Jazz Improvisation Using Simple Melodic Embellishment teaches fundamental concepts of jazz improvisation, highlighting the development of performance skills through embellishment techniques. Written with the college-level course in mind, this introductory textbook is both practical and comprehensive, ideal for the aspiring improviser, focused not on scales and chords but melodic embellishment. It assumes some basic theoretical knowledge and level of musicianship while introducing multiple techniques, mindful that improvisation is a learned skill as dependent on hard work and organized practice as it is on innate talent. This jargon-free textbook can be used in both self-guided study and as a course book, fortified by an array of interactive exercises and activities: musical examples performance exercises written assignments practice grids resources for advanced study and more! Nearly all musical exercises-presented throughout the text in concert pitch and transposed in the appendices for E-flat, B-flat, and bass clef instruments-are accompanied by backing audio tracks, available for download via the Routledge catalog page along with supplemental instructor resources such as a sample syllabus, PDFs of common transpositions, and tutorials for gear set-ups. With music-making at its core, Jazz Improvisation Using Simple Melodic Embellishment implores readers to grab their instruments and play, providing musicians with the simple melodic tools they need to "jazz it up."

Within one of the most complex musical categories yet to surface, Cal Tjader quietly pioneered the genre as a jazz vibraphonist, composer, arranger and bandleader from the 1950s through the 1980s. Reid tells the life story of a humble musician, written in a familiar, conversational tone that reveals Tjader's complex charisma. Tjader left behind a legacy and a labyrinth of influence, attested by his large audience and innovation that would change the course of jazz. Expanded and revised, this intimate biography now includes additional interviews and anecdotes from Tjader's family, bandmates, and community, print research, and rare photographs, presenting a full history of an undervalued musician, as well as a detailed account of the progression of Latin Jazz.

Charlie Parker has been idolized by generations of jazz musicians and fans. Indeed, his spectacular musical abilities--his blinding speed and brilliant improvisational style--made Parker a legend even before his tragic death at age thirty-four.
Now, in Chasin' The Bird, Brian Priestley offers a marvelous biography of this jazz icon, ranging from his childhood in Kansas City to his final harrowing days in New York. Priestley offers new insight into Parker's career, beginning as a teenager single-mindedly devoted to mastering the saxophone. We follow Parker on his first trip to New York, penniless, washing dishes for $9.00 a week at Jimmy's Chicken Shack, a favorite hangout of the great Art Tatum, whose stunning speed and ingenuity were an influence on the young musician. Priestley sheds light on Parker's collaborations with other jazz legands, and illuminates such classic recordings as "Salt Peanuts," "A Night in Tunisia," and "Yardbird Suite"--music which defined an era. He also gives us an unflinching look at Parker's dark side--the drug abuse, heavy drinking, and tangled relations with women and the law. He recounts the death of Parker's daughter Pree at just two-and-a-half years old, and Parker's own death at thirty-four, in such wretched condition that the doctor listed his age as fifty-three.
With an invaluable discography that lists every recording of Charlie Parker that has ever been made publicly available, this is a must-have biography of a true jazz giant, one that helps us penetrate the dazzling surface to grasp the artistry beneath.

(Fake Book). Since the 1970s, The Real Book has been the most popular book for gigging jazz musicians. Hal Leonard is proud to publish completely legal and legitimate editions of the original volumes as well as exciting new volumes to carry on the tradition to new generations of players in all styles of music All the Real Books feature hundreds of time-tested songs in accurate arrangements in the famous easy-to-read, hand-written notation with comb-binding. This all-new 4th volume presents 400 more songs, not previously available in any other volume Includes: Ashes to Ashes * Button up Your Overcoat * Cocktails for Two * Days of Wine and Roses * Down with Love * A Foggy Day (In London Town) * The Good Life * Home * I Got Rhythm * I Hadn't Anyone Till You * If You Could See Me Now * Just Friends * Kansas City * Linus and Lucy * Lonely Girl * Maybe This Time * My Bells * Night and Day * On Broadway * On Green Dolphin Street * Only the Lonely * The Pink Panther * Puttin' on the Ritz * Relaxin' at the Camarillo * Reunion Blues * The Sermon * The Shadow of Your Smile * Side by Side * Smile * Summertime * Sunny * Them There Eyes * and many more. Editions also available in B-flat, E-flat, and Bass Clef.

Gary Giddins's magnificent book Visions of Jazz has been hailed as a landmark in music criticism. Jonathan Yardley in The Washington Post called it "the definitive compendium by the most interesting jazz critic now at work." And Alfred Appel, Jr., in The New York Times Book Review, said it was "the finest unconventional history of jazz ever written." It was the first work on jazz ever to win the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. Now comes Weather Bird, a brilliant companion volume to Visions of Jazz. In this superb collection of essays, reviews and articles, Giddins brings together, for the first time, more than 140 pieces written over a 14-year period, most of them for his column in the Village Voice (also called "Weather Bird"). The book is first and foremost a celebration of jazz, with illuminating commentary on contemporary jazz events, on today's top musicians, on the best records of the year, and on leading figures from jazz's past. Readers will find extended pieces on Louis Armstrong, Erroll Garner, Benny Carter, Sonny Rollins, Dave Brubeck, Ornette Coleman, Billie Holiday, Cassandra Wilson, Tony Bennett, and many others. Giddins includes a series of articles on the annual JVC Jazz Festival, which taken together offer a splendid overview of jazz in the 1990s. Other highlights include an astute look at avant-garde music ("Parajazz") and his challenging essay, "How Come Jazz Isn't Dead?" which advances a theory about the way art is born, exploited, celebrated, and sidelined to the museum. A radiant compendium by America's leading music critic, Weather Bird offers an unforgettable look at the modern jazz scene.

Charles Mingus is one of the most important-and most mythologized-composers and performers in jazz history. Classically trained and of mixed race, he was an outspoken innovator as well as a bandleader, composer, producer, and record-label owner. His vivid autobiography, Beneath the Underdog, has done much to shape the image of Mingus as something of a wild man: idiosyncratic musical genius with a penchant for skirt-chasing and violent outbursts. But, as the autobiography reveals, he was also a hopeless romantic. After exploring the most important events in Mingus's life, Krin Gabbard takes a careful look at Mingus as a writer as well as a composer and musician. He digs into how and why Mingus chose to do so much self-analysis, how he worked to craft his racial identity in a world that saw him simply as "black," and how his mental and physical health problems shaped his career. Gabbard sets aside the myth-making and convincingly argues that Charles Mingus created a unique language of emotions-and not just in music. Capturing many essential moments in jazz history anew, Better Git It in Your Soul will fascinate anyone who cares about jazz, African American history, and the artist's life.

Jazz and its colorful, expansive history resonate in this unique collection of 60 essays specially-commissioned from today's top jazz performers, writers, and scholars. Contributors include such jazz insiders as Bill Crow, Samuel A. Floyd Jr., Ted Gioia, Gene Lees, Dan Morgenstern, Gunther Schuller, Richard M. Sudhalter, and Patricia Willard. Both a reference book and an engaging read, the Companion surveys the evolution of jazz from its roots in Africa and Europe until the present. Along the way, each distinctive style and period is profiled by an expert in the field. Whether your preference is ragtime, the blues, bebop, or fusion, you will find the chief characteristics and memorable performances illuminated here with a thoroughness found in no other single-volume jazz reference.
The Oxford Companion to Jazz features individual biographies of the most memorable characters of this relatively young art form. Sidney Bechet, King Oliver, Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong, Bix Beiderbecke, Bessie Smith, Duke Ellington, Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Charles Mingus, John Coltrane, and the divas of jazz song--Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, and Sarah Vaughan--come to life in thoughtful considerations of their influences, often turbulent personal lives, and signature styles. In addition, this book looks at the impact of jazz on American culture-in literature, film, television, and dance-and explores the essential instruments of jazz and their most memorable players.
The Oxford Companion to Jazz will provide a quick reference source as well as a dynamic and broad overview for all lovers of jazz, from novices to aficionados.

London-based musician and journalist Gordon Jack's method is to let the musicians tell their own stories with minimum intervention, in the manner of Ira Gitler's classic Swing to Bop. Famous or obscure, these more than 30 musicians who came to prominence in the 1950s each has a story to tell, and Jack captures the style and tone of his interviewees in this oral retrospective of what may have been jazz's last golden age. The musicians are: Gene Allen, Mose Allison, Dave Bailey, Chuck Berghofer, Eddie Bert, Bob Brookmeyer, Pete Christlieb, Bill Crow, Joe Dodge, Bob Enevoldsen, Don Ferrara, Herb Geller, Corky Hale, Peter Ind, Frank Isola, Lee Konitz, Stan Levey, Jack Montrose, Gerry Mulligan, the Gerry Mulligan Quartet (with Larry Bunker, Chico Hamilton, Carson Smith, Bob Whitlock), Lennie Niehaus, Jack Nimitz, Hod O'Brien, Bill Perkins, Bud Shank, Phil Urso, and Phil Woods. Jack's introductions and notes unobtrusively sketch out the life and achievements of each musician, and there are photographs of each one, many of them taken by Jack himself.

Jackson Pollock dancing to the music as he painted; Romare Bearden's stage and costume designs for Alvin Ailey and Dianne McIntyre; Stanley Crouch stirring his high-powered essays in a room where a drumkit stands at the center: from the perspective of the new jazz studies, jazz is not only a music to define -- it is a culture. Considering musicians and filmmakers, painters and poets, the intellectual improvisations in "Uptown Conversation" reevaluate, reimagine, and riff on the music that has for more than a century initiated a call and response across art forms, geographies, and cultures.

Building on Robert G. O'Meally's acclaimed "Jazz Cadence of American Culture, " these original essays offer new insights in jazz historiography, highlighting the political stakes in telling the story of the music and evaluating its cultural import in the United States and worldwide. Articles contemplating the music's experimental wing -- such as Salim Washington's meditation on Charles Mingus and the avant-garde or George Lipsitz's polemical juxtaposition of Ken Burns's documentary "Jazz" and Horace Tapscott's autobiography "Songs of the Unsung" -- share the stage with revisionary takes on familiar figures in the canon: Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, and Louis Armstrong.

The Jazz Itineraries series, a new format based on Ken Vail's successful Jazz Diaries, charts the careers of famous jazz musicians, listing club and concert appearances with details of recording sessions and movie appearances. Copiously illustrated with contemporary photographs, newspaper extracts, record and performance reviews, ads and posters, the series provides a fascinating insight into the lives of the greatest jazz musicians of our times. No.1 in the series, Dizzy Gillespie: The Bebop Years 1937d1952, chronicles Dizzy_s life from his early struggles, through the birth of bebop, the demise of his first big band, up to his departure for France in 1952.

The vibrant world of jazz may be viewed from many angles, from social and cultural history to music analysis, from economics to ethnography. It is challenging and exciting territory. This volume of nineteen specially commissioned essays offers informed and accessible guidance to the challenge, taking the reader through a series of five basic subject areas--locating jazz historically and geographically; defining jazz as musical and cultural practice; jazz in performance; the uses of jazz for audiences, markets, education and for other art forms; and the study of jazz.

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."

Jazz rock flourished from 1968 to 1974, offering a distinctively cool and innovative hybrid sound that captivated a generation-and beyond. Superstar bands like Blood, Sweat and Tears and Chicago have earned their place in popular consciousness, but the movement included many other powerful, innovative groups such as Tower of Power and Malo. Author Mike Baron explores the history of this music fusion, its rise and fall in popularity. He offers highlights-and his own unique insights from a front-row seat in jazz rock-into what made the era so special. A Brief History of Jazz Rock is a sax-meets-Strat bible that dares to inspire a Renaissance-to cultivate a new generation of musicians who might mix brass with bass, and help return forgotten bands like If and Dreams to their place on the main stage.

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.

A seasoned jazz critic draws on his interviews of forty musicians, from Slide Hampton and Bucky Pizzarelli to Dee Dee Bridgewater and Diana Krall, illuminating their lives, careers, and art.

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.

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.

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.