Black & Blue
Jazz Stories
- Publisher
- Vehicule Press
- Initial publish date
- Sep 2022
- Category
- Jazz, Essays, History & Criticism
-
Paperback / softback
- ISBN
- 9781550656114
- Publish Date
- Sep 2022
- List Price
- $21.95
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Description
Author and radio personality Stanley Péan is a jazz scholar who takes us seamlessly and knowledgeably through the history of the music, stopping at a number of high points along the way. He gets behind the scenes with anecdotes that tell much about the misunderstandings that have surrounded the music. How could French existentialist writer Jean-Paul Sartre have mixed up Afro-Canadian songwriter Shelton Brooks with the Jewish-American belter Sophie Tucker? What is the real story behind the searing classic "Strange Fruit" made immortal by Billie Holiday, who at first balked at performing it? Who knew that an Ohio housewife named Sadie Vimmerstedt was behind the revenge song "I wanna be around to pick up the pieces when somebody breaks your heart?" And since this is jazz, there is no shortage of sad ends: Bix Beiderbecke, Chet Baker, Lee Morgan, to name a few.
Jazz is liberation music, from Fats Waller to Duke Ellington to John Coltrane who walked side by side with Martin Luther King with his piece "Alabama." Péan shows how musicians like Miles Davis worked with the emerging voices of hip-hop to widen jazz's audience. The intricate crisscross between Black musical forms, from Marvin Gaye to the Last Poets is explored, as well as how the movies, Hollywood and European cinema alike, tried to use jazz, often whitening it in the process (with the exception of Spike Lee).
About the authors
Stanley Péan was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, in the spring of 1966, and he grew up in the Saguenay region of Quebec, where his parents settled after immigrating in the fall of that same year. A writer and cultural journalist, over the last thirty years, he has published twenty-five works in a variety of genres: novels, short story collections, essays, and fiction for young readers. A music lover, every night of the week Péan hosts a jazz show on ICI Musique, Radio-Canada's music channel. And though he is past fifty, he still has not learned to drive. Which explains the taxis...
David Homel has translated over 30 books, many by Quebec authors. He won the Governor General's Literary Award in translation in 1995 for Why Must a Black Writer Write About Sex? by Dany Laferrière; his translation of Laferrière's How to Make Love to a Negro was nominated in 1988; and he won the prize in 2001 with fellow translator Fred A. Reed for Fairy Wing. His novels, which include Sonya & Jack, Electrical Storms, and The Speaking Cure have been published in several languages. Homel lives in Montreal, Quebec.
