- Hardcover: 320 pages
- Publisher: OUP USA (13 May 2004)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0195154819
- ISBN-13: 978-0195154818
- Product Dimensions: 24.4 x 15.8 x 2.7 cm
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,073,489 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- See Complete Table of Contents
Highway 61 Revisited
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Review
"An informed, thought-provoking book that will appeal to general readers and fans."--Library Journal
"At its best, the writing here is lively and insightful, describing the aerobatics of a Louis Armstrong solo or a death's-head rasp of Miles Davis's voice.... Santoro's pleasure in the music always shines through."--New York Times Book Review
"Santoro is at his best when he's leading with his heart."--JazzTimes
"Insightful, informative.... The nonmusical issues that inevitably bubble up in Santoro's discussions of music--marginalism, politics, and, most frequently, race--reflect concerns of the country in general. One issue that doesn't trouble Santoro is that longstanding bugaboo of cultural arbiters, authenticity; as he compellingly demonstrates, overwrought concerns about an artist's genuineness impede cultural vitality."--Booklist
"When he focuses on postwar jazz or on artists like Dylan and Bruce Springsteen, with whom he passionately identifies, Santoro is an engag
Product Description
What do Louis Armstrong, Ray Charles, Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, Tom Waits, Cassandra Wilson, and Ani DiFranco have in common? In Highway 61 Revisited, acclaimed music critic Gene Santoro says the answer is jazz--not just the musical style, but jazz's distinctive ambiance and attitudes. As legendary bebop rebel Charlie Parker once put it, "If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn." Unwinding that Zen-like statement, Santoro traces how jazz's existential art has infused outstanding musicians in nearly every wing of American popular music--blues, folk, gospel, psychedelic rock, country, bluegrass, soul, funk, hiphop--with its parallel process of self-discovery and artistic creation through musical improvisation. Taking less-traveled paths through the last century of American pop, Highway 61 Revisited maps unexpected musical and cultural links between such apparently disparate figures as Louis Armstrong, Willie Nelson, Bob Dylan and Herbie Hancock; Miles Davis, Lenny Bruce, The Grateful Dead, Bruce Springsteen, and many others. Focusing on jazz's power to connect, Santoro shows how the jazz milieu created a fertile space "where whites and blacks could meet in America on something like equal grounds," and indeed where art and entertainment, politics and poetry, mainstream culture and its subversive offshoots were drawn together in a heady mix whose influence has proved both far-reaching and seemingly inexhaustible. Combining interviews and original research, and marked throughout by Santoro's wide ranging grasp of cultural history, Highway 61 Revisited offers readers a new look at--and a new way of listening to--the many ways jazz has colored the entire range of American popular music in all its dazzling profusion.
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First Sentence
FROM 1925 TO 1928, Louis Armstrong made an astonishing series of recordings, the jazz-creating legacy of his Hot Fives and Hot Sevens, a succession of studio groups that virtually never performed live. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
FROM 1925 TO 1928, Louis Armstrong made an astonishing series of recordings, the jazz-creating legacy of his Hot Fives and Hot Sevens, a succession of studio groups that virtually never performed live. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Collection Of Unrelated Essays About Musicians From Various Genres
15 Feb 2008
Format:Hardcover
The book's jacket claims that Santoro will demonstrate "the many ways jazz has colored the entire range of American popular music". But this collection of writings isn't really a unified book about the influence of jazz. But rather a collection of 29 unrelated essays about various artists in different musical genres - country, rock and folk as well as jazz. He occasionally mentions the influnce of jazz on a particular artist. But certainly not all of them and it hardly serves as the major theme tying these separate artists together. Instead the essays tend to comment on particular albums along with a bit of biography and a few anecdotal tales.
Santoro writes better than most music journalists. But he makes numerous factual errors and gets a bit carried away with his constant literary and philosophical references. For example, he says that the Flying Burrito Brother's "Wheels" was about "the urge to jump in the car and get away, light out for the territory on the road like everyone from Huck Finn to the Beats, amid the existential questions tearing (Gram) Parsons, a shrunken Elijah, apart". The entire book is chock of passages like this, along with endless allusions to Hegel, Brecht, existentialism, etc. So if you prefer books without so much intellectual pretense than you should probably stay away from this one.
Jazz is Santoro's forte and I did enjoy his essays on artists such as Louis Armstrong and Max Roach. His essay on Bob Dylan was also good. But on other rock performers, such as the Band and Bruce Springsteen, he really didn't have much new to offer. I think Deadheads will be especially disappointed as he obviously knows less about the Grateful Dead than their legion of devoted fans does.
I would recommend this book for those unfamiliar but curious about jazz, as he does know his stuff on that style of music. But his writings on rock musicians, with the exception of Dylan, can be easily skipped.
Santoro writes better than most music journalists. But he makes numerous factual errors and gets a bit carried away with his constant literary and philosophical references. For example, he says that the Flying Burrito Brother's "Wheels" was about "the urge to jump in the car and get away, light out for the territory on the road like everyone from Huck Finn to the Beats, amid the existential questions tearing (Gram) Parsons, a shrunken Elijah, apart". The entire book is chock of passages like this, along with endless allusions to Hegel, Brecht, existentialism, etc. So if you prefer books without so much intellectual pretense than you should probably stay away from this one.
Jazz is Santoro's forte and I did enjoy his essays on artists such as Louis Armstrong and Max Roach. His essay on Bob Dylan was also good. But on other rock performers, such as the Band and Bruce Springsteen, he really didn't have much new to offer. I think Deadheads will be especially disappointed as he obviously knows less about the Grateful Dead than their legion of devoted fans does.
I would recommend this book for those unfamiliar but curious about jazz, as he does know his stuff on that style of music. But his writings on rock musicians, with the exception of Dylan, can be easily skipped.
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