Search results for ""Author John Szwed""

Ranging across genres from the popular to the scholarly, this selection of John Szwed's published essays abides in the intersection of race and art, jazz and rap: crossovers inside and outside the academy. With reviews written for the Village Voice and articles from academic journals, this volume includes essays, commentary, and meditations on James Agee and Walker Evans, Cuban folklorist Lydia Cabrera, Lafcadio Hearn, Melville Herskovits, Josef Skorvecky, Patrick Chamoiseau, pop song writer Ellie Greenwich, and jazz musicians Sonny Rollins, Anthony Braxton, Sun Ra, and Ornette Coleman. Also included are pieces on the prehistory of hip hop, the blues, popular dance instruction songs, tap dance, and African American set dancing; creole writing and creolization; race and culture; and authenticity, representation, nostalgia, and obscenity in American popular culture, with excursions into jazz in Africa, Russia, and Argentina. Written about a country with cultural crossroads everywhere, where the question of race is thoroughly woven into the fabric of society, these essays cross boundaries and shed light on the complexities of American life.

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He was an anthropologist, a filmmaker, a painter, a folklorist, a mystic, and a walking encyclopedia. He taught Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe about the occult, swapped drugs with Timothy Leary, jammed with Thelonious Monk, lived with Allen Ginsberg, and received one of the first Guggenheim grants. He was always broke, frequently intoxicated, compulsively irascible, and unimpeachably authentic. Harry Smith was, in the words of Robert Frank, “the only person I met in my life that transcended everything.” In Cosmic Scholar, the celebrated biographer John Szwed reconstructs, for the first time, the life of one of the twentieth century’s most overlooked cultural figures. From his time recording the customs of Native American tribes to living in Greenwich Village in its heyday, Smith was consumed by an unceasing desire to create a unified theory of culture. He was an insatiable collector, responsible for the influential Anthology of American Folk Music and several pioneering experimental films, but he was also a destructive eccentric who was unable to survive in regular society or keep himself healthy or sober. Exhaustively researched, energetically told, and complete with a trove of images, Cosmic Scholar is a feat of biographical restoration and the long-overdue deification of an American icon.

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Named one of the Best Books of 2023 by the New Yorker and The New York Times'' Dwight GarnerThe first comprehensive biography of this hipster magus . . . [John Szwed] allows different sides of Smith's personality to catch blades of sun. He brings the right mixture of reverence and comic incredulity to his task. Dwight Garner, The New York TimesGrammy Awardwinning music scholar and celebrated biographer John Szwed presents the first biography of Harry Smith, the brilliant eccentric who transformed twentieth century art and culture.He was an anthropologist, filmmaker, painter, folklorist, mystic, and walking encyclopedia. He taught Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe about the occult, swapped drugs with Timothy Leary, had a front-row seat to a young Thelonious Monk, lived with (and tortured) Allen Ginsberg, was admired by Susan Sontag, and was one of the first artists funded by Guggenheim Foundation. He was always broke

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This ground-breaking biography is as much about Sun Ra's music as it is about his passionate, often wildly unorthodox views on the galaxy, black people and spiritual matters. With the various incarnations of his inimitable Arkestra, his repertoire ranged from boogie-woogie to swing to be-bop to fusion to New Age, and his influence extended throughout the jazz and rock worlds. While Sun Ra made a lifelong effort to obscure many of the facts of his early years, he did acknowledge that he was born on the planet Saturn. John Szwed has succeeded brilliantly in delving into and evoking the life and work of this extraordinary artist.

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