How does the jazz of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Fats Waller, Billie Holiday, and Charlie Parker fit into the great tradition of modernist art? In this book, an eminent cultural historian provides the answer and offers a brilliant new way of understanding jazz.

Jazz Modernism: From Ellington and Armstrong to Matisse and Joyce

Arts & Photography

Appel Jr., Alfred

Music

Yale University Press

How does the jazz of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Fats Waller, Billie Holiday, and Charlie Parker fit into the great tradition of the modern arts between 1920 and 1950? In Jazz Modernism, one of our finest cultural historians provides the answer. Alfred Appel, author of The Annotated Lolita ("superb . . . full of vigor, gems, and stratagems"--Vladimir Nabokov), compares the layering of sex, vitality, and the vernacular in jazz with the paper collages of Picasso, and the vital mix of high and low culture found in Joyce. He shows how the musical construct of jazz was pared down by the masters as sculpture was in Calder's hands or prose in Hemingway's. He makes clear how Armstrong and Waller tore apart and rebuilt Tin Pan Alley material in the way that modernists in the visual arts arrived at wood assemblage and scrap-metal sculpture. He enables us to see that Ellington's "jungle" style was as un-primitive as Brancusi's self-conscious Africanesque sculpture. And along the way, he "recalls" live jazz perform-ances during the 1950s by Armstrong and John Coltrane, among others, and the night Charlie Parker played to a visibly thrilled Igor Stravinsky at Birdland. Making connections as illuminating as they are unexpected, Alfred Appel gives us a brilliant new way of understanding jazz.

KNOPF

Signs of Life

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1973.

Bitter Air of Exile: Russian Writers in the West, 1922-1972

Literature & Fiction

Karlinsky, Simon

History & Criticism

University of California Press

A celebration of twentieth-century art analyzes the cultural interconnections among more than one hundred examples of modern painting, literature, sculpture, music, and photography

The Art of Celebration: Twentieth-Century Painting, Literature, Sculpture, Photography, and

The annotated text of this modern classic. It assiduously illuminates the extravagant wordplay and the frequent literary allusions, parodies, and cross-references. Edited with a preface, introduction and notes by Alfred Appel, Jr.

The Annotated Lolita: Revised and Updated

Humor & Entertainment

NABOKOV,Vladimir

Humor

Vintage

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Books by Appel Jr., Alfred