* first of a kind to explore the topic of contemporary Chinese jazz, and unique in examining phenomena of contemporary music in China * exposes the insiders' views of the very people - jazz musicians, teachers, students, producers and fans - who in their daily practices first created and developed Chinese jazz. * offers a unique study of the vibrant culture in China, with an exclusive comprehensive view on the increasing importance of music and urban culture in the everyday lives of Chinese people. * engages debates in jazz and popular music studies related to place, identity, education, creativity, individuality, politics, economy, society and cultural development in contemporary China.

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.

for solo voice, SATB (with divisions), flute, and piano John Rutter's timeless arrangement of Skylark, a standard of the golden age of American song, is rich, mellow, and mellifluous. Soaring lines for flute depict the eponymous songbird, and the classic Hoagy Carmichael tune is shared between solo voice and choir, the latter also often providing a cushion of evocative harmonies.

In 1957, Duke Ellington released the influential album A Drum Is a Woman. This musical allegory revealed the implicit truth about the role of women in jazz discourse-jilted by the musician and replaced by the drum. Further, the album's cover displays an image of a woman sitting atop a drum, depicting the way in which the drum literally obscures the female body, turning the subject into an object. This objectification of women leads to a critical reading of the role of women in jazz music: If the drum can take the place of a woman, then a woman can also take the place of a drum. The Drum Is a Wild Woman: Jazz and Gender in African Diaspora Literature challenges that image but also defines a counter-tradition within women's writing that involves the reinvention and reclamation of a modern jazz discourse. Despite their alienation from bebop, women have found jazz music empowering and have demonstrated this power in various ways. The Drum Is a Wild Woman explores the complex relationship between women and jazz music in recent African diasporic literature. The book examines how women writers from the African diaspora have challenged and revised major tropes and concerns of jazz literature since the bebop era in the mid-1940s. Black women writers create dissonant sounds that broaden our understanding of jazz literature. By underscoring the extent to which gender is already embedded in jazz discourse, author Patricia G. Lespinasse responds to and corrects narratives that tell the story of jazz through a male-centered lens. She concentrates on how the Wild Woman, the female vocalist in classic blues, used blues and jazz to push the boundaries of Black womanhood outside of the confines of respectability. In texts that refer to jazz in form or content, the Wild Woman constitutes a figure of resistance who uses language, image, and improvisation to refashion herself from object to subject. This book breaks new ground by comparing the politics of resistance alongside moments of improvisation by examining recurring literary motifs-cry-and-response, the Wild Woman, and the jazz moment-in jazz novels, short stories, and poetry, comparing works by Ann Petry, Gayl Jones, Toni Morrison, Paule Marshall, Edwidge Danticat, and Maya Angelou with pieces by Albert Murray, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Ellington. Within an interdisciplinary and transnational context, Lespinasse foregrounds the vexed negotiations around gender and jazz discourse.

A book that clearly explains the principles of jazz soloing. Logically organized, with hundreds of musical examples, this method is the result of many years of Ted's teaching and research.

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."

Improbasen is a Norwegian private learning centre that offers beginner's instrumental tuition within jazz improvisation for children between the ages of 7 and 15. This book springs out of a two-year ethnographic study of the teaching and learning activity at Improbasen, highlighting features from the micro-interactions within the lessons, the organisation of Improbasen, and its international activity. Music teachers, students, and scholars within music education as well as jazz research will benefit from the perspectives presented in the book, which shows how children systematically acquire tools for improvisation and shared codes for interplay. Through a process of guided participation in jazz culture, even very young children are empowered to take part in a global, creative musical practice with improvisation as an educational core. This book critically engages in current discussions about jazz pedagogy, inclusion and gender equity, beginning instrumental tuition, creativity, and authenticity in childhood.

Embracing the entire history of jazz poetry, the work defines this inspired literary genre as poetry necessarily informed by jazz music. It discusses the major figures and various movements from the racist poems of the 1920s to contemporary times when the tone of jazz poetry experienced a dramatic change from elegy to celebration. The jazz music of Charlie Parker and John Coltrane transliterated into poetry by the likes of Langston Hughes and Sterling Brown is but a part of this vital work. This unusual volume will be of interest to scholars and students of literature, music, American and African Studies, and popular culture as well as anyone who enjoys jazz and poetry.

Emphasis is given to a call and response between white and African American writers. The earliest jazz poems by white writers from the 1920s, for example, reflected the general anxieties evoked by jazz, particularly regarding race and sexuality, and jazz did not fully become embraced in American verse until Langston Hughes and Sterling Brown published their first books in 1926 and 1932, respectively. By the 1950s, jazz poetry had become a fad, featuring jazz and poetry in performance, and this book spends considerable time addressing the energetic but often wildly unsuccessful work by dominantly white, West coast writers who turned to Charlie Parker as their hero. African American poets from the 1960s, however, focused more on John Coltrane and interpreted his music as a representation of the Black Civil Rights movement. Jazz poetry from the 1970s to the present has had less to do with this call and response between races, and the final two chapters discuss contemporary jazz poetry in terms of its dramatic change in tone from elegy to joy.

"The photographs of William Claxton define the essence of cool." - Jason Ankeny (AllMusic) "Claxton's innovative choices and airy style, which he called 'jazz for your eyes', worked sublimely to document and promote the rise of trumpeter and singer Chet Baker, especially." - Howard Mandel Born in Pasadena, California, photographer William Claxton (1927-2008) is best known for his dozens of splendid portraits of jazz stars (especially those of Chet Baker, of whom he made the first professional photos) and Hollywood stars (such as his friend Steve McQueen). In 1952, while shooting Gerry Mulligan and Chet Baker at the Haig Club, he met Richard Bock, founder of Pacific Jazz, who quickly hired him as art director and house photographer. During his time at the label, Claxton snapped and designed album covers at a rate of roughly one per week, in the process establishing the visual identity of the West Coast jazz movement. Where previous jazz photographers captured their subjects in the dark, smoky environs of nightclubs, Claxton capitalised on the sun and surf of southern California, posing artists in unorthodox outdoor settings to represent a new era in the music's continued evolution. Claxton's images graced the covers of numerous music albums, and his work regularly appeared in such magazines as Life, Paris Match and Vogue. Claxton wrote 13 books, held dozens of exhibitions of his photographs around the world, and won numerous photography awards. This book presents a selection of more than 150 superb images by the great photographer. Among the multiple artists portrayed are Louis Armstrong, Chet Baker, Art Blakey, Clifford Brown, Dave Brubeck, Ray Charles, Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Bill Evans, Stan Getz, Billie Holiday, Antonio Carlos Jobim, Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk, Wes Montgomery, Lee Morgan, Art Pepper, Sonny Rollins, Dinah Washington, and Muddy Waters. Text in English, with an introduction in English, French and Spanish.

In this classic account of the new black music of the 1960s and 70s, celebrated photographer and jazz historian Val Wilmer tells the story of how a generation of revolutionary musicians established black music as the true vanguard of American culture.

Placing the achievements of African-American artists such as Albert Ayler, Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane and Sun Ra in their broader political and social context, Wilmer evokes an era of extraordinary innovation and experimentation that continues to inspire musicians today.

As vital now as when it was first published in 1977, As Serious As Your Life is the essential story of one of the most dynamic musical movements of the twentieth century.

for SATB, piano, and optional bass and drum kit The Nidaros Jazz Mass draws on a variety of jazz styles to present a fun and innovative setting of the Latin Missa brevis. With a gentle Kyrie, funky Gloria, ballad-like Sanctus, laid-back Benedictus, and passionate Agnus Dei, this work breathes new life into familiar words, perfectly combining the contemporary with the ancient. Recorded by a professional jazz trio (piano, bass, and drums), this backing track is a useful tool for rehearsal and performance, and is compatible with both mixed- and upper-voice versions.

The Stooges Brass Band always had big dreams. From playing in the streets of New Orleans in the mid-1990s to playing stages the world over, they have held fast to their goal of raising brass band music and musicians to new heights - professionally and musically. In the intervening years, the band's members have become family, courted controversy, and trained a new generation of musicians, becoming one of the city's top brass bands along the way. Two decades after their founding, they have decided to tell their story. Can't Be Faded: Twenty Years in the New Orleans Brass Band Game is a collaboration between musician and ethnomusicologist Kyle DeCoste and more than a dozen members of the Stooges Brass Band, past and present. It is the culmination of five years of interviews, research, and writing. Told with humor and candor, it's as much a personal account of the Stooges' careers as it is a story of the city's musicians and, even more generally, a coming-of-age tale about black men in the United States at the turn of the twenty-first century. DeCoste and the band members take readers into the barrooms, practice rooms, studios, tour vans, and streets where the music is made and brotherhoods are shaped and strengthened. Comprised of lively firsthand accounts and honest dialogue, Can't Be Faded is a dynamic approach to collaborative research that offers a sensitive portrait of the humans behind the horns.

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.

Outside and Inside: Representations of Race and Identity in White Jazz Autobiography is the first full-length study of key autobiographies of white jazz musicians. White musicians from a wide range of musical, social, and economic backgrounds looked to black music and culture as the model on which to form their personal identities and their identities as professional musicians. Their accounts illustrate the triumphs and failures of jazz interracialism. As they describe their relationships with black musicians who are their teachers and peers, white jazz autobiographers display the contradictory attitudes of reverence and entitlement, and deference and insensitivity that remain part of the white response to black culture to the present day. Outside and Inside features insights into the development of jazz styles and culture in the urban meccas of twentieth-century jazz in New Orleans, Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles. Reva Marin considers the autobiographies of sixteen white male jazz instrumentalists, including renowned swing-era bandleaders Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, and Charlie Barnet; reed instrumentalists Mezz Mezzrow, Bob Wilber, and Bud Freeman; trumpeters Max Kaminsky and Wingy Manone; guitarist Steve Jordan; pianists Art Hodes and Don Asher; saxophonist Art Pepper; guitarist and bandleader Eddie Condon; and New Orleans-style clarinetist Tom Sancton. While critical race theory informs this work, Marin argues that viewing these texts simply through the lens of white privilege does not do justice to the kind of sustained relationships with black music and culture described in the accounts of white jazz autobiographers. She both insists upon the value of insider perspectives and holds the texts to rigorous scrutiny, while embracing an expansive interpretation of white involvement in black culture. Marin opens new paths for study of race relations and racial, ethnic, and gender identity formation in jazz studies.

A deeply researched and beautifully illustrated study of saxophone legend John Coltrane's signature album. Written with the full co-operation of the Coltrane family and featuring the voices of musicians, producers and writers of the 1960s, Kahn has also unearthed rare, unpublished interviews with Coltrane and bassist Jimmy Garrison. The book also features commentary from contemporary music stars including Carlos Santana, Bono, Phil Lesh, Patti Smith, Ravi Shankar and Steve Reich.

Endorsed by Jamey Aebersold, James Moody, Dave Liebman, and others, The Jazz Theory Book presents all the information any student of jazz needs in an easy-to-understand, yet thorough, manner. For intermediate to advanced players, and written by one of the acknowledged masters of jazz, it is used by universities around the world.

One hundred years after the singer's birth, Peggy Lee: A Century of Song brings to life the eventful career of an iconic performer whose contributions to the Great American Songbook, jazz, popular music, and film music remained unparalleled. Lee stood out among her peers as an exquisite singer possessing a cool vocal style, a songwriter frequently collaborating with leading composers of American jazz and film music, and a globally-loved entertainer with star quality. Tish Oney sheds new light upon this Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award winner's impressive musical talents while guiding the reader through the best of Lee's fifty-plus albums, radio and TV performances, creative contributions to the film industry, and over half a century of finely-polished live performances. Oney focuses on the evolution of Peggy Lee's recorded music, vocal development, artistic achievements, and contributions to American music while interviews with Lee's family, friends, and music colleagues reveal new insights and memories of this musical icon. Peggy Lee enables readers to discover a brilliant artist's inimitable legacy in the history of American popular music.

Hugh Masekela is a prodigiously talented giant of jazz and world music, and a pioneer in sharing the voice and spirit of South Africa with the rest of the world, but his globetrotting tale transcends music.

Still Grazing was first published in the US in 2004; it is an autobiography which shares rich detail of world-acclaimed jazz giant Hugh Masekela's life, infused with love and loss, sex and drugs, exile and revolution.

He survived it all, with wit, passion, abundant talent and wisdom, and is now bringing his story back home!

An eclectic study of wide-ranging but carefully chosen case studies and examples, from nineteenth century literature, through 1930s Broadway and film, to twentieth and twenty- first century jazz and popular music. Six thematically- linked but stand-alone chapters ensure the book can be employed in a variety of music, cultural studies, arts, humanities, and social sciences courses No immediate or direct competitors, especially in terms of the book's particular theoretical and analytical approach, its historical and cultural breadth, its diverse musical and cultural references, and its original and challenging insights

The widespread presence of jazz and blues in African American visual art has long been overlooked. The Hearing Eye makes the case for recognizing the music's importance, both as formal template and as explicit subject matter. Moving on from the use of iconic musical figures and motifs in Harlem Renaissance art, this groundbreaking collection explores the more allusive - and elusive - references to jazz and blues in a wide range of mostly contemporary visual artists.
There are scholarly essays on the painters Rose Piper (Graham Lock), Norman Lewis (Sara Wood), Bob Thompson (Richard H. King), Romare Bearden (Robert G. O'Meally, Johannes Volz) and Jean-Michel Basquiat (Robert Farris Thompson), as well an account of early blues advertising art (Paul Oliver) and a discussion of the photographs of Roy DeCarava (Richard Ings). These essays are interspersed with a series of in-depth interviews by Graham Lock, who talks to quilter Michael Cummings and painters Sam Middleton, Wadsworth Jarrell, Joe Overstreet and Ellen Banks about their musical inspirations, and also looks at art's reciprocal effect on music in conversation with saxophonists Marty Ehrlich and Jane Ira Bloom.
With numerous illustrations both in the book and on its companion website, The Hearing Eye reaffirms the significance of a fascinating and dynamic aspect of African American visual art that has been too long neglected.