Jammin' at the Margins: Jazz and the American Cinema

Jammin' at the Margins: Jazz and the American Cinema

by KrinGabbard (Author)

Synopsis

American cinema has long been fascinated by jazz and jazz musicians. Yet most jazz films aren't really about jazz. Rather, as Krin Gabbard shows, they create images of racial and sexual identity, many of which have become inseparable from popular notions of the music itself. In this work, Gabbard scrutinizes these films, exploring the fundamental obsessions that American culture has brought to jazz in the cinema. Gabbard's close look at jazz film biographies, from The Jazz Singer to Bird , reveals Hollywood's reluctance to acknowledge black subjectivity. Black and even white jazz artists have become vehicles for familiar Hollywood conceptions of race, gender and sexuality. Even Scorsese's New York, New York and Spike Lee's Mo' Better Blues have failed to disentangle themselves from entrenched stereotypes and conventions. Gabbard also examines Hollywood's confrontation with jazz as an elite art form, and the role of the jazz trumpet as a crucial signifier of masculinity. Finally, he considers the acting careers of Louis Armstrong, Nat King Cole and Hoagy Carmichael; Duke Ellington's extraordinary work in films from 1929 until the late 1960s; and the forgotten career of Kay Kyser, star of nine Hollywood films and leader of a popular swing band.

$36.42

Quantity

20+ in stock

More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 357
Edition: New edition
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 06 Jun 1996

ISBN 10: 0226277895
ISBN 13: 9780226277899

Author Bio
Krin Gabbard is professor of comparative literature and English at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and an amateur trumpet player.