Jazz and American Culture

Michael Borshuk is the author of Swinging the Vernacular: Jazz and African American Modernist Literature (2006), which won the Texas Tech University President's Book Award for Outstanding Faculty Publication. He has written widely on African American literature, American modernism, and music. For ten years, he wrote on jazz for Coda magazine.

• Introduction: a brief history of jazz in American culture Michael Borshuk; Part I. Elements of Sound and Style: 1. Improvisation Ajay Heble; 2. Scat and vocalese Chris Tonelli; 3. Jazz as intertextual expression Charles Hersch; 4. How to watch jazz: the importance of performance Michael Borshuk; Part II. Aesthetic Movements: 5. Jazz age Harlem Fiona Ngo; 6. 'Hard Times Don't Worry Me': the blues in Black music and literature in the 1930s Steven Tracy; 7. A fool for beauty: modernism and the racial semiotics of crooning Michael Coyle; 8. Free Jazz, critical performativity, and 1968 Michael Hrebeniak; Part III. Cultural Contexts: 9. Jazz slang, jazz speak Amor Kohli; 10. Jazz cool Joel Dinerstein; 11. The institutionalization of jazz Dale Chapman; 12. Jazz abroad Jurgen Grandt; Part IV. Literary Genres: 13. Orchestrating chaos: othering and the politics of contingency in jazz fiction Herman Beavers; 14. 'Wail, wop': jazz poetry on the page and in performance Jessica Teague; 15. Jazz criticism and liner notes Timothy Gray; 16. Jazz autobiography Daniel Stein; 17. Jazz and the American songbook Katherine Williams; Part V. Images and Screens: 18. 'The Sound I Saw': jazz and visual culture Amy Abugo Ongiri; 19. Love, theft, and transcendence: jazz and narrative cinema Krin Gabbard; 20. Reinstating televisual histories of jazz Nicolas Pillai; 21. Documentary jazz/jazz documentary Will Finch; 22. Two dark rooms: jazz and photography Benjamin Cawthra.

'In this elegant, bold, ambitious, and much-needed intervention in the standard histories of Jazz, Borshuk brings together an all-star cast of leading scholars on a comprehensive set of topics that together enable us all to make a great leap forward in understanding the music's essential relation to American culture. The book begins with several insightful discussions of the specific aesthetic features that define jazz in the context of improvisation, race, literature, and performance, then situates the music historically in terms of Harlem, Modernism, and the watershed upheaval that peaked in 1968; from there, it connects jazz to American vernacular, the personal style of “cool,” and the music's eventual and always fraught relations with institutions of various kinds, its representation in poetry, autobiography, liner notes, and in the visual realm from cinema to TV to photography. An invaluable resource, a stunning achievement.' T. R. Johnson, Tulane University, Author of New Orleans: A Writer's City