Landing On The Wrong Note: Jazz, Dissonance And Critical Pract

Description:
This is a study of jazz from two perspectives: as a cultural and musical form, and as the subject of cultural theory. If jazz is the most sophisticated, even cerebral, of popular musical genres, what can literary and cultural theory contribute to our understanding of it? By intermingling personal anecdote, observation, and conversation with jazz artists, as well as deploying the materials of cultural theory (gender, psychoanalysis, and so forth), Ajay Heble offers an imaginative tool for understanding what it is that jazz does.

Table of Contents:
Preface Acknowledgements Introduction 1. The Poetics of Jazz: From Symbolic to Semiotic 2. The Rehistoricizing of Jazz: Chicago's 'Urban Bushmen' and the Problem of Representation 3. Performing Identity: Jazz Autobiography and the Politics of Literary Improvisation 4. 'Space is the Place': Jazz, Voice, and Resistance 5. Nice Work If You Can Get It: Women in Jazz 6. Capitulating to Barbarism: Jazz and/as Popular Culture 7. Up for Grabs: The Ethicopolitical Authority of Jazz Conclusion Works Cited Sound and Video Recordings Consulted