Offers insights in jazz historiography, highlighting the political stakes in telling the story of the music and evaluating its cultural import in the United States. This book contains articles such as Salim Washington's meditation on Charles Mingus and the avant-garde or George Lipsitz's polemical juxtaposition of Ken Burns' documentary "Jazz".

Introductory Notes, by Robert G. O'Meally, Brent Hayes Edwards, and Farah Jasmine Griffin Songs of the Unsung: The Darby Hicks History of Jazz, by George Lipsitz "All the Things You Could Be by Now": Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus and the Limits of Avant-Garde Jazz, by Salim Washington Experimental Music in Black and White: The AACM in New York, 1970-1985, by George Lewis When Malindy Sings: A Meditation on Black Women's Vocality, by Farah Jasmine Griffin Hipsters, Bluebloods, Rebels, and Hooligans: The Cultural Politics of the Newport Jazz Festival, 1954-1960, by John Gennari Mainstreaming Monk: The Ellington Album, by Mark Tucker The Man, by John Szwed The Real Ambassadors, by Penny M. Von Eschen Artistic Othering in Black Diaspora Musics: Preliminary Thoughts on Time, Culture, and Politics, by Kevin Gaines Notes on Jazz in Senegal, by Timothy R. Mangin Revisiting Romare Bearden's Art of Improvisation, by Diedra Harris-Kelley Louis Armstrong, Bricolage, and the Aesthetics of Swing, by Jorge Daniel Veneciano Checking Our Balances: Louis Armstrong, Ralph Ellison, and Betty Boop, by Robert G. O'Meally Paris Blues: Ellington, Armstrong, and Saying It with Music, by Krin Gabbard "How You Sound??": Amiri Baraka Writes Free Jazz, by William J. Harris The Literary Ellington, by Brent Hayes Edwards "Always New and Centuries Old": Jazz, Poetry and Tradition as Creative Adaptation, by Travis Jackson A Space We're All Immigrants From: Othering and Communitas in Nathaniel Mackey's Bedouin Hornbook, by Herman Beavers Exploding the Narrative in Jazz Improvisation, by Vijay Iyer Beneath the Underground: Exploring New Currents in "Jazz", by Robin D. G. Kelley , by v

This collection of erudite essarys aptly captures the spirit of those conversations...This must-have tome ups the ante on jazz banter. -- John Murph Jazz Times It is also a delightful, accessible, and provocative read--a book that how jazz studies can contribute to a host of other fields. Choice An intellectually stimulating discussion of jazz and its many variations. -- Justin Adewale Collins Black Issues Book Review The focus and depth of these essays prove that this chorus can sing - and not just standards. -- Larry Blumenfeld Jazziz Uptown Conversation gives us that crystallized vision and is destined to become an important source of research and reflection for many years to come. -- Anne Farnsworth Jazz Notes Uptown Conversations... continue[s] this trajectory by moving away from jazz as a static object to be stylistically described, explained, and celebrated through the heroic and larger-than-life individual towards an understanding of jazz as a music in continual dialogue with the historical, social, political, racial, gendered process governing its creation. -- Niko Higgins Current Musicology The international community of serious jazz enthusiasts who pick up the book will be impressed. -- Theodore R. Hudson Ellingtonia

Uptown Conversation asserts that jazz is not only a music to define, it is a culture.Original essays cover jazz historiography, the political stakes of telling the story of the music, and its cultural import, including the music's experimental wing and revisionary takes on familiar figures in the canon: Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, and Louis Armstrong. The book also considers how settings outside the United States have transformed the music.