Original Music composed by Antonio Ciacca for the Chocolate Festival Event, pairing Richart chocolate with live jazz.

"Practical Jazz Theory for Improvisation" is a jazz theory text with an emphasis on improvisation. Originally conceived as the Jazz Theory/Improvisation text and curriculum for the 2014 National Jazz Workshop, it has already been adopted by several university jazz programs. This book begins at a level accessible by students just beginning in jazz, with reference appendices to fill any fundamental music theory knowledge, yet progresses systematically in technical and conceptual content well beyond all but the most advanced college improvisation classes. With notated examples and exercises demonstrating all concepts as well free downloadable play-along tracks for all exercises, this book will have students playing the material almost immediately. While not required, the available 300+ page companion book, "Practical Jazz Theory for Improvisation Exercise Workbook" (available in treble and bass clef) has all exercises notated in all keys to allow for quicker technical and aural advancement.

This is a book for students and seasoned performers who want to know more about the thought processes for improvising Jazz. It is also for teachers who wish to control the subject in graduated steps. It shows promising students that it won't do to play just anything at any time, and that there is a difference between mere self-gratification and really connecting with a much larger audience. If, as a movement, Jazz has lost its way, this book shows the way back.

Koop Kooper, the Cocktail universe's high priest of all things hep, swinging, and swank, and cyber disc-jockey of his radio show, "The Cocktail Nation," has unleashed the definitive guide to the Lounge universe. Replete with gassin interviews and cool pixeramas, he reveals the incredible diorama of Cocktail culture, lifestyle, and music. Koop mixes it up with cool luminaries and pioneers of the Cocktail soundtrack, such as hepster Jack Constanzo, the bongo player of the 1950s, shakes a martini with the leaders of the revival Combustible Edison, trades smart lip with comedian satirist Shelley Berman and 21st century hit-makers Martini Kings, heads down the dark streets of Cocktail noir, muscling it up with croonoir Jimmy Vargas, then it's off to the Vegas pool, where he conducts an underwater interview with gorgeous fire-eating mermaid Marina. Koop Kooper's Cocktail Nation book is a glorious panorama of all things Lounge, created by the swank meister of uber cool himself.

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.

Carter and Ralph Stanley--the Stanley Brothers--are comparable to Bill Monroe and Flatt & Scruggs as important members of the earliest generation of bluegrass musicians. In this first biography of the brothers, author David W. Johnson documents that Carter (1925-1966) and Ralph (b 1927) were equally important contributors to the tradition of old-time country music. Together from 1946 to 1966, the Stanley Brothers began their careers performing in the schoolhouses of southwestern Virginia and expanded their popularity to the concert halls of Europe. In order to re-create this post-World War II journey through the changing landscape of American music, the author interviewed Ralph Stanley, the family of Carter Stanley, former members of the Clinch Mountain Boys, and dozens of musicians and friends who knew the Stanley Brothers as musicians and men. The late Mike Seeger allowed Johnson to use his invaluable 1966 interviews with the brothers. Notable old-time country and bluegrass musicians such as George Shuffler, Lester Woodie, Larry Sparks, and the late Wade Mainer shared their recollections of Carter and Ralph. Lonesome Melodies begins and ends in the mountains of southwestern Virginia. Carter and Ralph were born there and had an early publicity photograph taken at the Cumberland Gap. In December 1966, pallbearers walked up Smith Ridge to bring Carter to his final resting place. In the intervening years, the brothers performed thousands of in-person and radio shows, recorded hundreds of songs and tunes for half a dozen record labels, and tried to keep pace with changing times while remaining true to the spirit of old-time country music. As a result of their accomplishments, they have become a standard of musical authenticity.

A collection of anecdotes and reminiscences by local musicians and others of the Hastings jazz and social scene in the 50's and 60's. Together with photos and press clippings, it provides a trip down memory lane back to those fabulous years.

Thelonius Monk, Billy Taylor, and Maceo Parker--famous jazz artists who have shared the unique sounds of North Carolina with the world--are but a few of the dynamic African American artists from eastern North Carolina featured in The African American Music Trails of Eastern North Carolina. This first-of-its-kind travel guide will take you on a fascinating journey to music venues, events, and museums that illuminate the lives of the musicians and reveal the deep ties between music and community. Interviews with more than 90 artists open doors to a world of music, especially jazz, rhythm and blues, funk, gospel and church music, blues, rap, marching band music, and beach music. New and historical photographs enliven the narrative, and maps and travel information help you plan your trip. Included is a CD with 17 recordings performed by some of the region's outstanding artists.

"Black Pearls" is an anthology of black women singers who made major contributions to American music. The word anthology derives from the Greek language meaning "gathering of flowers." In this collection, Josephine Qualls has described the evolution of Jazz music and its' related musical forms as embodied in the careers of these women ranging from Bessie Smith through Ma Rainey, Memphis Minnie, Pearl Bailey, Ethel Waters, Aretha Franklin, Mahalia Jackson (mother of pearls) and many others. Also included are descriptions of several early venues in which black women developed their talents. The musical art forms of Jazz, Blues, Gospel, Ragtime and Dixieland highlights the descriptions of the births, early years and lifelong careers of these African/American women. Spanning the years from 1895 to the present, this is an engaging and informative book leaving the reader fascinated by the amazing variety in this "collection of flowers." "Black Pearls" belongs in the library of any fan or historian of African/American music.

Ken Prouty argues that knowledge of jazz, or more to the point, claims to knowledge of jazz, are the prime movers in forming jazz's identity, its canon, and its community. Every jazz artist, critic, or fan understands jazz differently, based on each individual's unique experiences and insights. Through playing, listening, reading, and talking about jazz, both as a form of musical expression and as a marker of identity, each aficionado develops a personalized relationship to the larger jazz world. Through the increasingly important role of media, listeners also engage in the formation of different communities that transcend not only traditional boundaries of geography, but increasingly exist only in the virtual world.

The relationships of "jazz people" within and between these communities is at the center of "Knowing Jazz." Some communities, such as those in academia, reflect a clash of sensibilities between historical traditions. Others, particularly those who inhabit cyberspace, represent new and exciting avenues for everyday fans, whose involvement in jazz has often been ignored. Other communities seek to define themselves as expressions of national or global sensibility, pointing to the ever-changing nature of jazz's identity as an American art form in an international setting. What all these communities share, however, is an intimate, visceral link to the music and the artists who make it, brought to life through the medium of recording. Informed by an interdisciplinary approach and approaching the topic from a number of perspectives, "Knowing Jazz" charts a philosophical course in which many disparate perspectives and varied opinions on jazz can find common ground.

Those who have lived - not just witnessed - the efflorescence of a pivotal culture moment never see the world through veiled eyes again. Jimmy Lyons was there, devising wholly original inventions of words and music while the Beats, the neo-folk troubadours, the post-bop jazz shooting stars, and the tie-dyed psychedelic rockers were scorching through the underbrush and opening new paths of creativity as alternatives to the increasingly bottom line-driven mainstream. Lyons, though, wasn't content to find a niche in one countercultural movement or another. He kept moving, observing, and writing new poems, stories, and songs. But he never gave up on the wry sophistication of the classic American popular song. Indeed, he has dedicated himself to infusing the same hallowed forms perfected by Irving Berlin, George and Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter, Harold Arlen, and others, with his singular fantasias of ingeniously colored and textured wordplay.

These plays have a subtext only Lyons can provide, derived from what he calls the "rituals of the road" and the "the circular rhythms" of the race track, the beats and pulses of everyday American life that rarely raise a ripple on the surface of American culture. Lyons hears the screams and dreams of his countrymen and woman; from them he creates new modes of expression. He has been changed by each of his open-hearted an open-eared encounters, and this body of work is his way of making those changes sing and swing. - Derk Richardson

As a thesaurus of chordal options available to the comping jazz guitarist, this book is an in-depth study of optimum voice leading motions using drop-2 and drop-3 voicings for the variations on the ubiquitous major and minor II-V-I progressions - yielding fluid and cohesive accompaniments.

"The Fierce Urgency of Now" links musical improvisation to struggles for social change, focusing on the connections between the improvisation associated with jazz and the dynamics of human rights struggles and discourses. The authors acknowledge that at first glance improvisation and rights seem to belong to incommensurable areas of human endeavor. Improvisation connotes practices that are spontaneous, personal, local, immediate, expressive, ephemeral, and even accidental, while rights refer to formal standards of acceptable human conduct, rules that are permanent, impersonal, universal, abstract, and inflexible. Yet the authors not only suggest that improvisation and rights "can "be connected; they insist that they "must" be connected.

Improvisation is the creation and development of new, unexpected, and productive cocreative relations among people. It cultivates the capacity to discern elements of possibility, potential, hope, and promise where none are readily apparent. Improvisers work with the tools they have in the arenas that are open to them. Proceeding without a written score or script, they collaborate to envision and enact something new, to enrich their experience in the world by acting on it and changing it. By analyzing the dynamics of particular artistic improvisations, mostly by contemporary American jazz musicians, the authors reveal improvisation as a viable and urgently needed model for social change. In the process, they rethink politics, music, and the connections between them.

In "People Get Ready," musicians, scholars, and journalists write about jazz since 1965, the year that Curtis Mayfield composed the famous civil rights anthem that gives this collection its title. The contributors emphasize how the political consciousness that infused jazz in the 1960s and early 1970s has informed jazz in the years since then. They bring nuance to historical accounts of the avant-garde, the New Thing, Free Jazz, "non-idiomatic" improvisation, fusion, and other forms of jazz that have flourished since the 1960s, and they reveal the contemporary relevance of those musical practices. Many of the participants in the jazz scenes discussed are still active performers. A photographic essay captures some of them in candid moments before performances. Other pieces revise standard accounts of well-known jazz figures, such as Duke Ellington, and lesser-known musicians, including Jeanne Lee; delve into how money, class, space, and economics affect the performance of experimental music; and take up the question of how digital technology influences improvisation. "People Get Ready" offers a vision for the future of jazz based on an appreciation of the complexity of its past and the abundance of innovation in the present.
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Contributors." Tamar Barzel, John Brackett, Douglas Ewart, Ajay Heble, Vijay Iyer, Thomas King, Tracy McMullen, Paul D. Miller/DJ Spooky, Nicole Mitchell, Roscoe Mitchell, Famoudou Don Moye, Aldon Lynn Nielsen, Eric Porter, Marc Ribot, Matana Roberts, Jaribu Shahid, Julie Dawn Smith, Wadada Leo Smith, Alan Stanbridge, John Szwed, Greg Tate, Scott Thomson, Rob Wallace, Ellen Waterman, Corey Wilkes

In "People Get Ready," musicians, scholars, and journalists write about jazz since 1965, the year that Curtis Mayfield composed the famous civil rights anthem that gives this collection its title. The contributors emphasize how the political consciousness that infused jazz in the 1960s and early 1970s has informed jazz in the years since then. They bring nuance to historical accounts of the avant-garde, the New Thing, Free Jazz, "non-idiomatic" improvisation, fusion, and other forms of jazz that have flourished since the 1960s, and they reveal the contemporary relevance of those musical practices. Many of the participants in the jazz scenes discussed are still active performers. A photographic essay captures some of them in candid moments before performances. Other pieces revise standard accounts of well-known jazz figures, such as Duke Ellington, and lesser-known musicians, including Jeanne Lee; delve into how money, class, space, and economics affect the performance of experimental music; and take up the question of how digital technology influences improvisation. "People Get Ready" offers a vision for the future of jazz based on an appreciation of the complexity of its past and the abundance of innovation in the present.
"
Contributors." Tamar Barzel, John Brackett, Douglas Ewart, Ajay Heble, Vijay Iyer, Thomas King, Tracy McMullen, Paul D. Miller/DJ Spooky, Nicole Mitchell, Roscoe Mitchell, Famoudou Don Moye, Aldon Lynn Nielsen, Eric Porter, Marc Ribot, Matana Roberts, Jaribu Shahid, Julie Dawn Smith, Wadada Leo Smith, Alan Stanbridge, John Szwed, Greg Tate, Scott Thomson, Rob Wallace, Ellen Waterman, Corey Wilkes