Uptown Conversation

Uptown Conversation asserts that jazz is not only a music to define, it is a culture.Original essays cover jazz historiography, the political stakes of telling the story of the music, and its cultural import, including the music's experimental wing and revisionary takes on familiar figures in the canon: Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, and Louis Armstrong. The book also considers how settings outside the United States have transformed the music.

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.

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.

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

Niko Higgins:
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.

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

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

Justin Adewale Collins:
An intellectually stimulating discussion of jazz and its many variations.

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

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