Adrian Rollini (1903-1956), an American jazz multi-instrumentalist, played the bass saxophone, piano, vibraphone, and an array of other instruments. He even introduced some, such as the harmonica-like cuesnophone, called Goofus, never before wielded in jazz. Adrian Rollini: The Life and Music of a Jazz Rambler draws on oral history, countless vintage articles, and family archives to trace Rollini's life, from his family's arrival in the US to his development and career as a musician and to his retirement and death. A child prodigy, Rollini was playing the piano in public at the age of five. At sixteen in New York he was recording pianola rolls when his peers recognized his talent and asked him to play xylophone and piano in a new band, the California Ramblers. When he decided to play a relatively new instrument, the bass saxophone, the Ramblers made their mark on jazz forever. Rollini became the man who gave this instrument its place. Yet he did not limit himself to playing bass parts-he became the California Ramblers' major soloist and created the studio and public sound of the band. In 1927 Rollini led a new band that included such jazz greats as Bix Beiderbecke and Frank Trumbauer. During the Depression years, he was back in New York playing with several bands including his own New California Ramblers. In the 1940s, Rollini purchased a property on Key Largo. He rarely performed again for the public but hosted rollicking jam sessions at his fishing lodge with some of the best nationally known and local players. After a car wreck and an unfortunate hospitalization, Rollini passed away at age fifty-three.

Analysis of Jazz: A Comprehensive Approach, originally published in French as Analyser le jazz, is available here in English for the first time. In this groundbreaking volume, Laurent Cugny examines and connects the theoretical and methodological processes that underlie all of jazz. Jazz in all its forms has been researched and analyzed by performers, scholars, and critics, and Analysis of Jazz is required reading for any serious study of jazz; but not just musicians and musicologists analyze jazz. All listeners are analysts to some extent. Listening is an active process; it may not involve questioning but it always involves remembering, comparing, and listening again. This book is for anyone who attentively listens to and wants to understand jazz. Divided into three parts, the book focuses on the work of jazz, analytical parameters, and analysis. In part one, Cugny aims at defining what a jazz work is precisely, offering suggestions based on the main features of definition and structure. Part two he dedicates to the analytical parameters of jazz in which a work is performed: harmony, rhythm, form, sound, and melody. Part three takes up the analysis of jazz itself, its history, issues of transcription, and the nature of improvised solos. In conclusion, Cugny addresses the issues of interpretation to reflect on the goals of analysis with regard to understanding the history of jazz and the different cultural backgrounds in which it takes place. Analysis of Jazz presents a detailed inventory of theoretical tools and issues necessary for understanding jazz.

Behind the iconic jazz orchestras, vocalists, and stage productions of the Swing Era lay the talents of popular music's unsung heroes: the arrangers. John Wriggle takes you behind the scenes of New York City's vibrant entertainment industry of the 1930s and 1940s to uncover the lives and work of jazz arrangers, both black and white, who left an indelible mark on American music and culture. Blue Rhythm Fantasy traces the extraordinary career of arranger Chappie Willet--a collaborator of Louis Armstrong, Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, Gene Krupa, and many others--to revisit legendary Swing Era venues and performers from Harlem to Times Square. Wriggle's insightful music analyses of big band arranging techniques explore representations of cultural modernism, discourses on art and commercialism, conceptions of race and cultural identity, music industry marketing strategies, and stage entertainment variety genres. Drawing on archives, obscure recordings, untapped sources in the African American press, and interviews with participants, Blue Rhythm Fantasy is a long-overdue study of the arranger during this dynamic era of American music history.

As a popular music, the evolution of jazz is tied to the contemporary sociological situation. Jazz was brought from America into a very different environment in Britain and resulted in the establishment of parallel worlds of jazz by the end of the 1920s: within the realms of institutionalized culture and within the subversive underworld. Tackley (nee Parsonage) demonstrates the importance of image and racial stereotyping in shaping perceptions of jazz, and leads to the significant conclusion that the evolution of jazz in Britain was so much more than merely an extension or reflection of that in America. The book examines the cultural and musical antecedents of the genre, including minstrel shows and black musical theatre, within the context of musical life in Britain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Tackley is particularly concerned with the public perception of jazz in Britain and provides close analysis of the early European critical writing on the subject. The processes through which an evolution took place are considered by looking at the methods of introducing jazz in Britain, through imported revue shows, sheet music, and visits by American musicians. Subsequent developments are analysed through the consideration of modernism and the Jazz Age as theoretical constructs and through the detailed study of dance music on the BBC and jazz in the underworld of London. The book concludes in the 1930s by which time the availability of records enabled the spread of 'hot' music, affecting the live repertoire in Britain. Tackley therefore sheds entirely new light on the development of jazz in Britain, and provides a deep social and cultural understanding of the early history of the genre.

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.

Few albums in the canon of popular music have had the influence, resonance, and endurance of John Coltrane's 1965 classic "A Love Supreme"-a record that proved jazz was a fitting medium for spiritual exploration and for the expression of the sublime. Bringing the same fresh and engaging approach that characterized his critically acclaimed "Kind of Blue: The Making of the Miles Davis Masterpiece," Ashley Kahn tells the story of the genesis, creation, and aftermath of this classic recording. Featuring interviews with more than one hundred musicians, producers, friends, and family members; unpublished interviews with Coltrane and bassist Jimmy Garrison; and scores of never-before-seen photographs, "A Love Supreme" balances biography, cultural context, and musical analysis in a passionate and revealing portrait.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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

Gary Giddins has been called "the best jazz writer in America today" ("Esquire"). Louis Armstrong has been called the most influential jazz musician of the century. Together this auspicious pairing has resulted in "Satchmo," one of the most vivid and fascinating portraits ever drawn of perhaps the greatest figure in the history of American music. Available now at a new price, this text-only edition is the authoritative introduction to Armstrong's life and art for the curious newcomer, and offers fresh insight even for the serious student of Pops.

In Landing on the Wrong Note, Ajay Heble provides a groundbreaking analysis of jazz in its cultural context and a lucid exploration of the music itself. Drawing on personal anecdotes, observation, conversations with jazz artists, and cultural theory, Heble demonstrates that although jazz may be free-form, its rich and varied history makes it an important point of entry into some of the most hotly contested issues of our era - power, identity, representation, history, ethics, and social change.

eBook available with sample pages: 0203901002

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.

Here is Nat Hentoff's deeply felt exploration of jazz, blues, country, and gospel--and the musicians who bring the music to life. Hentoff has not only loved music all his life, he has lived it by being friends with many of the musicians he writes about in this collection. Hentoff poignantly describes the early days of Roy Eldridge and the last years of Billie Holiday and Bird. He tells amazing stories of the Count, Duke, and Dizzy. "Full of insightful behind-the-scenes encounters" ("San Francisco Chronicle"), "Listen to the Stories" covers new recordings and old legends, remarkable lives and unforgettable music.

"Billie Holiday deserves a biography in which her musicianship isn't overshadowed by the tragic events of her life. O'Meally has written that book," says "Entertainment Weekly" about this absorbing and authoritative account of the greatest jazz singer in history. O'Meally emphasizes Holiday's artistry and training rather than her personal miseries, and he uses voluminous archival material to correct common myths about Holiday. Chronicling her rigorous musical apprenticeship in Baltimore, her reception in New York by Benny Goodman and Duke Ellington, and her work with various musicians, particularly Lester Young, "Lady Day" is an impassioned testament to Holiday's genius that confirms her place in American jazz.

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."

This comprehensive study of jazz singing is a revelation to anyone who owns at least one jazz recording and a must for the serious jazz enthusiast. Friedwald traces the growth and development of jazz, discusses performers who have never been thought of as jazz singers, and looks at contemporary artists who have incorporated jazz into their music. 16-page insert.

Bands were playing, people were dancing, the music business was booming. It was the big-band era, and swing was giving a new shape and sound to American culture. Swing Changes looks at New Deal America through its music and shows us how the contradictions and tensions within swing-over race, politics, its own cultural status, the role of women-mirrored those played out in the larger society. Drawing on memoirs, oral histories, newspapers, magazines, recordings, photographs, literature, and films, Swing Changes offers a vibrant picture of American society at a pivotal time, and a new perspective on music as a cultural force.

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.

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.

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.