Books
2019 | Duke University Press
2021 | Best Subsequent Book Prize (NAISA), Honorable Mention
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 Ask Question Kevin Fellezs listens to Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) and non-Hawaiian slack key guitarists in Hawai‘i, California, and Japan, attentive to the ways in which notions of Kanaka Maoli belonging and authenticity are negotiated and articulated in all three locations. In Hawai‘i, slack key guitar functions as a sign of Kanaka Maoli cultural renewal, resilience, and resistance in the face of appropriation and occupation, while in Japan it nurtures a merged Japanese-Hawaiian artistic and cultural sensibility. For diasporic Hawaiians in California, it provides a way to claim Hawaiian identity. By demonstrating how slack key guitar is a site for the articulation of Hawaiian values, Fellezs illuminates how slack key guitarists are reconfiguring notions of Hawaiian belonging, aesthetics, and politics throughout the transPacific.
2011 | Duke University Press
2012 | Woody Guthrie Book Award (IASPM-US)
Birds of Fire brings overdue critical attention to fusion, a musical idiom that emerged as young musicians blended elements of jazz, rock, and funk in the late 1960s and 1970s. At the time, fusion was disparaged by jazz writers and ignored by rock critics. In the years since, it has come to be seen as a commercially driven jazz substyle. Fusion never did coalesce into a genre. In Birds of Fire, Kevin Fellezs contends that hybridity was its reason for being. By mixing different musical and cultural traditions, fusion artists sought to disrupt generic boundaries, cultural hierarchies, and critical assumptions. Interpreting the work of four distinctive fusion artists—Tony Williams, John McLaughlin, Joni Mitchell, and Herbie Hancock—Fellezs highlights the ways that they challenged convention in the 1960s and 1970s. He also considers the extent to which a musician can be taken seriously as an artist across divergent musical traditions. Birds of Fire concludes with a look at the current activities of McLaughlin, Mitchell, and Hancock; Williams’s final recordings; and the legacy of the fusion music made by these four pioneering artists.
Co-edited with Andy R. Brown
2020 | Brill (2012 | Inter-Disciplinary)
Heavy Metal Generations is the fourth volume in the series of papers drawn from the 2012 Music, Metal and Politics international conference, which attracted scholars from around the globe, working within a diverse range of academic disciplines, to converge in Prague, Czech Republic, for three days of panel presentations, debate and conjecture about the past, present and future of metal music studies. The flavour of diversity, synchronicity and inter-disciplinarity that characterised the event can be gauged from the selection of chapters presented in this volume. We hope this collection contributes to the rising tide of academic work that serves to broaden and deepen heavy metal music studies on its intellectual and aesthetic grounds, critical agenda and political value by undermining old certainties and suggesting new horizons in the context of current social conditions, politics and society.
Prof. Fellezs cannot fully express his deep gratitude to Prof. Yan Liu (Central Conservatory of Music, Beijing/Tianjin Conservatory of Music) for all of her hard work and dedication in translating Birds of Fire into Mandarin Chinese. 謝謝你!