Nicolas Pillai – författare

What hasn't been said about Miles Davis?Much has been written about the jazz trumpeter and band leader, yet studies of Davis are often restricted to the groundbreaking acoustic jazz he produced between the 1940s and 50s. While more recent studies revisit his 1960s and 1970s work, Davis' later engagements with music, fashion, and the mainstream media are ripe for reassessment. Rethinking Miles Davis confronts familiar narratives about Davis and his music through a range of perspectives: from the ways Davis pushed jazz into new genre forms, re-envisioned jazz standards, and collaborated musically, to his role in the record companies that released his music, the persona he developed in video, film, and fashion, and how his masculinity manifested both professionally and personally. The collection includes a photo-essay of international jazz musicians' take on Davis' albums in which each musician explains the personal significance of a favourite recording. Ultimately, Rethinking Miles Davis challenges the orthodoxy of jazz criticism, repositioning Miles Davis within a larger framework of modernism and mass culture.

What hasn't been said about Miles Davis?Much has been written about the jazz trumpeter and band leader, yet studies of Davis are often restricted to the groundbreaking acoustic jazz he produced between the 1940s and 50s. While more recent studies revisit his 1960s and 1970s work, Davis' later engagements with music, fashion, and the mainstream media are ripe for reassessment. Rethinking Miles Davis confronts familiar narratives about Davis and his music through a range of perspectives: from the ways Davis pushed jazz into new genre forms, re-envisioned jazz standards, and collaborated musically, to his role in the record companies that released his music, the persona he developed in video, film, and fashion, and how his masculinity manifested both professionally and personally. The collection includes a photo-essay of international jazz musicians' take on Davis' albums in which each musician explains the personal significance of a favourite recording. Ultimately, Rethinking Miles Davis challenges the orthodoxy of jazz criticism, repositioning Miles Davis within a larger framework of modernism and mass culture.

New Jazz Conceptions: History, Theory, Practice is an edited collection that captures the cutting edge of British jazz studies in the early twenty-first century, highlighting the developing methodologies and growing interdisciplinary nature of the field. In particular, the collection breaks down barriers previously maintained between jazz historians, theorists and practitioners with an emphasis on interrogating binaries of national/local and professional/amateur. Each of these essays questions popular narratives of jazz, casting fresh light on the cultural processes and economic circumstances which create the music. Subjects covered include Duke Ellington’s relationship with the BBC, the impact of social media on jazz, a new view of the ban on visiting jazz musicians in interwar Britain, a study of Dave Brubeck as a transitional figure in the pages of Melody Maker and BBC2’s Jazz 625, the issue of ‘liveness’ in Columbia’s Ellington at Newport album, a musician and promoter's views of the relationship with audiences, a reflection on Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis and Eric Hobsbawm as jazz critics, a musician’s perspective on the oral and generational tradition of jazz in a British context, and a meditation on Alan Lomax’s Mr. Jelly Roll, and what it tells us about cultural memory and historical narratives of jazz.

This book provides a timely analysis of the relationship between jazz and recording and broadcast technologies in the early twentieth century. Jazz histories have traditionally privileged qualities such as authenticity, naturalness and spontaneity, but to do so overlooks jazz's status as a modernist, mechanised art form that evolved alongside the moving image and visual cultures. Jazz as Visual Language shows that the moving image is crucial to our understanding of what the materiality of jazz really is. Focusing on Len Lye's direct animation, Gjon Mili's experimental footage of musicians performing and the BBC's Jazz 625 series, this book places emphasis on film and television that conveys the 'sound of surprise' through formal innovation, rather than narrative structure. Nicolas Pillai seeks to refine a critical vocabulary of jazz and visual culture whilst arguing that jazz was never just a new sound; it was also a new way of seeing the world.