John F. Szwed's Books

Space Is the Place

The Lives and Times of Sun Ra

By: John Szwed

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Space Is the Place

The Lives and Times of Sun Ra

By: John Szwed

Considered by many to be a founder of Afrofuturism, Sun Ra—aka Herman Blount—was a composer, keyboardist, bandleader, philosopher, entrepreneur, poet, and self-proclaimed extraterrestrial from Saturn. He recorded over 200 albums with his Arkestra, which, dressed in Egypto-space costumes, played everything from boogie-woogie and swing to fusion and free jazz. John Szwed's Space is the Place is the definitive biography of this musical polymath, who was one of the twentieth century's greatest avant-garde artists and intellectuals. Charting the whole of Sun Ra's life and career, Szwed outlines how after years in Chicago as a blues and swing band pianist, Sun Ra set out in the 1950s to impart his views about the galaxy, black people, and spiritual matters by performing music with the Arkestra that was as vital and innovative as it was mercurial and confounding. Szwed's readers—whether they are just discovering Sun Ra or are among the legion of poets, artists, intellectuals, and musicians who consider him a spiritual godfather—will find that, indeed, space is the place.

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Page Count

330

Publisher

Duke University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1478012056

ISBN 13

9781478012054

Folksongs and Their Makers

By: Henry Glassie,Edward D. Ives,John F. Szwed

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Folksongs and Their Makers

By: Henry Glassie,Edward D. Ives,John F. Szwed

Three prominent folklorists wrote these essays in the 1970s about Dorrance Weir of upstate New York and his song "Take that Night Train to Selma," Joe Scott of Maine and his song "The Plain Golden Band," and Paul Hall of Newfoundland and "The Bachelor's Song.

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Page Count

184

Publisher

Popular Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0879720069

ISBN 13

9780879720063

Space Is the Place

The Lives and Times of Sun Ra

By: John F. Szwed

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Space Is the Place

The Lives and Times of Sun Ra

By: John F. Szwed

Always riveting, Space Is the Place is the definitive biography of "one of the great big-band leaders, pianists, and surrealists of jazz" (The New York Times)—unparalleled for his purposeful outlandishness, a man who exerted a powerful influence over a vast array of artists. Sun Ra—a/k/a Herman Poole "Sonny Blount—was born in Alabama on May 22, 1914. But like Father Divine and Elijah Muhammad, he made a lifelong effort to obscure many of the facts of his early life. After years as a rehearsal pianist for nightclub revues and in blues and swing bands, including Wynonie Harris's and Fletcher Henderson's, Sun Ra set out in the 1950s to find a way to impart his views about the galaxy, black people, and spiritual matters through the various incarnations of the Intergalactic Arkestra. His repertoire ranging from boogie-woogie, swing, and bebop to free form, fusion, and whatever, Sun Ra was above all a paragon of contradictions: profundity and vaudeville; technical pianistic virtuosity and irony; assiduous attention to arrangements and encouragement of collective improvisation; respect for tradition and celebration of the fresh. Some might have been bemused by his Afro-Platonic neo-hermeticism; others might have laughed at his egregious excesses. But Sun Ra was at once one of the great avant-gardists of the latter half of the twentieth century and a black cultural nationalist who extended Afrocentrism from ancient Egypt to the heavens.

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Page Count

599

Publisher

Pantheon

Published Date

ISBN 10

0307822443

ISBN 13

9780307822444

Send These to Me

Immigrants in Urban America

By: John Higham

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Send These to Me

Immigrants in Urban America

By: John Higham

Migration, immigration, urban America.

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Page Count

284

Published Date

ISBN 10

0801824737

ISBN 13

9780801824739

Jump at the Sun

Zora Neale Hurston's Cosmic Comedy

By: John Lowe

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Jump at the Sun

Zora Neale Hurston's Cosmic Comedy

By: John Lowe

Lowe has written what may well be the Hurston book for the years to come." -- Werner Sollors, Harvard University "Lowe's study . . . smartly begins with the assumption that one reason for the stunning popularity of Hurston's work is the verve with which it addresses serious subjects in a comic style." -- Cheryl A. Wall, editor of Changing Our Own Words: Essays on Criticism, Theory, and Writing by Black Women "Appreciative of Hurston's 'bodacious' humor, Lowe argues that she is 'a profoundly serious, experimental, subversive, and therefore unsettling artist.' . . . Strongly recommended." -- Choice "A trailblazing effort, a work that will enrich our understanding of Hurston's fiction." -- William R. Nash, The Southern Literary Journal "The most important booklength contribution to Hurston scholarship since Robert Hemenway published his biography in 1978." -- Will Brantley, Contemporary Literature

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Page Count

396

Publisher

University of Illinois Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0252066375

ISBN 13

9780252066375

Crossovers

Essays on Race, Music, and American Culture

By: John Szwed

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Crossovers

Essays on Race, Music, and American Culture

By: John Szwed

Ranging across genres from the popular to the scholarly, this selection of John Szwed's published essays abides in the intersection of race and art, jazz and rap: crossovers inside and outside the academy. With reviews written for the Village Voice and articles from academic journals, this volume includes essays, commentary, and meditations on James Agee and Walker Evans, Cuban folklorist Lydia Cabrera, Lafcadio Hearn, Melville Herskovits, Josef Skorvecky, Patrick Chamoiseau, pop song writer Ellie Greenwich, and jazz musicians Sonny Rollins, Anthony Braxton, Sun Ra, and Ornette Coleman. Also included are pieces on the prehistory of hip hop, the blues, popular dance instruction songs, tap dance, and African American set dancing; creole writing and creolization; race and culture; and authenticity, representation, nostalgia, and obscenity in American popular culture, with excursions into jazz in Africa, Russia, and Argentina. Written about a country with cultural crossroads everywhere, where the question of race is thoroughly woven into the fabric of society, these essays cross boundaries and shed light on the complexities of American life.

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Page Count

293

Publisher

University of Pennsylvania Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0812219724

ISBN 13

9780812219722

Blowin' Hot and Cool

Jazz and Its Critics

By: John Gennari

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Blowin' Hot and Cool

Jazz and Its Critics

By: John Gennari

In the illustrious and richly documented history of American jazz, no figure has been more controversial than the jazz critic. Jazz critics can be revered or reviled—often both—but they should not be ignored. And while the tradition of jazz has been covered from seemingly every angle, nobody has ever turned the pen back on itself to chronicle the many writers who have helped define how we listen to and how we understand jazz. That is, of course, until now. In Blowin’ Hot and Cool, John Gennari provides a definitive history of jazz criticism from the 1920s to the present. The music itself is prominent in his account, as are the musicians—from Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington to Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Roscoe Mitchell, and beyond. But the work takes its shape from fascinating stories of the tradition’s key critics—Leonard Feather, Martin Williams, Whitney Balliett, Dan Morgenstern, Gary Giddins, and Stanley Crouch, among many others. Gennari is the first to show the many ways these critics have mediated the relationship between the musicians and the audience—not merely as writers, but in many cases as producers, broadcasters, concert organizers, and public intellectuals as well. For Gennari, the jazz tradition is not so much a collection of recordings and performances as it is a rancorous debate—the dissonant noise clamoring in response to the sounds of jazz. Against the backdrop of racial strife, class and gender issues, war, and protest that has defined the past seventy-five years in America, Blowin’ Hot and Cool brings to the fore jazz’s most vital critics and the role they have played not only in defining the history of jazz but also in shaping jazz’s significance in American culture and life.

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Page Count

495

Publisher

University of Chicago Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0226289249

ISBN 13

9780226289243

Homo Narrans

The Poetics and Anthropology of Oral Literature

By: John D. Niles

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Homo Narrans

The Poetics and Anthropology of Oral Literature

By: John D. Niles

It would be difficult to imagine what human life would be like without stories—from myths recited by Pueblo Indian healers in the kiva, ballads sung in Slovenian market squares, folktales and legends told by the fireside in Italy, to jokes told at a dinner table in Des Moines—for it is chiefly through storytelling that people possess a past. In Homo Narrans John D. Niles explores how human beings shape their world through the stories they tell. The book vividly weaves together the study of Anglo-Saxon literature and culture with the author's own engagements in the field with some of the greatest twentieth-century singers and storytellers in the Scottish tradition. Niles ponders the nature of the storytelling impulse, the social function of narrative, and the role of individual talent in oral tradition. His investigation of the poetics of oral narrative encompasses literary works, such as the epic poems and hymns of early Greece and the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf, texts that we know only through written versions but that are grounded in oral technique. That all forms of narrative, even the most sophisticated genres of contemporary fiction, have their ultimate origin in storytelling is a point that scarcely needs to be argued. Niles's claims here are more ambitious: that oral narrative is and has long been the chief basis of culture itself, that the need to tell stories is what distinguishes humans from all other living creatures.

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Page Count

291

Publisher

University of Pennsylvania Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0812202953

ISBN 13

9780812202953

Dimensions of a Creole Continuum

History, Texts, and Linguistic Analysis of Guyanese Creole

By: John R. Rickford

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Dimensions of a Creole Continuum

History, Texts, and Linguistic Analysis of Guyanese Creole

By: John R. Rickford

A Stanford University Press classic.

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Page Count

380

Publisher

Stanford University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0804713774

ISBN 13

9780804713771

Book's by John F. Szwed

Space Is the Place

Space Is the Place

Folksongs and Their Makers

Folksongs and Their Makers

Space Is the Place

Space Is the Place

Send These to Me

Send These to Me

Jump at the Sun

Jump at the Sun

Crossovers

Crossovers

Blowin' Hot and Cool

Blowin' Hot and Cool

Homo Narrans

Homo Narrans

Dimensions of a Creole Continuum

Dimensions of a Creole Continuum

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