Django Reinhardt was perhaps the greatest guitarist to ever live. A Gypsy who made his jazz guitar speak with a human voice, he was dashing, charismatic, childish . . . and doomed to die young after creating a legacy of Gypsy Jazz that remains vibrant today. Gypsy Jazz is a music both joyous and sad, timeless and modern. It was born from a marriage of Louis Armstrong s trumpet with the anguished sound of Romany violin and the fire of flamenco guitar. Created amidst the glamour of Jazz Age Paris and reaching a peak during the horrors of World War II, Gypsy Jazz gave a voice to a dispossessed people. Today, Gypsy Jazz is more popular than ever. It has a legacy as strong as the Cuban sounds of the Buena Vista Social Club, the blues of B. B. King, or the R&B of Ray Charles. "Django Reinhardt and the Illustrated History of Gypsy Jazz" is a stylish collection of more than two hundred illustrations telling Django s story and the history of Gypsy jazz. Running through the Paris Jazz Age of the 1920s to the current worldwide renaissance of Gypsy jazz bands (including Django s grandsons, who are playing today), the images include rare archival photographs, modern images, posters, programs, tickets, guitars, memorabilia, paintings, and more. "

An in-depth analysis of the music and life of a gypsy music legend

Of all the styles of jazz to emerge in the twentieth century, none is more passionate, more exhilaratingly up-tempo, or more steeped in an outsider tradition than Gypsy Jazz. And there is no one more qualified to write about Gypsy Jazz than Michael Dregni, author of the acclaimed biography, Django. A vagabond music, Gypsy Jazz is played today in French Gypsy bars, Romany encampments, on religious pilgrimages--and increasingly on the world's greatest concert stages. Yet its story has never been told, in part because much of its history is undocumented, either in written form or often even in recorded music. Beginning with Django Reinhardt, whose dazzling Gypsy Jazz became the toast of 1930s Paris in the heady days of Josephine Baker, Picasso, and Hemingway, Dregni follows the music as it courses through caravans on the edge of Paris, where today's young French Gypsies learn Gypsy Jazz as a rite of passage, along the Gypsy pilgrimage route to Les Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer where the Romany play around their campfires, and finally to the new era of international Gypsy stars such as Bireli Lagrene, Boulou Ferre, Dorado Schmitt, and Django's own grandchildren, David Reinhardt and Dallas Baumgartner. Interspersed with Dregni's vivid narrative are the words of the musicians themselves, many of whom have never been interviewed for the American press before, as they describe what the music means to them. Gypsy Jazz also includes a chapter devoted entirely to American Gypsy musicians who remain largely unknown outside their hidden community. Blending travelogue, detective story, and personal narrative, Gypsy Jazz is music history at its best, capturing the history and culture of this elusive music--and the soul that makes it swing.

Django Generations shows how relationships between racial identities, jazz, and national belonging become entangled in France. Jazz manouche—a genre known best for its energetic, guitar-centric swing tunes—is among France’s most celebrated musical practices of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It centers on the recorded work of famed guitarist Django Reinhardt and is named for the ethnoracial subgroup of Romanies (also known, often pejoratively, as “Gypsies”) to which Reinhardt belonged. French Manouches are publicly lauded as bearers of this jazz tradition, and many take pleasure and pride in the practice while at the same time facing pervasive discrimination. Jazz manouche uncovers a contradiction at the heart of France’s assimilationist republican ideals: the music is portrayed as quintessentially French even as Manouches themselves endure treatment as racial others. In this book, Siv B. Lie explores how this music is used to construct divergent ethnoracial and national identities in a context where discussions of race are otherwise censured. Weaving together ethnographic and historical analysis, Lie shows that jazz manouche becomes a source of profound ambivalence as it generates ethnoracial difference and socioeconomic exclusion. As the first full-length ethnographic study of French jazz to be published in English, this book enriches anthropological, ethnomusicological, and historical scholarship on global jazz, race and ethnicity, and citizenship while showing how music can be an important but insufficient tool in struggles for racial and economic justice.

This book, on Jimi Hendrix’s life, times, visual-cultural prominence, and popular music, with a particular emphasis on Hendrix’s relationships to the cultural politics of race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, class, and nation. Hendrix, an itinerant “Gypsy” and “Voodoo child” whose racialized “freak” visual image continues to internationally circulate, exploited the exoticism of his race, gender, and sexuality and Gypsy and Voodoo transnational political cultures and religion. Aaron E. Lefkovitz argues that Hendrix can be located in a legacy of black-transnational popular musicians, from Chuck Berry to the hip hop duo Outkast, confirming while subverting established white supremacist and hetero-normative codes and conventions. Focusing on Hendrix’s transnational biography and centrality to US and international visual cultural and popular music histories, this book links Hendrix to traditions of blackface minstrelsy, international freak show spectacles, black popular music’s global circulation, and visual-cultural racial, gender, and sexual stereotypes, while noting Hendrix’s place in 1960s countercultural, US-exceptionalist, cultural Cold War, and rock histories.

This work attempts to counteract the essentialism of originary thinking in the contemporary era by providing a new reading of a relatively understudied corpus of literature from a ambivalently stereotyped diasporic group, in order to rethink and problematise the concept of diaspora as a spatial concept. As work situated in the Law-in-Literature movement, beyond the disciplinary boundaries of scholarship, this book aims to construct a ‘literary jurisprudence’ of diaspora space, deconstructing space in order to question what it means to be ‘settled’ in literary refractions of the lawscape by drawing on refractions of case law in a corpus of texts by Romani authors. These texts are used as hermeutic framings to draw unique spatio-temporal landscapes through which the reader can explore the refractive, reflective, interpretative conditions of legality as a crucible in which to theorise law.The radical intent of this work, therefore, is to deconstruct jurisprudential spatial order in order to theorize diaspora space, in the context of the Roma Diaspora. This work will offer readers new possibilities to re-imagine diaspora through law and literature and provides an innovative critical interdisciplinary analysis of the shaping of space.

Could everything we’ve learned about entrepreneurship simply be wrong? There is no shortage of how-to books with ‘manual’ in the title, and articles promising ‘The 7 [or 6 or 10] key traits of successful entrepreneurs’, which breed an infectious optimism all too often quashed as startups fail. Amiel Kornel puts a persuasive case for an alternative theory that while grounded in the natural way great entrepreneurs operate resists reduction to a simple recipe or method. Kornel, who has coached hundreds of entrepreneurs, believes that disciplined planning, lean management, and commitment are no guarantee of success. The limited resources of a startup demand knowing when and how to explore and ‘tinker’, artfully recombining ideas, designs, media, software, and materials on hand. True venture craftsmen harness and redirect the energy of startups that might otherwise spin dangerously out of control towards failure. The stories of entrepreneurs like Sun Basket’s Adam Zbar, Minecraft’s Markus Persson, Y Combinator’s Paul Graham, and Metacode Technologies’ Joel Schatz are woven throughout the book, along with examples from beyond business, including legendary ocean-racing sailor Isabelle Autissier and acclaimed urban designer Gerard Penot. Kornel shows how meeting challenges in a broad variety of fields rife with uncertainty often relies on the ability to loosen the coupling between command and control, a prerequisite of skillful improvisation.

The Art of Jazz explores how the expressionism and spontaneity of jazz spilled onto its album art, posters, and promotional photography, and even inspired standalone works of fine art. Everyone knows jazz is on the cutting edge of music, but how much do you know about its influence in the visual arts? With album covers that took inspiration from the avant-garde, jazz's primarily African American musicians and their producers sought to challenge and inspire listeners both musically and visually. Arranged chronologically, each chapter covers a key period in jazz history, from the earliest days of the twentieth century to today's postmodern jazz. Chapters begin with substantive introductions and present the evolution of jazz imagery in all its forms, mirroring the shifting nature of the music itself. With two authoritative features per chapter and over 300 images, The Art of Jazz is a significant contribution to the literature of this intrepid art form.

Neil Young and Philosophy, edited by Douglas L. Berger, explores the meanings, importance, and philosophical dimensions of the music, career, and life of this prolific singer/songwriter over the past five decades. Neil Young’s music has touched on a broad range of cultural, political and personal issues, all of which have enormous ongoing relevance for our own times. In order to accommodate Young’s artistic breadth, contributions of scholars from a wide variety of fields-- American philosophy, ethics, American Indian philosophy, feminist philosophy, psychology, philosophy of mind and religious studies--are included in this collection. They examine everything from Young’s environmentalism, invocation of American Indian themes, images of women, and interpretations of human relationships to his confrontations with the music industry, his experiments with recording technologies, his approach to social change, and his methods of creativity. The book builds on the fundamental commitment of the Philosophy and Popular Culture series to see the artist as a philosopher.

In the age of digital music it seems striking that so many of us still want to produce music concretely with our bodies, through the movement of our limbs, lungs and fingers, in contact with those materials and objects which are capable of producing sounds. The huge sales figures of musical instruments in the global market, and the amount of time and effort people of all ages invest in mastering the tools of music, make it clear that playing musical instruments is an important phenomenon in human life. By combining the findings made in music psychology and performative ethnomusicology, Marko Aho shows how playing a musical instrument, and the pleasure musicians get from it, emerges from an intimate dialogue between the personally felt body and the sounding instrument. An introduction to the general aspects of the tactile resources of musical instruments, musical style and the musician is followed by an analysis of the learning process of the regional kantele style of the Perho river valley in Finnish Central Ostrobothnia.