In People Get Ready, musicians, scholars, and journalists write about jazz since 1965, the year that Curtis Mayfield composed the famous civil rights anthem that gives this collection its title. The contributors emphasize how the political consciousness that infused jazz in the 1960s and early 1970s has informed jazz in the years since then. They bring nuance to historical accounts of the avant-garde, the New Thing, Free Jazz, "non-idiomatic" improvisation, fusion, and other forms of jazz that have flourished since the 1960s, and they reveal the contemporary relevance of those musical practices. Many of the participants in the jazz scenes discussed are still active performers. A photographic essay captures some of them in candid moments before performances. Other pieces revise standard accounts of well-known jazz figures, such as Duke Ellington, and lesser-known musicians, including Jeanne Lee; delve into how money, class, space, and economics affect the performance of experimental music; and take up the question of how digital technology influences improvisation. People Get Ready offers a vision for the future of jazz based on an appreciation of the complexity of its past and the abundance of innovation in the present.
Contributors. Tamar Barzel, John Brackett, Douglas Ewart, Ajay Heble, Vijay Iyer, Thomas King, Tracy McMullen, Paul D. Miller/DJ Spooky, Nicole Mitchell, Roscoe Mitchell, Famoudou Don Moye, Aldon Lynn Nielsen, Eric Porter, Marc Ribot, Matana Roberts, Jaribu Shahid, Julie Dawn Smith, Wadada Leo Smith, Alan Stanbridge, John Szwed, Greg Tate, Scott Thomson, Rob Wallace, Ellen Waterman, Corey Wilkes
Industry Reviews
"If you thought jazz was dead, think again. As this remarkable collection of essays makes crystal clear, jazz is alive, loud, messy, sprawling, old and wise, born again, and playful. People Get Ready makes an essential contribution to jazz studies, cultural studies, and our increasingly global understanding of modern music. And it demonstrates what discerning readers and listeners already know: that 'hip' is both an adjective and a verb." - Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original "Reader Get Ready! This lovely collection blasts past pessimism and uncertainty to showcase the resonant vibrancy of jazz today. From history to technology and from improvisation to politics, People Get Ready constitutes mandatory reading for anyone with a serious interest in answering Marvin Gaye's perennial question - 'What's Going On?" - Daniel Widener, author of Black Arts West: Culture and Struggle in Postwar Los Angeles "This collection of thought-provoking essays is as much about inclusion, looking at jazz as a genre relevant to all, as it is futurism. Evolved from the Guelph Jazz Festival Colloquium, the publication is like a breath of fresh air in the scholarship pertaining to the music, first and foremost because it looks at it from new angles, and, perhaps more importantly, provides a platform for artists who simply have not been lionised according to their full worth." - Kevin L Gendre, Jazzwise, June 2013 "[A] collection of essays on the state of free, experimental and avant jazz inspired in part by the Guelph Jazz Festival Colloquium." - Times Literary Supplement
