2004 Articles

Review of Daniel Fischlin and Ajay Heblin, eds. 2004. The Other Side of Nowhere: Jazz, Improvisation, and Communities in Dialogue. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press; and Robert O’Meally, Brent Hayes Edwards, and Farah Jasmine Griffith, eds. 2004.

Higgins, Niko

What is the "New Jazz Studies?" Uptown Conversations and The Other Side of Nowhere contain a diverse array of scholarship that approaches the broad fields of jazz studies and musical improvisation through various perspec-tives and methodologies. Krin Gabbard's two volume collection, Represent-ing Jazz (1995a) and Jazz Among the Discourses (1995b), is the clear prece-dent for these new anthologies. Uptown Conversations and The Other Side of Nowhere continue this trajectory by moving away from jazz as a static object to be stylistically described, explained, and celebrated through the heroic and larger-than-life individual towards an understanding of jazz as a music in continual dialogue with the historical, social, political, racial, and gendered processes governing its creation.