Lonesome Roads and Streets of Dreams
Place, Mobility, and Race in Jazz of the 1930s and '40s
Any listener knows the power of music to define a place, but few can describe the how or why of this phenomenon. In "Lonesome Roads and Streets of Dreams: Place, Mobility, and Race in Jazz of the 1930s and '40s", Andrew Berish attempts to right this wrong, showcasing how American jazz defined a culture particularly preoccupied with place. By analyzing both the performances and cultural context of leading jazz figures, including the many famous venues where they played, Berish bridges two dominant scholarly approaches to the genre, offering not only a new reading of swing era jazz but an entirely new framework for musical analysis in general, one that examines how the geographical realities of daily life can be transformed into musical sound.
Focusing on white bandleader Jan Garber, black bandleader Duke Ellington, white saxophonist Charlie Barnet, and black guitarist Charlie Christian, as well as traveling from Catalina Island to Manhattan to Oklahoma City, "Lonesome Roads and Streets of Dreams" depicts not only a geography of race but how this geography was disrupted, how these musicians crossed physical and racial boundaries – from black to white, South to North, and rural to urban – and how they found expression for these movements in the insistent music they were creating.
Reviews
"In 'Lonesome Roads', Andrew Berish has done scholars and fans of American music a great service. Beyond unearthing a treasure trove of information on musical and cultural life in the United States during the 1930s and '40s, Berish sheds welcome light on what the swing era's various sounds and grooves – both 'sweet' and 'hot' – meant to the people who created, listened to and danced to them. Equally adept with cultural theory as with music theory, Berish explores fascinating and previously under-appreciated connections among music making, technology, mobility, and identity during the mid twentieth century. His interpretations of jazz's role in shaping experiences of space, place, and time for musicians and their audiences are simply brilliant. Clear and engaging from start to finish, this is an outstanding book" – David Ake, University of Nevada, Reno
"'Lonesome Roads and Streets of Dreams' blends an advanced understanding of the aesthetic choices, figures, and devices attendant to jazz composition and performance with an empirically grounded and theoretically sophisticated understanding of the social history of the United States in the second quarter of the twentieth century. Scholars writing about jazz in the years ahead will certainly make productive use of Berish's example in thinking about physical locations and places as central components in the construction of discursive space, while social historians will certainly build on his findings about mobility and movement as central concerns for the national culture in that era" – George Lipsitz, author of "How Racism Takes Place"
"This is a very smart book. Berish has done an impressive job of bringing together two largely disconnected realms of scholarly mastery – the musicological and the cultural-historical – in order to rethink and reframe the position of swing-era jazz in the formation of modern US culture. In doing so, he provides a new understanding of how the audition of commercial jazz practices affected the comprehension and experience of being American and, in particular, of the role of jazz in the messy constitution of modern racial subjects. This book is an important contribution to the new jazz studies and to an emerging literature on music's significance in US social and cultural history" – Ronald Radano, author of "Lying up a Nation: Race and Black Music"
