Anyone who has ever heard a Billie Holiday record knows the sound of her voice,sad, sexy, always relaxed but securely aware of the beat. Conveying a poignancy that cut to the heart of a song, she redeemed even trivial material with her impeccable sense of dramatic phrasing and time. The well-known tale of her lifelong battle with drugs has obscured the artistry that has made her one of the most revered singers of the twentieth century. Everyone from Frank Sinatra (who in the 1950s called her "unquestionably the most important influence on American popular singing in the last twenty years") to Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan has recognized the singularity of her interpretations. The racism that Billie found at every turn, whether in Artie Shaw's band or in the heart of the south, immortalized in the chilling song "Strange Fruit," cannot be overlooked in her biography. Jazz historian John Chilton has told the story of her short, tragic, influential career with restraint, correcting many of the more sensational tales she wrote about herself in Lady Sings the Blues . Buck Clayton, who knew Billie in the Basie band during the nineteen-thirties, has written a warm and personal foreword to this fascinating biography of a great American artist.

The noted blues scholar Paul Oliver here examines the many different skeins of the blues form, relating them to other black traditions - musical and religious - and tracing the origin of the blues through the dense, many-coloured warp and weft of influences and inspiration. He describes "the dozens," Christmas rituals, and the coded (as well as blatant) sexual imagery that has always been a vital element of every popular song tradition. With extensive source notes, photographs, a discography, and two indexes of song titles and singers, this book serves as a sound, serious, and entertaining guide to the blues heritage that has vitalized so much of the world's musical culture.

This comprehensive survey of jazz piano, beginning with a brief history of the instrument within the jazz tradition and concluding with interviews that present twenty-seven pianists in their own words, is both wonderfully anecdotal and a serious piece of jazz history. Lyons has assembled a giant concert of piano voices,Bill Evans, Herbie Hancock, Teddy Wilson, Oscar Peterson, Keith Jarrett, Randy Weston, Cecil Taylor, Horace Silver, Dave Brubeck, Sun Ra, McCoy Tyner, Toshiko Akiyoshi, Chick Corea, and many others. The pianists are candid, intense, and always opinionated. Yet their responses are infused with a keen appreciation for fellow musicians, their contemporaries, and those who came before,Walter, Tatum, Ellington. For pianists everywhere, whatever their individual style, this book will speak to and for you as it expresses the thoughts of its many great artists.

The jazz decade saw the emergence of many of the great figures who defined the music for the world: Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, Earl Hines, Bix Beiderbecke, Fats Waller, Jack Teagarden, Fletcher Henderson--these giants set the standards for blues singing, big band arrangements, and solo improvisation that are the foundations for jazz. Richard Hadlock has chapters on each, with a discography and descriptions of all the players who made the '20s swing.

The emergence of Jack Teagarden as an important jazz stylist was a significant feature of the '20s jazz scene. He brought a maturity to the sound of the trombone and until late in his life played with a laconic grace that few, if any, on his instrument have equaled. His collaboration with Louis Armstrong--who rated their musical relationship higher than any he had known--was one of the great partnerships in jazz history. The story of this funny, happy Texan is told with affection and detail in this, the only biography of Jack Teagarden."Obviously a man like Teagarden, with his mastery of his instrument, might have stepped into almost any kind of music and made a career for himself. But one thing this book makes clear is that Jack could not have been any kind of musician except a jazz musician. A jazz musician simply has to make his music and dedicate his life to it, even though he may not tell you (or himself) why he has to. He may not, indeed, even be able to say why, or need to say why. The need is to make music and, necessarily, lead the life that makes that possible. All of which has little or nothing to do with ego or acclaim or money. He needs to give his music to the world and he hopes the world will understand.You will find out about that need in these pages. You will also find plenty of the pranks and boys-will-be-boys anecdotes that seem so prevalent, diverting, and (under the surface) necessary a part of the musical life."--Martin Williams, from his new preface.

As trumpet player and singer, Louis Armstrong is the single most important figure in jazz history, and one of the most influential musicians--in any category--in this century. He was also, as this book relates, a wonderful character: actor, clown, raconteur, a tough kid when he came to Chicago from New Orleans who mellowed into one of the music's true statesmen. This biography includes not only a gripping narrative written by two of the most reliable jazz historians, but also a chronology, film list, and selection of photos. He was the most beloved of jazz musicians, a hero to everyone from Eddie Condon and Bobby Hackett to Miles Davis and Ornette Coleman. His basically happy life is here memorably told, with a new preface by Dan Morgenstern who describes Armstrong's central place in world music.

A contribution to the history of the blues in particular and of Afro-American culture in general, new information about a remarkable set of assertive, creative women as well as new insights into the musical heritage they have left behind. Sippie Wallace, Edith Wilson, Victoria Spivey and Alberta Hunter are the collective focus of this work - four influential blues singers with diverse styles, who were big in the 1920s and were still performing in the 1980s. Writing from a firm black/feminist standpoint, Harrison shows the joys, trials, and heartbreaks in the lives of the first popular women blues artists.

Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Count Basie, Lester Young, Charlie Parker, Norman Granz, Oscar Peterson, Ray Charles, Don Ellis, and Miles Davis--these are the dozen jazz figures whom Leonard Feather chose to describe the development of jazz. This is the first Feather book to examine in-depth the innovative figures who have led the way throughout the music's history. As composer, producer, and for almost half-a-century one of its leading critics, Feather has a unique perspective of these jazz immortals. He has worked with and known all of them. "These are portraits of human beings first, analyses of musicians or musical history only peripherally if at all," says Feather in his new foreword. A warm, affectionate, and perceptive inside account of twelve originals, the book is packed with wonderful stories. As Feather says: "Most of all I am grateful for the inspiration and friendship of the artists themselves. Armstrong and Ellington were directly responsible, through their records, for drawing me to jazz. After their magic had worked on me, the others, one by one, sustained and refreshed and invigorated my interest in, an involvement with, this liveliest of twentieth-century arts."

This pioneering study documents the birth of soul music in America during the 1950s and '60s when, in response to the black community's new self-awareness and pride, musicians such as James Brown, The Impressions, Wilson Pickett, King Curtis, Stevie Wonder, and others were discovering in the urban blues, gospel, and r&b a new sound--soul--that expressed fresh musical and social ideals.

John Chilton's 'Who's Who of Jazz' has established itself as a major jazz reference book on the lives of over a thousand musicians born before 1920. The informative biographies give the essential details of each musician's life and career, and jazz greats jostle with unknowns for the readers attention. This completely revised edition adds much new information to the musical histories of the players, and the biographies of some of the major figures have been rewritten to incorporate recent research.

It would be no exaggeration to call Charles Mingus the greatest bass player in the history of jazz indeed, some might even regard it as understatement, for the hurricane power of his work as a composer, teacher, band leader, and iconoclast reached far beyond jazz while remaining true to its heritage in the music of Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, and Thelonious Monk. In this new biography Brian Priestley has written a masterly study of Mingus's dynamic career from the early years in Swing, to the escapades of the Bebop era, through his musical maturity in the '50s when he directed a band that redefined collective improvisation in jazz. Woven in with exacting assessments of Mingus's artistic legacy is the story of his volatile, unpredictable, sometimes dangerous personality. The book views Mingus as a black artist increasingly politicized by his situation, but also unreliable as a witness to his own persecution. Capturing him in all his furious contradictions,passionate, cool, revolutionary but with a keen sense of tradition,Brian Priestley has produced what can be called, again without exaggeration, the best biography of a jazz musician we have ever seen.

The fifties, though a quiescent period in many ways, was one of the most fervent decades in jazz history. The landmarks of modern jazz were firmly planted and, it could be argued, nearly all directions the music has taken since then can be charted back to recordings, groups, or individuals from this era. In this series of profiles, Joe Goldberg examines the lives and the music, the crucial events and dominant forces of a decade of great music and conflicting esthetics: Miles Davis's recording of Kind of Blue Gerry Mulligan's pianoless quartet Cecil Taylor's percussive keyboard experiments John Coltrane's and Sonny Rollins's marathon saxophone solos MJQ's blending of classical structure and jazz improvisation Ornette Coleman's Free Jazz. From Mingus to Monk to Blakey, it was an age of giants. Perhaps never before or since in jazz history have so many wildly idiosyncratic jazz innovators been contemporaries. Joe Goldberg was there and what his ears heard has become here a lasting music document.

Black Music--whether it be jazz, blues, r&b, gospel, or soul--has always expressed, consciously or not, its African "oral" heritage, reflecting the conditions of a minority culture in the midst of a white majority. "Black Talk" is one of those rare books since LeRoi Jones's "Blues People" to examine the social function of black music in the diaspora; it sounds the depths of experience and maps the history of a culture from the jazz age to the revolutionary outbursts of the 1960s. Ben Sidran finds radical challenges to the Western, white literary tradition in such varied music as Buddy Bolden's loud and hoarse cornet style, the call and response between brass and reeds in a swing band, the emotionalism of gospel, the primitivism of Ornette Coleman, and the cool ethic of bebop. "The musician is the document," says Sidran. "He is the information himself. The impact of stored information is transmitted not through records or archives, but through the human response to life."

Since 1934, the Village Vanguard in New York's Greenwich Village has hosted the foremost in live jazz, folk music, and comedy. Its owner, Max Gordon, has now written a personal history of his club and the hundreds of entertainment legends who have played there. Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, Lenny Bruce, Woody Allen, Woodie Guthrie, Betty Comden and Adolph Green, Josh White, Pete Seeger--Max has stories about all of them. And what stories! As Nat Hentoff says in his introduction, "A good many so-called professional writers have not done nearly so well."

The last few years have witnessed an enormous resurgence in the popularity of jazz, after some lean times in the sixties when many potential jazz fans turned to rock. Now the pendulum is on the backswing, and vintage and modern jazz as well as "jazz rock" are attracting huge new audiences. One factor involved in the comeback of jazz among blacks and whites alike is the rise of black consciousness, with its search for roots in the American experience. Nat Hentoff's "The Jazz Life" explores the social, economic, and psychological elements that make up the context of modern jazz. Among the jazz greats whose lives and work are discussed are Count Basie, Charles Mingus, John Lewis, Miles Davis, Thelonius Monk, and Ornette Coleman. Written with intelligence, passion, and wit, this jazz classic is of immense importance to anyone wanting a better understanding of the jazz--or indeed our American life.

Blues is a language--one which has evolved its own rules and which is the sole property of a culture always forced to the periphery of white society. As such it is a political language. Whether it is passed as a legacy from African village to Mississippi farm, or from farm to Chicago ghetto, or from ghetto to Paris cafe, it is part of a larger oral heritage that is an expression of black America. Makeshift instruments, runaway slaves, railroads, prisons, empty rooms, work gangs, blindness, and pain have all been involved in the passing of this legacy, which has moved from hand to hand like a bottle of whiskey among friends and which now, for whatever reasons, seems faced with extinction. As Lightnin' Hopkins says: "I see a few young musicians coming along. But it's not many. It's not many at all, and the few that is--I'll tell you, you know what I mean, they don't have it. They just don't feel it. . . . I never had that trouble. I had the one thing you need to be a blues singer. I was born with the blues."With an awareness of the urgency involved, and with considerable devotion, Samuel Charters has chosen twelve major bluesmen, each whom represents a major facet of the blues, and has written about them. Rather than adopt the voyeuristic tone of the academician, he has used the direct visceral images that have always composed the blues. Also included are interviews, photographs, lyrics, and separate chapters on the black experience in America, and the evolution of the blues language from its African origins. Samuel Charters has renewed contact with the greatness of the blues legacy--from the haunting lyric songs of the bluesmen like Robert Pete Williams and Lightnin' Hopkins to the fiercely joyous shouts of Champion Jack Depree, Memphis Slim, and Mighty Joe Young.

The story of a woman whose work inspired one of London's greatest attractions. Born in Strasbourg, the young Marie Tussaud learned her skills from her mother's employer, Philippe Curtius. In 1780 she became tutor to King Louis XVI's sister and for eight years prior to the Revolution lived at the court in Versailles. In Paris throughout the Revolution, she was often in extreme danger. Incredibly, she was forced to make death masks from the decapitated heads of her friends who fell to the guillotine. In 1802, she opened her first exhibition at the Lyceum theatre in London. With modelled figures such as Napoleon and Josephine and other notables from the Revolution, her exhibition was very popular. She also had the guillotine blade that severed Marie Antoinette's head. For the next 26 years Madame Tussaud toured England and Scotland with her Waxwork Exhibition, until she established her base in Baker Street in 1835. She had always had a separate room, for the most gruesome of the models, which in 1846 Punch dubbed The Chamber of Horrors. The name stuck. She died in 1850 and in 1884, Tussaud's grandsons moved the exhibition to Marylebone Road, where it remains.

Beginning with the African musical heritage and its fusion with European forms in the New World, Marshall Stearns's history of jazz guides the reader through work songs, spirituls, ragtime, and the blues, to the birth of jazz in New Orleans and its adoption by St Louis, Chicago, Kansas City, and New York. From swing and bop to the early days of rock, this lively book introduces us to the great musicians and singers and examines jazz's cultural effects on American and the world.

Written by an experienced and diverse lineup of veteran jazz educators, Teaching School Jazz presents a comprehensive approach to teaching beginning through high school-level jazz. Thoroughly grounded in the latest research, chapters are supported by case studies woven into the narrative. The book therefore provides not only a wealth of school jazz teaching strategies but also the perspectives and principles from which they are derived. The book opens with a philosophical foundation to describe the current landscape of school jazz education. Readers are introduced to two expert school jazz educators who offer differing perspectives on the subject. The book concludes with an appendix of recommended audio, visual, digital, and written resources for teaching jazz. Accompanied by a website of playing exercises and audio examples, the book is invaluable resource for pre- and in-service music educators with no prior jazz experience, as well as those who wish to expand their knowledge of jazz performance practice and pedagogy.

Throughout his life, Louis Armstrong tried to explain how singing with a barbershop quartet on the streets of New Orleans was foundational to his musicianship. Until now, there has been no in-depth inquiry into what he meant when he said, ""I figure singing and playing is the same,"" or, ""Singing was more into my blood than the trumpet."" Creating the Jazz Solo: Louis Armstrong and Barbershop Harmony shows that Armstrong understood exactly the relationship between what he sang and what he played, and that he meant these comments to be taken literally: he was singing through his horn. To describe the relationship between what Armstrong sang and played, author Vic Hobson discusses elements of music theory with a style accessible even to readers with little or no musical background. Jazz is a music that is often performed by people with limited formal musical education. Armstrong did not analyze what he played in theoretical terms. Instead, he thought about it in terms of the voices in a barbershop quartet. Understanding how Armstrong, and other pioneer jazz musicians of his generation, learned to play jazz and how he used his background of singing in a quartet to develop the jazz solo has fundamental implications for the teaching of jazz history and performance today. This assertive book provides an approachable foundation for current musicians to unlock the magic and understand jazz the Louis Armstrong way.

In Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, pianist Randy Weston and bassist Ahmed Abdul-Malik celebrated with song the revolutions spreading across Africa. In Ghana and South Africa, drummer Guy Warren and vocalist Sathima Bea Benjamin fused local musical forms with the dizzying innovations of modern jazz. These four were among hundreds of musicians in the 1950s and '60s who forged connections between jazz and Africa that definitively reshaped both their music and the world. Each artist identified in particular ways with Africa's struggle for liberation and made music dedicated to, or inspired by, demands for independence and self-determination. That music was the wild, boundary-breaking exultation of modern jazz. The result was an abundance of conversation, collaboration, and tension between African and African American musicians during the era of decolonization. This collective biography demonstrates how modern Africa reshaped jazz, how modern jazz helped form a new African identity, and how musical convergences and crossings altered politics and culture on both continents. In a crucial moment when freedom electrified the African diaspora, these black artists sought one another out to create new modes of expression. Documenting individuals and places, from Lagos to Chicago, from New York to Cape Town, Robin Kelley gives us a meditation on modernity: we see innovation not as an imposition from the West but rather as indigenous, multilingual, and messy, the result of innumerable exchanges across a breadth of cultures.

This book offers an oral history of musical genres from the Palmetto state musicians who helped define the sounds.From Jabbo Smith, Dizzy Gillespie, and Drink Small to Johnny Helms, Dick Goodwin, and Chris Potter, South Carolina has been home to an impressive number of well-known jazz and blues musicians. Through richly detailed interviews with 19 South Carolina musicians, Franklin presents an oral history of the tradition and influence of jazz and the blues in the Palmetto State.Franklin takes as his subjects a range of musicians born between 1905 and 1971, representing every decade in between, to trace the progression of these musical genres from Tommy Benford's and Jabbo Smith's first recording sessions in the summer of 1926 to the present day. Diverse not only in age but also in race, gender, instruments, and style, these musicians exemplify the breadth of jazz and blues performers from South Carolina.In their own colorful words, the performers recall their love affairs with the distinctive sounds of jazz and blues, indoctrinations into the musical word, early gigs, life on the tour bus, fans, drugs, military service, amateur night at the Apollo Theater, and influential friendships with other well-known musicians. As the story of South Carolina musical scene is tightly interwoven with that of the nation, these narratives also include appearances by Tony Bennett, Miles Davis, Count Basie, Herman Lubinsky, Helen Merrill, Pharoah Sanders, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and other significant musicians.

There were but four major galaxies in the early jazz universe, and three of them-New Orleans, Chicago, and New York-have been well documented in print. But there has never been a serious history of the fourth, Kansas City, until now. In this colorful history, Frank Driggs and Chuck Haddix range from ragtime to bebop and from Bennie Moten to Charlie Parker to capture the golden age of Kansas City jazz. Readers will find a colorful portrait of old Kaycee itself, back then a neon riot of bars, gambling dens and taxi dance halls, all ruled over by Boss Tom Pendergast, who had transformed a dusty cowtown into the Paris of the Plains. We see how this wide-open, gin-soaked town gave birth to a music that was more basic and more viscerally exciting than other styles of jazz, its singers belting out a rough-and-tumble urban style of blues, its piano players pounding out a style later known as "boogie-woogie." We visit the great landmarks, like the Reno Club, the "Biggest Little Club in the World," where Lester Young and Count Basie made jazz history, and Charlie Parker began his musical education in the alley out back. And of course the authors illuminate the lives of the great musicians who made Kansas City swing, with colorful profiles of jazz figures such as Mary Lou Williams, Big Joe Turner, Jimmy Rushing, and Andy Kirk and his "Clouds of Joy." Here is the definitive account of the raw, hard-driving style that put Kansas City on the musical map. It is a must read for everyone who loves jazz or American music history.

In "To a Young Jazz Musician, the renowned jazz musician and Pulitzer Prize--winning composer Wynton Marsalis gives us an invaluable guide to making good music-and to leading a good life.
Writing from the road "between the bus ride, the sound check, and the gig,"
Marsalis passes on wisdom gained from experience, addressed to a young musician coming up-and to any of us at any stage of life. He writes that having humility is a way to continue to grow, to listen, and to learn; that patience is necessary for developing both technical proficiency and your own art rather than an imitation of someone else's; and that rules are indispensable because "freedom lives in structure."
He offers lessons learned from his years as a performer and from his great forebears Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, and others; he explores the art of swing; he discusses why it is important to run toward your issues, not away; and he talks about what to do when your integrity runs up against the lack thereof in others and in our culture. He poetically expresses our need for healers: "All of it tracks back to how you heal your culture, one patient at a time, beginning with yourself."
This is a unique book, in which a great artist offers his personal thoughts, both on jazz and on how to live a better, more original, productive, and meaningful life. To a Young Jazz Musician is sure to be treasured by readers young and old, musicians, lovers of music, and anyone interested in being mentored by one of America's most influential, generous, and talented artists.

"From the Hardcover edition.

During the years between the world wars, a small but dynamic community of African American jazz musicians left the United States and settled in Paris, creating a vibrant expatriate musical scene and introducing jazz to the French. While the Harlem Renaissance was taking off across the Atlantic, entertainers in Montmartre, the epicenter of the Parisian scene, contributed enthusiastically to a culture that thrived for two decades, until the occupation of the city by German troops on June 18, 1940. In "Harlem in Montmartre, " William Shack takes a fascinating look at this extraordinary cultural moment, one in which African American musicians could flee the racism of the United States to pursue their lives and art in the relatively free context of bohemian Europe. His book is the first comprehensive treatment of the rise and decline of the African American music community in Paris; in it, he considers the international dimensions of black experience in the modern era and explores the similarities and differences of Harlem-style jazz and culture in Europe and America.
Shack focuses on some of the principal actors who played critical roles in shaping the jazz scene in Montmartre--Josephine Baker, Sidney Bechet, and Bricktop--but he also discusses others who opened clubs, underwrote loans, and contributed their musical talents to this unparalleled experiment. As an anthropologist, Shack pays particular attention to the club culture. He describes the musicians' experiences, the settings in which they performed, and the response of French audiences.
Shack's meticulous research and encyclopedic knowledge of Montmartre's jazz culture, including the people and places involved, make this a riveting, authoritative work. Seamlessly fusing biographical, sociological, and historical details, he brings this unique era to life and demonstrates how the Paris jazz scene played a crucial role in legitimizing jazz--both in Europe and the United States.