Los Angeles Zoot: Race "Riot," the Pachuco, and Black Music Culture

This chapter examines the haunting autobiography of Art Pepper, one of the leading jazz saxophonists of the postwar period, reading it against recent work on Los Angeles’ Central Avenue and West Coast jazz, more generally. Pepper’s account of his experiences with Black music and culture reprises some of the central themes of this study, including a white jazzman’s early recognition of the Black roots of jazz, his desire to belong to that world, and the euphoria and limitations of jazz interracialism. As the only autobiography in this book coauthored by a woman, Straight Life opens pathways for considering women’s resistance to the misogyny and rigid gendering that has dominated jazz culture. Laurie Pepper’s account of her central role during her husband’s final decade illuminates the authority and influence of a jazzwoman in a study of texts in which women’s voices are generally on the periphery or absent entirely.

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Soul, Afrofuturism & the Timeliness of Contemporary Jazz Fusions

Daedalus ◽

10.1162/daed_a_01740 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 148 (2) ◽

pp. 23-35 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Gabriel Solis

Keyword(s):

African American ◽

Los Angeles ◽

Hip Hop ◽

Black Music ◽

Musical Expression

The rise of jazz-R&B-hip hop fusions in contemporary Los Angeles offers an opportunity to reflect on the ways jazz matters to black audiences today. Drawing on recent Afrofuturist art and theory as well as on Amiri Baraka's analysis of the “changing same” in black music, this essay traces out the significance of work by artists as diverse as Kamasi Washington, Flying Lotus, Thundercat, and Robert Glasper, positing that their music tells us that jazz matters not only in itself, but also in its continuing capacity to engage in cross-genre dialogues for musicians and audiences who hear it as part of a rich continuum of African American musical expression.

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Sam Cooke as Pop Album Artist—A Reinvention in Three Songs

Journal of the American Musicological Society ◽

10.1525/jams.2012.65.1.113 ◽

2012 ◽

Vol 65 (1) ◽

pp. 113-178 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Mark Burford

Keyword(s):

African American ◽

Ethnic Identity ◽

Los Angeles ◽

Sexual Politics ◽

Black Music ◽

Employment Equity ◽

The Road ◽

Methodological Challenges ◽

Studio Musicians ◽

The Prestige

Abstract Though African American singer, songwriter, and entrepreneur Sam Cooke (1931–1964) is commonly celebrated as a pioneering soul singer, the preponderance of Cooke recordings suggesting to many critics a “white” middle-of-the-road pop sound has troubled this reception. From June 1957 until the end of 1959, Cooke recorded for the independent label Keen Records, where he charted a course for realizing his professional and socioeconomic aspirations, including his determination to harness the prestige attached to the long-playing album and the “album artist.” This article explores relationships between the repertory, performances, and production on three Keen album tracks: “Danny Boy,” “My Foolish Heart,” and “I've Got a Right to Sing the Blues.” These recordings reveal Cooke's seldom-noted proximity to contemporaneous figures and concerns: “Irish tenor” Morton Downey, who built a career on the fluidity between ethnic identity and pop's transparent “whiteness”; Billy Eckstine, who struggled to navigate the racial and sexual politics of the pop balladeer; and the black studio musicians whose campaign for employment equity in 1950s Los Angeles found resonance with Cooke's vision. Taking Cooke's endeavor seriously positions us to assess freshly Cooke's skills as a vocalist, the processes through which “pop” becomes racialized as white, and intractable methodological challenges in black music studies.

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