In Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, pianist Randy Weston and bassist Ahmed Abdul-Malik celebrated with song the revolutions spreading across Africa. In Ghana and South Africa, drummer Guy Warren and vocalist Sathima Bea Benjamin fused local musical forms with the dizzying innovations of modern jazz. These four were among hundreds of musicians in the 1950's and '60's who forged connections between jazz and Africa that definitively reshaped both their music and the world. Each artist identified in particular ways with Africa's struggle for liberation and made music dedicated to, or inspired by, demands for independence and self-determination. That music was the wild, boundary-breaking exultation of modern jazz. The result was an abundance of conversation, collaboration, and tension between African and African American musicians during the era of decolonization. This collective biography demonstrates how modern Africa reshaped jazz, how modern jazz helped form a new African identity, and how musical convergences and crossings altered politics and culture on both continents. In a crucial moment when freedom electrified the African diaspora, these black artists sought one another out to create new modes of expression. Documenting individuals and places, from Lagos to Chicago, from New York to Cape Town, Robin Kelley gives us a meditation on modernity: we see innovation not as an imposition from the West but rather as indigenous, multilingual, and messy, the result of innumerable exchanges across a breadth of cultures.

Explores how jazz helped propel the rise of African American Islam during the era of global Black liberation Amid the social change and liberation of the civil rights and Black Power movements, the tenor saxophonist Archie Shepp recorded a tribute to Malcolm X’s emancipatory political consciousness. Shepp saw similarities between his revolutionary hero and John Coltrane, one of the most influential jazz musicians of the era. Later, the esteemed trumpeter Miles Davis echoed Shepp’s sentiment, recognizing that Coltrane’s music represented the very passion, rage, rebellion, and love that Malcolm X preached. Soundtrack to a Movement examines the link between the revolutionary Black Islam of the post-WWII generation and jazz music. It argues that from the late 1940s and ’50s though the 1970s, Islam rose in prominence among African Americans in part because of the embrace of the religion among jazz musicians. The book demonstrates that the values that Islam and jazz shared—Black affirmation, freedom, and self-determination—were key to the growth of African American Islamic communities, and that it was jazz musicians who led the way in shaping encounters with Islam as they developed a Black Atlantic “cool” that shaped both Black religion and jazz styles. Soundtrack to a Movement demonstrates how by expressing their values through the rejection of systemic racism, the construction of Black notions of masculinity and femininity, and the development of an African American religious internationalism, both jazz musicians and Black Muslims engaged with a global Black consciousness and interconnected resistance movements in the African diaspora and Africa.

The distinguished scholar Steven Feld shaped the field of the anthropology of sound and music. In this new work, he looks at the vernacular cosmopolitanism of a group of jazz players in Ghana, including some who have traveled widely, played with American jazz greats, and blended Coltrane with local instruments and philosophy. He describes their cosmopolitan outlook as an accoustemology, a way of knowing the world through sound. Feld combines memoir, biography, ethnography, and history, telling a story of diasporic intimacy and dialogue that contests both American nationalist and Afrocentric narrations of jazz history.

From scouring flea markets and eBay to maxing out their credit cards, record collectors will do just about anything to score a long-sought-after album. In Vinyl Freak, music writer, curator, and collector John Corbett burrows deep inside the record fiend’s mind, documenting and reflecting on his decades-long love affair with vinyl. Discussing more than 200 rare and out-of-print LPs, Vinyl Freak is composed in part of Corbett's long-running DownBeat magazine column of the same name, which was devoted to records that had not appeared on CD. In other essays where he combines memoir and criticism, Corbett considers the current vinyl boom, explains why vinyl is his preferred medium, profiles collector subcultures, and recounts his adventures assembling the Alton Abraham Sun Ra Archive, an event so all-consuming that he claims it cured his record-collecting addiction. Perfect for vinyl newbies and veteran crate diggers alike, Vinyl Freak plumbs the motivations that drive Corbett and collectors everywhere.

This volume focuses on how music and arts in the global Africana world are used for political and social change. It will be an essential resource for scholars and students in African studies, Africana, Afro-Atlantic studies, diaspora studies, sociology, music, literature, politics and culture. The volume is divided into three sections, namely “Music and Politics”, “Case Studies of Experiential Practices in Healing and Education”, and “Literature, the Arts, and Political Expression”, which cross subject areas such as nationalism, political identity, post-coloniality, health, education, orality, and cultural expressivity. Diverse topics are covered, such as the African thematics of jazz, the Y’en a Marre/Fed Up movement in Senegal, the Occupy Nigeria movement, NGO activism in Brazil, and Africana performance traditions, as well as the dynamics of oral and written literature. The articles explore works by Joseph Conrad, Nathaniel Mackey, Kofi Awoonor, and Ngugi wa Thiong’o, as well as the artistic expression of Jean-Michel Basquiat.

Africa in Stereo analyzes how Africans have engaged with African American music and its representations in the long twentieth century (1890-2011) to offer a new cultural history attesting to pan-Africanism's ongoing and open theoretical potential. Tsitsi Jaji argues that African American popular music appealed to continental Africans as a unit of cultural prestige, a site of pleasure, and most importantly, an expressive form already encoded with strategies of creative resistance to racial hegemony. Ghana, Senegal and South Africa are considered as three distinctive sites where longstanding pan-African political and cultural affiliations gave expression to transnational black solidarity. The book shows how such transnational ties fostered what Jaji terms "stereomodernism." Attending to the specificity of various media through which music was transmitted and interpreted-poetry, novels, films, recordings, festivals, live performances and websites-stereomodernism accounts for the role of cultural practice in the emergence of solidarity, tapping music's capacity to refresh our understanding of twentieth-century black transnational ties.

In this transnational account of black protest, Nicholas Grant examines how African Americans engaged with, supported, and were inspired by the South African anti-apartheid movement. Bringing black activism into conversation with the foreign policy of both the U.S. and South African governments, this study questions the dominant perception that U.S.-centered anticommunism decimated black international activism. Instead, by tracing the considerable amount of time, money, and effort the state invested into responding to black international criticism, Grant outlines the extent to which the U.S. and South African governments were forced to reshape and occasionally reconsider their racial policies in the Cold War world. This study shows how African Americans and black South Africans navigated transnationally organized state repression in ways that challenged white supremacy on both sides of the Atlantic. The political and cultural ties that they forged during the 1940s and 1950s are testament to the insistence of black activists in both countries that the struggle against apartheid and Jim Crow were intimately interconnected.