Forward Groove: Jazz and the Real World from Louis Armstrong to Gilad Atzmon

Forward Groove is a powerfully eclectic survey of recorded jazz from 1923 to 2008, seeking to show jazz as a commentary on the social world of some of its finest musicians, from the great migrations north to Chicago and New York in the twenties and thirties, the campaigns against lynching and Jim Crow racism, the Civil Rights protests and the Vietnam anti-war movement of the fifties and sixties, to the South African anti-apartheid struggles in the sixties and seventies. The jazz art, insists Searle, is anything but mere entertainment; it is part of a culture of resistance, a music striving to build a framework of social and political justice.

Searle shows that a vital dimension of jazz has always been to create a better, more joyous world, from Louis Armstrong's "Coal Cart Blues", the lyrics of Bessie Smith and the Harlem rhapsodies of Duke Ellington, to Charlie Parker's "Now's the Time", the new sounds of John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman and the commitment of Archie Shepp, and on to the contemporary Palestinian cry of Gilad Atzmon's alto saxophone.

Forward Groove is a stimulating and provocative study of one of the great musical forms of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

CONTENIDO

Introduction
1. Workin' Man and Strugglin' Woman Blues
2. Jump for Joy
3. Now's the Time
4. Freedom Suite
5. Not in Our Name
6. Flowers for Emmett Till
7. Black Lightning
8. Sacred Common Ground
9. Tailpiece - the grooves continues
Books cited
Quotation credits
Index