People Get Ready

"If you thought jazz was dead, think again. As this remarkable collection of essays makes crystal clear, jazz is alive, loud, messy, sprawling, old and wise, born again, and playful. People Get Ready makes an essential contribution to jazz studies, cultural studies, and our increasingly global understanding of modern music. And it demonstrates what discerning readers and listeners already know: that 'hip' is both an adjective and a verb." - Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original

"Reader Get Ready! This lovely collection blasts past pessimism and uncertainty to showcase the resonant vibrancy of jazz today. From history to technology and from improvisation to politics, People Get Ready constitutes mandatory reading for anyone with a serious interest in answering Marvin Gaye's perennial question—'What's Going On?'" - Daniel Widener, author of Black Arts West: Culture and Struggle in Postwar Los Angeles

“This collection of thought-provoking essays is as much about inclusion, looking at jazz as a genre relevant to all, as it is futurism. Evolved from the Guelph Jazz Festival Colloquium, the publication is like a breath of fresh air in the scholarship pertaining to the music, first and foremost because it looks at it from new angles, and, perhaps more importantly, provides a platform for artists who simply have not been lionised according to their full worth.” - Kevin L Gendre, Jazzwise

“A diverse array of knowledgeable improvisers riffing on the musical practice and community that has inspired them.”  - Alex W. Rodriguez, Ethnomusicology Review

"...an excellent companion, presenting a diverse range of voices on the various aesthetic, social, and economic contexts bearing on improvised music currently and fleshing out how jazz and its aesthetic corollaries negotiate with these material factors through an ongoing stylistic restlessness and capacity for exchange." - Michael Borshuk, English Studies in Canada

"[T]he clearly situated specificity and well-grounded interdisciplinarity ... make[s] the conversations in People Get Ready so compelling." - A. Scott Currie, Ethnomusicology