Writing in the late 1930s, New York journalist Joseph Mitchell observed: "Except for the minstrel show, the strip act is probably America's only original contribution to the theater." In Body and Soul, Peter Stanfield's arguments echo Mitchell's observation. Stanfield begins by exploring how Hollywood used blackface minstrelsy to represent an emerging urban American theatrical history, and ends with a look at how American film at the close of the studio era represented urban decay through the figure of the burlesque dancer and stripper. In between, Stanfield considers the representation of American urban life in jazz, blues, ballads, and sin-songs and the manner in which the film studios exploited this "gutter" music. Alongside extensive, thought-provoking, and lively analysis of some of the most popular jazz and blues songs of the twentieth century--"Frankie and Johnny," "St. Louis Blues," "The Man I Love," "Blues in the Night," and "Body and Soul"--the book contains new work on blackface minstrelsy in early sound movies, racial representation and censorship, torch singers and torch songs, burlesque and strippers, the noir cityscape, the Hollywood Left, and hot jazz.

Philip Larkin (1922-85) was not only one of the foremost English poets of the twentieth century, but also a notable novelist and a distinguished writer on jazz. He was jazz critic for The Daily Telegraph between 1961 and 1971. Jazz Writings brings together Larkin's reviews, articles and essays written for The Guardian, The Observer, The New Statesman, and numerous other publications.

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.

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.

Modern jazz and rock 'n' roll, both of which were once identified with youthful insurrection, have reached middle age. So have many longtime listeners -including Francis Davis. Now, in these thirty-one articles, the revered jazz critic considers music young and old, examining performers from Frank Sinatra and Billie Holiday to Ornette Coleman and Sun Ra. But what makes this Davis's most surprising book is the inclusion of such pop icons as Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan, Burt Bacharach, and Lou Reed. Using himself as an example, Davis pinpoints our collective longing for a time when we (and our music) were younger-and more inclined to take risks. Lively, opinionated, gracefully written, and often very funny, Like Young is a book for those who have long savored Davis's writing, as well as for those just now discovering him.

The voice of Jimmy Scott is one of the world's most mesmerizing instruments, transcending gender and age. But its beauty is inextricably entwined with pain, hardship, and tragedy-yet Scott's resilience made his life a story of triumph. Born in Cleveland in 1925, Scott was orphaned as a teenager, and suffered from Kallman's syndrome, which kept his voice unnaturally high. He toured with Lionel Hampton in the '40s and recorded for Savoy Records. In 1962 Ray Charles produced and played on what many agree was Scott's best album, "Falling in Love Is Wonderful," and a career breakthrough seemed imminent. But it was not to be, and Scott returned to Cleveland to work as an orderly and a shipping clerk-until he was rediscovered performing at his friend Doc Pomus's funeral in March of 1991. Acclaimed biographer David Ritz, with Scott's cooperation, has created a poignant portrait of a man whose voice cuts to the sadness and hope within us all. "Faith in Time" resonates like a haunting melody.

The thrill of sitting in a club or concert hall hearing jazz being made is familiar to most fans. But what if you could immerse yourself in the world of the musician, where creating and performing is a profound task, and yet as routine as breathing? When writer Carl Vigeland was invited to tour with Wynton Marsalis and his septet, he was able to do just that. Vigeland's acute observations sweep us into their world as he becomes virtually part of the band. At the same time, Marsalis offers intimate meditations on home, family, creation, and performance- written in the cadence of his inimitable voice. Set on the stage, in the studio, and in great cities and small towns around the world, this richly textured narrative explores how the music is made in America today.

When a jazz hero dies, rumors, speculation, gossip, and legend can muddle the real cause of death.

In this book, Frederick J. Spencer conducts an inquest on how jazz greats lived and died pursuing their art. Forensics, medical histories, death certificates, and biographies divulge the way many musical virtuosos really died.

An essential reference source, "Jazz and Death" strives to correct misinformation and set the story straight. Reviewing the medical records of such jazz icons as Scott Joplin, James Reese Europe, Bennie Moten, Tommy Dorsey, Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, Wardell Gray, and Ronnie Scott, the book spans decades, styles, and causes of death.

Divided into disease categories, it covers such illnesses as ALS (Lou Gehrig's Disease), which killed Charlie Mingus, and tuberculosis, which caused the deaths of Chick Webb, Charlie Christian, Bubber Miley, Jimmy Blanton, and Fats Navarro. It notes the significance of dental disease in affecting a musician's embouchure and livelihood, as happened with Joe "King" Oliver. A discussion of Art Tatum's visual impairment leads to discoveries in the pathology of what blinded Lennie Tristano.

Heavy drinking, even during Prohibition, was the norm in the clubs of New Orleans and Kansas City and in the ballrooms of Chicago and New York. Too often, the musical scene demanded that those who play jazz be "jazzed."

After World War II, as heroin addiction became the hallmark of revolution, talented bebop artists suffered long absences from the bandstand. Many did jail time, and others succumbed to the ravages of "horse."

With "Jazz and Death," the causes behind the great jazz funerals may no longer be misconstrued. Its clinical and morbidly entertaining approach creates an invaluable compendium for jazz fans and scholars alike.

Frederick J. Spencer is a professor and associate dean emeritus of the School of Medicine (Medical College of Virginia) at Virginia Commonwealth University. He has been published in the "New England Journal of Medicine," "Journal of the American Medical Association," "American Journal of Public Health," and "Modern Medicine," among other publications.

A legend on both the clarinet and the soprano saxophone, one of the most brilliant exponents of New Orleans jazz, Sidney Bechet (1897-1959) played with such fellow jazz legends as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, and Jelly Roll Morton. Here is his vivid story written in his own words. Expressive, frank, and hilarious, this classic in jazz literature re-creates a man, a music, and an era.

German and Austrian music of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries stands at the heart of the Western musical canon. In this innovative study of various cultural practices (such as music journalism and scholarship, singing instruction, and concerts), David Gramit examines how music became an important part of middle-class identity. He investigates historical discourses around such topics as the aesthetic debates over the social significance of folk music, various comparisons of the musical practices of ethnic "others" to the German "norm," and the establishment of the concert as a privileged site of cultural activity.
"Cultivating Music" analyzes the ideologies of German musical discourse during its formative period. Claiming music's importance to both social well-being and individual development, proponents of musical culture sought to secure the status of music as an art integral to bourgeois life. They believed that "music" referred to the autonomous musical work, meaningful in and of itself to those cultivated to experience it properly. The social limits to that cultivation ensured that boundaries of class, gender, and educational attainment preserved the privileged status of music despite (but also by means of) their claims for the "universality" of their canon. Departing from the traditional focus on individual musical works, Gramit considers the social history of the practice of music in Austro-German culture. He examines the origins of the privileged position of the Western canon in musicological discourses and argues that we cannot fully understand the role that canon has played without considering the interests that motivated its creators.

Leonard Garment was a successful Wall Street attorney when, in 1965, he found himself arguing a Supreme Court case alongside his new law partner,former Vice President Richard Nixon. It was the start of a friendship that lasted more than thirty years. In Crazy Rhythm, which the New York Times Book Review called "an eloquent memoir," Garment engagingly tells of his boyhood as the child of immigrants, and the beginning of a life-long love affair with jazz. After Brooklyn Law School, Garment went on to Wall Street, where encountering Nixon changed the course of his life. Crazy Rhythm allows us a rare, intimate look at Nixon's extraordinary tenure in the White House. More than that, the book tells stories from a life that has included close encounters with characters such as Benny Goodman and Billie Holiday, Henry Kissinger and Alan Greenspan, Golda Meir and Yasser Arafat, Giovanni Agnelli and Marc Rich, and moves like the best jazz, in a writer's voice that is truly one-of-a-kind. To quote former U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, "A century from now, I cannot doubt Americans will still be reading Crazy Rhythm. This is a story of our time, written for the ages."

From the Bill of Rights, freedom of speech, and civil rights to jazz, blues and country music, Nat Hentoff has written about American life for decades, in the "Atlantic Monthly," the "New Yorker," the "Village Voice," the "Wall Street Journal," and "JazzTimes, " among countless other publications. The "New York Times" has hailed Hentoff's work as "an invigorating and entertaining reminder of why freedom of expression matters." The "Washington Post Book World" has called Hentoff "an old-fashioned music lover who likes, as Charlie Parker once put it, 'to listen to the stories' that good music tells." Nat Hentoff is a legend.And now, for the first time, here are his most important writings of the past twenty years--the quintessential Hentoff on everything from Cardinal John O'Connor to Merle Haggard, racism and political correctness in the classroom to Lester Young, Dizzy Gillespie to the censorship of Huckleberry Finn. Controversial? You bet. Whatever the topic, "The Nat Hentoff Reader" shows a man of passion and insight, of streetwise wit and polished eloquence-a true American original.

Christopher Wilkinson uncovers a fascinating and unexplored side of American musical and social history in this richly detailed account of Don Albert's musical career and the multicultural forces that influenced it. Albert was born Albert Dominque in New Orleans in 1908. Wilkinson discusses his musical education in the Creole community of New Orleans and the fusion of New Orleans jazz and the Texas blues styles in the later 1920s during his tenure with Troy Floyd's Orchestra of Gold. He documents the founding of Albert's own band in San Antonio, its tours through twenty-four states during the 1930s, its recordings, and its significant reputation within the African American community. In addition to providing a vivid account of life on the road and imparting new insight into the daily existence of working musicians, this book illustrates how the fundamental issue of race influenced Albert's life, as well as the music of the era.
Albert's years as a San Antonio nightclub owner in the 1940s and 1950s saw the rise in popularity of rhythm and blues and the decline of interest in jazz. There was also increasing racial animosity, which Albert resisted by the successful legal defense of his right to operate an integrated establishment in 1951. In the two decades before his death in 1980, his performances in Dixieland jazz bands and interviews with oral historians concerning his own career were the fitting climax to a multifaceted musical life. Albert's voice and personality, his feelings and opinions about the music he loved, and the obstacles he faced in performing and promoting it, are artfully conveyed in Wilkinson's fluid, accessible, and erudite narrative. "Jazz on the Road "shows the importance of live performance in bringing jazz to America, and succeeds brilliantly in depicting an era, a locale, and a way of life.

Twenty-five years ago in his hit song, "Sir Duke," Stevie Wonder sings: "Music knows it is and always will be one of the things that life just won't quit. / Here are some of music's basic pioneers that time will not allow us to forget: / There's Basie, Miller, Satchmo, and the King of All, Sir Duke! / And with a voice like Ella's ringing out, there's no way the band can lose! / You can feel it all over!" To say that Ellington was a prominent jazz-band leader of the 20th century would be like saying William Shakespeare was simply a prominent English playwright of his time. This book begins with personal reflections as well as the life before going on to consider - through anecdote, musical scholarship and personal interviews - Ellington's profound and direct influence on an amazing range of pop artists: Stevie Wonder, Steely Dan, Miles Davis (who, in the ultimate tribute, had himself interred next to The Duke in New York's Woodlawn Cemetery), Sun Ra, James Brown, Sly Stone, George Clinton, Prince, Frank Zappa, Charles Mingus, Ravi Shankar and others.

Sonny Rollins is one of jazz's great innovators, arguably the most influential tenor saxophonist, along with John Coltrane, in the history of modern jazz. He began his musical career at the age of eleven, and within five short years he was playing with the legendary Thelonious Monk. In the late forties, before his twenty-first birthday, Rollins was in full swing, recording with jazz luminaries such as Charlie Parker, Bud Powell, Max Roach, Art Blakey, and Miles Davis, and he was hailed as the best jazz tenor man alive in the mid-fifties. Still active today, Rollins and his compelling sound reach a whole new generation of listeners with his eagerly anticipated live appearances. Now renowned jazz writer Eric Nisenson provides a long-overdue look at one of jazz's brightest, and most enduring, stars.

First published in 1984 and reissued to coincide with the publication of the second volume, this selection of the 250 best jazz records traces the earliest roots of the music to the beginnings of the modern jazz era. Volume One's focus is on LP collections of 78 rpm originals and nearly every significant musician -- both familiar and obscure -- of early 20th-century jazz is listed. For each record listed, full details of personnel, recording dates and locations are provided.

Jazz clarinetist, saxophonist, and bassoonist Garvin Bushell (1902-1991) performed with many of the twentieth century's greatest jazz musicians,from Fletcher Henderson, Fats Waller, and Cab Calloway to Eric Dolphy, Gil Evans, and John Coltrane,during his remarkable career that spanned from 1916 to the 1980s. Although best known as a jazz soloist and sideman, Bushell also played oboe and bassoon with symphony orchestras and was a highly regarded instructor of woodwinds. In Jazz from the Beginning , Bushell vividly recounts his musical experiences, featuring candid assessments of the legends with whom he performed as well as eye-opening accounts of the early days of jazz and the racism that he encountered on the road. Based on a series of interviews conducted by jazz scholar Mark Tucker, these memoirs provide a colourful account of Bushell's extraordinary life and career as well as an important record of seventy years of America's musical history.

Brian Ward is Lecturer in American History at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne .; This book is intended for american studies, American history postwar social and cultural history, political history, Black history, Race and Ethnic studies and Cultural studies together with the general trade music.

This fresh look at the neglected rhythm section in jazz ensembles shows that the improvisational interplay among drums, bass, and piano is just as innovative, complex, and spontaneous as the solo. Ingrid Monson juxtaposes musicians' talk and musical examples to ask how musicians go about "saying something" through music in a way that articulates identity, politics, and culture. Through interviews with Jaki Byard, Richard Davis, Sir Roland Hanna, Billy Higgins, Cecil McBee, and others, she develops a perspective on jazz improvisation that has "interactiveness" at its core: in the creation of music through improvisational interaction, in the shaping of social communities and networks through music, and in the development of cultural meanings and ideologies that inform the interpretation of jazz in twentieth-century African-American and American cultural life. Replete with original musical transcriptions, this broad view of jazz improvisation and its emotional and cultural power will have a wide audience among jazz fans, ethnomusicologists, and anthropologists.

It's impossible to think of the heritage of music and dance in the United States without the invaluable contributions of African Americans. Those art forms have been touched by the genius of African American culture and have helped this nation take its important and unique place in the pantheon of world art. Steppin' on the Blues explores not only the meaning of dance in African American life but also the ways in which music, song, and dance are interrelated in African American culture. Dance as it has emanated from the black community is a pervasive, vital, and distinctive form of expression--its movements speak eloquently of African American values and aesthetics. Beyond that it has been, finally, one of the most important means of cultural survival. Former dancer Jacqui Malone throws a fresh spotlight on the cultural history of black dance, the Africanisms that have influenced it, and the significant role that vocal harmony groups, black college and university marching bands, and black sorority and fraternity stepping teams have played in the evolution of dance in African American life. From the cakewalk to the development of jazz dance and jazz music, all Americans can take pride in the vitality, dynamism, drama, joy, and uncommon singularity with which African American dance has gifted the world.

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

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