One of the twentieth century's greatest composers, Duke Ellington (1899-1974) led a fascinating life. Beyond Category, the first biography to draw on the vast Duke Ellington archives at the Smithsonian Institution, recounts his remarkable career: his childhood in Washington, D.C., and his musical apprenticeship in Harlem his long engagement at the Cotton Club the challenging years of the depression his tours to Europe and into America's deep South, where he helped lower racial barriers the postwar years when television and bebop threatened to eclipse the big bands Ellington's own triumphant comeback at the 1956 Newport Jazz Festival his collaborations with Billy Strayhorn, Johnny Hodges, and Ella Fitzgerald as well as five decades of hits and masterpieces that constantly broke new ground.The art of Duke Ellington was a musical expression of the African-American experience, in all its pain, pride, and glory. He composed his music as he composed his life,with flair, passion, and individuality,and no book reveals the man and his artistic evolution more brilliantly than Beyond Category.

The first autobiography of a jazz musician, Louis Armstrong's Swing That Music is a milestone in jazz literature. Armstrong wrote most of the biographical material, which is of a different nature and scope than that of his other, later autobiography, Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans (also published by Da Capo/Perseus Books Group). Satchmo covers in intimate detail Armstrong's life until his 1922 move to Chicago but Swing That Music also covers his days on Chicago's South Side with "King" Oliver, his courtship and marriage to Lil Hardin, his 1929 move to New York, the formation of his own band, his European tours, and his international success. One of the most earnest justifications ever written for the new style of music then called "swing" but more broadly referred to as "Jazz," Swing That Music is a biography, a history, and an entertainment that really "swings."

Notes and Tones is one of the most controversial, honest, and insightful books ever written about jazz. As a black musician himself, Arthur Taylor was able to ask his subjects hard questions about the role of black artists in a white society. Free to speak their minds, these musicians offer startling insights into their music, their lives, and the creative process itself. This expanded edition is supplemented with previously unpublished interviews with Dexter Gordon and Thelonious Monk, a new introduction by the author, and new photographs. Notes and Tones consists of twenty-nine no-holds-barred conversations which drummer Arthur Taylor held with the most influential jazz musicians of the '60s and '70s,including:

Eddie Condon (1905-1973) pioneered a kind of jazz popularly known as Chicago-Dixieland, though musicians refer to it simply as Condon style. Played by small ensembles with driving beat, it was and is an informal, exciting music, slightly disjointed and often mischievous. The same could be said of Condon's autobiography, We Called It Music, a book widely celebrated for capturing the camaraderie of early jazz. Condon's wit was as legendary as the music he boosted. Here is Condon on modern jazz: "The boopers flat their fifths. We consume ours." On Bix Beiderbecke: "The sound came out like a girl saying yes." On the New York subway: "It was my first ride in a sewer." When his memoir was first published,to great acclaim,in 1947, he was well known as a newspaper columnist, radio personality, saloon keeper, guitarist, and bandleader. He was the ideal man to come up with an insightful portrait of the early days of white jazz, and his book offers nonpareil accounts of many of the jazz greats of that era, including Beiderbacke, Fats Waller, Jack Teagarden, Jimmy McPartland, Gene Krupa, Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong, and Bing Crosby.These were the days when jazz was popularly associated with Paul Whiteman and Irving Berlin. Condon considered true jazz an outlaw music and himself an outlaw. He and his cohorts tried to get as close as possible to the black roots of jazz, a scandalous thing in the'20s. Along the way he facilitated one of the first integrated recording sessions. We Called It Music, now published with an introduction by Gary Giddins that places the book in historical context, remains essential reading for anyone interested in the wild and restless beginnings of America's great musical art, or in the wit and vinegar of Eddie Condon.

Anyone who has ever heard a Billie Holiday record knows the sound of her voice,sad, sexy, always relaxed but securely aware of the beat. Conveying a poignancy that cut to the heart of a song, she redeemed even trivial material with her impeccable sense of dramatic phrasing and time. The well-known tale of her lifelong battle with drugs has obscured the artistry that has made her one of the most revered singers of the twentieth century. Everyone from Frank Sinatra (who in the 1950s called her "unquestionably the most important influence on American popular singing in the last twenty years") to Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan has recognized the singularity of her interpretations. The racism that Billie found at every turn, whether in Artie Shaw's band or in the heart of the south, immortalized in the chilling song "Strange Fruit," cannot be overlooked in her biography. Jazz historian John Chilton has told the story of her short, tragic, influential career with restraint, correcting many of the more sensational tales she wrote about herself in Lady Sings the Blues . Buck Clayton, who knew Billie in the Basie band during the nineteen-thirties, has written a warm and personal foreword to this fascinating biography of a great American artist.

This comprehensive survey of jazz piano, beginning with a brief history of the instrument within the jazz tradition and concluding with interviews that present twenty-seven pianists in their own words, is both wonderfully anecdotal and a serious piece of jazz history. Lyons has assembled a giant concert of piano voices,Bill Evans, Herbie Hancock, Teddy Wilson, Oscar Peterson, Keith Jarrett, Randy Weston, Cecil Taylor, Horace Silver, Dave Brubeck, Sun Ra, McCoy Tyner, Toshiko Akiyoshi, Chick Corea, and many others. The pianists are candid, intense, and always opinionated. Yet their responses are infused with a keen appreciation for fellow musicians, their contemporaries, and those who came before,Walter, Tatum, Ellington. For pianists everywhere, whatever their individual style, this book will speak to and for you as it expresses the thoughts of its many great artists.

Beginning with the emergence of commercial American music in the nineteenth century, Volume 1 includes essays on the major performers, composers, media, and movements that shaped our musical culture before rock and roll. Articles explore the theoretical dimensions of popular music studies; the music of the nineteenth century; and the role of black Americans in the evolution of popular music. Also included--the music of Tin Pan Alley, ragtime, swing, the blues, the influences of W. S. Gilbert and Rodgers and Hammerstein, and changes in lyric writing styles from the nineteenth century to the rock era.

Beginning with the emergence of commercial American music in the nineteenth century, Volume 1 includes essays on the major performers, composers, media, and movements that shaped our musical culture before rock and roll. Articles explore the theoretical dimensions of popular music studies; the music of the nineteenth century; and the role of black Americans in the evolution of popular music. Also included--the music of Tin Pan Alley, ragtime, swing, the blues, the influences of W. S. Gilbert and Rodgers and Hammerstein, and changes in lyric writing styles from the nineteenth century to the rock era.

The noted blues scholar Paul Oliver here examines the many different skeins of the blues form, relating them to other black traditions - musical and religious - and tracing the origin of the blues through the dense, many-coloured warp and weft of influences and inspiration. He describes "the dozens," Christmas rituals, and the coded (as well as blatant) sexual imagery that has always been a vital element of every popular song tradition. With extensive source notes, photographs, a discography, and two indexes of song titles and singers, this book serves as a sound, serious, and entertaining guide to the blues heritage that has vitalized so much of the world's musical culture.

The emergence of Jack Teagarden as an important jazz stylist was a significant feature of the '20s jazz scene. He brought a maturity to the sound of the trombone and until late in his life played with a laconic grace that few, if any, on his instrument have equaled. His collaboration with Louis Armstrong--who rated their musical relationship higher than any he had known--was one of the great partnerships in jazz history. The story of this funny, happy Texan is told with affection and detail in this, the only biography of Jack Teagarden."Obviously a man like Teagarden, with his mastery of his instrument, might have stepped into almost any kind of music and made a career for himself. But one thing this book makes clear is that Jack could not have been any kind of musician except a jazz musician. A jazz musician simply has to make his music and dedicate his life to it, even though he may not tell you (or himself) why he has to. He may not, indeed, even be able to say why, or need to say why. The need is to make music and, necessarily, lead the life that makes that possible. All of which has little or nothing to do with ego or acclaim or money. He needs to give his music to the world and he hopes the world will understand.You will find out about that need in these pages. You will also find plenty of the pranks and boys-will-be-boys anecdotes that seem so prevalent, diverting, and (under the surface) necessary a part of the musical life."--Martin Williams, from his new preface.

Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Count Basie, Lester Young, Charlie Parker, Norman Granz, Oscar Peterson, Ray Charles, Don Ellis, and Miles Davis--these are the dozen jazz figures whom Leonard Feather chose to describe the development of jazz. This is the first Feather book to examine in-depth the innovative figures who have led the way throughout the music's history. As composer, producer, and for almost half-a-century one of its leading critics, Feather has a unique perspective of these jazz immortals. He has worked with and known all of them. "These are portraits of human beings first, analyses of musicians or musical history only peripherally if at all," says Feather in his new foreword. A warm, affectionate, and perceptive inside account of twelve originals, the book is packed with wonderful stories. As Feather says: "Most of all I am grateful for the inspiration and friendship of the artists themselves. Armstrong and Ellington were directly responsible, through their records, for drawing me to jazz. After their magic had worked on me, the others, one by one, sustained and refreshed and invigorated my interest in, an involvement with, this liveliest of twentieth-century arts."

This pioneering study documents the birth of soul music in America during the 1950s and '60s when, in response to the black community's new self-awareness and pride, musicians such as James Brown, The Impressions, Wilson Pickett, King Curtis, Stevie Wonder, and others were discovering in the urban blues, gospel, and r&b a new sound--soul--that expressed fresh musical and social ideals.

John Chilton's 'Who's Who of Jazz' has established itself as a major jazz reference book on the lives of over a thousand musicians born before 1920. The informative biographies give the essential details of each musician's life and career, and jazz greats jostle with unknowns for the readers attention. This completely revised edition adds much new information to the musical histories of the players, and the biographies of some of the major figures have been rewritten to incorporate recent research.

It would be no exaggeration to call Charles Mingus the greatest bass player in the history of jazz indeed, some might even regard it as understatement, for the hurricane power of his work as a composer, teacher, band leader, and iconoclast reached far beyond jazz while remaining true to its heritage in the music of Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, and Thelonious Monk. In this new biography Brian Priestley has written a masterly study of Mingus's dynamic career from the early years in Swing, to the escapades of the Bebop era, through his musical maturity in the '50s when he directed a band that redefined collective improvisation in jazz. Woven in with exacting assessments of Mingus's artistic legacy is the story of his volatile, unpredictable, sometimes dangerous personality. The book views Mingus as a black artist increasingly politicized by his situation, but also unreliable as a witness to his own persecution. Capturing him in all his furious contradictions,passionate, cool, revolutionary but with a keen sense of tradition,Brian Priestley has produced what can be called, again without exaggeration, the best biography of a jazz musician we have ever seen.

The fifties, though a quiescent period in many ways, was one of the most fervent decades in jazz history. The landmarks of modern jazz were firmly planted and, it could be argued, nearly all directions the music has taken since then can be charted back to recordings, groups, or individuals from this era. In this series of profiles, Joe Goldberg examines the lives and the music, the crucial events and dominant forces of a decade of great music and conflicting esthetics: Miles Davis's recording of Kind of Blue Gerry Mulligan's pianoless quartet Cecil Taylor's percussive keyboard experiments John Coltrane's and Sonny Rollins's marathon saxophone solos MJQ's blending of classical structure and jazz improvisation Ornette Coleman's Free Jazz. From Mingus to Monk to Blakey, it was an age of giants. Perhaps never before or since in jazz history have so many wildly idiosyncratic jazz innovators been contemporaries. Joe Goldberg was there and what his ears heard has become here a lasting music document.

Black Music--whether it be jazz, blues, r&b, gospel, or soul--has always expressed, consciously or not, its African "oral" heritage, reflecting the conditions of a minority culture in the midst of a white majority. "Black Talk" is one of those rare books since LeRoi Jones's "Blues People" to examine the social function of black music in the diaspora; it sounds the depths of experience and maps the history of a culture from the jazz age to the revolutionary outbursts of the 1960s. Ben Sidran finds radical challenges to the Western, white literary tradition in such varied music as Buddy Bolden's loud and hoarse cornet style, the call and response between brass and reeds in a swing band, the emotionalism of gospel, the primitivism of Ornette Coleman, and the cool ethic of bebop. "The musician is the document," says Sidran. "He is the information himself. The impact of stored information is transmitted not through records or archives, but through the human response to life."

No European jazz musician has so enchanted the word as Django Reinhardt, the gypsy guitarist whose recording with Stephane Grappelly and the Hot Club of France have meant "The Thirties" to several generations of listeners, influencing musicians as far afield as Larry Coryell, Leon Redbone, Eddy Lang, and Charlie Christian.This is the only full-length study of Django ever published in English, an unforgettable portrait of a wild and independent figure who never learned to read or write (friends forged his autographs), exasperated those people who lived by schedules, gambled away a week's salary in a night, but who played the guitar like no one before or since. The distinguished French critic Charles Delaunay, who knows more about Django than anyone alive, here provides not only the familiar outline of a life- the childhood travels in gypsy caravans, the fire that left Django with a crippled hand, the legendary temper and generosity- but he also collected scores of anecdotes about the sensitivity and musical gifts that were the basis for Django's appearance as a character in Jean Cocteau's Les Enfants Terribles. Who else but Django could charm his way out of a jail sentence by serenading the police officer with his guitar?The comprehensive discography at the back of the book completes Delaunay's picture of this "misrepresented and fantastic creature, at once so captivating and so divorced from the contentions of his age."

Since 1934, the Village Vanguard in New York's Greenwich Village has hosted the foremost in live jazz, folk music, and comedy. Its owner, Max Gordon, has now written a personal history of his club and the hundreds of entertainment legends who have played there. Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, Lenny Bruce, Woody Allen, Woodie Guthrie, Betty Comden and Adolph Green, Josh White, Pete Seeger--Max has stories about all of them. And what stories! As Nat Hentoff says in his introduction, "A good many so-called professional writers have not done nearly so well."

The last few years have witnessed an enormous resurgence in the popularity of jazz, after some lean times in the sixties when many potential jazz fans turned to rock. Now the pendulum is on the backswing, and vintage and modern jazz as well as "jazz rock" are attracting huge new audiences. One factor involved in the comeback of jazz among blacks and whites alike is the rise of black consciousness, with its search for roots in the American experience. Nat Hentoff's "The Jazz Life" explores the social, economic, and psychological elements that make up the context of modern jazz. Among the jazz greats whose lives and work are discussed are Count Basie, Charles Mingus, John Lewis, Miles Davis, Thelonius Monk, and Ornette Coleman. Written with intelligence, passion, and wit, this jazz classic is of immense importance to anyone wanting a better understanding of the jazz--or indeed our American life.

Blues is a language--one which has evolved its own rules and which is the sole property of a culture always forced to the periphery of white society. As such it is a political language. Whether it is passed as a legacy from African village to Mississippi farm, or from farm to Chicago ghetto, or from ghetto to Paris cafe, it is part of a larger oral heritage that is an expression of black America. Makeshift instruments, runaway slaves, railroads, prisons, empty rooms, work gangs, blindness, and pain have all been involved in the passing of this legacy, which has moved from hand to hand like a bottle of whiskey among friends and which now, for whatever reasons, seems faced with extinction. As Lightnin' Hopkins says: "I see a few young musicians coming along. But it's not many. It's not many at all, and the few that is--I'll tell you, you know what I mean, they don't have it. They just don't feel it. . . . I never had that trouble. I had the one thing you need to be a blues singer. I was born with the blues."With an awareness of the urgency involved, and with considerable devotion, Samuel Charters has chosen twelve major bluesmen, each whom represents a major facet of the blues, and has written about them. Rather than adopt the voyeuristic tone of the academician, he has used the direct visceral images that have always composed the blues. Also included are interviews, photographs, lyrics, and separate chapters on the black experience in America, and the evolution of the blues language from its African origins. Samuel Charters has renewed contact with the greatness of the blues legacy--from the haunting lyric songs of the bluesmen like Robert Pete Williams and Lightnin' Hopkins to the fiercely joyous shouts of Champion Jack Depree, Memphis Slim, and Mighty Joe Young.

From the field cries and work chants of Southern Negroes emerged a rich and vital music called the country blues, an intensely personal expression of the pains and pleasures of black life. This music- recorded during the twenties by men like Blind Lemon Jefferson, Big Bill Broonzy, and Robert Johnson- had all but disappeared from memory until the folk music revival of the late 1950's created a new and appreciable audience for the country blues.On of the pioneering studies of this unjustly-neglected music was Sam Charter's The Country Blues. In it, Charters recreates the special world of the country bluesman- that lone black performer accompanying himself on the acoustic guitar, his music a rich reflection of his own emotional life.Virtually rewriting the history of the blues, Charters reconstructs its evolution and dissemination, from the first tentative soundings on the Mississippi Delta through the emergence, with Elvis Presley, of rock and roll. His carefully-researched biographies of near-legendary performers like Lonnie Johnson, Blind Boy Fuller, and Tampa Red- coupled with his perceptive discussions of their recordings- pay tribute to a kind of artistry that will never be seen or heard again. And his portraits of the still-strumming Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee, Muddy Waters, and Lightnin' Hopkins- point up the undying strength and vitality of the country blues.

The story of a woman whose work inspired one of London's greatest attractions. Born in Strasbourg, the young Marie Tussaud learned her skills from her mother's employer, Philippe Curtius. In 1780 she became tutor to King Louis XVI's sister and for eight years prior to the Revolution lived at the court in Versailles. In Paris throughout the Revolution, she was often in extreme danger. Incredibly, she was forced to make death masks from the decapitated heads of her friends who fell to the guillotine. In 1802, she opened her first exhibition at the Lyceum theatre in London. With modelled figures such as Napoleon and Josephine and other notables from the Revolution, her exhibition was very popular. She also had the guillotine blade that severed Marie Antoinette's head. For the next 26 years Madame Tussaud toured England and Scotland with her Waxwork Exhibition, until she established her base in Baker Street in 1835. She had always had a separate room, for the most gruesome of the models, which in 1846 Punch dubbed The Chamber of Horrors. The name stuck. She died in 1850 and in 1884, Tussaud's grandsons moved the exhibition to Marylebone Road, where it remains.

The social connotation of jazz in American popular culture has shifted dramatically since its emergence in the early twentieth century. Once considered youthful and even rebellious, jazz music is now a firmly established American artistic tradition. As jazz in American life has shifted, so too has the kind of venue in which it is performed. In Jazz Places, Kimberly Hannon Teal traces the history of jazz performance from private jazz clubs to public, high-art venues often associated with charitable institutions. As live jazz performance has become more closely tied to nonprofit institutions, the music's heritage has become increasingly important, serving as a means of defining jazz as a social good worthy of charitable support. Though different jazz spaces present jazz and its heritage in various and sometimes conflicting terms, ties between the music and the past play an important role in defining the value of present-day music in a diverse range of jazz venues, from the Village Vanguard in New York to SFJazz on the West Coast to Preservation Hall in New Orleans.

Hearing Luxe Pop explores a deluxe-production aesthetic that has long thrived in American popular music, in which popular-music idioms are merged with lush string orchestrations and big-band instrumentation. John Howland presents an alternative music history that centers on shifts in timbre and sound through innovative uses of orchestration and arranging, traveling from symphonic jazz to the Great American Songbook, the teenage symphonies of Motown to the "countrypolitan" sound of Nashville, the sunshine pop of the Beach Boys to the blending of soul and funk into 1970s disco, and Jay-Z's hip-hop-orchestra events to indie rock bands performing with the Brooklyn Philharmonic. This book attunes readers to hear the discourses gathered around the music and its associated images as it examines pop's relations to aspirational consumer culture, theatricality, sophistication, cosmopolitanism, and glamorous lifestyles.