`The best one-volume history of jazz.' That is how the American Music Guide described the book that Louis Armstrong once said `held ol' Satch spellbound'. A unique blend of history and criticism, this lively and perceptive book includes chapters on such jazz giants as King Oliver, Jelly Roll Morton, John Coltrane, and Ornette Coleman. In addition to an expanded essay on Count Basie, this revised edition also includes pieces on Eric Dolphy, Bill Evans, and the World Saxophone Quartet.

Keith Hatschek tells the story of three determined artists: Louis Armstrong, Dave Brubeck, and Iola Brubeck and the stand they took against segregation by writing and performing a jazz musical titled The Real Ambassadors. First conceived by the Brubecks in 1956, the musical's journey to the stage for its 1962 premiere tracks extraordinary twists and turns across the backdrop of the civil rights movement. A variety of colorful characters, from Broadway impresarios to gang-connected managers, surface in the compelling storyline. During the Cold War, the US State Department enlisted some of America's greatest musicians to serve as jazz ambassadors, touring the world to trumpet a so-called "free society." Honored as celebrities abroad, the jazz ambassadors, who were overwhelmingly African Americans, returned home to racial discrimination and deferred dreams. The Brubecks used this double standard as the central message for the musical, deploying humor and pathos to share perspectives on American values. On September 23, 1962, The Real Ambassadors's stunning debut moved a packed arena at the Monterey Jazz Festival to laughter, joy, and tears. Although critics unanimously hailed the performance, it sadly became a footnote in cast members' bios. The enormous cost of reassembling the star-studded cast made the creation impossible to stage and tour. However, The Real Ambassadors: Dave and Iola Brubeck and Louis Armstrong Challenge Segregation caps this jazz story by detailing how the show was triumphantly revived in 2014 by Jazz at Lincoln Center. This reaffirmed the musical's place as an integral part of America's jazz history and served as an important reminder of how artists' voices are a powerful force for social change.

In 1957, Duke Ellington released the influential album A Drum Is a Woman. This musical allegory revealed the implicit truth about the role of women in jazz discourse-jilted by the musician and replaced by the drum. Further, the album's cover displays an image of a woman sitting atop a drum, depicting the way in which the drum literally obscures the female body, turning the subject into an object. This objectification of women leads to a critical reading of the role of women in jazz music: If the drum can take the place of a woman, then a woman can also take the place of a drum. The Drum Is a Wild Woman: Jazz and Gender in African Diaspora Literature challenges that image but also defines a counter-tradition within women's writing that involves the reinvention and reclamation of a modern jazz discourse. Despite their alienation from bebop, women have found jazz music empowering and have demonstrated this power in various ways. The Drum Is a Wild Woman explores the complex relationship between women and jazz music in recent African diasporic literature. The book examines how women writers from the African diaspora have challenged and revised major tropes and concerns of jazz literature since the bebop era in the mid-1940s. Black women writers create dissonant sounds that broaden our understanding of jazz literature. By underscoring the extent to which gender is already embedded in jazz discourse, author Patricia G. Lespinasse responds to and corrects narratives that tell the story of jazz through a male-centered lens. She concentrates on how the Wild Woman, the female vocalist in classic blues, used blues and jazz to push the boundaries of Black womanhood outside of the confines of respectability. In texts that refer to jazz in form or content, the Wild Woman constitutes a figure of resistance who uses language, image, and improvisation to refashion herself from object to subject. This book breaks new ground by comparing the politics of resistance alongside moments of improvisation by examining recurring literary motifs-cry-and-response, the Wild Woman, and the jazz moment-in jazz novels, short stories, and poetry, comparing works by Ann Petry, Gayl Jones, Toni Morrison, Paule Marshall, Edwidge Danticat, and Maya Angelou with pieces by Albert Murray, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Ellington. Within an interdisciplinary and transnational context, Lespinasse foregrounds the vexed negotiations around gender and jazz discourse.

Lennie Tristano was one of jazz's most extraordinary innovators, possessing a superb piano technique and an awesome musical imagination. Unheralded by the general public, the blind pianist's work was revered by many jazz greats including the legendary Charlie Parker. Tristano's persuasive personality made him an ideal teacher, and he proved that (against the accepted theory of the time) jazz improvisation could be taught. His guidance played a big part in the development of many instrumentalists including saxophonists Lee Konitz and Warne Marsh and double-bassist Peter Ind. It is Ind's long, direct involvement with his subject that makes this such a revealing book: the story of an English musician going to New York to study with a neglected Jazz giant. In the process, Tristano's genius is examined and his reputation revalued, with Ind making a persuasive case for the pianist to be placed at the centre of jazz developments in the mid-20th century.

The Jazz Masters: Setting the Record Straight features twenty-one conversations with musicians who have had at least fifty years of professional experience, and several as many as seventy-five. In all, these voices reflect some seventeen hundred years' worth of paying dues. Appealing to casual fans and jazz aficionados alike, these interviews have been carefully, but minimally edited by Peter Zimmerman for sense and clarity, without changing any of the musicians' actual words. Five of the interviewees-Dick Hyman, Jimmy Owens, Sonny Rollins, Clark Terry, and Yusef Lateef-have received the National Endowment for the Arts' prestigious Jazz Masters Fellowship, attesting to their importance and ability. While not official masters, the rest are veteran performers willing to share their experiences and knowledge. Artists such as David Amram, Charles Davis, Clifford Jordan, Valery Ponomarev, and Sandy Stewart, to name a few, open their hearts and memories and reveal who they are as people. The musicians interviewed for the book range in age from their early seventies to mid-nineties. Older musicians started their careers during the segregation of the Jim Crow era, while the youngest came up during the struggle for civil rights. All grapple with issues of race, performance, and jazz's rich legacies. In addition to performing, touring, and recording, many have composed and arranged, and others have contributed as teachers, historians, studio musicians, session players, producers, musicians' advocates, authors, columnists, poets, and artists. The interviews in The Jazz Masters are invaluable primary material for scholars and will appeal to musicians inspired by these veterans' stories and their different approaches to music.

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.

The Jazz Masters: Setting the Record Straight features twenty-one conversations with musicians who have had at least fifty years of professional experience, and several as many as seventy-five. In all, these voices reflect some seventeen hundred years' worth of paying dues. Appealing to casual fans and jazz aficionados alike, these interviews have been carefully, but minimally edited by Peter Zimmerman for sense and clarity, without changing any of the musicians' actual words. Five of the interviewees-Dick Hyman, Jimmy Owens, Sonny Rollins, Clark Terry, and Yusef Lateef-have received the National Endowment for the Arts' prestigious Jazz Masters Fellowship, attesting to their importance and ability. While not official masters, the rest are veteran performers willing to share their experiences and knowledge. Artists such as David Amram, Charles Davis, Clifford Jordan, Valery Ponomarev, and Sandy Stewart, to name a few, open their hearts and memories and reveal who they are as people. The musicians interviewed for the book range in age from their early seventies to mid-nineties. Older musicians started their careers during the segregation of the Jim Crow era, while the youngest came up during the struggle for civil rights. All grapple with issues of race, performance, and jazz's rich legacies. In addition to performing, touring, and recording, many have composed and arranged, and others have contributed as teachers, historians, studio musicians, session players, producers, musicians' advocates, authors, columnists, poets, and artists. The interviews in The Jazz Masters are invaluable primary material for scholars and will appeal to musicians inspired by these veterans' stories and their different approaches to music.