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Books > Arts & Architecture > Music > Contemporary popular music > Jazz
Recorded by his quartet in a single session in 1964, A Love Supreme
is widely considered John Coltrane's magnum opus and one of the
greatest jazz albums of all time.
Clad in white tie and tails, dancing and scatting his way through the "Hi-de-ho" chorus of "Minnie the Moocher," Cab Calloway exuded a sly charm and sophistication that endeared him to legions of fans. In Hi-de-ho, author Alyn Shipton offers the first full-length biography of Cab Calloway, whose vocal theatrics and flamboyant stage presence made him one of the highest-earning African American bandleaders. Shipton sheds new light on Calloway's life and career, explaining how he traversed racial and social boundaries to become one of the country's most beloved entertainers. Drawing on first-hand accounts from Calloway's family, friends, and fellow musicians, the book traces the roots of this music icon, from his childhood in Rochester, New York, to his life of hustling on the streets of Baltimore. Shipton highlights how Calloway's desire to earn money to support his infant daughter prompted his first break into show business, when he joined his sister Blanche in a traveling revue. Beginning in obscure Baltimore nightclubs and culminating in his replacement of Duke Ellington at New York's famed Cotton Club, Calloway honed his gifts of scat singing and call-and-response routines. His career as a bandleader was matched by his genius as a talent-spotter, evidenced by his hiring of such jazz luminaries as Ben Webster, Dizzy Gillespie, and Jonah Jones. As the swing era waned, Calloway reinvented himself as a musical theatre star, appearing as Sportin' Life in "Porgy and Bess" in the early 1950s; in later years, Calloway cemented his status as a living legend through cameos on "Sesame Street" and his show-stopping appearance in the wildly popular "The Blues Brothers" movie, bringing his trademark "hi-de-ho" refrain to a new generation of audiences. More than any other source, Hi-de-ho stands as an entertaining, not-to-be-missed portrait of Cab Calloway-one that expertly frames his enduring significance as a pioneering artist and entertainer.
"An occasion to appreciate Dexter's resounding musical genius as well as his wish for major social transformation."-Angela Y. Davis, political activist, scholar, author, and speaker Sophisticated Giant presents the life and legacy of tenor saxophonist Dexter Gordon (1923-1990), one of the major innovators of modern jazz. In a context of biography, history, and memoir, Maxine Gordon has completed the book that her late husband began, weaving his "solo" turns with her voice and a chorus of voices from past and present. Reading like a jazz composition, the blend of research, anecdote, and a selection of Dexter's personal letters reflects his colorful life and legendary times. It is clear why the celebrated trumpet genius Dizzy Gillespie said to Dexter, "Man, you ought to leave your karma to science." Dexter Gordon the icon is the Dexter beloved and celebrated on albums, on film, and in jazz lore--even in a street named for him in Copenhagen. But this image of the cool jazzman fails to come to terms with the multidimensional man full of humor and wisdom, a figure who struggled to reconcile being both a creative outsider who broke the rules and a comforting insider who was a son, father, husband, and world citizen. This essential book is an attempt to fill in the gaps created by our misperceptions as well as the gaps left by Dexter himself.
Behind the scenes in the life of a musician--an exuberant, entertaining memoir from jazz guitarist, singer, and raconteur John Pizzarelli John Pizzarelli, the son of jazz guitar legend Bucky Pizzarelli, is a connoisseur of American song who grew up among the legends of jazz. From teenage explorations of rock music to life on the road with his father, he worked his way from gigs in tiny clubs to opening for Frank Sinatra during his final international tour. Now Pizzarelli performs in festivals and top venues across the United States and the world, and he shares his unique journey in this revealing, charming, and heartwarming memoir. Includes firsthand stories of famous jazz greats and popular music icons including Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Rosemary Clooney, Benny Goodman, Joe Pass, James Taylor, and Paul McCartney Reveals what it was like to grow up among great musicians and storytellers and shares the day-to-day experiences of a touring musician's life Includes thirty-five terrific photographs that take you inside John Pizzarelli's life and music Part of the Wiley-Lincoln Center alliance Absorbing, upbeat, funny, and down to earth, World on a String is an irresistible celebration of music and life that will appeal to John Pizzarelli's large and growing following.
At its most intimate level, music heals our emotional wounds and inspires us. At its most public, it unites people across cultural boundaries. But can it rebuild a city? That's the central question posed in New Atlantis, journalist John Swenson's beautifully detailed account of the musical artists working to save America's most colorful and troubled metropolis: New Orleans. The city has been threatened with extinction many times during its three-hundred-plus-year history by fire, pestilence, crime, flood, and oil spills. Working for little money and in spite of having lost their own homes and possessions to Katrina, New Orleans's most gifted musicians-including such figures as Dr. John, the Neville Brothers, "Trombone Shorty," and Big Chief Monk Boudreaux-are fighting back against a tidal wave of problems: the depletion of the wetlands south of the city (which are disappearing at the rate of one acre every hour), the violence that has made New Orleans the murder capitol of the U.S., the waning tourism industry, and above all the continuing calamity in the wake of Hurricane Katrina (or, as it is known in New Orleans, the "Federal Flood"). Indeed, most of the neighborhoods that nurtured the indigenous music of New Orleans were destroyed in the flood, and many of the elder statesmen have died or been incapacitated since then, but the musicians profiled here have stepped up to fill their roles. New Atlantis is their story. Packed with indelible portraits of individual artists, informed by Swenson's encyclopedic knowledge of the city's unique and varied music scene-which includes jazz, R&B, brass band, rock, and hip hop-New Atlantis is a stirring chronicle of the valiant efforts to preserve the culture that gives New Orleans its grace and magic.
This book traces the learning experiences of the jazz community in Bristol, UK from 1945 to 2012. Grounded in a methodology of participant observation and case studies, it documents changes in the economic, cultural and educational circumstances faced by the players. In their own words, the musicians recall the influences that initiated and developed their musicianship. Drawing on first-person accounts, the study traces the historical development of jazz music and musicians in Bristol. In the post-war years, players began to develop significant stylistic aspects in the jazz lexicon. Drawing on media sources and interaction in performance, players garnered a host of performing skills whilst suffering dwindling audiences and declining venues. Reforms in English music education in the 1980s offered formal opportunities to study jazz in the city's schools, drawing minimal attention from institutions. Practical learning and playing opportunities offered by the Local Authority music service sustained a modest membership over the years. Post millennium, local schools, with one or two exceptions, showed little interest in jazz education. Nevertheless, maintaining its traditional stance, Bristol's jazz community continues to exhort top quality jazz performances including compositions that match national and international standards.
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.
Jazz Trumpet Studies brings together 78 of James Rae's pieces from his successful method Progressive Jazz Studies into a single great-value book, suitable for Grade 1 to 5. *Part 1 introduces the beginner to jazz rhythms including swing quavers, syncopation and anticipation *Part 2 contains fully graded melodic jazz studies *Part 3 develops confidence within common jazz tonalities: whole-tone, diminished and blues scales, modes and the II-V-I chord sequence. **ABRSM selected pieces (Trumpet, Cornet & Flugelhorn from 2009): Study No. 31 or No. 33 (Rae) Study No. 37 or No. 43 (Rae) Study No. 44 or No. 48 (Rae) Study No. 61 (Rae)
For jazz historians, Louis Armstrong's Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings mark the first revolution in the history of a music riven by upheaval. Yet few traces of this revolution can be found in the historical record of the late 1920s, when the records were made. Even black newspapers covered Armstrong as just one name among many, and descriptions of his playing, while laudatory, bear little resemblance to those of today. For this reason, the perspective of Armstrong's first listeners is usually regarded as inadequate, as if they had missed the true significance of his music. This attitude overlooks the possibility that those early listeners might have heard something valuable on its own terms, something we ourselves have lost. If we could somehow recapture their perspective-without abandoning our own-how might it change our understanding of these seminal recordings? In Louis Armstrong's Hot Five and Hot Seven Recordings, Harker selects seven exceptional records to study at length: "Cornet Chop Suey," "Big Butter and Egg Man," "Potato Head Blues," "S.O.L. Blues"/"Gully Low Blues," "Savoy Blues," and "West End Blues." The world of vaudeville and show business provide crucial context, revealing how the demands of making a living in a competitive environment could catalyze Armstrong's unique artistic gifts. Technical achievements such as virtuosity, structural coherence, harmonic improvisation, and high-register playing are all shown to have a basis in the workaday requirements of Armstrong's profession. Invoking a breadth of influences ranging from New Orleans clarinet style to Guy Lombardo, and from tap dancing to classical music, this book offers bold insights, fresh anecdotes, and, ultimately, a new interpretation of Louis Armstrong and his most influential body of recordings.
The influence of Miles Davis's "second great quintet," consisting of Davis (trumpet), Wayne Shorter (tenor saxophone), Herbie Hancock (piano), Ron Carter (bass), and Tony Williams (drums) continues to resonate. Jazz musicians, historians, and critics have celebrated the group for its improvisational communication, openness, and its transitional status between hard bop and the emerging free jazz of the 1960s, creating a synthesis described by one quintet member as "controlled freedom." The book provides a critical analytical study of the Davis quintet studio recordings released between 1965-68, including E.S.P., Miles Smiles, Sorcerer, Nefertiti, Miles in the Sky, and Filles de Kilimanjaro. In contrast to the quintet's live recordings, which included performances of older jazz standards, the studio recordings offered an astonishing breadth of original compositions. Many of these compositions have since become jazz standards, and all of them played a central role in the development of contemporary jazz composition. Using transcription and analysis, author Keith Waters illuminates the compositional, improvisational, and collective achievements of the group. With additional sources, such as rehearsal takes, alternate takes, session reels, and copyright deposits of lead sheets, he shows how the group in the studio shaped and altered features of the compositions. Despite the earlier hard bop orientation of the players, the Davis quintet compositions offered different responses to questions of form, melody, and harmonic structure, and they often invited other improvisational paths, ones that relied on an uncanny degree of collective rapport. And given the spontaneity of the recorded performances-often undertaken with a minimum of rehearsal-the players responded with any number of techniques to address formal, harmonic, or metrical discrepancies that arose while the tape was rolling. The book provides an invaluable resource for those interested in Davis and his sidemen, as well as in jazz of the 1960s. It serves as a reference for jazz musicians and educators, with detailed transcriptions and commentary on compositions and improvisations heard on the studio recordings.
Of all the styles of jazz to emerge in the twentieth century, none
is more passionate, more exhilaratingly up-tempo, or more steeped
in an outsider tradition than Gypsy Jazz. And there is no one more
qualified to write about Gypsy Jazz than Michael Dregni, author of
the acclaimed biography, Django.
John Coltrane's unique and powerful saxophonic sound is commonly recognized among jazz scholars and fans alike as having a "spiritual" nature, imbued with the perfomer's soul, which deeply touches musicians and listeners worldwide. This revered and respected musician created new standards, linked tradition with innovation, challenged common assumptions, and relentlessly pursued spiritual goals in his music, which he aimed openly to use as a means to help listeners see the beauty of life. More than four decades after Coltrane's death, it is this spiritual nature of the music that has kept his sound alive - and thriving - on the contemporary jazz scene. Edited by prominent jazz musician and scholar Leonard Brown, John Coltrane and Black America's Quest for Freedom is a timely exploration of Coltrane's sound and its spiritual qualities as they relate to Black American music culture and aspirations for freedom. A wide-ranging collection of essays and interviews featuring many of the most eminent figures in jazz studies and performance-Tommy Lee Lott, Anthony Brown, Herman Gray, Emmett G. Price III, Dwight Andrews, Tammy Kernodle, Salim Washington, Eric Jackson, and TJ Anderson (foreword)- the book examines the full spectrum of Coltrane's legacy. Each essay approaches this theme from a different angle, in both historical and contemporary contexts, focusing on how Coltrane became a quintessential example of the universal and enduring qualities of Black American culture. The contributors address Coltrane as the Black intellectual, the visionary master of musical syntax, the man and the media icon, and ultimately the symbol of the spiritual core of Black American music.
A biography of a jazz giant, this title appeals to jazz lovers and Dizzy fans. It has been reviewed in books and music pages of national newspapers e.g., "Observer Music Monthly" magazine. Dizzy Gillespie has secured his place in the jazz pantheon as one of the most expressive and virtuosic improvisers in the history of the music. But, he was much more than that. As one of the primary creators of the bebop and Afro-Cuban revolutions, he twice fundamentally changed the way jazz improvisation was done. And, he later extended his revolutionary reach by transforming the aesthetic of big band jazz. This vivid biography chronicles Dizzy's saga from the lowest rung on the American social and political ladder to the highest. Born black in fiercely racist Cheraw, South Carolina in 1917, Dizzy combined great energy, a furious drive to succesed, and a one-in-a-million talent to climb quickly out of rural poverty to a role among the swing era jazz elite before his twenty-first birthday. Dizzy's story takes us on the road with the great Calloway, Hines, and Eckstine bands and to Cheraw's cotton fields, Harlem's after-hours clubs, the teeming 1940s 52nd street jazz scene, the rhythmic barrios of Havana, Rio's samba festivals, the White House, and the world's great concert halls as Dizzy teamed up with prodigious talents to make great music of a span of fifty-five years. It also records his spiritual growth over the decades and the intense love he earned from those close to him. Dizzy became beloved worldwide as an entertainer as he combined his electrifying musicianship with an infectious warmth and rare comedic skills to achieve a popularity that few jazz musicians have ever enjoyed.
A jazz writer for three decades, W. Royal Stokes has a special
talent for capturing the initial spark that launches a musician's
career. In Growing Up With Jazz, he has interviewed twenty-four
instrumentalists and singers who talk candidly about the early
influences that started them on the road to jazz and where that
road has taken them.
Expertise in Jazz Guitar Improvisation is an examination of musical interplay and the ways implicit (sub-conscious) and explicit (conscious) knowledge appear during improvisation. The practice-based research inquiry includes: interviews and interplay with five world-class jazz guitarists, Lage Lund, Jack Wilkins, Ben Monder, Rez Abbasi and Adam Rogers; a modal matrix for analyzing structure, time and form in jazz guitar improvisation, and musical analysis based on cognitive theories. By explaining the cognitive and musical foundations for expertise in jazz guitar improvisation, this book illuminates how jazz guitarists' strategies are crucially dependent on context, style and type of interplay. With accompanying video provided as an e-resource, this material will be of interest to anyone fascinated by Jazz and Psychology of Music.
Jazz on the Line: Improvisation in Practice presents an ethnographic reflection on improvisation as performance, examining how musicians think and act when negotiating improvisational frameworks. This multidisciplinary discussion-guided by a focus on recordings, composition, authenticity, and venues-explores the musical choices made by performers, emphasizing how these choices can be logically understood within the context of controlled, musical outputs. Throughout the text, the author engages directly with musicians and their varied practices-from canonized dogmas to innovative experimentalism-offering interviews both planned and spontaneous. Musical agency is posited as a tightrope balancing act, signifying the skill and excitement of improvisational performativity and exemplifying the life of a jazzaerialist. With a travel journal approach as a backdrop, Jazz on the Line provides concepts and theories that demystify the creative processes of improvisation.
Thanks to the pioneering tours of the Creole Band, jazz began to be
heard nationwide on the vaudeville stages of America from 1914 to
1918. This seven-piece band toured the country, exporting for the
first time the authentic jazz strains that had developed in New
Orleans at the start of the 20th century. The band's vaudeville
routines were deeply rooted in the minstrel shows and plantation
cliches of American show business in the late 19th century, but its
instrumental music was central to its performance and distinctive
and entrancing to audiences and reviewers.
Jazz Improvisation for Keyboard Players is a straightforward, no-nonsense improvisation series. It deals with creating melodies, using the left hand, pianistic approaches to soloing, scale choices for improvisation and much more.
The definitive biography of Bessie Smith, the great singer known as the "Empress of the Blues" Considered by many to be the greatest blues singer of all time, Bessie Smith was also a successful vaudeville entertainer who became the highest paid African-American performer of the roaring twenties. This book-a revised and expanded edition of the classic biography of this extraordinary artist-debunks many of the myths that have circulated since her untimely death in 1937. Chris Albertson writes with insight and candor about the singer's personal life and her career, supplementing his historical research with dozens of interviews with her relatives, friends, and associates, in particular Ruby Walker Smith, a niece by marriage who toured with Bessie for over a decade. For this new edition he includes more details of Bessie's early years, new interview material, and a chapter devoted to events and responses that followed the original publication in 1971.
Peter King's book ranks among the great jazz autobiographies. One of the world's leading alto saxophonists, he tells his story with searing honesty, revealing the obsessions and motivations that have driven him and the dilemmas of surviving as a top creative musician in an often inhospitable world. With cool, unsparing self-analysis, he describes the difficulties that accompanied his brilliant career for many years. Internationally recognised as a jazz star, he has performed and recorded with a galaxy of musical legends, many of them his close friends. Among those vividly recalled in this book are Bud Powell, Ray Charles, Anita O'Day, Elvin Jones, Max Roach, Hampton Hawes, Al Haig, Philly Joe Jones, Zoot Sims, Jimmy Witherspoon, Dakota Staton, Red Rodney, Jon Hendricks, Tony Bennett and Marlene Dietrich. But while the story here centres on Peter King's life in jazz it shows other important sides of him too: his ambitions and achievements in classical composing, his interests outside music (he is a leading figure and writer in the aero-modelling world) and, above all, the treasured personal relationships that have sustained him through a turbulent life. "Flying High" tells of an exhilarating high altitude journey, in the jazz world and beyond.
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.
A Rothschild by birth and a Baroness by marriage, beautiful, spirited Pannonica - known as Nica - seemed to have it all: children, a handsome husband and a trust fund. But in the early 1950s she heard a piece by the jazz legend Thelonious Monk. The music overtook her like a magic spell, and she abandoned her marriage to go and find him. Arriving in New York, Nica was shunned by society but accepted by the musicians. They gave her friendship; she gave them material and emotional support. Her convertible Bentley was a familiar sight outside the clubs and she drank whisky from a hip flask disguised as a Bible. Her notoriety was sealed when drug-addicted saxophonist Charlie Parker died in her apartment. But her real love was reserved for Monk, whom she cared for until his death in 1982. The Baroness traces Nica's extraordinary, thrilling journey - from England's stately homes to the battlefields of Africa, passing under the shadow of the Holocaust, and finally to the creative ferment of the New York jazz scene. Hannah Rothschild's search to solve the mystery of her rebellious great aunt draws on their long friendship and years of meticulous research and interviews. It is part musical odyssey, part dazzling love story.
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.
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. |
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