Dreams in Double Time: On Race, Freedom, and Bebop

by Jonathan Leal

Overview

In Dreams in Double Time Jonathan Leal examines how the musical revolution of bebop opened up new futures for racialized and minoritized communities. Blending lyrical nonfiction with transdisciplinary critique and moving beyond standard Black/white binary narratives of jazz history, Leal focuses on the stories and experiences of three musicians and writers of color: James Araki, a Nisei multi-instrumentalist, soldier-translator, and literature and folklore scholar; Raúl Salinas, a Chicano poet, jazz critic, and longtime activist who endured the US carceral system for over a decade; and Harold Wing, an Afro-Chinese American drummer, pianist, and songwriter who performed with bebop pioneers before working as a public servant. Leal foregrounds that for these men and their collaborators, bebop was an affectively and intellectually powerful force that helped them build community and dream new social possibilities. Bebop’s complexity and radicality, Leal contends, made it possible for those like Araki, Salinas, and Wing who grappled daily with state-sanctioned violence to challenge a racially supremacist, imperial nation, all while hearing and making the world anew.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781478024583
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	07/17/2023
Series:	Refiguring American Music
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	256
File size:	11 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Jonathan Leal is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Southern California and coeditor of Cybermedia: Explorations in Science, Sound, and Vision.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments  ix
Introduction. Dreaming Otherwise  1
1. After-Hours  25
2. Layered Time  46
3. Quartered Notes  74
4. Among Others  114
Epilogue. Affinities  152
Notes  161
Bibliography  207
Index  227

Editorial Reviews

“With Dreams in Double Time, Jonathan Leal proves he has ‘something to say.’ I use this phrase in the prosaic sense that he contributes new understanding and opens fresh areas of inquiry, and in the sense associated with a jazz musician’s solo. Almost every page treats readers to surprising revelation and provocation, and the figures Leal focalizes his history through are compelling as subjects on their own. This book is a tremendous achievement, a gift to readers seeking cultural history and methodologically innovative work.”

-- Anthony Reed, author of Soundworks: Race, Sound, and Poetry in Production

“In this fascinating and compelling book, Jonathan Leal works against the grain of jazz criticism by focusing on three relatively unknown figures for whom bebop proposed new ways of being in the world. Leal’s ‘trio,’ as he calls them, offer readers a glimpse into a much larger population of marginalized, often poor people of color who heard bebop as a radical, creative challenge to the totalizing singularity of what ‘white’ stood for during the second half of the twentieth century.”

-- Ronald Radano, coeditor of Audible Empire: Music, Global Politics, Critique

"Deftly drawing together the major trends in recent jazz scholarship, Leal makes an important intervention. . . . By explicitly focusing on minor figures, putting them in relationship to one another, Leal draws attention to the other side of bebop musicking: its emphasis on collaboration and conversation. . . . In the words of James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues,” a story to which Leal returns several times, Dreams in Double Time keeps both bebop and jazz writing 'new, at the risk of ruin, destruction, madness, and death, in order to find new ways to make us listen.'"

-- Sam V. H. Reese Los Angeles Review of Books

"If you’re interested in the relationship between jazz, sociology, racism and history, this book (a product of feeling as well as hard work) could prove highly rewarding."

-- Graham Colombé Jazz Journal

"A thoroughly evocative and important study that should be read at an unrushed pace to hear and feel the music and consider the radical nature of bebop not in a too-precious, historical vacuum but as a reaction against the violence of racism. Highly recommended."

-- Debbie Burke

"Leal provides a thoughtful and, at times, personal study that is academic in its rigour and musical knowledge while also genuinely illuminating and inspiring. . . . Leal’s style of writing is refreshing and engaging, not just for his attention to detail and knowledge of the subject matter, but for his thoughtful and appropriately lyrical reflections on music."

-- Alex Brent Popmatters

From the Publisher