Liner notes evolved during the twentieth century as a new genre of music writing, one that served as both a compliment and a complement to the pioneering jazz recordings it set out to describe. Prior to the purchase of a jazz album, liner notes gave consumers a preview of the sounds they would soon hear (and the messages they might receive). As decades passed, some liner notes became as memorable as the albums they graced. When writers as diverse as Ira Gitler, Amiri Baraka, and Stanley Crouch emerged as tastemakers in jazz circles, it was not only for their music criticism, but also for the liner notes they placed on albums by John Coltrane, Billie Holiday, and Wynton Marsalis. This essay considers a host of writers who made liner notes a key factor within jazz culture, and within American discourse more generally.

Messiaen was inspired by a pantheon of saints and theologians that were important to him: Francis of Assisi, Teresa of Ávila, John of the Cross, Catherine of Siena, and Thérèse de Lisieux, and then Ernest Hello, Dom. Columba Marmion, Romano Guardini, and Hans Urs von Balthasar. This chapter focusses in particular on St Thomas Aquinas, whose work exerted the greatest influence on Messiaen’s understanding of Christian doctrine. It examines the way this shaped his language, and assesses the range of the symbolic manifestations of Aquinas’s thought in his art.

Throughout jazz history, improvisation has been central to the music’s aesthetic and social force. From the polyphonic group extemporizations of early styles, through the featured solos within Swing Era arrangements, to bebop’s harmonic steeplechase or the open form experiments that followed, jazz musicians have privileged departures from through-composed scores and fixed musical texts. This essay considers the social, ideological, and aesthetic stakes of these departures, exploring how the music’s emphasis on improvisation constitutes both an ongoing impetus for artistic innovation and a vital challenge to the American status quo. By opening up a cultural space for validating otherwise marginalized Black innovators, improvisation has offered resources for hope, social transformation, and Black mobility. It has also enabled an ongoing critique of existing discourses, subjecting the rigidity of white supremacy, Eurocentrism, or sexism, for instance, to reformulation through an articulation of other possible futures.

Jazz photographs are evidentiary documents, nostalgic memorials, and contributors to a romantic mythology and mystique. Sight and sound are combined and made more potent by mutual association. But classic jazz photographs do not exist in the realm of myth alone. Jazz photographs intersected with trends in portraiture, documentary, and advertising during the peak decades of the music’s popularity. They described the social contours of the music– the places where it was heard and the communities formed around it. And images helped sell the music, whether promoting performances or recordings. Photographs also made African American artistic innovation more obvious as the drive for equality gained momentum. The symbiotic relationship between the two art forms has been strengthened over more than one hundred years. Publicity portraiture, photojournalism, album cover imagery, street photography, African American photography, and archival and exhibition curation have all probed the music’s deep beauty for visual analogues and associations.

The Great Migration, which began in the late nineteenth century and witnessed the movement of more than six million Black folk from the agrarian US South to the urban North between 1919 and 1970, and the flourishing of “Black Renaissances” in Harlem, Chicago, Pittsburgh, and other Northern urban centers were the essential soil in which are rooted not only the two works that are the subject of this book, but also the lives and careers of Margaret Bonds, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Langston Hughes. This chapter explores the roles of those two large societal seizings of freedom for the poor and oppressed as the context for Margaret Bonds’s career and the source of her career-long commitment to using her art to uplift what she in 1942 called “our oppressed Race” and work for global equality.

After the heavy saturation of blues performing in the 1920s and the application of various elements– rhythm, syncopation, call and response, lyrics, and so on– to avant-garde literature, Black and white, of the time, the country descended into a prolonged Depression in the 1930s. Blues recording ground nearly to a halt for several years, though conditions that fed into the blues were in ample supply. The music was changing with the amalgamation of swing band elements and boogie-woogie with the rural blues, producing a jumping hybrid that used blues structures and lyrics with a big-band lilt. The move to the Left, especially in the artistic community, found literary blues having a decidedly Leftist feel in writers such as Langston Hughes, holding over from the twenties and Frank Marshall Davis emerging in the thirties. There were still the musical artists from various genres, including classical, who made use of the blues, and movies, for example, reflected the music as well. It was a new kind of hot music– and thus, hot music literature– that was in the offing.

Messiaen’s cahiers de notations des chants d’oiseaux tell us a great deal about how he fashioned works such as Oiseaux exotiques and Catalogue d’oiseaux from birdsong notations made in the wild and from recordings. Of what benefit can they be to performers? This chapter shows how insights the cahiers give into Messiaen’s imaginative world can influence performers’ approaches, offering perspectives on Messiaen’s perceptions of the ‘artistry’ of the birds, which are not always apparent from the published scores.

Schoenberg’s family background might have suggested that he would have a career as a bank clerk or schoolteacher. Yet his early commitment to music, and pursuit of expert contacts who encouraged his ambitions, marked him out as someone determined to take risks and to avoid easy options. Five years after having shown his ability to compose an effective if derivative string quartet, Verklärte Nacht (1899) for string sextet – later arranged for string orchestra – was a decisive leap forward in which respect for tradition was set against the radical perception that chamber music and tone poetry need not be kept apart. Sources considering Verklärte Nacht’s genesis in detail, and exploring its processes in depth, are surveyed. The extent to which the young composer was prepared to challenge conventional boundaries was reinforced by the unfailing resourcefulness with which his music consistently reflects the style and form of its poetic source.

This chapter considers the material and violent circumstances that surrounded Black performers such as Louis Armstrong, Ethel Waters, Bessie Smith, Duke Ellington, Fredi Washington, and Fats Waller, as they produced some of the most memorable work of the Harlem Renaissance. To survive, these artists employed strategies of gender fugitivity to navigate a world of labor, poverty, and policing, while claiming spaces of survival and creativity. The first of three sections explores fugitive gender, arguing that the purposeful instability caused through the relationship between gender and Blackness created the conditions of possibility in everyday life for Black folks. The second section excavates the meanings of Duke Ellington’s cosmopolitan dandyism as seen in the 1929 film Black and Tan.The final section considers the fugitive sociality of rent parties, informal musical venues born of necessity and delight, which served the community of Harlem by providing shelter, food, entertainment, and sexual pleasure.