Results for "Szwed, John"

Named one of the Best Books of 2023 by the New Yorker and The New York Times' Dwight Garner“The first comprehensive biography of this hipster magus . . . [John Szwed] allows different sides of Smith’s personality to catch blades of sun. He brings the right mixture of reverence and comic incredulity ... Read More about Cosmic Scholar: The Life and Times of Harry Smith

Named one of the Best Books of 2023 by the New Yorker and The New York Times' Dwight Garner“The first comprehensive biography of this hipster magus . . . [John Szwed] allows different sides of Smith’s personality to catch blades of sun. He brings the right mixture of reverence and comic incredulity ... Read More about Cosmic Scholar: The Life and Times of Harry Smith

Stemming from his anthropological field work among black religious groups in Philadelphia in the early 1940s, Arthur Huff Fauset believed it was possible to determine the likely direction that mainstream black religious leadership would take in the future, a direction that later indeed manifested it... Read More about Black Gods of the Metropolis: Negro Religious Cults of the Urban North

Ranging across genres from the popular to the scholarly, this selection of John Szwed's published essays abides in the intersection of race and art, jazz and rap: crossovers inside and outside the academy. With reviews written for the Village Voice and articles from academic journals, this volume in... Read More about Crossovers: Essays on Race, Music, and American Culture

I Remember is a first-hand account of the world of black American music told by a man who has been part of that world for eighty years. Clyde E. B. Bernhardt worked with a number of bands, including King Oliver, Marion Hard, Cecil Scott, the Bascomb Brothers, and Joe Garland. He started his own band... Read More about I Remember: Eighty Years of Black Entertainment, Big Bands, and the Blues

Considered by many to be a founder of Afrofuturism, Sun Ra-aka Herman Blount-was a composer, keyboardist, bandleader, philosopher, entrepreneur, poet, and self-proclaimed extraterrestrial from Saturn. He recorded over 200 albums with his Arkestra, which, dressed in Egypto-space costumes, played ever... Read More about Space Is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra