People Get Ready

In People Get Ready, musicians, scholars, and journalists write about jazz since 1965, the year that Curtis Mayfield composed the famous civil rights anthem that gives this collection its title. The contributors emphasize how the political consciousness that infused jazz in the 1960s and early 1970s has informed jazz in the years since then. They bring nuance to historical accounts of the avant-garde, the New Thing, Free Jazz, "non-idiomatic" improvisation, fusion, and other forms of jazz that have flourished since the 1960s, and they reveal the contemporary relevance of those musical practices. Many of the participants in the jazz scenes discussed are still active performers. A photographic essay captures some of them in candid moments before performances. Other pieces revise standard accounts of well-known jazz figures, such as Duke Ellington, and lesser-known musicians, including Jeanne Lee; delve into how money, class, space, and economics affect the performance of experimental music; and take up the question of how digital technology influences improvisation. People Get Ready offers a vision for the future of jazz based on an appreciation of the complexity of its past and the abundance of innovation in the present. Contributors. Tamar Barzel, John Brackett, Douglas Ewart, Ajay Heble, Vijay Iyer, Thomas King, Tracy McMullen, Paul D. Miller/DJ Spooky, Nicole Mitchell, Roscoe Mitchell, Famoudou Don Moye, Aldon Lynn Nielsen, Eric Porter, Marc Ribot, Matana Roberts, Jaribu Shahid, Julie Dawn Smith, Wadada Leo Smith, Alan Stanbridge, John Szwed, Greg Tate, Scott Thomson, Rob Wallace, Ellen Waterman, Corey Wilkes

From Africa through the spirituals, from minstrel music through jubilee, and from traditional to contemporary gospel, "People Get Ready!" provides, for the first time, an accessible overview of this musical genre.

Humanity is on the verge of its darkest hour -- or its greatest moment The consequences of the technological revolution are about to hit hard: unemployment will spike as new technologies replace labor in the manufacturing, service, and professional sectors of an economy that is already struggling. The end of work as we know it will hit at the worst moment imaginable: as capitalism fosters permanent stagnation, when the labor market is in decrepit shape, with declining wages, expanding poverty, and scorching inequality. Only the dramatic democratization of our economy can address the existential challenges we now face. Yet, the US political process is so dominated by billionaires and corporate special interests, by corruption and monopoly, that it stymies not just democracy but progress. The great challenge of these times is to ensure that the tremendous benefits of technological progress are employed to serve the whole of humanity, rather than to enrich the wealthy few. Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols argue that the United States needs a new economy in which revolutionary technologies are applied to effectively address environmental and social problems and used to rejuvenate and extend democratic institutions. Based on intense reporting, rich historical analysis, and deep understanding of the technological and social changes that are unfolding, they propose a bold strategy for democratizing our digital destiny -- before it's too late -- and unleashing the real power of the Internet, and of humanity.

Throughout this book, Kevin Meehan offers historical and theoretical readings of Caribbean and African American interaction from the 1700s to the present. By analyzing travel narratives, histories, creative collaborations, and political exchanges, he traces the development of African American/Caribbean dialogue through the lives and works of four key individuals: historian Arthur Schomburg, writer/archivist Zora Neale Hurston, poet Jayne Cortez, and politican Jean-Bertrand Aristide. People Get Ready examines how these influential figures have reevaluated popular culture, revised the relationship between intellectuals and everyday people, and transformed practices ranging from librarianship and anthropology to poetry and broadcast journalism. This discourse, Meehan notes, is not free of contradictions, and misunderstandings arise on both sides. In addition to noting dialogues of unity, People Get Ready focuses on instances of intellectual elitism, sexim, color, prejudice, imperialism, national, chauvinism, and other forms of mutual disdain that continue to limit African American and Caribbean solidarity.

In People Get Ready, musicians, scholars, and journalists write about jazz since 1965, the year that Curtis Mayfield composed the famous civil rights anthem that gives this collection its title. The contributors emphasize how the political consciousness that infused jazz in the 1960s and early 1970s has informed jazz in the years since then. They bring nuance to historical accounts of the avant-garde, the New Thing, Free Jazz, "non-idiomatic" improvisation, fusion, and other forms of jazz that have flourished since the 1960s, and they reveal the contemporary relevance of those musical practices. Many of the participants in the jazz scenes discussed are still active performers. A photographic essay captures some of them in candid moments before performances. Other pieces revise standard accounts of well-known jazz figures, such as Duke Ellington, and lesser-known musicians, including Jeanne Lee; delve into how money, class, space, and economics affect the performance of experimental music; and take up the question of how digital technology influences improvisation. People Get Ready offers a vision for the future of jazz based on an appreciation of the complexity of its past and the abundance of innovation in the present. Contributors. Tamar Barzel, John Brackett, Douglas Ewart, Ajay Heble, Vijay Iyer, Thomas King, Tracy McMullen, Paul D. Miller/DJ Spooky, Nicole Mitchell, Roscoe Mitchell, Famoudou Don Moye, Aldon Lynn Nielsen, Eric Porter, Marc Ribot, Matana Roberts, Jaribu Shahid, Julie Dawn Smith, Wadada Leo Smith, Alan Stanbridge, John Szwed, Greg Tate, Scott Thomson, Rob Wallace, Ellen Waterman, Corey Wilkes

Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour stands on the brink of power, promising a fundamental re-ordering of British politics. But what, in practice, will this entail? How can a radical government stand up to an establishment that is hostile to any significant redistribution of wealth and power? People Get Ready!dives into the nitty gritty of what’s needed to bring about transformative change. Unlike a decade ago, the left’s problem is no longer a shortage of big ideas. Inside and outside the Labour Party, an agenda for new forms of public and community ownership is taking shape. Today the biggest danger facing the left is lack of preparedness—the absence of strategies that can make these ideas a reality. People Get Ready! draws on previous attempts at radical change, from the election of Labour at the end of the Second World War and the progressive early days of Mitterrand’s presidency in France, to Tony Benn’s battles with Harold Wilson and Margaret Thatcher’s icy insistence that there was no alternative to free markets. These stories highlight the importance of knowing your allies and, even more, your enemies, of being ready to deal with sabotage and resistance from the highest levels, of being bold enough to transform the structures of government, and of having a mass movement that can both support the leadership and hold it to its radical programme when the going gets tough. Remarkably, democratic socialism in Britain is closer to government than in any other European country. The responsibilities this brings for those supporting the Corbyn project are as great as the opportunities it presents. But there isn’t much time to get ready …

Meet twelve activists whose faith transformed twentieth-century America. In a political climate where Christianity is increasingly seen as reactionary, People Get Ready offers a revolutionary alternative. Narrated by some of the most galvanizing voices of the current moment, this collection of succinct and evocative biographies tells the stories of twelve modern apostles who lived the gospel mission and unsettles what we think we know about Christianity’s role in American politics. As the spiritual successor to Can I Get a Witness?, People Get Ready presents a diverse cast of twentieth-century “saints” who bore witness to their faith with unapologetic advocacy for the marginalized. From novelists to musicians to scientists, these courageous men and women rose to the challenges of their times. Just so, readers will reflect on their legacies in light of the challenges of today. Contributors: Jacqueline A. Bussie, Carolyn Renée Dupont, Mark R. Gornik, Jane Hong, Ann Hostetler, M. Therese Lysaught, Charles Marsh, Mallory McDuff, Ansley L. Quiros, Daniel P. Rhodes, Peter Slade, Jemar Tisby, Shea Tuttle, and Lauren F. Winner.

What does it mean to be a community of difference? St. Mary of the Angels is a tiny underground Catholic parish in the heart of Boston’s Egleston Square. More than a century of local, national, and international migrations has shaped and reshaped the neighborhood, transforming streets into borderlines and the parish into a waystation. Today, the church sustains a community of Black, Caribbean, Latin American, and Euro-American parishioners from Roxbury and beyond. In People Get Ready, Susan Reynolds draws on six years of ethnographic research to examine embodied ritual as a site of radical solidarity in the local church. Weaving together archived letters, oral histories, stories, photographs, newspaper articles, and newly examined archdiocesan documents, Reynolds traces how the people of St. Mary’s constructed rituals of solidarity as a practical foundation for building bridges across difference. She looks beyond liturgy to unexpected places, from Mass announcements to parish council meetings, from the Good Friday Via Crucis through neighborhood streets to protests staged in and around the church in the wake of Boston’s 2004 parish shutdowns. Through ethnography and Catholic ecclesiology, Reynolds argues for a retrieval of Vatican II’s notion of ecclesial solidarity as a basis for the mission of the local church in an age of migration, displacement, and change. It is through the work of ritual, the story of St. Mary’s reveals, that we learn to negotiate the borders in our midst—to cultivate friendships, exercise power, build peace, and, in a real way, to survive.