The Transformation Of Black Music

The Transformation of Black Music includes a full spectrum of black musics from four continents as it argues for a re-codification of black musics and performers. Framed by a call and response argument, the authors present not only a more holistic and historically accurate understanding of musics in the African Diaspora, but also an intellectually robust future for the field of black music research.

Powerful and embracive, The Transformation of Black Music explores the full spectrum of black musics over the past thousand years as Africans and their descendants have traveled around the globe making celebrated music both in their homelands and throughout the Diaspora. Authors Samuel A. Floyd, Melanie Zeck, and Guthrie Ramsey brilliantly discuss how the music has blossomed, permeated present traditions, and created new practices. As a companion to the ground-breaking The Power of Black Music, this text brilliantly situates emerging, morphing, and influential black musics in a broader framework of cultural, political, and social histories. Grappling with subjects frequently omitted from traditional musical texts, The Transformation of Black Music is guided by more than just the ideals of inclusivity and representation. This work covers overlooked topics that include classical musicians of African descent, and builds upon the contributions of esteemed predecessors in the field of black music study. Providing a sweeping list of figures rarely included in conventional music history and theory textbooks, the text elucidates the findings of ethnomusicologists, cultural historians, Americanists, Africanists, and anthropologists, and weaves these accounts into a powerful and informative narrative. Taking its readers on a journey - one that has never been attempted in a single volume alone - this book reflects the musical phenomena generated by forced African migration and collective memory, and considers the kinds of powerful stories that these musics were meant to tell. Filling in critical musical and historical gaps previously ignored, authors Floyd, Zeck, and Ramsey infuse an engaging musical dialogue with a deeper understanding of the interrelationships between black musical genres and mainstream music. The Transformation of Black Music will solidify not only the inestimable value of black musics, but also the importance and relevance of black music research to all musical endeavors.

Black Music Matters: Jazz and the Transformation of Music Studies is one of the first books to promote the reform of music studies with a centralized presence of jazz and black music to ground American musicians in a core facet of their true cultural heritage. Ed Sarath applies an emergent consciousness-based worldview called Integral Theory to music studies while drawing upon overarching conversations on diversity and race and a rich body of literature on the seminal place of black music in American culture. Combining a visionary perspective with an activist tone, Sarath installs jazz and black music in as a foundation for a new paradigm of twenty-first-century musical training that will yield an unprecedented skill set for transcultural navigation among musicians. Sarath analyzes prevalent patterns in music studies change discourse, including an in-depth critique of multiculturalism, and proposes new curricular and organizational systems along with a new model of music inquiry called Integral Musicology. This jazz/black music paradigm further develops into a revolutionary catalyst for development of creativity and consciousness in education and society at large. Sarath’s work engages all those who share an interest in black-white race dynamics and its musical ramifications, spirituality and consciousness, and the promotion of creativity throughout all forms of intellectual and personal expression.

Probes the principal contradiction in the jazz world: that between black artistry on the one hand and white ownership of the means of jazz distribution -- the recording companies, booking agencies, festivals, nightclubs, and magazines -- on the other.

The author offers a new way of listening to the music of black America, and appreciating its profound contribution to all American music. By breaking down the barriers that remain between high art and low art, it illuminates the centuries-old linkage between the music, myths and rituals of Africa and the continuing evolution and enduring vitality of African-American music.

The year 1917 was unlike any other in American history, or in the history of American music. The United States entered World War I, jazz burst onto the national scene, and the German musicians who dominated classical music were forced from the stage. As the year progressed, New Orleans natives Nick LaRocca and Freddie Keppard popularized the new genre of jazz, a style that suited the frantic mood of the era. African-American bandleader James Reese Europe accepted the challenge of making the band of the Fifteenth New York Infantry into the best military band in the country. Orchestral conductors Walter Damrosch and Karl Muck met the public demand for classical music while also responding to new calls for patriotic music. Violinist Fritz Kreisler, pianist Olga Samaroff, and contralto Ernestine Schumann-Heink gave American audiences the best of Old-World musical traditions while walking a tightrope of suspicion because of their German sympathies. Before the end of the year, the careers of these eight musicians would be upended, and music in America would never be the same. Making Music American recounts the musical events of this tumultuous year month by month from New Year's Eve 1916 to New Year's Day 1918. As the story unfolds, the lives of these eight musicians intersect in surprising ways, illuminating the transformation of American attitudes toward music both European and American. In this unsettled time, no one was safe from suspicion, but America's passion for music made the rewards high for those who could balance musical skill with diplomatic savvy.

When Jimi Hendrix transfixed the crowds of Woodstock with his gripping version of "The Star Spangled Banner," he was building on a foundation reaching back, in part, to the revolutionary guitar playing of Howlin' Wolf and the other great Chicago bluesmen, and to the Delta blues tradition before him. But in its unforgettable introduction, followed by his unaccompanied "talking" guitar passage and inserted calls and responses at key points in the musical narrative, Hendrix's performance of the national anthem also hearkened back to a tradition even older than the blues, a tradition rooted in the rings of dance, drum, and song shared by peoples across Africa. Bold and original, The Power of Black Music offers a new way of listening to the music of black America, and appreciating its profound contribution to all American music. Striving to break down the barriers that remain between high art and low art, it brilliantly illuminates the centuries-old linkage between the music, myths and rituals of Africa and the continuing evolution and enduring vitality of African-American music. Inspired by the pioneering work of Sterling Stuckey and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., author Samuel A. Floyd, Jr, advocates a new critical approach grounded in the forms and traditions of the music itself. He accompanies readers on a fascinating journey from the African ring, through the ring shout's powerful merging of music and dance in the slave culture, to the funeral parade practices of the early new Orleans jazzmen, the bluesmen in the twenties, the beboppers in the forties, and the free jazz, rock, Motown, and concert hall composers of the sixties and beyond. Floyd dismisses the assumption that Africans brought to the United States as slaves took the music of whites in the New World and transformed it through their own performance practices. Instead, he recognizes European influences, while demonstrating how much black music has continued to share with its African counterparts. Floyd maintains that while African Americans may not have direct knowledge of African traditions and myths, they can intuitively recognize links to an authentic African cultural memory. For example, in speaking of his grandfather Omar, who died a slave as a young man, the jazz clarinetist Sidney Bechet said, "Inside him he'd got the memory of all the wrong that's been done to my people. That's what the memory is....When a blues is good, that kind of memory just grows up inside it." Grounding his scholarship and meticulous research in his childhood memories of black folk culture and his own experiences as a musician and listener, Floyd maintains that the memory of Omar and all those who came before and after him remains a driving force in the black music of America, a force with the power to enrich cultures the world over.

First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.