Africa Speaks, America Answers Africa Speaks, America Answers
The Nathan I. Huggins lectures

Africa Speaks, America Answers

Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times

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    • £35.99

Publisher Description

In Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, pianist Randy Weston and bassist Ahmed Abdul-Malik celebrated with song the revolutions spreading across Africa. In Ghana and South Africa, drummer Guy Warren and vocalist Sathima Bea Benjamin fused local musical forms with the dizzying innovations of modern jazz. These four were among hundreds of musicians in the 1950s and ’60s who forged connections between jazz and Africa that definitively reshaped both their music and the world.

Each artist identified in particular ways with Africa’s struggle for liberation and made music dedicated to, or inspired by, demands for independence and self-determination. That music was the wild, boundary-breaking exultation of modern jazz. The result was an abundance of conversation, collaboration, and tension between African and African American musicians during the era of decolonization. This collective biography demonstrates how modern Africa reshaped jazz, how modern jazz helped form a new African identity, and how musical convergences and crossings altered politics and culture on both continents.

In a crucial moment when freedom electrified the African diaspora, these black artists sought one another out to create new modes of expression. Documenting individuals and places, from Lagos to Chicago, from New York to Cape Town, Robin Kelley gives us a meditation on modernity: we see innovation not as an imposition from the West but rather as indigenous, multilingual, and messy, the result of innumerable exchanges across a breadth of cultures.

GENRE
Non-Fiction
RELEASED
2012
27 February
LANGUAGE
EN
English
LENGTH
272
Pages
PUBLISHER
Harvard University Press
SIZE
3.9
MB

More Books by Robin D. G. Kelley

Freedom Dreams Freedom Dreams
2022
Race Rebels Race Rebels
1996
Our History Has Always Been Contraband Our History Has Always Been Contraband
2023
Breaking the Chains Breaking the Chains
2024
Invisible Men Invisible Men
2016
To Make Our World Anew To Make Our World Anew
2005

Other Books in This Series

The Long Emancipation The Long Emancipation
2015
Why White Liberals Fail Why White Liberals Fail
2022
Black Jews in Africa and the Americas Black Jews in Africa and the Americas
2013
No Property in Man No Property in Man
2019
Emancipating Lincoln Emancipating Lincoln
2012
How Free Is Free? How Free Is Free?
2009