The essays contained in this volume address some of the most visible, durable and influential of African American musical styles as they developed from the mid-1960s into the 21st-century. Soul, funk, pop, R&B and hip hop practices are explored both singly and in their many convergences, and in writings that have often become regarded as landmarks in black musical scholarship. These works employ a wide range of methodologies, and taken together they show the themes and concerns of academic black musical study developing over three decades. While much of the writing here is focused on music...

How did French musicians and critics interpret jazz that quintessentially American music in the mid-twentieth century? How far did players reshape what they learned from records and visitors into more local jazz forms, and how did the music figure in those angry debates that so often suffused French cultural and political life?After Djangobegins with the famous interwar triumphs of Josephine Baker and Django Reinhardt, but, for the first time, the focus here falls on the French jazz practices of the postwar era. The work of important but neglected French musicians such as Andre Hodeir...