A CHOICE 2018 Outstanding Academic Title In Jazz Transatlantic, Volume I, renowned scholar Gerhard Kubik takes the reader across the Atlantic from Africa to the Americas and then back in pursuit of the music we call jazz. This first volume explores the term itself and how jazz has been defined and redefined. It also celebrates the phenomena of jazz performance and uncovers hidden gems of jazz history. The volume offers insights gathered during Kubik's extensive field work and based on in-depth interviews with jazz musicians around the Atlantic world. Languages, world views, beliefs, experiences, attitudes, and commodities all play a role. Kubik reveals what is most important--the expertise of individual musical innovators on both sides of the Atlantic, and hidden relationships in their thoughts. Besides the common African origins of much vocabulary and structure, all the expressions of jazz in Africa share transatlantic family relationships. Within that framework, musicians are creating and re-creating jazz in never-ending contacts and exchanges. The first of two volumes, Jazz Transatlantic, Volume I examines this transatlantic history, sociolinguistics, musicology, and the biographical study of personalities in jazz during the twentieth century. This volume traces the African and African American influences on the creation of the jazz sound and traces specific African traditions as they transform into American jazz. Kubik seeks to describe the constant mixing of sources and traditions, so he includes influences of European music in both volumes. These works will become essential and indelible parts of jazz history.
Brazil owes a significant portion of its social and cultural heritage of several West and Central African cultures. Due to his intensive knowledge of the African culture renown ethnomusicologist Gerhard Kubik has studied the presence of African culture phenomena in several research trips in Brazil. His insights and interpretations in areas such as language, music, religion, and social organization lead to entirely new perspectives in terms of the share of Africa in the molding process of new cultures on the other side of the Atlantic. Gerhard Kubik's very lively written book is not only a milestone in the study of Afro-Latin and African diaspora cultures, but as it will prove to be a reference for future African and African diaspora culture-related issues.
Erudite and exhaustive, Gerhard Kubik’s Theory of African Music provides an authoritative account of its subject. Over the course of two volumes, Kubik, one of the most prominent experts in the field, draws on his extensive travels and three decades of study throughout Africa to compare and contrast a wealth of musical traditions from a range of cultures. In this second volume, Kubik explores a variety of topics, including Yoruba chantefables, the musical Kachamba family of Malawˆ i, and the cognitive study of African rhythm. Drawing on his remarkable ability to make cross-cultural comparisons, Kubik illuminates every facet of the African understanding of rhythm, from timing systems to elementary pulsation. His analysis of tusona ideographs in Luchazi culture leads to an exploration of African space/time concepts that synthesizes his theories of art, rhythm, and culture. Featuring a large number of photographs and accompanied by a compact disc of Kubik’s own recordings, Theory of African Music, Volume II, will be an invaluable reference for years to come.
Various graphic systems designed to express and transmit ideas or to convey messages were known in sub-Saharan Africa in pre-colonial times, ideographic and pictographic systems. One of the most intriguing of these traditions, known across eastern Angola into northwestern Zambia, among speakers of Luchazi, Chokwe, Lwena and related languages is the tusona ideographs. This work is a fascinating excursion into symbolism, the remote history of eastern Angola, Luchazi oral literature, mathematics, graphic art and communication.
The transplantation of African musical cultures to the Americas was a multi-track and multi-time process. In the past many historical studies of African diaspora music, dance and other aspects of expressive culture concentrated on events in the Americas. What happened before the American trauma and simultaneously in Africa was often looked at unhistorically. In this book, world-renowned ethnomusicologist Gerhard Kubik considers African music and dance forms as the products of people living in various African cultures which have changed continuously in history, absorbing and processing elements from inside and outside the continent, creating new styles and fashions all the time. African diaspora music then appears as a consequent and creative extension overseas of African musical cultures that have existed in the period between the sixteenth and the twentieth century. From this perspective African diaspora music cannot be described adequately in terms of "retentions" and "survivals," as if African cultures in the Americas were doomed from the outset and perhaps only by some act of mercy permitted to "retain" certain elements. Using field research and documentary sources, Kubik tracks down some aspects of the Angolan dimension in the panorama of African music and dance cultures in Brazil, and also addresses methodology applicable in the wider context of African diaspora cultural studies.
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