In 1971, French jazz critics Philippe Carles and Jean-Louis Comolli co-wrote Free Jazz/Black Power, a treatise on the racial and political implications of jazz and jazz criticism. It remains a testimony to the long ignored encounter of radical African American music and French left-wing criticism. Carles and Comolli set out to defend a genre vilified by jazz critics on both sides of the Atlantic by exposing the new sound's ties to African American culture, history, and the political struggle that was raging in the early 1970s. The two offered a political and cultural history of black presence in the United States to shed more light on the dubious role played by jazz criticism in racial oppression.
This analysis of jazz criticism and its production is astutely self-aware. It critiques the critics, building a work of cultural studies in a time and place where the practice was virtually unknown. The authors reached radical conclusions--free jazz was a revolutionary reaction against white domination, was the musical counterpart to the Black Power movement, and was a music that demanded a similar political commitment. The impact of this book is difficult to overstate, as it made readers reconsider their response to African American music. In some cases it changed the way musicians thought about and played jazz. Free Jazz / Black Power remains indispensable to the study of the relation of American free jazz to European audiences, critics, and artists. This monumental critique caught the spirit of its time and also realigned that zeitgeist.

Free Jazz/Black Power (American Made Music Series)

Arts & Photography

Carles, Philippe

Comolli, Jean-Louis

Music

UNIVERSITY PRESS OF MISSISSIPPI

Free jazz Black power

Literature & Fiction

Essays & Correspondence

Фоліо

Dictionnaire du jazz

Clergeat, André

ROBERT LAFFONT

Daech, le cinéma et la mort

VERDIER

Jean-Louis Comolliâ€™s six-part essay Technique and Ideologyhad a revolutionary effect on film theory and history when it first appeared in Cahiers du CinÃ©ma in 1971. In 2009, Comolli revisited his earlier text, arguing that the present age, marked by the total dominance of media-filtered spectacle over image production, makes the need for an 'emancipated, critical spectator' more pressing than ever. In this volume, Daniel Fairfax presents annotated translations of these two texts to provide an overview of Comolliâ€™s activity as both a theorist and a filmmaker.

Cinema Against Spectacle: Technique and Ideology Revisited (Film Theory in Media History)

Photography & Video

Amsterdam University Press

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