Africa Speaks, America Answers

Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times

by: Robin D. G. Kelley

Africa Speaks, America Answers
Author: Robin D. G. Kelley

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Series: The Nathan I. Huggins Lectures

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Format: Electronic book text

Publication date: 31 March 2012

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ISBN: 0674065247 ISBN 13: 9780674065246

Africa Speaks, America Answers by Robin D. G. Kelley

This collective biography of four jazz musicians from Brooklyn, Ghana, and South Africa demonstrates how modern Africa reshaped jazz, how modern jazz helped form a new African identity, and how musical convergences and crossings altered the politics and culture of both continents. Top page

Complete description

In Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, pianist Randy Weston and bassist Ahmed Abdul-Malik celebrated with song the revolutions spreading across Africa. In Ghana and South Africa, drummer Guy Warren and vocalist Sathima Bea Benjamin fused local musical forms with the dizzying innovations of modern jazz. These four were among hundreds of musicians in the 1950s and '60s who forged connections between jazz and Africa that definitively reshaped both their music and the world. Each artist identified in particular ways with Africa's struggle for liberation and made music dedicated to, or inspired by, demands for independence and self-determination. That music was the wild, boundary-breaking exultation of modern jazz. The result was an abundance of conversation, collaboration, and tension between African and African American musicians during the era of decolonization. This collective biography demonstrates how modern Africa reshaped jazz, how modern jazz helped form a new African identity, and how musical convergences and crossings altered politics and culture on both continents. In a crucial moment when freedom electrified the African diaspora, these black artists sought one another out to create new modes of expression. Documenting individuals and places, from Lagos to Chicago, from New York to Cape Town, Robin Kelley gives us a meditation on modernity: we see innovation not as an imposition from the West but rather as indigenous, multilingual, and messy, the result of innumerable exchanges across a breadth of cultures. Top page

General info

Publisher & Imprint: Harvard University Press

Pages: 272

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Age recommended: General/trade

Subject Indexing & Classification Dewey:(DC23) 781.650922

Departments: Composers & musicians;

Record updated at: 14 September, 2012 time: 05:36


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