This book is the first volume in a series designed to help the student of jazz piano learn and apply jazz scales by mastering each scale and its uses in improvisation. Volume 1 focuses on the major scale, illustrating the scale in all twelve keys with complete fingerings. Chords and left hand voicings, exercises and etudes to help apply the material to improvising, ideas for further study and listening, and detailed instructions and suggestions on how to practice the material are also provided. Volume 1 also includes primers on note-reading, theory basics from intervals through seventh chords, and rhythmic notation.

Pianist George Shearing is that rare thing, a European jazz musician who became a household name in the US, as a result of the "Shearing sound" -- the recordings of his historic late 1940s quintet. Together with his unique "locked hands" approach to playing the piano, Shearing's quintet with guitar and vibraphone in close harmony to his own playing revolutionised small group jazz, and ensured that after seven years as Melody Maker's top British pianist, he achieved even greater success in America. His compositions have been recorded by everyone from Sarah Vaughan to Miles Davis, and his best known pieces include "Lullaby of Birdland," "She" and "Conception." His story is all the more remarkable because Shearing was born blind. As a teenager he joined Claude Bampton's band, and he recounts hilarious anecdotes about the trials and tribulations of this all blind group. By the start of the war years, Shearing was established as one of Britain's most popular and impressive jazz pianists--broadcasting regularly and playing and recording with Stephane Grappelli. In 1947 he emigrated to the US and started his landmark series of records with his quintet as well as performing classical pieces with several leading symphony orchestras. His candid reminiscences include a behind the scenes experience of New York's 52nd Street in its heyday, as well as memories of a vast roll-call of professional colleagues that includes all the great names in jazz.

George Lewis, one of the great traditional jazz clarinetists, was born in 1900 at about the same time that jazz itself first appeared in New Orleans. And by the time he died, on the last day of 1968, New Orleans jazz had pretty much run its course, too. By then a jazz museum stood on Bourbon Street, and a cultural center was under construction where Globe Hall had Stood. Lewis's life thus paralleled that of New Orleans jazz, and in his later years hew as the best known standard bearer of his city's music. He came to the attention of the jazz world at the time of the so-called "New Orleans Revival" of the 1940's, when veteran trumpeter Bunk Johnson was recorded by a number of jazz enthusiasts, notably William Russell. In this new biography, Tom Bethell challenges a favorite myth of the history of jazz: that the music became moribund in New Orleans after the legal red light district, Storyville, was closed in 1917, resulting in most jazz musicians going "up the river." In fact, Bethell shows, many more jazzmen stayed in the city than left, and the musical style continued to develop and grow. Thus the jazz fans who arrived in the city in the early 1940's did not encounter a "revival" of an old style so much as an ongoing tradition, with clarinetists like Lewis having been influenced by Benny Goodman and the Swing Era in addition to Lorenzo Tio and the Creole School. After Bunk Johnson's death in 1949, at a time when many other social changes were beginning to be felt in the city, the New Orleans jazz tradition began to go into a decline. It became increasingly rigid and repetitive, and was often designed to please what one observer called "Dixieland fans yelling for their favorite members." The book is based on lengthy research in New Orleans, including interviews with George Lewis shortly before his death, and unpublished material from the diaries kept by William Russell on his visits to New Orleans between 1942 and 1949. It also includes a statement by Lewis on jazz and the best way to play it and a complete Lewis discography. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1977.

This study examines the migration of African American jazz musicians to other parts of the world from 1919 to the present. It provides evidence that African American jazz musicians fared better in the diaspora than they did in America where jazz and its inventors were born. Characterized as bereft of 'culture' in America, they were hailed as the epitome of high culture in Europe, Asia, and the Soviet Union: they fraternized with royalty in Europe while Jim Crow laws prevailed in America. The study begins with the emergence of jazz music in America, examines musicians who traveled abroad, and their lives and influences in postwar Europe, including Germany from 1925-1945, and also presents some surprising statistics on the death rates of jazz and classical musicians in the US and abroad. The study, written by an anthropologist who is also a jazz musician, provides a treatment of the cultural, historical, artistic, innovative, and aesthetic aspects of the migration of African American jazz musicians to the diaspora.

Ten classic jazz tunes including transcribed solos and chord symbols in melody line arrangements. With demonstration performances and specially recorded backing tracks, featuring live jazz trio. Ideal for learning and practising jazz improvisation. Includes transcriptions if famous recorded solos and chord symbols for your own improvised solos. On the CD hear the full performance versions of each tune, including demonstation solos, on Tracks 2 - 11. The instrumental part is then omitted from Tracks 12 - 21 so you can play along with the recorded accompaniments.

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.

This book is the 2nd volume in a series designed to help the student of jazz piano learn and apply jazz scales by mastering each scale and its uses in improvisation. Each book focuses on a different scale, illustrating the scale in all twelve keys with complete fingerings. Also provided are chords and left hand voicings to match, exercises and etudes to help apply the material to improvising, ideas for further study and listening, and detailed instructions and suggestions on how to practice the material.

As the handsome (and much-married) leader of a series of big bands and small groups in the 1930s and 1940s, clarinetist Artie Shaw achieved measures of fame and fortune that temporarily eclipsed those of his great rival, Benny Goodman. Shaw's five top single recordigs had sold over 65 million copies by 1965; by 1990 his total sales exceeded 100 million records. Yet Shaw was an ambitiously serious and introspective musician. He frequently tired of the music business, often forsaking it for extended periods. He also achieved renown as a writer of fiction. Unlike Goodman, Shaw, now in his 93rd year and the last surviving icon of the Swing Era, has not been well served by jazz writers. In rectifying that omission, the revised edition of this book offers a narrative account and analytical assessment of the life and times of a major figure in American popular music.

Throughout his life as a tenor saxophonist, Theodore Walter 'Sonny' Rollins has been committed to the fundamental truths of jazz, especially swing, while managing also to be consistently experimental and forward looking, and his recorded oeuvre includes at least a dozen albums essential to any serious collection. Yet Rollins is an enigmatic figure. The idealist who wrote the renowned and controversial Freedom Suite and who memorably declared "jazz means no barriers" has also been prey to periods of diffidence, at times withdrawing from the music scene altogether. This new appraisal charts in full the somewhat fitful career of an artist who at his best remains one of jazz's most noble improvisers. Transcriptions of three of Rollins' solos are included.

Rebelling against the Elvis-based, American-imported rock scene in late '60s Brazil, Caetano Veloso suffused lyrical Brazilian folksongs with fuzz guitar, avant-jazz, and electronic music-and in doing so blew apart the status quo of Brazilian culture. Caetano and the movement he catalyzed, "tropicalia," urged an adoption of personal freedom in politics, music, and lifestyle. His "rabble-rousing," as the government saw it, would get Caetano and his comrade Gilberto Gil arrested and exiled to London to wait out the military dictatorship. His fame increasing by the year, Caetano focused on writing songs about his homeland, returning to Brazil as a national hero-a mantle he still wears today. His most recent album, "Live in Bahia," was released to international critical and popular acclaim.

Where did Charlie Parker first play with Dizzy Gillespie? What are the coolest clubs in Chicago? Which city has the largest jazz museum? Where is Howlin' Wolf buried? The answers can be found in The Da Capo Jazz and Blues Lover's Guide to the U.S. , an insiders look at all the places where jazz and blues live, from national clubs to unmarked holes in the wall, in twenty-five cities and the Mississippi Delta. With the most up-to-date listings for festivals, historic theatres, record stores, and radio stations-plus anecdotes from club owners and musicians,this is the essential "where-to" for jazz and blues fans everywhere.

"This oracular first novel, which unfurls like gossamer [has] characters of a depth seldom found in a debut."—The New Yorker

In Diana Abu-Jaber's "impressive, entertaining" (Chicago Tribune) first novel, a small, poor-white community in upstate New York becomes home to the transplanted Jordanian family of Matussem Ramoud: his grown daughters, Jemorah and Melvina; his sister Fatima; and her husband, Zaeed. The widower Matuseem loves American jazz, kitschy lawn ornaments, and, of course, his daughters. Fatima is obsessed with seeing her nieces married—Jemorah is nearly thirty! Supernurse Melvina is firmly committed to her work, but Jemorah is ambivalent about her identity and role. Is she Arab? Is she American? Should she marry and, if so, whom?

Winner of the Oregon Book Award and finalist for the National PEN/Hemingway Award, Arabian Jazz is "a joy to read.... You will be tempted to read passages out loud. And you should" (Boston Globe). USA Today praises Abu-Jaber's "gift for dialogue...her Arab-American rings musically, and hilariously, true." Reading group guide included.

"[A] joy to read.... You will be tempted to read passages out loud. And you should."—Boston Globe

"[Abu-Jaber's] Arab-American rings musically, and hilariously, true."—USA Today

Bayou Jazz Lives is a collection of biographies and autobiographies of jazz and blues musicians who made a vital contribution to the development of these genres. Offering first-hand accounts from the men and women who made the music, as well as scholarly and well-researched life stories by established biographers, this series is an invaluable aid to anyone seeking more information about the conditions in which these key strands of popular music were created.

Marshal Royal was a core member of the Count Basie Orchestra for twenty years during its resurgence in the 1950s and 1960s. Before that, he was a pioneer of jazz on the West Coast, playing with many bands in and around Los Angeles. A child prodigy of both the violin and saxophone, Royal was literally born on the road as his musician parents made their way West.

Royal shares his experiences with Les Hite's band at Sebastian's New Cotton Club, where he worked with jazz legends such as Louis Armstrong and Fats Waller. He became a founding member and 'straw boss' of Lionel Hampton's Orchestra after a wartime career in U.S. Navy bands. After leaving Hampton, Royal made countless recordings as a freelancer before joining Basie, where he was responsible for rehearsing the Orchestra. Later, he became internationally known as a soloist while continuing his prolific recording career. His brother, Ernie, who was a star trumpeter in the bands of Woody Herman and Stan Kenton, is also profiled.

The acclaimed biography of the legendary tenor
"Lester Leaps In jumps off the page with authenticity and insight. The Prez was an amazing creator with a uniquely wicked sense of humor, and this book captures it all."
--Quincy Jones
"Twenty years in the making, this is the most thorough and penetrating book on the President of the Tenor Saxophone to date."
--Publishers Weekly
"A provocative book, presenting Lester Young in a novel, even controversial light while opening new avenues of possible investigation into one of the most tantalizingly enigmatic of all historic jazz figures."
--Richard Sudhalter, Los Angeles Times
"The lessons learned from Pres' painful life tell us a lot about ourselves and the horrible consequences of racism in America."
--T. Michael Crowell, San Diego Union-Tribune
Douglas Henry Daniels is professor of history and black studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is author of Pioneer Urbanites: A Social and Cultural History of Black San Francisco and lives in Santa Barbara.

The thrill of sitting in a club or concert hall hearing jazz being made is familiar to most fans. But what if you could immerse yourself in the world of the musician, where creating and performing is a profound task, and yet as routine as breathing? When writer Carl Vigeland was invited to tour with Wynton Marsalis and his septet, he was able to do just that. Vigeland's acute observations sweep us into their world as he becomes virtually part of the band. At the same time, Marsalis offers intimate meditations on home, family, creation, and performance- written in the cadence of his inimitable voice. Set on the stage, in the studio, and in great cities and small towns around the world, this richly textured narrative explores how the music is made in America today.

Though serious jazz fans certainly recognize the brilliance of guitarist Grant Green, his overall contributions to the genre were sorely underrated during his own lifetime. Best known as a coveted Blue Note Records session leader and sideman - he played on nine Blue Note albums in 1961 alone - Green helped raise the art of jazz guitar playing to new heights. Like his contemporary Wes Montgomery, Green's driving, aggressive tone was simultaneously fluid and eloquent. He moved freely from style to style, embracing bop, gospel, blues, Latin, country, soul, and funk. In the late '60s, Green forayed into pop jazz but was overshadowed on the charts by more commercial players such as George Benson, who sang as well as played. Throughout most of his brief life, Green battled racial and religious barriers, as well as two failed marriages and a drug habit. This book follows him from his St. Louis gospel and blues roots to his heyday at New York's Blue Note Records; through a subsequent period of musical flux; on the club circuit in Detroit; and into eventual disillusionment, declining health, and death in 1979 at age 43. While later Grant Green songs such as "Down Here on the Ground" from the 1970 album Alive! have been sampled by performers ranging from Madonna to A Tribe Called Quest, the more classic 1963 album Idle Moments ranked Number 9 on Rolling Stone's Alternative Music chart in 1994 - more than 30 years after it was recorded. Such versatility and timelessness makes the short life and career of this jazz guitar genius all the more fascinating.

From its beginning, jazz has presented a contradictory social world: jazz musicians have worked diligently to erase old boundaries, but they have just as resolutely constructed new ones. David Ake's vibrant and original book considers the diverse musics and related identities that jazz communities have shaped over the course of the twentieth century, exploring the many ways in which jazz musicians and audiences experience and understand themselves, their music, their communities, and the world at large.
Writing as a professional pianist and composer, the author looks at evolving meanings, values, and ideals--as well as the sounds--that musicians, audiences, and critics carry to and from the various activities they call jazz. Among the compelling topics he discusses is the "visuality" of music: the relationship between performance demeanor and musical meaning. Focusing on pianists Bill Evans and Keith Jarrett, Ake investigates the ways in which musicians' postures and attitudes influence perceptions of them as profound and serious artists. In another essay, Ake examines the musical values and ideals promulgated by college jazz education programs through a consideration of saxophonist John Coltrane. He also discusses the concept of the jazz "standard" in the 1990s and the differing sense of tradition implied in recent recordings by Wynton Marsalis and Bill Frisell.
"Jazz Cultures" shows how jazz history has not consisted simply of a smoothly evolving series of musical styles, but rather an array of individuals and communities engaging with disparate--and oftentimes conflicting--actions, ideals, and attitudes.

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.

Ever since it was originally released in 1959, Miles Davis's Kind of Blue has been hailed as a jazz masterpiece. To this day, it remains the bestselling jazz album of all time, selling an incredible 5,000 copies per week. Kind of Blue is a modern-day classic, an album that has long been embraced by students and scholars (and knowing fans) of all musical genres. The album also represents a watershed moment in jazz history, for it helped trigger the first great revolution the music had faced since bebop: modal jazz.

The Making of Kind of Blue is an exhaustively researched examination of how this masterpiece was born. Recorded with (among others) pianist Bill Evans, tenor saxophonist John Coltrane, composer/theorists George Russell and Gil Evans, alto saxophonist Julian "Cannonball" Adderley, and Miles himself playing trumpet, the album was seen then, and is still seen today, as a fortuitous conflation of some of the real giants of the jazz world. Together these giants produced a recording that would forever change the face of American music.

Drawing on extensive interviews, a vast command of both the history and character of jazz music, and access to rare recordings, Nisenson has pieced together the whole story of this miraculous recording session. His book functions as an in-depth study of the genius of Miles Davis, as well as the genius of Kind of Blue's other musicians and, indeed, the genius of jazz itself.

From the Bill of Rights, freedom of speech, and civil rights to jazz, blues and country music, Nat Hentoff has written about American life for decades, in the "Atlantic Monthly," the "New Yorker," the "Village Voice," the "Wall Street Journal," and "JazzTimes, " among countless other publications. The "New York Times" has hailed Hentoff's work as "an invigorating and entertaining reminder of why freedom of expression matters." The "Washington Post Book World" has called Hentoff "an old-fashioned music lover who likes, as Charlie Parker once put it, 'to listen to the stories' that good music tells." Nat Hentoff is a legend.And now, for the first time, here are his most important writings of the past twenty years--the quintessential Hentoff on everything from Cardinal John O'Connor to Merle Haggard, racism and political correctness in the classroom to Lester Young, Dizzy Gillespie to the censorship of Huckleberry Finn. Controversial? You bet. Whatever the topic, "The Nat Hentoff Reader" shows a man of passion and insight, of streetwise wit and polished eloquence-a true American original.

Bayou Jazz Lives is a collection of biographies and autobiographies of jazz and blues musicians who made a vital contribution to the development of these genres. Offering first-hand accounts from the men and women who made the music, as well as scholarly and well-researched life stories by established biographers, this series is an invaluable aid to anyone seeking more information about the conditions in which these key strands of popular music were created.

The first volume of Barker's memoirs, A Life in Jazz, followed him from New Orleans into the big bands of Cab Calloway and Benny Carter. He was working on this -- the second volume -- for some years before his death in 1994. Beginning with an extended portrait of Buddy Bolden as recalled by the likes of Jelly Roll Morton and Bunk Johnson as well as Barker himself, this book draws together a lifetime of stories and the vivid characters who populated "Storyville."

"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.

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.