From 1975 to 1981 the jazz giant Miles Davis temporarily retired from music. Almost completely reclusive, nobody outside of a very close circle knew what was happening to him. Rumors abounded: he was sick, he was dying, he was healthy; he was playing the trumpet, the organ, nothing at all. Only one jazz writer was able to get close to him during this time: Eric Nisenson. From 1978 to 1981 Nisenson conducted dozens of interviews with Miles Davis and his associates. The result was 'Round About Midnight, an engaging firsthand account of Miles's fascinating and difficult career. From his recordings with Charlie Parker and the Birth of the Cool nonet, through the Coltrane quintet, the Gil Evans-arranged masterpieces of the sixties, the landmark Kind of Blue album, the Shorter/Hancock/Carter/Williams group, and the success of his fusion recordings of the seventies, Miles's personality - contemplative, abruptly defiant, strong, elegant - meshed with his art to form one of the most compelling legends in the history of American music. While actively disdaining his audience, he sought to broaden it by incorporating elements of other musics - classical, flamenco, rock, funk - into his uncompromising jazz. This contradictory combination of contempt and a desire for recognition fueled controversy in both his public and private lives, and resulted in Miles's lengthy self-imposed isolation. Nisenson broke through that isolation, and his biographical portrait is vivid and telling. This updated edition features a new preface, new material covering Miles in the eighties, and a new recommended listening section.

The best biography of any jazz musician that we have. Bird Lives! will stand for a long time as a major source of information and illumination not only of the great musician with whom it deals but of the entire jazz life in this society.--Ralph Gleason Inspired by great affection and dedication, Bird Lives! provides a vivid and accurate picture not only of the saxophonist-composer as artist and human being but of his zeitgeist and the musical/social setting that produced him. Parker was an immensely complex personality; saint and satyr, loving father and footloose vagabond, with a limitless appetite for sex, music, food, pills, heroin, liquor, life. A man of vast influence, the most admired and imitated creator of the mid-1940s bop revolution, he was forced to work in dives, reduced to bumming dollars when he should have been respected as a reigning virtuoso. . . . A sensitive, penetrating portrait.--Leonard Feather, Los Angeles Times One of the very few jazz books that deserve to be called literature . . . perhaps the finest writing on jazz to be found anywhere. . . . Those aware of Parker's genius cannot do without this book.--Grover Sales, Saturday Review

Fifty years after hearing Sidney Bechet (1897-1959) in 1923, Duke Ellington recalled, "I have never forgotten the power and imagination with which he played". The first great jazz soloist, Bechet was a genius of the clarinet and the notoriously difficult soprano saxophone. In a career that spanned five decades and two continents he worked with Bunk Johnson, King Oliver, Duke Ellington, Josephine Baker, Jelly Roll Morton, and Louis Armstrong. Bechet was a giant in early New Orleans jazz and a pioneer of improvisation whose contribution to the music, from the traditional to the avant-garde, has been a vital and lasting one. This biography reveals with insight and precision the man and his music, and illuminates the many events obscured by Bechet's own highly readable but factually suspect autobiography, Treat It Gentle.

Martin provides a new overall assessment of the importance of Charlie Parker through an analysis of his improvisations in a variety of genres. Earlier studies of Parker argue that his style is based on an extensive network of melodic formulas that are combined to create solos. Because the same formulas appear throughout his improvisations regardless of the theme, these studies concluded that the solos do not usually relate to the original melodies. Charlie Parker and Thematic Improvisation provides a much-needed reassessment by showing that Parker's solos are often related to the original themes in unexpected and sometimes ingenious ways. The conclusion sums up features of Parker's style and discusses his contribution in the context of Western music history. Numerous transcriptions are provided. This groundbreaking technical study will be of interest to musicologists and serious students of jazz.

Celebrating the Duke offers readers a perceptive, panoramic survey of jazz as revealed, in illuminating detail, through the lives and music of its heroes (and heroines), from its founding fathers to the post-bebop generation, including Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong, Jimmie Lunceford, Lester Young, Charlie Parker, Albert Ayler, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, and a rich cache of writings on "America's greatest composer", the Duke himself.

Traditional jazz studies have tended to see jazz in purely musical terms, as a series of changes in rhythm, tonality, and harmony, or as a parade of great players. But jazz has also entered the cultural mix through its significant impact on novelists, filmmakers, dancers, painters, biographers, and photographers. Representing Jazz explores the "other" history of jazz created by these artists, a history that tells us as much about the meaning of the music as do the many books that narrate the lives of musicians or describe their recordings. Krin Gabbard has gathered essays by distinguished writers from a variety of fields. They provide engaging analyses of films such as Round Midnight, Bird, Mo' Better Blues, Cabin in the Sky, and Jammin' the Blues; the writings of Eudora Welty and Dorothy Baker; the careers of the great lindy hoppers of the 1930s and 1940s; Mura Dehn's extraordinary documentary on jazz dance; the jazz photography of William Claxton; painters of the New York School; the traditions of jazz autobiography; and the art of "vocalese." The contributors to this volume assess the influence of extramusical sources on our knowledge of jazz and suggest that the living contexts of the music must be considered if a more sophisticated jazz scholarship is ever to evolve. Transcending the familiar patterns of jazz history and criticism, Representing Jazz looks at how the music actually has been heard and felt at different levels of American culture. With its companion anthology, Jazz Among the Discourses, this volume will enrich and transform the literature of jazz studies. Its provocative essays will interest both aficionados and potential jazz fans.Contributors. Karen Backstein, Leland H. Chambers, Robert P. Crease, Krin Gabbard, Frederick Garber, Barry K. Grant, Mona Hadler, Christopher Harlos, Michael Jarrett, Adam Knee, Arthur Knight, James Naremore

Features Thelonious Monk, McCoy Tyner, Count Basie, and John Coltrane.

Features Lester Young, early black recording, Earl Hines, jazz and bop harmony.

Miles Davis, Gil Evans, Dizzy Gillespie, Jon Hendricks, Max Roach, Betty Carter, Jackie McLean, Don Cherry, Sonny Rollins, McCoy Tyner, Archie Shepp, Herbie Hancock, Tony Williams, Keith Jarrett, Wynton Marsalis, and Jack DeJohnette,these are just a few of the jazz musicians whose conversations with Ben Sidran are recorded in this volume. In stimulating, personal, and informative discussions, they not only reveal their personalities, but also detail aspects of the performance, technique, business, history, and emotions of jazz. Newly expanded with previously unpublished dialogues with David Murray, Dr. John, and Mose Allison, Talking Jazz is undoubtedly the best oral history of recent and contemporary jazz.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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."

Improvising Jazz gives the beginning performer and the curious listener alike insights into the art of jazz improvisation. Jerry Coker, teacher and noted jazz saxophonist, explains the major concepts of jazz, including blues, harmony, swing, and the characteristic chord progressions. An easy-to-follow self-teaching guide, Improvising Jazz contains practical exercises and musical examples. Its step-by-step presentation shows the aspiring jazz improviser how to employ fundamental musical and theoretical tools, such as melody, rhythm, and superimposed chords, to develop an individual melodic style.

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."