"Yellow Music" is the first history of the emergence of Chinese popular music and urban media culture in early-twentieth-century China. Andrew F. Jones focuses on the affinities between "yellow" or "pornographic" music--as critics derisively referred to the "decadent" fusion of American jazz, Hollywood film music, and Chinese folk forms--and the anticolonial mass music that challenged its commercial and ideological dominance. Jones radically revises previous understandings of race, politics, popular culture, and technology in the making of modern Chinese culture.
The personal and professional histories of three musicians are central to Jones's discussions of shifting gender roles, class inequality, the politics of national salvation, and emerging media technologies: the American jazz musician Buck Clayton; Li Jinhui, the creator of "yellow music"; and leftist Nie Er, a former student of Li's whose musical idiom grew out of virulent opposition to this Sinified jazz. As he analyzes global media cultures in the postcolonial world, Jones avoids the parochialism of media studies in the West. He teaches us to hear not only the American influence on Chinese popular music but the Chinese influence on American music as well; in so doing, he illuminates the ways in which both cultures were implicated in the unfolding of colonial modernity in the twentieth century.

Biography of the legendary pianist/composer. Based on scores of interviews with family and friends, the book gives rare insights into the elusive personality of this legendary hero of jazz.

Sonny Rollins is one of jazz's great innovators, arguably the most influential tenor saxophonist, along with John Coltrane, in the history of modern jazz. He began his musical career at the age of eleven, and within five short years he was playing with the legendary Thelonious Monk. In the late forties, before his twenty-first birthday, Rollins was in full swing, recording with jazz luminaries such as Charlie Parker, Bud Powell, Max Roach, Art Blakey, and Miles Davis, and he was hailed as the best jazz tenor man alive in the mid-fifties. Still active today, Rollins and his compelling sound reach a whole new generation of listeners with his eagerly anticipated live appearances. Now renowned jazz writer Eric Nisenson provides a long-overdue look at one of jazz's brightest, and most enduring, stars.

This is the first biography of jazz trumpeter and singer, Henry 'Red' Allen, long regarded as Louis Armstrong's chief rival. Both men were born in New Orleans and shared an African-American heritage, but their social backgrounds were quite different. Whereas Armstrong made many best-selling records, Allen never achieved hit parade success but gradually built up a durable international following today, dozens of his CDs are widely available. As a close friend, Chilton reveals Allen's personality, as well as analyzing his magnificent recordings. The intriguing contrast between Allen's spectacular performance showmanship and his off-stage reticence is dealt with, and fascinating details of Allen's early life in New Orleans and on the Mississippi riverboats are brought to life. Allen's popularity has increased each year since his death in 1967; his latter day tours of Europe are still regarded as being among the most successful by any visiting jazz musician. The background details of all the periods of Allen's varied career are dealt with, including his work with King Oliver, Luis Russell, Fletcher Henderson, Kid Ory, and Louis Armstrong. The book also contains a selected discography.

The jazz pianist Billy Tipton was born in Oklahoma City as Dorothy Tipton, but almost nobody knew the truth until the day he died, in Spokane in 1989. Over a fifty-year performing career, Billy Tipton fooled nearly everyone, including Duke Ellington and Norma Teagarden, five successive "wives" with whom Billy lived as a man, and three children who he "fathered." As Billy Tipton herself said, "Some people might think I'm a freak or a hermaphrodite. I'm not. I'm a normal person. This has been my choice." This jazz-era biography evokes the rich popular-music history of the Great Depression and reads like a detective story.

The richest place in America's musical landscape is that fertile ground occupied by jazz. Scott DeVeaux takes a central chapter in the history of jazz - the birth of bebop - and shows how our contemporary ideas of this uniquely American art form flow from that pivotal moment. At the same time, he provides an extraordinary view of the United States in the decades just prior to the civil rights movement. DeVeaux begins with an examination of the Swing Era, focusing particularly on the position of African American musicians. He highlights the role played by tenor saxophonist Coleman Hawkins, a 'progressive' committed to a vision in which black jazz musicians would find a place in the world commensurate with their skills. He then looks at the young musicians of the early 1940s, including Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Thelonious Monk, and links issues within the jazz world to other developments on the American scene, including the turmoil during World War II and the pervasive racism of the period. Throughout, DeVeaux places musicians within the context of their professional world, paying close attention to the challenges of making a living as well as of making good music. He shows that bebop was simultaneously an artistic movement, an ideological statement, and a commercial phenomenon. In drawing from the rich oral histories that a living tradition provides, DeVeaux's book resonates with the narratives of individual lives. While "The Birth of Bebop" is a study in American cultural history and a critical musical inquiry, it is also a fitting homage to bebop and to those who made it possible.

My Life in E-flat is the memoir of a woman who witnessed some of the most important movements in the history of jazz. Through her autobiography, Chan Parker provides intimate insights into the music and into life with Charlie Parker, the key figure in the development of bebop and one of the most important of all jazz musicians. Chan Parker was born Beverly Dolores Berg in New York City at the height of the Jazz Age. Her father was a producer of vaudeville shows and her mother was a dancer in Florenz Ziegfeld's Midnight Frolic. Parker became part of the jazz culture as a nightclub dancer and later as the wife of jazz saxophonists Charlie Parker and then Phil Woods. In a moving and candid portrait of Charlie Parker, the author describes in harrowing detail a man of incredible talent besieged with addictions and self-destructiveness. She painfully recounts his death at the age of 35 while married to her and its effect on her life as well as on the musical world. Parker's honest portrait of one of the most gifted musicians in jazz provides unique insight into the history of the music and the difficulties faced by African American performers during the 1940s. Parker also reflects on her struggle to find her own voice and on her work with Clint Eastwood on the film biography of Charlie Parker, Bird (1988).

In Roosevelt's Blues Guido van Rijn documents more than a hundred blues and gospel lyrics that contain direct political comment about FDR. Altogether, they convey the thought, spirit, and history of the African-American population during the Roosevelt era. Included in the book are recorded sermons by Rev. J.M. Gates and lyrics to songs recorded by such notable musicians as Huddie "Leadbelly" Ledbetter, Big Bill Broonzy, "Champion" Jack Dupree, Sonny Boy Williamson, Josh White, the Mississippi Sheiks, and many others. Using these sources, which have been neglected by historians, van Rijn documents Roosevelt's vast popularity among blacks.

Jazz clarinetist, saxophonist, and bassoonist Garvin Bushell (1902-1991) performed with many of the twentieth century's greatest jazz musicians,from Fletcher Henderson, Fats Waller, and Cab Calloway to Eric Dolphy, Gil Evans, and John Coltrane,during his remarkable career that spanned from 1916 to the 1980s. Although best known as a jazz soloist and sideman, Bushell also played oboe and bassoon with symphony orchestras and was a highly regarded instructor of woodwinds. In Jazz from the Beginning , Bushell vividly recounts his musical experiences, featuring candid assessments of the legends with whom he performed as well as eye-opening accounts of the early days of jazz and the racism that he encountered on the road. Based on a series of interviews conducted by jazz scholar Mark Tucker, these memoirs provide a colourful account of Bushell's extraordinary life and career as well as an important record of seventy years of America's musical history.

Louis Armstrong was the founding father of jazz and one of this century's towering cultural figures, yet the full story of his extravagant life has never been told.

Born in 1901 to the sixteen-year-old daughter of a slave, he came of age among the prostitutes, pimps, and rag-and-bone merchants of New Orleans.  He married four times and enjoyed countless romantic involvements in and around his marriages.  A believer in marijuana for the head and laxatives for the bowels, he was also a prolific diarist and correspondent, a devoted friend to celebrities from Bing Crosby to Ella Fitzgerald, a perceptive social observer, and, in his later years, an international goodwill ambassador.

And, of course, he was a dazzling musician.  From the bordellos and honky-tonks of Storyville--New Orleans's red light district--to the upscale nightclubs in Chicago, New York, and Hollywood, Armstrong's stunning playing, gravelly voice, and irrepressible personality captivated audiences and critics alike.  Recognized and beloved wherever he went, he nonetheless managed to remain vigorously himself.

Now Laurence Bergreen's remarkable book brings to life the passionate, courageous, and charismatic figure who forever changed the face of American music.

Singing Jazz looks at the ups and downs of this tough profession through the eyes of legendary jazz singers, well-established performers, and some newcomers. Drawing on accounts from vocalists of yesterday and today in all major jazz styles, the book explores the musical influences of jazz singing; the learning process, whether on the road or in training; the challenges of building a repertoire, getting gigs, traveling, and performing under sometimes difficult circumstances; and the ongoing struggle for artistic recognition and financial security in the competitive world of popular music. To reveal the roots and evolution of this unique art form, authors Crother and Pinfold revisit the lives, words, and stylistic innovations of great singers in jazz history, including Carmen McRae, Dinah Washington, Mel Torme, Shirley Horn, Ethel Waters, Anita O'Day, and many more. Plus - interviewed especially for Singing Jazz - some of today's best performers illustrate the contemporary view of jazz singing. Kitty Margolis, Mark Murphy, Helen Merrill, Mark Porter, Christine Tyrrell, and many others discuss the influences and experiences that have shaped their singing careers, and share insights on how their art is still evolving today.

For nearly thirty years Frank Zappa (1940-1993) pursued an idiosyncratic but influential course in music - rock, jazz, and classical composer (releasing over fifty albums); founder of the Mothers of Invention; guitarist, conductor, and producer; as well as social satirist, sonic scientist, First Amendment champion, and all-around iconoclast. This updated edition of David Walley's cutting-edge classic includes a new foreword, a substantial chapter carrying the Zappa saga through his death from cancer, an afterword, bibliography, discography, videography, and guide to Zappa on the Internet. From 1960's Freak Out! to the posthumous Civilization Phaze III, No Commercial Potential offers converts and connoisseurs the most practical and penetrating book ever written on the musical phenomenon known as Frank Zappa.

With The Jazz Poetry Anthology, this volume offers a comprehensive exploration of the history of jazz poetry. The Second Set gathers many poets omitted from The Jazz Poetry Anthology, including Gwendolyn Brooks, Arthur Brown, Diane di Prima, Henry Dumas, Nikki Giovanni, David Henderson, Anselm Hollo, Haki Madhubuti, Michael McClure, Larry Neal, Dudley Randall, Eugene B. Redmond, Carolyn M. Rodgers, Ntozake Shange, A. B. Spellman, and Jay Wright. The Second Set fills out the history of jazz poetry with poems written before World War II, as well as those from the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s, and includes contemporary writers from a range of cultural backgrounds, including Ai, Rita Dove, Yusef Komunyakaa, Martin Espada, Joy Harjo, Keorapetse Kgositsile, Michael Longley, Mwatabu Okantah, Charles Simic, Lorenzo Thomas, Derek Walcott, Ron Welburn, and Yevgeny Yevtushenko.

Embracing a wide variety of poems informed by jazz, The Second Set also includes statements of poetics by many of the poets anthologized."

Texas musicians and jazz share a history that goes all the way back to the origins of jazz in ragtime, blues, and boogie-woogie. Texans have left their mark on all of jazz's major movements, including hot jazz, swing, bebop, the birth of the cool, hard bop, and free jazz. Yet these musicians are seldom identified as Texans because their careers often took them to the leading jazz centers in New Orleans, Chicago, New York, Kansas City, and Los Angeles.

In Texan Jazz, Dave Oliphant reclaims these musicians for Texas and explores the vibrant musical culture that brought them forth. Working through the major movements of jazz, he describes the lives, careers, and recordings of such musicians as Scott Joplin, Hersal Thomas, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Sippie Wallace, Jack Teagarden, Buster Smith, Hot Lips Page, Eddie Durham, Herschel Evans, Charlie Christian, Red Garland, Kenny Dorham, Jimmy Giuffre, Ornette Coleman, John Carter, and many others.

The great strength of Texan Jazz is its record of the contributions to jazz made by African-American Texans. The first major book on this topic ever published, it will be fascinating reading for everyone who loves jazz.

It is the summer of 1976 and Salvo Ursari, a man of retirement age, is walking on a taut wire strung between the Twin Towers of New York's World Trade centre, almost fourteen hundred feet above the city. Far below him in the gaping crowd stands his wife, Anna, to whom he has made a solemn promise: This wire walk will end his career. In this daring moment, Steven Galloway opens his riveting novel about Salvo Ursari, whose life begins in 1919 amid a Transylvanian boyhood inhabited by gypsy folklore and inspired by the bravery of his persecuted people. Salvo's story moves irresistibly from a tragic fire that envelops his family, to street life in Budapest, where he learns the skills of a wire walker, to the carnivals of Europe and the competitive world of the American circus. Most fulfilled when living with paradox, Salvo feels safest while performing startling feats of balance on a wire high above the dangerous world and most endangered if performing above a net. With compassion, warmth, and blazing originality, Ascension combines jaw-dropping storytelling, and fantastical symbolism with mesmerizing detail of Romany and circus culture, and an unforgettable walk with the amazing Salvo Ursari.

Hailed as a classic in music studies when it was first published in 1977, Early Downhome Blues is a detailed look at traditional country blues artists and their work. Combining musical analysis and cultural history approaches, Titon examines the origins of downhome blues in African American society. He also explores what happened to the art form when the blues were commercially recorded and became part of the larger American culture. From forty-seven musical transcriptions, Titon derives a grammar of early downhome blues melody. His book is enriched with the recollections of blues performers, audience members, and those working in the recording industry. In a new afterword, Titon reflects on the genesis of this book in the blues revival of the 1960s and the politics of tourism in the current revival under way. |Kalman examines the crucial period of 1967-1970 at Yale Law School, when the mainstream liberal faculty was challenged by left-liberal students who aimed to unlock the democratic visions of law and social change they associated with Yale's legal realists of the 1930s. Law students during this phase of the school's history included Bill Clinton, Hillary Rodham Clinton, and Clarence Thomas.

New York in the 1950s. On the stage at Birdland is the midget master of ceremonies, 3'9" Pee Wee Marquette, dressed in a zoot suit and loud tie, smoking a huge cigar and screeching mispronounced introductions into the microphone. Pee Wee is just one of the many characters that have made Bill Crow's forty years in jazz seem like an instant. In the same key as his acclaimed Jazz Anecdotes, this collection of revealing, hilarious, and sometimes moving stories runs the full gamut of New York's nightspots, introducing us along the way to the likes of Dizzy Gillespie, Benny Goodman, Stan Getz, Judy Holliday, Yul Brynner, and Simon and Garfunkel.

In the 1920s, many black regional jazz bands were recorded and became products of the entertainment industry, which was altering the face of America from the handmade, homemade, homemade society of the ninteenth century to the mass-produced, mass-consumed technological culture of the twentieth century. Making use of the files of African American newspapers, such as the Chicago Defender, as well as published and archival oral history interviews, Hennessey explores the contradictions that musicians often faced as African Americans, as trained professional musicians, and as the products of differing regional experiences. From Jazz to Swing follows jazz from its beginnings in the regional black musics of the turn of the century in New Orleans, Chicago, New York, and the territories that make up the rest of the country.

Sarah Vaughan possessed the most spectacular voice in jazz history. In Sassy , Leslie Gourse, the acclaimed biographer of Nat King Cole and Joe Williams, defines and celebrates Vaughan's vital musical legacy and offers a detailed portrait of the woman as well as the singer. Revealed here is "The Divine One" as only her closest friends and musical associates knew her. By her early twenties Sarah Vaughan was singining with Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, and Billy Eckstine, helping them invent bebop. For forty-five years thereafter, she reigned supreme in both pop and jazz, with several million-selling hits (among them "Broken Hearted Melody," "Make Yourself Comfortable," and "Misty").But life offstage was never smooth for Sarah Vaughan. Her voluptuous voice was matched by her exuberant appetite for excess: three failed marriages, financial difficulties through many changes in management, late-night jam sessions, liquor, and cocaine. In Sassy , though, we also see the feisty and unpretentious woman who worked hard all her life to support her parents and adopted daughter, and who came to savour the hard-won independence and worldwide acclaim she achieved as the greatest jazz singer of her generation.

Hard bop was a brand of post bebop jazz that enveloped many of the most talented American musicians in the period between 1955 and 1956. These were years unrivalled in jazz history for the number of musically brilliant records issued - including Art Blakey's Ugetsu, Miles Davis's Kind of Blue, Thelonius Monk's Brilliant Corners, and Sonny Rollins's Saxophone Colossus.

This is the first book devoted entirely to hard bop, combining a narrative of the movement's evolution, from its beginnings as an amalgam of bebop and R&B to its experimental breakthroughs in the 1960s. With close analyses of musicians' styles and recordings, as well as specific tendencies within the school, such as `soul jazz', it offers a much needed examination of the artists, milieus, and above all the sounds of one of America's greatest musical epochs.

Legendary jazzman Johnny Otis has spent a lifetime at the center of L.A.'s black music scene as a composer, performer, producer, d.j., activist, and preacher. His energetic, anecdotal memoir, Upside Your Head Rhythm and Blues on Central Avenue, recalls the music, the great performers, and the vibrant culture of the district, as well as the political and social forces -- including virulent white racism -- that have shaped black life in Los Angeles. Resonating with anger, poignancy, joy, and defiance, Upside Your Head is a unique document of the African-American musical and cultural experience.
Upside Your Head recalls a 50-year career when it seems Otis either encountered, discovered, or performed with every significant figure in the early days of rhythm & blues and rock 'n' roll, including Count Basie, Esther Phillips, T-Bone Walker, Big Mama Thornton, and Lester Young. Drawing on dozens of vignettes, personal photographs, and hours of taped interviews from the popular "Johnny Otis Show," Upside Your Head offers a moving tribute to the black community that gave birth to L.A.'s rhythm and blues. His stories celebrate the true roots in black culture of a distinctive American music while lamenting its eventual appropriation by the dominant white society.

(Limelight). ..".his economical writing style ... manages to pack lots of information and opinion into a few carefully chosen words ... Besides detail work well-grounded in scholarship...the author isn't afraid to interpolate such generalizations and speculations as he sees fit; he may be the Stephen Hawking of jazz criticism." Bob Tarte, The Beat

"Jazz: America's Classical Music" is a delightful introduction and guide to this complex and compelling music and to its rich history. In an engaging and conversational style, renowned jazz teacher Grover Sales tells of the lives and music of the greats--Ellington, Tatum, Hawkins, Coltrane, Parker, Hines, Goodman, Armstrong, and many others--with a mix of important facts, fascinating anecdotes, and brilliant interpretations. Illustrated with astonishing photographs of the artists in performance," Jazz: America's Classical Music" is a classic text, an ideal book for beginners and an inspiring one for serious students of the art of jazz.

American composer, pianist, and orchestra leader Duke Ellington was the first genuine jazz composer of truly international status. In this book Ken Rattenbury offers the most thorough musical analysis ever written of Ellington's works, assessing the extent to which Ellington drew on the black music traditions of blues and ragtime and the music of Tin Pan Alley, and examining how he integrated black folk music practices with elements of European art music. Rattenbury, a professional jazz musician for over fifty years, investigates Ellington's methods of composing, focusing on works written, performed, and recorded between 1939 and 1941, years that witnessed the full flowering of Ellington's genius. He discusses the infinite care with which Ellington selected his musicians-players possessing, in addition to technical accomplishment, the unique folksy qualities of timbre and delivery necessary to contribute to the "Ellington sound." He remarks on Ellington's gifts as a melodist and songwriter, shedding light on the commercial aspect of his involvement with Tin Pan Alley. After examining two early Ellington compositions for piano, he closely analyzes full scores of five significant pieces transcribed from their original recordings and including all extemporized solos and variations in performance. These transcriptions range from a duo for piano and double bass, through pieces for small groups, to compositions for Ellington's full orchestra. Drawing at length from the observations of Ellington himself and of the members of Ellington's orchestra, as well as from his own, extensive musical knowledge, Rattenbury provides new perspectives on Ellington's life and music, the interpretations of some of his most creative soloists, and the evolution of the jazz tradition