Free Jazz: A Research and Information Guide offers carefully selected and annotated sources on free jazz, with comprehensive coverage of English-language academic books, journal articles, and dissertations, and selective coverage of trade books, popular periodicals, documentary films, scores, Masters' theses, online texts, and materials in other languages. Free Jazz will be a major reference tool for students, faculty, librarians, artists, scholars, critics, and serious fans navigating this literature.

In How to Listen to Jazz, award-winning music scholar Ted Gioia presents a lively, accessible introduction to the art of listening to jazz. Covering everything from the music's structure and history to the basic building blocks of improvisation, Gioia shows exactly what to listen for in a jazz performance. How does a casual listener learn to understand and appreciate the nuances between the unapologetic and innovative sounds of Louis Armstrong, the complexity of Coleman Hawkin's saxophone, and the exotic and alluring compositions of Duke Ellington? How does Thelonius Monk fit in alongside Benny Goodman and John Coltrane? He shares listening strategies that will help readers understand and appreciate the great American art form for the rest of their lives, and provides a history of the major movements in jazz right up to the present day. He concludes with a guide to 150 elite musicians who are setting the tone for 21st century jazz. Both an appreciation and an introduction to jazz by a foremost expert, How to Listen to Jazz is a must-read for anyone who's ever wanted to understand America's greatest contribution to the world of music.

The Unsung Songwriters is dedicated to a period in the history of American music that author Warren Vache calls the "Golden Age of Songwriting," and to the men and women who made it great. Contrary to the widely held opinion that most of our hit and standard songs were composed by a handful of top writers Berlin, Gershwin, Kern, Porter, and Rodgers the fact is that the vast majority of them were written by relatively unknown composers. In this definitive reference work to the "unsung songwriters," you will find Al Neiberg, the author of "It's the Talk of the Town," Maceo Pinkard, the mind behind "Sweet Georgia Brown" and "Sugar," Harry Woods for "Try a Little Tenderness," J. Fred Coots for "You Go to My Head," and many more.

The New Yorker recently referred to Pat Metheny as 'possibly the most influential jazz guitarist of the past five decades.' A native of Lee's Summit, Missouri, just southeast of Kansas City, Metheny started playing in pizza parlors at age fourteen. By the time he graduated from high school he was the first-call guitarist for Kansas City jazz clubs, private clubs, and jazz festivals. Now 66, he attributes his early success to the local musical environment he was brought up in and the players and teachers who nurtured his talent and welcomed him into the jazz community. Metheny's twenty Grammys in ten categories speak to his versatility and popularity. Despite five decades of interviews, none have conveyed in detail his stories about his teenage years. Beneath Missouri Skies also reveals important details about jazz in Kansas City during the sixties and early seventies, often overlooked in histories of Kansas City jazz. Yet this time of cultural change was characterized by an outstanding level of musicianship. Author Carolyn Glenn Brewer shows how his keen sense of ensemble had its genesis in his school band under the guidance of a beloved band director. Drawn from news accounts, archival material, interviews, and remembrances, to which the author had unique access, Beneath Missouri Skies portrays a place and time from which Metheny still draws inspiration and strength.

What do Louis Armstrong, Ray Charles, Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, Tom Waits, Cassandra Wilson, and Ani DiFranco have in common? In Highway 61 Revisited, acclaimed music critic Gene Santoro says the answer is jazz--not just the musical style, but jazz's distinctive ambiance and attitudes.
As legendary bebop rebel Charlie Parker once put it, "If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn." Unwinding that Zen-like statement, Santoro traces how jazz's existential art has infused outstanding musicians in nearly every wing of American popular music--blues, folk, gospel, psychedelic rock, country, bluegrass, soul, funk, hiphop--with its parallel process of self-discovery and artistic creation through musical improvisation. Taking less-traveled paths through the last century of American pop, Highway 61 Revisited maps unexpected musical and cultural links between such apparently disparate figures as Louis Armstrong, Willie Nelson, Bob Dylan and Herbie Hancock; Miles Davis, Lenny Bruce, The Grateful Dead, Bruce Springsteen, and many others. Focusing on jazz's power to connect, Santoro shows how the jazz milieu created a fertile space "where whites and blacks could meet in America on something like equal grounds," and indeed where art and entertainment, politics and poetry, mainstream culture and its subversive offshoots were drawn together in a heady mix whose influence has proved both far-reaching and seemingly inexhaustible.
Combining interviews and original research, and marked throughout by Santoro's wide ranging grasp of cultural history, Highway 61 Revisited offers readers a new look at--and a new way of listening to--the many ways jazz has colored the entire range of American popular music in all its dazzling profusion.

How the claim to jazz knowledge forges community and forms an understanding of canon Ken Prouty argues that knowledge of jazz, or more to the point, claims to knowledge of jazz, are the prime movers in forming jazz's identity, its canon, and its community. Every jazz artist, critic, or fan understands jazz differently, based on each individual's unique experiences and insights. Through playing, listening, reading, and talking about jazz, both as a form of musical expression and as a marker of identity, each aficionado develops a personalized relationship to the larger jazz world. Through the increasingly important role of media, listeners also engage in the formation of different communities that not only transcend traditional boundaries of geography, but increasingly exist only in the virtual world. The relationships of "jazz people" within and between these communities is at the center of Knowing Jazz. Some groups, such as those in academia, reflect a clash of sensibilities between historical traditions. Others, particularly online communities, represent new and exciting avenues for everyday fans, whose involvement in jazz has often been ignored. Other communities seek to define themselves as expressions of national or global sensibility, pointing to the ever-changing nature of jazz's identity as an American art form in an international setting. What all these communities share, however, is an intimate, visceral link to the music and the artists who make it, brought to life through the medium of recording. Informed by an interdisciplinary approach and approaching the topic from a number of perspectives, Knowing Jazz charts a philosophical course in which many disparate perspectives and varied opinions on jazz can find common ground.

Dark Magus is a warts-and-all look at the real Miles Davis. As told by his son, this book strips away the public perception of Davis and gets down to the realities of his personality, his relationships, and his many quirks. Dark Magus details this enigmatic superstar's Jekyll and Hyde behavior: his swings between sobriety and prodigious drug use; his tender family moments and his destructive selfishness; his search for marital stability and his obsession with young women; his exalted musical talent and his ever-present personal demons. The author also delves into Davis' relationships with artists such as Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and John Coltrane, as well as his role as a mentor to young musicians, his obsession with sports, the ups and downs of his career, and the family's turmoil over his final will. "This book is a brilliant and engaging revelation of Miles' character through the recollections of his oldest son. It's a book about a legendary musician who was one of my closest friends, and a book that's second to none." - Clark Terry

This research and information guide provides a wide range of scholarship on the life, career, and musical legacy of Miles Davis, and is compiled for an interdisciplinary audience of scholars in jazz and popular music, musicology, and cultural studies. It serves as an excellent tool for librarians, researchers, and scholars sorting through the massive amount of material in the field.

Technology and the Stylistic Evolution of the Jazz Bass traces the stylistic evolution of jazz from the bass player's perspective. Historical works to date have tended to pursue a 'top down' reading, one that emphasizes the influence of the treble instruments on the melodic and harmonic trajectory of jazz. This book augments that reading by examining the music's development from the bottom up. It re-contextualizes the bass and its role in the evolution of jazz (and by extension popular music in general) by situating it alongside emerging music technologies. The bass and its technological mediation are shown to have driven changes in jazz language and musical style, and even transformed creative hierarchies in ways that have been largely overlooked. The book's narrative is also informed by investigations into more commercial musical styles such as blues and rock, in order to assess how, and the degree to which, technological advances first deployed in these areas gradually became incorporated into general jazz praxis. Technology and the Jazz Bass reconciles technology more thoroughly into jazz historiography by detailing and evaluating those that are intrinsic to the instrument (including its eventual electrification) and those extrinsic to it (most notably evolving recording and digital technologies). The author illustrates how the implementation of these technologies has transformed the role of the bass in jazz, and with that, jazz music as an art form.

New Jazz Conceptions: History, Theory, Practice is an edited collection that captures the cutting edge of British jazz studies in the early twenty-first century, highlighting the developing methodologies and growing interdisciplinary nature of the field. In particular, the collection breaks down barriers previously maintained between jazz historians, theorists and practitioners with an emphasis on interrogating binaries of national/local and professional/amateur. Each of these essays questions popular narratives of jazz, casting fresh light on the cultural processes and economic circumstances which create the music. Subjects covered include Duke Ellington's relationship with the BBC, the impact of social media on jazz, a new view of the ban on visiting jazz musicians in interwar Britain, a study of Dave Brubeck as a transitional figure in the pages of Melody Maker and BBC2's Jazz 625, the issue of 'liveness' in Columbia's Ellington at Newport album, a musician and promoter's views of the relationship with audiences, a reflection on Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis and Eric Hobsbawm as jazz critics, a musician's perspective on the oral and generational tradition of jazz in a British context, and a meditation on Alan Lomax's Mr. Jelly Roll, and what it tells us about cultural memory and historical narratives of jazz.

The contributors to Negotiated Moments explore how subjectivity is formed and expressed through musical improvisation, tracing the ways the transmission and reception of sound occur within and between bodies in real and virtual time and across memory, history, and space. They place the gendered, sexed, raced, classed, disabled, and technologized body at the center of critical improvisation studies and move beyond the field's tendency toward celebrating improvisation's utopian and democratic ideals by highlighting the improvisation of marginalized subjects. Rejecting a singular theory of improvisational agency, the contributors show how improvisation helps people gain hard-won and highly contingent agency. Essays include analyses of the role of the body and technology in performance, improvisation's ability to disrupt power relations, Pauline Oliveros's ideas about listening, flautist Nicole Mitchell's compositions based on Octavia Butler's science fiction, and an interview with Judith Butler about the relationship between her work and improvisation. The contributors' close attention to improvisation provides a touchstone for examining subjectivities and offers ways to hear the full spectrum of ideas that sound out from and resonate within and across bodies. Contributors. George Blake, David Borgo, Judith Butler, Rebecca Caines, Louise Campbell, Illa Carrillo Rodriguez, Berenice Corti, Andrew Raffo Dewar, Nina Eidsheim, Tomie Hahn, Jaclyn Heyen, Christine Sun Kim, Catherine Lee, Andra McCartney, Tracy McMullen, Kevin McNeilly, Leaf Miller, Jovana Milovic, Francois Mouillot, Pauline Oliveros, Jason Robinson, Neil Rolnick, Simon Rose, Gillian Siddall, Julie Dawn Smith, Jesse Stewart, Clara Tomaz, Sherrie Tucker, Lindsay Vogt, Zachary Wallmark, Ellen Waterman, David Whalen, Pete Williams, Deborah Wong, Mandy-Suzanne Wong

The Annual Review of Jazz Studies is dedicated to scholarly research on jazz and its related musical forms. It recognizes the growing awareness of jazz as a cultural phenomenon. All volumes include numerous musical examples, a book review section, a portfolio of jazz photographs, and bibliographic surveys. This volume contains a particularly broad range of articles, both technical and non-technical, which should appeal to both the jazz fan and the scholar. ARJS 10 introduces a new feature: "Jazz Fiction: A Bibliography from Nonjazz Journals," which identifies many important jazz publications that might otherwise elude researchers. Researchers will find "Using e-commerce Music Sites for Discographical Research" a useful survey of Internet resources. The Louis Armstrong Centennial is heralded by a warm reminiscence by Dan Morgenstern and a gallery of rare photos from the files of the Institute of Jazz Studies. Musicological treatments include articles on McCoy Tyner, Bill Evans, Charlie Parker, and Jimmy Smith. Several articles examine Thelonious Monk's unique body of work from different perspectives. In addition, there are reviews of three recent works about this singular figure. Other book reviews cover such important contributions as Scott DeVeaux's The Birth of Bebop and Ingrid Monson's Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction. " The 'Stardust' File" traces the evolution of one of the music's most enduring standards. Finally, "Busted" tells the full story of Gene Krupa's arrest in 1943.

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.

Sounding American: Hollywood, Opera, and Jazz tells the story of the interaction between musical form, film technology, and ideas about race, ethnicity, and the nation during the American cinema's conversion to sound. Contrary to most accepted narratives about the conversion, which tend to explain the competition between the Hollywood studios' film sound technologies in qualitative and economic terms, this book argues that the battle between disc and film sound was waged primarily in an aesthetic realm. Opera and jazz in particular, though long neglected in studies of the film score, were extremely important in defining the scope of the American soundtrack, not only during the conversion, but also once sound had been standardized. Examining studio advertisements, screenplays, scores, and the films themselves, the book concentrates on the interactions between musical form and film technology, arguing that each of the major studios appropriated opera and jazz in a unique way in order to construct its own version of an ideal American voice. The book's central question asks what the synthesis of opera and jazz during the conversion reveals about the stylistic and ideological norms of classical Hollywood cinema and the racial, ethnic, gendered, and socially stratified spaces of American musical production. Unlike much of the scholarship on film music, which gravitates toward feature film scores, Sounding American concentrates on the musical shorts of the late 1920s, showing how their representations of the stage, conservatory, ballroom, and nightclub reflected what opera and jazz meant for particular groups of Americans and demonstrating how the cinema helped to shape the racial, ethnic, and national identities attached to this music. Traditional histories of Hollywood film music have tended to concentrate on the unity of the score, a model that assumes a passive spectator. Sounding American claims that the classical Hollywood film is essentially an illustrated jazz-opera with a musical structure that encourages an active form of listening and viewing in order to make sense of what is ultimately a fragmentary text.

In Rhythm Is My Beat: Jazz Guitar Great Freddie Green and the Count Basie Sound, Alfred Green tells the story of his father, rhythm guitarist Freddie Green, whose guitar work served as the pulse of the Count Basie Band. A quiet but key figure in big band jazz, Freddie Green took a distinct pride in his role as Basie's rhythm guitarist, redefining the outer limits of acoustic rhythm guitar and morphing it into an art form. So distinct was Green's style that it would eventually give birth to notations on guitar charts that read: "Play in the style of Freddie Green." This American jazz icon, much like his inimitable sound, achieved stardom as a sideman, both in and out of Basie's band. Green's signature sound provided lift to soloists like Lester Young and vocalist Lil' Jimmy Rushing, a reflection of Green's sophisticated technique, that produced, in Green's words, his "rhythm wave." Billie Holiday, Ruby Braff, Benny Goodman, Gerry Mulligan, Teddy Wilson, Ray Charles, Judy Carmichael, Joe Williams and other recording artists all benefited from the relentless fours of the man who came to be known as Mr. Rhythm. The mystique surrounding Freddie Green's technique is illuminated through generous commentary by insightful interviews with other musicians, guitar professionals and scholars, all of whom offer their ideas on Freddie Green's sound. Alfred Green throughout demystifies the man behind the legend. This work will interest jazz fans, students, and scholars; guitar enthusiasts and professionals; music historians and anyone interested not only in the history of jazz but of the African American experience in jazz.

Microgroove continues John Corbett's exploration of diverse musics, with essays, interviews, and musician profiles that focus on jazz, improvised music, contemporary classical, rock, folk, blues, post-punk, and cartoon music. Corbett's approach to writing is as polymorphous as the music, ranging from oral history and journalistic portraiture to deeply engaged cultural critique. Corbett advocates for the relevance of "little" music, which despite its smaller audience is of enormous cultural significance. He writes on musicians as varied as Sun Ra, PJ Harvey, Koko Taylor, Steve Lacy, and Helmut Lachenmann. Among other topics, he discusses recording formats; the relationship between music and visual art, dance, and poetry; and, with Terri Kapsalis, the role of female orgasm sounds in contemporary popular music. Above all, Corbett privileges the importance of improvisation; he insists on the need to pay close attention to "other" music and celebrates its ability to open up pathways to new ideas, fresh modes of expression, and unforeseen ways of knowing.

(Book). The Jazz Guitar Handbook is a step-by-step guide to jazz guitar playing. It takes you from the basics through to advanced harmony and soloing concepts, and teaches you the music theory a jazz guitarist needs to know. Along the way it covers a wide range of styles, including jazzy blues, swing, bebop, modal, jazz-funk, Gypsy, and more. The handbook features over 120 exercises in notation and tab and includes a 96-track CD of examples, play-alongs, and backing tracks. It also presents the history of the jazz guitar and its great players. Easy to use and useful for players at various levels, this volume is a must-have reference for players looking to expand their jazz skillset.

(Piano Solo Personality). 24 essential Evans standards arranged for piano solo, including: Alice in Wonderland * Autumn Leaves * But Beautiful * Everything Happens to Me * Here's That Rainy Day * How Deep Is the Ocean (How High Is the Sky) * In a Sentimental Mood * My Foolish Heart * Night and Day * Some Day My Prince Will Come * Suicide Is Painless (Song from M*A*S*H) * Witchcraft * and more.

1) This is the only book that is written as a coursebook for Improv, and directed to the college classroom. 2) Brings various aspects of the jazz learning process together -- practicing scales, chord arpeggios and melodic motives in 12 keys, along with the assimilation of the rhythmic nature of jazz and its related forms of (primarily African American) music -- in one systematic, organized and easy-to-assimilate manner. 3) Chapters are organized with: - a paragraph or two explaining a particular scale/harmonic basis or a common form used in jazz repertoire - suggested exercises, from basic scales to advanced melodic motives taken directly from recordings - a repertoire list that employs the harmonic, melodic or formal aspects being discussed in each chapter - concludes with a transcription of an improvised solo by a jazz master which illustrates how theory is put into practice. 4) Includes supplementary materials such as recordings of the transcribed solos, relevant Aebersold Play-Along recordings, and fake books

Improvisation is a performance practice that animates and activates diverse energies of inspiration, critique, and invention. In recent years it has coalesced into an exciting and innovative new field of interdisciplinary scholarly inquiry, becoming a cornerstone of both practical and theoretical approaches to performance."

The Improvisation Studies Reader" draws together the works of key artists and thinkers from a range of disciplines, including theatre, music, literature, film, and dance. Divided by keywords into eight sections, this book bridges the gaps between these fields. The book includes case studies, exercises, graphic scores and poems in order to produce a teaching and research resource that identifies central themes in improvisation studies. The sections include:

• Listening
• Trust/Risk
• Flow
• Dissonance
• Responsibility
• Liveness
• Surprise
• Hope

Each section of the Reader is introduced by a newly commissioned think piece by a key figure in the field, which opens up research questions reflecting on the keyword in question.

By placing key theoretical and classic texts in conversation with cutting-edge research and artists statements, this book answers the urgent questions facing improvising artists and theorists in the mediatized Twenty-First Century. "

Black British musicians have been making jazz since around 1920 when the genre first arrived in Britain. This groundbreaking book reveals their hidden history and major contribution to the development of jazz in the UK. More than this, though, the chapters show the importance of black British jazz in terms of musical hybridity and the cultural significance of race. Decades before Steel Pulse, Soul II Soul, or Dizzee Rascal pushed their way into the mainstream, black British musicians were playing jazz in venues up and down the country from dance halls to tiny clubs. In an important sense, then, black British jazz demonstrates the crucial importance of musical migration in the musical history of the nation, and the links between popular and avant-garde forms. But the volume also provides a case study in how music of the African diaspora reverberates around the world, beyond the shores of the USA - the engine-house of global black music. As such it will engage scholars of music and cultural studies not only in Britain, but across the world.

Endorsed by Jamey Aebersold, James Moody, Dave Liebman, and others, The Jazz Theory Book presents all the information any student of jazz needs in an easy-to-understand, yet thorough, manner. For intermediate to advanced players, and written by one of the acknowledged masters of jazz, it is used by universities around the world.

for soprano solo, SATB, piano, bass, drums and optional alto saxophone Will Todd's Mass in Blue is a dynamic, uplifting, and highly popular jazz setting of the Latin mass. The work features driving grooves and blues harmonies, with provision for short piano solos (notated or improvised) and great moments of musical interplay between soprano soloist and choir. The Jazz Trio Set includes parts for piano (with chord symbols), bass (with chord symbols), drum kit (fully notated), and optional alto saxophone.