DownloadThe Portobello Bookshop Gift Guide 2024

Loft Jazz

Improvising New York in the 1970s

Michael C Heller author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:University of California Press

Published:14th Feb '17

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Loft Jazz cover

The New York loft jazz scene of the 1970s was a pivotal period for uncompromising, artist-produced work. Faced with a flagging jazz economy, a group of young avant-garde improvisers chose to eschew the commercial sphere and develop alternative venues in the abandoned factories and warehouses of Lower Manhattan. Loft Jazz provides the first book-length study of this period, tracing its history amid a series of overlapping discourses surrounding collectivism, urban renewal, experimentalist aesthetics, underground archives, and the radical politics of self-determination.

"[Heller] paints a kaleidoscopic portrait... inherently fascinating." The Wire "Heller - through dozens of interviews and painstaking research that included full access to the ample personal archive of percussionist Juma Sultan, a pivotal figure in the movement - refreshingly moves beyond reductionist notions." Village Voice "Using interviews and archival research, Michael G. Heller examines the scene's rise and eventual fall from historical, pedagogical and sociological perspectives... [He] itemizes what differentiated Loft Jazz from other styles and how its creation, dissemination and demise affected innovative jazz." The New York City Jazz Record

ISBN: 9780520285408

Dimensions: 229mm x 152mm x 20mm

Weight: 544g

272 pages