An insightful examination of the impact of the Civil Rights Movement and African Independence on jazz in the 1950s and 60s, Freedom Sounds
traces the complex relationships among music, politics, aesthetics, and
activism through the lens of the hot button racial and economic issues
of the time. Ingrid Monson illustrates how the contentious and
soul-searching debates in the Civil Rights, African Independence, and
Black Power movements shaped aesthetic debates and exerted a moral
pressure on musicians to take action. Throughout, her arguments show how
jazz musicians' quest for self-determination as artists and human
beings also led to fascinating and far reaching musical explorations and
a lasting ethos of social critique and transcendence.
Across a broad body of issues of cultural and political relevance, Freedom Sounds considers
the discursive, structural, and practical aspects of life in the jazz
world in the 1950s and 1960s. In domestic politics, Monson explores the
desegregation of the American Federation of Musicians, the politics of
playing to segregated performance venues in the 1950s, the participation
of jazz musicians in benefit concerts, and strategies of economic
empowerment. Issues of transatlantic importance such as the effects of
anti-colonialism and African nationalism on the politics and aesthetics
of the music are also examined, from Paul Robeson's interest in Africa,
to the State Department jazz tours, to the interaction of jazz musicians
such Art Blakey and Randy Weston with African and African diasporic
aesthetics.
Monson deftly explores musicians' aesthetic agency in
synthesizing influential forms of musical expression from a
multiplicity of stylistic and cultural influences--African American
music, popular song, classical music, African diasporic aesthetics, and
other world musics--through examples from cool jazz, hard bop, modal
jazz, and the avant-garde. By considering the differences between
aesthetic and socio-economic mobility, she presents a fresh
interpretation of debates over cultural ownership, racism, reverse
racism, and authenticity.
Freedom Sounds will be avidly
read by students and academics in musicology, ethnomusicology,
anthropology, popular music, African American Studies, and African
diasporic studies, as well as fans of jazz, hip hop, and African
American music.
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