Results by title

63 books match the query 'Road' and 2 start with p

cover of Playing the Changes: Jazz at an African University and on the Road

Playing the Changes

Jazz at an African University and on the Road

Darius Brubeck and Catherine Brubeck

University of Illinois Press, 2024

Catherine and Darius Brubeck’s 1983 move to South Africa launched them on a journey that helped transform jazz education. Blending biography with storytelling, the pair recount their time at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, where they built a pioneering academic program in jazz music and managed and organized bands, concerts, and tours around the world.

The Brubecks and the musicians faced innumerable obstacles, from the intensification of apartheid and a lack of resources to the hardscrabble lives that forced even the most talented artists to the margins. Building a program grounded in multi-culturalism, Catherine and Darius encouraged black and white musicians to explore and expand the landscape of South African jazz together Their story details the sometimes wily, sometimes hilarious problem-solving necessary to move the institution forward while offering insightful portraits of South African jazz players at work, on stage, and providing a soundtrack to the freedom struggle and its aftermath.

Frank and richly detailed, Playing the Changes provides insiders’ accounts of how jazz intertwined with struggle and both expressed and resisted the bitter unfairness of apartheid-era South Africa.

[more]
cover of Postcards from the Road: Robert Frank’s ‘The Americans’

Postcards from the Road

Robert Frank’s ‘The Americans’

Jonathan Day

Intellect Books, 2014

Walker Evans said in his 1958 introduction to Robert Frank’s The Americans, “For the thousandth time, it must be said that pictures speak for themselves, wordlessly, visually, or they fail.” The images revolutionized postwar American photography. With their candid images of men and women from all classes and walks of life, the photographs presented a very different story than that portrayed by the wholesome caricature of midcentury prosperity pervading American photography at the time. Although initially dismissed by his peers for his pioneering work, Frank was ultimately credited with changing the course of the art form, and his photography holds a secure status in the history of twentieth-century art. And he did all this without words. It seems appropriate then – and not a little overdue – that Jonathan Day has created a book that expounds, explores, and examines Frank’s work pictorially. 
 
Taking Frank’s iconic images as his point of reference, Day shot new photographs that commented on the road and contemporary America. Here, these images are paired with critical commentary that details the aspects of the work that are visually expounded and explained in Day’s complementary images. A visual entryway to the photographs and themes of this iconic book in the history of photography, Postcards from the Road represents an innovative, carefully considered departure from standard photographic textbooks.
[more]