New Day Jazz
Justin Desmangles
This afternoon on New Day Jazz, we continue our exploration of Ornette Coleman's music, revisiting some of his least known works. Included will be selections from Chappaqua Suite, Crisis, as well as The Chamber Symphony of Philadelphia's performance of Saints and Soldiers, also the string quartets, Space Flight, and Dedication to Poets and Writers.
Later, in the 5 o'clock hour, I am joined by Mark Greif, discussing his most recent book, The Age of the Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in America, 1933-1973.
In a midcentury American cultural episode forgotten today, intellectuals of all schools shared a belief that human nature was under threat. The immediate result was a glut of dense, abstract books on the “nature of man.” But the dawning “age of the crisis of man,” as Mark Greif calls it, was far more than a historical curiosity. In this ambitious intellectual and literary history, Greif recovers this lost line of thought to show how it influenced society, politics, and culture before, during, and long after World War II.
During the 1930s and 1940s, fears of the barbarization of humanity energized New York intellectuals, Chicago protoconservatives, European Jewish émigrés, and native-born bohemians to seek “re-enlightenment,” a new philosophical account of human nature and history. After the war this effort diffused, leading to a rebirth of modern human rights and a new power for the literary arts.
Critics’ predictions of a “death of the novel” challenged writers to invest bloodless questions of human nature with flesh and detail. Hemingway, Faulkner, and Richard Wright wrote flawed novels of abstract man. Succeeding them, Ralph Ellison, Saul Bellow, Flannery O’Connor, and Thomas Pynchon constituted a new guard who tested philosophical questions against social realities—race, religious faith, and the rise of technology—that kept difference and diversity alive.
By the 1960s, the idea of “universal man” gave way to moral antihumanism, as new sensibilities and social movements transformed what had come before. Greif’s reframing of a foundational debate takes us beyond old antagonisms into a new future, and gives a prehistory to the fractures of our own era.
Mark Greif is assistant professor of literary studies at the New School. He is a founder and editor of the journal n+1.
"An important book, a brilliant book, an exasperating book. . . . In The Age of the Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in America, 1933-1973, the gifted essayist Mark Greif, who reveals himself to be also a skillful historian of ideas, charts the history of the 20th-century reckonings with the definition of 'man.'"-- Leon Wieseltier, New York Times Book Review
"[A]n important new study of mid-century intellectual life."-- Louis Menand, New Yorker
"In careful, thoughtful, and elegant prose reminiscent of Lionel Trilling and Edmund Wilson, Greif gives a brilliant exploration of the philosophical field that developed in the middle decades of the 20th century and echoes even up to our own time. . . . Greif's dazzling, must read analysis offers luminous insights into midcentury American understandings of humanity and its relevance to the present."-- Publisher’s Weekly, starred review
"[The Age of the Crisis of Man is] a brilliant contribution to the history of ideas, one of the rare books that reshapes the present by reinterpreting the past."--Adam Kirsch, Tablet
" 'One of the striking features of the discourse of man to modern eyes, in a sense the most striking, is how unreadable it is, how tedious, how unhelpful. The puzzle is why it is unreadable.' Thus, Mark Greif in his exhilarating study The Age of the Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in America 1933-1973. By 'the discourse of man' Greif means the vast midcentury literature on human dignity, from Being and Nothingness, to the 'Family of Man' photo exhibition, to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights--a discourse that Greif interrogates with verve, erudition, sympathy, and suspicion, and that he follows into the fiction of our time."-- Lorin Stein, Paris Review
Genre
Jazz
Missed the Show?
Sunday 6/21/2015 @ 3:00PM - 6:00PM
| Artist | Song | Album | Label | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ornette Coleman | Song for Che | Crisis | Impulse! | New York University, March 22, 1969 |
| Ornette Coleman | Space Jungle | Crisis | Impulse! | |
| Ornette Coleman | Trouble in the East | Crisis | Impulse! | |
| Airbreak | ||||
| Ornette Coleman | Garden of Souls | New York is Now! | Blue Note | NYC, April 29, 1968 |
| Ornette Coleman | Love Call | Love Call | Blue Note | NYC, May 7, 1968 |
| Airbreak | ||||
| Ornette Coleman featuring Pharoah Sanders | Chappaqua Suite Part IV | Chappaqua Suite | CBS-France | NYC, June 15, 16 & 17, 1965 |
| Modern Jazz Quartet | Lonely Woman (Ornette Coleman) | Lonely Woman | Atlantic | NYC, January 25, 1962 |
| Airbreak | ||||
| The Chamber Symphony Of Philadelphia Quartet | Saints And Soldiers | The Music Of Ornette Coleman | RCA | NYC, March 31, 1967 |
| The Chamber Symphony Of Philadelphia Quartet | Space Flight | The Music Of Ornette Coleman | RCA | |
| Airbreak | ||||
| Interview with Mark Greif by Justin Desmangles | Interview with Mark Greif by Justin Desmangles | Interview with Mark Greif by Justin Desmangles | Interview with Mark Greif by Justin Desmangles | |
| Ornette Coleman String Quartet | Dedication to Poets and Writers | Ornette Coleman - Town Hall 1962 | ESP | Selwart Clarke, Nathan Goldstein (violin) Julian Barber (viola) Kermit Moore (cello) Town Hall, NYC, December 21, 1962 |