Created by President Jimmy Carter in 1979, this month celebrates the African American musical influences that comprise an essential part of our nation’s treasured cultural heritage. Let’s dig in with some of our newest and well-loved books and journal articles!
Welcome 2 Houston: Hip Hop Heritage in Hustle Town
Langston Collin Wilkins
A vivid journey through a southern hip hop bastion, Welcome 2 Houston offers readers an inside look at a unique musical culture.
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“‘A Meditation Among Drums’: A Black Archive of Wandering at the Milford Graves: Fundamental Frequency Exhibit” by Kehinde Alonge (Vol. 7, Iss. 1)
This article follows Alonge’s firsthand encounter with the Ars Nova Workshop and Artist Space’s collaborative exhibit, Milford Graves: Fundamental Frequency, to fully engage with the question of how one might construct, or perhaps, more appropriately, deconstruct, an archive away from its typical neoliberal function to allow the propagation of “Black wandering”, whereby unrelenting subjectivity and disjunctive practices in temporality persist.
The Resounding Revolution: Freedom Song after 1968
Stephen Stacks
Insightful and vividly detailed, The Resounding Revolution examines sixty years of Black music to challenge and reshape the entrenched story of the Civil Rights Movement.
Journal of American Ethnic History
“‘Our Buzzing Latin Cousins’: Afro-Latinxs, African Americans, and the Creation of a Black Transcultural Midtown Musical Scene, 1933–1966” by Matthew Pessar Joseph (Vol. 44, Iss. 3)
After the Palladium Ballroom began hosting Afro-Cuban mambo groups in 1947, it became the foremost integrated dancehall to emerge in postwar New York City. This article examines Afro-Latinx and African American cultural mediators who helped forge a mixed-race midtown scene at the venue and at nearby jazz clubs.
Blues Before Sunrise 3: Guitar Slingers and Backbeaters
Steve Cushing
Introduction by Wayne Everett Goins
Steve Cushing’s third volume of interviews from Blues Before Sunrise puts fans face-to-face with music legends and industry figures.
“Black Musicological World-Making in Who Hears Here?” by Samantha Ege (Vol. 41, Iss. 2)
“What I want,” writes Kevin Quashie in Black Aliveness, or A Poetics of Being, “is the freeness of a black world where blackness can be of being, where there is no argument to be made, where there is no speaking to or against an audience because we are all the audience there is. . . . ” In Who Hears Here?, Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr., invites readers into a world where Black music is “of being,” devoid of defenses, justifications, or validations for its existence. Ege discusses Ramsey’s work in the context of her own musical and academic work.
This article appeared as a part of a printed symposium on Guthrie P. Ramsey’s scholarship. Read the other essays included here and be sure not to miss Ramsey’s response essay, “Bars.”
Aaron J. Johnson
An interwoven story of a music and a medium, Jazz Radio America answers perennial questions about why certain kinds of jazz get played and why even that music is played in so few places.
“‘Some Rooms Make You Whisper’: The Art of Isolation and the Racial Politics of Quiet in a Concert Hall Built for Jazz” by Tom Wetmore (Vol. 69, Iss. 1)
This article ethnographically analyzes the unique acoustic properties of Rose Theater, a lavish 1,300-seat concert hall at Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York City. By dramatically cutting off the sounds of jazz from the exterior world, thus excluding unwanted “noise,” Rose Theater’s acoustic design sonically refutes longstanding racist ideologies associating jazz with a noisy material essence. This analysis prompts new ways of interrogating how sound, space, and the built environment are entangled with difference and power.