Watching Jazz: Encounters With Jazz Performance On Screen - Tapa blanda

Watching Jazz is an enlightening and enjoyable book. Well written and well edited, these chapters speak to each other, and contrasting viewpoints come across as alternative understandings rather than conflicting standpoints. I recommend this book to any jazz, media, or social history scholars seeking to explore new ways in which to think about the production and reception of jazz, or the ways that the music and audiovisual presentation developed in tandem. Watching Jazz is a timely collection, as it builds upon recent scholarship (by Elsdon, Brian Harker, Katz, Jed Rasula, Gabriel Solis, Catherine Tackley, Keith Waters, and others) about the role of audio recording in jazz, and expands this scholarship by showing how the visual element directs viewers towards aspects of the music, which in turn allows them to see and hear elements of jazz more clearly. (Notes)

Watching Jazz: Encounters with Jazz Performance on Screen is the first systematic study of jazz on screen media. Where earlier studies have focused almost entirely on the role and portrayal of jazz in Hollywood film, the present book engages with a plethora of technologies and media from early film and soundies through television to recent developments in digital technologies and online media. Likewise, the authors discuss jazz in the widest sense, ranging from Duke Ellington and Jimmy Dorsey through the likes of Dizzy Gillespie, Art Blakey, Oscar Peterson, Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Charles Mingus to Pat Metheny.

Much of this rich and fascinating material has never been studied in depth before, and what emerges most clearly are the manifold connections between the music and the media on which it was and is being recorded. Its long association with film and television has left its trace in jazz, just as online and social media are subtly shaping it now. Vice versa, visual media have always benefited from focusing on music and this significantly affected their development. The book follows these interrelations, showing how jazz was presented and represented on screen and what this tells us about the music, the people who made it and their audiences. The result is a new approach to jazz and the media, which will be required reading for students of both fields.