The Power of Black Music: Interpreting Its History from Africa to the United States
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.88 (775 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0195109759 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 336 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2014-08-06 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
Your library needs this book! This book is a classic and seminal work researching Black Music. It is a must read for those interested in culture and history. A radical presentation of African American music nadav haber I am thankful to Guthrie Ramsey who referred to this book in his book "Race Music", and made me buy it and read it. There is no doubt in my mind that this is a must for anyone interested in African American music.The book begins with the spiritual-mythological aspects of African life - and their musical expressions. He shows how these aspects were brought to America with the tranplanted and enslaved Africans. Floyd generalizes th. Very wordy and hard to keep up with. Throws Very wordy and hard to keep up with. Throws out a ton of names to the reader at a time and its hard to keep up with what the book is saying.
From Booklist African American music deserves but seldom gets as much attention from academics as from music critics. Aaron Cohen. Drawing on the works of prominent cultural theorists, such as Henry Louis Gates, Floyd traces the key elements in the music's panorama to an aesthetic that is still clearly linked to African myths and rituals (one example he cites is call-and-response technique, which is pervasive throughout many stylistic categories). A midwesterner, Floyd attends to the historically important but frequently overlooked Chicago Renaissance of black cultural activity and to the influential composers from that city as well as to the more familiar Harlem effloresce
For example, in speaking of his grandfather Omar, who died a slave as a young man, the jazz clarinetist Sidney Bechet said, "Inside him he'd got the memory of all the wrong that's been done to my people. Inspired by the pioneering work of Sterling Stuckey and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., author Samuel A. Floyd maintains that while African Americans may not have direct knowledge of African traditions and myths, they can intuitively recognize links to an authentic African cultural memory. When Jimi Hendrix transfixed the crowds of Woodstock with his gripping version of "The Star Spangled Banner," he was building on a foundation reaching back, in part, to the revolutionary guitar playing of Howlin' Wolf and the other great Chicago bluesmen, and to the Delta blues tradition before him. Floyd dismisses the assumption that Africans brought to the United States as slaves took the music of whites in the New World and transformed it through their own performance practices. But in its unforgettable introduction, followed by his unaccompanied "talking" guitar passage and inserted calls and responses at key points in the musical narrative, Hendrix's performance of the national anthem also hearkened back to a tradition even older than the blues