Jazz, Rags & Blues, Books 1 through 4, contain original solos for late elementary to late intermediate-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. The CD includes dynamic recordings of each song.

This history of jazz, spanning the twentieth century, is the first to place it within the broad context of American culture. Burton Peretti argues persuasively that this distinctive American music has been a key thread in the tapestry of the nation's culture. The music itself, its players and its audience, and the critical debates it has prompted, tell us much about changes in American life since 1910. Mr. Peretti traces the emergence of jazz out of ragtime during a time of tumultuous growth of cites and industries. In the 1920s jazz flourished and symbolized the cultural struggle between modernists and traditionalists. As American sought reassurance and self-esteem during the Great Depression, jazz reached new levels of sophistication in the Swing Era. World War II encouraged rapid changes in popular tastes, and in the postwar decades jazz became both a voice of a globally dominant America and an avant-garde music reflecting social and political turmoil. Today, Mr. Peretti concludes, jazz symbolizes important cultural trends and enjoys a new prestige in a complex musical scene. Jazz in American Culture tells a peculiarly American story, evaluating the music as well as those who created it, and opening new perspectives on our cultural history.

This book, first published in 1982, shows that jazz and blues are music forms that are about individualism, experiment, expression and feeling. From their origin in the work songs and spirituals of America's southern slaves, through to their adaptation to the urban adaptation to the urban environment in Chicago and New Orleans, the author details the social and economic background that saw the birth of the blues and jazz, and introduces and appraises their leading exponents. He shows how African rhythms were combined with an American musical tradition to produce a distinctive style which was to revitalise Western music.

This research and information guide provides a wide range of scholarship on the life, career, and musical legacy of Miles Davis, and is compiled for an interdisciplinary audience of scholars in jazz and popular music, musicology, and cultural studies. It serves as an excellent tool for librarians, researchers, and scholars sorting through the massive amount of material in the field.

"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.

Jazz is a music born in the United States and formed by a combination of influences. In its infancy, jazz was a melting pot of military brass bands, work songs and field hollers of the United States slaves during the 19th century, European harmonies and forms, and the rhythms of Africa and the Caribbean. Later, the blues and the influence of Spanish and French Creoles with European classical training nudged jazz further along in its development. As it moved through the swing era of the 1930s, bebop of the 1940s, and cool jazz of the 1950s, jazz continued to serve as a reflection of societal changes. During the turbulent 1960s, freedom and unrest were expressed through Free Jazz and the Avant Garde. Popular and world music have been incorporated and continue to expand the impact and reach of jazz. Today, jazz is truly an international art form. This second edition of Historical Dictionary of Jazz contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 1,500 cross-referenced entries on musicians, styles of jazz, instruments, recording labels, bands and bandleaders, and more. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Jazz.

Edward "Kid" Ory (1886-1973) was a trombonist, composer, recording artist, and early New Orleans jazz band leader. Creole Trombone tells his story from birth on a rural sugar cane plantation in a French-speaking, ethnically mixed family, to his emergence in New Orleans as the city's hottest band leader. The Ory band featured such future jazz stars as Louis Armstrong and King Oliver, and was widely considered New Orleans's top "hot" band. Ory's career took him from New Orleans to California, where he and his band created the first African American New Orleans jazz recordings ever made. In 1925 he moved to Chicago where he made records with Oliver, Armstrong, and Jelly Roll Morton and captured the spirit of the jazz age. His most famous composition from that period, "Muskrat Ramble," is a jazz standard. Retired from music during the Depression, he returned in the 1940s and enjoyed a reignited career.

Drawing on oral history and Ory's unpublished autobiography, "Creole Trombone" is a story that is told in large measure by Ory himself. The author reveals Ory's personality to the reader and shares remarkable stories of incredible innovations of the jazz pioneer. The book also features unpublished Ory compositions, photographs, and a selected discography of his most significant recordings.

The first study of the performance practice, repertoire and context of the modern 'brass ensemble' in the musical world. Whereas the British 'brass band' originated in the nineteenth century and rapidly developed into a nationwide working-class movement, the perceived modern 'brass ensemble' has a less clear foundation and identity. This book is the first to focus exclusively on the performance, practice, repertoire and context of the 'brass ensemble' in the musical world. Following World War II, the brass quintet and other orchestral groupings emerged in the United States and Europe, with musical customs established by professional players playing orchestral instruments. These groups initially played a combination of the music of Gabrieli and his contemporaries as well as newly commissioned works. By the late twentieth century, however, repertory spanned works by Elliott Carter, Maxwell Davies and Lutoslawski, together with music that integrated jazz, commercial elements, and landmark transcriptions. At the book's heart is the story of the London-based, internationally acclaimed, Philip Jones Brass Ensemble. But this is not a story of one ensemble, as the 'brass ensemble' can be defined in several forms. The Modern Brass Ensemble in Twentieth-Century Britain offers a comprehensive account by an author and performer who was involved in many of the key developments of the modern 'brass ensemble'.

Women performers played a vital role in the development of American and transatlantic entertainment, celebrity culture, and gender ideology. Sara E. Lampert examines the lives, careers, and fame of overlooked figures from Europe and the United States whose work in melodrama, ballet, and other stage shows shocked and excited early U.S. audiences. These women lived and performed the tensions and contradictions of nineteenth-century gender roles, sparking debates about women's place in public life. Yet even their unprecedented wealth and prominence failed to break the patriarchal family structures that governed their lives and conditioned their careers. Inevitable contradictions arose. The burgeoning celebrity culture of the time forced women stage stars to don the costumes of domestic femininity even as the unsettled nature of life in the theater defied these ideals.A revealing foray into a lost time, Starring Women returns a generation of performers to their central place in the early history of American theater.

In Soundscapes of Liberation, Celeste Day Moore traces the popularization of African American music in postwar France, where it signaled new forms of power and protest. Moore surveys a wide range of musical genres, soundscapes, and media: the US military's wartime records and radio programs; the French record industry's catalogs of blues, jazz, and R&B recordings; the translations of jazz memoirs; a provincial choir specializing in spirituals; and US State Department-produced radio programs that broadcast jazz and gospel across the French empire. In each of these contexts, individual intermediaries such as educators, producers, writers, and radio deejays imbued African American music with new meaning, value, and political power. Their work resonated among diverse Francophone audiences and transformed the lives and labor of many African American musicians, who found financial and personal success as well as discrimination in France. By showing how the popularity of African American music was intertwined with contemporary structures of racism and imperialism, Moore demonstrates this music's centrality to postwar France and the convergence of decolonization, the expanding globalized economy, the Cold War, and worldwide liberation movements.

Free Jazz, Harmolodics, and Ornette Coleman discusses Ornette Coleman's musical philosophy of "Harmolodics," an improvisational system deeply inspired by the Civil Rights Movement. Falling under the guise of "free jazz," Harmolodics can be difficult to understand, even for seasoned musicians and musicologists. Yet this book offers a clear and thorough approach to these complex methods, outlining Coleman's position as the developer of a logical-and historically significant-system of jazz improvisation. Included here are detailed musical analyses of improvisations, accompanied by full transcriptions. Intimate interviews between the author and Coleman explore the deeper issues at work in Harmolodics, issues of race, class, sex, and poverty. The principle of human equality quickly emerges as a central tenet of Coleman's life and music. Harmolodics is best understood when viewed in its essential form, both as a theory of improvisation and as an artistic expression of racial and human equality.

The year 1917 was unlike any other in American history, or in the history of American music. The United States entered World War I, jazz burst onto the national scene, and the German musicians who dominated classical music were forced from the stage. As the year progressed, New Orleans natives Nick LaRocca and Freddie Keppard popularized the new genre of jazz, a style that suited the frantic mood of the era. African-American bandleader James Reese Europe accepted the challenge of making the band of the Fifteenth New York Infantry into the best military band in the country. Orchestral conductors Walter Damrosch and Karl Muck met the public demand for classical music while also responding to new calls for patriotic music. Violinist Fritz Kreisler, pianist Olga Samaroff, and contralto Ernestine Schumann-Heink gave American audiences the best of Old-World musical traditions while walking a tightrope of suspicion because of their German sympathies. Before the end of the year, the careers of these eight musicians would be upended, and music in America would never be the same. Making Music American recounts the musical events of this tumultuous year month by month from New Year's Eve 1916 to New Year's Day 1918. As the story unfolds, the lives of these eight musicians intersect in surprising ways, illuminating the transformation of American attitudes toward music both European and American. In this unsettled time, no one was safe from suspicion, but America's passion for music made the rewards high for those who could balance musical skill with diplomatic savvy.

The Gospel Coaltion Award of Distinction-Arts and Culture ECPA Top Shelf Award Winner For practitioners and fans, jazz expresses the deepest meanings of life. Its rich history and its distinctive elements like improvisation and syncopation unite to create an unrepeatable and inexpressible aesthetic experience. But for others, jazz is an enigma. Might jazz be better appreciated and understood in relation to the Christian faith? In this volume, theologian and jazz pianist William Edgar argues that the music of jazz cannot be properly understood apart from the Christian gospel, which like jazz moves from deep lament to inextinguishable joy. By tracing the development of jazz, placing it within the context of the African American experience, and exploring the work of jazz musicians like Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, John Coltrane, Ella Fitzgerald, and Louis Armstrong, Edgar argues that jazz deeply resonates with the hope that is ultimately found in the good news of Jesus Christ. Grab a table. The show is about to begin.

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

(Book). The Jazz Guitar Handbook is a step-by-step guide to jazz guitar playing. It takes you from the basics through to advanced harmony and soloing concepts, and teaches you the music theory a jazz guitarist needs to know. Along the way it covers a wide range of styles, including jazzy blues, swing, bebop, modal, jazz-funk, Gypsy, and more. The handbook features over 120 exercises in notation and tab and includes a 96-track CD of examples, play-alongs, and backing tracks. It also presents the history of the jazz guitar and its great players. Easy to use and useful for players at various levels, this volume is a must-have reference for players looking to expand their jazz skillset.

This book, first published in 1982, shows that jazz and blues are music forms that are about individualism, experiment, expression and feeling. From their origin in the work songs and spirituals of America's southern slaves, through to their adaptation to the urban adaptation to the urban environment in Chicago and New Orleans, the author details the social and economic background that saw the birth of the blues and jazz, and introduces and appraises their leading exponents. He shows how African rhythms were combined with an American musical tradition to produce a distinctive style which was to revitalise Western music.

Get your mojo working as you take a musical trip from the Mississippi Delta to Chicago's gritty South Side and points beyond with Blues For Dummies, an insightful, toe-tappin', music lovers' guide to the blues. Popular blues guitarist Lonnie Brooks serves as your tour guide through the life and times of the blues, from the acoustic mystique of Robert Johnson and Son House to the urban blues men and women of today: John Lee Hooker, Robert Cray, B.B. King, Etta James, Koko Taylor, Stevie Ray Vaughan, and, of course, Brooks himself.

Blues For Dummies travels from sad to glad, with stops along the way at heartache and despair, hope and joy, on the road to great music. Get hip to the different styles and eras of the blues; discover what makes the blues so blue; find out "Who's Who" among four generations of blues musicians; and make tracks to the best blues clubs on the planet with this great, easygoing reference. Plus, take a listen to some of the greatest blues recordings of all time (from Muddy Waters and Little Walter to Bobby "Blue" Bland, Buddy Guy, and Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown) on the exclusive audio CD that comes with Blues For Dummies.

To serve the British nation in World War II, the BBC charged itself with mobilizing popular music in support of Britain's war effort. Radio music, British broadcasters and administrators argued, could maintain civilian and military morale, increase industrial production, and even promote a sense of Anglo-American cooperation. Because of their widespread popularity, dance music and popular song were seen as ideal for these tasks; along with jazz, with its American associations and small but youthful audience, these genres suddenly gained new legitimacy at the traditionally more conservative BBC.
In Victory through Harmony, author Christina Baade both tells the fascinating story of the BBC's musical participation in wartime events and explores how popular music and jazz broadcasting helped redefine notions of war, gender, race, class, and nationality in wartime Britain. Baade looks in particular at the BBC's pioneering Listener Research Department, which tracked the tastes of select demographic groups including servicemen stationed overseas and young female factory workers in order to further the goal of entertaining, cheering, and even calming the public during wartime. The book also tells how the wartime BBC programmed popular music to an unprecedented degree with the goal of building national unity and morale, promoting new roles for women, virile representations of masculinity, Anglo-American friendship, and pride in a common British culture. In the process, though, the BBC came into uneasy contact with threats of Americanization, sentimentality, and the creativity of non-white "others," which prompted it to regulate and even censor popular music and performers.
Rather than provide the soundtrack for a unified "People's War," Baade argues, the BBC's broadcasting efforts exposed the divergent ideologies, tastes, and perspectives of the nation. This illuminating book will interest all readers in popular music, jazz, and radio, as well as British cultural history and gender studies.

Louis 'Satchmo' Armstrong was not only jazz's greatest musician and innovator, but also arguably its most famous entertainer and the frontal figure in the development of contemporary popular music. Overcoming social and political obstacles, he created a long and impressive career and an enormous musical output. Now, his ground breaking musical career is amassed and detailed in this discography of all his works, from professionally made commercial releases, to amateur and unissued recordings. All of Me is a comprehensive, chronological discography born out of love and admiration for Louis Armstrong, and devotion to years of collecting his musical accomplishments. Author Jos Willems has meticulously compiled all of Satchmo's known recordings_both studio and live performances_and with assistance from internationally renowned specialists, has assembled an impressively detailed, accurate, and complete listing. This volume is superbly formatted and presented, logically organized, and thoroughly indexed by song title and individual. Researchers, collectors, and enthusiasts can easily look up any detail of a recording: issues and releases of particular songs; publishing companies; producers; catalog numbers; dates, times, and locations of recordings; musicians Armstrong played with; and format, be it 78 or 45 RPM records, LPs, CDs, or media appearances. Every detail of Armstrong's career is listed in this impressive volume, shedding light on the enormity of his impact on jazz and popular culture. This is the ultimate reference guide for the complete works of Louis Armstrong.

In Soundworks Anthony Reed argues that studying sound requires conceiving it as process and as work. Since the long Black Arts era (ca. 1958-1974), intellectuals, poets, and musicians have defined black sound as radical aesthetic practice. Through their recorded collaborations as well as the accompanying interviews, essays, liner notes, and other media, they continually reinvent black sound conceptually and materially. Soundwork is Reed's term for that material and conceptual labor of experimental sound practice framed by the institutions of the culture industry and shifting historical contexts. Through analyses of Langston Hughes's collaboration with Charles Mingus, Amiri Baraka's work with the New York Art Quartet, Jayne Cortez's albums with the Firespitters, and the multimedia projects of Archie Shepp, Matana Roberts, Cecil Taylor, and Jeanne Lee, Reed shows that to grasp black sound as a radical philosophical and aesthetic insurgence requires attending to it as the product of material, technical, sensual, and ideological processes.

The Dorsey brothers were prominent members of the Big Band fraternity in the late thirties, forties, and fifties. Jimmy Dorsey: A Study in Contrasts is a bio-discographical text that spans Jimmy Dorsey's career as a musician, orchestra leader, and composer. The book is a collection of chronological listings of every recording on which Dorsey is believed to have played or have been present, interspersed with brief biographical notations and contemporary historical information that show the close relationship between his talents and his life experiences as well as points out the many contrasts between Jimmy and his brother Tommy in personality, business drive, and musical ability. Each listing contains an abundance of information about the studio, city, and date of the session, the name of the recording group, its personnel and their instruments, plus the matrix number, song title, vocalist (if any) and all the world wide releases known to be in existence (including 78 rpm, 45 rpm, EP, LP, 8-track, cassette, compact disc, and electrical transcription). The listings even include any other titles under which the recording may have been released. In addition to music, motion pictures, radio, and television programs on which Dorsey worked or appeared, the listings contain information about the Broadway musical productions where he was a member of the pit band. In all, over 3000 recordings and appearances are listed, making this an unequaled and minutely detailed reference on Jimmy Dorsey, one of the most influential musicians of the big band era.

The colourful, personal story of an early jazz legend First published in 1971 and now lovingly reissued this autobiography is a valuable, entertaining, and sometimes risque firsthand account of early New Orleans jazz by one of the pioneers of the string bass. In transcribed interviews, Foster describes the milieu in which early jazz developed. With great attention to detail and an outspoken narrative style he puts the record straight, correcting many jazz critics and historians in the process. Colorful anecdotes bring to life legends of early jazz such as Jelly Roll Morton, Buddy Bolden, and King Oliver. A generous collection of rare photographs complement this dramatic and fascinating story.

Birdland was a legendary nightclub in New York City and, from 1949 to 1965, was the scene for the greatest jazz music and musicians in the world. This illustrated book offers a history of this legendary jazz club and presents the greats who played its stage, in capsule biographies, vintage photos, and rare memorabilia. Named after legendary jazz saxophonist Charlie Yardbird Parker, the club showcased memorable double and triple bills lasting until dawn. Many classic live recordings were made at the Jazz Corner of the World, such as A Night at Birdland by the Art Blakey Quintet, Basie at Birdland, and Coltrane, Live at Birdland. Birdland established itself as the one place that every jazz musician had to play. Greats such as Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Count Basie, John Coltrane, Art Tatum, Art Blakey, Horace Silver, Clifford Brown, Ella Fitzgerald, Stan Getz, Lester Young, Billie Holiday, Oscar Peterson, and Sonny Rollins, to name only a few, graced its stage.

Jazz photography has attracted increasing attention in recent years. Photographs of musicians are popular with enthusiasts, while historians and critics are keen to incorporate photographs as illustrations. Yet there has been little interrogation of these photographs and it is noticeable that what has become known as the jazz photography 'tradition' is dominated by a small number of well-known photographers and 'iconic' images. Many photographers, including African American photojournalists, studio photographers, early twentieth-century emigres, the Jewish exiles of the 1930s and vernacular snapshots are frequently overlooked. Drawing on ideas from contemporary photographic theory supported by extensive original archival research, Sight Readings is a thorough exploration of twentieth century jazz photography, and it includes discussions of jazz as a visual subject, its attraction to different types of photographers and offers analysis of why and how they approached the subject in the way they did. One of the remarkable things about this book is its movement back and forth between detailed archive research, the empirical documentation of photographers, their techniques, working practices, equipment etc., and cultural theory, the sophisticated discussion of aesthetics, cultural sociology, the politics of identity, etc. The result is both a fine scholarly achievement and an engaging labour of love. The primary readership will be those with specialist interests in the history of jazz and the history of photography. The audience will include jazz scholars, musicians, critics and fans, along with photographers, photography scholars, art historians and those generally interested in the history of visual images. It will be an essential text for teaching as well as research in the fields of music and photography. It will be of interest to those teaching and studying within cultural studies, American studies, African American studies, critical race and ethnic studies, history, English and sociology. There is also a significant readership for jazz and photographic history outside the academic context. It will be of interest to the media, the museum world and the general reader with interests in music or photography.