Music/American studies/Cultural studies

Live Dead

The Grateful Dead, Live Recordings, and the Ideology of Liveness

JOHN BRACKETT

The Grateful Dead were one of the most successful live acts of the rock era. Performing over 2300 shows between 1965 and 1995, the Grateful Dead’s reputation as a “live band” was—and continues to be—sustained by thousands of live concert recordings from every era of the group’s long and colorful career. In Live Dead, musicologist John Brackett examines how live recordings—from the group’s official releases to fan-produced tapes, bootlegs to “Betty Boards,” and Dick’s Picks to From the Vault—have shaped the general history and popular mythology of the Grateful Dead for over fifty years. Drawing on a diverse array of materials and documents contained in the Grateful Dead Archive, Live Dead details how live recordings became meaningful among the band and their fans not only as sonic souvenirs of past musical performances but also as expressions of assorted ideals, including notions of “liveness,” authenticity, and the power of recorded sound.

STUDIES IN THE GRATEFUL DEAD

A series edited by Nicholas Meriwether

John Brackett is Instructor of Music at Vance-Granville Community College, author of John Zorn: Tradition and Transgression, and coeditor of The Routledge Companion to Popular Music Analysis: Expanding Approaches.

Music/African American studies

NOW AVAILABLE FROM DUKE The Dark Tree

Jazz and the Community Arts in Los Angeles STEVEN L. ISOARDI

In the early 1960s, pianist Horace Tapscott gave up a successful career in Lionel Hampton’s band and returned to his home in Los Angeles to found the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra, a community arts group that focused on providing community-oriented jazz and jazz training. Over the course of almost forty years, the Arkestra, together with the related Union of God’s Musicians and Artists Ascension Foundation, were at the forefront of the vital community-based arts movements in black Los Angeles. Some three hundred artists—musicians, vocalists, poets, playwrights, painters, sculptors, and graphic artists— passed through these organizations, many ultimately remaining within the community and others moving on to achieve international fame. In The Dark Tree, Steven L. Isoardi draws on one hundred in-depth interviews with the Arkestra’s participants to tell the history of the important and largely overlooked community arts movement of black Los Angeles. This revised and updated edition brings the story of the Arkestra up to date, as its ethos and aesthetic remain vital forces in jazz and popular music to this day.

Steven L. Isoardi is an independent scholar and editor of Songs of the Unsung: The Musical and Social Journey of Horace Tapscott, also published by Duke University Press, Central Avenue Sounds: Jazz in Los Angeles, and Jazz Generations: A Life in American Music and Society. He is the author of The Music Finds a Way: A PAPA/UGMAA Oral History of Growing up in Postwar South Central Los Angeles.

December 240 pages, 25 illustrations paper, 978-1-4780-2548-1 $26.95tr/£22.99 cloth, 978-1-4780-2070-7 $102.95/£92.00

September 456 pages, 59 illustrations paper, 978-1-4780-2528-3 $29.95tr/£25.99