Books and Writings

In this book, Solis looks beyond the challenges of Monk's playing and composing, and his uncompromising artistic stance, to grapple with lingering questions about Monk's life and music. He examines a wealth of documents and recordings newly available to explore these questions and to illustrate the significance of Monk's work for the study of jazz. The excerpt featured here presents a brief synopsis of Monk's life and explains the uneven trajectory of his career and public reception.

Gerald Majer, a native of Chicago's racially segregated South Side, has written a book about its musical life. The Velvet Lounge combines his personal experiences with the story, or stories, of his community, merging his account of the music and with the difficult conditions that shaped it. The result is an innovative combination of history, subjective experience of that history, and reflection on its meaning-that is, of fact, literature, and criticism.

This article surveys the role of dance in black entertainment and its relation to the development of jazz in the first half of the 20th century. Malone finds that leading jazz instrumentalists gained formative experiences accompanying dancers, especially tap dancers. Musicians accordingly viewed dancers as practicing a sophisticated and influential form of jazz, and interaction between dance and music performance was seen as a vital sphere of improvisation.

This essay explores the sexual politics of women's blues of the 1920s and compares it to black women's fiction during the same period. Carby argues that classic blues singers Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, and Ethel Waters had more latitude to challenge patriarchy and expose the contradictions of black women's experience than black women writers-though the latter's work has been more thoroughly investigated for insights into these issues.

Jazz writers have often debated whether a tradition of standard jazz practices should be followed or transcended. Against this backdrop, Jackson investigates the unjustly neglected performance of the poem “In the Tradition,” a collaboration between poet LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), drummer Steve McCall, and saxophonist David Murray. Jackson argues that their approach to the jazz tradition is more constructive than the rigid conventional views: theirs represents “less a closed canon than . . . an energizing, inspirational base.”