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Books > Arts & Architecture > Music > Contemporary popular music > Jazz
In The Performance of Authenticity: The Makings of Jazz and the Self in Autobiography Teofilo Espada-Brignoni analyzes the autobiographies of New Orleans musicians (Baby Dodds, Sidney Bechet, Pops Foster, and Lee Collins) who throughout their texts construct New Orleans jazz as an authentic musical expression grounded in their experiences and culture. The author argues the autobiographies reproduce and reinterpret modernist conceptions of authenticity to assert and affirm authority over the public representations and discussions of jazz. Through the autobiographers' use of ideas about authenticity, they establish the value of their narratives but at the same time reinforce some of the power dynamics they set out to criticize. Their narratives also reveal the complex ethics that emerged during the first decades of the music and problematize modernist values such as individualism, the dichotomy of work and life, as well as the self and the social. The book adopts Foucauldian and social-constructivist perspectives, complementing analysis of the autobiographies by drawing from literary theory, psychology, sociology, and jazz scholarship.
Improbasen is a Norwegian private learning centre that offers beginner's instrumental tuition within jazz improvisation for children between the ages of 7 and 15. This book springs out of a two-year ethnographic study of the teaching and learning activity at Improbasen, highlighting features from the micro-interactions within the lessons, the organisation of Improbasen, and its international activity. Music teachers, students, and scholars within music education as well as jazz research will benefit from the perspectives presented in the book, which shows how children systematically acquire tools for improvisation and shared codes for interplay. Through a process of guided participation in jazz culture, even very young children are empowered to take part in a global, creative musical practice with improvisation as an educational core. This book critically engages in current discussions about jazz pedagogy, inclusion and gender equity, beginning instrumental tuition, creativity, and authenticity in childhood.
A CHOICE 2018 Outstanding Academic Title.In Jazz Transatlantic, Volume I, renowned scholar Gerhard Kubik takes the reader across the Atlantic from Africa to the Americas and then back in pursuit of the music we call jazz. This first volume explores the term itself and how jazz has been defined and redefined. It also celebrates the phenomena of jazz performance and uncovers hidden gems of jazz history. The volume offers insights gathered during Kubik's extensive field work and based on in-depth interviews with jazz musicians around the Atlantic world. Languages, world views, beliefs, experiences, attitudes, and commodities all play a role. Kubik reveals what is most important--the expertise of individual musical innovators on both sides of the Atlantic, and hidden relationships in their thoughts. Besides the common African origins of much vocabulary and structure, all the expressions of jazz in Africa share transatlantic family relationships. Within that framework, musicians are creating and re-creating jazz in never-ending Contacts and exchanges. The first of two volumes, Jazz Transatlantic, Volume I examines this transatlantic history, sociolinguistics, musicology, and the biographical study of personalities in jazz during the twentieth century. This volume traces the African and African American influences on the creation of the jazz sound and traces specific African traditions as they transform into American jazz. Kubik seeks to describe the constant mixing of sources and traditions, so he includes influences of European music in both volumes. These works will become essential and indelible parts of jazz history.
When Derek Coller decided to pay tribute to his late friend - the author, biographer, discographer and researcher, Bert Whyatt - he looked for a common theme under which to group some of the articles they had written together over the years. He found it in Chicago where their research activities had gravitated towards the style of music created by the young white musicians from that city and its environs - particularly those who rallied around the figurehead of Eddie Condon - as they listened to and learned from the pioneer black stylists, many of them the greatest jazz players to emigrate from New Orleans, including King Oliver, Louis Armstrong, Johnny and Baby Dodds and Jimmy Noone. Two trips to the USA, made by the authors in 1979 and 1992, led to meetings and correspondence with some of the musicians in this compilation, and to learning about many others. There are connections between most of these articles, interviews and notes, with an over-lapping of jobs, leaders and clubs. Some of the stories are about pioneers: Elmer Schoebel, Jack Pettis and Frank Snyder, for example, were in the New Orleans Rhythm Kings in 1923. Trombonist George Brunis, chronicled here, was also a member of that band, though his long career - during which he played with Muggsy Spanier, as did Rod Cless and George Zack, in the Spanier Ragtime Band of 'Great Sixteen' fame - has been more widely documented. Floyd Bean and Tut Soper, here too, were also Spanier alumni. The articles originally appeared variously under a dual by-line, or by either Whyatt or Coller, but always with consultation and discussion prior to publication. Here they become a lively mix of the voices of the authors as well as the musicians and their families, building a story through biography, reviews and discography. The book is illustrated with evocative black and white photographs and images, and there is an Index of names and places to help the reader keep track of the musicians, composers, producers, promoters and writers who created this part of the history of jazz.
Experimentation in Improvised Jazz: Chasing Ideas challenges the notion that in the twenty-first century, jazz can be restrained by a singular, static definition. The worldwide trend for jazz to be marginalized by the mainstream music industry, as well as conservatoriums and schools of music, runs the risk of stifling the innovative and challenging aspects of its creativity. The authors argue that to remain relevant, jazz needs to be dynamic, proactively experimental, and consciously facilitate new ideas to be made accessible to an audience broader than the innovators themselves. Experimentation in Improvised Jazz explores key elements of experimental jazz music in order to discern ways in which the genre is developing. The book begins with an overview of where, when and how new ideas in free and improvised jazz have been created and added to the canon, developing the genre beyond its initial roots. It moves on to consider how and why musicians create free and improvised jazz; the decisions they make while playing. What are they responding to? What are they depending on? What are they thinking? The authors analyse and synthesise the creation of free jazz by correlating the latest research to the reflections provided by some of the world's greatest jazz innovators for this project. Finally, the book examines how we respond to free and improvised jazz: artistically, critically and personally. Free jazz is, the book argues, an environment that develops through experimentation with new ideas.
Outside and Inside: Representations of Race and Identity in White Jazz Autobiography is the first full-length study of key autobiographies of white jazz musicians. White musicians from a wide range of musical, social, and economic backgrounds looked to black music and culture as the model on which to form their personal identities and their identities as professional musicians. Their accounts illustrate the triumphs and failures of jazz interracialism. As they describe their relationships with black musicians who are their teachers and peers, white jazz autobiographers display the contradictory attitudes of reverence and entitlement, and deference and insensitivity that remain part of the white response to black culture to the present day. Outside and Inside features insights into the development of jazz styles and culture in the urban meccas of twentieth-century jazz in New Orleans, Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles. Reva Marin considers the autobiographies of sixteen white male jazz instrumentalists, including renowned swing-era bandleaders Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, and Charlie Barnet; reed instrumentalists Mezz Mezzrow, Bob Wilber, and Bud Freeman; trumpeters Max Kaminsky and Wingy Manone; guitarist Steve Jordan; pianists Art Hodes and Don Asher; saxophonist Art Pepper; guitarist and bandleader Eddie Condon; and New Orleans-style clarinetist Tom Sancton. While critical race theory informs this work, Marin argues that viewing these texts simply through the lens of white privilege does not do justice to the kind of sustained relationships with black music and culture described in the accounts of white jazz autobiographers. She both insists upon the value of insider perspectives and holds the texts to rigorous scrutiny, while embracing an expansive interpretation of white involvement in black culture. Marin opens new paths for study of race relations and racial, ethnic, and gender identity formation in jazz studies.
The development of jazz and swing in the African-American community in Los Angeles in the years before the second World War received a boost from the arrival of a significant numbers of musicians from Chicago and the southwestern states. In Swingin' on Central: African-American Jazz in Los Angeles, a new study of that vibrant jazz community, music historian and jazz journalist Peter Vacher traveled between Los Angeles and London over several years in order to track down key figures and interview them for this oral history of one of the most swinging jazz scenes in the United States. Vacher recreates the energy and vibrancy of the Central Avenue scene through first-hand accounts from such West Coast notables as trumpeters Andy Blakeney , George Orendorff, and McLure "Red Mack" Morris; pianists Betty Hall Jones, Chester Lane, and Gideon Honore, saxophonists Chuck Thomas, Jack McVea, and Caughey Roberts Jr; drummers Jesse Sailes, Red Minor Robinson, and Nathaniel "Monk" McFay; and others. Throughout, readers learn the story behind the formative years of these musicians, most of whom have never been interviewed until now. While not exactly headliners-nor heavily recorded-this community of jazz musicians was among the most talented in pre-war America. Arriving in Los Angeles at a time when black Americans faced restrictions on where they could live and work, jazz artists of color commonly found themselves limited to the Central Avenue area. This scene, supplemented by road travel, constituted their daily bread as players-with none of them making it to New York. Through their own words, Vacher tells their story in Los Angeles, offering along the way a close look at the role the black musicians union played in their lives while also taking on jazz historiography's comparative neglect of these West Coast players. Music historians with a particular interest in pre-bop jazz in California will find much new material here as Vacher paints a world of luxurious white nightclubs with black bands, ghetto clubs and after-hours joints, a world within a world that resulted from the migration of black musicians to the West Coast.
During World War II, jazz embodied everything that was appealing about a democratic society as envisioned by the Western Allied powers. Labelled `degenerate' by Hitler's cultural apparatus, jazz was adopted by the Allies to win the hearts and minds of the German public. It was also used by the Nazi Minister for Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, to deliver a message of Nazi cultural and military superiority. When Goebbels co-opted young German and foreign musicians into `Charlie and his Orchestra' and broadcast their anti-Allied lyrics across the English Channel, jazz took centre stage in the propaganda war that accompanied World War II on the ground. The Jazz War is based on the largely unheard oral testimony of the personalities behind the German and British wartime radio broadcasts, and chronicles the evolving relationship between jazz music and the Axis and Allied war e orts. Studdert shows how jazz both helped and hindered the Allied cause as Nazi soldiers secretly tuned in to British radio shows while London party-goers danced the night away in demimonde `bottle parties', leading them to be branded a `menace' in Parliament. This book will appeal to students of the history of jazz, broadcasting, cultural studies, and the history of World War II.
Patterns for Jazz stands as a monument among jazz educational materials. Condensed charts and pertinent explanations are conveniently inserted throughout the book to give greater clarity to the application of more than 400 patterns built on chords and scales -- from simple (major) to complex (lydian augmented scales).
Songs of the Unsung is the autobiography of Los Angeles jazz musician and activist Horace Tapscott (1934-1999). A pianist who ardently believed in the power of music to connect people, Tapscott was a beloved and influential character who touched many yet has remained unknown to the majority of Americans. In addition to being "his" story, Songs of the Unsung is the story of Los Angeles's cultural and political evolution over the last half of the twentieth century, of the origins of many of the most important avant-garde musicians still on the scene today, and of a rich and varied body of music. Tapscott's narrative covers his early life in segregated Houston, his move to California in 1943, life as a player in the Air Force band in the early fifties, and his travels with the Lionel Hampton Band. He reflects on how the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra (the "Ark"), an organization he founded in 1961 to preserve and spread African and African-American music, eventually became the Union of God's Musicians and Artists Ascension-a group that not only performed musically but was active in the civil rights movement, youth education, and community programs. Songs of the Unsung also includes Tapscott's vivid descriptions of the Watts neighborhood insurrection of 1965 and the L.A. upheavals of 1992, interactions with both the Black Panthers and the L.A.P.D., his involvement in Motown's West Coast scene, the growth of his musical reputation abroad, and stories about many of his musician-activist friends, including Billy Higgins, Don Cherry, Buddy Collette, Arthur Blythe, Lawrence and Wilber Morris, Linda Hill, Elaine Brown, Stanley Crouch, and Sun Ra. With a foreword by Steven Isoardi, a brief introduction by actor William Marshall, a full discography of Tapscott's recordings, and many fine photographs, Songs of the Unsung is the inspiring story of one of America's most unassuming twentieth-century heroes.
Hugh Masekela is a prodigiously talented giant of jazz and world music, and a pioneer in sharing the voice and spirit of South Africa with the rest of the world, but his globetrotting tale transcends music. Still Grazing was first published in the US in 2004; it is an autobiography which shares rich detail of world-acclaimed jazz giant Hugh Masekela's life, infused with love and loss, sex and drugs, exile and revolution. He survived it all, with wit, passion, abundant talent and wisdom, and is now bringing his story back home!
In the early spring of 1959, six musicians went into the 30th Street Studio in New York. Nine hours later, they had recorded one of the finest albums of the twentieth century. Kind of Blue traces Miles Davis's development into an artist capable of making such a masterpiece, and explores the careers and struggles of the musicians who shaped him and played alongside him. Using interviews and pictures, studio dialogue and outtakes, the great jazz historian Ashley Kahn follows Miles and his group into the studio, to show precisely how the greatest jazz record of all time was made, how it was introduced to the world, and how it changed music forever.
American composer George Gershwin, an icon of the American Jazz Age, indelibly marked 20th-century music, with many of his works becoming standards in the popular and jazz music repertory, not to mention his world-famous classical works such as Rhapsody in Blue (1924) and Porgy and Bess (1935). This major bibliography includes a brief biography, which examines Gershwin's influence and situates him within the cultural context of his time, a complete cross-reference list of all his compositions, a discography of more than 1,150 items, and a descriptive filmography. The extensive bibliography includes writings by both George and his brother Ira, and more than 2,100 entries about George's compositions. As an exhaustive research tool, this up-to-date bibliographic reference compiles information on George Gershwin from numerous, disparate sources and should appeal to music and theater scholars, cultural historians, and Gershwin enthusiasts alike. The work is divided among seven sections that cross-reference one another. A separate appendix lists itineraries for the Paul Whiteman tours of 1924-1925, and the Leo Reisman tour of 1934, at which Gershwin's music figured prominently, and a comprehensive index completes the volume.
Terry Gibbs, legendary jazz vibraphonist and bandleader, was 12 years old when he kicked off his career as a professional musician, winning first place in an amateur performance. Born and raised in the heart of Brooklyn and possessing tremendous musical talent, Gibbs learned the ins and outs of bebop from pioneers like Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, and Bud Powell. In 1959 his ensemble, later dubbed The Dream Band, became the toast of Hollywood. Four decades, 65 albums, and 300 compositions later, his story is one of great substance-his foot tapping music, revolutionary. Good Vibes is a rollicking autobiography that tracks jazz from the turbulent post-war years through the rise of bebop, traversing its changes through the eyes of one of its greatest practitioners. Gibbs's hilarious, poignant, and always fascinating anecdotes reveal little-known attributes and quirks about legendary personalities such as Benny Goodman, Buddy Rich, Steve Allen, Frank Sinatra, Don Rickles, Billie Holiday, and many more. A foreword by Chubby Jackson, a discography, and an index round out this work."
Interaction, Improvisation, and Interplay in Jazz Performance offers a new and exciting way to listen to and understand jazz. When describing a performance, most jazz writers focus on the improvised lines of the soloist and their underlying harmonic progressions. This approach overlooks the basic fact that when you listen to jazz, you almost never hear a single line, but rather a musical fabric woven by several musicians in real time. While it is often pragmatic to single out an individual solo line, it is important to remember that an improvised solo is but one thread in that fabric; and it is a thread supported by, responded to, and responsive of the parts being played by the other musicians in the group. Interaction, Improvisation, and Interplay in Jazz Performance explores the process of player interaction in jazz, and the role this interaction plays in creating improvised music, including:
Interaction, Improvisation, and Interplay in Jazz Performance will appeal to students of jazz history, composition, and performance, as well as to the general jazz audience.
Serge Chaloff (1923-1957) is most widely remembered as the flamboyant baritone saxophone star with Woody Herman's 2nd Herd whose problems with drugs extended to erratic personal behavior. Nevertheless, there were many brilliant sessions featuring his work before and after his stint with Herman. This work attempts to bring them the recognition they deserve. Simosko details the life and music of Serge Chaloff in an engaging style, from his childhood in Boston, Massachusetts, through his untimely death in 1957. He also provides a discography of Chaloff's recorded output, much of which has been made available by the 1993 Mosaic Records release of The Complete Serge Chaloff Sessions.
From the mid-1950s to the late 1970s, jazz was harnessed as America's "sonic weapon" to promote an image to the world of a free and democratic America. Dizzy Gillespie, Dave Brubeck, Duke Ellington and other well-known jazz musicians were sent around the world - including to an array of Communist countries - as "jazz ambassadors" in order to mitigate the negative image associated with domestic racial problems. While many non-Americans embraced the Americanism behind this jazz diplomacy without question, others criticized American domestic and foreign policies while still appreciating jazz - thus jazz, despite its popularity, also became a medium for expressing anti-Americanism. This book examines the development of jazz outside America, including across diverse historical periods and geographies - shedding light on the effectiveness of jazz as an instrument of state power within a global political context. Saito examines jazz across a wide range of regions, including America, Europe, Japan and Communist countries. His research also draws heavily upon a variety of sources, primary as well as secondary, which are accessible in these diverse countries: all had their unique and culturally specific domestic jazz scenes, but also interacted with each other in an interesting dimension of early globalization. This comparative analysis on the range of unique jazz scenes and cultures offers a detailed understanding as to how jazz has been interpreted in various ways, according to the changing contexts of politics and society around it, often providing a basis for criticizing America itself. Furthering our appreciation of the organic relationship between jazz and global politics, Saito reconsiders the uniqueness of jazz as an exclusively "American music." This book will be of interest to students and scholars of international relations, the history of popular music, and global politics.
Voices Found: Free Jazz and Singing contributes to a wave of voice studies scholarship with the first book-length study of free jazz voice. It pieces together a history of free jazz voice that spans from sound poetry and scat in the 1950s to the more recent wave of free jazz choirs. The author traces the developments and offers a theory, derived from interviews with many of the most important singers in the history of free jazz voice, of how listeners have experienced and evaluated the often unconventional vocal sounds these vocalists employed. This theory explains that even audiences willing to enjoy harsh sounds from saxophones or guitars often resist when voices make sounds that audiences understand as not-human. Experimental poetry and scat were combined and transformed in free jazz spaces in the 1960s and 1970s by vocalists like Yoko Ono (in solo work and her work with Ornette Coleman and John Stevens), Jeanne Lee (in her solo work and her work with Archie Shepp and Gunter Hampel), Leon Thomas (in his solo work as well as his work with Pharoah Sanders and Carlos Santana), and Phil Minton and Maggie Nicols (who devoted much of their energy to creating unaccompanied free jazz vocal music). By studying free jazz voice we can learn important lessons about what we expect from the voice and what happens when those expectations are violated. This book doesn't only trace histories of free jazz voice, it makes an attempt to understand why this story hasn't been told before, with an impressive breadth of scope in terms of the artists covered, drawing on research from the US, Canada, Wales, Scotland, France, The Netherlands, and Japan.
Stephen Botek apprenticed at the side of some of the greats of the jazz era, learning not only about music, but about life. Growing up in small-town Pennsylvania in the shadow of the Dorseys, Botek decides to follow his muse to a future in jazz. He gets mentored by clarinet great Buddy DeFranco and saxophone legend Joe Allard, meets up with greats such as Artie Shaw and Dizzy Gillespie along the way, and follows in Glenn Miller's footsteps with the Army Air Force Band. A primer on the jazz era, as well as an account of the benefits of apprenticeship, SONG ON MY LIPS not only recounts stories of the greats but takes us backstage, to their studios, and to many of the unique venues of the time. Jazz aficionados and new musicians alike will learn much about the music from this unique life story.
At the age of five, a blind African-American boy is handed over to a brutal state home. Here Ludlow Washington will suffer for eleven years, until his prodigious musical talent provides him an unlikely ticket back into the world. The property of a band, playing for down-and-outs in a southern dive, Ludlow's pioneering flair will take him to New York and the very top of the jazz scene - where his personal demons will threaten to drag him back down to the bottom. A Drop of Patience is the story of a gifted and damaged man entirely set apart - by blindness, by race, by talent - who must wrestle with adversity and ambition to generate the acceptance and self-worth that have always eluded him.
Revisit favorite arrangements, discover new ones, and inspire your jazz ensemble with sound and adventurous music to play. This new book recommends and analyzes sixty-seven quality jazz arrangements recommended by eighteen of the foremost jazz experts in the field today, including directors and professors from high schools and colleges across the country, including the Houston High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, Bloomington High School, Fiorello La Guardia Performing Arts High School, Juilliard School, Berklee College of Music, and Harvard University. Listed alphabetically, each analysis includes information on instrumentation, ranges, playability, and requirements for rendering the score. This book includes eight indexes of musical features to help instructors select repertoire and teaching topics, five indexes for quick navigation and reference, three appendices on survey data results, a glossary, a bibliography, a list of jazz ensemble music publishers, and a general index.
Jazz, Rags & Blues, Books 1 through 4, contain original solos for late elementary to late intermediate-level pianists that reflect the various styles of the jazz idiom. An excellent way to introduce your students to this distinctive American contribution to 20th century music. The CD includes dynamic recordings of each song.
Comprehensive chronological survey and analysis of every recording on which Louis Armstrong played during the period 1923 to 1928. Armstrong's immense impact on the evolution of jazz is found primarily in these early recordings, and Brooks's close examination of this period is important, as much of this influence becomes obscured by later recordings. Glossary, bibliography, and title index.
"Both as a person and as a musician, he was number one in my book." -Benny Carter Bassist George Duvivier (1920-1985) was one of the most universally respected musicians in jazz. His impeccable musicianship graced the big bands in the 1940s and led to musical associations with virtually every important jazz and popular artist. His prolific recording career spanned all styles of music, from Eubie Blake to Eric Dolphy, Billie Holiday to Barry Manilow. Duvivier was a most astute and articulate observer of the musical scene. A large part of this book is devoted to his own reflections on growing up in Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s, the evolution of the bass, life in the commercial studios, and his memories of close associates-Coleman Hawkins, Jimmie Lunceford, Bud Powell, Lena Horne, and many others. In addition, twenty of Duvivier's colleagues, including Louie Bellson, Ron Carter, Milt Hinton, Ed Shaughnessy, Arthur Taylor, and Joe Wilder, have contributed, covering a variety of musical and social issues, as well as providing a loving portrait of an extraordinary artist. Duvivier's musical style is discussed by David Chevan, who has included transcriptions of several solos. An extensive discography/solography traces Duvivier's incredibly diverse recording career. With dozens of previously unpublished photos. |
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