When Genres Collide: Down Beat, Rolling Stone, and the Struggle between Jazz and Rock (Alternate Takes: Critical Responses to Popular Music)

Brennan, Matt (University of Glasgow, UK)

ISBN 10: 1501326147 / ISBN 13: 9781501326141

Published by Bloomsbury Academic, 2017

About this Item

Seller Inventory # 9781501326141

Bibliographic Details

• Title: When Genres Collide: Down Beat, Rolling Stone, and the Struggle between Jazz and Rock (Alternate Takes: Critical Responses to Popular Music)
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Publication Date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1501326147
• ISBN 13: 9781501326141
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

Winner of the IASPM Canada Book Prize 2019

Honorable Mention for PROSE Award for Excellence in Music and the Performing Arts 2018

When Genres Collide is a provocative history that rethinks the relationship between jazz and rock through the lens of the two oldest surviving and most influential American popular music periodicals: Down Beat and Rolling Stone. Writing in 1955, Duke Ellington argued that the new music called rock 'n' roll “is the most raucous form of jazz, beyond a doubt.” So why did jazz and rock subsequently become treated as separate genres?

The rift between jazz and rock (and jazz and rock scholarship) is based on a set of received assumptions about their fundamental differences, but there are other ways popular music history could have been written. By offering a fresh examination of key historical moments when the trajectories and meanings of jazz and rock intersected, overlapped, or collided, it reveals how music critics constructed an ideological divide between jazz and rock that would be replicated in American musical discourse for decades to follow.

Recipient of and Honorable Mention in the PROSE Award, Music & the Performing Arts 2018.

About the Author

Matt Brennan is a Chancellor's Fellow of Music at the University of Edinburgh, UK. He has served as Chair of the UK and Ireland branch of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM). His is the co-author (with Simon Frith, Martin Cloonan, and Emma Webster) of The History of Live Music in Britain.