John Szwed

John F. Szwed (born 1936) is is the John M. Musser Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and African American Studies at Yale University. Additionally, he is an Adjunct Senior Research Scholar in the Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia University, where he previously served as the Center's director and Professor of Music and Jazz Studies. Szwed is the author of many books on jazz and American music, including studies of Sun Ra, Miles Davis, Jelly Roll Morton, Alan Lomax and Billie Holiday.

Career

Szwed gained his Ph.D. in anthropology from Ohio State University; his work as an anthropologist and folklorist includes field studies in Newfoundland, the Georgia Sea Islands, and Trinidad.^[1] As a musician, Szwed studied trombone, music theory, and played professionally for twelve years. He has taught at New York University, the University of Pennsylvania (where he was Director of the Center for Urban Ethnography and Chair of the Department of Folklore).^[1] From 1982 to 2008, Szwed was John M. Musser Professor of Anthropology, African American Studies, and Film Studies at Yale University.^[2] Szwed was appointed Professor of music and Jazz studies at Columbia University in 2008. In 2011, he was appointed Director of the Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia.^[2]

Publications

In 2000, Szwed published a study of Sun Ra, Space is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra.^[3] In 2003, he published a Miles Davis biography, So What: The Life of Miles Davis.^[4][5] Szwed wrote Doctor Jazz, a booklet about Jelly Roll Morton for the 2005 issue of The Complete Library of Congress Recordings by Alan Lomax on Rounder Records. The booklet won the 2005 Grammy Award for Best Album Notes.^[6] In 2010, Szwed published a biography of Alan Lomax, the folklorist, ethnomusicologist, and field collector of folk music of the 20th century, entitled The Man Who Recorded the World.^[7][8]

In 2015, Szwed published Billie Holiday: The Musician and the Myth, which analyses the art of Billie Holiday's singing and the construction of her life as a mythic paradigm of African American suffering. Szwed argues that Holiday's autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues, is a generally accurate account of Holiday's life, and that Holiday's co-writer, William Dufty, was forced to water down or suppress material by the threat of legal action. The New Yorker reviewer Richard Brody writes: "In particular, Szwed traces the stories of two important relationships that are missing from the book—with Charles Laughton, in the nineteen-thirties, and with Tallulah Bankhead, in the late nineteen-forties—and of one relationship that’s sharply diminished in the book, her affair with Orson Welles around the time of Citizen Kane."^[9]

Bibliography

• Afro-American Anthropology: Contemporary Perspective on Theory and Research, ed. Norman Whitten & John Szwed, 1970, ISBN 978-0-02-935250-2
• Space is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra, 2000, ISBN 978-1-84195-055-6
• Jazz 101: A Complete Guide to Learning and Loving Jazz, 2000, ISBN 978-0-7868-8496-4
• So What: The Life of Miles Davis, 2003, ISBN 978-0-09-928183-2
• Doctor Jazz, Jelly Roll Morton, 2005, Rounder Records
• Crossovers: Essays on Race, Music, and American Culture, 2006, ISBN 978-0-8122-1972-2
• Alan Lomax: The Man Who Recorded the World, 2010, ISBN 978-0-14-312073-5
• Billie Holiday: The Musician & The Myth, 2015, ISBN 978-0670014729

References

External links

• John Szwed website
• John Szwed, The Department of Music at columbia University
• The Center for Jazz Studies, Columbia University
• John Szwed, Yale University