Description
(Text)
Many jazz musicians from different generations have written autobiographies. This study argues that these texts are not only interesting musicological documents, but are equally relevant from a literary as well as a cultural-political perspective. As musicians' textual reconstructions of their lives are indicative of a politics of jazz, they provide insights into the meaning of jazz in American culture. As the author's reading of the self-narratives of Louis Armstrong, Art Pepper, and Oscar Peterson reveals, the jazz lives represented therein range from affirmation of the values of American national culture to resistance against them.
(Author portrait)
Alexander J. Beissenhirtz, born in 1977 in Kiel, Germany, received his Master's degree in American Literature from the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich in 2005. The present work is his dissertation thesis at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies of the Free University Berlin. His research interests focus on jazz and African-American Literature.
