Ken Prouty’s Knowing Jazz: Community, Pedagogy, and Canon in the Information Age argues that knowledge of jazz, or more to the point, claims to knowledge of jazz, are at the formation of jazz’s identity, its canon, and is manifestation as a community. Originally published by UPM in December 2011, this book is now available in paperback.
Every
jazz artist, critic, or fan understands jazz differently, based on each
individual’s unique experiences and insights. Through playing, listening,
reading, and talking about jazz, both as a form of musical expression and as a
marker of identity, each develops a personalized relationship to the larger jazz
world. Through the increasingly important role of media, they also engage in
the formation of different communities that transcend not only traditional
boundaries of geography, but increasingly exist only in the virtual world.
The relationships formed by “jazz people” within and between these types of
communities is at the center of Knowing Jazz. Some communities,
such as those in academia, reflect a clash of sensibilities between historical
traditions. Others, particularly those who inhabit cyberspace, represent a new
and exciting avenue for communities of everyday fans, whose involvement in jazz
has often been ignored. Other communities seek to define themselves as expressions
of national or global sensibility, pointing to the ever-changing nature of
jazz’s identity as an American art form in an international setting.
What
all these communities share, however, is an intimate, visceral link to the
music and the artists who make it, brought to life through the medium of
recording, perhaps the one core activity which unites all jazz people around
the world.
The
book includes extensive critical discussions of issues in jazz pedagogy,
including the nature of social systems and traditions, which are rarely
discussed in the disciplines of jazz studies or ethnomusicology. Also featured
is a detailed examination of the impact of social media on jazz and its
communities, which to date is conspicuously absent from existing literature in
both jazz and musicology.
Prouty
uses an approach and style that speaks effectively to audiences in different
disciplines and different levels Informed by an interdisciplinary approach and
approaching the topic from a number of different perspectives, Knowing
Jazz charts a philosophical course in which many disparate perspectives
and varied opinions on jazz can find common ground.
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