With The Jazz Poetry Anthology, this volume offers a comprehensive exploration of the history of jazz poetry. The Second Set gathers many poets omitted from The Jazz Poetry Anthology, including Gwendolyn Brooks, Arthur Brown, Diane di Prima, Henry Dumas, Nikki Giovanni, David Henderson, Anselm Hollo, Haki Madhubuti, Michael McClure, Larry Neal, Dudley Randall, Eugene B. Redmond, Carolyn M. Rodgers, Ntozake Shange, A. B. Spellman, and Jay Wright. The Second Set fills out the history of jazz poetry with poems written before World War II, as well as those from the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s, and includes contemporary writers from a range of cultural backgrounds, including Ai, Rita Dove, Yusef Komunyakaa, Martin Espada, Joy Harjo, Keorapetse Kgositsile, Michael Longley, Mwatabu Okantah, Charles Simic, Lorenzo Thomas, Derek Walcott, Ron Welburn, and Yevgeny Yevtushenko.

Embracing a wide variety of poems informed by jazz, The Second Set also includes statements of poetics by many of the poets anthologized."

For nearly thirty years Frank Zappa (1940-1993) pursued an idiosyncratic but influential course in music - rock, jazz, and classical composer (releasing over fifty albums); founder of the Mothers of Invention; guitarist, conductor, and producer; as well as social satirist, sonic scientist, First Amendment champion, and all-around iconoclast. This updated edition of David Walley's cutting-edge classic includes a new foreword, a substantial chapter carrying the Zappa saga through his death from cancer, an afterword, bibliography, discography, videography, and guide to Zappa on the Internet. From 1960's Freak Out! to the posthumous Civilization Phaze III, No Commercial Potential offers converts and connoisseurs the most practical and penetrating book ever written on the musical phenomenon known as Frank Zappa.

Texas musicians and jazz share a history that goes all the way back to the origins of jazz in ragtime, blues, and boogie-woogie. Texans have left their mark on all of jazz's major movements, including hot jazz, swing, bebop, the birth of the cool, hard bop, and free jazz. Yet these musicians are seldom identified as Texans because their careers often took them to the leading jazz centers in New Orleans, Chicago, New York, Kansas City, and Los Angeles.

In Texan Jazz, Dave Oliphant reclaims these musicians for Texas and explores the vibrant musical culture that brought them forth. Working through the major movements of jazz, he describes the lives, careers, and recordings of such musicians as Scott Joplin, Hersal Thomas, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Sippie Wallace, Jack Teagarden, Buster Smith, Hot Lips Page, Eddie Durham, Herschel Evans, Charlie Christian, Red Garland, Kenny Dorham, Jimmy Giuffre, Ornette Coleman, John Carter, and many others.

The great strength of Texan Jazz is its record of the contributions to jazz made by African-American Texans. The first major book on this topic ever published, it will be fascinating reading for everyone who loves jazz.

The Guitar in Jazz presents in rich, entertaining detail the history and development of the guitar as a jazz instrument. In a series of essays by some of jazz's leading historians and critics, the volume traces the impressive evolution of jazz guitar playing, from the pioneering styles of Nick Lucas and Eddie Lang through the recent innovations of such contemporary masters as Jim Hall and Ralph Towner. Editor James Sallis has included essays that focus on individual guitarists, including Charlie Christian, Django Reinhardt, and JoePass. Other chapters vividly describe important jazz guitar styles, such as swing guitar and fingerstyle guitar. In all, The Guitar in Jazz provides a full and captivating portrait of the guitar's place in jazz. The book also offers insights into the larger history of jazz-its development, the social contexts in which the music came into being, and its eventual recognition as "the American classical music." The essays will appeal to guitar players and enthusiasts, and to all jazz lovers. James Sallis is a guitar player and writer. He is the author of The Guitar Players, available as a Bison Book, and of the novels The Long-Legged Fly, Moth, and Black Hornet.

Hailed as a classic in music studies when it was first published in 1977, Early Downhome Blues is a detailed look at traditional country blues artists and their work. Combining musical analysis and cultural history approaches, Titon examines the origins of downhome blues in African American society. He also explores what happened to the art form when the blues were commercially recorded and became part of the larger American culture. From forty-seven musical transcriptions, Titon derives a grammar of early downhome blues melody. His book is enriched with the recollections of blues performers, audience members, and those working in the recording industry. In a new afterword, Titon reflects on the genesis of this book in the blues revival of the 1960s and the politics of tourism in the current revival under way. |Kalman examines the crucial period of 1967-1970 at Yale Law School, when the mainstream liberal faculty was challenged by left-liberal students who aimed to unlock the democratic visions of law and social change they associated with Yale's legal realists of the 1930s. Law students during this phase of the school's history included Bill Clinton, Hillary Rodham Clinton, and Clarence Thomas.

New York in the 1950s. On the stage at Birdland is the midget master of ceremonies, 3'9" Pee Wee Marquette, dressed in a zoot suit and loud tie, smoking a huge cigar and screeching mispronounced introductions into the microphone. Pee Wee is just one of the many characters that have made Bill Crow's forty years in jazz seem like an instant. In the same key as his acclaimed Jazz Anecdotes, this collection of revealing, hilarious, and sometimes moving stories runs the full gamut of New York's nightspots, introducing us along the way to the likes of Dizzy Gillespie, Benny Goodman, Stan Getz, Judy Holliday, Yul Brynner, and Simon and Garfunkel.

In the 1920s, many black regional jazz bands were recorded and became products of the entertainment industry, which was altering the face of America from the handmade, homemade, homemade society of the ninteenth century to the mass-produced, mass-consumed technological culture of the twentieth century. Making use of the files of African American newspapers, such as the Chicago Defender, as well as published and archival oral history interviews, Hennessey explores the contradictions that musicians often faced as African Americans, as trained professional musicians, and as the products of differing regional experiences. From Jazz to Swing follows jazz from its beginnings in the regional black musics of the turn of the century in New Orleans, Chicago, New York, and the territories that make up the rest of the country.

Sarah Vaughan possessed the most spectacular voice in jazz history. In Sassy , Leslie Gourse, the acclaimed biographer of Nat King Cole and Joe Williams, defines and celebrates Vaughan's vital musical legacy and offers a detailed portrait of the woman as well as the singer. Revealed here is "The Divine One" as only her closest friends and musical associates knew her. By her early twenties Sarah Vaughan was singining with Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, and Billy Eckstine, helping them invent bebop. For forty-five years thereafter, she reigned supreme in both pop and jazz, with several million-selling hits (among them "Broken Hearted Melody," "Make Yourself Comfortable," and "Misty").But life offstage was never smooth for Sarah Vaughan. Her voluptuous voice was matched by her exuberant appetite for excess: three failed marriages, financial difficulties through many changes in management, late-night jam sessions, liquor, and cocaine. In Sassy , though, we also see the feisty and unpretentious woman who worked hard all her life to support her parents and adopted daughter, and who came to savour the hard-won independence and worldwide acclaim she achieved as the greatest jazz singer of her generation.

Hard bop was a brand of post bebop jazz that enveloped many of the most talented American musicians in the period between 1955 and 1956. These were years unrivalled in jazz history for the number of musically brilliant records issued - including Art Blakey's Ugetsu, Miles Davis's Kind of Blue, Thelonius Monk's Brilliant Corners, and Sonny Rollins's Saxophone Colossus.

This is the first book devoted entirely to hard bop, combining a narrative of the movement's evolution, from its beginnings as an amalgam of bebop and R&B to its experimental breakthroughs in the 1960s. With close analyses of musicians' styles and recordings, as well as specific tendencies within the school, such as `soul jazz', it offers a much needed examination of the artists, milieus, and above all the sounds of one of America's greatest musical epochs.

Legendary jazzman Johnny Otis has spent a lifetime at the center of L.A.'s black music scene as a composer, performer, producer, d.j., activist, and preacher. His energetic, anecdotal memoir, Upside Your Head Rhythm and Blues on Central Avenue, recalls the music, the great performers, and the vibrant culture of the district, as well as the political and social forces -- including virulent white racism -- that have shaped black life in Los Angeles. Resonating with anger, poignancy, joy, and defiance, Upside Your Head is a unique document of the African-American musical and cultural experience.
Upside Your Head recalls a 50-year career when it seems Otis either encountered, discovered, or performed with every significant figure in the early days of rhythm & blues and rock 'n' roll, including Count Basie, Esther Phillips, T-Bone Walker, Big Mama Thornton, and Lester Young. Drawing on dozens of vignettes, personal photographs, and hours of taped interviews from the popular "Johnny Otis Show," Upside Your Head offers a moving tribute to the black community that gave birth to L.A.'s rhythm and blues. His stories celebrate the true roots in black culture of a distinctive American music while lamenting its eventual appropriation by the dominant white society.

(Limelight). ..".his economical writing style ... manages to pack lots of information and opinion into a few carefully chosen words ... Besides detail work well-grounded in scholarship...the author isn't afraid to interpolate such generalizations and speculations as he sees fit; he may be the Stephen Hawking of jazz criticism." Bob Tarte, The Beat

I went to Africa to find the roots of the blues. So Samuel Charters begins the extraordinary story of his research. But what began as a study of how the blues was handed down from African slaves to musicians of today via the slave ships, became something much more complex. For in Africa Samuel Charters discovered a music which was not just a part of the past but a very vital living part of African culture. The Roots of the Blues not only reveals Charters's remarkable talent in discussing African folk music and its relationship with American blues it demonstrates his power as a descriptive and narrative writer. Using extensive quotations of song lyrics and some remarkable photographs of the musicians, Charters has created a unique contribution to our understanding of both African and American cultures and their music.

"Jazz: America's Classical Music" is a delightful introduction and guide to this complex and compelling music and to its rich history. In an engaging and conversational style, renowned jazz teacher Grover Sales tells of the lives and music of the greats--Ellington, Tatum, Hawkins, Coltrane, Parker, Hines, Goodman, Armstrong, and many others--with a mix of important facts, fascinating anecdotes, and brilliant interpretations. Illustrated with astonishing photographs of the artists in performance," Jazz: America's Classical Music" is a classic text, an ideal book for beginners and an inspiring one for serious students of the art of jazz.

American composer, pianist, and orchestra leader Duke Ellington was the first genuine jazz composer of truly international status. In this book Ken Rattenbury offers the most thorough musical analysis ever written of Ellington's works, assessing the extent to which Ellington drew on the black music traditions of blues and ragtime and the music of Tin Pan Alley, and examining how he integrated black folk music practices with elements of European art music. Rattenbury, a professional jazz musician for over fifty years, investigates Ellington's methods of composing, focusing on works written, performed, and recorded between 1939 and 1941, years that witnessed the full flowering of Ellington's genius. He discusses the infinite care with which Ellington selected his musicians-players possessing, in addition to technical accomplishment, the unique folksy qualities of timbre and delivery necessary to contribute to the "Ellington sound." He remarks on Ellington's gifts as a melodist and songwriter, shedding light on the commercial aspect of his involvement with Tin Pan Alley. After examining two early Ellington compositions for piano, he closely analyzes full scores of five significant pieces transcribed from their original recordings and including all extemporized solos and variations in performance. These transcriptions range from a duo for piano and double bass, through pieces for small groups, to compositions for Ellington's full orchestra. Drawing at length from the observations of Ellington himself and of the members of Ellington's orchestra, as well as from his own, extensive musical knowledge, Rattenbury provides new perspectives on Ellington's life and music, the interpretations of some of his most creative soloists, and the evolution of the jazz tradition

Here, for the first time, is a book which analyses popular music from a musical, as opposed to a sociological, biographical, or political point of view. Peter van der Merwe has made an extensive survey of Western popular music in all its forms - blues, ragtime, music hall, waltzes, marches, parlour ballads, folk music - uncovering the common musical language which unites these disparate styles. The book examines the split between `classical' and`popular' Western music in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, shedding light, in the process, on the `serious' music of the time. With a wealth of musical illustrations ranging from Strauss waltzes to Mississippi blues and from the Middle Ages to the 1920s, the author lays bare the tangled roots of the popular music of today in a book which is often provocative, always readable, and outstandingly comprehensive in its scope.

Charlie Barnet (1913-1991) is best known as the popular bandleader whose hits included "Cherokee", "Pompton Turnpike", and "Skyliner". But he was also the first to break the colour barrier in a popular dance band, and his black musicians included Clark Terry, Roy Eldridge, and singer Lena Horne; his white musicians included Jack Purvis, Red Norvo, Maynard Ferguson, and Doc Severinson. Barnet not only played jazz, he lived the jazz life: in this book, he writes of his whiskey and marijuana habits, of his whorehouse visits and his half-dozen marriages. Charlie Barnet epitomised the jazz age, and there are few memoirs as lively as "Those Swinging Years".

Here is the book jazz lovers have eagerly awaited, the second volume of Gunther Schuller's monumental The History of Jazz. When the first volume, Early Jazz, appeared two decades ago, it immediately established itself as one of the seminal works on American music. Nat Hentoff called it "a remarkable breakthrough in musical analysis of jazz," and Frank Conroy, in The New York Times Book Review, praised it as "definitive.... A remarkable book by any standard...unparalleled in the literature of jazz." It has been universally recognized as the basic musical analysis of jazz from its beginnings until 1933.

The Swing Era focuses on that extraordinary period in American musical history--1933 to 1945--when jazz was synonymous with America's popular music, its social dances and musical entertainment. The book's thorough scholarship, critical perceptions, and great love and respect for jazz puts this well-remembered era of American music into new and revealing perspective. It examines how the arrangements of Fletcher Henderson and Eddie Sauter--whom Schuller equates with Richard Strauss as "a master of harmonic modulation"--contributed to Benny Goodman's finest work...how Duke Ellington used the highly individualistic trombone trio of Joe "Tricky Sam" Nanton, Juan Tizol, and Lawrence Brown to enrich his elegant compositions...how Billie Holiday developed her horn-like instrumental approach to singing...and how the seminal compositions and arrangements of the long-forgotten John Nesbitt helped shape Swing Era styles through their influence on Gene Gifford and the famous Casa Loma Orchestra. Schuller also provides serious reappraisals of such often neglected jazz figures as Cab Calloway, Henry "Red" Allen, Horace Henderson, Pee Wee Russell, and Joe Mooney.

Much of the book's focus is on the famous swing bands of the time, which were the essence of the Swing Era. There are the great black bands--Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Jimmie Lunceford, Earl Hines, Andy Kirk, and the often superb but little known "territory bands"--and popular white bands like Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsie, Artie Shaw, and Woody Herman, plus the first serious critical assessment of that most famous of Swing Era bandleaders, Glenn Miller. There are incisive portraits of the great musical soloists--such as Art Tatum, Teddy Wilson, Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Bunny Berigan, and Jack Teagarden--and such singers as Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra, Peggy Lee, and Helen Forest.

Charles Mingus was a pioneer figure in modern jazz. Besides being a virtuoso bass player who played with the top jazz musicians for four decades, he was also an accomplished pianist, bandleader and composer who recorded more than 100 albums and wrote more than 300 original and innovative scores. This incredible collection explores Mingus' background and prestigious career as well as 55 of his pieces. The stories behind each song are given and accompanied by notes on how Mingus played the piece. Mingus photos, anecdotes, quotes and an extensive discography fill this volume that collectors will treasure. A truly personal work that celebrates the genius within this jazz legend. Songs include: Fables of Faubus * Sue's Changes * Better Get Hit in Your Soul * Weird Nightmare * and more.

These are just a few of Willie Dixon's contributions to blues, R&B, and rock'n'roll,songs performed by artists as varied as the Rolling Stones, Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters, ZZ Top, the Doors, Sonny Boy Williamson, the Grateful Dead, Van Morrison, Megadeth, Eric Clapton, Let Zepplin, Tesla, Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Stevie Ray Vaughan, and Jeff Healey. I Am the Blues captures Willie Dixon's inimitable voice and character as he tells his life story: the segregation of Visksburg Mississippi, where Dixon grew up the prison farm from which he escaped and then hoboed his way north as a teenager his equal-rights-based draft refusal in 1942 his work,as songwriter bassist, producer, and arranger,with Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Little Walter, Bo Diddley, and Chuck Berry which shaped the definitive Chicago blues sound of Chess Records and his legal battles to recapture the rights to his historic catalogue of songs.

Tony Bolden presents an innovative history of funk music focused on the performers, regarding them as intellectuals who fashioned a new aesthetic. Utilizing musicology, literary studies, performance studies, and African American intellectual history, Bolden explores what it means for music, or any cultural artifact, to be funky. Multitudes of African American musicians and dancers created aesthetic frameworks with artistic principles and cultural politics that proved transformative. Bolden approaches the study of funk and black musicians by examining aesthetics, poetics, cultural history, and intellectual history. The study traces the concept of funk from early blues culture to a metamorphosis into a full-fledged artistic framework and a named musical genre in the 1970s, and thereby Bolden presents an alternative reading of the blues tradition. In part one of this two-part book, Bolden undertakes a theoretical examination of the development of funk and the historical conditions in which black artists reimagined their music. In part two, he provides historical and biographical studies of key funk artists, all of whom transfigured elements of blues tradition into new styles and visions. Funk artists, like their blues relatives, tended to contest and contextualize racialized notions of blackness, sexualized notions of gender, and bourgeois notions of artistic value. Funk artists displayed contempt for the status quo and conveyed alternative stylistic concepts and social perspectives through multimedia expression. Bolden argues that on this road to cultural recognition, funk accentuated many of the qualities of black expression that had been stigmatized throughout much of American history.

Improvising Jazz gives the beginning performer and the curious listener alike insights into the art of jazz improvisation. Jerry Coker, teacher and noted jazz saxophonist, explains the major concepts of jazz, including blues, harmony, swing, and the characteristic chord progressions. An easy-to-follow self-teaching guide, Improvising Jazz contains practical exercises and musical examples. Its step-by-step presentation shows the aspiring jazz improviser how to employ fundamental musical and theoretical tools, such as melody, rhythm, and superimposed chords, to develop an individual melodic style.

'Without a doubt the most important artist the blues has ever produced' Eric Clapton 'No one did more to spread the gospel of the blues' President Barack Obama 'One part of me says, "Yes, of course I can play." But the other part of me says, "Well, I wish I could just do it like B.B. King."' John Lennon Riley 'Blues Boy' King (1925-2015) was born into deep poverty in Mississippi. Wrenched away from his sharecropper father, B.B. lost his mother at age ten, leaving him more or less alone. Music became his emancipation from exhausting toil in the fields. Inspired by a local minister's guitar and by the records of Blind Lemon Jefferson and T-Bone Walker, B.B. taught his guitar to sing in the unique solo style that, along with his relentless work ethic and humanity, became his trademark. In turn, generations of artists claimed him as inspiration, from Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton to Carlos Santana and the Edge. King of the Blues presents the vibrant life and times of a trailblazing giant. Witness to dark prejudice and lynching in his youth, B.B. performed incessantly (more than fifteen thousand concerts in ninety countries over nearly sixty years) - in some real way his means of escaping his past. His career roller-coasted between adulation and relegation, but he always rose back up. At the same time, his story reveals the many ways record companies took advantage of artists, especially those of colour. Daniel de Vise has interviewed almost every surviving member of B.B. King's inner circle - family, band members, retainers, managers and more - and their voices and memories enrich and enliven the life of this Mississippi blues titan, whom his contemporary Bobby 'Blue' Bland simply called 'the man.'

Huey "Piano" Smith's musical legacy stands alongside that of fellow New Orleans legends Dr. John, Fats Domino, Ernie K-Doe, and Allen Toussaint. His 1957 classic, "Rocking Pneumonia and the Boogie Woogie Flu," made Billboard's top R&B singles chart, and hundreds of artists including Aerosmith, the Grateful Dead, the Beach Boys, Johnny Rivers, and Chubby Checker have recorded his songs.

The first biography of the artist responsible for hits "Don't You Just Know It," "High Blood Pressure," and "Sea Cruise," Huey "Piano" Smith and the Rocking Pneumonia Blues follows the musician's extraordinary life from his Depression-era childhood to his teen years as a pianist for blues star Guitar Slim to his mainstream success in the 1950s and '60s. Drawing from extensive interviews and court records, author and journalist John Wirt also provides new insights on Smith's professional disappointments and financial struggles in the 1980s and '90s as he battled over royalties from his most successful and profitable work.

An enigmatic and guarded personality in a profession of extroverted performers, Smith made farreaching contributions to the New Orleans music scene as a songwriter, pianist, and producer. Wirt reveals that Smith's numerous collaborations with other artists -- including the Clowns, the Pitter Pats, the Hueys, and Shindig Smith and the Soul Shakers -- served as vehicles for his creative vision rather than simply as an anonymous backup for a leading front man.

Throughout this intimate account, Wirt details Smith's significant impact on rock and roll history and underscores both the longevity of his music -- which has entertained and inspired for over five decades -- and the musician's personal endurance in the face of hardship and opposition.