The received wisdom of popular jazz history is that the era of the big band was the 1930s and '40s, when swing was at its height. But as practicing jazz musicians know, even though big bands lost the spotlight once the bebop era began, they never really disappeared. "Making the Scene" challenges conventional jazz historiography by demonstrating the vital role of big bands in the ongoing development of jazz. Alex Stewart describes how jazz musicians have found big bands valuable. He explores the rich 'rehearsal band' scene in New York and the rise of repertory orchestras. "Making the Scene" combines historical research, ethnography, and participant observation with musical analysis, ethnic studies, and gender theory, dismantling stereotypical views of the big band.

This unique book is especially designed for traditionally trained classical pianists who are interested in learning the rudiments of jazz piano. It uses a systematic, a step-by-step approach to learning to read jazz lead sheets, and provides simple techniques for beginning jazz and blues improvisation. The book is based on many years of successfully teaching classical pianists and piano teachers to overcome their notation dependency and conquer their fear of improvisation. A special feature is the inclusion of complete lead sheets for several popular jazz tunes (Satin Doll, Lover Man, Summertime, Autumn Leaves, Birth of the Blues).

Here is quite simply one of the most original books about a jazz musician ever published--a biography-cum-discography that focuses in turn on fourteen major albums recorded by Miles Davis, using them as a jumping off point for an illuminating discussion of the turbulent life and work of the "Evil Genius of Jazz." Richard Cook, a veteran writer respected throughout the jazz world, looks at such landmark recordings as Birth of the Cool, Miles Ahead, Kind of Blue, The Complete Live at The Plugged Nickel, In a Silent Way, Bitches Brew, and Live at Montreux. Each of these recordings is considered in detail, illuminating their contribution to Davis's development as instrumentalist, group leader, and composer. But Cook goes well beyond these fourteen albums, evaluating all the trumpeter's recordings (official and bootleg), and relating them to events in Miles's life as well as to wider currents in contemporary music. Cook helps us disentangle Miles the legendary figure from the music itself, to re-hear and reconsider this marvelous body of work ranging over four exhilarating decades. The author also highlights the indispensable contributions of sidemen such as John Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley, Herbie Hancock, John McLaughlin, John Scofield, and many others, as well as calling for a reassessment of the importance of such "satellite" figures as Gil Evans, Bill Evans, Wayne Shorter, Tony Williams and Chick Corea in the development of Miles's music. A comprehensive and rigorous guide to the music and life of Miles Davis, It's About That Time is a stunning book that burns away the fog of myth that surrounds its complex and contrary subject.

In the early twentieth century, New Orleans was a place of colliding identities and histories, and Louis Armstrong was a gifted young man of psychological nimbleness. A dark-skinned, impoverished child, he grew up under low expectations, Jim Crow legislation, and vigilante terrorism. Yet he also grew up at the center of African American vernacular traditions from the Deep South, learning the ecstatic music of the Sanctified Church, blues played by street musicians, and the plantation tradition of ragging a tune. Louis Armstrong's New Orleans interweaves a searching account of early twentieth-century New Orleans with a narrative of the first twenty-one years of Armstrong's life. Drawing on a stunning body of first-person accounts, this book tells the rags-to-riches tale of Armstrong's early life and the social and musical forces that shaped him. The city and the musician are both extraordinary, their relationship unique, and their impact on American culture incalculable.

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 workbooks designed to help students of jazz piano learn and apply jazz scales by mastering each scale and its use in improvisation. Each book focuses on a different scale, and features: . the scale in all twelve keys - two octaves up and down with complete fingerings . chords and left hand voicings that can be used with the scale . ideas for applying the material . transcriptions and/or etudes using the scale . ideas for further study and listening . detailed instructions and suggestions on how to practice the material . opportunity to contact the author online if questions arise This book explores the Aeolian mode and its use in jazz improvisation. It provides an entry point for the student who is exploring modes for the first time. Beginning improvisors will find that the approach in this book allows them quickly to begin applying the Aeolian mode to simple chord progressions. Volume 6 also offers an introduction to "shell" voicings.Like the other books in this series, this book offers melodic examples that you can practice as well as listen to on the Muse Eek website. The goal is to provide you with enough guidance to work confidently on your own so that you become comfortable integrating the use of the scales into your improvisation. 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, 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.

It's never too late to play jazz gives players the chance to learn about jazz, as well as explore their favourite repertoire in easy-to-play arrangements. The pieces are suitable for those who have learnt for approximately one year, or have reached Level 14 of the It's never too late to play piano tutor, by Pam Wedgwood. This book guides the player through the different skills and techniques needed to play jazz, covering swing rhythm, syncopation, walking bass, blues and improvisation. The pieces are gently progressive and include irresistible new pieces by Pam and Olly Wedgwood, as well as plenty of jazz classics such as I Get A Kick Out Of You, A Nightingale Sang, My Baby Just Cares For Me and As Time Goes By. The CD contains performance tracks and a range of backing tracks to bring your jazz playing to life! Pam Wedgwood is one of the UK's favourite composers of popular piano music and creator of Jazzin' About, After Hours and Up-Grade. The ground-breaking It's never too late... Series gives adults the opportunity to learn the piano with a method devised especially for them. This best-selling tutor breaks the learning into manageable chunks, features accompanying CDs, and is packed with irresistible music and fascinating information - all the motivation needed to make learning fun!

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

Over seventy original progressive studies in a variety of jazz styles, by James Rae. A systematic, methodical approach that helps you to play stylish Jazz right from the beginning.
The book is divided into three sections:
Part One introduces the beginner to jazz rhythms, including swing quavers, syncopation and displaced accents.
Part Two contains twenty carefully graded melodic jazz studies to assist in the formulation of physical techniques and skills.
Part Three Improvisation and Blues encourages the budding Jazz flautist to use these studies as the basis for further creative jazz improvisation.

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.

Handy resource for jazz listeners and hardcore fans. Spanning players from eighty years of history, this bold book steps forward and claims who are the greatest. Compiled from an extensive survey conducted with the best jazz minds in the education, publishing and entertainment worlds, noted jazz journalist Gene Rizzo summarized the chosen and presents a concise bio on the essence of these jazz giants. Choices were made on the basis of chops, originality, creativity, and degree of influence. This book will either confirm some readers' opinions or open debate with others, but ultimately the book provides an impressive summary of the greatest jazz piano players of all time. A photo accompanies each listing * Landmark recordings are listed * Extra lists include the next twenty to be selected, the top women players and an alphabetical list of all the other players considered

In the long decade between the mid-fifties and the late sixties, jazz was changing more than its sound. The age of Max Roach's Freedom Now Suite, John Coltrane's A Love Supreme, and Charles Mingus's The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady was a time when jazz became both newly militant and newly seductive, its example powerfully shaping the social dramas of the Civil Rights movement, the Black Power movement, and the counterculture. Freedom Is, Freedom Ain't is the first book to tell the broader story of this period in jazz--and American--history. The story's central figures are jazz musicians like Coltrane and Mingus, who rewrote the conventions governing improvisation and composition as they sought to infuse jazz with that gritty exuberance known as "soul." Scott Saul describes how these and other jazz musicians of the period engaged in a complex cultural balancing act: utopian and skeptical, race-affirming and cosmopolitan, they tried to create an art that would make uplift into something forceful, undeniable in its conviction, and experimental in its search for new possibilities. Freedom Is, Freedom Ain't considers these musicians and their allies as a cultural front of the Civil Rights movement, a constellation of artists and intellectuals whose ideas of freedom pushed against a cold-war consensus that stressed rational administration and collective security. Capturing the social resonance of the music's marriage of discipline and play, the book conveys the artistic and historical significance of the jazz culture at the start, and the heart, of the sixties.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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'.

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.