Uptown Conversation - by Robert O'Meally & Brent Hayes Edwards & Farah Jasmine Griffin (Paperback)

About the Book

Allowing readers to "eavesdrop on one of the most exciting intellectual jam sessions of our time" (Sherry Tucker, University of Kansas), this book's original essays cover jazz historiography, the political stakes of the story of the music, and the cultural import of jazz. 22 halftones.

Book Synopsis

Jackson Pollock dancing to the music as he painted; Romare Bearden's stage and costume designs for Alvin Ailey and Dianne McIntyre; Stanley Crouch stirring his high-powered essays in a room where a drumkit stands at the center: from the perspective of the new jazz studies, jazz is not only a music to define--it is a culture. Considering musicians and filmmakers, painters and poets, the intellectual improvisations in Uptown Conversation reevaluate, reimagine, and riff on the music that has for more than a century initiated a call and response across art forms, geographies, and cultures.

Building on Robert G. O'Meally's acclaimed Jazz Cadence of American Culture, these original essays offer new insights in jazz historiography, highlighting the political stakes in telling the story of the music and evaluating its cultural import in the United States and worldwide. Articles contemplating the music's experimental wing--such as Salim Washington's meditation on Charles Mingus and the avant-garde or George Lipsitz's polemical juxtaposition of Ken Burns's documentary Jazz and Horace Tapscott's autobiography Songs of the Unsung--share the stage with revisionary takes on familiar figures in the canon: Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, and Louis Armstrong.

Review Quotes

Uptown Conversation gives us that crystallized vision and is destined to become an important source of research and reflection for many years to come.--Anne Farnsworth "Jazz Notes"

Uptown Conversations... continue[s] this trajectory by moving away from jazz as a static object to be stylistically described, explained, and celebrated through the heroic and larger-than-life individual towards an understanding of jazz as a music in continual dialogue with the historical, social, political, racial, gendered process governing its creation.--Niko Higgins "Current Musicology"

An intellectually stimulating discussion of jazz and its many variations.--Justin Adewale Collins "Black Issues Book Review"

It is also a delightful, accessible, and provocative read--a book that how jazz studies can contribute to a host of other fields.-- "Choice"

The focus and depth of these essays prove that this chorus can sing - and not just standards.--Larry Blumenfeld "Jazziz"

The international community of serious jazz enthusiasts who pick up the book will be impressed.--Theodore R. Hudson "Ellingtonia"

This collection of erudite essarys aptly captures the spirit of those conversations...This must-have tome ups the ante on jazz banter.--John Murph "Jazz Times"

About the Author

Robert G. O'Meally is Zora Neale Hurston Professor of American Literature at Columbia University. He is the author of numerous books, including The Jazz Cadence of American Culture and Lady Day: The Many Faces of Billie Holiday.Brent Hayes Edwards is an associate professor of English at Rutgers University and the author of The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism.Farah Jasmine Griffin is a professor of English, comparative literature, and African American studies at Columbia University. She is the author of If You Can't Be Free, Be a Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday.