By Thomas Brothers (NHC Fellow, 2003–04) In the early twentieth century, New Orleans was a place of colliding identities and histories, and Louis Armstrong was a gifted young man of psychological nimbleness. A dark-skinned, impoverished child, he grew up under low expectations, Jim Crow legislation, and vigilante terrorism. Yet he also grew up at the … Continued
Edited by Theodore E. Buehrer (NHC Fellow, 2006–07) Careful listeners and readers need to spend little time perusing Mary Lou Williams’s solo piano recordings or her music manuscripts to realize her immense talent. A two-time Guggenheim Fellow, Williams (1910–81) honed her craft as a jazz pianist, composer, and arranger during a career that spanned five … Continued
By Carol Ann Muller (NHC Fellow, 1999–00) Musical Echoes tells the life story of the South African jazz vocalist Sathima Bea Benjamin. Born in Cape Town in the 1930s, Benjamin came to know American jazz and popular music through the radio, movies, records, and live stage and dance band performances. She was especially moved by the … Continued
By Penny M. Von Eschen (NHC Fellow, 1996–97) At the height of the ideological antagonism of the Cold War, the U.S. State Department unleashed an unexpected tool in its battle against Communism: jazz. From 1956 through the late 1970s, America dispatched its finest jazz musicians to the far corners of the earth, from Iraq to … Continued
By Ann Douglas (NHC Fellow, 1978–79) Terrible Honesty is the biography of a decade, a portrait of the soul of a generation – based on the lives and work of more than a hundred men and women. In a strikingly original interpretation that brings the Jazz Age to life in a wholly new way, Ann … Continued
Edited by Mark Tucker (NHC Fellow, 1991–92) Duke Ellington is universally recognized as one of the towering figures of 20th-century music, both a brilliant composer and one of the preeminent musicians in jazz history. From early pieces such as East St. Louis Toodle-O, Black and Tan Fantasy, It Don't Mean a Thing, and Mood Indigo, to his more complex … Continued
Too often, the history of corporate capitalism is told as a story of “great men” who innovated by creating new labor systems and irresistible commodities. The reality is far more interesting. This webinar puts the ordinary people who built the early the cigarette industry, before the dangers of smoking were understood, at the forefront. Hundreds … Continued
Prohibition bred glamour — speakeasies, flappers, the Jazz age. Prohibition bred crime — gangsters, smuggling, shoot-outs. It also pitted country folk against city dwellers, Protestants against Catholics, the native-born against immigrants. It promoted women’s liberation, stoked racial fears, made drinking alcohol an act of treason, and turned America into a nation of informers, all this … Continued
At the age of 74, I could describe many humanities moments but this one stands out. Sometime in 1961, my brother was driving me home when I first heard Symphony Sid play John Coltrane’s “My Favorite Things” over the radio. I was a veteran jazz listener at that time but the sound of this recording … Continued