TRANSNATIONAL JAZZ AND BLUES: AURAL AESTHETICS AND AFRICAN DIASPORIC FICTION

This dissertation examines the influence of jazz and blues on African Diasporic fiction. While the influences of jazz and blues on African American cultural production have received critical attention for many decades, I contend that literary criticism neglects to recognize that jazz and blues are more than just national forms. They are international forms that have influenced a diverse group of writers and their novels. My work fills gaps in current scholarship by examining well-known and lesser-known novels that depict jazz and blues both within and without American contexts. This international approach is crucial to any examination of jazz, blues, and fiction because it expands our understanding of how authors aim to represent the experiences of African Diasporic people throughout the world. Building on the work in African American literary criticism and jazz studies, this dissertation examines the varying elements of jazz and blues -- what I refer to as "aural aesthetics" -- that writers incorporate into fiction in order to understand the continued influence of music on African Diasporic fiction. In Chapter One, I contend that Langston Hughes uses the blues as a form of protest in his first published novel Not Without Laughter (1930) to advance critiques of racism and African American involvement in World War I. In Chapter Two, I argue that Ann Petry fills her first novel The Street (1946) with a blues aesthetic that not only undergirds her representations of protest but also responds to the call for the use of vernacular forms in literature. In Chapter Three, I argue that Jackie Kay in Trumpet (1999) and Paule Marshall in The Fisher King (2000) represent the jazz-inflected solo as a means through which their characters build individual identities that challenge notions of an undifferentiated, monolithic African Diaspora. In Chapter Four, I contend that John A. Williams in Clifford's Blues (1999) and Xam Wilson Cartiér in Muse-Echo Blues (1991) present protagonists as composers that use jazz and blues as methods to assert individual African Diasporic identities and to express communal histories that are not present elsewhere in literature. By providing a critical framework for understanding the influence of jazz and blues in African Diasporic fiction, this project responds directly to criticism that limits the study of jazz and blues to American texts and contexts, calls for a reconsideration of those nationalistic tendencies, and argues for the critical engagement of jazz and blues as forms international in scope

The relationship between creativity, identity, place, and community resilience: the renaissance of Clarksdale, Mississippi, United States

This paper examines the relationship between creativity, identity, and place for the small economically challenged Delta City, Mississippi of Clarksdale, United States, a once prosperous manufacturing and farming community. Promoted as the Delta’s epicenter of blues music, over the last twenty years key business stakeholders in the city’s renaissance have been committed to developing local and international awareness of Clarksdale’s historic architecture, culture and blues heritage. It was not until 2008 when economist and town planner John C. Henshall formulated the Downtown Clarksdale Action Plan for Economic Revitalization that the city secured a comprehensive guide to growth. The plan was designed to support downtown infrastructure and tourism through a creatively based strategy, dependent on the tourism potential of blues performances and the imaginative efforts of those invested in the ongoing renewal project. Drawing on incentives aligned with the plan’s objectives, and seven semi-structured interviews with local entrepreneurs and revitalization participants, this paper examines the connection between collaborative creativity, collective identity, connection to place, and community resilience

La solitude du poète touareg

International audienceL'article traite de la poésie touarègue contemporaine, des sentiments qu'elle exprime ou qu'elle suscite, des voies par lesquelles elle se transmet. Il a paru dans les Actes d'un colloque tenu à l'Université libre de Bruxelles en 2001, et dédié aux variations du sentiment triste dans les musiques du monde et les poésies ou chansons populaires. Les styles de musique abordés étaient, entre autres, le blues, le fado, le flamenco, le tango, etc. Le trouble provoqué par cette émotion mélancolique est conceptualisé et nuancé différemment selon les cultures : blues, saudade, etc. Dans le cas des Touaregs, le mot qui désigne le sentiment particulier attaché à la poésie est "esuf", qui reprend les diverses acceptions du mot français "solitude"

Central Florida Future, Vol. 21 No. 68, July 5, 1989

Photo of UCF presidents Millican, Colbourn and Altman; SEDS rocket gets a boost from Senate; CEBA Il\u27s financial blues: State won\u27t pay for over-priced furniture, says comptroller; International student services gets lift from money gift.https://stars.library.ucf.edu/centralfloridafuture/1931/thumbnail.jp

Improving music genre classification using automatically induced harmony rules

We present a new genre classification framework using both low-level signal-based features and high-level harmony features. A state-of-the-art statistical genre classifier based on timbral features is extended using a first-order random forest containing for each genre rules derived from harmony or chord sequences. This random forest has been automatically induced, using the first-order logic induction algorithm TILDE, from a dataset, in which for each chord the degree and chord category are identified, and covering classical, jazz and pop genre classes. The audio descriptor-based genre classifier contains 206 features, covering spectral, temporal, energy, and pitch characteristics of the audio signal. The fusion of the harmony-based classifier with the extracted feature vectors is tested on three-genre subsets of the GTZAN and ISMIR04 datasets, which contain 300 and 448 recordings, respectively. Machine learning classifiers were tested using 5 × 5-fold cross-validation and feature selection. Results indicate that the proposed harmony-based rules combined with the timbral descriptor-based genre classification system lead to improved genre classification rates

Improving music genre classification using automatically induced harmony rules

We present a new genre classification framework using both low-level signal-based features and high-level harmony features. A state-of-the-art statistical genre classifier based on timbral features is extended using a first-order random forest containing for each genre rules derived from harmony or chord sequences. This random forest has been automatically induced, using the first-order logic induction algorithm TILDE, from a dataset, in which for each chord the degree and chord category are identified, and covering classical, jazz and pop genre classes. The audio descriptor-based genre classifier contains 206 features, covering spectral, temporal, energy, and pitch characteristics of the audio signal. The fusion of the harmony-based classifier with the extracted feature vectors is tested on three-genre subsets of the GTZAN and ISMIR04 datasets, which contain 300 and 448 recordings, respectively. Machine learning classifiers were tested using 5 × 5-fold cross-validation and feature selection. Results indicate that the proposed harmony-based rules combined with the timbral descriptor-based genre classification system lead to improved genre classification rates

Demons, devils and witches: the occult in heavy metal music

Heavy Metal has developed from a British fringe genre of rock music in the late 1960s to a global mass market consumer-good in the early twenty-first century. Early proponents of the musical style, such as Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, Judas Priest, Saxon, Uriah Heep and Iron Maiden, were mostly seeking to reach a young male audience. Songs were often filled with violent, sexist and nationalistic themes but were also speaking to the growing sense of deterioration in social and professional life. At the same time, however, Heavy Metal was seriously indebted to the legacies of blues and classical music as well as to larger literary and cultural themes. The genre also produced mythological concept albums and rewritings of classical poems. In other words, Heavy Metal tried from the beginning to locate itself in a liminal space between pedestrian mass culture and a rather elitist adherence to complexity and musical craftsmanship, speaking from a subaltern position against the hegemonic discourse. This collection of essays provides a comprehensive and multi-disciplinary look at British Heavy Metal from its beginning through The New Wave of British Heavy Metal up to the increasing internationalization and widespread acceptance in the late 1980s. The individual chapter authors approach British Heavy Metal from a textual perspective, providing critical analysis of the politics and ideology behind the lyrics, images and performances. Rather than focus on individual bands or songs, the essays collected here argue with the larger system of Heavy Metal music in mind, providing comprehensive analysis that relate directly to the larger context of British life and culture. The wide range of approaches should provide readers from various disciplines with new and original ideas about the study of this phenomenon of popular culture

October 27, 1972

•No Show •Placement Blues •Shock Therapy •Where Have all the Flowers Gone •ABA Plot Bites the Dust •MIAP •Notes on Congress •Sports •The Winner •Board of Education Meeting •Law Students Facing a Job Shortage •Electronic Voting in the House of Representatives •Center for Law and Social Policy •The International Law Society •Ratty Red-Dog\u27s Fabulous Friday Football Pol

October 27, 1972

•No Show •Placement Blues •Shock Therapy •Where Have all the Flowers Gone •ABA Plot Bites the Dust •MIAP •Notes on Congress •Sports •The Winner •Board of Education Meeting •Law Students Facing a Job Shortage •Electronic Voting in the House of Representatives •Center for Law and Social Policy •The International Law Society •Ratty Red-Dog\u27s Fabulous Friday Football Pol