For jazz historians, Louis Armstrong's Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings mark the first revolution in the history of a music riven by upheaval. Yet few traces of this revolution can be found in the historical record of the late 1920s, when the records were made. Even black newspapers covered Armstrong as just one name among many, and descriptions of his playing, while laudatory, bear little resemblance to those of today. For this reason, the perspective of Armstrong's first listeners is usually regarded as inadequate, as if they had missed the true significance of his music. This attitude overlooks the possibility that those early listeners might have heard something valuable on its own terms, something we ourselves have lost. If we could somehow recapture their perspective-without abandoning our own-how might it change our understanding of these seminal recordings? In Louis Armstrong's Hot Five and Hot Seven Recordings, Harker selects seven exceptional records to study at length: "Cornet Chop Suey," "Big Butter and Egg Man," "Potato Head Blues," "S.O.L. Blues"/"Gully Low Blues," "Savoy Blues," and "West End Blues." The world of vaudeville and show business provide crucial context, revealing how the demands of making a living in a competitive environment could catalyze Armstrong's unique artistic gifts. Technical achievements such as virtuosity, structural coherence, harmonic improvisation, and high-register playing are all shown to have a basis in the workaday requirements of Armstrong's profession. Invoking a breadth of influences ranging from New Orleans clarinet style to Guy Lombardo, and from tap dancing to classical music, this book offers bold insights, fresh anecdotes, and, ultimately, a new interpretation of Louis Armstrong and his most influential body of recordings.

As a result of their actions such as the "Punk Prayer" in Moscow's Christ the Savior Cathedral and their subsequent trials, the girls of Pussy Riot were transformed into icons of protest. The images of the principal members, Nadezda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alekhina, were seen all around the world before the two disappeared for two years into Russian prison camps. Immediately after their release, the successful Dutch entrepreneur and avid photographer Bert Verwelius contacted the two women, setting into motion what was to be an extraordinary photo shoot: using the activists' stories and sketches of the prison camp, he depicted their living and working conditions there as an impressive picture series. Yet Bert Verwelius also shows us a very different, hidden side to the two young women in this book, his first publication. With his sensitive portraits, he captures the open and loveable nature of Nadezda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alekhina-- not to mention their beauty.

You have never seen the women behind the masks quite like this

The International Who's Who in Popular Music 2007 provides biographical details on some of the most talented and influential artists, as well as up-and-coming individuals from the world of popular music. International in scope, this new edition provides information on artists, varying from Eminem to Wynton Marsalis; Ray Davies to Talvin Singh. Listed alphabetically by surname, entries provide full biographical profiles, including personal information, principal career details, recordings and compositions, and full contact details, where available. An index of groups is provided for ease of reference. Appendices include directories listing music festivals, music organizations, music awards and digital music sites providing legal downloads. The careers of pop, rock, folk, jazz, dance, world and country music artists from around the world are profiled in this new edition. New artists are included, as well as established names in popular music. Entrants include Elvis Costello, Carlos Santana, Wayne Shorter, Dizzee Rascal, Gil Scott-Heron and Joss Stone. Over 6,000 alphabetically arranged entries. Fully revised and updated for this ninth edition. Spans the full range of popular music.

Though you may not know the man, you probably know his music. Arkansas-born Louis Jordan's songs like "Baby, It's Cold Outside," "Caldonia" and "Ain't Nobody Here But Us Chickens" can still be heard today, decades since Jordan ruled the charts. In his five-decade career, Jordan influenced American popular music, film and more and inspired the likes of James Brown, B.B. King, Chuck Berry and Ray Charles. Known as the "King of the Jukeboxes," he and his combo played a hybrid of jazz, swing, blues and comedy music during the big band era that became the start of R&B.

In a stunning narrative portrait of Louis Jordan, author Stephen Koch contextualizes the great, forgotten musician among his musical peers, those he influenced and the musical present.

The music we hear is always inhabited by voices of previous performances. Because listening is now so often accompanied by moving images, this process is more complex than ever. Music videos, television and film music, interactive video games, and social media are now part of the contemporary listening experience.
In An Eye for Music, author John Richardson navigates key areas of current thought - from music theory to film theory to cultural theory - to explore what it means that the experience of music is now cinematic, spatial, and visual as much as it is auditory. Richardson maps out the terrain of recent audiovisual production over a wide array of styles and practices, and sketches out a set of common structures that inform how we experience sound and vision. Whether examining Philip Glass or The Gorillaz, Richard Linklater's Waking Life or Michel Gondry's Be Kind Rewind, Richardson's arguments are both fascinating and provocative.

How does the immediate experience of musical sound relate to processes of meaning construction and discursive mediation?
This question lies at the heart of the studies presented in Experience and Meaning in Music Performance, a unique multi-authored work that both draws on and contributes to current debates in a wide range of disciplines, including ethnomusicology, musicology, psychology, and cognitive science. Addressing a wide range of musical practices from Indian raga and Afro-Brazilian Congado rituals to jazz, rock, and Canadian aboriginal fiddling, the coherence of this study is underpinned by its three main themes: experience, meaning, and performance. Central to all of the studies are moments of performance: those junctures when sound and meaning are actually produced. Experience-what people do, and what they feel, while engaging in music-is equally important. And considered alongside these is meaning: what people put into a performance, what they (and others) get out of it, and, more broadly, how discourses shape performances and experiences of music. In tracing trajectories from moments of musical execution, this volume a novel and productive view of how cultural practice relates to the experience and meaning of musical performance.
A model of interdisciplinary study, and including access to an array of audio-visual materials available on an extensive companion website, Experience and Meaning in Music Performance is essential reading for scholars and students of ethnomusicology and music psychology.

Embodying Mexico examines two performative icons of Mexicanness--the Dance of the Old Men and Night of the Dead of Lake P tzcuaro--in numerous manifestations, including film, theater, tourist guides, advertisements, and souvenirs. Covering a ninety-year period from the postrevolutionary era to the present day, Hellier-Tinoco's analysis is thoroughly grounded in Mexican politics and history, and simultaneously incorporates choreographic, musicological, and dramaturgical analysis.
Exploring multiple contexts in Mexico, the USA, and Europe, Embodying Mexico expands and enriches our understanding of complex processes of creating national icons, performance repertoires, and tourist attractions, drawing on wide-ranging ethnographic, archival, and participatory experience. An extensive companion website illustrates the author's arguments through audio and video.

Blues history is steeped in Chicago's sidewalks; it floats out of its restaurants, airport lounges and department stores. It is a fundamental part of the city's heritage that every resident should know and every visitor should be afraid to miss. Allow Rosalind Cummings-Yeates to take you inside the Checkerboard and Gerri's Palm Tavern, where folks like Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Willie Dixon and Ma Rainey transformed Chicago into the blues mecca. Continue on to explore the contemporary blues scene and discover the best spots to hear the purest sounds of Sweet Home Chicago.

Intimate, anecdotal, and spell-binding, Singing Out offers a fascinating oral history of the North American folk music revivals and folk music. Culled from more than 150 interviews recorded from 1976 to 2006, this captivating story spans seven decades and cuts across a wide swath of generations and perspectives, shedding light on the musical, political, and social aspects of this movement. The narrators highlight many of the major folk revival figures, including Pete Seeger, Bernice Reagon, Phil Ochs, Mary Travers, Don McLean, Judy Collins, Arlo Guthrie, Ry Cooder, and Holly Near. Together they tell the stories of such musical groups as the Composers' Collective, the Almanac Singers, People's Songs, the Weavers, the New Lost City Ramblers, and the Freedom Singers. Folklorists, musicians, musicologists, writers, activists, and aficionados reveal not only what happened during the folk revivals, but what it meant to those personally and passionately involved. For everyone who ever picked up a guitar, fiddle, or banjo, this will be a book to give and cherish. Extensive notes, bibliography, and discography, plus a photo section.

Music is one of the most distinctive cultural characteristics of Latin American countries. But, while many people in the United States and Europe are familiar with musical genres such as salsa, merengue, and reggaeton, the musical manifestations that young people listen to in most Latin American countries are much more varied than these commercially successful ones that have entered the American and European markets. Not only that, the young people themselves often have little in common with the stereotypical image of them that exists in the American imagination.
Bridging this divide between perception and reality, Music and Youth Culture in Latin America brings together contributors from throughout Latin America and the US to examine the ways in which music is used to advance identity claims in several Latin American countries and among Latinos in the US. From young Latin American musicians who want to participate in the vibrant jazz scene of New York without losing their cultural roots, to Peruvian rockers who sing in their native language (Quechua) for the same reasons, to the young Cubans who use music to construct a post-communist social identification, this volume sheds new light on the complex ways in which music provides people from different countries and social sectors with both enjoyment and tools for understanding who they are in terms of nationality, region, race, ethnicity, class, gender, and migration status. Drawing on a vast array of fields including popular music studies, ethnomusicology, sociology, and history, Music and Youth Culture in Latin America is an illuminating read for anyone interested in Latin American music, culture, and society."

On January 16, 1938 Benny Goodman brought his swing orchestra to America's venerated home of European classical music, Carnegie Hall. The resulting concert - widely considered one of the most significant events in American music history - helped to usher jazz and swing music into the American cultural mainstream. This reputation has been perpetuated by Columbia Records' 1950 release of the concert on LP. Now, in Benny Goodman's Famous 1938 Carnegie Hall Jazz Concert, jazz scholar and musician Catherine Tackley provides the first in depth, scholarly study of this seminal concert and recording. Combining rigorous documentary and archival research with close analysis of the recording, Tackley strips back the accumulated layers of interpretation and meaning to assess the performance in its original context, and explore what the material has come to represent in its recorded form. Taking a complete view of the concert, she examines the rich cultural setting in which it took place, and analyzes the compositions, arrangements and performances themselves, before discussing the immediate reception, and lasting legacy and impact of this storied event and album. As the definitive study of one of the most important recordings of the twentieth-century, Benny Goodman's Famous 1938 Carnegie Hall Jazz Concert is a must-read for all serious jazz fans, musicians and scholars.

Tracing Tangueros offers an inside view of Argentine tango music in the context of the growth and development of the art form's instrumental and stylistic innovations. Rather than perpetuating the glamorous worldwide conceptions that often only reflect the tango that left Argentina nearly 100 years ago, authors Kacey Link and Kristin Wendland trace tango's historical and stylistic musical trajectory in Argentina, beginning with the guardia nueva's crystallization of the genre in the 1920s, moving through tango's Golden Age (1925-1955), and culminating with the "Music of Buenos Aires" today. Through the transmission, discussion, examination, and analysis of primary sources currently unavailable outside of Argentina, including scores, manuals of style, archival audio/video recordings, and live video footage of performances and demonstrations, Link and Wendland frame and define Argentine tango music as a distinct expression possessing its own musical legacy and characteristic musical elements. Beginning by establishing a broad framework of the tango art form, the book proceeds to move through twelve in-depth profiles of representative tangueros (tango musicians) within the genre's historical and stylistic trajectory. Through this focused examination of tangueros and their music, Link and Wendland show how the dynamic Argentine tango grows from one tanguero linked to another, and how the composition techniques and performance practices of each generation are informed by that of the past.

Keith Jarrett ranks among the most accomplished and influential pianists in jazz history. His TheKoln Concert stands among the most important jazz recordings of the past four decades, not only because of the music on the record, but also because of the remarkable reception it has received from musicians and lay-listeners alike. Since the album's 1975 release, it has sold over three million copies: a remarkable achievement for any jazz record, but an unprecedented feat for a two-disc set of solo piano performances featuring no well-known songs.
In Keith Jarrett's The Koln Concert, author Peter Elsdon seeks to uncover what it is about this recording, about Keith Jarrett's performance, that elicits such success. Recognizing The Koln Concert as a multi-faceted text, Elsdon engages with it musically, culturally, aesthetically, and historically in order to understand the concert and album as a means through which Jarrett articulated his own cultural and musical outlook, and establish himself as a serious artist. Through these explorations of the concert as text, of the recording and of the live performance, Keith Jarrett's The Koln Concert fills a major hole in jazz scholarship, and is essential reading for jazz scholars and musicians alike, as well as Keith Jarrett's many fans."

In Spirit Song: Afro-Brazilian Religious Music and Boundaries, ethnomusicologist Marc Gidal explains how and why a multi-faith community in southern Brazil uses music to combine and segregate three Afro-Brazilian religions: Umbanda, Quimbanda, and Batuque. Spirit Song will be the first book in any language about the music of Umbanda and its close relative Quimbanda-twentieth-century fusions of European Spiritism, Afro-Brazilian religion, and Folk Catholicism-as well as the first publication in English about the music of the African-derived Batuque religion and "Afro-gaucho" identity, a local term that celebrates the contributions of African descendants to the cowboy culture of southernmost Brazil. Combining ethnomusicology and symbolic boundary studies, Gidal advances a theory of musical boundary-work: the use of music to reinforce, bridge, or blur boundaries, whether for personal, social, spiritual, or political purposes. The Afro-gaucho religious community uses music and rituals to varisuly promote innovation and egalitarianism in Umbanda and Quimbanda, whereas it reinforces musical preservation and hierarchies in Batuque. Religious and musical leaders carefully restrict the cosmologies, ceremonial sequences, and sung prayers of one religion from affecting the others so as to safeguard Batuque's African heritage. Members of disenfranchised populations have also used the religions as vehicles for empowerment, whether based on race-ethnicity, gender, or religious belief; and innovations in ritual music reflect this activism. Gidal explains these points by describing and interpreting spirit-mediumship rituals and their musical accompaniment, drawing on the perspectives of participants, with video and audio examples available on the book's companion website. The first book in English to explore music in Afro-Brazilian religions, Spirit Song is a landmark study that will be of interest to ethnomusicologists, anthropologists, and religious studies scholars.

Modern Moves traces the movement of American social dance styles between black and white cultural groups and between immigrant and migrant communities during the early twentieth century. Its central focus is New York City, where the confluence of two key demographic streams - an influx of immigrants from Eastern Europe and the growth of the city's African American community particularly as it centered Harlem - created the conditions of possibility for hybrid dance forms like blues, ragtime, ballroom, and jazz dancing. Author Danielle Robinson illustrates how each of these forms came about as the result of the co-mingling of dance traditions from different cultural and racial backgrounds in the same urban social spaces. The results of these cross-cultural collisions in New York City, as she argues, were far greater than passing dance trends; they in fact laid the foundation for the twentieth century's social dancing practices throughout the United States. By looking at dance as social practice across conventional genre and race lines, this book demonstrates that modern social dancing, like Western modernity itself, was dependent on the cultural production and labor of African diasporic peoples - even as they were excluded from its rewards. A cornerstone in Robinson's argument is the changing role of the dance instructor, which was transformed from the proprietor of a small-scale, local dance school at the end of the nineteenth century to a member of a distinct, self-identified social industry at the beginning of the twentieth. Whereas dance studies has been slow to connect early twentieth century dancing with period racial politics, Modern Moves departs radically from prior scholarship on the topic, and in so doing, revises social and African American dance history of this period. Recognizing the rac(ial)ist beginnings of contemporary American social dancing, it offers a window into the ways that dancing throughout the twentieth century has provided a key means through which diverse groups of people have navigated shifting socio-political relations through their bodily movement. Modern Moves asserts that the social practice of modern dancing, with its perceived black origins, empowered displaced people such as migrants and immigrants to grapple with the effects of industrialization, urbanization, and the rise of North American modernity. Far more than simple appropriation, the selling and practicing of "black" dances during the 1910s and 1920s reinforced whiteness as the ideal racial status in America through embodied and rhetorical engagements with period black stereotypes.

In this groundbreaking study, D. R. M. Irving reconnects the Philippines to current musicological discourse on the early modern Hispanic world. For some two and a half centuries, the Philippine Islands were firmly interlinked to Latin America and Spain through transoceanic relationships of politics, religion, trade, and culture. The city of Manila, founded in 1571, represented a vital intercultural nexus and a significant conduit for the regional diffusion of Western music. Within its ethnically diverse society, imported and local musics played a crucial role in the establishment of ecclesiastical hierarchies in the Philippines and in propelling the work of Roman Catholic missionaries in neighboring territories. Manila's religious institutions resounded with sumptuous vocal and instrumental performances, while an annual calendar of festivities brought together many musical traditions of the indigenous and immigrant populations in complex forms of artistic interaction and opposition.
Multiple styles and genres coexisted according to strict regulations enforced by state and ecclesiastical authorities, and Irving uses the metaphors of European counterpoint and enharmony to critique musical practices within the colonial milieu. He argues that the introduction and institutionalization of counterpoint acted as a powerful agent of colonialism throughout the Philippine Archipelago, and that contrapuntal structures were reflected in the social and cultural reorganization of Filipino communities under Spanish rule. He also contends that the active appropriation of music and dance by the indigenous population constituted a significant contribution to the process of hispanization. Sustained "enharmonic engagement" between Filipinos and Spaniards led to the synthesis of hybrid, syncretic genres and the emergence of performance styles that could contest and subvert hegemony. Throwing new light on a virtually unknown area of music history, this book contributes to current understanding of the globalization of music, and repositions the Philippines at the frontiers of research into early modern intercultural exchange.

Country music in the Carolinas and the southern Appalachian Mountains owes a tremendous debt to freedom-loving Scotch-Irish pioneers who settled the southern backcountry during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These hardy Protestant settlers brought with them from Lowland Scotland, Northern England and the Ulster Province of Ireland music that created the essential framework for "old-time string band music." From the cabins of the Blue Ridge and Great Smoky Mountains to the textile mills and urban centers of the Carolina foothills, this colorful, passionate, heartfelt music transformed the culture of America and the world and laid the foundation for western swing, bluegrass, rockabilly and modern country music. Author Michael Scoggins takes a trip to the roots of country music in the Carolinas.

An insightful examination of the impact of the Civil Rights Movement and African Independence on jazz in the 1950s and 60s, Freedom Sounds traces the complex relationships among music, politics, aesthetics, and activism through the lens of the hot button racial and economic issues of the time. Ingrid Monson illustrates how the contentious and soul-searching debates in the Civil Rights, African Independence, and Black Power movements shaped aesthetic debates and exerted a moral pressure on musicians to take action. Throughout, her arguments show how jazz musicians' quest for self-determination as artists and human beings also led to fascinating and far reaching musical explorations and a lasting ethos of social critique and transcendence.
Across a broad body of issues of cultural and political relevance, Freedom Sounds considers the discursive, structural, and practical aspects of life in the jazz world in the 1950s and 1960s. In domestic politics, Monson explores the desegregation of the American Federation of Musicians, the politics of playing to segregated performance venues in the 1950s, the participation of jazz musicians in benefit concerts, and strategies of economic empowerment. Issues of transatlantic importance such as the effects of anti-colonialism and African nationalism on the politics and aesthetics of the music are also examined, from Paul Robeson's interest in Africa, to the State Department jazz tours, to the interaction of jazz musicians such Art Blakey and Randy Weston with African and African diasporic aesthetics.
Monson deftly explores musicians' aesthetic agency in synthesizing influential forms of musical expression from a multiplicity of stylistic andcultural influences--African American music, popular song, classical music, African diasporic aesthetics, and other world musics--through examples from cool jazz, hard bop, modal jazz, and the avant-garde. By considering the differences between aesthetic and socio-economic mobility, she presents a fresh interpretation of debates over cultural ownership, racism, reverse racism, and authenticity.
Freedom Sounds will be avidly read by students and academics in musicology, ethnomusicology, anthropology, popular music, African American Studies, and African diasporic studies, as well as fans of jazz, hip hop, and African American music.

Music- and style-centred youth cultures are now a familiar aspect of everyday life in countries as far apart around the globe as Nepal and Jamaica, Hong Kong and Israel, Denmark and Australia. This lucid and original text provides a lively and wide-ranging account of the relationship between popular music and youth culture within the context of debates about the spatial dimensions of identity. It begins with a clear and comprehensive survey, and critical evaluation, of the existing body of literature on youth culture and popular music developed by sociologists and cultural and media theorists. It then develops a fresh perspective on the ways in which popular music is appropriated as a cultural resource by young people, using as a springboard a series of original ethnographic studies of dance music, rap, bhangra and rock. Bennett's original research material is carefully contextualised within a wider international literature on youth styles, local spaces and popular music but it serves to illustrate graphically how styles of music and their attendant stylistic innovations are appropriated and `lived out' by young people in particular social spaces. Music, Bennett argues, is produced and consumed by young people in ways that both inform their sense of self and also serve to construct the social world in which their identities operate. With its comprehensive coverage of youth and music studies and its important new insights, Popular Music and Youth Culture is essential reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students in sociology, cultural studies, media studies and popular music studies. Dr ANDY BENNETT is lecturer in Sociology at the University of Kent at Canterbury. He has published articles on aspects of youth culture, popular music, local identity and music and ethnicity in a number of journals, including Sociological Review, Media Culture and Society and Popular Music. He is currently co-editing a book on guitar cultures.

In response to increased focus on the protection of intangible cultural heritage across the world, Music Endangerment offers a new practical approach to assessing, advocating, and assisting the sustainability of musical genres. Drawing upon relevant ethnomusicological research on globalization and musical diversity, musical change, music revivals, and ecological models for sustainability, author Catherine Grant systematically critiques strategies that are currently employed to support endangered musics. She then constructs a comparative framework between language and music, adapting and applying the measures of language endangerment as developed by UNESCO, in order to identify ways in which language maintenance might (and might not) illuminate new pathways to keeping these musics strong. Grant's work presents the first in-depth, standardized, replicable tool for gauging the level of vitality of music genres, providing an invaluable resource for the creation and maintenance of international cultural policy. It will enable those working in the field to effectively demonstrate the degree to which outside intervention could be of tangible benefit to communities whose musical practices are under threat. Significant for both its insight and its utility, Music Endangerment is an important contribution to the growing field of applied ethnomusicology, and will help secure the continued diversity of our global musical traditions.

Sixties British rock and pop changed music history. While American popular music dominated the record industry in the late fifties and early sixties, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Kinks, the Who, and numerous other groups soon invaded the world at large and put Britain at the center of the modern musical map. Please Please Me offers an insider's view of the British pop-music recording industry during the seminal period of 1956 to 1968, based on personal recollections, contemporary accounts, and all relevant data that situate this scene in the economic, political, and social context of postwar Britain. Author Gordon Thompson weaves issues of class, age, professional status, gender, and ethnicity into his narrative, beginning with the rise of British beat groups and the emergence of teenagers as consumers in postwar Britain, and moving into the competition between performers and the recording industry for control over the music. He interviews session musicians who recorded anonymously with the Beatles, Hermans Hermits, and the Kinks, professional musicians who toured with British bands promoting records or providing dance music, songwriters, music directors, and producers and engineers who worked with the best-known performers of the era. The consequences of World War Two for pop music in the late fifties and early sixties form the backdrop for discussion of recording equipment, musical instruments, and new jet-age transportation, all contributors to the rise of British pop-music alongside the personalities that more famously made entertainment news. And these famous personalities traverse the pages of Please Please Me as well: performing songwriters John Carter and Ken Lewis, Lennon and McCartney, Jagger and Richards, Ray Davies, and Pete Townshend took center stage while the production teams and session musicians created the art of recording behind the doors of Londons studios. Drawing his interpretation of the processes at work during this musical revolution into a wider context, Thompson unravels the musical change and innovation of the time with an eye on understanding what traces individuals leave in the musical and recording process. Opening up important new historical and musical understandings in a repertoire that is at the core of rock music's history, Please Please Me will appeal to all students, scholars, and fans of popular music.

This definitive biography of John Mellencamp is "a true coming-of-age story" (John Sykes, chairman of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Foundation) of an iconic American rock and roll original, featuring exclusive in-depth interviews and never-before-told details. Perfect for fans of Janis and Born to Run.

John Mellencamp is not your typical rock star.

With music inspired by the work of William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, and other giants of American literature, he has experienced a colorful career unlike any other. Now, this fascinating biography fully charts the life of one of this country's most important voices in American music.

Mellencamp's story is also the story of the American heartland. His growth as an artist and evolution into legendary status directly reflected the major changes of the last fifty years. From the Summer of Love to the growing divisiveness of American politics and beyond, his music has served as the backdrop to this country for millions of fans.

Featuring exclusive interviews with friends, family, and colleagues, and exploring everything from the founding of Farm Aid to his induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, this is a fresh, expansive, and "inspirational" (Nora Guthrie, president of The Woody Guthrie Foundation) look at a true original.

Miles Davis was one of the musical giants of the twentieth century. In a career that spanned more than five decades, Miles transformed the face of jazz four or five times and his music resonates far beyond the bounds of his genre. Miles made the most famous album in the history of jazz, Kind of Blue, formed one of the greatest jazz quintets in the 1960s and fused jazz with rock. Including unique interviews with dozens of Miles' closest colleagues, many of whom have never before been interviewed about their time with him, The Last Miles concentrates on the final period of Miles' life, after he had emerged from a five-year lay-off from the world of music. Right up until the end of his life, he was still searching, still exploring and still refusing to play it safe. The focus is on the music Miles recorded and played, and how it evolved in the eyes of the musicians he played with. Those interviewed include, George Duke, Teo Macero, Tommy LiPuma, Marcus Miller, Darryl Jones and Easy Mo Bee. There are also interviews with musicians who played with Miles before the 1980s, including Dave Liebman, Pete Cosey, Michael Henderson and Mike Zwerin, who give their own assessment of the music Miles played during the final period of his life. Cheryl Davies, Miles' only daughter, is also interviewed. The Last Miles is full of fascinating new facts and stories about Miles. For the first time, every member of the group of young musicians from Chicago who helped bring Miles back into the music scene gives their story. Music journalist George Cole also reveals for the first time the full story behind a lost Miles Davis album recorded in 1985, tells you about a song Miles co-wrote for Mick Jagger, how he worked with Prince, and discovers new and unreleased music that Miles recorded. If you've ever wanted to know how Miles recruited his band members, what it was like working with Miles in the studio or to play with him on-stage, The Last Miles has the answers. There is at least one chapter devoted to each album that Miles recorded during this period. Full track-by-track descriptions contain many new and interesting tales behind the songs including how Sting came to record on one of Miles' tracks, why Prince dropped a song slated to appear on the Tutu album, how Gil Evans helped Miles compose many of the tunes on the album Star People, what Splatch means and who Ursula was.