Intertribal Native American Music in the United States ─ Experiencing Music, Expressing Culture

Over time many Native American tribes have developed a shared musical culture that is prominently audible on local, national, and international stages. In Intertribal Native American Music in the United States, ethnomusicologist and GRAMMYR Award-winning musician Dr. John-Carlos Perea shows how traditional sounds, such as pow-wow and Native American flute songs, have developed in tandem with increasingly recognizable forms like Native jazz and rock. Perea provides an in-depth look at how Northern and Southern Plains pow-wow practices represent a singular performance encompassing disparate stories and sounds. The result is the only brief text that makes clear the interconnectedness of Native American music through a dynamic and thorough analysis of how it began and where it is headed.

Intertribal Native American Music in the United States is one of several case-study volumes that can be used along with Thinking Musically, the core book in the Global Music Series. Thinking Musically incorporates music from many diverse cultures and establishes the framework for exploring the practice of music around the world. It sets the stage for an array of case-study volumes, each of which focuses on a single area of the world. Each case study uses the contemporary musical situation as a point of departure, covering historical information and traditions as they relate to the present.

Dr. John-Carlos Perea (Mescalero Apache, Irish, German, Chicano) is Assistant Professor in the Department of American Indian Studies, College of Ethnic Studies, at San Francisco State University. He received his BA (2000) in Music from San Francisco State University and his MA and Ph.D. (2005/2009) in Music from the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests include contemporary urban American Indian musical cultures, powwow music and dance, New Age music, and the music of saxophonist Jim Pepper. Perea has recorded on sixteen albums and, in 2007, he won a Grammy (Best New Age Album [Vocal or Instrumental]) as a member of the Paul Winter Consort for pow-wow and cedar flute songs contributed to Crestone (Living Music, 2007).