Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday Essay Example for Free

Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday Essay Bill Crow’s Jazz Anecdotes is a thought-provoking, often amusing collection of stories from within jazz’s inner circles, told by and about some of the genre’s leading figures. While not a history of jazz, it gives readers some insights to how jazz artists worked, lived, bonded, and coped with an America in which many were still outsiders. The book’s forty-three chapters (expanded from the original 1990 edition) describe the life jazz musicians shared, offering insights into a rather exclusive, unconventional circle of performing artists. The numerous anecdotes are categorized by chapters, gathering related tales and moving from a general overview of jazz life to anecdotes about individuals, like Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, and Benny Goodman. Essentially, Crow creates a context in which jazz musicians lived, and then places individual musicians within it, giving readers a better understanding of how they functioned in this rarified climate. For example, the volume opens with â€Å"Wild Scenes,† which Crow says describes how â€Å"the individuality of jazz musicians combines with the capricious world in which they try to make a living† (Crow 3). The brief chapter sets the stage for the rest of the book, giving glimpses of the unconventional world jazz musicians inhabited (which explains to some degree their relationship to society at large). â€Å"The Word ‘Jazz’† contains attempts to explain the origins of the genre’s name, and â€Å"Inventions† offers accounts of how certain innovations occurred (such as Dizzy Gillespie’s distinctive bent trumpet), giving the reader a sense of history though the work is not an orthodox history per se. Many of the stories contained in Jazz Anecdotes convey the musicians’ camaraderie and warmth toward each other, as well as each other’s idiosyncrasies. Others convey how difficult and often arbitrary the jazz lifestyle often was. â€Å"Hiring and Firing† demonstrates how unstable many musicians’ careers were, rife with disputes over money or dismissals for their personal quirks. (For example, Count Basie fired Lester Young for refusing to participate in recording sessions occurring on the 13th of any month. ) â€Å"Managers, Agents, and Bosses† offers a glimpse into the seamier underside of jazz, where dishonest managers and mobsters often trapped jazz performers in unfair contracts or worse. Though jazz musicians appear to inhabit a special world, Crow does not discuss jazz in a social vacuum, tying it to social phenomena like race relations. In â€Å"Prejudice,† the tales take a more serious tone by showing how black jazz artists faced abundant racism, particularly in the South. However, Crow notes that â€Å"Jazz helped to start the erosion of racial prejudice in America . . . [because] it drew whites and blacks together into a common experience† (Crow 148). Jazz artists dealt with racism in various ways – Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday stood up to it while Zutty Singleton accepted it. Meanwhile, even white musicians like Stan Smith angered both races – whites for performing with blacks, and blacks for â€Å"intruding on their music† (Crow 152). The final chapters focus on individual artists, illustrating the greats’ personalities. Louis Armstrong emerges as earthy and good-hearted; Bessie Smith as strong and willful but ultimately self-destructive; Fats Waller is an impish pleasure-seeker given to excellent music but poor business decisions; and Benny Goodman as gifted but tight-fisted and controlling. Taken as a whole, Jazz Anecdotes offers a look at jazz’s human side, including its foibles, genius, camaraderie, crookedness, and connection to an American society from which it sometimes stood apart. Its legendary figures are depicted as gifted, devoted artists who enjoyed hedonism, companionship, and particularly independence. If any single thing stands out in this book, it is the latter; for the figures in this work, jazz meant creativity and freedom, which they pursued with equal vigor and vitality. Crow, Bill. Jazz Anecdotes. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday. (2016, Aug 28).

Loyalty and its role in customer relationship management 02222 Essay

Loyalty and its role in customer relationship management 02222 - Essay Example This severely reduces the customer retention of the firm. Therefore maintaining the loyalty of the customers is imperative to organizational success. The companies are constantly seeking out for new ways to retain their existing customers. This paper is based on the study of customer relationship and how it is important in maintaining the customer loyalty. The consumer behaviour can be explained as the response that the consumers express under certain circumstances. These circumstances are often on the grounds of introduction of new products or services, post purchase behaviour and gradual change in the consumption patter of the society. These factors are always studies by the marketers so that they can provide the proper value addition for the consumers (Allentuck, 2007). The loyal of a customer towards a brand is mostly dependent on hid post purchase behaviour, which is turn is related to the buying process of the customer. The buying process of the customers can be divided into stages like need recognition, information search, evaluating alternatives, finalizing the purchase, post purchase behaviour. Among these four stages the post purchase behaviour determines whether or not the customer will remain loyal to the company. Customer loyalty can be described by the customer’s tendency to voluntarily make repeated purchase from one particular company. Anderson and Kerr (2008) stated that customer loyalty is proportional to their satisfaction level; more satisfied a customer is, the more likely he is to make a repeat purchase. The satisfaction of a customer can be assessed by the following five dimensions, which are cognitive, affective, conative, situational and social norms (Anderson and Kerr, 2009). The level of cognition suggests the level of relevancy between the customers’ needs or preferences and the offered products or services. The Affective dimension indicates how the customer

Economics of Warfare Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words - 1

Economics of Warfare - Essay Example The inconsistency in the evaluation occurs because of the endogenous regressor that measures the magnitude of the association. In an ordinary circumstance, both the direction of causation and the magnitude provides invaluable information to the policy analysts. Therefore, the use of instrumental variable provides estimates that assist in obtaining consistent parameters. The article by Miguel et al. (2004) that assessed Economic shocks and civil conflict provides a simple and most effective way of using instrumental variables. For that reason, the article was the most important paper to critique and use when explaining why and how to use the instrumental variable. Estimation of economic impacts from civil conflict is not a simple process because of the endogeneity and the likelihood of biases. Miguel et al (2004) used rainfall variations to simulate the instrumental variables to assess economic growth for 41 countries in Africa after the onsets of wars and civil conflict because most of the countries rely on rain-fed agriculture for economic growth. Miguel et al. (2004) noted that instrumental variables provided credible association between conflicts like civil wars, and financial condition takes a causal relationship rather than merely a correlation (p. 726). The study reported that instrumental variables use two separate equations to define one function. Each of the equation defines and specifies a particular relationship. For instance, one of the equations will explain the existing relationship between the outcome and the independent variable. The second equation will determine the association that exist between the outcome and the instrum ental variable. For instance, if Y refers to the result, V refers to the critical independent variable that measures the policy outcome, N refers to instrumental variable, x refers to the vector of controlled variable, Q1, Q2, Q3, and Q4 signifies the parameters yet to be