Jazz Albums as Art
In the Process of Completing Research for This Issue, I Realized That What I Want to Say May Be Divided into Two Sections. Part One Surveys the General Topic of Album Art; Part Two (Outlined in the Accompanying Sidebar) Considers the Conspicuous Absence of Black Artists from the Process of Designing Jazz Packages: Covers, Liner Notes Etc. This Second Part Will Be Published in an Upcoming Issue.--R.G.O'M.
The enclosed portfolio of album cover art springs from my ongoing concern with the emergence in the United States of a jazz culture that has affected not only virtually all other music, here and elsewhere, but other forms of expression as well. This influence has been exceedingly potent in the visual arts world where for nearly a century, painters, sculptors, photographers, and filmmakers have been inspired by jazz to create visual counterparts of the music. Working in varied media, artists have not only created likenesses of the musicians and their instruments, they have attempted to capture formal aspects of the music itself--its rhythms, call/response exchanges, and impulses to improvise--in the work that they do as visual artists who want their work to swing.
In the process of pursuing these various lines of influence,(1) it has occurred to me that the jazz record album itself comprises a unique and significant item of American material culture (above all the covers but also the entire package, including the shellac, vinyl, and metal disks, the liner notes, and the sleeves and boxes that hold them). What follows here is a set of brief notes reflecting on the jazz record package or album as a unique multimedia creation deserving a comprehensive scholarly study and perhaps a museum show of...
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...ESCHICHTE UND ASTHETIK EINER SCHALLPLATTENVERPACKUN IN DEN USA NACH 1940 (Munchen: Scaneg, 1987).
3. See Martina Schmitz, "Facing the Music." PRINT 40 (March/April, 1986), pp. 88-99.
4. I refer to Sidney Finkelstein, JAZZ: A PEOPLES MUSIC (New York: Citadel Press, 1948).
5. Schmitz, ALBUM COVERS, p. 41 (Appendix).
6. Schmitz, "Facing the Music," p. 90.
7. Walter Herdeg, ed. RECORD COVERS (Zurich: Graphis Press, 1974).
8. Tom Piazza, SETTING THE TEMPO: FIFTY YEARS OF GREAT JAZZ LINER NOTES (New York: Doubleday, 1996).
9. Piazza, p. 1.
10. Piazza, p. 2.
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Bibliography:
INTL. REVIEW OF AFRICAN AMERICAN ART
Vol. 14, No. 3, 1997, pp. 38-47
Copyright (c) 1997 INTERNATIONAL REVIEW OF AFRICAN AMERICAN ART,
which is published by the Hampton University Museum.
By the end of World War I, Black Americans were facing their lowest point in history since slavery. Most of the blacks migrated to the northern states such as New York and Chicago. It was in New York where the “Harlem Renaissance” was born. This movement with jazz was used to rid of the restraints held against African Americans. One of the main reasons that jazz was so popular was that it allowed the performer to create the rhythm. With This in Mind performers realized that there could no...
Interview footage of her colleagues, fellow musicians, and friends such as Annie Ross, Buck Clayton, Mal Waldron, and Harry “Sweets” Edison look back on their years of friendship and experiences with the woman they affectionately call “Lady”. Their anecdotes, fond memories, and descriptive way of describing Holiday’s unique talent and style, show the Lady that they knew and loved. The film also makes interesting use of photographs and orignal recordings of Holiday, along with movie footage of different eras. With the use of these devices, we get a feel for what Holiday’s music meant for the audience it reached. The black and white footage from the thirties of groups of people merrily swing dancing, paired with a bumptious, and swingin’ number Billie Holiday performed with Count Basie called “Swing Me Count”, makes one wonder what it might have been like to actually be there. To wildly swing dance to the live vocals of Billie Holiday must have been an amazing experience, as this film demonstrates.
Throughout history, and even today, music has shaped America’s culture, society, and even politics. One of the most outstanding and enduring musical movement has been from African American artists, ranging from bebop to jazz to hip-hop to rap. During the 1920’s , jazz artists stepped into the limelight and began their impact on American and even world history. Louis Armstrong was one of the most influential leaders during the Harlem Renaissance and his jazz legacy and impact of American history is everlasting. A master of his craft, Armstrong and his music heavily influenced America’s white and black populations from the 1920’s and up until his death.
...frican American Musicians as Artists, Critics, and Activists. Berkeley, CA: University of California, 2002. 54-100. EBSCOhost. Web. 8 May 2015.
... Bohlman, Philip V. Music and the Racial Imagination. University Of Chicago Press, Chicago. 2001. Print.
Baldwin, James. “Sonny’s Blues.” The Jazz Fiction Anthology. Ed. Sascha Feinstein and David Rife. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2009. 17-48.
According to Albert Murray, the African-American musical tradition is “fundamentally stoical yet affirmative in spirit” (Star 3). Through the medium of the blues, African-Americans expressed a resilience of spirit which refused to be crippled by either poverty or racism. It is through music that the energies and dexterities of black American life are sounded and expressed (39). For the black culture in this country, the music of Basie or Ellington expressed a “wideawake, forward-tending” rhythm that one can not only dance to but live by (Star 39).
The word “jazz” is significant to America, and it has many meanings. Jazz could simply be defined as a genre or style of music that originated in America, but it can also be described as a movement which “bounced into the world somewhere about the year 1911…” . This is important because jazz is constantly changing, evolving, adapting, and improvising. By analyzing the creators, critics, and consumers of jazz in the context of cultural, political, and economic issue, I will illustrate the movement from the 1930’s swing era to the birth of bebop and modern jazz.
Sundquist, Eric J. “Ralph Ellison, Jazz, and Louis Armstrong.” Bloom’s Literature. Facts on File, Inc., 1995. Web. 9 Jan. 2014.
During the 1940’s the world found itself entangled in World War II. However, in the United States, a movement known as the Chicago Renaissance flushed through Illinois. An era of black literature, music and culture began. Specifically, jazz music became increasingly popular and was the popular hit of most hotspots located in Chicago and may other cities in the nation. In the painting Nightl...
"Dance in the Jazz Age." Dance in the Jazz Age. N.p., n.d. Web. 22 Dec. 2013. .
Albert, Richard N. "The Jazz-Blues Motif in James Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues"" College Literature 11.2 (1984): 171-85. College Literature. Web. Apr.-May 2014.
Music nurtured the African American tradition and their struggle towards equality in the same century.... ... middle of paper ... ... Greensboro, N.C.: Morgan Reynolds Pub. Carter, D. (2009).
“With the writing of Jazz, Morrison takes on new tasks and new risks. Jazz, for example, doesn’t fit the classic novel format in terms of design, sentence structure, or narration. Just like the music this novel is named after, the work is improvisational.”
Powell, A. (2007). The Music of African Americans and its Impact on the American Culture in the 1960’s and the 1970’s. Miller African Centered Academy, 1. Retrieved from http://www.chatham.edu/pti/curriculum/units/2007/Powell.pdf