An Unsung Cat explores the life and music of jazz saxophonist, Warne Marsh. Safford Chamberlain follows the artist from his start in youth bands like the Hollywood Canteen Kids and The Teen-Agers through his studies under Lennie Tristano, his brilliant playing of the 1950s, his disappearance from public view in the 1960s, his re-emergence in the 1970s, and his belated recognition in the 1980s as one of the finest tenor players of the post-World War II era. Through interviews with the Marsh family and friends, Chamberlain offers an inside view of Marsh's private life, including his struggles with drug abuse. Detailed analysis of outstanding performances complements the personal story, while an extensively researched discography and photographs reveal the public and private face of this unique performer. In addition to the book, Scarecrow is pleased to offer a companion compact disc, released by Storyville Records. The tracks on the CD provide a representative sampling of Marsh's best work, while providing a historical overview of his development, from the beginning track, "Apple Honey," which is a private, low-fidelity tape from an NBC radio broadcast in 1945 of the Hoagy Carmichael Show, to the final track, "Sweet and Lovely," captured months before his death in 1987.

Now in paperback! Showcases professional work in the arena of jazz theory. Among the contributors are scholars of jazz theory as well as musicians, including four of the founding members of the jazz section of the Society for Music Theory. The articles offer a close analysis of a wide variety of jazz styles and span the years from the 1920s to the 1960s. Feature articles include analyses of the music of Johnny Dodds, Charlie Parker, Herbie Hancock, Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane, an overview of jazz theory that examines its history and purpose, a discussion of linear intervallic patterns in the jazz repertory, and a review of scientific analyses of jazz microrhythms. Of great interest to jazz theorists, performers, educators and critics.

A group of resourceful kids start "solution-seekers.com," a website where "cybervisitors" can get answers to questions that trouble them. But when one questioner asks the true meaning of Christmas, the kids seek to unravel the mystery by journeying back through the prophecies of the Old Testament. What they find is a series of "S" words that reveal a "spectacular story " With creative characters, humorous dialogue and great music, The "S" Files is a children's Christmas musical your kids will love performing.

.,."that rare thing, a piece of careful scholarship that is also superby entertaining...Starr, who is president of Oberlin College and has been associated with the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies, is also a professional jazz musician, and his knowledgeable affection for the music shines through the text." - Andrea Lee, New York Times Book Review

The voice of Jimmy Scott is one of the world's most mesmerizing instruments, transcending gender and age. But its beauty is inextricably entwined with pain, hardship, and tragedy-yet Scott's resilience made his life a story of triumph. Born in Cleveland in 1925, Scott was orphaned as a teenager, and suffered from Kallman's syndrome, which kept his voice unnaturally high. He toured with Lionel Hampton in the '40s and recorded for Savoy Records. In 1962 Ray Charles produced and played on what many agree was Scott's best album, "Falling in Love Is Wonderful," and a career breakthrough seemed imminent. But it was not to be, and Scott returned to Cleveland to work as an orderly and a shipping clerk-until he was rediscovered performing at his friend Doc Pomus's funeral in March of 1991. Acclaimed biographer David Ritz, with Scott's cooperation, has created a poignant portrait of a man whose voice cuts to the sadness and hope within us all. "Faith in Time" resonates like a haunting melody.

Tonight at Noon is a story of love between American opposites: she, a product of privilege, a Smith College graduate who worked as a journalist in Europe and in New York he, an authentic jazz master, a brilliant, eccentric, difficult artist, a scion of Watts, Los Angeles, who would become one of America's foremost composers. Charles Mingus's improbable love for Sue Graham, his unpredictable confrontations, excesses, and exaggerations, drew her into a bewildering world, one where jazz and art were magnificent obsessions -obsessions refracted through Mingus's individualistic interpretation of life itself. It was a world that was as hostile, enlightening, and baffling as any far-off country. In Tonight at Noon, Sue Graham tells the story of that world, of her tumultuous, passionate marriage, and of her personal odyssey inside and outside its confines. Here is a love story that is also an important chapter in jazz history, a portrait of a marriage that also sheds light on the inner workings of a rare and complex artist whose music still plays to packed concert halls almost twenty-five years after his death.

(Book). The creator of the unforgettable "Girl from Ipanema" tenor sax tone, this son of Ukranian immigrants took his unique sound through five decades of swing, cool, bossa and beyond. From Getz's teenage gigs with Dorsey, Goodman and Stan Kenton, fame with Woody Herman, years as a masterful bandleader, and struggles with drugs and the law, this biography tells the bittersweet story of one of our most beloved jazz musicians. This is the first book to focus on Getz's musical legacy, exploring the lightness of touch, lyricism and warm glow that marked his sound. It also gives insight into his skills as a consummate improviser, capable of playing with a musical, tonal and emotional range matched by few other musicians. "We'd all sound like that if we could." John Coltrane on Stan Getz

Certainly no singer has been more mythologized and more misunderstood than Billie Holiday, who helped to create much of the mystique herself with her autobiography, "Lady Sings the Blues," "Now, finally, we have a definitive biography," said "Booklist" of Donald Clarke's "Billie Holiday," "by a deeply compassionate, respectful, and open-minded biographer [whose] portrait embraces every facet of Holiday's paradoxical nature, from her fierceness to her vulnerability, her childlikeness to her innate elegance and amazing strength." Clarke was given unrivaled access to a treasure trove of interviews from the 1970s--interviews with those who knew Lady Day from her childhood in the streets and good-time houses of Baltimore through the early days of success in New York and into the years of fame, right up to her tragic decline and death at the age of forty-four. Clarke uses these interviews to separate fact from fiction and, in the words of the "Seattle Times," "finally sets us straight. . .evoking her world in all its anguish, triumph, force and irony." "Newsday" called this "a thoroughly riveting account of Holiday and her milieu." The "New York Times" raved that it "may be the most thoroughly valuable of the many books on Holiday," and Helen Oakley Dance in "JazzTimes" said, "We should probably have to wait a long time for another life of Billie Holiday to supersede Donald Clarke's achievement."

It was for stage bands, for dancing, and for a jiving mood of letting go. Throughout the nation swing re-sounded with the spirit of good times.

But this pop genre, for a decade America's favorite, arose during the worst of times, the Great Depression.

From its peak in the 1930s until bebop, r & b, and country swamped it after World War II, swing defined an American generation and measured America's musical heartbeat. In its heyday swing reached a mass audience of very disparate individuals and united them. They perceived in the tempers and tempos of swing the very definition of modernity.

A survey of the thirties reveals that the time was indeed the Swing Era, America's segue into modernity. What social structures encouraged swing's creation, acceptance, and popularity? "Swing, That Modern Sound" examines the cultural and historical significance of swing and tells how and why it achieved its audience, unified its fans, defined its generation, and, after World War II, fell into decline.

What fed the music? And, in turn, what did the music feed? This book shows that swing manifested the kind of up-to-date allure that the populace craved. Swing sounded modern, happy, optimistic. It flouted the hardship signals of the Great Depression. The key to its rise and appeal, this book argues, was its all-out appropriation of modernity--consumer advertising, the language and symbols of consumption, and the public's all-too-evident wish for goods during a period of scarcity.

As it examines the role of race, class, and gender in the creation of this modern music, "Swing, That Modern Sound" tells how a music genre came to symbolize the cultural revolution taking place in America.

Leonard Garment was a successful Wall Street attorney when, in 1965, he found himself arguing a Supreme Court case alongside his new law partner,former Vice President Richard Nixon. It was the start of a friendship that lasted more than thirty years. In Crazy Rhythm, which the New York Times Book Review called "an eloquent memoir," Garment engagingly tells of his boyhood as the child of immigrants, and the beginning of a life-long love affair with jazz. After Brooklyn Law School, Garment went on to Wall Street, where encountering Nixon changed the course of his life. Crazy Rhythm allows us a rare, intimate look at Nixon's extraordinary tenure in the White House. More than that, the book tells stories from a life that has included close encounters with characters such as Benny Goodman and Billie Holiday, Henry Kissinger and Alan Greenspan, Golda Meir and Yasser Arafat, Giovanni Agnelli and Marc Rich, and moves like the best jazz, in a writer's voice that is truly one-of-a-kind. To quote former U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, "A century from now, I cannot doubt Americans will still be reading Crazy Rhythm. This is a story of our time, written for the ages."

In his varied and colourful life, Teddy Wilson worked with innumerable great names of jazz. He came to fame in the small groups led by Benny Goodman and also through his remarkable series of recordings with the singer Billie Holiday. During the mid 1970's Wilson recorded and toured often in Europe and during these visits he was frequently teamed with the Dutch Swing College Band. The band's guitarist Arie Ligthart and Anglo-Dutch publicist and author Humphrey van Loo took the opportunity of these visits to work with Wilson on a full length autobiography which has lain unpublished during the years since Wilson's death in 1986. Teddy Wilson Talks Jazz is a candid account of Wilson's life and career, from his childhood through to his association with the critic and producer John Hammond, and on to his associations with Goodman, Holiday, his own bands and fellow pianists such as Earl Hines and Art Tatum.Highlights in ths very personal view of a life in music include recollections of Al Capone, his respect for jazz pioneers such as Jelly Roll Morton, his account of the organization behind Billie Holiday's recording career, his recordings with Lester Young and his 1962 trip to Russia as well as his insider's account of working with Benny Goodman. Teddy Wilson was one of the most significan jazz pianists of the swing era. He was a memner of Benny Goodman's small groups, made a series of immortal small group records accompanying Billie Holiday, and went on to a distinguished international career as a soloist and a band-leader. He died in 1986. Arie Lingthart was a guitarist with the Dutch Swing College Band for over twenty years, appearing on many sessions with the band's Americal guests including Billy Butterfield, Joe Ventui and Jimmy Witherspoon, as well as Teddy Wilson. Humphrey van Loo is an Anglo-Dutch writer, journalist and publicist.

Twenty-five years ago in his hit song, "Sir Duke," Stevie Wonder sings: "Music knows it is and always will be one of the things that life just won't quit. / Here are some of music's basic pioneers that time will not allow us to forget: / There's Basie, Miller, Satchmo, and the King of All, Sir Duke! / And with a voice like Ella's ringing out, there's no way the band can lose! / You can feel it all over!" To say that Ellington was a prominent jazz-band leader of the 20th century would be like saying William Shakespeare was simply a prominent English playwright of his time. This book begins with personal reflections as well as the life before going on to consider - through anecdote, musical scholarship and personal interviews - Ellington's profound and direct influence on an amazing range of pop artists: Stevie Wonder, Steely Dan, Miles Davis (who, in the ultimate tribute, had himself interred next to The Duke in New York's Woodlawn Cemetery), Sun Ra, James Brown, Sly Stone, George Clinton, Prince, Frank Zappa, Charles Mingus, Ravi Shankar and others.

The family of musical styles known as jazz came into being around 1900 as several popular black musical idioms coalesced. This free-flowing, spontaneous music based in improvisation emerged primarily from ragtime and the blues. But jazz did not remain solely in the domain of American music, for very quickly it swept through virtually all of the national culture as fiction, poetry, film, photography, painting, and classical music came under its spell. If it's art that expresses a nation's essence best, then jazz set America's tempo and afforded an artistic pattern for modernism.

In this book for the nonspecialist Peter Townsend shows how during an entire century jazz has appeared in a wide diversity of times and places and in many different cultural settings.

He reveals how jazz surfaced early in America's movies ("The Jazz Singer," "Strike Up the Band," "Orchestra Wives," "Blues in the Night") and how it became an aesthetic model serious composers (George Gershwin, Aaron Copland) did not miss. Jazz has punctuated literary fiction (Ralph Ellison, Eudora Welty, James Baldwin, John Clellon Holmes, Jack Kerouac, Toni Morrison) and American poetry (William Carlos Williams, Carl Sandburg, Langston Hughes, Percy Johnson). Jazz influenced painting (Jackson Pollock, Romare Bearden, Stuart Davis, Archibald Motley, and Jimmy Ernst), and several photographers have devoted their careers to documenting jazz performers and their music scene (William Claxton, William Gottlieb, Roy De Carava, Carol Reiff).

Townsend probes the deep-rooted mythology that holds jazz as indefinable, unteachable, and instinctive with blacks but tough for whites and that its birthplace was New Orleans brothels, that its musicians live tragic lives, and that jazz is dominated by males and despises whiffs of the mainstream.

As modernism swayed to the tempos of jazz and adapted to its modes, the once clearly defined lines of demarcation faded and jazz became well established as one of the great musical cultures of the world.

Peter Townsend is a senior lecturer in the School of Music and Humanities at the University of Huddersfield in England.

Copublished with Edinburgh University Press

For sale in the U.S.A., Canada, and U.S. dependencies only

Now available for a new generation of swing enthusiasts, reissued to coincide with the release of "The World of Swing" CD from Columbia/Legacy, this monumental history of big band jazz, documented through interviews with forty leading musicians, has been updated with a new introduction and discography by Dan Morgenstern.

Back in the early 1940s, late at night in the clubs of Harlem, a handful of jazz musicians began to experiment with a style that no one had ever heard before. The music was fast, complicated, impossible to play for many of the older musicians--but it soon became the lingua franca of jazz music. They called it bebop, and as the years went by, it became even more popular. Today it reigns as perhaps the best-loved style of jazz ever created. Ira Gitler conveys the excitement of this musical birth as only someone who was there can. In "The Masters of Bebop," Gitler traces the advent of what was a revolution in sound. He profiles the leading players--Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillepie, Max Roach--but also studies the style and music of the first disciples, such as Dexter Gordon and J. J. Johnson, to reveal bebop's pervasive influence throughout American culture. Revised with an updated discography--and with a new chapter covering bebop right up through the end of the twentieth century--"The Masters of Bebop" is the essential listener's handbook.

In candid interviews, jazz players, composers and critics share their thoughts on how racism has affected their lives. Gene Lees points out that many jazz musicians have been at least in part Native Americans, but the Indian contribution has never been acknowledged. Dave Brubeck, who himself has Indian ancestors, describes how racism long made it all but impossible for jazz groups composed of white and black players to book tours. And Horace Silver recalls listening as a boy to the black Jimme Lunceford band through the wooden slats of a Connecticut pavilion to which blacks were not admitted - except as performers.

"The ultimate in art is self-expression, not escape."-Duke Ellington In this fascinating portrait of one of America's greatest musical legends, longtime friend and jazz historian Stanley Dance recounts the life of the incomparable Duke Ellington in his own words and in the words of the artists who played along with him: longtime co-composer Billy Strayhorn, saxophonists Johnny Hodges and Ben Webster, trumpeters Cootie Williams and Clark Terry, drummer Sonny Greer, vocalist Alice Babs, and organist Wild Bill Davis, among many others. There are also first-hand accounts of Ellington's world tours, performances in churches and the White House, interviews and public appearances, and a complete discography and chronology. The result is a timeless chronicle of the long and extraordinary career of a music master."The truest and most intimate portrait of the great Ellington that we have."-Whitney Balliett

(Book). Through anecdotal biographies and evocative photos, this book by jazz author extraordinaire Scott Yanow portrays every key Afro-Cuban Jazz innovator past and present, plus other jazz artists influenced by this infectious music. Also includes reviews and ratings of recordings that make (or don't make) the cut, and essays packed with historical insight not found in other guides. Musicians covered include: Tito Puente, Cal Tjader, Willie Bobo, Machito, Poncho Sanchez, Chucho Valdes, Arturo Sandoval, Mongo Santamaria, Gato Barbieri, Eddie Palmieri, and many more.

In this companion to his own Riding on a Blue Note and Faces in the Crowd, Gary Giddins provides another piece in his mosaic providing a guide to the jazz world. Whether describing a concert, defining a style or tracing an artist's evolution, Giddins' writing swings with the rhythm of the music. The book moves from sweeping surveys of jazz history, to vivid assessments of individual performers, including Thelonius Monk, Art Pepper, Stan Getz, the Marsalis brothers, Ornette Coleman and David Murray.

Once a thriving body of innovative and fluid music, jazz is now the victim of destructive professional and artistic forces, says Eric Nisenson. Corruption by marketers, appropriation by the mainstream, superficial media portrayal, and sheer lack of skill have all contributed to the demise of this venerable art form. Nisenson persuasively describes how the entire jazz "industry" is controlled by a select cadre with a choke hold on the most vital components of the music. As the listening culture has changed, have spontaneity and improvisation been sacrificed? You can agree or disagree with Nisenson's thesis and arguments, but as "Booklist" says, "his passion is engrossing."

First published in 1984 and reissued to coincide with the publication of the second volume, this selection of the 250 best jazz records traces the earliest roots of the music to the beginnings of the modern jazz era. Volume One's focus is on LP collections of 78 rpm originals and nearly every significant musician -- both familiar and obscure -- of early 20th-century jazz is listed. For each record listed, full details of personnel, recording dates and locations are provided.

Unlike most jazz arranging books, which focus on the rudiments of arranging (transposition, ranges, notation, and so forth), this book deals with the real substance of arranging for small jazz ensembles, in addition to the rudiments. Rinzler devotes a chapter to each of the following arranging elements: intros, endings, accents/breaks/dynamics, time and tempo changes, style changes, form, rhythm section procedure, harmony and orchestration. Over a hundred musical examples demonstrate arranging techniques that apply to 147 jazz standards and modern compositions.

Al Rose has known virtually every noteworthy jazz musician of this century. For many of them he has organized concerts, composed songs that they later played or sang, and promoted their acts. He has, when called upon, bailed them out of jail, straightened out their finances, stood up for them at their weddings, and eulogized them at their funerals. He has caroused with them in bars and clubs from New Orleans to New York, from Paris to Singapore -- and survived to tell the story. The result has been a lifetime of friendship with some of the music world's most engaging and rambunctious personalities. In I Remember Jazz, Rose draws on this unparallelled experience to recall, through brief but poignant vignettes, the greats and the near-greats of jazz. In a style that is always entertaining, unabashedly idiosyncratic, and frequently irreverent, he writes about Jelly Roll Morton and Bunny Berigan, Eubie Blake and Bobby Hackett, Earl Hines and Louis Armstrong, and more than fifty others.

Rose was only twenty-two when he was first introduced to Jelly Roll Morton. He quickly discovered that they had more in common than a love of music. Something of a peacock at that age, Rose was dressed in a "polychromatic, green-striped suit, pink shirt with a detachable white collar, dubonnet tie, buttonhole, and handkerchief" -- and so was Jelly Roll. About Eubie Blake, Rose notes that he was not only a superb musician but also a notorious ladies' man. Rose recalls asking the noted pianist when he was ninety-seven, "How old do you have to be before the sex drive goes?" Blake's reply: "You'll have to ask someone older than me." Once in 1947, Rose was asked to assemble a group of musicians to play at a reception to be hosted by President Truman at Blair House in Washington, D.C. The musicians included Muggsy Spanier, George Brunies, Pee Wee Russell, Pops Foster, and Baby DOdds. But the hit of the evening was President Truman himself, who joined the group on the piano to play "Kansas City Kitty" and the "Missouri Waltz."

I Remember Jazz is replete with such amusing and affectionate anecdotes -- vignettes that will delight all fans of the music. Al Rose does indeed remember jazz. And for that we can all be grateful.

This history of jazz, spanning the twentieth century, is the first to place it within the broad context of American culture. Burton Peretti argues persuasively that this distinctive American music has been a key thread in the tapestry of the nation's culture. The music itself, its players and its audience, and the critical debates it has prompted, tell us much about changes in American life since 1910. Mr. Peretti traces the emergence of jazz out of ragtime during a time of tumultuous growth of cites and industries. In the 1920s jazz flourished and symbolized the cultural struggle between modernists and traditionalists. As American sought reassurance and self-esteem during the Great Depression, jazz reached new levels of sophistication in the Swing Era. World War II encouraged rapid changes in popular tastes, and in the postwar decades jazz became both a voice of a globally dominant America and an avant-garde music reflecting social and political turmoil. Today, Mr. Peretti concludes, jazz symbolizes important cultural trends and enjoys a new prestige in a complex musical scene. Jazz in American Culture tells a peculiarly American story, evaluating the music as well as those who created it, and opening new perspectives on our cultural history.