Race, Ethnicity, & Culture
In this special issue (Nos. 71-72, Spring 2001-Spring 2002), Current Musicology drew together some of the most prominent scholars in the nascent field of jazz studies to deal with important and provocative questions the subject has raised. The volume was dedicated to Columbia professor Mark Tucker, whose untimely death on December 6, 2000 robbed the field of one of its leading lights. This JSO special feature presents selected articles from the issue. © Used by permission of Current Musicology and the authors of specific excerpts.
This review of Barry Ulanov's biography of Duke Ellington appeared in Ebony Magazine in January 1946. It summarizes Ulanov's account of the racial obstacles Ellington and his musicians faced and their various strategies for transcending them. "It is an American band," Ellington says of his orchestra, "because it is democratic."
This resource presents two chapters from Barry Ulanov's Duke Ellington, the first full biography of the great composer and orchestra leader. They deal with two of the composer's most important extended works: the musical "Jump for Joy" and the concert suite "Black, Brown, and Beige."
Brazilian Popular Music History and Performance Practice
Professor Cliff Korman
BIBLIOGRAPHY
TEXTS
Appleby, David P. The Music of Brazil (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press,1983)
Cancado, Tania Mara Lopes. An Investigation of West African and Haitian Rhythms on the Development of Syncopation in Cuban Habanera, Brazilian Tango/Choro, and American Ragtime, 1791-1900 (unpublished doctoral thesis, Shenandoah University, 1999)
This artful survey of interpretations of jazz history is also a challenge to the notion that there can or should be any single one. DeVeaux shows that common claims as to what jazz is about-a form of resistance, a folk art, an autonomous high art-coexist uneasily, and that each has been used to support otherwise antagonistic stylistic agendas. He calls for closer inquiry into the nuanced history of each period and rejects dogmatic assertions of jazz' "essence."
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