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Books > Music > Contemporary popular music > Jazz

Constructing Walking Jazz Bass Lines, Book I - Walking Bass Lines - The Blues in 12 Keys (Japanese, Paperback, Japanese ed):... Constructing Walking Jazz Bass Lines, Book I - Walking Bass Lines - The Blues in 12 Keys (Japanese, Paperback, Japanese ed)
Steven Mooney; Translated by Shinya Yonezawa, Madoka Mooney
R676 Discovery Miles 6 760 Ships in 10 - 15 working days

Rhythm Changes in 12 Keys is Book II in the " Constructing Walking Jazz Bass Lines " series for the Double Bassist and Electric Jazz Bassist.Rhythm Changes in 12 Keys compliments Book I " The Blues in 12 Keys " by following on with an in depth study of " must know " Jazz chord progressions for the aspiring Jazz Bassist.Rhythm Changes in 12 Keys is a complete guide demonstrating how to construct walking jazz bass lines in the jazz tradition. Part 1 of the book outlines and demonstrates the various techniques used by professional Jazz Bassists to provide forward motion and a strong harmonic and rhythmic foundation into bass lines. Part 2 of the book outlines Rhythm Changes in 12 keys with over 70 choruses of professional jazz bass lines.for Beginner to Advanced students.

Knowing Jazz - Community, Pedagogy, and Canon in the Information Age (Paperback): Ken Prouty Knowing Jazz - Community, Pedagogy, and Canon in the Information Age (Paperback)
Ken Prouty
R966 Discovery Miles 9 660 Ships in 10 - 15 working days

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

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

The Fierce Urgency of Now - Improvisation, Rights, and the Ethics of Cocreation (Hardcover, New): Daniel Fischlin, Ajay Heble,... The Fierce Urgency of Now - Improvisation, Rights, and the Ethics of Cocreation (Hardcover, New)
Daniel Fischlin, Ajay Heble, George Lipsitz
R2,634 R2,302 Discovery Miles 23 020 Save R332 (13%) Ships in 12 - 19 working days

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

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

That's Got 'Em! - The Life and Music of Wilbur C. Sweatman (Paperback): Mark Berresford That's Got 'Em! - The Life and Music of Wilbur C. Sweatman (Paperback)
Mark Berresford; Foreword by Samuel Charters
R1,102 Discovery Miles 11 020 Ships in 10 - 15 working days

Wilbur C. Sweatman (1882-1961) is one of the most important, yet unheralded, African American musicians involved in the transition of ragtime into jazz in the early twentieth century. In "That's Got 'Em ," Mark Berresford tracks this energetic pioneer over a seven-decade career. His talent transformed every genre of black music before the advent of rock and roll--"pickaninny" bands, minstrelsy, circus sideshows, vaudeville (both black and white), night clubs, and cabarets. Sweatman was the first African American musician to be offered a long-term recording contract, and he dazzled listeners with jazz clarinet solos before the Original Dixieland Jazz Band's so-called "first jazz records."

Sweatman toured the vaudeville circuit for over twenty years and presented African American music to white music lovers without resorting to the hitherto obligatory "plantation" costumes and blackface makeup. His bands were a fertile breeding ground of young jazz talent, featuring such future stars as Duke Ellington, Coleman Hawkins, and Jimmie Lunceford. Sweatman subsequently played pioneering roles in radio and recording production. His high profile and sterling reputation in both the black and white entertainment communities made him a natural choice for administering the estate of Scott Joplin and other notable black performers and composers.

"That's Got 'Em " is the first full-length biography of this pivotal figure in black popular culture, providing a compelling account of his life and times.

Big Band Jazz in Black West Virginia, 1930-1942 (Paperback): Christopher Wilkinson Big Band Jazz in Black West Virginia, 1930-1942 (Paperback)
Christopher Wilkinson
R1,102 Discovery Miles 11 020 Ships in 10 - 15 working days

The coal fields of West Virginia would seem an unlikely market for big band jazz during the Great Depression. That a prosperous African American audience dominated by those involved with the coal industry was there for jazz tours would seem equally improbable. "Big Band Jazz in Black West Virginia, 1930-1942" shows that, contrary to expectations, black Mountaineers flocked to dances by the hundreds, in many instances traveling considerable distances to hear bands led by Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Andy Kirk, Jimmie Lunceford, and Chick Webb, among numerous others. Indeed, as one musician who toured the state would recall, "All the bands were goin' to West Virginia."

The comparative prosperity of the coal miners, thanks to New Deal industrial policies, was what attracted the bands to the state. This study discusses that prosperity as well as the larger political environment that provided black Mountaineers with a degree of autonomy not experienced further south. Author Christopher Wilkinson demonstrates the importance of radio and the black press both in introducing this music and in keeping black West Virginians up to date with its latest developments. The book explores connections between local entrepreneurs who staged the dances and the national management of the bands that played those engagements. In analyzing black audiences' aesthetic preferences, the author reveals that many black West Virginians preferred dancing to a variety of music, not just jazz. Finally, the book shows bands now associated almost exclusively with jazz were more than willing to satisfy those audience preferences with arrangements in other styles of dance music.

Constructing Walking Jazz Bass Lines, Book I - Walking Bass Lines - The Blues in 12 Keys (Japanese, Paperback, Japanese bass... Constructing Walking Jazz Bass Lines, Book I - Walking Bass Lines - The Blues in 12 Keys (Japanese, Paperback, Japanese bass tab ed)
Steven Mooney; Translated by Shinya Yonezawa, Madoka Mooney
R709 Discovery Miles 7 090 Ships in 10 - 15 working days

Rhythm Changes in 12 Keys is Book II in the " Constructing Walking Jazz Bass Lines " series for the Double Bassist and Electric Jazz Bassist.Rhythm Changes in 12 Keys compliments Book I " The Blues in 12 Keys " by following on with an in depth study of " must know " Jazz chord progressions for the aspiring Jazz Bassist.Rhythm Changes in 12 Keys is a complete guide demonstrating how to construct walking jazz bass lines in the jazz tradition. Part 1 of the book outlines and demonstrates the various techniques used by professional Jazz Bassists to provide forward motion and a strong harmonic and rhythmic foundation into bass lines. Part 2 of the book outlines Rhythm Changes in 12 keys with over 70 choruses of professional jazz bass lines.for Beginner to Advanced students.

Blowin' the Blues Away - Performance and Meaning on the New York Jazz Scene (Paperback): Travis A. Jackson Blowin' the Blues Away - Performance and Meaning on the New York Jazz Scene (Paperback)
Travis A. Jackson
R1,115 Discovery Miles 11 150 Ships in 10 - 15 working days

New York City has always been a mecca in the history of jazz, and in many ways the cityOCOs jazz scene is more important now than ever before. "BlowinOCO the Blues Away" examines how jazz has thrived in New York following its popular resurgence in the 1980s. Using interviews, in-person observation, and analysis of live and recorded events, ethnomusicologist Travis A. Jackson explores both the ways in which various participants in the New York City jazz scene interpret and evaluate performance, and the criteria on which those interpretations and evaluations are based. Through the notes and words of its most accomplished performers and most ardent fans, jazz appears not simply as a musical style, but as a cultural form intimately influenced by and influential upon American concepts of race, place, and spirituality.

Jazz Cosmopolitanism in Accra - Five Musical Years in Ghana (Hardcover, New): Steven Feld Jazz Cosmopolitanism in Accra - Five Musical Years in Ghana (Hardcover, New)
Steven Feld
R2,509 Discovery Miles 25 090 Ships in 12 - 19 working days

In this remarkable book, Steven Feld, pioneer of the anthropology of sound, listens to the vernacular cosmopolitanism of jazz players in Ghana. Some have traveled widely, played with American jazz greats, and blended the innovations of John Coltrane with local instruments and worldviews. Combining memoir, biography, ethnography, and history, Feld conveys a diasporic intimacy and dialogue that contests American nationalist and Afrocentric narratives of jazz history. His stories of Accra's jazz cosmopolitanism feature Ghanaba/Guy Warren (1923-2008), the eccentric drummer who befriended the likes of Charlie Parker, Max Roach, and Thelonious Monk in the United States in the 1950s, only to return, embittered, to Ghana, where he became the country's leading experimentalist. Others whose stories figure prominently are Nii Noi Nortey, who fuses the legacies of the black avant-gardes of the 1960s and 1970s with pan-African philosophy in sculptural shrines to Coltrane and musical improvisations inspired by his work; the percussionist Nii Otoo Annan, a traditional master inspired by Coltrane's drummers Elvin Jones and Rashied Ali; and a union of Accra truck and minibus drivers whose squeeze-bulb honk-horn music for drivers' funerals recalls the jazz funerals of New Orleans. Feld describes these artists' cosmopolitan outlook as an "acoustemology," a way of knowing the world through sound.

Princess Noire - The Tumultuous Reign of Nina Simone (Paperback, New edition): Nadine Cohodas Princess Noire - The Tumultuous Reign of Nina Simone (Paperback, New edition)
Nadine Cohodas
R1,075 Discovery Miles 10 750 Ships in 10 - 15 working days

Born Eunice Waymon in Tryon, North Carolina, Nina Simone (1933-2003) began her musical life playing classical piano. A child prodigy, she wanted a career on the concert stage, but when the Curtis Institute of Music rejected her, the devastating disappointment compelled her to change direction. She turned to popular music and jazz but never abandoned her classical roots or her intense ambition. By the age of twenty six, Simone had sung at New York City's venerable Town Hall and was on her way. Tapping into newly unearthed material on Simone's family and career, Nadine Cohodas paints a luminous portrait of the singer, highlighting her tumultuous life, her innovative compositions, and the prodigious talent that matched her ambition. With precision and empathy, Cohodas weaves the story of Simone's contentious relationship with audiences and critics, her outspoken support for civil rights, her two marriages and her daughter, and, later, the sense of alienation that drove her to live abroad from 1993 until her death. Alongside these threads runs a more troubling one: Simone's increasing outbursts of rage and pain that signaled mental illness and a lifelong struggle to overcome a deep sense of personal injustice.

Harlem in Montmartre - A Paris Jazz Story between the Great Wars (Hardcover): William A. Shack Harlem in Montmartre - A Paris Jazz Story between the Great Wars (Hardcover)
William A. Shack
R1,103 R1,028 Discovery Miles 10 280 Save R75 (7%) Ships in 12 - 19 working days

During the years between the world wars, a small but dynamic community of African American jazz musicians left the United States and settled in Paris, creating a vibrant expatriate musical scene and introducing jazz to the French. While the Harlem Renaissance was taking off across the Atlantic, entertainers in Montmartre, the epicenter of the Parisian scene, contributed enthusiastically to a culture that thrived for two decades, until the occupation of the city by German troops on June 18, 1940. In "Harlem in Montmartre, " William Shack takes a fascinating look at this extraordinary cultural moment, one in which African American musicians could flee the racism of the United States to pursue their lives and art in the relatively free context of bohemian Europe. His book is the first comprehensive treatment of the rise and decline of the African American music community in Paris; in it, he considers the international dimensions of black experience in the modern era and explores the similarities and differences of Harlem-style jazz and culture in Europe and America.
Shack focuses on some of the principal actors who played critical roles in shaping the jazz scene in Montmartre--Josephine Baker, Sidney Bechet, and Bricktop--but he also discusses others who opened clubs, underwrote loans, and contributed their musical talents to this unparalleled experiment. As an anthropologist, Shack pays particular attention to the club culture. He describes the musicians' experiences, the settings in which they performed, and the response of French audiences.
Shack's meticulous research and encyclopedic knowledge of Montmartre's jazz culture, including the people and places involved, make this a riveting, authoritative work. Seamlessly fusing biographical, sociological, and historical details, he brings this unique era to life and demonstrates how the Paris jazz scene played a crucial role in legitimizing jazz--both in Europe and the United States.

The Jazz Ear (Paperback): Ben Ratliff The Jazz Ear (Paperback)
Ben Ratliff
R504 R474 Discovery Miles 4 740 Save R30 (6%) Ships in 10 - 15 working days

""The Jazz Ear" will be a permanent part of learning how to listen inside the musicians playing."--Nat Hentoff, "Jazz Times"

Jazz is conducted almost wordlessly: John Coltrane rarely told his quartet what to do, and Miles Davis famously gave his group only the barest instructions before recording his masterpiece "Kind of Blue." Musicians often avoid discussing their craft for fear of destroying its improvisational essence, rendering jazz among the most ephemeral and least transparent of the performing arts.

In "The Jazz Ear," acclaimed music critic Ben Ratliff discusses with jazz greats the recordings that most influenced them and skillfully coaxes out a profound understanding of the men and women themselves, the context of their work, and how jazz--from horn blare to drum riff--is conceptualized. Ratliff speaks with Sonny Rollins, Ornette Coleman, Branford Marsalis, Dianne Reeves, Wayne Shorter, Joshua Redman, and others about the subtle variations in generation and attitude that define their music.

Playful and keenly insightful, "The Jazz Ear" is a revelatory exploration of a unique way of making and hearing music.

Monk's Music - Thelonious Monk and Jazz History in the Making (Paperback): Gabriel Solis Monk's Music - Thelonious Monk and Jazz History in the Making (Paperback)
Gabriel Solis
R1,106 Discovery Miles 11 060 Ships in 10 - 15 working days

Thelonious Monk (1917-1982) was one of jazz's greatest and most enigmatic figures. As a composer, pianist, and bandleader, Monk both extended the piano tradition known as Harlem stride and was at the center of modern jazz's creation during the 1940s, setting the stage for the experimentalism of the 1960s and '70s. This pathbreaking study combines cultural theory, biography, and musical analysis to shed new light on Monk's music and on the jazz canon itself. Gabriel Solis shows how the work of this stubbornly nonconformist composer emerged from the jazz world's fringes to find a central place in its canon. Solis reaches well beyond the usual life-and-times biography to address larger issues in jazz scholarship - ethnography and the role of memory in history's construction. He considers how Monk's stature has grown, from the narrowly focused wing of the avant-garde in the 1960s and '70s to the present, where he is claimed as an influence by musicians of all kinds. He looks at the ways musical lineages are created in the jazz world and, in the process, addresses the question of how musicians use performance itself to maintain, interpret, and debate the history of the musical tradition we call jazz.

Considering Genius - Writings on Jazz (Paperback, New Ed): Stanley Crouch Considering Genius - Writings on Jazz (Paperback, New Ed)
Stanley Crouch
R1,139 Discovery Miles 11 390 Ships in 10 - 15 working days

Stanley Crouch-MacArthur Genius" Award recipient, co-founder of Jazz at Lincoln centre, National Book Award nominee, and perennial bull in the china shop of black intelligentsia-has been writing about jazz and jazz artists for more than thirty years. His reputation for controversy is exceeded only by a universal respect for his intellect and passion. As Gary Giddons notes: Stanley may be the only jazz writer out there with the kind of rhinoceros hide necessary to provoke and outrage and then withstand the fulminations that come back." In Considering Genius , Crouch collects some of his best loved, most influential, and most controversial pieces (published in Jazz Times , The New Yorker , the Village Voice , and elsewhere), together with two new essays. The pieces range from the introspective Jazz Criticism and Its Effect on the Art Form" to a rollicking debate with Amiri Baraka, to vivid, intimate portraits of the legendary performers Crouch has known.

Pearl Harbor Jazz - Changes in Popular Music in the Early 1940s (Paperback, Print-On-Demand): Peter Townsend Pearl Harbor Jazz - Changes in Popular Music in the Early 1940s (Paperback, Print-On-Demand)
Peter Townsend
R1,117 Discovery Miles 11 170 Ships in 10 - 15 working days

This book is a study of a crucial period in the life of American jazz and popular music. "Pearl Harbor Jazz" analyses the changes in the world of the professional musician brought about both by the outbreak of World War II and by long-term changes in the music business, in popular taste and in American society itself. It describes how the infrastructure of American music, the interdependent fields of recording, touring, live engagements, radio and the movies, was experiencing change in the conditions of wartime, and how this impacted upon musical styles, and hence upon the later history of popular music. Successive chapters of the book examine the impact of these changed conditions upon the songwriting and music publishing industries, upon the world of the touring big bands, and upon changing conceptions of the role of jazz and popular music.

Not only the economic conditions but also ideas were changing; the book traces a movement among writers and critics which created new definitions of 'jazz' and other terms that had a permanent influence on the way musical styles were thought of for the rest of the century. The book deals in some depth with the work of a number of important artists in these various fields, including, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Johnny Mercer and Frank Sinatra, looks at the growing presence of bebop, the rise of country music, and the contemporary musical scenes in such locations as New York and Los Angeles. The book combines detail of the day to day working lives of musicians with challenging views of the long-term development of musical style in jazz and popular music.

Peter Townsend lectures at Manchester Metropolitan University and in the School of Music at the University of Huddersfield, England

Blowin' Hot and Cool (Hardcover, Annotated Ed): John Gennari Blowin' Hot and Cool (Hardcover, Annotated Ed)
John Gennari
R1,140 Discovery Miles 11 400 Ships in 12 - 19 working days

In the illustrious and richly documented history of American jazz, no figure has been more controversial than the jazz critic. Jazz critics can be revered or reviled--often both--but they should not be ignored. And while the tradition of jazz has been covered from seemingly every angle, nobody has ever turned the pen back on itself to chronicle the many writers who have helped define how we listen to and how we understand jazz. That is, of course, until now.
In "Blowin' Hot and Cool," John Gennari provides a definitive history of jazz criticism from the 1920s to the present. The music itself is prominent in his account, as are the musicians--from Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington to Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Roscoe Mitchell, and beyond. But the work takes its shape from fascinating stories of the tradition's key critics--Leonard Feather, Martin Williams, Whitney Balliett, Dan Morgenstern, Gary Giddins, John Hammond, and Stanley Crouch, among many others. Gennari is the first to show the many ways these critics have mediated the relationship between the musicians and the audience--not merely as writers, but in many cases as producers, broadcasters, concert organizers, and public intellectuals as well.
For Gennari, the jazz tradition is not so much a collection of recordings and performances as it is a rancorous debate--the dissonant noise clamoring in response to the sounds of jazz. Against the backdrop of racial strife, class and gender issues, war, and protest that has defined the past seventy-five years in America, "Blowin' Hot and Cool" brings to the fore the most vital critics of jazz and the role they have played not only in defining the history of jazz but also inshaping its significance in American culture and life.


Dizzy - The Life and Times of John Birks Gillespie (Paperback, New edition): Donald L. Maggin Dizzy - The Life and Times of John Birks Gillespie (Paperback, New edition)
Donald L. Maggin
R611 Discovery Miles 6 110 Ships in 10 - 15 working days

A biography of a jazz giant, this title appeals to jazz lovers and Dizzy fans. It has been reviewed in books and music pages of national newspapers e.g., "Observer Music Monthly" magazine. Dizzy Gillespie has secured his place in the jazz pantheon as one of the most expressive and virtuosic improvisers in the history of the music. But, he was much more than that. As one of the primary creators of the bebop and Afro-Cuban revolutions, he twice fundamentally changed the way jazz improvisation was done. And, he later extended his revolutionary reach by transforming the aesthetic of big band jazz. This vivid biography chronicles Dizzy's saga from the lowest rung on the American social and political ladder to the highest. Born black in fiercely racist Cheraw, South Carolina in 1917, Dizzy combined great energy, a furious drive to succesed, and a one-in-a-million talent to climb quickly out of rural poverty to a role among the swing era jazz elite before his twenty-first birthday. Dizzy's story takes us on the road with the great Calloway, Hines, and Eckstine bands and to Cheraw's cotton fields, Harlem's after-hours clubs, the teeming 1940s 52nd street jazz scene, the rhythmic barrios of Havana, Rio's samba festivals, the White House, and the world's great concert halls as Dizzy teamed up with prodigious talents to make great music of a span of fifty-five years. It also records his spiritual growth over the decades and the intense love he earned from those close to him. Dizzy became beloved worldwide as an entertainer as he combined his electrifying musicianship with an infectious warmth and rare comedic skills to achieve a popularity that few jazz musicians have ever enjoyed.

Freedom Is, Freedom Ain't - Jazz and the Making of the Sixties (Paperback, New Ed): Scott Saul Freedom Is, Freedom Ain't - Jazz and the Making of the Sixties (Paperback, New Ed)
Scott Saul
R1,098 Discovery Miles 10 980 Ships in 10 - 15 working days

In the long decade between the mid-fifties and the late sixties, jazz was changing more than its sound. The age of Max Roach's Freedom Now Suite, John Coltrane's A Love Supreme, and Charles Mingus's The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady was a time when jazz became both newly militant and newly seductive, its example powerfully shaping the social dramas of the Civil Rights movement, the Black Power movement, and the counterculture. Freedom Is, Freedom Ain't is the first book to tell the broader story of this period in jazz--and American--history. The story's central figures are jazz musicians like Coltrane and Mingus, who rewrote the conventions governing improvisation and composition as they sought to infuse jazz with that gritty exuberance known as "soul." Scott Saul describes how these and other jazz musicians of the period engaged in a complex cultural balancing act: utopian and skeptical, race-affirming and cosmopolitan, they tried to create an art that would make uplift into something forceful, undeniable in its conviction, and experimental in its search for new possibilities. Freedom Is, Freedom Ain't considers these musicians and their allies as a cultural front of the Civil Rights movement, a constellation of artists and intellectuals whose ideas of freedom pushed against a cold-war consensus that stressed rational administration and collective security. Capturing the social resonance of the music's marriage of discipline and play, the book conveys the artistic and historical significance of the jazz culture at the start, and the heart, of the sixties.

Bessie (Paperback, Revised and Expanded Edition): Chris Albertson Bessie (Paperback, Revised and Expanded Edition)
Chris Albertson
R1,112 Discovery Miles 11 120 Ships in 10 - 15 working days

The definitive biography of Bessie Smith, the great singer known as the "Empress of the Blues" Considered by many to be the greatest blues singer of all time, Bessie Smith was also a successful vaudeville entertainer who became the highest paid African-American performer of the roaring twenties. This book-a revised and expanded edition of the classic biography of this extraordinary artist-debunks many of the myths that have circulated since her untimely death in 1937. Chris Albertson writes with insight and candor about the singer's personal life and her career, supplementing his historical research with dozens of interviews with her relatives, friends, and associates, in particular Ruby Walker Smith, a niece by marriage who toured with Bessie for over a decade. For this new edition he includes more details of Bessie's early years, new interview material, and a chapter devoted to events and responses that followed the original publication in 1971.

Body and Soul - Jazz and Blues in American Film, 1927-63 (Paperback): Peter Stanfield Body and Soul - Jazz and Blues in American Film, 1927-63 (Paperback)
Peter Stanfield
R539 Discovery Miles 5 390 Ships in 12 - 19 working days

Writing in the late 1930s, New York journalist Joseph Mitchell observed: "Except for the minstrel show, the strip act is probably America's only original contribution to the theater." In Body and Soul, Peter Stanfield's arguments echo Mitchell's observation. Stanfield begins by exploring how Hollywood used blackface minstrelsy to represent an emerging urban American theatrical history, and ends with a look at how American film at the close of the studio era represented urban decay through the figure of the burlesque dancer and stripper. In between, Stanfield considers the representation of American urban life in jazz, blues, ballads, and sin-songs and the manner in which the film studios exploited this "gutter" music. Alongside extensive, thought-provoking, and lively analysis of some of the most popular jazz and blues songs of the twentieth century--"Frankie and Johnny," "St. Louis Blues," "The Man I Love," "Blues in the Night," and "Body and Soul"--the book contains new work on blackface minstrelsy in early sound movies, racial representation and censorship, torch singers and torch songs, burlesque and strippers, the noir cityscape, the Hollywood Left, and hot jazz.

Jazz Writings (Paperback, New ed): Philip Larkin Jazz Writings (Paperback, New ed)
Philip Larkin
R1,185 R1,123 Discovery Miles 11 230 Save R62 (5%) Ships in 10 - 15 working days

Philip Larkin (1922-85) was not only one of the foremost English poets of the twentieth century, but also a notable novelist and a distinguished writer on jazz. He was jazz critic for The Daily Telegraph between 1961 and 1971. Jazz Writings brings together Larkin's reviews, articles and essays written for The Guardian, The Observer, The New Statesman, and numerous other publications.

Jelly's Blues - The Life, Music, and Redemption of Jelly Roll Morton (Paperback, New Ed): Howard Reich, William Gaines Jelly's Blues - The Life, Music, and Redemption of Jelly Roll Morton (Paperback, New Ed)
Howard Reich, William Gaines
R708 Discovery Miles 7 080 Ships in 10 - 15 working days

The acclaimed, definitive biography of the first jazz composer, based on newly discovered archival material. Jelly's Blues recounts the tumultuous life of Jelly Roll Morton (ca., 18851941). A virtuoso pianist with a larger-than-life personality, he composed such influential early jazz pieces as King Porter Stomp and New Orleans Blues. However, by the late 1930s, he was nearly forgotten. In 1992, the death of an eccentric memorabilia collector led to the unearthing of a startling archive, revealing Morton to be a much more complex and passionate man than many realized. An especially immediate and visceral look into the jazz worlds of New Orleans and Chicago, Jelly's Blues is a definitive biography, a long overdue look at one of the twentieth century's most important composers.

So What - The Life of Miles Davis (Paperback, New Ed): John Szwed So What - The Life of Miles Davis (Paperback, New Ed)
John Szwed 2
R517 R469 Discovery Miles 4 690 Save R48 (9%) Ships in 9 - 17 working days

Miles Davis was one of the crucial influences in the development of modern jazz. His "Kind of Blue" is an automatic inclusion in any critic's list of the great jazz albums, the one jazz record people who own no other jazz records possess, and still sells 250,000 copies a year in the US alone. But Miles regularly changed styles, leaving his inimitable impact on many forms of jazz, whether he created them or simply developed the work of others, from modal jazz and be-bop, his seminal Quintet and his big-band work, to the jazz-funk experiments of later years. Miles not only knew and worked with everyone who was anyone in jazz, from Coltrane to Monk, he was a friend of Sartre's, lover of Juliette Greco and musical collaborator with musicians who ranged from Stockhausen to Hendrix.

Tonight At Noon - A Love Story (Paperback, Export Ed): Sue Mingus Tonight At Noon - A Love Story (Paperback, Export Ed)
Sue Mingus
R532 Discovery Miles 5 320 Ships in 10 - 15 working days

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.

Billie Holiday - Wishing On The Moon (Paperback, Revised): Donald Clarke Billie Holiday - Wishing On The Moon (Paperback, Revised)
Donald Clarke
R910 Discovery Miles 9 100 Ships in 10 - 15 working days

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."

Crazy Rhythm - From Brooklyn And Jazz To Nixon's White House, Watergate, And Beyond (Paperback, 1st Da Capo Press ed):... Crazy Rhythm - From Brooklyn And Jazz To Nixon's White House, Watergate, And Beyond (Paperback, 1st Da Capo Press ed)
Leonard Garment
R836 Discovery Miles 8 360 Ships in 10 - 15 working days

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."

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