ARSC Journal最新文献

{"title":"Spirits Rejoice!: Jazz and American Religion","authors":"Robert M. Marovich","doi":"10.5860/choice.191917","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.191917","url":null,"abstract":"Spirits Rejoice!: Jazz and American Religion. By Jason C. Bivins. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. 369pp (hardcover). Illustrations, Bibliography, Index. ISBN 9780-19-023091-3. $29.95 Spirits Rejoice!: Jazz and American Religion is the book Jason Bivins was born to write. A professor of religious studies and a jazz musician, Bivins combines his estimable knowledge of both subjects into one ambitious volume that aims to recalibrate popular considerations of jazz and American religion. Deliberately \"complicating\" the reader's understanding of both topics by stripping the common conceptions away Bivins builds a complex but, ultimately far steadier and more insightful view of jazz and religion as fellow travelers on the road to spiritual freedom. With a few exceptions, Spirits Rejoice! focuses on the postwar jazz scene, when some of the most innovative experimentation occurred. Bivins begins his exploration with the most obvious connections between jazz and religion, and then proceeds chapter by chapter to the most esoteric. Of the former, he illustrates how the music of specific religious traditions, such as Baptist and Pentecostal, influenced the compositional work of those who grew up in them or, as with Chick Corea and Dizzy Gillespie, adopted them later in life (Scientology and the Baha'i faith, respectively). Of the latter, he shows how certain jazz performance subcultures were functioning as unconventional forms of religion, how jazz historiographies used music to comment critically on the relationship between American religion and race, the ways in which performance ritual served as a \"medium of the gods,\" and how meditation and mysticism in jazz performance was a means for performer and listener to communicate with the divine. He concludes with the most esoteric: the metaphysical work of artists such as Ornette Coleman, Anthony Braxton, and Wadada Leo Smith, who sought to embrace the cosmos by forming all new musical languages and adapting new spiritual sensibilities--\"art without limits,\" Bivins writes. Bivins also tackles the associations between religion, jazz, and race, most notably how African American jazzmen and jazzwomen were, and continue to be, subject to what he calls \"the reality of the sweating brow.\" This describes the \"racialized expectations audiences have when engaging 'jazz,' often understood to be music played by sweating, cathartic, emotionally exuberant black performers.\" Such characterization, writes Bivins, obfuscates the true meaning and value of jazz. To Bivins, religion and jazz are forms of \"human cultural communication\" constantly in search of enlightenment. It is artistic expression in a quest for God, as much a medium to the spiritual as any religious denomination or sacred practice. This restless search for the spiritual is at the book's core. The most fascinating aspects of Spirits Rejoice! are the analyses of familiar works by more universally known artists, such as Sun Ra and his ever-evolving space ","PeriodicalId":158557,"journal":{"name":"ARSC Journal","volume":"10 3","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132501357","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"iTake-Over: The Recording Industry in the Digital Era","authors":"Andrew Justice","doi":"10.5860/choice.190843","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.190843","url":null,"abstract":"iTake-Over: The Recording Industry in the Digital Era. By David Arditi. NY: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015. 165pp (hardcover). Figures, Notes, Bibliography, Index. ISBN 978-1-4422-4013-1. $65 The History of Music Production. By Richard James Burgess. NY: Oxford University Press, 2014. 245pp (paperback). Illustrations, Notes, Bibliography, Index. ISBN 978-01993-5717-8. $26.95 The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media. Edited by Carol Vernallis, Amy Herzog, and John Richardson. NY: Oxford University Press, 2013. 817pp (hardcover). Figures, Notes, Bibliographies, Companion website, Index. ISBN 978-01997-5764-0. $160 David Arditi's book addresses the widespread assumption that the digital music revolution has somehow damaged the recording industry by considering several areas of actual data and situating them within larger cultural environments. Identifying a trend he calls the \"piracy panic narrative,\" Arditi's specific areas of focus include the recording industry's response to consumption expansion through the disintermediation of manufacturing costs and commodification of new platforms, its influence on copyright law to benefit from emerging digital technology the intensification of musicians' work as labor (not artistry), and the changing nature of recorded music's digital distribution with how the industry performs surveillance on consumption. Throughout the book, Arditi consistently responds to industry-initiated narratives (whether artist- or label- or RIAA-generated) with concrete data either directly to refute or contextualize within a larger framework, thereby arriving at a more credible conclusion. The strength of Arditi's writing is in this construct, and it can be terribly effective: even in the first chapter, he calmly sets up the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry's (IFPI) analysis of the dwindling retail value of music in the United States between 1995-2009 and then contrasts it with Nielsen SoundScan numbers from the same period, which show a remarkable increase. However, he is also careful to consider wider issues with the same technique, such as later in that same chapter where he compares dwindling album sales according to SoundScan with global single sales from IFPI. Perhaps the most successful point Arditi drives home is that of the traditional process where the artist, in receiving a necessary advance from the label to make a recording, signs away their royalties and hence logically cannot truly be \"injured\" by peer-to-peer sharing or stealing, the latter of which he also effectively deconstructs with an impressive postmodern panache. The perspective of the individual musician is one that is often lost in discussions of the music industry in the digital era, and it is clear that Arditi's primary motivation springs from this consideration. His discussion of musicians' labor, the example of Metallica (particularly Lars Ulrich's 2000 testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee), and 360 deals is a par","PeriodicalId":158557,"journal":{"name":"ARSC Journal","volume":"28 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126212641","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Man That Got Away: The Life and Songs of Harold Arlen","authors":"Lawrence Schulman","doi":"10.5860/choice.194909","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.194909","url":null,"abstract":"The Man That Got Away: The Life and Songs of Harold Arlen. By Walter Rimler Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015. 209pp. $29.95 How strange that, for some, Harold Arlen isn't a known name: a composer of mid-century popular music who deserved the celebrity of George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, Harry Warren, Richard Rogers, Cole Porter, and so many others! For others, his music is one of the foundations of the Great American Songbook. These two opposing worlds are bridged in Walter Rimler's fascinating new biography. From the introduction, the book takes a personal approach to Arlen's life (Rimler calls it Arlen's \"personal story\"), especially regarding Arlen's alcoholism and his wife Anya's behavioral issues. Arlen friend and biographer Edward Jablonski's earlier opus, Harold Arlen: Happy with the Blues (Doubleday, 1961), written during Arlen's lifetime, did not touch on such issues, although his second work, Harold Arlen: Rhythm, Rainbows & Blues (Northeastern University Press, 1996), did. This intimacy creates a rounded picture of the artist, whose work is woven into the fabric of his life. A dispassionate overview of Arlen's life and career, this primer has the necessary distance from its subject to give the twenty-first-century reader and music lover the information needed to understand this most essential composer. Shy by nature, bold by craft, Arlen had a career that began in the Cotton Club and went beyond the era of the Beatles. Such longevity belies the fact that Arlen was a musical laborer, ever searching for inspiration, which did not always come easily. Not finding any ideas for the music for Judy Garland's ballad in The Wizard of Oz, Arlen and Anya drove to the Grauman's Chinese Theatre for distraction, and along the way the melody for \"Over the Rainbow\" came to him out of the blue, at which time they pulled over and he \"jotted\" it down. For Arlen, inspiration was divine. Like Peter Shaffer's Mozart, Arlen's music pre-existed and he was the scribe. Son of a cantor, Arlen was also the blackest of the great American melodists. His first success, the 1929 \"Get Happy\" (lyrics by Ted Koehler), is a feel-good rouser that could have been invented by no one but Arlen. He next contributed the music to a good number of now-standards that were first featured at the Cotton Club, among which were \"Stormy Weather\" (1933, made famous by Ethel Waters), \"As Long As I Live\" (1934, as sung by Lena Horne), and \"Ill Wind\" (1934, as sung by Adelaide Hall). His Hollywood career included many a film that is today forgotten, but those years produced a wealth of songs that are today considered standards. His Broadway notables included such musicals as You Said It (1931), Life Begins at 8:40 (1934), Hooray for What! (1937), Bloomer Girl (1944), St. Louis Woman (1946), House of Flowers (1954), Jamaica (1957), and Saratoga (1959). Like the Gershwin brothers, his list of song classics and standouts in Hollywood and New York is long and outstanding,","PeriodicalId":158557,"journal":{"name":"ARSC Journal","volume":"96 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133062157","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Folksongs of Another America: Field Recordings from the Upper Midwest, 1937-1946","authors":"D. N. Lewis","doi":"10.5860/choice.193817","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.193817","url":null,"abstract":"Folksongs of Another America: Field Recordings from the Upper Midwest, 1937-1946. Book by James P. Leary. University of Wisconsin Press/Dust-to-Digital DTD-43 (456 pp., 5 audio CDs, 1 DVD). This release certainly has the appearance of a book but was submitted for a sound recording review; in my headnote I have incorporated properties of both. James P. Leary is a professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and an editor of the Journal of American Folklore, though his tenure in that position ends in 2015. To typify Folksongs of Another America as Leary's pet project would be to do it an injustice; it is the sum total of fifty years' work and forms the central keystone to a cycle of studies devoted to folk traditions in North Midwestern states, namely Wisconsin, Michigan and Northern Minnesota. This area has cold winters and is largely underdeveloped and unpopulated even today, and settling this part of the world has been a shared experience for a wide range of diverse immigrant cultures--Finns, Swedes, Germans, Viennese, Lithuanians, Poles, French-speaking former Canadians, Scots, African American former slaves and so forth--joined by contact with indigenous peoples such as the Ojibway and Ho-Chunk. Between 1937 and 1946, folklorists armed with disc cutters swept through the region periodically; Sidney Robertson (later Cowell) in 1937-38, Alan Lomax again in 1938 and Helene Stratman-Thomas in 1940-41 and 1946. Folksongs of Another America is both distillation and contextualization of these wide-ranging field trips, and Leary has usefully subdivided the recorded material among five CDs organized by field trip and substance. Just because the book contains five CDs does not mean that the audio content is more than what is manageable for the reader; the content of the field trip determines the overall length of each disc, and the second disc, devoted to songs of Wisconsin lumberjacks recorded by Robertson, only runs a half an hour, including tracks as short as 24 seconds. Ethnographic recordings, by their very nature, are often brief, and listening to many of them in long stretches takes some measure of discipline on part of the listener. Folksongs of Another America is not the exclusive domain of amateur performers and many of the correspondents contacted by the folklorists, such as French-Canadian singer Mary Agnes Starr or the Wisconsin lumberjacks group recorded by Robertson were professional or semi-professional performers at folk festivals or in more intimate contexts, and the musical performances are of a consistently high quality. So much of the material here is previously uncirculated that neither Leary nor Dust-to-Digital indicates former releases apart from including the titles in the \"Sources\" section, but all of the audio transfers--by Brad McCoy of Library of Congress and Michael Graves of the Osiris Studio in Atlanta--are far superior in comparison to older issues. Each track is lovingly examined and annotated individually by Leary","PeriodicalId":158557,"journal":{"name":"ARSC Journal","volume":"106 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129189930","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Hidden in the Mix: The African American Presence in Country Music","authors":"John W. Troutman","doi":"10.5860/choice.51-2569","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.51-2569","url":null,"abstract":"Hidden in the Mix: The African American Presence in Country Music. Ed. by Diane Pecknold. Durham: Duke University Press, 2013. 383 pp, includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 987-0-8223-5149-8 Over the past several years, the making of southern American vernacular and commercial musics, and the sinews of their composition over the previous century, has fallen under intense scrutiny by academics and musicians alike. Their efforts challenge the naturalization of the idea that southern music genres developed, more or less, within the lines of a stringently enforced, bifurcated, and segregated racial landscape. Recent historical scholarship has sought to reveal a far more multi-cultural twentieth century South, composed of a much more agile, mobile, and culturally fluid population than the black and white lens of the Jim Crow South or the contemporary media would admit to acknowledge. Scholars such as Karl Hagstrom Miller, for example, have demonstrated how record companies in the 1920s strategically created the racialized categories of \"race\" and \"hillbilly\" (or \"old time\") records, for example, in order more effectively to hock their wares to southern black and white consumers, respectively. Building upon the earlier practice of marketing international and domestic recordings of \"ethnic\" music to corresponding pools of ethnic consumers, he demonstrates how the industry's imagining of southern black and white consumers ultimately reinforced white hegemony and the bipartite matrix of the Jim Crow South's social order. Meanwhile, niche market musicians such as the members of the Carolina Chocolate Drops have celebrated the longstanding involvement of African-Americans in string band traditions, typically now associated with white southerners, that predate the creation of the industry's bipartite marketing strategies. Attracting far more attention, today we also find hip hop stars occasionally collaborating on major label country albums, most infamously, perhaps, as demonstrated by Brad Paisley and L.L. Cool J's recording of \"Accidental Racist.\" Critics, however, consistently ghettoize, if not lampoon, such collaborations for their novelty or attempted \"crossover\" appeal, which tends to reify the whiteness of country by proving the rule rather than acknowledging the fault lines. Indeed, despite such forays, scholarly or musically, that might otherwise denaturalize the mono-racial identities of southern music genres, the whiteness of country music remains nearly unassailable. In a new anthology, ably curated by editor Diane Pecknold, contributors to Hidden in the Mix seek both to further illuminate the making of country's whiteness, and challenge the premises upon which it is constructed. As Pecknold's authoritative introduction reveals, \"one aim of this volume is thus to examine how the genre's whiteness was produced and is maintained, to imagine country music not merely as a cultural reflection of a preexisting racial identity but as one o","PeriodicalId":158557,"journal":{"name":"ARSC Journal","volume":"48 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131761011","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Softly with Feeling: Joe Wilder and the Breaking of Barriers in American Music","authors":"Vincent Pelote","doi":"10.5860/choice.186032","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.186032","url":null,"abstract":"Softly With Feeling: Joe Wilder and the Breaking of Barriers in American Music. By Edward Berger. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2014. 378pp, numerous b & w photographs, discography/solography, index, ISBN 978-1-4399-1127-3, $25.37. Softly, With Feeling is first and foremost a very well researched and clearly written biography of a jazz trumpet icon who also distinguished himself in the classical idiom. It is also a book about race in America in the 1930s and the decades that followed, and offers insight into the music business, especially pertaining to the role of African Americans. Edward Berger, whose previous works include biographies of Benny Carter, Teddy Reig, and George Duvivier, does his usual thorough job of penetrating his subjects through interviews and extensive archival research to produce another excellent work on an important figure in American music. In Softly, With Feeling, Mr. Berger relates Wilder's story starting with his upbringing in a working class, interracial neighborhood in Philadelphia. As has historically been the case, children have always been more racially tolerant of their peers than adults. For instance, Wilder talked about getting along with his white playmates as a child even befriending a white girl, Helen Gibbons. Even in that world, racism would occasionally surface and it would be something that Wilder would have to deal with throughout his life. The book is filled with numerous incidents detailing how cruel some white people were to Wilder and his fellow African Americans. That the trumpeter emerged without bitterness, and refused to characterize all white people as racists speaks volumes about his character. As he noted, for every prejudiced individual he encountered there were always whites who treated him with the respect he deserved. His musical training began with trumpet lessons from a family friend then progressed when he started studying with a local cornet legend, Frederick D. Griffin. Griffin was not a jazz player so Wilder was exposed early to classical music, which became a life-long passion even though it would be decades before he was accepted in a white symphony orchestra. Like so many other talented black musicians with classical aspirations he turned to jazz as a way of making a living. The book details his tenures with some of the big bands of the day, including the orchestras of Les Hite, Lionel Hampton, Dizzy Gillespie, and Count Basie. Because of his classical training he often found himself playing lead in these bands with limited opportunity to solo, but he eventually developed into a very lyrical, technically adept improviser with a beautiful tone reminiscent of the great Bix Beiderbecke. …","PeriodicalId":158557,"journal":{"name":"ARSC Journal","volume":"49 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116425758","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Hamilton Harty: Musical Polymath","authors":"D. Wells","doi":"10.5860/choice.52-0747","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.52-0747","url":null,"abstract":"Hamilton Harty: Musical Polymath. By Jeremy Dibble. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2013. 365pp (hardcover). Photographs, Musical Examples, List of Works, List of Recordings, Bibliography, Index of Works, General Index. ISBN 978-1-84383-858-6. $80 Sir Hamilton Harty is best known today as a conductor but, as the title of this book suggests, his musical talents were many and diverse. He began his career as a church organist and choirmaster, became a highly sought-after accompanist, composed works in a variety of genres, and, of course, became one of Britain's premiere conductors. He was a champion of the music of Berlioz and his arrangements and re-orchestrations of Handel were popular in his day (although they were largely swept aside with the advent of historically informed performance). The only previous book-length study of Harty and his music is the 1978 collection Hamilton Harty: His Life and Music (Blackstaff Press), edited by David Greer (reviewed in ARSC Journal Vol. 10:2/3). The present volume, part of Boydell's series, Music in Britain, 1600-2000 (formerly Music in Britain, 1600-1900), is a welcome addition to the literature. Harty was born in Hillsborough (in what is now Northern Ireland), where his father served as church organist, choirmaster, and music teacher. Music dominated Harty's life from a very early age, although he had no formal musical education. His initial studies were with his father, and the rest of his skill was gleaned from experience, dedicated practice, and the guidance of other unofficial mentors. Harty's first musical appointment, as organist and choirmaster of a parish church, came at the age of fourteen. He quickly proceeded from there to a similar post at a large church in Belfast, and then to a still larger one near Dublin. His experience in Dublin greatly expanded his musical horizons and brought him into contact with numerous performers and teachers. The most important of these was the eminent Italian-born pianist Michele Esposito who became Harty's lifelong mentor. Harty's skill and reputation as an accompanist began to outstrip the opportunities that Dublin presented, and in 1901 he moved to London. After a slow start, his career blossomed there. He was soon accompanying high profile artists such as violinist Fritz Kreisler, baritone Harry Plunket Greene, and soprano Agnes Nicholls (who he would later marry). Harty began also to be known as a composer, and it was through performance of some of his larger works that he began to develop a reputation as a top-notch conductor. Harty led a number of British orchestras, but his longest tenure was with the Halle in Manchester. He was named the orchestra's first permanent conductor in 1920, and served in that post until 1933. Harty conducted the Halle and other orchestras in more than 170 recordings between 1913 and 1935, largely for Columbia. Only a handful of these were of his own works; the composers whose music he recorded most often were Berlioz, Handel, Pucc","PeriodicalId":158557,"journal":{"name":"ARSC Journal","volume":"44 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114755415","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Big Band Jazz in Black West Virginia, 1930-1942","authors":"John W. Troutman","doi":"10.5860/choice.49-6798","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.49-6798","url":null,"abstract":"Big Band Jazz in Black West Virginia, 1930-1942. By Christopher Wilkinson. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012. 197pp (hardcover). Illustrations. ISBN 978-1-61703-168-7. $55 In 1934, Irving Mills blackballed Jimmie Lunceford from the major New York theatres, radio audiences, and hotel ballrooms that his orchestra had consistently played over the years. Lunceford left after becoming fed up with Mills' exploitation, but the timing, deep in the throes of the Great Depression, was far from perfect. He knew that he had to find the steadiest work possible for his band, and fast, so he hit the road, like so many other jazz musicians did in the 1930s, towards ... the coal camps of West Virginia. Christopher Wilkinson's wonderfully researched Big Band Jazz in Black West Virginia, 1930-1942 yields a number of such revelatory anecdotes as he presents for us the vibrant dance culture of West Virginia during the long 1930s. African-American miners indeed created a remarkable and unique space in the hills of West Virginia, unlike anything witnessed during that time in the Jim Crow South, from where most of them had arrived. Railroad construction and the operation of high-quality bituminous coal mines in West Virginia required highly concentrated labor. African-American sharecroppers from the South were among the first to take advantage of this opportunity, particularly as welcomed members of the United Mine Workers Association; the work was extremely dangerous, but the financial incentive was hard to ignore, particularly after the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 virtually guaranteed the union members well-paying work for the remainder of that tumultuous decade. With disposable cash in hand, they often turned to dance band music. Wilkinson in fact documents 356 public dances held for African-Americans between 1930 and 1942 in the state. African-American southerners indeed had much reason to celebrate in West Virginia: there they wielded a politically influential right to vote, they succeeded in banning racist films such as Birth of a Nation from the state's theaters, secured an anti-lynching law, and, as Wilkinson demonstrates through the vivid remembrance of Lionel Hampton's trumpeter, Joe Wilder, enjoyed the dignify of integrated seating in train cars. One of Wilkinson's contributions lies in his ability to use a musical micro-history of West Virginia's coal camps in order to further disrupt the dichotomies that originally defined the work of many music scholars: those of rural versus urban entertainments, of \" hot\" versus \"sweet\" jazz adherents, and of the musical preferences of whites versus blacks and middle class versus working class audiences. From the days of medicine shows, West Virginians had become well versed in the cosmopolitan, commercial musics that emanated from New York and Chicago. Enhanced through the distribution of phonographs and the reach of radio deep into the hollers of the mountains, indeed the most well-known orche","PeriodicalId":158557,"journal":{"name":"ARSC Journal","volume":"12 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130987044","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Kansas City Lightning: The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker","authors":"Edward M. Komara","doi":"10.5860/choice.51-5494","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.51-5494","url":null,"abstract":"Kansas City Lightning: The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker. By Stanley Crouch. New York: Harper, 2013. 369pp (hardcover). ISBN 978-0-06-200559-5. $27.99 Bird: The Life and Music of Charlie Parker. By Chuck Haddix. Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2013. 188.pp (hardcover). ISBN 978-0-25203791-7. $24.95 Charlie \"Yardbird\" Parker (1920-1955) lived fast and died young. His innovations in bebop jazz, including his exquisite solos on alto saxophone, have made that life worth studying. The two new biographies reviewed here emphasize the roots of Parker's style in his birthplace, Kansas City, Missouri. Chuck Haddix's Bird may be read as a sequel to his 2005 book with Frank Driggs, Kansas City Jazz (Oxford University Press), which in my estimation had superseded Ross Russell's Jazz Style in Kansas City and the Southwest. Haddix presents in seven chapters a straightforward account of the musician's life. Living in Kansas City, Haddix knows and makes full use of his local historical resources; the first three chapters, dealing with Parker's Kansas City beginnings and apprenticeships through 1942, are among the most informed in the book. The remainder of Haddix's narrative tells of Parker and Dizzy Gillespie formulating bebop during World War II, Parker's postwar musical prime, and his physical and mental declines until his 1955 death. For the New York and Los Angeles phases of Parker's career, Haddix has to rely on the research of other writers more than he had for the Kansas City years. Like every writer on Parker for the past forty years, he makes much use of Robert Reisner's Bird: The Legend of Charlie Parker (Citadel Press, 1962) and Ross Russell's Bird Lives! (Charterhouse, 1973). To his credit, he introduces a sheaf of contemporary reportage on the musician not reprinted in Carl Woideck's The Charlie Parker Companion (Schirmer Books, 1998). On the other hand, Haddix's inconsistent bibliographic citation practice in his endnotes lessens the usefulness of his book as a research springboard. Some books are cited in their reprints but not in the original editions (such as Reisner's Bird, cited only in its 1977 Da Capo reprint). He cites a few of Ross Russell's articles that were originally published in the French magazine Jazz Hot, but he fails to give proper bibliographic citations, acknowledging instead that copies of them may be viewed among the Russell papers at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin; requests for these Jazz Hot articles using these sketchy citations would be returned unfulfilled by library interlibrary loan services. For some strange reason, he cites my correspondence with Russell, but not the book for which the letters were written, The Dial Recordings of Charlie Parker (Greenwood, 1998). That book would have provided him with some detailed bibliographic citations that could have verified Russell's Jazz Hot articles he saw at the Ransom Center, and it would ha","PeriodicalId":158557,"journal":{"name":"ARSC Journal","volume":"14 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133265519","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Tony Allen: An Autobiography of the Master Drummer of Afrobeat","authors":"C. E. Pena","doi":"10.5860/choice.51-4344","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.51-4344","url":null,"abstract":"Tony Allen: An Autobiography of the Master Drummer of Afrobeat. By Tony Allen with Michael E. Veal. Durham: Duke University Press, 2013. 199pp (paperback). Photographs, Bibliography, Discography, Index. ISBN 9780822355915 Tony Allen's autobiography, co-authored with Michael E. Veal, achieves the rare duality of being a fun and engaging read for fans as well as a significant addition to Afrobeat and African popular music scholarship. Few genres have been dominated by a single artist as Fela Kuti (1938-1997) dominated Afrobeat. Fela's ego and penchant for authoritarian control were almost as well-known as his brilliantly danceable and political music. His bandleader and the only member of his large ensemble who was free to compose his own parts was his drum set player, Tony Allen (b. 1940). While Fela was Afrobeat's mastermind, Allen's contribution, representing the music's driving force, can hardly be underestimated when appraising the sources and impact of what has arguably become the most internationally renowned style of Nigerian popular music. Allen's position in the upper echelon of Afropop certainly warrants the publication of this work, and fans and scholars will not be disappointed by its content and style. Veal's introduction contextualizes the work within African cultural studies as well as the tradition of the drum set, an instrument with complex meaning in Africa. He is an ideal collaborator for this project, during which he conducted extensive interviews with Allen and also spent time as a member of the drummer's working band. With the publication of Tony Allen, Veal continues the contribution to African and popular music scholarship that he began with his essential Fela: The Life & Times of an African Musical Icon (Temple University Press, 2000). One value of autobiography is the reader's gained sense of intimacy with a celebrity's personality. In contrast with common stereotypes of drum set players, Veal's highly-readable reproduction of the \"tone and flavor\" of Allen's voice depicts the drummer as calm, wise, and level-headed. We learn interesting details such as Allen's skill as a chef and his early training as an electrician. At the same time, we increase our understanding of Afrobeat and of Fela from Allen's perspective that, due to his status as an original and premier sideman, is highly valuable. Allen brings certain subjects that were broached in Veal's earlier work into greater focus, such as the need to simplify the overly-complex music of Fela's first band, Koola Lobitos, in order to achieve Afrobeat's later success. Another example is the issue of money, with which Fela was not generally forthcoming. According to Allen, proper payment of sidemen was always an issue in the Nigerian popular music scene, and Fela's bands were no exception. For his part, Allen showed dedication in prioritizing music over money, until he finally had enough of Fela's antics and left the band in 1978. The story of Allen's career, as seen here, a","PeriodicalId":158557,"journal":{"name":"ARSC Journal","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126339205","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}