Anyone interested in learning about a distinct music--jazz--will welcome this newest addition to the popular 101 reference series. Noted anthropologist, critic, and musical scholar John F. Szwed takes readers on a tour of the music's tangled history, and explores how it developed from an ethnic music to become North America's most popular music and then part of the avant garde in less than fifty years. Jazz 101 presents the key figures, history, theory, and controversies that shaped its development, along with a discussion of some of its most important recordings.

Black Gods of the Metropolis Negro Religious Cults of the Urban North Arthur Huff Fauset. Foreword by Barbara Dianne Savage. Introduction by John Szwed "A foundational text in fields as diverse as religion and urban studies, Black studies and anthropology--a must read "--Lee D. Baker, author of From Savage to Negro "Fauset's falls into the select group that includes works of Ralph Ellison, LeRoi Jones, and Albert Murray, that is, the writings of those who have best recognized the distinctiveness and power of Afro-American culture, and given it its proper place in the world."--John F....

Crossovers Essays on Race, Music, and American Culture John Szwed "In this collection of thirty-one short articles, essays, and reviews written over a thirty-six-year period, John Szwed consistently displays the extraordinary imagination and ingenuity that have made him one of the most respected scholars in African-American and Afro-diasporic Studies. Crossovers is both a revealing intellectual history of Szwed's development as a scholar and critic, and a unified and integrated argument on behalf of the aesthetic, moral, and political genius of the African diaspora."--George Lipsitz,...

Miles Davis was one of the crucial influences in the development of modern jazz. This book tells the story of Miles' childhood, his depressions and his relationship with heroin as well as the more familiar public career.

Three prominent folklorists wrote these essays in the 1970s about Dorrance Weir of upstate New York and his song "Take that Night Train to Selma," Joe Scott of Maine and his song "The Plain Golden Band," and Paul Hall of Newfoundland and "The Bachelor's Song."