Change : the new thing and modern jazz /
"Change: The "New Thing" and Modern Jazz is the first aesthetic and cultural history of jazz's mid-century avant-garde that foregrounds the artists' creative ideas and work, contextualizing the inner world of the music with its external social and political forces. It traces...
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| Format: | eBook |
| Language: | English |
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New York, NY :
Oxford University Press,
[2025]
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| Series: | Theorizing African American music
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | Connect to the full text of this electronic book |
| Summary: | "Change: The "New Thing" and Modern Jazz is the first aesthetic and cultural history of jazz's mid-century avant-garde that foregrounds the artists' creative ideas and work, contextualizing the inner world of the music with its external social and political forces. It traces the emergence of jazz's avant-garde in the United States as the new music began to shake the conceptual and sonic foundation of modern jazz. Change intervenes upon the standard free jazz narrative that positions the new music as a noisy and chaotic aberrance from or reaction to modern jazz-one that simply reflected and projected the political turbulence and social unrest of the era. I propose a new conceptual term-heterophony-to more accurately describe the abstract sound of the new thing; it describes the multiple instrumental voices that, in musicians' collective improvisations, produced a dense sonic texture of decentralized simultaneity. That thick, undulating sonic fabric represented a bold new paradigm for collective improvisation in the 1960s and was perceived by critics, club owners, other musicians, and informed jazz listeners as inherently political and abhorrent. Grounded in deep archival research and deep listening of key recordings, Change vacillates between music analysis and cultural history to offer readers a new way to understand what we now commonly call "free jazz" by first considering what in modern jazz-and the modern world-was so unfree in the first place"-- |
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| Physical Description: | 1 online resource (xv, 226 pages) : illustrations (some color). |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| ISBN: | 9780197780114 0197780113 9780197780121 0197780121 9780197780107 0197780105 |