Black Music, White Business: Illuminating the History and Political Economy of Jazz

By Frank Kofsky

Book Overview

Probes the conflicts between the artistry of Black musicians and the control by largely white-owned businesses of jazz distribution—the recording companies, booking agencies, festivals, clubs, and... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B00FI6VZLO
• ISBN13: 9780873488594
• Release Date: January 1998
• Publisher: Pathfinder
• Length: 186 Pages
• Weight: 0.52 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.2" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

An important illumination of the way jazz has worked

As the pithy title suggests, African-American culture has been the primary source of jazz music -- and folks who hail from that culture have had prescious little influence over where the profits from the music have gone... and, even, over who has gotten work and who has been heard.This book illuminates that ugly side to the jazz world. The first three chapters get things rolling in fits and starts without adequate evidence to demonstrate that the explotation of black musicians has been markedly different from that of other musicians. If this were the bulk of the work it would be interesting reading but would not do much more than preach to the choir.The rest of the book builds on those chapters, deepens them, broadens them, and creates an inarguable portrait of exploitation that goes so far as to names names *and* provide well-researched explanations that refute, for example, the notion that race is what one should focus on when exploring the history of jazz. The "black" and "white" of the title may appear to refer to genetics or race -- but the text makes it clear that these are cultural categories and are inextricably bound up within the history of jazz, what it has sounded like, what it sounds like now, and how it has been made.