Description
Book SynopsisIn jazz circles, players and listeners with "big ears" hear and engage complexity in the moment, as it unfolds. Taking gender as part of the intricate, unpredictable action in jazz culture, this title explores the terrain opened up by listening, with big ears, for gender in jazz.
Trade Review“
Big Ears is a breath of fresh air in contemporary jazz studies. Whereas the field has exploded during the last several years, this is the first volume specifically devoted to new work on gender and jazz. The essays here are wide-ranging in form, content, and method. They pay admirable attention to jazz across media (in film, concerts, recordings) and in international, not just U.S., contexts.”—
Gayle Wald, author of
Shout, Sister, Shout! The Untold Story of Rock-and-Roll Trailblazer Sister Rosetta Tharpe“Opening new vistas upon the study of jazz in the humanities, Nichole T. Rustin and Sherrie Tucker guide a vibrant and profound conversation at the nexus of performance studies, film and literary studies, gender studies, and many other fields. The unprecedented range and scope of this essential new collection affirm the centrality of improvisation to our understanding of culture.”—
George E. Lewis, author of
A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental MusicTable of ContentsAcknowledgments vii
Introduction / Nichole T. Rustin and Sherrie Tucker 1
Part I. Rooting Gender in Jazz History
Separated at "Birth": Singing and the History of Jazz / Lara Pellegrinelli 31
With Lovie and Lil: Rediscovering Two Chicago Pianists of the 1920s / Jeffrey Taylor 48
Gender, Jazz, and the Popular Front / Monica Hairston 64
"The Battle of the Saxes": Gender, Dance Bands, and British Nationalism in the Second World War / Christina Baade 90
Identity for Sale: Glenn Miller, Wynton Marsalis, and Cultural Replay in Music / Tracy McMullen 129
Part II. Improvising Gender: Embodiment and Performance
From the Point of View of the Pavement: A Geopolitics of Black Dance / Jayna Brown 157
Perverse Hysterics: The Noisy
Cri of Les Diaboliques / Julie Dawn Smith 180
"Born Out of Jazz . . . Yet Embracing All Music": Race, Gender, and Technology in George Russell's Lydian Chromatic Concept / Eric Porter 210
"But This Music is Mine Already!" : "White Woman" as Jazz Collector in the Film
New Orleans (1947) / Sherrie Tucker 235
Fitting the Part / Ingrid Monson 267
Part III. Reimagining Jazz Representations
"Better a Jazz Album Than Lipstick" (
Lieber Jazzplatte Als Lippenstift): The 1956
Jazz Podium Series Reveals Images of Jazz and Gender in Postwar Germany / Ursel Schlicht 291
Exclusion, Openness, and Utopia in Black Male Performance at the World Stage Jazz Jam Sessions / João H. Costa Vargas 320
"It Takes Two People to Confirm the Truth": The Jazz Fiction of Sherley Ann Williams and Toni Cade Bambara / Farah Jasmine Griffin 348
"Blow, Man, Blow!": Representing Gender, White Primitives, and Jazz Melodrama Through
A Young Man With A Horn / Nichole T. Rustin 361
The Gendered Jazz Aesthetics of
That Man of Man: The International Sweethearts of Rhythm and Independent Black Sound Film / Kristin McGee 393
Bibliography 423
Contributors 435
Index 441
