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Circular Breathing

The Cultural Politics of Jazz in Britain
  • George McKay
Language: English
Published/Copyright: 2005
View more publications by Duke University Press

About this book

An exploration of the political and cultural experience of jazz performers in Britain from the 1950s “traditional jazz boom” on.

Author / Editor information

George McKay is a professor of cultural studies at the University of Salford in England. He is the author of Glastonbury: A Very English Fair and Senseless Acts of Beauty: Cultures of Resistance since the Sixties; the editor of DiY Culture: Party & Protest in Nineties Britain; and a coeditor of Community Music: A Handbook and Social Movement Studies: Journal of Social, Cultural, and Political Protest.

Reviews

Circular Breathing is a marvelous book. I admire George McKay’s knowledge of jazz, the British left, and cultural history. His ability to blend those elements is to my knowledge unique and unprecedented, and his interviews with jazz musicians enrich immeasurably the story that he is telling.”—Dennis Dworkin, author of Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain: History, the New Left, and the Origins of Cultural Studies

Circular Breathing is quite simply the best book so far on jazz in Britain. George McKay acts as a cultural archaeologist, digging up traces of a ninety-year musical presence and writing them back into history. He comments acutely on a music which can be peripheral and exclusive but which he rightly sees as vital to the story of Britain’s social and political evolution.”—Andrew Blake, author of The Land without Music: Music, Culture, and Society in Twentieth-Century Britain

“George McKay's book plugs a significant scholarly gap and provides a much-needed cultural history of jazz in Britain. . . . This book is a hugely impressive, detailed, and fascinating cultural history of jazz in Britain and should be recommended not only to cultural historians but also to historians of the Cold War, the British Left, and those interested in race relations and national identity in twentieth-century Britain.”

-- James J. Nott American Historical Review

“McKay has written an excellent study of one of the many new cultures and cultural spaces of postwar England. His emphasis on space and culture, gender and space, and race and identity make this a strong work well worth the time to read. . . . [H]is book places the playing and study of jazz music in clear class terms as few scholars have before him.”

-- Gordon J. Marshall Journal of British Studies

"It is only by reading Circular Breathing, George McKay's skillful examination of race relations, gender issues, and the Left in relation to British jazz, that we can understand why British jazz wasn't at the center of the European free-jazz revolution. . . . [V]aluable and imaginative scholarship."

-- Stephanie Hanson Bookforum


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Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
November 23, 2005
eBook ISBN:
9780822387282
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
Main content:
376
Other:
36 b&w photos
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