- Genre:music
- Sub-genre:History & Criticism
- Language:English
- Pages:210
- eBook ISBN:9781450753609
Book details
Overview
Black music - whether it be jazz, blues, R&B, gospel, or soul - has always expressed, consciously or not, its African "oral" heritage, reflecting conditions of a minority culture in the midst of a white majority. Black Talk is one of the rare books since Leroi Jones's Blues People to examine the social function of black music in the diaspora; it sounds the depths of experience and maps the history of a culture from the jazz age to the revolutionary outbursts of the 1960s. Ben Sidran finds in Buddy Bolden's loud and hoarse cornet style, the call and response between brass and reeds in a swing band, the emotionalism of gospel, the primitivism of Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Milford Graves, and the cool ethic of bebop, radical challenges to the Western, white, literary tradition. "The musician is the document," says Sidran. "He is the information itself. The impact of stored information is transmitted not through records or archives, but through the human response to life."
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Mr. Sidran is a songwriter, singer and jazz pianist. He holds a doctorate in American Studies from Sussex University and has hosted a number of National Public Radio programs on jazz involving weekly interviews with Jazz musicians, the latter forming the basis for his work "Talking Jazz: An Oral History" [1992]. In this work, Mr. Sidran helps us understand that the basis for many of the unique Black contributions to the creation of Jazz music stem from the fact that these features were derived from the African oral cultural tradition. He goes on to explain that an oral culture is different from a literate culture [i.e.: European] since it is based on speech which is an improvisational and spontaneous act. In "Black Talk," Mr. Sidran discusses how singular elements of black music such as a "vocalized tone" and a "peculiarly black approach to rhythm" helped Jazz evolve into a unique American art form. One of the most, instructive, illuminating and unique books about Jazz ever written.
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