Jazz Cosmopolitanism in Accra

In this remarkable book, Steven Feld, pioneer of the anthropology of sound, listens to the vernacular cosmopolitanism of jazz players in Ghana. Some have traveled widely, played with American jazz greats, and blended Coltrane with local instruments and worldviews. Combining memoir, biography, ethnography, and history, Feld conveys a diasporic intimacy and dialogue that contests American nationalist and Afrocentric narratives of jazz history. His stories of Accra's jazz cosmopolitanism feature Ghanaba/Guy Warren (1923–2008), the eccentric drummer who befriended the likes of Charlie Parker, Max Roach, and Thelonious Monk in the United States in the 1950s, only to return, embittered, to Ghana, where he became the country's leading experimentalist. Others whose stories feature prominently are Nii Noi Nortey, who fuses the legacies of the 1960s and 1970s black avant-gardes with Pan-African philosophy in sculptural shrines to John Coltrane and Coltrane-inspired musical improvisations; the percussionist Nii Otoo Annan, a traditional master inspired by Coltrane's drummers Elvin Jones and Rashied Ali; and a union of Accra truck and minibus drivers whose squeeze-bulb honk horn music for driver funerals resonates with the jazz funerals of New Orleans. Feld describes these artists' cosmopolitan outlook as an "acoustemology," a way of knowing the world through sound.

Steven Feld is a musician, filmmaker, and Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Music at the University of New Mexico. His books include Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expression, a new edition of which is forthcoming from Duke University Press, and, with Charles Keil, Music Grooves: Essays and Dialogues. He is a recipient of the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.