Uptown Conversation

Robert G. O'Meally is Zora Neale Hurston Professor of American Literature at Columbia University. He is the author of numerous books, including The Jazz Cadence of American Culture and Lady Day: The Many Faces of Billie Holiday.Brent Hayes Edwards is an associate professor of English at Rutgers University and the author of The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism.Farah Jasmine Griffin is a professor of English, comparative literature, and African American studies at Columbia University. She is the author of If You Can't Be Free, Be a Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday.

This collection of erudite essarys aptly captures the spirit of those conversations...This must-have tome ups the ante on jazz banter. -- John Murph Jazz Times It is also a delightful, accessible, and provocative read--a book that how jazz studies can contribute to a host of other fields. Choice An intellectually stimulating discussion of jazz and its many variations. -- Justin Adewale Collins Black Issues Book Review The focus and depth of these essays prove that this chorus can sing - and not just standards. -- Larry Blumenfeld Jazziz Uptown Conversation gives us that crystallized vision and is destined to become an important source of research and reflection for many years to come. -- Anne Farnsworth Jazz Notes Uptown Conversations... continue[s] this trajectory by moving away from jazz as a static object to be stylistically described, explained, and celebrated through the heroic and larger-than-life individual towards an understanding of jazz as a music in continual dialogue with the historical, social, political, racial, gendered process governing its creation. -- Niko Higgins Current Musicology The international community of serious jazz enthusiasts who pick up the book will be impressed. -- Theodore R. Hudson Ellingtonia

• Introductory Notes, by Robert G. O'Meally, Brent Hayes Edwards, and Farah Jasmine Griffin Songs of the Unsung: The Darby Hicks History of Jazz, by George Lipsitz "All the Things You Could Be by Now": Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus and the Limits of Avant-Garde Jazz, by Salim Washington Experimental Music in Black and White: The AACM in New York, 1970-1985, by George Lewis When Malindy Sings: A Meditation on Black Women's Vocality, by Farah Jasmine Griffin Hipsters, Bluebloods, Rebels, and Hooligans: The Cultural Politics of the Newport Jazz Festival, 1954-1960, by John Gennari Mainstreaming Monk: The Ellington Album, by Mark Tucker The Man, by John Szwed The Real Ambassadors, by Penny M. Von Eschen Artistic Othering in Black Diaspora Musics: Preliminary Thoughts on Time, Culture, and Politics, by Kevin Gaines Notes on Jazz in Senegal, by Timothy R. Mangin Revisiting Romare Bearden's Art of Improvisation, by Diedra Harris-Kelley Louis Armstrong, Bricolage, and the Aesthetics of Swing, by Jorge Daniel Veneciano Checking Our Balances: Louis Armstrong, Ralph Ellison, and Betty Boop, by Robert G. O'Meally Paris Blues: Ellington, Armstrong, and Saying It with Music, by Krin Gabbard "How You Sound??": Amiri Baraka Writes Free Jazz, by William J. Harris The Literary Ellington, by Brent Hayes Edwards "Always New and Centuries Old": Jazz, Poetry and Tradition as Creative Adaptation, by Travis Jackson A Space We're All Immigrants From: Othering and Communitas in Nathaniel Mackey's Bedouin Hornbook, by Herman Beavers Exploding the Narrative in Jazz Improvisation, by Vijay Iyer Beneath the Underground: Exploring New Currents in "Jazz", by Robin D. G. Kelley , by v