Eric Porter

An intellectual history of jazz traces its evolution through the words of the artists themselves, examining how the musicians actively shaped the institutional structure through which the music is created, distributed, and consumed. Simultaneous.

African American Musicians as Artists, Critics, and Activists

What Is This Thing Called Jazz?

Daniel Fischlin

The contributors to Playing for Keeps examine the ways in which musical improvisation can serve as a method for negotiating violence, trauma, systemic inequality, and the aftermaths of war and colonialism. Outlining the relation of improvisatory practices to local and global power structures, they show how in sites as varied as South Africa, Canada, Egypt, the United States, and the Canary Islands, improvisation provides the means for its participants to address the past and imagine the future. In addition to essays, the volume features a poem by saxophonist Matana Roberts, an interview with pianist Vijay Iyer about his work with U.S. veterans of color, and drawings by artist Randy DuBurke that chart Nina Simone's politicization. Throughout, the contributors illustrate how improvisation functions as a model for political, cultural, and ethical dialogue and action that can foster the creation of alternate modes of being and knowing in the world. Contributors. Randy DuBurke, Rana El Kadi, Kevin Fellezs, Daniel Fischlin, Kate Galloway, Reem Abdul Hadi, Vijay Iyer, Mark Lomanno, Moshe Morad, Eric Porter, Sara Ramshaw, Matana Roberts, Darci Sprengel, Paul Stapleton, Odeh Turjman, Stephanie Vos

Improvisation in the Aftermath

Playing for Keeps

Extends the field of improvisation studies in a more global, transcultural direction

Improvisation and Transcultural Difference

Sound Changes

Lewis Watts

With New Orleans Suite, Eric Porter and Lewis Watts join the post-Katrina conversation about New Orleans and its changing cultural scene. Using both visual evidence and the written word, Watts and Porter pay homage to the city, its region, and its residents, by mapping recent and often contradictory social and cultural transformations, and seeking to counter inadequate and often pejorative accounts of the people and place that give New Orleans its soul. Focusing for the most part on the city’s African American community, New Orleans Suite is a story about people: how bad things have happened to them in the long and short run, how they have persevered by drawing upon and transforming their cultural practices, and what they can teach us about citizenship, politics, and society.

Music and Culture in Transition

New Orleans Suite

"PLAYING FOR KEEPS is an edited volume of essays exploring the global dimensions of musical improvisation. The editors are interested in what they call the "aftermaths" associated with improvisational music practices: the various ways musical improvisation can respond in the aftermath of trauma, and the imagined possibilities that lie in the wake of improvisatory performance. The volume is presented as global case studies, each offering an example of how musical improvisation can foster communal responses to the realities of colonialism, imperialism, and war. By turning its attention to the global scale, this volume seeks to complicate the notion, popular within North American contexts, that improvisation necessarily leads to liberation. Instead, the editors seek to situate improvisation within local contexts, and, by examining how improvisational music practices are enmeshed in local and global power structures, point to improvisation as a site of potentiality. The volume is comprised of twelve chapters, with an introduction by the editors. Chapter One, Matana Roberts's poem "manifesto," stages improvisatory practice on the page in the form of a response to the Preamble of the United States Constitution. In chapter 2, Stephanie Vos examines the communal response to the burglary of the Zimology Institute in South Africa-an institute dedicated to educational programs about musical improvisation-which itself took the form of an improvisational music performance. Chapter 4, an interview with jazz musician and composer Vijay Iyer, examines Iyer's collaborative project Holding it Down, a performance of poetry and music that explores the experiences of US veterans of color. This chapter, in particular, complicates notions of improvisation, as Iyer claims that both oppressed people and their oppressors use improvisatory practices to accomplish their respective goals. In Chapter 8 Darci Sprengel documents the use of Tarab, a practice of "deep listening" that dissolves the distinction between self and other, by Mini Mobile Concerts (MMC), an improvisational concert group active in post-Mubarak Egypt. In particular, Sprengel focuses on how the improvisational practices of MMC addressed the topic of sexual assault, thereby renegotiating the gendered public space of the street. Chapter 9, an interview with Reem Abdul Hadi and Odej Turjman of the Al Mada Association for Art-Based Community, examines how Palestinians in the Occupied West Bank and Palestine use music improvisation to negotiate the erasure of their land, culture, and identity. Other locations explored in the volume include Afro/Canarian jazz in the Canary Islands; indigenous music practices in Canada; jazz and civil rights in the United States; and popular music in Israel. This volume will be of interest to scholars of jazz, music studies, performance theory, and cultural studies, as well as colonial and postcolonial studies"--

The Problem of the Future World is a compelling reassessment of the later writings of the iconic African American activist and intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois. As Eric Porter points out, despite the outpouring of scholarship devoted to Du Bois, the broad range of writing he produced during the 1940s and early 1950s has not been thoroughly examined in its historical context, nor has sufficient attention been paid to the theoretical interventions he made during those years. Porter locates Du Bois’s later work in relation to what he calls “the first postracial moment.” He suggests that Du Bois’s midcentury writings are so distinctive and so relevant for contemporary scholarship because they were attuned to the shape-shifting character of modern racism, and in particular to the ways that discredited racial taxonomies remained embedded and in force in existing political-economic arrangements at both the local and global levels. Porter moves the conversation about Du Bois and race forward by building on existing work about the theorist, systematically examining his later writings, and looking at them from new perspectives, partly by drawing on recent scholarship on race, neoliberalism, and empire. The Problem of the Future World shows how Du Bois’s later writings help to address race and racism as protean, global phenomena in the present.

W. E. B. Du Bois and the Race Concept at Midcentury

The Problem of the Future World

Despite the plethora of writing about jazz, little attention has been paid to what musicians themselves wrote and said about their practice. An implicit division of labor has emerged where, for the most part, black artists invent and play music while white writers provide the commentary. Eric Porter overturns this tendency in his creative intellectual history of African American musicians. He foregrounds the often-ignored ideas of these artists, analyzing them in the context of meanings circulating around jazz, as well as in relationship to broader currents in African American thought. Porter examines several crucial moments in the history of jazz: the formative years of the 1920s and 1930s; the emergence of bebop; the political and experimental projects of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s; and the debates surrounding Jazz at Lincoln Center under the direction of Wynton Marsalis. Louis Armstrong, Anthony Braxton, Marion Brown, Duke Ellington, W.C. Handy, Yusef Lateef, Abbey Lincoln, Charles Mingus, Archie Shepp, Wadada Leo Smith, Mary Lou Williams, and Reggie Workman also feature prominently in this book. The wealth of information Porter uncovers shows how these musicians have expressed themselves in print; actively shaped the institutional structures through which the music is created, distributed, and consumed, and how they aligned themselves with other artists and activists, and how they were influenced by forces of class and gender. What Is This Thing Called Jazz? challenges interpretive orthodoxies by showing how much black jazz musicians have struggled against both the racism of the dominant culture and the prescriptive definitions of racial authenticity propagated by the music's supporters, both white and black.

Eric Porter

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