Charles Mingus was one of the most innovative jazz musicians of the 20th century, and ranks with Charles Ives and Duke Ellington as one of America's greatest composers. By temperament, he was a high-strung and sensitive romantic, a towering figure whose tempestuous personal life found powerfully coherent expression in the ever-shifting textures of his music. Now, acclaimed music critic Gene Santoro strips away the myths shrouding "Jazz's Angry Man," revealing Mingus as more complex than even his close friends knew. Written in a lively, novelistic style, Myself When I Am Real draws on dozens of new interviews and previously untapped letters and archival materials to explore the intricate connections between this extraordinary man and the extraordinary music he made.

Django Reinhardt was arguably the greatest guitarist who ever lived, an important influence on Les Paul, Charlie Christian, B.B. King, Jerry Garcia, Chet Atkins, and many others. Yet there is no major biography of Reinhardt.
Now, in Django, Michael Dregni offers a definitive portrait of this great guitarist. Handsome, charismatic, childlike, and unpredictable, Reinhardt was a character out of a picaresque novel. Born in a gypsy caravan at a crossroads in Belgium, he was almost killed in a freak fire that burned half of his body and left his left hand twisted into a claw. But with this maimed left hand flying over the frets and his right hand plucking at dizzying speed, Django became Europe's most famous jazz musician, commanding exorbitant fees--and spending the money as fast as he made it. Dregni not only chronicles this remarkably colorful life--including a fascinating account of gypsy culture--but he also sheds much light on Django's musicianship. He examines his long musical partnership with violinist Stephane Grappelli--the one suave and smooth, the other sharper and more dissonant--and he traces the evolution of their novel string jazz ensemble, Quintette du Hot Club de France. Indeed, the author spotlights Django's amazing musical diversity, describing his swing-styled Nouveau Quintette, his big band Django's Music, and his later bebop ensemble, as well as his many compositions, including symphonic pieces influenced by Ravel and Debussy and his unfinished organ mass inspired by Bach. And along the way, the author offers vivid snapshots of the jazz scene in Paris--colorful portraits of Josephine Baker, Bricktop, Louis Armstrong, Coleman Hawkins, and countless others--and of Django's vagabond wanderings around France, Europe, and the United States, where he toured with Duke Ellington.
Capturing the extraordinary life and times of one of the great musicians of the twentieth century, Django is a must-read portrait of a true original."

Harry James was one of the major figures of the Swing Era of the 1930s and 1940s. As a trumpet-player he had few peers. The band he led was the most popular in the United States during the war years, but it was also the band that first introduced Frank Sinatra. His fame was even wider as husband to the most famous Hollywood star of the period-Betty Grable- as a film star himself, and as a long term headliner in Las Vegas casinos. But he also had a dark side-as a womanizer, alcoholic, compulsive gambler. In this dramatic, understanding biography, Peter Levinson brilliantly delineates James and the role he played in American culture.

Declared a "national treasure" by the White House in 1990, John Birks "Dizzy" Gillespie was a not only a great musician but also a major innovator in the jazz world. While his first and foremost claim to fame is helping to create the style known as bebop, Gillespie also did much to establish the inclusion of Latin American elements in jazz and was partially responsible for the inception of both Afro-Cuban jazz and bossa nova. Covering Dizzy's days as a flashy trumpet player in the swing bands of the 1930s, the worldwide fame and adoration he earned through a State Department-backed tour of his big band in the 1950s, and the many recordings and performances which defined a career that ran clear up to the early 1990s, this book fully traces the path and progress of an extraordinary--and most exploratory--American musician.

J.J. Johnson, known as the spiritual father of modern trombone, has been a notable figure in the history of jazz. His career has embodied virtually every innovation and development in jazz over the last half of the 20th century. In this comprehensive biography, filmography, catalogue of compositions and discography of J.J. Johnson, Berrett and Bourgois fill a gap in jazz studies. In its exploration of the various turning points in Johnson's life, The Musical World of J.J. Johnson offers a provocative and comprehensive declaration of the makings of a jazz legend. This analysis details Johnson's childhood and early education, documents his first compositions and examines his classical roots, thereby creating a powerful illustration of the composer's technical and stylistic development.

When jazz musicians get together, they often delight one another with stories about the great, or merely remarkable, players and singers they've worked with. One good story leads to another until someone says, "Somebody ought to wrie these down!" With Jazz Anecdotes, somebody finally has. Drawing on a rich verbal tradition, bassist and jazz writer Bill Crow has culled stories from a wide variety of sources, including interviews, biographies and a remarkable oral history collection, which resides at the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University, to paint fascinating and very human portraits of jazz musicians. Organized around general topics--teaching and learning, life on the road, prejudice and discrimination, and the importance of a good nickname--Jazz Anecdotes shows the jazz world as it really is. In this fully updated edition, which contains over 150 new anecdotes and new topics like Hiring and Firing, Crow regales us with new stories of such jazz greats as Benny Goodman, Chet Baker, Ravi Coltrane, Buddy Rich and Paul Desmond. He offers extended sections on old favorites--Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young, and the fabulous Eddie Condon, who seems to have lived his entire life with the anecdotist in mind. With its unique blend of sparkling dialogue and historical and social insight, Jazz Anecdotes will delight anyone who loves a good story. It offers a fresh perspective on the joys and hardships of a musician's life as well as a rare glimpse of the personalities who created America's most distinctive music.

A collection of the original sheet music for 39 classic standards, featuring the arrangements of 'Fats' Waller, Art Tatum, Duke Ellington, James P. Johnson, Albert Ammons, Pete Johnson, Count Basie, Clarence Williams, Jay McShann, Billy Kyle, Zez Confrey. Songs include: "A" Flat to "C" * Ain't Misbehavin' * Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea * Bugle Call Rag * Central Avenue Drag * Dinah * For Me and My Gal * I Can't Give You Anything but Love * Mood Indigo * Organ Grinder Blues * Sophisticated Lady * Stardust * When You're Smiling (The Whole World Smiles with You) * and more.

Presents a selection of 150 jazz standards arranged for piano, voice, and guitar. This work includes the songs: Ain't Misbehavin', Don't Get Around Much Anymore, Fly Me To The Moon, God Bless' The Child, I'm Beginning To See The Light, My Funny Valentine, Satin Doll, Stella By Starlight, Witchcraft, Unforgettable, and more.

(Guitar Educational). Now you can add authentic jazz feel and flavor to your playing Here are 101 definitive licks, plus a demonstration CD, from every major jazz guitar style, neatly organized into easy-to-use categories. They're all here: swing and pre-bop, bebop, post-bop modern jazz, hard bop and cool jazz, modal jazz, soul jazz and postmodern jazz. Includes an introduction by Wolf Marshall, tips for using the book and CD, and a listing of suggested recordings.

Gene Lees is probably the best jazz essayist in America today, and the book that consolidated his reputation was Singers and the Song, which appeared in 1987. Now this classic work is being released in an expanded edition: Singers and the Song II. This volume includes famous selections from the original edition, including Lees' classic profile of Frank Sinatra, as well as new essays.

Nadine Jansen, a flugelhornist and pianist, remembers a night in the 1940s when a man came out of the audience as she was playing both instruments. "I hate to see a woman do that," he explained as he hit the end of her horn, nearly chipping her tooth. Half a century later, a big band named Diva made its debut in New York on March 30, 1993, with Melissa Slocum on bass, Sue Terry on alto sax, Lolly Bienenfeld on trombone, Sherrie Maricle on drums, and a host of other first rate instrumentalists. The band made such a good impression that it was immediately booked to play at Carnegie Hall the following year. For those who had yet to notice, Diva signaled the emergence of women musicians as a significant force in jazz.
Madame Jazz is a fascinating invitation to the inside world of women in jazz. Ranging primarily from the late 1970s to today's vanguard of performance jazz in New York City and on the West Coast, it chronicles a crucial time of transition as women make the leap from novelty acts regarded as second class citizens to sought-out professionals admired and hired for their consummate musicianship. Author Leslie Gourse surveys the scene in the jazz clubs, the concert halls, the festivals, and the recording studios from the musicians' point of view. She finds exciting progress on all fronts, but also lingering discrimination. The growing success of women instrumentalists has been a long time in coming, she writes. Long after women became accepted as writers and, to a lesser extent, as visual artists, women in music--classical, pop, or jazz--faced the nearly insuperable barrier of chauvinism and the still insidious force of tradition and habit that keeps most men performing with the musicians they have always worked with, other men.
Gourse provides dozens of captivating no-holds-barred interviews with both rising stars and seasoned veterans. Here are up-and-coming pianists Renee Rosnes and Rachel Z., trumpeter Rebecca Coupe Frank, saxophonist Virginia Mayhew, bassist Tracy Wormworth, and drummer Terri Lynne Carrington, and enduring legends Dorothy Donegan, Marian McParland and Shirley Horne. Here, as well, are conversations with three pioneering business women: agent and producer Helen Keane, manager Linda Goldstein, and festival and concert producer Cobi Narita. All of the women speak insightfully about their inspiration and their commitment to pursuing the music they love. They are also frank about the realities of life on the road, and the extra dues women musicians pay in a tough and competitive field where everybody pays dues. A separate chapter offers a closer look at women musicians and the continual stress confronting those who would combine love, marriage, and/or motherhood with a life in music.
Madame Jazz is about the history that women jazz instrumentalists are making now, as well as an inspiring preview of the even brighter days ahead. It concludes with Frankie Nemko's lively evaluation of the West Coast jazz scene, and appends the most comprehensive list ever assembled of women currently playing instruments professionally.

Bold and original, The Power of Black Music offers a new way of listening to the music of black America, and appreciating its profound contribution to all American music.

The Jazz Piano Player: Collection features sixteen classic jazz standards such as My Funny Valentine, Summertime, I Get A Kick Out of You, and is superbly arranged by John Kember for intermediate-level piano solo. All the songs are in their standard keys and include chord symbols, and there is also included a guide to jazz chords for further tutorial assistance. The accompanying CD features John Kember performing all of the piano arrangements for an enhanced learning mobility.

Created in the jazz clubs of New York City, and initially treated by most musicians and audiences as radical, chaotic, and bewildering: bebop has become, Thomas Owen writes, `the lingua franca of jazz, serving as the principal musical language of thousands of jazz musicians.'

In Bebop, Owens conducts us on an insightful, loving tour through the music, players, and recordings that changed American culture. Combining vivid portraits of bebop's gigantic personalities - among them Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Miles Davis - with deft musical analysis, he offers an instrument-by-instrument look at the key players and their innovations.

As music columnist for The Nation, Gene Santoro has established himself as an important new critical voice, able to write well on a broad spectrum of popular music and jazz, without losing touch with the cutting edge of today's music scene.

Dancing in Your Head gathers Santoro's liveliest reviews and essays for the first time, introducing a fresh and provocative perspective on several decades of musicians and their work. From the legendary blues singer Robert Johnson to Miles Davis and James Brown, from the sounds of Neil Young and Lou Reed to Public Enemy's controversial rap lyrics, this books offers sharp and honest reflections on the evolution of jazz, rock and roll, and rap.

It was none other than Louis Armstrong who said, "These people who make the restrictions, they don't know nothing about music. It's no crime for cats of any color to get together and blow." "You can't know what it means to be black in the United States--in any field," Dizzy Gillespie once said, but Gillespie vigorously objected to the proposition that only black people could play jazz. "If you accept that premise, well then what you're saying is that maybe black people can only play jazz. And black people, like anyone else, can be anything they want to be."
In Cats of Any Color, Gene Lees, the acclaimed author of three previous collections of essays on jazz and popular music, takes a long overdue look at the shocking pervasiveness of racism in jazz's past and present--both the white racism that long ghettoized the music and generations of talented black musicians, and what Lees maintains is an increasingly virulent reverse racism aimed at white jazz musicians. In candid interviews, living jazz legends, critics, and composers step forward and share their thoughts on how racism has affected their lives. Dave Brubeck, part Modoc Indian, discusses native Americans' contribution to jazz and the deeply ingrained racism that for a time made it all but impossible for jazz groups with black and white players to book tours and television appearances. Horace Silver looks back on his long career, including the first time he ever heard jazz played live. Blacks were not not allowed into the pavilion in Connecticut where Jimmie Lunceford's band was performing, so the ten-year-old Silver listened and watched through the wooden slats surrounding the pavilion. "And oh man That was it " Silver recalls. Red Rodney recalls his early days with Charlie "Bird" Parker, and pianist and composer Cedar Walton tells of the time Duke Ellington played at the army base at Ford Dix and allowed the young enlisted Walton to sit in. Tracing the jazz world's shifting attitude towards race, many of the stories Lees tells are inspiring--Brubeck cancelling 23 out of 25 concert dates in the South rather than replace black bass player Eugene Wright, or Silver insisting that while he strives to provide his fellow black musicians opportunities, "I just want the best musicans I can get. I don't give a damn if they're pink or polka dot." Others are profoundly disturbing--Lees' first encounter with Oscar Peterson, after a Canadian barber flatly refused to cut Peterson's hair, or Wynton Marsalis on television claiming that blacks have been held back for so many years because the music business is controlled by "people who read the Torah and stuff."
From the old shantytowns of Louisville, to the streets of South Central L.A., to the up-to-the-minute controversies surrounding Marsalis's jazz program at Lincoln Center, and the Jazz Masters awards given by the NEA, Cats of Any Color confronts racism head-on. At its heart is a passionate plea to recognize jazz not as the sole property of any one group, but as an art form celebrating the human spirit--not just for the protection of individual musicians, but for the preservation of the music itself.

Duke Ellington is universally recognized as one of the towering figures of 20th-century music, both a brilliant composer and one of the preeminent musicians in jazz history.

In The Duke Ellington Reader, Mark Tucker offers the first historical anthology of writings about this major African-American musician. The volume includes over a hundred selections - interviews, critical essays, reviews, memoirs, and over a dozen writings by Ellington himself - with generous introductions and annotations for each selection provided by the editor. The result is a unique sourcebook that illuminates Ellington's work and reveals the profound impact his music has made on listeners over the years.

Art Tatum was the greatest virtuoso performer in the history of jazz piano; his technique overwhelmed almost every jazz player who heard him and caused classical virtuosos to take notice.

Through extensive interviews with Tatum's friends and fellow musicians, James Lester captures the complexities of this remarkable talent and the vibrant jazz world of the 1930s and 1940s in which he played.

In Chicago Jazz, William Howland Kenny offers a wide-ranging look at jazz in the Windy City, revealing how Chicago became the major centre for jazz in the 1920s, one of the most vital periods in the history of the music.

Teddy Reig (1917-1984) was a larger-than-life character, a self-described hustler who had a profound effect on the music world from the 1940s to the 1970s. As a record producer, he captured the work of dozens of leading jazz innovators. He also had an impact on rhythm and blues, rock and roll, and the Latin field. In Part 1, Reig tells his own story. Part 2 consists of interviews with key figures who were close to Reig at various stages of his career. Part 3 is an extensive discography of Reig's productions. The copious illustrations include many previously unpublished photos.

Saxophone virtuoso Charlie "Bird" Parker began playing professionally in his early teens, became a heroin addict at 16, changed the course of music, and then died when only 34 years old. His friend Robert Reisner observed, "Parker, in the brief span of his life, crowded more living into it than any other human being." Like Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, and John Coltrane, he was a transitional composer and improviser who ushered in a new era of jazz by pioneering bebop and influenced subsequent generations of musicians. Meticulously researched and written, Bird: The Life and Music of Charlie Parker tells the story of his life, music, and career. This new biography artfully weaves together firsthand accounts from those who knew him with new information about his life and career to create a compelling narrative portrait of a tragic genius. While other books about Parker have focused primarily on his music and recordings, this portrait reveals the troubled man behind the music, illustrating how his addictions and struggles with mental health affected his life and career. He was alternatively generous and miserly; a loving husband and father at home but an incorrigible philanderer on the road; and a chronic addict who lectured younger musicians about the dangers of drugs. Above all he was a musician, who overcame humiliation, disappointment, and a life-threatening car wreck to take wing as Bird, a brilliant improviser and composer. With in-depth research into previously overlooked sources and illustrated with several never-before-seen images, Bird: The Life and Music of Charlie Parker corrects much of the misinformation and myth about one of the most influential musicians of the twentieth century.