Jazz Cosmopolitanism in Accra
Five Musical Years in Ghana
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- 23,99 €
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- 23,99 €
Description de l’éditeur
In this remarkable book, Steven Feld, pioneer of the anthropology of sound, listens to the vernacular cosmopolitanism of jazz players in Ghana. Some have traveled widely, played with American jazz greats, and blended the innovations of John Coltrane with local instruments and worldviews. Combining memoir, biography, ethnography, and history, Feld conveys a diasporic intimacy and dialogue that contests American nationalist and Afrocentric narratives of jazz history. His stories of Accra’s jazz cosmopolitanism feature Ghanaba/Guy Warren (1923–2008), the eccentric drummer who befriended the likes of Charlie Parker, Max Roach, and Thelonious Monk in the United States in the 1950s, only to return, embittered, to Ghana, where he became the country’s leading experimentalist. Others whose stories figure prominently are Nii Noi Nortey, who fuses the legacies of the black avant-gardes of the 1960s and 1970s with pan-African philosophy in sculptural shrines to Coltrane and musical improvisations inspired by his work; the percussionist Nii Otoo Annan, a traditional master inspired by Coltrane’s drummers Elvin Jones and Rashied Ali; and a union of Accra truck and minibus drivers whose squeeze-bulb honk-horn music for drivers’ funerals recalls the jazz funerals of New Orleans. Feld describes these artists’ cosmopolitan outlook as an “acoustemology,” a way of knowing the world through sound.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A successful fusion of anthropology and aesthetics that illuminates the musical and cultural links and differences between African and American jazz, this is also a fascinating memoir of one person's attempt to understand the urban culture of Ghana in an age of globalization. Feld is a musician, filmmaker, and professor of anthropology and music at the University of New Mexico whose work revolves around the ideology of cosmopolitanism: the idea that all ethnic groups are connected and that individuals from these groups need to form relationships that lead to understanding and respect. In the case of Accra, Feld explores how the lives and practices in a "global city" can reveal "how histories of global entanglement are shaping contemporary African musical life-worlds." But Feld never becomes mired in academic jargon. He shows the connections between Africa and America by focusing on the lives of specific musicians who embody the idea of cosmopolitanism. Most notably, he superbly recounts the life of Ghanaba, a percussionist who traveled to the U.S. in the 1950s. Under the name Guy Warren, he worked under jazz legends like Charlie Parker and Max Roach and introduced both to new African rhythmic ideas, only to return to Ghana after his uncompromising Afrocentric recordings "did not approach the necessary exotica threshold to be a commercial hit."
