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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.
| 1 | Introduction | 1 |
| 2 | Musical style and racial conflict | 19 |
| 3 | Musical adaptation among Afro-Americans | 27 |
| 4 | An American anthropological dilemma : the politics of Afro-American culture | 37 |
| 5 | Reconsideration : the myth of the Negro past | 53 |
| 6 | Reconsideration : Lafcadio Hearn in Cincinnati | 57 |
| 7 | The forest as moral document : the achievement of Lydia Cabrera | 61 |
| 8 | Race and the embodiment of culture | 77 |
| 9 | After the myth : studying Afro-American cultural patterns in the plantation literature | 91 |
| 10 | Speaking people, in their own terms | 108 |
| 11 | The lizards fake the fake | 113 |
| 12 | As it is prophesied, so it used to be | 115 |
| 13 | Greenwich's good gnosis | 118 |
| 14 | Free samples : Roy Nathanson and Anthony Coleman | 121 |
| 15 | Milling at the mall | 123 |
| 16 | Childhood's ends | 126 |
| 17 | Sweet feet | 129 |
| 18 | From "Messin' around" to "Funky western civilization" : the rise and fall of dance instruction songs | 131 |
| 19 | The Afro-American transformation of European set dances and dance suites | 153 |
| 20 | All that beef, and symbolic action, too! : notes on the occasion of the banning of 2 Live Crew's As nasty as they wanna be | 168 |
| 21 | The real old school | 174 |
| 22 | Josef Skvorecky and the tradition of jazz literature | 183 |
| 23 | World views collide : the history of jazz and hot dance | 191 |
| 24 | Way down yonder in Buenos Aires | 195 |
| 25 | Improvising under apartheid : Afro blue | 198 |
| 26 | Sonny Rollins in the age of mechanical reproduction | 207 |
| 27 | Sun Ra, 1914-1993 | 209 |
| 28 | !Ornette Coleman : ?civilization | 211 |
| 29 | The local and the express : Anthony Braxton's title-drawings | 215 |
| 30 | Magnificent declension : Solibo magnificent | 220 |
| 31 | Metaphors of incommensurability | 223 |
Overview
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 ...