This biography tells the story of one of the most notorious figures in the history of popular music, Morris Levy (1927-1990). At age nineteen, he cofounded the nightclub Birdland in Hell's Kitchen, which became the home for a new musical style, bebop. Levy operated one of the first integrated clubs on Broadway and helped build the careers of Dizzy Gillespie and Bud Powell and most notably aided the reemergence of Count Basie. In 1957, he founded a record label, Roulette Records. Roulette featured many of the significant jazz artists who played Birdland but also scored top pop hits with acts like Buddy Knox, Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, Joey Dee and the Starliters, and, in the mid-1960s, Tommy James. Stories abound of Levy threatening artists, songwriters, and producers, sometimes just for the sport, other times so he could continue to build his empire. Along the way, Levy attracted ""investors"" with ties to the Mafia, including Dominic Ciaffone (a.k.a. ""Swats"" Mulligan), Tommy Eboli, and the most notorious of them all, Vincent Gigante. Gigante allegedly owned large pieces of Levy's recording and retail businesses. Starting in the late 1950s, the FBI and IRS investigated Levy but could not make anything stick until the early 1980s, when Levy foolishly got involved in a deal to sell remaindered records to a small-time reseller, John LaMonte. With partners in the mob, Levy tried to force LaMonte to pay for four million remaindered records. When the FBI secretly wiretapped LaMonte in an unrelated investigation and agents learned about the deal, investigators successfully prosecuted Levy in the extortion scheme. Convicted in 1988, Levy did not live to serve prison time. Stricken with cancer, he died just as his last appeals were exhausted. However, even if he had lived, Levy's brand of storied high life was effectively bust. Corporate ownership of record labels doomed most independents in the business, ending the days when a savvy if ruthless hustler could blaze a path to the top.

In The Performance of Authenticity: The Makings of Jazz and the Self in Autobiography Teofilo Espada-Brignoni analyzes the autobiographies of New Orleans musicians (Baby Dodds, Sidney Bechet, Pops Foster, and Lee Collins) who throughout their texts construct New Orleans jazz as an authentic musical expression grounded in their experiences and culture. The author argues the autobiographies reproduce and reinterpret modernist conceptions of authenticity to assert and affirm authority over the public representations and discussions of jazz. Through the autobiographers' use of ideas about authenticity, they establish the value of their narratives but at the same time reinforce some of the power dynamics they set out to criticize. Their narratives also reveal the complex ethics that emerged during the first decades of the music and problematize modernist values such as individualism, the dichotomy of work and life, as well as the self and the social. The book adopts Foucauldian and social-constructivist perspectives, complementing analysis of the autobiographies by drawing from literary theory, psychology, sociology, and jazz scholarship.

Improbasen is a Norwegian private learning centre that offers beginner's instrumental tuition within jazz improvisation for children between the ages of 7 and 15. This book springs out of a two-year ethnographic study of the teaching and learning activity at Improbasen, highlighting features from the micro-interactions within the lessons, the organisation of Improbasen, and its international activity. Music teachers, students, and scholars within music education as well as jazz research will benefit from the perspectives presented in the book, which shows how children systematically acquire tools for improvisation and shared codes for interplay. Through a process of guided participation in jazz culture, even very young children are empowered to take part in a global, creative musical practice with improvisation as an educational core. This book critically engages in current discussions about jazz pedagogy, inclusion and gender equity, beginning instrumental tuition, creativity, and authenticity in childhood.

(Real Book Play-Along). The Real Book you know and love has now been updated to include backing tracks for 240 songs on one convenient USB flash drive stick The play-along CDs alone are worth $100 so this is an amazing package price The Real Books are the best-selling jazz books of all time. Since the 1970s, musicians have trusted these volumes to get them through every gig, night after night. The problem is that the books were illegally produced and distributed without any reqard to copyright law or royalties paide to the composers who created these musical masterpieces. Hal Leonard is very proud to present the first legitimate and legal editions of these books ever produced. You won't even notice the difference, other than that all of the notorious errors have been fixed

American composer George Gershwin, an icon of the American Jazz Age, indelibly marked 20th-century music, with many of his works becoming standards in the popular and jazz music repertory, not to mention his world-famous classical works such as Rhapsody in Blue (1924) and Porgy and Bess (1935). This major bibliography includes a brief biography, which examines Gershwin's influence and situates him within the cultural context of his time, a complete cross-reference list of all his compositions, a discography of more than 1,150 items, and a descriptive filmography. The extensive bibliography includes writings by both George and his brother Ira, and more than 2,100 entries about George's compositions.

As an exhaustive research tool, this up-to-date bibliographic reference compiles information on George Gershwin from numerous, disparate sources and should appeal to music and theater scholars, cultural historians, and Gershwin enthusiasts alike. The work is divided among seven sections that cross-reference one another. A separate appendix lists itineraries for the Paul Whiteman tours of 1924-1925, and the Leo Reisman tour of 1934, at which Gershwin's music figured prominently, and a comprehensive index completes the volume.

During World War II, jazz embodied everything that was appealing about a democratic society as envisioned by the Western Allied powers. Labelled `degenerate' by Hitler's cultural apparatus, jazz was adopted by the Allies to win the hearts and minds of the German public. It was also used by the Nazi Minister for Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, to deliver a message of Nazi cultural and military superiority. When Goebbels co-opted young German and foreign musicians into `Charlie and his Orchestra' and broadcast their anti-Allied lyrics across the English Channel, jazz took centre stage in the propaganda war that accompanied World War II on the ground. The Jazz War is based on the largely unheard oral testimony of the personalities behind the German and British wartime radio broadcasts, and chronicles the evolving relationship between jazz music and the Axis and Allied war e orts. Studdert shows how jazz both helped and hindered the Allied cause as Nazi soldiers secretly tuned in to British radio shows while London party-goers danced the night away in demimonde `bottle parties', leading them to be branded a `menace' in Parliament. This book will appeal to students of the history of jazz, broadcasting, cultural studies, and the history of World War II.

Terry Gibbs, legendary jazz vibraphonist and bandleader, was 12 years old when he kicked off his career as a professional musician, winning first place in an amateur performance. Born and raised in the heart of Brooklyn and possessing tremendous musical talent, Gibbs learned the ins and outs of bebop from pioneers like Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, and Bud Powell. In 1959 his ensemble, later dubbed The Dream Band, became the toast of Hollywood. Four decades, 65 albums, and 300 compositions later, his story is one of great substance-his foot tapping music, revolutionary. Good Vibes is a rollicking autobiography that tracks jazz from the turbulent post-war years through the rise of bebop, traversing its changes through the eyes of one of its greatest practitioners. Gibbs's hilarious, poignant, and always fascinating anecdotes reveal little-known attributes and quirks about legendary personalities such as Benny Goodman, Buddy Rich, Steve Allen, Frank Sinatra, Don Rickles, Billie Holiday, and many more. A foreword by Chubby Jackson, a discography, and an index round out this work."

Experimentation in Improvised Jazz: Chasing Ideas challenges the notion that in the twenty-first century, jazz can be restrained by a singular, static definition. The worldwide trend for jazz to be marginalized by the mainstream music industry, as well as conservatoriums and schools of music, runs the risk of stifling the innovative and challenging aspects of its creativity. The authors argue that to remain relevant, jazz needs to be dynamic, proactively experimental, and consciously facilitate new ideas to be made accessible to an audience broader than the innovators themselves. Experimentation in Improvised Jazz explores key elements of experimental jazz music in order to discern ways in which the genre is developing. The book begins with an overview of where, when and how new ideas in free and improvised jazz have been created and added to the canon, developing the genre beyond its initial roots. It moves on to consider how and why musicians create free and improvised jazz; the decisions they make while playing. What are they responding to? What are they depending on? What are they thinking? The authors analyse and synthesise the creation of free jazz by correlating the latest research to the reflections provided by some of the world's greatest jazz innovators for this project. Finally, the book examines how we respond to free and improvised jazz: artistically, critically and personally. Free jazz is, the book argues, an environment that develops through experimentation with new ideas.

Interaction, Improvisation, and Interplay in Jazz Performance offers a new and exciting way to listen to and understand jazz. When describing a performance, most jazz writers focus on the improvised lines of the soloist and their underlying harmonic progressions. This approach overlooks the basic fact that when you listen to jazz, you almost never hear a single line, but rather a musical fabric woven by several musicians in real time. While it is often pragmatic to single out an individual solo line, it is important to remember that an improvised solo is but one thread in that fabric; and it is a thread supported by, responded to, and responsive of the parts being played by the other musicians in the group.

Interaction, Improvisation, and Interplay in Jazz Performance explores the process of player interaction in jazz, and the role this interaction plays in creating improvised music, including:

• jazz improvisation through theory and analysis
• musical roles, behaviours and relationships
• harmony, interaction and performance

Interaction, Improvisation, and Interplay in Jazz Performance will appeal to students of jazz history, composition, and performance, as well as to the general jazz audience.

Serge Chaloff (1923-1957) is most widely remembered as the flamboyant baritone saxophone star with Woody Herman's 2nd Herd whose problems with drugs extended to erratic personal behavior. Nevertheless, there were many brilliant sessions featuring his work before and after his stint with Herman. This work attempts to bring them the recognition they deserve. Simosko details the life and music of Serge Chaloff in an engaging style, from his childhood in Boston, Massachusetts, through his untimely death in 1957. He also provides a discography of Chaloff's recorded output, much of which has been made available by the 1993 Mosaic Records release of The Complete Serge Chaloff Sessions.

Stephen Botek apprenticed at the side of some of the greats of the jazz era, learning not only about music, but about life. Growing up in small-town Pennsylvania in the shadow of the Dorseys, Botek decides to follow his muse to a future in jazz. He gets mentored by clarinet great Buddy DeFranco and saxophone legend Joe Allard, meets up with greats such as Artie Shaw and Dizzy Gillespie along the way, and follows in Glenn Miller's footsteps with the Army Air Force Band. A primer on the jazz era, as well as an account of the benefits of apprenticeship, SONG ON MY LIPS not only recounts stories of the greats but takes us backstage, to their studios, and to many of the unique venues of the time. Jazz aficionados and new musicians alike will learn much about the music from this unique life story.

Tomasz Stanko is arguably the greatest jazz musician Poland has ever produced. His career spanned almost 60 years until his death in 2018. A visionary trumpeter and composer, a protege of Krzysztof Komeda and a colleague of musicians from Poland, Sweden, Norway, Britain, Cuba and the USA, his impact on jazz internationally was profound, proving that jazz was not exclusively an American art form but truly world-wide. In 2014 he was awarded the Polytika Passport in Poland, the Prix du Musicien European in Paris and the Preis der deutschen Schallplattenkritik. The book is a no-holds-barred extended interview with broadcaster Rafal Ksiezyk originally published in Polish by Wydawnictwo Literackie.

Voices Found: Free Jazz and Singing contributes to a wave of voice studies scholarship with the first book-length study of free jazz voice. It pieces together a history of free jazz voice that spans from sound poetry and scat in the 1950s to the more recent wave of free jazz choirs. The author traces the developments and offers a theory, derived from interviews with many of the most important singers in the history of free jazz voice, of how listeners have experienced and evaluated the often unconventional vocal sounds these vocalists employed. This theory explains that even audiences willing to enjoy harsh sounds from saxophones or guitars often resist when voices make sounds that audiences understand as not-human. Experimental poetry and scat were combined and transformed in free jazz spaces in the 1960s and 1970s by vocalists like Yoko Ono (in solo work and her work with Ornette Coleman and John Stevens), Jeanne Lee (in her solo work and her work with Archie Shepp and Gunter Hampel), Leon Thomas (in his solo work as well as his work with Pharoah Sanders and Carlos Santana), and Phil Minton and Maggie Nicols (who devoted much of their energy to creating unaccompanied free jazz vocal music). By studying free jazz voice we can learn important lessons about what we expect from the voice and what happens when those expectations are violated. This book doesn't only trace histories of free jazz voice, it makes an attempt to understand why this story hasn't been told before, with an impressive breadth of scope in terms of the artists covered, drawing on research from the US, Canada, Wales, Scotland, France, The Netherlands, and Japan.

From the mid-1950s to the late 1970s, jazz was harnessed as America's "sonic weapon" to promote an image to the world of a free and democratic America. Dizzy Gillespie, Dave Brubeck, Duke Ellington and other well-known jazz musicians were sent around the world - including to an array of Communist countries - as "jazz ambassadors" in order to mitigate the negative image associated with domestic racial problems. While many non-Americans embraced the Americanism behind this jazz diplomacy without question, others criticized American domestic and foreign policies while still appreciating jazz - thus jazz, despite its popularity, also became a medium for expressing anti-Americanism. This book examines the development of jazz outside America, including across diverse historical periods and geographies - shedding light on the effectiveness of jazz as an instrument of state power within a global political context. Saito examines jazz across a wide range of regions, including America, Europe, Japan and Communist countries. His research also draws heavily upon a variety of sources, primary as well as secondary, which are accessible in these diverse countries: all had their unique and culturally specific domestic jazz scenes, but also interacted with each other in an interesting dimension of early globalization. This comparative analysis on the range of unique jazz scenes and cultures offers a detailed understanding as to how jazz has been interpreted in various ways, according to the changing contexts of politics and society around it, often providing a basis for criticizing America itself. Furthering our appreciation of the organic relationship between jazz and global politics, Saito reconsiders the uniqueness of jazz as an exclusively "American music." This book will be of interest to students and scholars of international relations, the history of popular music, and global politics.

Revisit favorite arrangements, discover new ones, and inspire your jazz ensemble with sound and adventurous music to play. This new book recommends and analyzes sixty-seven quality jazz arrangements recommended by eighteen of the foremost jazz experts in the field today, including directors and professors from high schools and colleges across the country, including the Houston High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, Bloomington High School, Fiorello La Guardia Performing Arts High School, Juilliard School, Berklee College of Music, and Harvard University. Listed alphabetically, each analysis includes information on instrumentation, ranges, playability, and requirements for rendering the score. This book includes eight indexes of musical features to help instructors select repertoire and teaching topics, five indexes for quick navigation and reference, three appendices on survey data results, a glossary, a bibliography, a list of jazz ensemble music publishers, and a general index.

Comprehensive chronological survey and analysis of every recording on which Louis Armstrong played during the period 1923 to 1928. Armstrong's immense impact on the evolution of jazz is found primarily in these early recordings, and Brooks's close examination of this period is important, as much of this influence becomes obscured by later recordings. Glossary, bibliography, and title index.

"Both as a person and as a musician, he was number one in my book." -Benny Carter Bassist George Duvivier (1920-1985) was one of the most universally respected musicians in jazz. His impeccable musicianship graced the big bands in the 1940s and led to musical associations with virtually every important jazz and popular artist. His prolific recording career spanned all styles of music, from Eubie Blake to Eric Dolphy, Billie Holiday to Barry Manilow. Duvivier was a most astute and articulate observer of the musical scene. A large part of this book is devoted to his own reflections on growing up in Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s, the evolution of the bass, life in the commercial studios, and his memories of close associates-Coleman Hawkins, Jimmie Lunceford, Bud Powell, Lena Horne, and many others. In addition, twenty of Duvivier's colleagues, including Louie Bellson, Ron Carter, Milt Hinton, Ed Shaughnessy, Arthur Taylor, and Joe Wilder, have contributed, covering a variety of musical and social issues, as well as providing a loving portrait of an extraordinary artist. Duvivier's musical style is discussed by David Chevan, who has included transcriptions of several solos. An extensive discography/solography traces Duvivier's incredibly diverse recording career. With dozens of previously unpublished photos.

Superbly researched and vividly written, "The Devil's Music "is one of the only books to trace the rise and development of the blues both in relation to other forms of black music and in the context of American social history as experienced by African Americans. From its roots in the turn-of-the-century honky-tonks of New Orleans and the barrelhouses and plantations of the Mississippi Delta to modern legends such as John Lee Hooker and B. B. King, the blues comes alive here through accounts by the blues musicians themselves and those who knew them. Throughout this wide-ranging and fascinating book, Giles Oakley describes the texture of the life that made the blues possible, and the changing attitudes toward the music. "The Devil's Music" is a wholehearted and loving examination of one of America's most powerful traditions.

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.

Experimentation in Improvised Jazz: Chasing Ideas challenges the notion that in the twenty-first century, jazz can be restrained by a singular, static definition. The worldwide trend for jazz to be marginalized by the mainstream music industry, as well as conservatoriums and schools of music, runs the risk of stifling the innovative and challenging aspects of its creativity. The authors argue that to remain relevant, jazz needs to be dynamic, proactively experimental, and consciously facilitate new ideas to be made accessible to an audience broader than the innovators themselves. Experimentation in Improvised Jazz explores key elements of experimental jazz music in order to discern ways in which the genre is developing. The book begins with an overview of where, when and how new ideas in free and improvised jazz have been created and added to the canon, developing the genre beyond its initial roots. It moves on to consider how and why musicians create free and improvised jazz; the decisions they make while playing. What are they responding to? What are they depending on? What are they thinking? The authors analyse and synthesise the creation of free jazz by correlating the latest research to the reflections provided by some of the world's greatest jazz innovators for this project. Finally, the book examines how we respond to free and improvised jazz: artistically, critically and personally. Free jazz is, the book argues, an environment that develops through experimentation with new ideas.

The Unsung Songwriters is dedicated to a period in the history of American music that author Warren Vache calls the "Golden Age of Songwriting," and to the men and women who made it great. Contrary to the widely held opinion that most of our hit and standard songs were composed by a handful of top writers Berlin, Gershwin, Kern, Porter, and Rodgers the fact is that the vast majority of them were written by relatively unknown composers. In this definitive reference work to the "unsung songwriters," you will find Al Neiberg, the author of "It's the Talk of the Town," Maceo Pinkard, the mind behind "Sweet Georgia Brown" and "Sugar," Harry Woods for "Try a Little Tenderness," J. Fred Coots for "You Go to My Head," and many more.

Free Jazz: A Research and Information Guide offers carefully selected and annotated sources on free jazz, with comprehensive coverage of English-language academic books, journal articles, and dissertations, and selective coverage of trade books, popular periodicals, documentary films, scores, Masters' theses, online texts, and materials in other languages. Free Jazz will be a major reference tool for students, faculty, librarians, artists, scholars, critics, and serious fans navigating this literature.

What do Louis Armstrong, Ray Charles, Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, Tom Waits, Cassandra Wilson, and Ani DiFranco have in common? In Highway 61 Revisited, acclaimed music critic Gene Santoro says the answer is jazz--not just the musical style, but jazz's distinctive ambiance and attitudes.
As legendary bebop rebel Charlie Parker once put it, "If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn." Unwinding that Zen-like statement, Santoro traces how jazz's existential art has infused outstanding musicians in nearly every wing of American popular music--blues, folk, gospel, psychedelic rock, country, bluegrass, soul, funk, hiphop--with its parallel process of self-discovery and artistic creation through musical improvisation. Taking less-traveled paths through the last century of American pop, Highway 61 Revisited maps unexpected musical and cultural links between such apparently disparate figures as Louis Armstrong, Willie Nelson, Bob Dylan and Herbie Hancock; Miles Davis, Lenny Bruce, The Grateful Dead, Bruce Springsteen, and many others. Focusing on jazz's power to connect, Santoro shows how the jazz milieu created a fertile space "where whites and blacks could meet in America on something like equal grounds," and indeed where art and entertainment, politics and poetry, mainstream culture and its subversive offshoots were drawn together in a heady mix whose influence has proved both far-reaching and seemingly inexhaustible.
Combining interviews and original research, and marked throughout by Santoro's wide ranging grasp of cultural history, Highway 61 Revisited offers readers a new look at--and a new way of listening to--the many ways jazz has colored the entire range of American popular music in all its dazzling profusion.

Dark Magus is a warts-and-all look at the real Miles Davis. As told by his son, this book strips away the public perception of Davis and gets down to the realities of his personality, his relationships, and his many quirks. Dark Magus details this enigmatic superstar's Jekyll and Hyde behavior: his swings between sobriety and prodigious drug use; his tender family moments and his destructive selfishness; his search for marital stability and his obsession with young women; his exalted musical talent and his ever-present personal demons. The author also delves into Davis' relationships with artists such as Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and John Coltrane, as well as his role as a mentor to young musicians, his obsession with sports, the ups and downs of his career, and the family's turmoil over his final will. "This book is a brilliant and engaging revelation of Miles' character through the recollections of his oldest son. It's a book about a legendary musician who was one of my closest friends, and a book that's second to none." - Clark Terry

Patterns for Jazz stands as a monument among jazz educational materials. Condensed charts and pertinent explanations are conveniently inserted throughout the book to give greater clarity to the application of more than 400 patterns built on chords and scales -- from simple (major) to complex (lydian augmented scales).