Taking to heart Ralph Ellison's remark that much in American life is "jazz-shaped," The Jazz Cadence of American Culture offers a wide range of eloquent statements about the influence of this art form. Robert G. O'Meally has gathered a comprehensive collection of important essays, speeches, and interviews on the impact of jazz on other arts, on politics, and on the rhythm of everyday life. Focusing mainly on American artistic expression from 1920 to 1970, O'Meally confronts a long era of political and artistic turbulence and change in which American art forms influenced one another in...

Jackson Pollock dancing to the music as he painted; Romare Bearden's stage and costume designs for Alvin Ailey and Dianne McIntyre; Stanley Crouch stirring his high-powered essays in a room where a drumkit stands at the center: from the perspective of the new jazz studies, jazz is not only a music to define--it is a culture. Considering musicians and filmmakers, painters and poets, the intellectual improvisations in Uptown Conversation reevaluate, reimagine, and riff on the music that has for more than a century initiated a call and response across art forms, geographies, and cultures....

"Billie Holiday deserves a biography in which her musicianship isn't overshadowed by the tragic events of her life. O'Meally has written that book," says Entertainment Weekly about this absorbing and authoritative account of the greatest jazz singer in history. O'Meally emphasizes Holiday's artistry and training rather than her personal miseries, and he uses voluminous archival material to correct common myths about Holiday. Chronicling her rigorous musical apprenticeship in Baltimore, her reception in New York by Benny Goodman and Duke Ellington, and her work with various musicians,...

Published less than fifty years ago, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man shares with older classic works the odd quality of seeming to have been in place much longer. It is a novel that encompasses much of the American scene and character: though told by a single Afro-American voice and set in the contemporary South and then in modern New York City, its references are to the First World War, to Reconstruction, to the Civil War and slavery, to the founding of the American republic, to Columbus, and to the country's frontier past. In his introduction to this volume Robert O'Meally discusses Ellison's...