Chet Atkins called Lenny Breau (1941-1984) "the greatest guitarist who ever walked the face of the earth." Breau's astonishing virtuosity influenced countless performers, but unfortunately it came at the expense of his personal relationships. Ron Forbes-Roberts analyzes Breau and his recordings to reveal an enormously gifted man and the inner workings of his music.

The amount of theoretical knowledge required to become a fluent improvisor on the piano can be overwhelming to the aspiring jazz pianist. Jazz Piano Vocabulary is a series of books designed to help students master each scale and learn how to apply it in improvisation. Each book focuses on a different mode of the major scale, and features: . the scale in all twelve keys - two octaves up and down with complete fingerings . chords and left hand voicings that work with the scale . motivic sequences and melodic ideas (with right hand fingerings) . detailed instructions and suggestions on how to practice the material . opportunity to contact the author online if questions arise Volume 4, which focuses on the fourth mode of the major scale, the Lydian mode, also includes exercises for the left and right hand to help the intermediate improvisor with common phrasing and rhythmic problems, a jazz waltz etude, and exercises for learning how to comp in 3/4 meter. Because the Lydian mode is used in a more advanced harmonic context than some of the other modes, this volume is recommended after the material in Volumes 1, 2, and 5 has been mastered. Sound samples and additional information are made available to the reader on the publisher's website. This book is based on Roberta Piket's twenty-plus years of educational experience. In addition to her private students and her experience coaching jazz ensembles at Long Island University, Roberta has given clinics or masterclasses at the Eastman school of Music, Rutgers University, California Institute of the Arts, Macalester College, Duke University, The Jazz School, and countless middle and high schools throughout the U.S., Europe and Japan. An unusual feature of this book is the author's availability to answer questions on the material at the Muse Eek Publishing website, creating an interactive learning experience for the student.

Steve Lacy: Conversations is a collection of thirty-four interviews with the innovative saxophonist and jazz composer. Lacy (1934-2004), a pioneer in making the soprano saxophone a contemporary jazz instrument, was a prolific performer and composer, with hundreds of recordings to his name. This volume brings together interviews that appeared in a variety of magazines between 1959 and 2004. Conducted by writers, critics, musicians, visual artists, a philosopher, and an architect, the interviews indicate the evolution of Lacy's extraordinary career and thought. Lacy began playing the soprano saxophone at sixteen, and was soon performing with Dixieland musicians much older than he. By nineteen he was playing with the pianist Cecil Taylor, who ignited his interest in the avant-garde. He eventually became the foremost proponent of Thelonious Monk's music. Lacy played with a broad range of musicians, including Monk and Gil Evans, and led his own bands. A voracious reader and the recipient of a MacArthur "genius" grant, Lacy was particularly known for setting to music literary texts-such as the Tao Te Ching, and the work of poets including Samuel Beckett, Robert Creeley, and Taslima Nasrin-as well as for collaborating with painters and dancers in multimedia projects. Lacy lived in Paris from 1970 until 2002, and his music and ideas reflect a decades-long cross-pollination of cultures. Half of the interviews in this collection originally appeared in French sources and were translated specifically for this book. Jason Weiss provides a general introduction, as well as short introductions to each of the interviews and to the selection of Lacy's own brief writings that appears at the end of the book. The volume also includes three song scores, a selected discography of Lacy's recordings, and many photos from the personal collection of his wife and longtime collaborator, Irene Aebi. Interviews by: Derek Bailey, Franck Bergerot, Yves Bouliane, Etienne Brunet, Philippe Carles, Brian Case, Garth W. Caylor Jr., John Corbett, Christoph Cox, Alex Dutilh, Lee Friedlander, Maria Friedlander, Isabelle Galloni d'Istria, Christian Gauffre, Raymond Gervais, Paul Gros-Claude, Alain-Rene Hardy, Ed Hazell, Alain Kirili, Mel Martin, Franck Medioni, Xavier Prevost, Philippe Quinsac, Ben Ratliff, Gerard Rouy, Kirk Silsbee, Roberto Terlizzi, Jason Weiss

This book is the 2nd volume in a series designed to help the student of jazz piano learn and apply jazz scales by mastering each scale and its uses in improvisation. Each book focuses on a different scale, illustrating the scale in all twelve keys with complete fingerings. Also provided are chords and left hand voicings to match, exercises and etudes to help apply the material to improvising, ideas for further study and listening, and detailed instructions and suggestions on how to practice the material.

Preface jazz technique. It presents an alternative to what is currently being taught in jazz curriculums (such as the over-used chord-scale system). Building upon the original work of Arnold Schonberg in his Structural Functions of Harmony (1954; 1969) this work takes Schonberg's monotonality approach and broadens it for use in the jazz medium. the tonic chord would still be considered related--whether directly or indirectly. With the central chord becoming the primary tonal personality of a work, all melodic and chordal deviations from that prime become but related regions branching off from, but controlled or dominated by, the established tonality. In this handbook the concept of the sixth degree of the scale, and other substitute intervals, is given emphasis as a starting point of melodic improvisation. performer, thus widening both the harmonic and melodic possibilities of creative improvisation. Commercial jazz is the music of the future, and the techniques offered here utilize scientific principles of universal and fundamental implication. Volume I discovers different intervals to play while improvising, using specially outlined solo techniques. hoped that you will find it likewise rewarding, while expanding your own creative horizons.

This is Whitney Balliett's long-awaited "big book." In it are all the jazz profiles he has written for "The New Yorker" during the past 24 years. These include his famous early portraits of Pee Wee Russell, Red Allen, Earl Hines, and Mary Lou Williams, done when these giants were in full flower; his recent reconstructions of the lives of such legends as Art Tatum, Coleman Hawkins, Jack Teagarden, Zoot Sims, and Dave Tough; His quick but indelible glimpses into the daily (or nocturnal) lives of Duke Ellington and Charles Mingus; and his vivid pictures of such on-the-scene masters as Red Norvo, Ornette Coleman, Buddy Rich, Elvin Jones, Art Farmer, Michael Moore, and Tommy Flanagan. Also included are such lesser known but invaluable players as Art Hodes, Jabbo Smith, Joe Wilder, Warne Marsh, Gene Bertoncini, Joe Bushkin, and Marie Marcus.

All these profiles make the reader feel, as one observer has pointed out, that he is "sitting with Balliett and his subject and listening in." The book can be taken as a kind of history of jazz, as well as a biographical encylopedia of many of its most important performers. It can also be regarded as a model of American prose. Robert Dawidoff said of Whitney Balliett"s most recent book, "Jelly Roll, Jabbo and Fats," that "few people write as well about anything as Balliett writes about jazz." And the late Philip Larkin wrote in 1982 of the "transcendence of Balliett's prose."

In Circular Breathing, George McKay, a leading chronicler of British countercultures, uncovers the often surprising ways that jazz has accompanied social change during a period of rapid transformation in Great Britain. Examining jazz from the founding of George Webb's Dixielanders in 1943 through the burgeoning British bebop scene of the early 1950s, the Beaulieu Jazz Festivals of 1956-61, and the improvisational music making of the 1960s and 1970s, McKay reveals the connections of the music, its players, and its subcultures to black and antiracist activism, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, feminism, and the New Left. In the process, he provides the first detailed cultural history of jazz in Britain.McKay explores the music in relation to issues of whiteness, blackness, and masculinity-all against a backdrop of shifting imperial identities, postcolonialism, and the Cold War. He considers objections to the music's spread by the "anti-jazzers" alongside the ambivalence felt by many leftist musicians about playing an "all-American" musical form. At the same time, McKay highlights the extraordinary cultural mixing that has defined British jazz since the 1950s, as musicians from Britain's former colonies-particularly from the Caribbean and South Africa-have transformed the genre. Circular Breathing is enriched by McKay's original interviews with activists, musicians, and fans and by fascinating images, including works by the renowned English jazz photographer Val Wilmer. It is an invaluable look at not only the history of jazz but also the Left and race relations in Great Britain.

This book is the first volume in a series designed to help the student of jazz piano learn and apply jazz scales by mastering each scale and its uses in improvisation. Volume 1 focuses on the major scale, illustrating the scale in all twelve keys with complete fingerings. Chords and left hand voicings, exercises and etudes to help apply the material to improvising, ideas for further study and listening, and detailed instructions and suggestions on how to practice the material are also provided. Volume 1 also includes primers on note-reading, theory basics from intervals through seventh chords, and rhythmic notation.

When Mikhail Baryshnikov defected in Toronto in 1974, he admitted that he knew only three things about Canada: It had great hockey teams, a lot of wheatfields, and Glenn Gould.
In Wondrous Strange, Kevin Bazzana vividly recaptures the life of Glenn Gould, one of the most celebrated pianists of our time. Drawing on twenty years of intensive research, including unrestricted access to Gould's private papers and interviews with scores of friends and colleagues, many of them never interviewed before, Bazzana sheds new light on such topics as Gould's family history, his secretive sexual life, and the mysterious problems that afflicted his hands in his later years. The author places Gould's distinctive traits--his eccentric interpretations, his garish onstage demeanor, his resistance to convention--against the backdrop of his religious, upper- middle-class Canadian childhood, illuminating the influence of Gould's mother as well as the lasting impact of the only piano teacher Gould ever had. Bazzana offers a fresh appreciation of Gould's concert career--his high-profile but illness-plagued international tours, his adventurous work for Canadian music festivals, his musical and legal problems with Steinway & Sons. In 1964, Gould made the extraordinary decision to perform only for records, radio, television, and film, a turning point that the author examines with unprecedented thoroughness (discussing, for example, his far-seeing interest in new recording technology). Here, too, are Gould's interests away from the piano, from his ambitious but failed effort to be a composer to his innovative brand of "contrapuntal radio."
Richly illustrated with rare photographs, Wondrous Strange is a superbly written account of one of the most memorable and accomplished musicians of our times.

This book is the first volume in a series designed to help the student of jazz piano learn and apply jazz scales by mastering each scale and its uses in improvisation. Volume 1 focuses on the major scale, illustrating the scale in all twelve keys with complete fingerings. Chords and left hand voicings, exercises and etudes to help apply the material to improvising, ideas for further study and listening, and detailed instructions and suggestions on how to practice the material are also provided. Volume 1 also includes primers on note-reading, theory basics from intervals through seventh chords, and rhythmic notation.

Compelling from cover to cover, this is the story of one of the most recorded and beloved jazz trumpeters of all time. With unsparing honesty and a superb eye for detail, Clark Terry, born in 1920, takes us from his impoverished childhood in St. Louis, Missouri, where jazz could be heard everywhere, to the smoke-filled small clubs and carnivals across the Jim Crow South where he got his start, and on to worldwide acclaim. Terry takes us behind the scenes of jazz history as he introduces scores of legendary greats -Ella Fitzgerald, Oscar Peterson, Dizzy Gillespie, Dinah Washington, Doc Severinsen, Ray Charles, Thelonious Monk, Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan, Coleman Hawkins, Zoot Sims, and Dianne Reeves, among many others. Terry also reveals much about his own personal life, his experiences with racism, how he helped break the color barrier in 1960 when he joined the Tonight Show band on NBC, and why - at ninety years old - his students from around the world still call and visit him for lessons.

Pianist George Shearing is that rare thing, a European jazz musician who became a household name in the US, as a result of the "Shearing sound" -- the recordings of his historic late 1940s quintet. Together with his unique "locked hands" approach to playing the piano, Shearing's quintet with guitar and vibraphone in close harmony to his own playing revolutionised small group jazz, and ensured that after seven years as Melody Maker's top British pianist, he achieved even greater success in America. His compositions have been recorded by everyone from Sarah Vaughan to Miles Davis, and his best known pieces include "Lullaby of Birdland," "She" and "Conception." His story is all the more remarkable because Shearing was born blind. As a teenager he joined Claude Bampton's band, and he recounts hilarious anecdotes about the trials and tribulations of this all blind group. By the start of the war years, Shearing was established as one of Britain's most popular and impressive jazz pianists--broadcasting regularly and playing and recording with Stephane Grappelli. In 1947 he emigrated to the US and started his landmark series of records with his quintet as well as performing classical pieces with several leading symphony orchestras. His candid reminiscences include a behind the scenes experience of New York's 52nd Street in its heyday, as well as memories of a vast roll-call of professional colleagues that includes all the great names in jazz.

This study examines the migration of African American jazz musicians to other parts of the world from 1919 to the present. It provides evidence that African American jazz musicians fared better in the diaspora than they did in America where jazz and its inventors were born. Characterized as bereft of 'culture' in America, they were hailed as the epitome of high culture in Europe, Asia, and the Soviet Union: they fraternized with royalty in Europe while Jim Crow laws prevailed in America. The study begins with the emergence of jazz music in America, examines musicians who traveled abroad, and their lives and influences in postwar Europe, including Germany from 1925-1945, and also presents some surprising statistics on the death rates of jazz and classical musicians in the US and abroad. The study, written by an anthropologist who is also a jazz musician, provides a treatment of the cultural, historical, artistic, innovative, and aesthetic aspects of the migration of African American jazz musicians to the diaspora.

Written by one of today's great jazz educators, this is a system for building great-sounding jazz lines. the relationship of the individual lines to chords and progressions is analyzed. In addition, original saxophone studies integrate these concepts with technical proficiency.

Ten classic jazz tunes including transcribed solos and chord symbols in melody line arrangements. With demonstration performances and specially recorded backing tracks, featuring live jazz trio. Ideal for learning and practising jazz improvisation. Includes transcriptions if famous recorded solos and chord symbols for your own improvised solos. On the CD hear the full performance versions of each tune, including demonstation solos, on Tracks 2 - 11. The instrumental part is then omitted from Tracks 12 - 21 so you can play along with the recorded accompaniments.

Jackson Pollock dancing to the music as he painted; Romare Bearden's stage and costume designs for Alvin Ailey and Dianne McIntyre; Stanley Crouch stirring his high-powered essays in a room where a drumkit stands at the center: from the perspective of the new jazz studies, jazz is not only a music to define -- it is a culture. Considering musicians and filmmakers, painters and poets, the intellectual improvisations in "Uptown Conversation" reevaluate, reimagine, and riff on the music that has for more than a century initiated a call and response across art forms, geographies, and cultures.

Building on Robert G. O'Meally's acclaimed "Jazz Cadence of American Culture, " these original essays offer new insights in jazz historiography, highlighting the political stakes in telling the story of the music and evaluating its cultural import in the United States and worldwide. Articles contemplating the music's experimental wing -- such as Salim Washington's meditation on Charles Mingus and the avant-garde or George Lipsitz's polemical juxtaposition of Ken Burns's documentary "Jazz" and Horace Tapscott's autobiography "Songs of the Unsung" -- share the stage with revisionary takes on familiar figures in the canon: Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, and Louis Armstrong.

This book is the 2nd volume in a series designed to help the student of jazz piano learn and apply jazz scales by mastering each scale and its uses in improvisation. Each book focuses on a different scale, illustrating the scale in all twelve keys with complete fingerings. Also provided are chords and left hand voicings to match, exercises and etudes to help apply the material to improvising, ideas for further study and listening, and detailed instructions and suggestions on how to practice the material.

New, expanded and updated edition of the best comprehensive survey of who's who of British jazz musicians. Over 900 biographies detail the work of musicians from every era of British jazz, ranging from those who played professionally before 1920 at the dawn of jazz in Britain, through to today's younger stars. Contains new information on the early careers of those who became famous and the chronological listing of events in each subject's life sheds new light on the development of jazz in Britain. Thousands of facts are presented and some popular myths dispelled. Veteren musicians have been traced, even those who have left the profession or emigrated have been included. One of the most fully documented sources on the jazz musicians of any country outside the USA and a treasury of information covering every jazz style. John Chilton divides his time between plaging his trumpet (his band The Feetwarmers backed singer George Melly for 30 years) and writing his books on jazz. John has written biographies of Billie Holiday, Sidney Bechet, Coleman Hawkins, Louis Jordan, Henry 'Red' Allen and Roy Eldridge as well as Who's Who of Jazz - Storyville and Swing Street, the definitive account of the early careers of early American jazz musicians (which is currently in its fifth edition). His writings on jazz have won him in a grammy and the prestigious ARSC award. Down Beat magazine has dubbed him a 'master of the craft of research'.

As the handsome (and much-married) leader of a series of big bands and small groups in the 1930s and 1940s, clarinetist Artie Shaw achieved measures of fame and fortune that temporarily eclipsed those of his great rival, Benny Goodman. Shaw's five top single recordigs had sold over 65 million copies by 1965; by 1990 his total sales exceeded 100 million records. Yet Shaw was an ambitiously serious and introspective musician. He frequently tired of the music business, often forsaking it for extended periods. He also achieved renown as a writer of fiction. Unlike Goodman, Shaw, now in his 93rd year and the last surviving icon of the Swing Era, has not been well served by jazz writers. In rectifying that omission, the revised edition of this book offers a narrative account and analytical assessment of the life and times of a major figure in American popular music.

Throughout his life as a tenor saxophonist, Theodore Walter 'Sonny' Rollins has been committed to the fundamental truths of jazz, especially swing, while managing also to be consistently experimental and forward looking, and his recorded oeuvre includes at least a dozen albums essential to any serious collection. Yet Rollins is an enigmatic figure. The idealist who wrote the renowned and controversial Freedom Suite and who memorably declared "jazz means no barriers" has also been prey to periods of diffidence, at times withdrawing from the music scene altogether. This new appraisal charts in full the somewhat fitful career of an artist who at his best remains one of jazz's most noble improvisers. Transcriptions of three of Rollins' solos are included.

Rebelling against the Elvis-based, American-imported rock scene in late '60s Brazil, Caetano Veloso suffused lyrical Brazilian folksongs with fuzz guitar, avant-jazz, and electronic music-and in doing so blew apart the status quo of Brazilian culture. Caetano and the movement he catalyzed, "tropicalia," urged an adoption of personal freedom in politics, music, and lifestyle. His "rabble-rousing," as the government saw it, would get Caetano and his comrade Gilberto Gil arrested and exiled to London to wait out the military dictatorship. His fame increasing by the year, Caetano focused on writing songs about his homeland, returning to Brazil as a national hero-a mantle he still wears today. His most recent album, "Live in Bahia," was released to international critical and popular acclaim.

Where did Charlie Parker first play with Dizzy Gillespie? What are the coolest clubs in Chicago? Which city has the largest jazz museum? Where is Howlin' Wolf buried? The answers can be found in The Da Capo Jazz and Blues Lover's Guide to the U.S. , an insiders look at all the places where jazz and blues live, from national clubs to unmarked holes in the wall, in twenty-five cities and the Mississippi Delta. With the most up-to-date listings for festivals, historic theatres, record stores, and radio stations-plus anecdotes from club owners and musicians,this is the essential "where-to" for jazz and blues fans everywhere.