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Who Can Afford to Improvise? : James Baldwin and Black Music, the Lyric and the Listeners / Ed Pavlić.

By: Material type: TextTextPublisher: New York, NY : Fordham University Press, [2015]Copyright date: ©2015Description: 1 online resource (352 p.)Content type:
Media type:
Carrier type:
ISBN:
  • 9780823268481
  • 9780823268504
Subject(s): DDC classification:
  • 818.5409 23
LOC classification:
  • PS3552.A45 Z813 2016eb
Other classification:
  • online - DeGruyter
Online resources: Available additional physical forms:
  • Issued also in print.
Contents:
Frontmatter -- Contents -- Introduction. "To the listeners, for those that have an ear for this" -- BOOK I. The Uses of the Blues -- 1. "Not the country we're sitting in now" -- 2. Blues Constants, Jazz Changes -- 3. "Making words do something" -- BOOK II. The Uses of the Lyric -- 4. Billie Holiday: Radical Lyricist -- 5. Dinah Washington's Blues and the Trans- Digressive Ocean -- 6. "But Amen is the price" -- BOOK III. "For you I was a flame" -- 7. On Camden Row -- 8. Speechless in San Francisco -- 9. "In a way they must . . ." -- 10. "Shades cannot be fixed" -- Conclusion. -- Acknowledgments -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index
Summary: More than a quarter-century after his death, James Baldwin remains an unparalleled figure in American literature and African American cultural politics. In Who Can Afford to Improvise? Ed Pavlić offers an unconventional, lyrical, and accessible meditation on the life, writings, and legacy of James Baldwin and their relationship to the lyric tradition in black music, from gospel and blues to jazz and R&B. Based on unprecedented access to private correspondence, unpublished manuscripts and attuned to a musically inclined poet's skill in close listening, Who Can Afford to Improvise? frames a new narrative of James Baldwin's work and life. The route retraces the full arc of Baldwin's passage across the pages and stages of his career according to his constant interactions with black musical styles, recordings, and musicians.Presented in three books - or movements - the first listens to Baldwin, in the initial months of his most intense visibility in May 1963 and the publication of The Fire Next Time. It introduces the key terms of his lyrical aesthetic and identifies the shifting contours of Baldwin's career from his early work as a reviewer for left-leaning journals in the 1940s to his last published and unpublished works from the mid-1980s. Book II listens with Baldwin and ruminates on the recorded performances of Billie Holiday and Dinah Washington, singers whose message and methods were closely related to his developing world view. It concludes with the first detailed account of "The Hallelujah Chorus," a performance from July 1, 1973, in which Baldwin shared the stage at Carnegie Hall with Ray Charles. Finally, in Book III, Pavlić reverses our musically inflected reconsideration of Baldwin's voice, projecting it into the contemporary moment and reading its impact on everything from the music of Amy Winehouse, to the street performances of Turf Feinz, and the fire of racial oppression and militarization against black Americans in the 21st century.Always with an ear close to the music, and avoiding the safe box of celebration, Who Can Afford to Improvise? enables a new kind of "lyrical travel" with the instructive clarity and the open-ended mystery Baldwin's work invokes into the world.
Holdings
Item type Current library Call number URL Status Notes Barcode
eBook eBook Biblioteca "Angelicum" Pont. Univ. S.Tommaso d'Aquino Nuvola online online - DeGruyter (Browse shelf(Opens below)) Online access Not for loan (Accesso limitato) Accesso per gli utenti autorizzati / Access for authorized users (dgr)9780823268504

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Introduction. "To the listeners, for those that have an ear for this" -- BOOK I. The Uses of the Blues -- 1. "Not the country we're sitting in now" -- 2. Blues Constants, Jazz Changes -- 3. "Making words do something" -- BOOK II. The Uses of the Lyric -- 4. Billie Holiday: Radical Lyricist -- 5. Dinah Washington's Blues and the Trans- Digressive Ocean -- 6. "But Amen is the price" -- BOOK III. "For you I was a flame" -- 7. On Camden Row -- 8. Speechless in San Francisco -- 9. "In a way they must . . ." -- 10. "Shades cannot be fixed" -- Conclusion. -- Acknowledgments -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index

restricted access online access with authorization star

http://purl.org/coar/access_right/c_16ec

More than a quarter-century after his death, James Baldwin remains an unparalleled figure in American literature and African American cultural politics. In Who Can Afford to Improvise? Ed Pavlić offers an unconventional, lyrical, and accessible meditation on the life, writings, and legacy of James Baldwin and their relationship to the lyric tradition in black music, from gospel and blues to jazz and R&B. Based on unprecedented access to private correspondence, unpublished manuscripts and attuned to a musically inclined poet's skill in close listening, Who Can Afford to Improvise? frames a new narrative of James Baldwin's work and life. The route retraces the full arc of Baldwin's passage across the pages and stages of his career according to his constant interactions with black musical styles, recordings, and musicians.Presented in three books - or movements - the first listens to Baldwin, in the initial months of his most intense visibility in May 1963 and the publication of The Fire Next Time. It introduces the key terms of his lyrical aesthetic and identifies the shifting contours of Baldwin's career from his early work as a reviewer for left-leaning journals in the 1940s to his last published and unpublished works from the mid-1980s. Book II listens with Baldwin and ruminates on the recorded performances of Billie Holiday and Dinah Washington, singers whose message and methods were closely related to his developing world view. It concludes with the first detailed account of "The Hallelujah Chorus," a performance from July 1, 1973, in which Baldwin shared the stage at Carnegie Hall with Ray Charles. Finally, in Book III, Pavlić reverses our musically inflected reconsideration of Baldwin's voice, projecting it into the contemporary moment and reading its impact on everything from the music of Amy Winehouse, to the street performances of Turf Feinz, and the fire of racial oppression and militarization against black Americans in the 21st century.Always with an ear close to the music, and avoiding the safe box of celebration, Who Can Afford to Improvise? enables a new kind of "lyrical travel" with the instructive clarity and the open-ended mystery Baldwin's work invokes into the world.

Issued also in print.

Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.

In English.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 02. Mrz 2022)