ellington, and lesser-known musicians, including Jeanne Lee; delve into how money, class, space, and economics affect the performance of experimental music; and take up the question of how digital technology influences improvisation. In People Get Readyoffers a vision for the future of jazz based on an appreciation of the complexity of its past and the abundance of innovation in the present.
Duke University Press
16 photographs, 1 figure
June 2013 336pp 9780822354253 PB £16.99
now only £11.89 when you quote CS1013JAZZ when you order
Edited by Roger N. Buckley & Tamara Roberts
"This powerful volume is an antiphonal response to Fred Ho's revolutionary music and politics. Ho's aesthetics are assertive, demanding, unequivocal, absolute, polemical, unrelenting, and beautiful, and his friends and colleagues have responded
in kind. This collection carries forward Ho's message."—Deborah Wong, author of
Speak It Louder: Asian Americans Making Music
This dynamic collection explores the life, work, and persona of saxophonist Fred Ho, an unabashedly revolutionary artist whose illuminating and daring work redefines the relationship between art and politics. Scholars, artists, and friends give their unique takes on Ho's career, articulating his artistic contributions, their joint projects, and personal stories. Exploring his musical and theatrical work, his political theory and activism, and his personal life as it relates to politics, Yellow Power, Yellow Soul offers an intimate appreciation of Fred Ho's irrepressible and truly original creative spirit.
University of Illinois Press
15 b&w photographs, discography
June 2013 280pp 9780252078996 PB £18.99
now only £13.29 when you quote CS1013JAZZ when you order
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