The Recordings of Andy Kirk and His Clouds of Joy
- Submitting institution
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University of Portsmouth
- Unit of assessment
- 33 - Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies
- Output identifier
- 7123382
- Type
- A - Authored book
- DOI
-
-
- Publisher
- Oxford University Press
- ISBN
- 9780199335589
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- September
- Year of publication
- 2019
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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B - Music, Dance, Drama and Performing Arts
- Proposed double-weighted
- Yes
- Double-weighted statement
- At over 120,000 words, this book marks the outcome of eight years of sustained research. It addresses a body of over 170 recordings within a critical framework connecting jazz styles with structural racism and resistance to it. It draws on archival research conducted in Kansas City, Ann Arbour, Newark (New Jersey) and the UK. An interdisciplinary enterprise, it combines research on blackface minstrelsy, black cultural politics, social dancing, falsetto singing and recording technologies with readings of the music and musicians. Its discography is the most complete of any for research of Armed Forces Radio Service recordings.
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This book, as a whole, was awarded ‘Best Discography’ in the 2020 Awards for Excellence in Recorded Sound Research of the Association of Recorded Sound Collections (ARSC). It is the first book-length study of the recordings of Andy Kirk and his Clouds of Joy, an all-black band from Kansas City that found fame through records made between 1929 and 1956. Those recordings serve to raise fundamental questions about long-standing relationships between jazz music and critical judgements concerning race, which continue to shape it. The book illuminates how Kirk’s band negotiated racialized musical styles in a performative way akin to black forms of blackface: it signified race as it subverted racist conceptions of ‘hot’ and ‘sweet’ jazz. The band’s inclusion of pianist-composer Mary Lou Williams and falsetto-vocalist Pha Terrell further extend the book’s critical purview to embrace intersecting critical discourses of gender and sexuality. The methodology brings together analytical tools from musicology with interdisciplinary critical perspectives (Gates, etc.) to show how conceptions of authenticity, race, gender and sexuality are embedded in and expressed by the recorded music. The book was, nevertheless, written to ensure that the musical analysis and critical discussions would be accessible to lay audiences (record collectors, jazz fans, etc.) as much as academic ones. It was published in Oxford’s Studies in Recorded Jazz series, which aims to offer searching but accessible academic studies of recordings. Since publication in 2019, reviews have appeared in specialist magazines such as Jazz Journal and Jazz Wise, and the ARSC journal. These, together with the ARSC award, show that the volume and its critical enterprise has found significance beyond academia as well as within it.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
