Reviews for Black women in American bands and orchestras

The average rating for Black women in American bands and orchestras based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-11-05 00:00:00 Juliana Yarosh Having recently watched Ken Burns's epic documentary on jazz recently, I wanted to gain a more in depth perspective on some of the claims made in the film. Notably, I was struck by what seemed to me rather doctrinaire positions taken by Wynton Marsalis and others in dismissing the entire post-1960 avant-garde current in jazz. I do not know much about jazz, but I know enough to be deeply suspicious of the wholesale rejection of free jazz. Turning to Eric Porter's study of the discourses of jazz, I was hoping to get more of a scholarly analysis, particularly in light of what I perceived as a contentious set of claims made by Burns and others in the film. Published a year after the PBS series, Porter's book was no doubt written in stuck in the academic press pipeline during the broadcast of the series and the explosion of attention that followed in its wake. Consequently, the book makes no mention of Burns and his heroic depiction of jazz as a uniquely American art form. However, as I would learn by reading the book, those claims are nothing new and, in fact, have been at the center of an on-going debate between neoclassicists like Albert Murray, Stanely Crouch and Marsalis himself and the various strains of established contemporary jazz musicianship and scholarship. I would very much recommend the final chapter of Porter's book to anyone who has seen the documentary or plans on doing so. Porter provides a framework for understanding its claims within a larger context of political and aesthetic positions. The book as a whole takes up the specific project of identifying some of the primary themes and contradictions that have appeared in jazz discourse beginning in the 1920s. In particular, Porter focuses on the words of the actual practitioners and how artists like Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Charles Mingus, Abbey Lincoln, and many others have navigated the placement of jazz within the discourses of history, aesthetics, and politics. This attention to the artists themselves made the book especially compelling -- ensuring that the artists and not the critics have the last word. Given Porter's focus on the specific themes of the discourse, it is to be expected that the book deliberates far more on the spoken and written word than on the music itself. This is not to say that Porter pays no attention to the music. However, this is not a study in composition but, rather, an intellectual history that recognizes artists' own power of reflection and analysis. Over the course of the books chapters -- arranged largely chronologically -- one begins to discern the key themes, or contradictions, that organize how the problem of jazz has been conceptualized. I say problem because, for one thing, as is often stated, the very word jazz is highly contested and has been from the beginning. The nature of those complains spans a variety of professional, artistic and political investments from the unmarked terms of sexism, to that of universalism, anti-Jim Crow, anti-capitalist, black nationalist, separatist, pan-Africanist, Black Marxist, to a more conservative form of American exceptionalism. Also at the center of these debates is a more fundamental problem around the tension between race and culture. It is a problem that gets played out in jazz as symptomatic of larger tensions within the civil rights struggles of the 20th Century. For this reason, Porter's book makes for something like a case study on how the problems of "race" as a category play out in material culture. It's one thing to study critical race theory. It's another to investigate how "race" as an unstable and always ideologically-determined category structure and is structured by actual lived experience. What makes Porter's book especially powerful, in this regard, is his decision to eschew the theoretical formulations of critical race theory. He refrains from burying the musician's words beneath convoluted writing and academic jargon (not a "the way in which" in the entire book!). I can write much more about this book, but I will stop here. Much recommended for both the scholar and the popular reader. My one recommendation is to keep in mind that this book is an investigation. And as such, narrative and inclusiveness are subordinated to the development of a set of questions or themes. The careful reader will begin to take note of those themes and observe how they change and shift from period to period and from one artist to the next. In this sense, the book is not just an analysis of jazz discourse but a lesson in practice that is not unique to jazz but cultural practice in general within the framework of a racist and capitalist national context.

Review # 2 was written on 2019-11-24 00:00:00 Phillip Kelly porter has created what is sure to be a standard text for any jazz course for the forseeable future, as he has combined exceptional scholarship with a solid (but never heavy-handed) theory on the origins and course of jazz in america. rooted in the belief that this music is a uniquely african-american cultural creation, he finds the time to give credence to both the amiri barakas and stanley crouches of this world, all the while spinning a fantastic yarn about the development of this music and the intellectuals who create it. his writing is rarely especially musical, but is always concise and always plentiful in its information and context; as any one chapter in this book will undoubtedly lead readers to seek out at least three or four other entire texts. i was lucky enough to study this book for one course (concerning the development of jazz as a larger intellectual and socio-cultural statement) while simultaneously taking another course which focused primarily on the music, with special attention paid to some of the more progressive (and mostly white) composers and arrangers of the 1940's and 1950's. this juxtaposition provided for a well-rounded study of the subject matter; so while i 110% whole-heartedly recommend this porter text, it would behoove its readers to read it alongside a study of late bag band arrangers and a stack of bill evans records by your side.