Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, And Miles Davis: A Twentieth-Century Transnational Biography - 9781498567510

This book addresses how Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Miles Davis were distinctively global symbols of threatening and non-threatening black-transnational masculinity, reintroducing jazz to its international routes and challenging US exceptionalist definitions of jazz as uniquely American. Noting African-American jazz performers' shifting racial, gender, sexual, class, national, and transnational formations and representative of jazz's international histories, this book centers Armstrong, Ellington, and Davis in debates over US popular-musical exceptionalism, noting the ways these musicians have been a part of definitions of jazz as a jingoistic and exclusively US form of popular culture. Armstrong, Ellington, and Davis performed groundbreaking jazz and lived their lives in radically contrasting ways, acting as countercultural and conservative jazz icons, disturbing claims of the musical culture as distinctly American throughout the twentieth century, from the 1920s Jazz Age to the 1930s Great Depression, the cultural Cold War, and the Reagan Era. As each pushed jazz into creative and alternative realms, Armstrong, Ellington, and Davis fused jazz with transnational traditions and genres. Without them, jazz would lack some of its most innovative, challenging, and aesthetically pleasing sounds. Book jacket.

• | Author: Aaron E. Lefkovitz
• | Publisher: Lexington Books
• | Publication Date: Jun 20, 2018
• | Number of Pages: 226 pages
• | Language: English
• | Binding: Hardcover
• | ISBN-10: 1498567517
• | ISBN-13: 9781498567510