At the Vanguard of Vinyl: A Cultural History of the Long-Playing Record in Jazz

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At the Vanguard of Vinyl: A Cultural History of the Long-Playing Record in Jazz

by Darren Mueller

Duke University Press, 2024

ISBNs

Cloth: 978-1-4780-2581-8

Paper: 978-1-4780-3007-2

eISBN: 978-1-4780-9415-9 (OA)

eISBN: 978-1-4780-5907-3 (standard)

About the Book

In At the Vanguard of Vinyl, Darren Mueller examines how the advent of the long-playing record (LP) in 1948 revolutionized the recording and production of jazz in the 1950s. The LP’s increased fidelity and playback capacity allowed lengthy compositions and extended improvisations to fit onto a single record, ushering in a period of artistic exploration. Despite these innovations, LP production became another site of negotiating the uneven power relations of a heavily segregated music industry. Exploring how musicians, producers, and other industry professionals navigated these dynamics, Mueller contends that the practice of making LPs significantly changed how jazz was created, heard, and understood in the 1950s and beyond. By attending to the details of audio production, he reveals how Black musicians such as Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, and Charles Mingus worked to redefine prevailing notions of race and cultural difference within the United States. Mueller demonstrates that the LP emerges as a medium of sound and culture that maps onto the more expansive sonic terrain of Black modernity in the 1950s.

About the Author

Darren Mueller is Assistant Professor of Musicology at the Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester, and coeditor of Digital Sound Studies, also published by Duke University Press.

Reviews

“Darren Mueller gives us a fresh take on jazz recordings that fundamentally transforms the way we think about jazz improvisation and the relationship between jazz musicians and recording technologies, as well as our assumptions about how gender, race, and music inform record production. A profound reconception of jazz historiography, At the Vanguard of Vinyl forces us to confront our deepest-held notions about jazz through close attention to the musicians and record-industry personnel who shaped the ways in which we hear and appreciate the music.”

-- Kevin Fellezs, author of Birds of Fire: Jazz, Rock, Funk, and the Creation of Fusion

“In this brilliantly researched and sophisticated work, Darren Mueller presents a genealogy of the jazz LP as it became canonized as the music’s familiar and durable mode of presentation on record. His advocacy for understanding recordings as fixed moments of culture and freedom work and, at the same time, as evolving points of relation in a still emergent Afro-modernity is most compelling. Offering a much-needed intervention in African American studies, jazz studies, music history, and sound studies, At the Vanguard of Vinyl is a game changer for anyone who considers recordings as a site for interrogating technological change and cultural politics.”

-- Charles F. McGovern, author of Sold American: Consumption and Citizenship, 1890–1945

"This excellent title embraces art, technology and economics. Its accessible scholarship changes our understanding of a familiar artefact. . . . Mueller's title is one of my jazz books of the year, for sure."

-- Andy Hamilton The Wire

"The breadth and depth of his research is exemplary. This book is suitable for academic libraries with significant music collections. Highly recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty; professionals."
-- Choice

"Darren Mueller astutely traverses the history of the LP in At the Vanguard of Vinyl, explaining how a medium that brought recordings of live classical and jazz performances into the homes of music lovers became the palette for geniuses like Mingus and Miles to stretch their wings."
-- Adam Perry Boulder Weekly

". . . Mueller has made a great contribution to jazz scholarship and to media studies. He offers a new method of analysis for the original issues of mid-century jazz music. . . . He supplies the reader with excellent discographies of the original LPs he examined and a long bibliography of jazz and media-studies publications underlying and supporting his analyses. Any library supporting those areas of research should acquire At the Vanguard of Vinyl."
-- Matthew Snyder Notes

"The volume is exhaustively researched by an author of intelligence and passion who provides illuminating moments and invaluable information. . . . At the Vanguard of Vinyl is a worthy read."
-- Terrell K. Holmes New York City Jazz Record

"At the Vanguard of Vinyl represents an original and nuanced take on the course of post-war jazz."
-- Andrei Pohorelsky College Music Symposium