The contributors to Negotiated Moments explore how subjectivity is formed and expressed through musical improvisation, tracing the ways the transmission and reception of sound occur within and between bodies in real and virtual time and across memory, history, and space. They place the gendered, sexed, raced, classed, disabled, and technologized body at the center of critical improvisation studies and move beyond the field's tendency toward celebrating improvisation's utopian and democratic ideals by highlighting the improvisation of marginalized subjects. Rejecting a singular theory of improvisational agency, the contributors show how improvisation helps people gain hard-won and highly contingent agency. Essays include analyses of the role of the body and technology in performance, improvisation's ability to disrupt power relations, Pauline Oliveros's ideas about listening, flautist Nicole Mitchell's compositions based on Octavia Butler's science fiction, and an interview with Judith Butler about the relationship between her work and improvisation. The contributors' close attention to improvisation provides a touchstone for examining subjectivities and offers ways to hear the full spectrum of ideas that sound out from and resonate within and across bodies. Contributors. George Blake, David Borgo, Judith Butler, Rebecca Caines, Louise Campbell, Illa Carrillo Rodriguez, Berenice Corti, Andrew Raffo Dewar, Nina Eidsheim, Tomie Hahn, Jaclyn Heyen, Christine Sun Kim, Catherine Lee, Andra McCartney, Tracy McMullen, Kevin McNeilly, Leaf Miller, Jovana Milovic, Francois Mouillot, Pauline Oliveros, Jason Robinson, Neil Rolnick, Simon Rose, Gillian Siddall, Julie Dawn Smith, Jesse Stewart, Clara Tomaz, Sherrie Tucker, Lindsay Vogt, Zachary Wallmark, Ellen Waterman, David Whalen, Pete Williams, Deborah Wong, Mandy-Suzanne Wong

Appetite for Destruction was the debut studio album by American hard rock band Guns N' Roses. Released in 1987, it was well received by critics and topped the American Billboard 200 chart. 20 years afer its release, the album has been certified diamond by the RIAA, accumulating worldwide sales in excess of twenty-eight million. This album matching songbook feautures all the hits from the album, including the classic Welcome To The Jungle, Sweet Child O' Mine and Paradise City, arranged in standard notation and guitar tablature with chord boxes and full lyrics.

In the context of a shifting domestic and international status quo that was evolving in the decades following World War II, French audiences used jazz as a means of negotiating a wide range of issues that were pressing to them and to their fellow citizens. Despite the fact that jazz was fundamentally linked to the multicultural through its origins in the hands of African-American musicians, happenings within the French jazz public reflected much about France's postwar society. In the minds of many, jazz was connected to youth culture, but instead of challenging traditional gender expectations, the music tended to reinforce long-held stereotypes. French critics, musicians, and fans contended with the reality of American superpower strength and often strove to elevate their own country's stature in relation to the United States by finding fault with American consumer society and foreign policy aims. Jazz audiences used this music to condemn American racism and to support the American civil rights movement, expressing strong reservations about the American way of life. French musicians lobbied to create professional opportunities for themselves, and some went so far as to create a union that endorsed preferential treatment for French nationals. As France became more ethnically and religiously diverse due immigration from Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean, French jazz critics and fans noted the insidious appearance of racism in their own country and had to contend with how their own citizens would address the changing demographics of the nation, even if they continued to insist that racism was more prevalent in the United States. As independence movements brought an end to the French empire, jazz enthusiasts from both former colonies and France had to reenvision their relationship to jazz and to the music's international audiences. In these postwar decades, the French were working to preserve a distinct national identity in the face of weakened global authority, most forcefully represented by decolonization and American hegemony. Through this originally African American music, French listeners, commentators, and musicians participated in a process that both challenged and reinforced ideas about their own culture and nation.

The book Jazzmen (1939) claimed New Orleans as the birthplace of jazz and introduced the legend of Buddy Bolden as the ""First Man of Jazz."" Much of the information that the book relied on came from a highly controversial source: Bunk Johnson. He claimed to have played with Bolden and that together they had pioneered jazz. Johnson made many recordings talking about and playing the music of the Bolden era. These recordings have been treated with skepticism because of doubts about Johnson's credibility. Using oral histories, the Jazzmen interview notes, and unpublished archive material, this book confirms that Bunk Johnson did play with Bolden. This confirmation, in turn, has profound implications for Johnson's recorded legacy in describing the music of the early years of New Orleans jazz. New Orleans jazz was different from ragtime in a number of ways. It was a music that was collectively improvised, and it carried a new tonality--the tonality of the blues. How early jazz musicians improvised together and how the blues became a part of jazz has until now been a mystery. Part of the reason New Orleans jazz developed as it did is that all the prominent jazz pioneers, including Buddy Bolden, Bunk Johnson, Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, Johnny Dodds, and Kid Ory, sang in barbershop (or barroom) quartets. This book describes in both historical and musical terms how the practices of quartet singing were converted to the instruments of a jazz band, and how this, in turn, produced collectively improvised, blues-inflected jazz, that unique sound of New Orleans.

Between 1972 and 1987, freelance teacher and music journalist Roland Baggenaes conducted a series of interviews with jazz musicians for CODA magazine. Upon recently re-discovering the interviews, he was once again fascinated by the enthusiasm of the musicians and their profound dedication to their chosen profession. Jazz Greats Speak: Interviews with Master Musicians brings those fascinating discussions into one bound volume. Such jazz artists as Lee Konitz, Mary Lou Williams, Dexter Gordon, Red Rodney, Stanley Clarke, and John Tchicai talk about their art, how they got interested in playing jazz, their influences, and about the many different musicians with whom they worked. The interviewees openly relate in their own words what jazz means to them and, in some cases, share their viewpoints on politics, religion, and their social life and conditions as a jazz artist in America or elsewhere. The book covers a wide area of jazz but emphasizes the period from the early 1940s into the 1960s. In their entirety, the interviews give an insight into the development of jazz, from the early days of the 1920s, over the formative 1940s and 1950s, and up to the new trends of the 1980s. Complete with a beautiful selection of photographs, brief biographies of each participant, and an index, this volume will appeal to lovers of jazz, students of jazz, and anyone interested in finding out what jazz and its corresponding lifestyle is about.

Dr. Herb Wong (1926-2014) was an internationally recognised jazz industry leader and the author of more than 400 liner notes from the 1940s through to the early 2000s. He reviewed not only the tracks on those albums but the artists and their eras as well. This book features the best of Wong's liner notes, articles and album selections, his personal stories about the artists, and his illuminating one-on-one conversations with many jazz greats, providing an insightful jazz primer and invaluable discography.

Louisiana's unique multicultural history has led to the development of more styles of American music than anywhere else in the country. Encyclopedia of Louisiana Musicians compiles over 1,600 native creators, performers, and recorders of the state's indigenous musical genres. The culmination of years of exhaustive research, Gene Tomko's comprehensive volume not only reviews major and influential artists but also documents for the first time hundreds of lesser-A known notable musicians. Arranged in accessible A- Z format- from Fernest ""Man"" Abshire to Zydeco Ray- Tomko's concise entries detail each musician's life and career, reflecting exciting new discoveries about many enigmatic and early artists: Country Jim, Henry Zeno, Douglas Bellard, Good Rockin' Bob, Blind Uncle Gaspard, Emma L. Jackson, and Rocket Morgan, to name just a few. A separate section features musicians from elsewhere who made an impact in Louisiana, such as MississippiA -born blues singerA -songwriter-A guitarist Eddie ""Guitar Slim"" Jones and celebrated jazz pianist Billie Pierce, a native of Florida. The final section highlights key regional record producers and studio and label owners, like J. D. Miller, Stan Lewis, and Cosimo Matassa, who have enabled future generations to enjoy music of the Bayou State. Written with both the casual fan and the scholar in mind, Encyclopedia of Louisiana Musicians is the definitive reference on Louisiana's rich musical legacy and the numerous important musicians it has produced.

Microgroove continues John Corbett's exploration of diverse musics, with essays, interviews, and musician profiles that focus on jazz, improvised music, contemporary classical, rock, folk, blues, post-punk, and cartoon music. Corbett's approach to writing is as polymorphous as the music, ranging from oral history and journalistic portraiture to deeply engaged cultural critique. Corbett advocates for the relevance of "little" music, which despite its smaller audience is of enormous cultural significance. He writes on musicians as varied as Sun Ra, PJ Harvey, Koko Taylor, Steve Lacy, and Helmut Lachenmann. Among other topics, he discusses recording formats; the relationship between music and visual art, dance, and poetry; and, with Terri Kapsalis, the role of female orgasm sounds in contemporary popular music. Above all, Corbett privileges the importance of improvisation; he insists on the need to pay close attention to "other" music and celebrates its ability to open up pathways to new ideas, fresh modes of expression, and unforeseen ways of knowing.

Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington (1899-1974) is recognized as one of the great composers and orchestra leaders of the twentieth century and is credited for raising jazz to its highest plateau. He remained musically active through his entire life, creating a prolific musical output. Ellingtonia: The Recorded Music of Duke Ellington and His Sidemen compiles Ellington's entire musical catalog from the first recording session in July 1923 to the last concert in March 1974. More than a discography, the book comprises all the activities of these musicians, including studio recordings, movie soundtracks, concerts, dance dates, radio broadcasts, telecasts, and private and unissued recordings, as well as recordings made by Ellington's sidemen under their own names or with other bands. W. E. Timner provides the date, location and personnel for each session, the label of first issue, master and take numbers (if available), and song title, including alternate titles and derivatives. Containing a comprehensive guide for users and indexes of titles, musicians, cities, venues, and general subjects, this completely revised and updated 5th edition also contains a new section listing Ellington's radio broadcasts and telecasts. Complete with extensive footnotes, Ellingtonia remains an indispensable and easy to use reference source for Jazz collectors and scholars.

**FINALIST for the 2022 PROSE Award in Music & the Performing Arts** **Certificate of Merit, Best Historical Research on Recorded Jazz, given by the 2022 Association for Recorded Sounds Collection Awards for Excellence in Historical Sound Research** Explores how jazz helped propel the rise of African American Islam during the era of global Black liberation Amid the social change and liberation of the civil rights and Black Power movements, the tenor saxophonist Archie Shepp recorded a tribute to Malcolm X's emancipatory political consciousness. Shepp saw similarities between his revolutionary hero and John Coltrane, one of the most influential jazz musicians of the era. Later, the esteemed trumpeter Miles Davis echoed Shepp's sentiment, recognizing that Coltrane's music represented the very passion, rage, rebellion, and love that Malcolm X preached. Soundtrack to a Movement examines the link between the revolutionary Black Islam of the post-WWII generation and jazz music. It argues that from the late 1940s and '50s though the 1970s, Islam rose in prominence among African Americans in part because of the embrace of the religion among jazz musicians. The book demonstrates that the values that Islam and jazz shared-Black affirmation, freedom, and self-determination-were key to the growth of African American Islamic communities, and that it was jazz musicians who led the way in shaping encounters with Islam as they developed a Black Atlantic "cool" that shaped both Black religion and jazz styles. Soundtrack to a Movement demonstrates how by expressing their values through the rejection of systemic racism, the construction of Black notions of masculinity and femininity, and the development of an African American religious internationalism, both jazz musicians and Black Muslims engaged with a global Black consciousness and interconnected resistance movements in the African diaspora and Africa.

Sounding American: Hollywood, Opera, and Jazz tells the story of the interaction between musical form, film technology, and ideas about race, ethnicity, and the nation during the American cinema's conversion to sound. Contrary to most accepted narratives about the conversion, which tend to explain the competition between the Hollywood studios' film sound technologies in qualitative and economic terms, this book argues that the battle between disc and film sound was waged primarily in an aesthetic realm. Opera and jazz in particular, though long neglected in studies of the film score, were extremely important in defining the scope of the American soundtrack, not only during the conversion, but also once sound had been standardized. Examining studio advertisements, screenplays, scores, and the films themselves, the book concentrates on the interactions between musical form and film technology, arguing that each of the major studios appropriated opera and jazz in a unique way in order to construct its own version of an ideal American voice. The book's central question asks what the synthesis of opera and jazz during the conversion reveals about the stylistic and ideological norms of classical Hollywood cinema and the racial, ethnic, gendered, and socially stratified spaces of American musical production. Unlike much of the scholarship on film music, which gravitates toward feature film scores, Sounding American concentrates on the musical shorts of the late 1920s, showing how their representations of the stage, conservatory, ballroom, and nightclub reflected what opera and jazz meant for particular groups of Americans and demonstrating how the cinema helped to shape the racial, ethnic, and national identities attached to this music. Traditional histories of Hollywood film music have tended to concentrate on the unity of the score, a model that assumes a passive spectator. Sounding American claims that the classical Hollywood film is essentially an illustrated jazz-opera with a musical structure that encourages an active form of listening and viewing in order to make sense of what is ultimately a fragmentary text.

In Rhythm Is My Beat: Jazz Guitar Great Freddie Green and the Count Basie Sound, Alfred Green tells the story of his father, rhythm guitarist Freddie Green, whose guitar work served as the pulse of the Count Basie Band. A quiet but key figure in big band jazz, Freddie Green took a distinct pride in his role as Basie's rhythm guitarist, redefining the outer limits of acoustic rhythm guitar and morphing it into an art form. So distinct was Green's style that it would eventually give birth to notations on guitar charts that read: "Play in the style of Freddie Green." This American jazz icon, much like his inimitable sound, achieved stardom as a sideman, both in and out of Basie's band. Green's signature sound provided lift to soloists like Lester Young and vocalist Lil' Jimmy Rushing, a reflection of Green's sophisticated technique, that produced, in Green's words, his "rhythm wave." Billie Holiday, Ruby Braff, Benny Goodman, Gerry Mulligan, Teddy Wilson, Ray Charles, Judy Carmichael, Joe Williams and other recording artists all benefited from the relentless fours of the man who came to be known as Mr. Rhythm. The mystique surrounding Freddie Green's technique is illuminated through generous commentary by insightful interviews with other musicians, guitar professionals and scholars, all of whom offer their ideas on Freddie Green's sound. Alfred Green throughout demystifies the man behind the legend. This work will interest jazz fans, students, and scholars; guitar enthusiasts and professionals; music historians and anyone interested not only in the history of jazz but of the African American experience in jazz.

The John Coltrane Church began in 1965, when Franzo and Marina King attended a performance of the John Coltrane Quartet at San Francisco's Jazz Workshop and saw a vision of the Holy Ghost as Coltrane took the bandstand. Celebrating the spirituality of the late jazz innovator and his music, the storefront church emerged during the demise of black-owned jazz clubs in San Francisco, and at a time of growing disillusionment with counter-culture spirituality following the 1978 Jonestown tragedy. The ideology of the church was refined through alliances with the Black Panther Party, Alice Coltrane, the African Orthodox Church and the Nation of Islam. For 50 years, the church has - in the name of its patron saint, John Coltrane - effectively fought redevelopment, environmental racism, police brutality, mortgage foreclosures, religious intolerance, gender disparity and the corporatization of jazz. This critical history is the first book-length treatment of the evolution, beliefs and practices of an extraordinary African-American church and community institution.

Jazz, Rags & Blues, Books 1 through 5 contain original solos for late elementary to early advanced-level pianists that reflect the various styles of the jazz idiom. An excellent way to introduce your students to this distinctive American contribution to 20th century music. Available separately (item #18115), the CD includes dynamic recordings of each song in Books 1-3 of this series.

When Sheila Jordan dropped a nickel in the juke box of a Detroit diner in the 1940s and heard "Now's The Time" by Charlie Parker, she was instantly hooked-and so began a seventy-year jazz journey. In 1962, she emerged as the first jazz singer to record on the prestigious Blue Note label with her debut album Portrait of Sheila. Exploding on the jazz scene, this classic work set the bar for her career as an iconic jazz vocalist and mentor to other promising female vocalists. As The New York Times then announced, "Her ballad performances are simply beyond the emotional and expressive capabilities of most other vocalists." Jazz Child: A Portrait of Sheila Jordan, as the first complete biography about this remarkable singer's life, reveals the challenges she confronted, from her growing up poor in a Pennsylvania coal mining town to her rise as a bebop singer in Detroit and New York City during the 1950s to her work as a recording artist and performer under the influence of and in performance with such jazz luminaries as Charlie Parker, George Russell, Lennie Tristano, Charles Mingus, Sonny Rollins, and Thelonious Monk. Jordan's views as a woman living the jazz life in an era of racial and gender discrimination while surrounded by those often struggling with the twin evils of alcohol and drug abuse are skillfully woven into the tapestry of the tale she tells. With Jordan's full cooperation, author Ellen Johnson documents the fascinating career of this jazz great, who stands today as one of the most deeply respected jazz singers and educators. For jazz fans, Johnson's biography is a testament to a vanishing generation of musicians and her indomitable spirit is an inspiration to all walks of life. More information is available at: http://www.jazzchildthebook.com/

Black British musicians have been making jazz since around 1920 when the genre first arrived in Britain. This groundbreaking book reveals their hidden history and major contribution to the development of jazz in the UK. More than this, though, the chapters show the importance of black British jazz in terms of musical hybridity and the cultural significance of race. Decades before Steel Pulse, Soul II Soul, or Dizzee Rascal pushed their way into the mainstream, black British musicians were playing jazz in venues up and down the country from dance halls to tiny clubs. In an important sense, then, black British jazz demonstrates the crucial importance of musical migration in the musical history of the nation, and the links between popular and avant-garde forms. But the volume also provides a case study in how music of the African diaspora reverberates around the world, beyond the shores of the USA - the engine-house of global black music. As such it will engage scholars of music and cultural studies not only in Britain, but across the world.

London-based musician and journalist Gordon Jack's method is to let the musicians tell their own stories with minimum intervention, in the manner of Ira Gitler's classic Swing to Bop. Famous or obscure, these more than 30 musicians who came to prominence in the 1950s each has a story to tell, and Jack captures the style and tone of his interviewees in this oral retrospective of what may have been jazz's last golden age. The musicians are: Gene Allen, Mose Allison, Dave Bailey, Chuck Berghofer, Eddie Bert, Bob Brookmeyer, Pete Christlieb, Bill Crow, Joe Dodge, Bob Enevoldsen, Don Ferrara, Herb Geller, Corky Hale, Peter Ind, Frank Isola, Lee Konitz, Stan Levey, Jack Montrose, Gerry Mulligan, the Gerry Mulligan Quartet (with Larry Bunker, Chico Hamilton, Carson Smith, Bob Whitlock), Lennie Niehaus, Jack Nimitz, Hod O'Brien, Bill Perkins, Bud Shank, Phil Urso, and Phil Woods. Jack's introductions and notes unobtrusively sketch out the life and achievements of each musician, and there are photographs of each one, many of them taken by Jack himself.

Improvisation is a performance practice that animates and activates diverse energies of inspiration, critique, and invention. In recent years it has coalesced into an exciting and innovative new field of interdisciplinary scholarly inquiry, becoming a cornerstone of both practical and theoretical approaches to performance."

The Improvisation Studies Reader" draws together the works of key artists and thinkers from a range of disciplines, including theatre, music, literature, film, and dance. Divided by keywords into eight sections, this book bridges the gaps between these fields. The book includes case studies, exercises, graphic scores and poems in order to produce a teaching and research resource that identifies central themes in improvisation studies. The sections include:

• Listening
• Trust/Risk
• Flow
• Dissonance
• Responsibility
• Liveness
• Surprise
• Hope

Each section of the Reader is introduced by a newly commissioned think piece by a key figure in the field, which opens up research questions reflecting on the keyword in question.

By placing key theoretical and classic texts in conversation with cutting-edge research and artists statements, this book answers the urgent questions facing improvising artists and theorists in the mediatized Twenty-First Century. "

Jazz on the Line: Improvisation in Practice presents an ethnographic reflection on improvisation as performance, examining how musicians think and act when negotiating improvisational frameworks. This multidisciplinary discussion-guided by a focus on recordings, composition, authenticity, and venues-explores the musical choices made by performers, emphasizing how these choices can be logically understood within the context of controlled, musical outputs. Throughout the text, the author engages directly with musicians and their varied practices-from canonized dogmas to innovative experimentalism-offering interviews both planned and spontaneous. Musical agency is posited as a tightrope balancing act, signifying the skill and excitement of improvisational performativity and exemplifying the life of a jazzaerialist. With a travel journal approach as a backdrop, Jazz on the Line provides concepts and theories that demystify the creative processes of improvisation.

Jazz as an instrument of global diplomacy transformed superpower relations in the Cold War era and reshaped democracy's image worldwide. Lisa E. Davenport tells the story of America's program of jazz diplomacy practiced in the Soviet Union and other regions of the world from 1954 to 1968. Jazz music and jazz musicians seemed an ideal card to play in diminishing the credibility and appeal of Soviet communism in the Eastern bloc and beyond. Government-funded musical junkets by such jazz masters as Louis Armstrong, Dave Brubeck, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, and Benny Goodman dramatically influenced perceptions of the U.S. and its capitalist brand of democracy while easing political tensions in the midst of critical Cold War crises. This book shows how, when coping with foreign questions about desegregation, the dispute over the Berlin Wall, the Cuban missile crisis, Vietnam, and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, jazz players and their handlers wrestled with the inequalities of race and the emergence of class conflict while promoting America in a global context. And, as jazz musicians are wont to do, many of these ambassadors riffed off script when the opportunity arose.

"Jazz Diplomacy" argues that this musical method of winning hearts and minds often transcended economic and strategic priorities. Even so, the goal of containing communism remained paramount, and it prevailed over America's policy of redefining relations with emerging new nations in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

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."

In Experiencing Jazz: A Listener s Companion, writer, teacher, and prominent jazz drummer Michael Stephans offers a much-needed survey in the art of listening to and enjoying this dynamic, ever-changing art form. More than mere entertainment, jazz provides a pleasurable and sometimes dizzying listening experience with an extensive range in structure and form, from the syncopated swing of big bands to the musical experimentalism of small combos. As Stephans illustrates, listeners and jazz artists often experience the essence of the music together an experience unique in the world of music. Experiencing Jazz demonstrates how the act of listening to jazz takes place on a deeply personal level and takes readers on a whirlwind tour of the genre, instrument by instrument offering not only brief portraits of key musicians like Joe Lovano and John Scofield, but also their own commentaries on how best to experience their music. Throughout, jazz takes center stage as a personal transaction that enriches the lives of the musician and the listener. Written for anyone curious about the musical genre, this book encourages further reading, listening, and viewing, helping potential listeners cultivate an understanding and appreciation of the jazz art and how it can help in drummer Art Blakey s words wash away the dust of everyday life. "

Miles Davis's Bitches Brew is one of the most iconic albums in American music, the preeminent landmark and fertile seedbed of jazz-fusion. Fans have been fortunate in the past few years to gain access to Davis's live recordings from this time, when he was working with an ensemble that has come to be known as the Lost Quintet. In this book, jazz historian and musician Bob Gluck explores the performances of this revolutionary group Davis's first electric band to illuminate the thinking of one of our rarest geniuses and, by extension, the extraordinary transition in American music that he and his fellow players ushered in. Gluck listens deeply to the uneasy tension between this group's driving rhythmic groove and the sonic and structural openness, surprise, and experimentation they were always pushing toward. There he hears and outlines a fascinating web of musical interconnection that brings Davis's funk-inflected sensibilities into conversation with the avant-garde worlds that players like Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane were developing. Going on to analyze the little-known experimental groups Circle and the Revolutionary Ensemble, Gluck traces deep resonances across a commercial gap between the celebrity Miles Davis and his less famous but profoundly innovative peers. The result is a deeply attuned look at a pivotal moment when once-disparate worlds of American music came together in explosively creative combinations.

Pepper Adams' Joy Road is more than a compendium of sessions and gigs done by the greatest baritone saxophone soloist in history. It's a fascinating overview of Adams' life and times, thanks to colorful interview vignettes, drawn from the author's unpublished conversations with Adams and other musicians. These candid observations from jazz greats about Adams and his colleagues reveal previously unknown, behind-the-scenes drama about legendary recordings made by John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Pearson, Thad Jones, David Amram, Elvin Jones, and many others. All types of sound material-studio recordings, private tapes and broadcasts, film scores, audience tapes, and even jingles-are listed, and Adams' oeuvre is pushed back from 1956 to 1947, when Adams was 16 years old, before he played baritone saxophone. Because of Carner's access to Adams' estate, just prior to its disposition in 1987, much new discographical material is included, now verified by Adams' date books and correspondence. Since Adams worked in so many of the great bands of his era, Pepper Adams' Joy Road is a refreshing, sometimes irreverent walk through a large swath of jazz history. This work also functions as a nearly complete band discography of the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Orchestra, the most influential big band of its time. Adams was a founding member and stayed with the band until a year before Jones left to relocate in Denmark. Finally, Carner charts the ascent of Adams as an original yet still underappreciated composer, one who wrote 43 unique works, nearly half of them after August, 1977, when he left Jones-Lewis to tour the world as a soloist. Pepper Adams' Joy Road, the first book ever published about Pepper Adams, is a companion to the author's forthcoming biography on Adams.

Dave Liebman is one of the leading forces in contemporary jazz. Prominently known for performing with Miles Davis and Elvin Jones, he has exerted considerable influence as a saxophonist, bandleader, composer, author, and educator. In addition to his recent recognition as a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master, he has received the Order of Arts and Letters from France and holds an honorary doctorate from the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, Finland. He has mentored many of today's most notable young jazz musicians worldwide and is a prolific writer on jazz. In What It Is: The Life of a Jazz Artist, friend, pianist, and noted jazz scholar Lewis Porter conducts a series of in-depth interviews with Liebman, who discusses his professional, personal, and musical relationships with Davis and Jones, as well as such notable musicians as Chick Corea, Richie Beirach, Michael and Randy Brecker, and many others. Through the interviews, Liebman discusses such personal matters as contracting polio as a child and the difficulties it caused as an adult during his rise as a jazz musician. He offers insights into the life of jazz performers of his generation, particularly the tumultuous period of the 1960s and 1970s. The book also features rare photos from Liebman's personal collection. A fascinating and witty storyteller, Liebman's stories in What It Is will appeal to jazz fans and scholars by providing a firsthand look into the creative life of one of America's leading jazz musicians.