A galvanizing history of how jazz and jazz musicians flourished despite rampant cultural exploitation The music we call "jazz" arose in late nineteenth century North America--most likely in New Orleans--based on the musical traditions of Africans, newly freed from slavery. Grounded in the music known as the "blues," which expressed the pain, sufferings, and hopes of Black folk then pulverized by Jim Crow, this new music entered the world via the instruments that had been abandoned by departing military bands after the Civil War. Jazz and Justice examines the economic, social, and political forces that shaped this music into a phenomenal US--and Black American--contribution to global arts and culture. Horne assembles a galvanic story depicting what may have been the era's most virulent economic--and racist--exploitation, as jazz musicians battled organized crime, the Ku Klux Klan, and other variously malignant forces dominating the nightclub scene where jazz became known. Horne pays particular attention to women artists, such as pianist Mary Lou Williams and trombonist Melba Liston, and limns the contributions of musicians with Native American roots. This is the story of a beautiful lotus, growing from the filth of the crassest form of human immiseration.

Taking in the jazz and blues icons whom Jefferson idolised as a child in the 1950s, ideas of what the female body could be - as incarnated by trailblazing Black dancers and athletes - Harriet Beecher Stowe's Topsy reimagined in the artworks of Kara Walker, white supremacy in the novels of Willa Cather, and more, this breathtakingly eloquent account is both a critique and a vindication of the constructed self.

Jazz stories have been entwined with cinema since the inception of jazz film genre in the 1920s, giving us origin tales and biopics, spectacles and low-budget quickies, comedies, musicals, and dramas, and stories of improvisers and composers at work. And the jazz film has seen a resurgence in recent years-from biopics like Miles Ahead and HBO's Bessie, to dramas Whiplash and La La Land. In Play the Way You Feel, author and jazz critic Kevin Whitehead offers a comprehensive guide to these films and other media from the perspective of the music itself. Spanning 93 years of film history, the book looks closely at movies, cartoons, and a few TV shows that tell jazz stories, from early talkies to modern times, with an eye to narrative conventions and common story points. Examining the ways historical films have painted a clear picture of the past or overtly distorted history, Play the Way You Feel serves up capsule discussions of sundry topics including Duke Ellington's social life at the Cotton Club, avant-garde musical practices in 1930s vaudeville, and Martin Scorsese's improvisatory method on the set of New York, New York. Throughout the book, Whitehead brings the same analytical bent and concise, witty language listeners know from his jazz segments on NPR's Fresh Air with Terry Gross. He investigates well-known songs, traces the development of the stock jazz film ending, and offers fresh, often revisionist takes on works by such directors as Howard Hawks, John Cassavetes, Shirley Clarke, Francis Ford Coppola, Clint Eastwood, Spike Lee, Robert Altman, Woody Allen and Damien Chazelle. In all, Play the Way You Feel is a feast for film-genre fanatics and movie-watching jazz enthusiasts.

(Fake Book). A new low voice edition of nearly 300 songs picked especially for vocalists Includes: Ain't Misbehavin' * All the Way * Bali Ha'i * Be Careful, It's My Heart * Bein' Green * Besame Mucho * Blackbird * Caravan * Cheek to Cheek * Crazy * East of the Sun (And West of the Moon) * Everybody Loves Somebody * Falling in Love Again (Can't Help It) * From This Moment On * The Glory of Love * A Good Man Is Hard to Find * Hard Hearted Hannah (The Vamp of Savannah) * How Deep Is the Ocean (How High Is the Sky) * I Left My Heart in San Francisco * I'll Be Around * I'll Take Romance * I've Got My Love to Keep Me Warm * I've Got You Under My Skin * It's You or No One * Java Jive * Just Squeeze Me (But Don't Tease Me) * The Lady Is a Tramp * Learnin' the Blues * Lollipops and Roses * Lost in the Stars * L-O-V-E * Makin' Whoopee * Mona Lisa * Moonlight in Vermont * More (Ti Guardero Nel Cuore) * My Blue Heaven * My Heart Stood Still * A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square * On the Street Where You Live * Prelude to a Kiss * Pure Imagination * Speak Low * Stormy Weather (Keeps Rainin' All the Time) * Strangers in the Night * That Old Black Magic * Time After Time * Unforgettable * The Very Thought of You * What a Wonderful World * Witchcraft * You Are Beautiful * and more.

At 102 years of age, Louise Tobin is one of the last surviving musicians of the Swing Era. Born in Aubrey, Texas, in 1918, she grew up in a large family that played music together. She once said that she fell out of the cradle singing and all she ever wanted to do was to sing. And sing she did. She sang with Benny Goodman and also performed vocals for such notables as Will Bradley, Bobby Hackett, Harry James (her first husband), Johnny Mercer, Lionel Hampton, the Glenn Miller Orchestra, Peanuts Hucko (her second husband), and Fletcher Henderson.Based on extensive oral history interviews and archival research, Texas Jazz Singer recalls both the glamour and the challenges of life on the road and onstage during the golden age of swing and beyond. As it traces American music through the twentieth century, Louise Tobin's story provides insight into the challenges musicians faced to sustain their careers during the cultural revolution and ever-changing styles and tastes in music. In this absorbing biography, music historian Kevin Edward Mooney offers readers a view of a remarkable life in music, told from the vantage point of the woman who lived it. Rather than simply making Tobin an emblem for women in jazz of the big band era, Mooney concentrates instead on Tobin's life, her struggles and successes, and in doing so captures the particular sense of grace that resonates throughout each phase of Tobin's notable career.

Keil's classic account of blues and its artists is both a guide to the development of the music and a powerful study of the blues as an expressive form in and for African American life. This updated edition explores the place of the blues in artistic, social, political, and commercial life since the 1960s. "An achievement of the first magnitude...He opens our eyes and introduces a world of amazingly complex musical happening."--Robert Farris Thompson, Ethnomusicology

Though serious jazz fans certainly recognize the brilliance of guitarist Grant Green, his overall contributions to the genre were sorely underrated during his own lifetime. Best known as a coveted Blue Note Records session leader and sideman - he played on nine Blue Note albums in 1961 alone - Green helped raise the art of jazz guitar playing to new heights. Like his contemporary Wes Montgomery, Green's driving, aggressive tone was simultaneously fluid and eloquent. He moved freely from style to style, embracing bop, gospel, blues, Latin, country, soul, and funk. In the late '60s, Green forayed into pop jazz but was overshadowed on the charts by more commercial players such as George Benson, who sang as well as played. Throughout most of his brief life, Green battled racial and religious barriers, as well as two failed marriages and a drug habit. This book follows him from his St. Louis gospel and blues roots to his heyday at New York's Blue Note Records; through a subsequent period of musical flux; on the club circuit in Detroit; and into eventual disillusionment, declining health, and death in 1979 at age 43. While later Grant Green songs such as "Down Here on the Ground" from the 1970 album Alive! have been sampled by performers ranging from Madonna to A Tribe Called Quest, the more classic 1963 album Idle Moments ranked Number 9 on Rolling Stone's Alternative Music chart in 1994 - more than 30 years after it was recorded. Such versatility and timelessness makes the short life and career of this jazz guitar genius all the more fascinating.

The New Yorker recently referred to Pat Metheny as 'possibly the most influential jazz guitarist of the past five decades.' A native of Lee's Summit, Missouri, just southeast of Kansas City, Metheny started playing in pizza parlors at age fourteen. By the time he graduated from high school he was the first-call guitarist for Kansas City jazz clubs, private clubs, and jazz festivals. Now 66, he attributes his early success to the local musical environment he was brought up in and the players and teachers who nurtured his talent and welcomed him into the jazz community. Metheny's twenty Grammys in ten categories speak to his versatility and popularity. Despite five decades of interviews, none have conveyed in detail his stories about his teenage years. Beneath Missouri Skies also reveals important details about jazz in Kansas City during the sixties and early seventies, often overlooked in histories of Kansas City jazz. Yet this time of cultural change was characterized by an outstanding level of musicianship. Author Carolyn Glenn Brewer shows how his keen sense of ensemble had its genesis in his school band under the guidance of a beloved band director. Drawn from news accounts, archival material, interviews, and remembrances, to which the author had unique access, Beneath Missouri Skies portrays a place and time from which Metheny still draws inspiration and strength.

"Hold tight. The way to go mad without losing your mind is sometimes unruly." So begins La Marr Jurelle Bruce's urgent provocation and poignant meditation on madness in black radical art. Bruce theorizes four overlapping meanings of madness: the lived experience of an unruly mind, the psychiatric category of serious mental illness, the emotional state also known as "rage," and any drastic deviation from psychosocial norms. With care and verve, he explores the mad in the literature of Amiri Baraka, Gayl Jones, and Ntozake Shange; in the jazz repertoires of Buddy Bolden, Sun Ra, and Charles Mingus; in the comedic performances of Richard Pryor and Dave Chappelle; in the protest music of Nina Simone, Lauryn Hill, and Kendrick Lamar, and beyond. These artists activate madness as content, form, aesthetic, strategy, philosophy, and energy in an enduring black radical tradition. Joining this tradition, Bruce mobilizes a set of interpretive practices, affective dispositions, political principles, and existential orientations that he calls "mad methodology." Ultimately, How to Go Mad without Losing Your Mind is both a study and an act of critical, ethical, radical madness.

This title features in-depth interviews with seven influential jazz composers and musicians in Britain in the 1970s. The author documents their ideas, influences, enthusiasms and the heroic efforts to continue playing the music to which they are committed. The interviews are set in context with some detailed notes on other individual musicians as well as a section on Carr's band, Nuceus. This title is republished with a postscript by Roger Cotterrell and new photos.

Kansas City Lightning: The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker is the first installment in the long-awaited portrait of one of the most talented and influential musicians of the twentieth century, from Stanley Crouch, one of the foremost authorities on jazz and culture in America.

Throughout his life, Charlie Parker personified the tortured American artist: a revolutionary performer who used his alto saxophone to create a new music known as bebop even as he wrestled with a drug addiction that would lead to his death at the age of thirty-four.

Drawing on interviews with peers, collaborators, and family members, Kansas City Lightning recreates Parker's Depression-era childhood; his early days navigating the Kansas City nightlife, inspired by lions like Lester Young and Count Basie; and on to New York, where he began to transcend the music he had mastered. Crouch reveals an ambitious young man torn between music and drugs, between his domineering mother and his impressionable young wife, whose teenage romance with Charlie lies at the bittersweet heart of this story.

With the wisdom of a jazz scholar, the cultural insights of an acclaimed social critic, and the narrative skill of a literary novelist, Stanley Crouch illuminates this American master as never before.

Following the success of the first volume in Nikki Iles's acclaimed jazz series, this collection features sophisticated new jazz arrangements of Christmas classics, including 'Let it snow!', 'Rudolph, the red-nosed reindeer', 'Away in a manger', and 'Past three o'clock'. A wide variety of styles are represented, from swing and stride to boogaloo and calypso, and the expertly recorded CD, by Nikki Iles, helps with interpretation. With fully notated rhythms, grooves, and improvisations, Jazz on a Winter's Night 2 is the perfect collection for pianists looking for that authentic sound.

The Jazz Age. The phrase conjures images of Louis Armstrong holding court at the Sunset Cafe in Chicago, Duke Ellington dazzling crowds at the Cotton Club in Harlem, and star singers like Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey. But the Jazz Age was every bit as much of a Paris phenomenon as it was a Chicago and New York scene.
In "Paris Blues," Andy Fry provides an alternative history of African American music and musicians in France, one that looks beyond familiar personalities and well-rehearsed stories. He pinpoints key issues of race and nation in France's complicated jazz history from the 1920s through the 1950s. While he deals with many of the traditional icons--such as Josephine Baker, Django Reinhardt, and Sidney Bechet, among others--what he asks is how they came to be so iconic, and what their stories hide as well as what they preserve. Fry focuses throughout on early jazz and swing but includes its re-creation--reinvention--in the 1950s. Along the way, he pays tribute to forgotten traditions such as black musical theater, white show bands, and French wartime swing. "Paris Blues" provides a nuanced account of the French reception of African Americans and their music and contributes greatly to a growing literature on jazz, race, and nation in France.

Sophisticated Giant presents the life and legacy of tenor saxophonist Dexter Gordon (1923-1990), one of the major innovators of modern jazz. In a context of biography, history, and memoir, Maxine Gordon has completed the book that her late husband began, weaving his "solo" turns with her voice and a chorus of voices from past and present. Reading like a jazz composition, the blend of research, anecdote, and a selection of Dexter's personal letters reflects his colorful life and legendary times. It is clear why the celebrated trumpet genius Dizzy Gillespie said to Dexter, "Man, you ought to leave your karma to science." Dexter Gordon the icon is the Dexter beloved and celebrated on albums, on film, and in jazz lore--even in a street named for him in Copenhagen. But this image of the cool jazzman fails to come to terms with the multidimensional man full of humor and wisdom, a figure who struggled to reconcile being both a creative outsider who broke the rules and a comforting insider who was a son, father, husband, and world citizen. This essential book is an attempt to fill in the gaps created by our misperceptions as well as the gaps left by Dexter himself.

This is the first book to tell the story of the bebop subculture in London's Soho, a subculture that emerged in 1945 and reached its pinnacle in 1950. In an exploration via the intersections of race, class and gender, it shows how bebop identities were constructed and articulated. Combining a wide range of archival research and theory, the book evocatively demonstrates how the scene evolved in Soho's clubs, the fashion that formed around the music, drug usage amongst a contingent of the group, and the moral panic which led to the police raids on the clubs between 1947 and 1950. Thereafter it maps the changes in popular culture in Soho during the 1950s, and argues that the bebop story is an important precedent to the institutional harassment of black-related spaces and culture that continued in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This book therefore rewrites the first chapter of the 'classic' subcultural canon, and resets the subcultural clock; requiring us to rethink the periodization and social make-up of British post-war youth subcultures.

This book is a deeply personal portrait of the people and music of today's New Orleans--a city that has been hard hit by Katrina, but is managing to keep its great jazz tradition, brass band scene, incomparable food, and unique lifestyle vital and intact.

Among the musicians appearing in this book are: the Rebirth Brass Band, Hot 8, the Soul Rebels, the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, Johnny Vidacovich, Barry Martyn, Lars Edegran, Chuck Badie, Pete Fountain, Michael White, the Hot Club of New Orleans, Coco Robicheaux, record company owner George Buck, and gospel musician Billy Edwards.

The book also presents portraits of everyday New Orleans people confronting a challenging situation.

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.

Miles Davis, supremely cool behind his shades. Billie Holiday, eyes closed and head tilted back in full cry. Blue Notes in Black and White charts the development of jazz photography from the swing era of the 1930s to the rise of black nationalism in the '60s. Through text and photographs, Benjamin Cawthra provides a fascinating account of the partnership between two of the twentieth century's most innovative art forms.