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Books > Arts & Architecture > Music > Contemporary popular music > Jazz
Bud Powell was not only one of the greatest bebop pianists of all
time, he stands as one of the twentieth century's most dynamic and
fiercely adventurous musical minds. His expansive musicianship,
riveting performances, and inventive compositions expanded the
bebop idiom and pushed jazz musicians of all stripes to higher
standards of performance. Yet Powell remains one of American
music's most misunderstood figures, and the story of his
exceptional talent is often overshadowed by his history of alcohol
abuse, mental instability, and brutalization at the hands of white
authorities. In this first extended study of the social
significance of Powell's place in the American musical landscape,
Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr. shows how the pianist expanded his own
artistic horizons and moved his chosen idiom into new realms.
Illuminating and multi-layered, "The Amazing Bud Powell"
centralizes Powell's contributions as it details the collision of
two vibrant political economies: the discourses of art and the
practice of blackness.
'You the funkiest man alive.' Miles Davis' accolade was the perfect
expression of John Lee Hooker's apotheosis as blues superstar:
recording with the likes of Van Morrison, Keith Richards and Carlos
Santana; making TV commercials (Lee Jeans); appearing in films (The
Blues Brothers); and even starring in Pete Townshend's musical
adaptation of Ted Hughes' story The Iron Man. His was an
extraordinary life. Born in the American deep south, he moved to
Detroit and then, in a career spanning over fifty years, recorded
hypnotic blues classics such as 'Boogie Chillen', rhythm-and-blues
anthems such as 'Dimples' and 'Boom Boom' and, in his final,
glorious renaissance, the Grammy-winning album The Healer. Charles
Shaar Murray's authoritative biography vividly, and often in John
Lee Hooker's own words, does magnificent justice to the man and his
music.
Graham Collier's radical new analysis of the place of the composer
in jazz is nothing less than a complete reassessment of the
direction in which the music is developing and a powerful argument
for fresh thinking. He takes a detailed look at the music of Duke
Ellington, Charles Mingus and Gil Evans. His views about jazz
composition - jazz happens in real time, once - and about
contemporary composers are clearly and strongly expressed,
controversial and provocative. This book will appeal to lay
readers, especially those who enjoy an argument, as well as
professional musicians and teachers. Musical examples in the book
are linked to the author's website. 'I find "The Jazz Composer" to
be an insightful, intelligent, creative and artful view to the
understanding of jazz composition. It is written and developed for
all interested listeners, the novice as well as the performer, and
shows the way to the deepest artistic level' - Justin DiCioccio,
jazz educator. 'Composers - take heed! ...If you're confident in
your compositional devices - take the challenge to have your
foundations soundly rattled If you're searching for a methodology
to follow or guide you, it could well lie here...Not for the
squeamish . ..prepare to be provoked' - Mike Gibbs, jazz composer.
'Collier ...makes music that speaks directly ...strongly personal
but in no way self-dramatising ...It's reassuring to learn that
when he turns to prose, the same qualities are in place' - Brian
Morton, jazz critic.
The exercises in this book are designed to help students learn the
scales, articulations, technic, and style necessary to play in the
jazz idiom, particularly in the Big Band or swing styles.
Jazz Italian Style explores a complex era in music history, when
politics and popular culture collided with national identity and
technology. When jazz arrived in Italy at the conclusion of World
War I, it quickly became part of the local music culture. In Italy,
thanks to the gramophone and radio, many Italian listeners paid
little attention to a performer's national and ethnic identity.
Nick LaRocca (Italian-American), Gorni Kramer (Italian), the Trio
Lescano (Jewish-Dutch), and Louis Armstrong (African-American), to
name a few, all found equal footing in the Italian soundscape. The
book reveals how Italians made jazz their own, and how, by the
mid-1930s, a genre of jazz distinguishable from American varieties
and supported by Mussolini began to flourish in northern Italy and
in its turn influenced Italian-American musicians. Most
importantly, the book recovers a lost repertoire and an array of
musicians whose stories and performances are compelling and well
worth remembering.
FROM THE PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING CRITIC AND ACCLAIMED AUTHOR OF
NEGROLAND Shortlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize 2022 'This is one
of the most imaginative - and therefore moving - memoirs I have
ever read' - Vivian Gornick, author of Fierce Attachments Margo
Jefferson boldly and brilliantly fuses cultural analysis and memoir
to probe race, class, family and art. Taking in the jazz and blues
icons whom Jefferson idolised as a child in the 1950s, ideas of
what the female body could be - as incarnated by trailblazing Black
dancers and athletes - Harriet Beecher Stowe's Topsy reimagined in
the artworks of Kara Walker, white supremacy in the novels of Willa
Cather, and more, this breathtakingly eloquent account is both a
critique and a vindication of the constructed self. 'Margo
Jefferson's Constructing a Nervous System is as electric as its
title suggests. It takes vital risks, tosses away rungs of the
ladder as it climbs, and offers an indispensable, rollicking
account of the enchantments, pleasures, costs, and complexities of
"imagin[ing] and interpret[ing] what had not imagined you' - Maggie
Nelson, author of The Argonauts 'If you want to know who we are and
where we've been, read Margo Jefferson' - Edmund White, author of A
Previous Life 'This is a moving portrait of the life of a brilliant
African American woman's mind. Margo Jefferson is so real, her
sensibility so literary, her learning such a joy. The gifts of
reading her are many' - Darryl Pinckney, author of Sold and Gone
When the Nicholas Brothers danced, uptown at the Cotton Club,
downtown at the Roxy, in segregated movie theatres in the South,
and dance halls across the country, audiences cheered, clapped,
stomped their feet, and shouted out uncontrollably. Their exuberant
style of American theatrical dance-a melding of jazz, tap,
acrobatics, black vernacular dance, and witty repartee-was
dazzling. Though daredevil flips, slides, and hair-raising splits
made them show-stoppers, the Nicholas Brothers were also highly
sophisticated dancers who refined a centuries-old tradition of
percussive dance into the rhythmic brilliance of jazz tap. In
Brotherhood in Rhythm, author Constance Valis Hill interweaves an
intimate portrait of these great performers with a richly detailed
history of jazz music and jazz dance, both bringing their act to
life and explaining their significance through a colourful analysis
of their eloquent footwork, their full-bodied expressiveness, and
their changing style. Hill vividly captures their soaring careers,
from the Cotton Club appearances with Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway,
and Jimmy Lunceford, to film-stealing big-screen performances with
Chick Webb, Tommy Dorsey, and Glenn Miller. Drawing on a deep well
of research and endless hours of interviews with the Nicholas
brothers themselves, she also documents their struggles against the
nets of racism and segregation that constantly enmeshed their
careers and denied them the recognition they deserved. More than a
biography of two immensely talented but underappreciated
performers, Brotherhood in Rhythm offers a profound understanding
of this distinctively American art and its intricate links to the
history of jazz.
"The path the slave took to 'citizenship' is what I want to look at. And I make my analogy through the slave citizen's music -- through the music that is most closely associated with him: blues and a later, but parallel development, jazz... [If] the Negro represents, or is symbolic of, something in and about the nature of American culture, this certainly should be revealed by his characteristic music." So says Amiri Baraka in the Introduction to Blues People, his classic work on the place of jazz and blues in American social, musical, economic, and cultural history. From the music of African slaves in the United States through the music scene of the 1960's, Baraka traces the influence of what he calls "negro music" on white America -- not only in the context of music and pop culture but also in terms of the values and perspectives passed on through the music. In tracing the music, he brilliantly illuminates the influence of African Americans on American culture and history.
Hearing Luxe Pop explores a deluxe-production aesthetic that has
long thrived in American popular music, in which popular-music
idioms are merged with lush string orchestrations and big-band
instrumentation. John Howland presents an alternative music history
that centers on shifts in timbre and sound through innovative uses
of orchestration and arranging, traveling from symphonic jazz to
the Great American Songbook, the teenage symphonies of Motown to
the "countrypolitan" sound of Nashville, the sunshine pop of the
Beach Boys to the blending of soul and funk into 1970s disco, and
Jay-Z's hip-hop-orchestra events to indie rock bands performing
with the Brooklyn Philharmonic. This book attunes readers to hear
the discourses gathered around the music and its associated images
as it examines pop's relations to aspirational consumer culture,
theatricality, sophistication, cosmopolitanism, and glamorous
lifestyles.
Five superb albums of graded pieces provide a wealth of jazz
repertoire for you to play. Throughout, there is a huge range of
styles, from bebop blues to calypsos, boogie-woogie to ballads,
jazz waltzes to free jazz. There are classic tunes by the jazz
greats, including Duke Ellington, Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk.
And there are brand-new pieces specially commissioned from
professional British jazz musicians and educators. Each album
presents 15 pieces in three lists: blues, standards and
contemporary jazz. The head of each piece is set out with all the
characteristic voicings, phrasing and rhythmic patterns you need
for a stylish performance. The improvised section gives guideline
pitches and left-hand voicings as a practical starting-point.
Accessible, student-centred and of the highest musical standards,
these pieces will get you playing jazz confidently and creatively.
Contains all the pieces for ABRSM's new jazz piano exam.
"Enka," a sentimental ballad genre, epitomizes for many the
"nihonjin no kokoro" (heart/soul of Japanese). To older members of
the Japanese public, who constitute "enka"'s primary audience, this
music--of parted lovers, long unseen rural hometowns, and
self-sacrificing mothers--evokes a direct connection to the
traditional roots of "Japaneseness." Overlooked in this emotional
invocation of the past, however, are the powerful commercial forces
that, since the 1970s, have shaped the consumption of "enka" and
its version of national identity. Informed by theories of
nostalgia, collective memory, cultural nationalism, and gender,
this book draws on the author's extensive fieldwork in probing the
practice of identity-making and the processes at work when Japan
becomes "Japan."
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