Kevin Analu Fellezs

Columbia University | CU · Music/African American and African Diaspora Studies

Steely Dan has always been a grumpy old guy’s band. In this essay, I listen to the ways in which Becker and Fagen turn their critical misandry on middle-aged American boomer generation males, adrift in vats of self-pity, marinating in melancholy and regret, and fermenting inexorably into elderly obsolescence. The duo masked their baleful assessment...

This volume brings together a range of chapters, written by new and established scholars, that present original research and analysis into the subjects and practices that constitute the phenomenon of global metal music and culture. But what exactly is global metal music and culture? When did it begin? Is it possible to define it? Study it? And by w...

Performed on an acoustic steel-string guitar with open tunings and a finger-picking technique, Hawaiian slack key guitar music emerged in the mid-nineteenth century. Though performed on a non-Hawaiian instrument, it is widely considered to be an authentic Hawaiian tradition grounded in Hawaiian aesthetics and cultural values. In Listen But Don’t As...

In this essay, I explore the ways in which kī hō‘alu (Hawaiian slack key guitarists) articulated Native Hawaiian aspirations for self-determination and reterritorialization during the Second Hawaiian Renaissance. I argue that Hawaiian music speaks to a liberatory politics that is embedded within an aesthetic of nahenahe (soft, sweet, melodious). Na...

In this essay, I mean to re-examine the notion of virtuosity, which has been characterized as a Romantic reaction to bourgeois rationalism that mobilizes virtuoso musical technique in the service of critiquing bourgeois understandings of art. Furthermore, most critics accuse virtuosos of providing vulgar spectacle in place of sober execution linked...

As a nascent academic field of study, it is an optimal time for metal music scholars to fashion a metal (music) studies focused on (heavy) metal’s status and development as genre, as tradition, as culture – in other words, as subject/object of broad scholarly enquiry – that productively resists orthodoxies not only by maintaining metal scholarship’...

I thought I was black for about three years. I felt like there was a black poet trapped inside me, and [’The Jungle Line’] was about Harlem - the primitive juxtaposed against the Frankenstein of modern industrialization; the wheels turning and the gears grinding and the beboppers with the junky spit running down their trumpets. All of that together...

Women Drummers: A History from Rock and Jazz to Blues and Country. By Angela Smith. Lanham, MD and Plymouth: Rowan and Littlefield, 2014. 250 pp. ISBN 978-0-8108-8834-0 - Volume 34 Issue 3 - Kevin Fellezs

Daniel Fischlin, Ajay Heble, and George Lipsitz, The Fierce Urgency of Now: Improvisation, Rights, and the Ethics of Cocreation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013, $23.95). Pp. 277. isbn978 0 8223 5478 9. - Volume 49 Issue 3 - KEVIN FELLEZS

Formed in 1968, musical group The Fourth Way was among the first bands to merge rock, jazz, and non-Western musical approaches in a way that mirrored the mixed-race membership of the band—white New Zealander pianist Mike Nock, black American violinist Michael White, white American bassist Ron McClure, and black American drummer Eddie Marshall—a not...

Review of Bob Gluck's You'll Know When You Get There: Herbie Hancock and the Mwandishi Band.

For all of metal’s globalization, metal is frequently associated with white, working-class men. This article focuses attention on the African-American minority within US metal scenes, drawing on a case study of the all-black thrash metal band Stone Vengeance, who ‘while enjoying a primarily white male audience, formed their aesthetic in recognition...

In this essay, I explore composer and pianist Toshiko Akiyoshi's articulation of a transcultural rootlessness which she developed by rendering non-jazz influences, drawn most notably from Japanese musical aesthetics, within a jazz context. Her active infusion of traditional Japanese musical elements into large ensemble jazz music compositions and a...

This essay investigates the ways in which Tony Williams's fusion band, Lifetime, challenged and complicated the meanings jazz held as both a tradition of popular music and as art music. The band merged psychedelic and hard rock styles with jazz, producing music that unmasked the racialized assumptions behind genre categories, helped introduce rock'...

Typescript. Microfiche copy available in Special Collections Dept. Thesis (M.A.)--San Francisco State University, 2000. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 239-245).