This book & CD traces the evolution of New Orleans jazz and second-line drumming from the early styles of ragtime and traditional jazz to their modern applications in contemporary jazz.

In a career that spanned 60 years, Paul Whiteman changed the landscape of American music, beginning with his million-selling recordings in the early 1920s of "Whispering," "Japanese Sandman," and "Three O'Clock in the Morning." Whiteman would then introduce "symphonic jazz," a powerful blend of the classical and jazz idioms that represented a whole new approach to modern American music, influencing generations of bandleaders and composers. While some hold that at the close of the Roaring Twenties Whiteman's musical hegemony quickly waned, Don Rayno illustrates in this second volume of Paul Whiteman: Pioneer in American Music how much of a dominant figure Whiteman remained. A major figure on the American music scene for decades to come, he would continue to lead critically-acclaimed orchestras, filling theaters and concert halls alike and diligently seeking out and nurturing musical talent on the largest scale of any orchestra leader in the 20th century. In this second volume of Rayno's magisterial treatment of the life and music of this remarkable maestro, Whiteman's career during the second half of his life is explored in the fullest detail, as Whiteman conquers the worlds of theater and vaudeville, the concert hall, radio, motion pictures, and television, winning accolades in all of them. Through hundreds of interviews, extensive documentation, and exhaustive research of over nearly three decades, a portrait emerges of one of American music's most important musical figures during the last century. Rayno paints a stunning portrait of Whiteman's considerable accomplishments and far-reaching influence.

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.

The Cultural Politics of Jazz Collectives: This Is Our Music documents the emergence of collective movements in jazz and improvised music. Jazz history is most often portrayed as a site for individual expression and revolves around the celebration of iconic figures, while the networks and collaborations that enable the music to maintain and sustain its cultural status are surprisingly under-investigated. This collection explores the history of musician-led collectives and the ways in which they offer a powerful counter-model for rethinking jazz practices in the post-war period. It includes studies of groups including the New York Musicians Organization, Sweden's Ett minne foer livet, Wonderbrass from South Wales, the contemporary Dutch jazz-hip hop scene, and Austria's JazzWerkstatt. With an international list of contributors and examples from Europe and the United States, these twelve essays and case studies examine issues of shared aesthetic vision, socioeconomic and political factors, local education, and cultural values among improvising musicians.

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.

Today, jazz history is dominated by iconic figures who have taken on an almost God-like status. From Satchmo to Duke, Bird to Trane, these legendary jazzmen form the backbone of the jazz tradition. Jazz icons not only provide musicians and audiences with figureheads to revere but have also come to stand for a number of values and beliefs that shape our view of the music itself. Jazz Icons explores the growing significance of icons in jazz and discusses the reasons why the music's history is increasingly dependent on the legacies of 'great men'. Using a series of individual case studies, Whyton examines the influence of jazz icons through different forms of historical mediation, including the recording, language, image and myth. The book encourages readers to take a fresh look at their relationship with iconic figures of the past and challenges many of the dominant narratives in jazz today.

Recorded by his quartet in a single session in 1964, A Love Supreme is widely considered John Coltrane's magnum opus and one of the greatest jazz albums of all time.
In Beyond A Love Supreme, Tony Whyton explores both the musical complexities of A Love Supreme and the album's seminal importance in jazz history. Marking Coltrane's transition from the bebop and hard bop of his earlier recordings to the free jazz style perfected throughout the rest of his career, the album also embodies the deep spirituality that characterized the final years of his life. The titles of the four part suite--"Acknowledgment," "Resolution," "Pursuance," and "Psalm"--along with the poem Coltrane composed for inclusion in the liner notes, which he "recites" instrumentally in "Psalm," reflect the religious aspect of the album, a quality that contributes to its mystique and symbolic importance within the canon of major jazz recordings. But Whyton also shows how A Love Supreme challenges many of the traditional, unreflective assumptions that permeate jazz culture--the binary oppositions between improvisation and composition, black music and white music, live performance and studio recording. He critically examines many of the mythologizing narratives about how the album was conceived and recorded and about what it signifies in terms of the trajectory of Coltrane's personal life. Sifting through the criticism of late Coltrane, Whyton suggests ways of listening to these recordings that go beyond the conventional ideologies of mainstream jazz practice and open the music to a wider range of responses.
Filled with fresh insights into one of the most influential recordings in jazz history, Beyond A Love Supreme is an indispensable resource for jazz scholars, jazz musicians, and fans and aficionados at all levels.

Clad in white tie and tails, dancing and scatting his way through the "Hi-de-ho" chorus of "Minnie the Moocher," Cab Calloway exuded a sly charm and sophistication that endeared him to legions of fans. In Hi-de-ho, author Alyn Shipton offers the first full-length biography of Cab Calloway, whose vocal theatrics and flamboyant stage presence made him one of the highest-earning African American bandleaders. Shipton sheds new light on Calloway's life and career, explaining how he traversed racial and social boundaries to become one of the country's most beloved entertainers. Drawing on first-hand accounts from Calloway's family, friends, and fellow musicians, the book traces the roots of this music icon, from his childhood in Rochester, New York, to his life of hustling on the streets of Baltimore. Shipton highlights how Calloway's desire to earn money to support his infant daughter prompted his first break into show business, when he joined his sister Blanche in a traveling revue. Beginning in obscure Baltimore nightclubs and culminating in his replacement of Duke Ellington at New York's famed Cotton Club, Calloway honed his gifts of scat singing and call-and-response routines. His career as a bandleader was matched by his genius as a talent-spotter, evidenced by his hiring of such jazz luminaries as Ben Webster, Dizzy Gillespie, and Jonah Jones. As the swing era waned, Calloway reinvented himself as a musical theatre star, appearing as Sportin' Life in "Porgy and Bess" in the early 1950s; in later years, Calloway cemented his status as a living legend through cameos on "Sesame Street" and his show-stopping appearance in the wildly popular "The Blues Brothers" movie, bringing his trademark "hi-de-ho" refrain to a new generation of audiences. More than any other source, Hi-de-ho stands as an entertaining, not-to-be-missed portrait of Cab Calloway-one that expertly frames his enduring significance as a pioneering artist and entertainer.

"An occasion to appreciate Dexter's resounding musical genius as well as his wish for major social transformation."-Angela Y. Davis, political activist, scholar, author, and speaker 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.

Behind the scenes in the life of a musician--an exuberant, entertaining memoir from jazz guitarist, singer, and raconteur John Pizzarelli John Pizzarelli, the son of jazz guitar legend Bucky Pizzarelli, is a connoisseur of American song who grew up among the legends of jazz. From teenage explorations of rock music to life on the road with his father, he worked his way from gigs in tiny clubs to opening for Frank Sinatra during his final international tour. Now Pizzarelli performs in festivals and top venues across the United States and the world, and he shares his unique journey in this revealing, charming, and heartwarming memoir. Includes firsthand stories of famous jazz greats and popular music icons including Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Rosemary Clooney, Benny Goodman, Joe Pass, James Taylor, and Paul McCartney Reveals what it was like to grow up among great musicians and storytellers and shares the day-to-day experiences of a touring musician's life Includes thirty-five terrific photographs that take you inside John Pizzarelli's life and music Part of the Wiley-Lincoln Center alliance Absorbing, upbeat, funny, and down to earth, World on a String is an irresistible celebration of music and life that will appeal to John Pizzarelli's large and growing following.

At its most intimate level, music heals our emotional wounds and inspires us. At its most public, it unites people across cultural boundaries. But can it rebuild a city? That's the central question posed in New Atlantis, journalist John Swenson's beautifully detailed account of the musical artists working to save America's most colorful and troubled metropolis: New Orleans. The city has been threatened with extinction many times during its three-hundred-plus-year history by fire, pestilence, crime, flood, and oil spills. Working for little money and in spite of having lost their own homes and possessions to Katrina, New Orleans's most gifted musicians-including such figures as Dr. John, the Neville Brothers, "Trombone Shorty," and Big Chief Monk Boudreaux-are fighting back against a tidal wave of problems: the depletion of the wetlands south of the city (which are disappearing at the rate of one acre every hour), the violence that has made New Orleans the murder capitol of the U.S., the waning tourism industry, and above all the continuing calamity in the wake of Hurricane Katrina (or, as it is known in New Orleans, the "Federal Flood"). Indeed, most of the neighborhoods that nurtured the indigenous music of New Orleans were destroyed in the flood, and many of the elder statesmen have died or been incapacitated since then, but the musicians profiled here have stepped up to fill their roles. New Atlantis is their story. Packed with indelible portraits of individual artists, informed by Swenson's encyclopedic knowledge of the city's unique and varied music scene-which includes jazz, R&B, brass band, rock, and hip hop-New Atlantis is a stirring chronicle of the valiant efforts to preserve the culture that gives New Orleans its grace and magic.

This book traces the learning experiences of the jazz community in Bristol, UK from 1945 to 2012. Grounded in a methodology of participant observation and case studies, it documents changes in the economic, cultural and educational circumstances faced by the players. In their own words, the musicians recall the influences that initiated and developed their musicianship. Drawing on first-person accounts, the study traces the historical development of jazz music and musicians in Bristol. In the post-war years, players began to develop significant stylistic aspects in the jazz lexicon. Drawing on media sources and interaction in performance, players garnered a host of performing skills whilst suffering dwindling audiences and declining venues. Reforms in English music education in the 1980s offered formal opportunities to study jazz in the city's schools, drawing minimal attention from institutions. Practical learning and playing opportunities offered by the Local Authority music service sustained a modest membership over the years. Post millennium, local schools, with one or two exceptions, showed little interest in jazz education. Nevertheless, maintaining its traditional stance, Bristol's jazz community continues to exhort top quality jazz performances including compositions that match national and international standards.

Jazz Trumpet Studies brings together 78 of James Rae's pieces from his successful method Progressive Jazz Studies into a single great-value book, suitable for Grade 1 to 5. *Part 1 introduces the beginner to jazz rhythms including swing quavers, syncopation and anticipation *Part 2 contains fully graded melodic jazz studies *Part 3 develops confidence within common jazz tonalities: whole-tone, diminished and blues scales, modes and the II-V-I chord sequence. **ABRSM selected pieces (Trumpet, Cornet & Flugelhorn from 2009): Study No. 31 or No. 33 (Rae) Study No. 37 or No. 43 (Rae) Study No. 44 or No. 48 (Rae) Study No. 61 (Rae)

For jazz historians, Louis Armstrong's Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings mark the first revolution in the history of a music riven by upheaval. Yet few traces of this revolution can be found in the historical record of the late 1920s, when the records were made. Even black newspapers covered Armstrong as just one name among many, and descriptions of his playing, while laudatory, bear little resemblance to those of today. For this reason, the perspective of Armstrong's first listeners is usually regarded as inadequate, as if they had missed the true significance of his music. This attitude overlooks the possibility that those early listeners might have heard something valuable on its own terms, something we ourselves have lost. If we could somehow recapture their perspective-without abandoning our own-how might it change our understanding of these seminal recordings? In Louis Armstrong's Hot Five and Hot Seven Recordings, Harker selects seven exceptional records to study at length: "Cornet Chop Suey," "Big Butter and Egg Man," "Potato Head Blues," "S.O.L. Blues"/"Gully Low Blues," "Savoy Blues," and "West End Blues." The world of vaudeville and show business provide crucial context, revealing how the demands of making a living in a competitive environment could catalyze Armstrong's unique artistic gifts. Technical achievements such as virtuosity, structural coherence, harmonic improvisation, and high-register playing are all shown to have a basis in the workaday requirements of Armstrong's profession. Invoking a breadth of influences ranging from New Orleans clarinet style to Guy Lombardo, and from tap dancing to classical music, this book offers bold insights, fresh anecdotes, and, ultimately, a new interpretation of Louis Armstrong and his most influential body of recordings.

The influence of Miles Davis's "second great quintet," consisting of Davis (trumpet), Wayne Shorter (tenor saxophone), Herbie Hancock (piano), Ron Carter (bass), and Tony Williams (drums) continues to resonate. Jazz musicians, historians, and critics have celebrated the group for its improvisational communication, openness, and its transitional status between hard bop and the emerging free jazz of the 1960s, creating a synthesis described by one quintet member as "controlled freedom." The book provides a critical analytical study of the Davis quintet studio recordings released between 1965-68, including E.S.P., Miles Smiles, Sorcerer, Nefertiti, Miles in the Sky, and Filles de Kilimanjaro. In contrast to the quintet's live recordings, which included performances of older jazz standards, the studio recordings offered an astonishing breadth of original compositions. Many of these compositions have since become jazz standards, and all of them played a central role in the development of contemporary jazz composition. Using transcription and analysis, author Keith Waters illuminates the compositional, improvisational, and collective achievements of the group. With additional sources, such as rehearsal takes, alternate takes, session reels, and copyright deposits of lead sheets, he shows how the group in the studio shaped and altered features of the compositions. Despite the earlier hard bop orientation of the players, the Davis quintet compositions offered different responses to questions of form, melody, and harmonic structure, and they often invited other improvisational paths, ones that relied on an uncanny degree of collective rapport. And given the spontaneity of the recorded performances-often undertaken with a minimum of rehearsal-the players responded with any number of techniques to address formal, harmonic, or metrical discrepancies that arose while the tape was rolling. The book provides an invaluable resource for those interested in Davis and his sidemen, as well as in jazz of the 1960s. It serves as a reference for jazz musicians and educators, with detailed transcriptions and commentary on compositions and improvisations heard on the studio recordings.

Of all the styles of jazz to emerge in the twentieth century, none is more passionate, more exhilaratingly up-tempo, or more steeped in an outsider tradition than Gypsy Jazz. And there is no one more qualified to write about Gypsy Jazz than Michael Dregni, author of the acclaimed biography, Django.
A vagabond music, Gypsy Jazz is played today in French Gypsy bars, Romany encampments, on religious pilgrimages--and increasingly on the world's greatest concert stages. Yet its story has never been told, in part because much of its history is undocumented, either in written form or often even in recorded music. Beginning with Django Reinhardt, whose dazzling Gypsy Jazz became the toast of 1930s Paris in the heady days of Josephine Baker, Picasso, and Hemingway, Dregni follows the music as it courses through caravans on the edge of Paris, where today's young French Gypsies learn Gypsy Jazz as a rite of passage, along the Gypsy pilgrimage route to Les Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer where the Romany play around their campfires, and finally to the new era of international Gypsy stars such as Bireli Lagrene, Boulou Ferre, Dorado Schmitt, and Django's own grandchildren, David Reinhardt and Dallas Baumgartner. Interspersed with Dregni's vivid narrative are the words of the musicians themselves, many of whom have never been interviewed for the American press before, as they describe what the music means to them. Gypsy Jazz also includes a chapter devoted entirely to American Gypsy musicians who remain largely unknown outside their hidden community.
Blending travelogue, detective story, and personal narrative, Gypsy Jazz is music history at its best, capturing the history and culture of this elusive music--and the soul that makes it swing.

John Coltrane's unique and powerful saxophonic sound is commonly recognized among jazz scholars and fans alike as having a "spiritual" nature, imbued with the perfomer's soul, which deeply touches musicians and listeners worldwide. This revered and respected musician created new standards, linked tradition with innovation, challenged common assumptions, and relentlessly pursued spiritual goals in his music, which he aimed openly to use as a means to help listeners see the beauty of life. More than four decades after Coltrane's death, it is this spiritual nature of the music that has kept his sound alive - and thriving - on the contemporary jazz scene. Edited by prominent jazz musician and scholar Leonard Brown, John Coltrane and Black America's Quest for Freedom is a timely exploration of Coltrane's sound and its spiritual qualities as they relate to Black American music culture and aspirations for freedom. A wide-ranging collection of essays and interviews featuring many of the most eminent figures in jazz studies and performance-Tommy Lee Lott, Anthony Brown, Herman Gray, Emmett G. Price III, Dwight Andrews, Tammy Kernodle, Salim Washington, Eric Jackson, and TJ Anderson (foreword)- the book examines the full spectrum of Coltrane's legacy. Each essay approaches this theme from a different angle, in both historical and contemporary contexts, focusing on how Coltrane became a quintessential example of the universal and enduring qualities of Black American culture. The contributors address Coltrane as the Black intellectual, the visionary master of musical syntax, the man and the media icon, and ultimately the symbol of the spiritual core of Black American music.

A biography of a jazz giant, this title appeals to jazz lovers and Dizzy fans. It has been reviewed in books and music pages of national newspapers e.g., "Observer Music Monthly" magazine. Dizzy Gillespie has secured his place in the jazz pantheon as one of the most expressive and virtuosic improvisers in the history of the music. But, he was much more than that. As one of the primary creators of the bebop and Afro-Cuban revolutions, he twice fundamentally changed the way jazz improvisation was done. And, he later extended his revolutionary reach by transforming the aesthetic of big band jazz. This vivid biography chronicles Dizzy's saga from the lowest rung on the American social and political ladder to the highest. Born black in fiercely racist Cheraw, South Carolina in 1917, Dizzy combined great energy, a furious drive to succesed, and a one-in-a-million talent to climb quickly out of rural poverty to a role among the swing era jazz elite before his twenty-first birthday. Dizzy's story takes us on the road with the great Calloway, Hines, and Eckstine bands and to Cheraw's cotton fields, Harlem's after-hours clubs, the teeming 1940s 52nd street jazz scene, the rhythmic barrios of Havana, Rio's samba festivals, the White House, and the world's great concert halls as Dizzy teamed up with prodigious talents to make great music of a span of fifty-five years. It also records his spiritual growth over the decades and the intense love he earned from those close to him. Dizzy became beloved worldwide as an entertainer as he combined his electrifying musicianship with an infectious warmth and rare comedic skills to achieve a popularity that few jazz musicians have ever enjoyed.

A jazz writer for three decades, W. Royal Stokes has a special talent for capturing the initial spark that launches a musician's career. In Growing Up With Jazz, he has interviewed twenty-four instrumentalists and singers who talk candidly about the early influences that started them on the road to jazz and where that road has taken them.
Stokes offers a kaleidoscopic look at the jazz scene, featuring musicians from a dazzling array of backgrounds. Ray Gelato recalls the life of a working class youth in London, Patrizia Scascitelli recounts being a child prodigy in Rome who became the first woman of Italian jazz, and Billy Taylor tells about his childhood in Washington, DC, where his grandfather was a Baptist minister and his father a dentist--and everyone in the family seemed well trained in music. Perhaps most exotic is Luluk Purwanto, an Indonesian violinist who as a child listened to gamelan music in the morning and took violin lessons in the afternoon (on an instrument so expensive she didn't dare quit). For some, the flame burned bright at an early age. Jane Monheit sang before she could speak and was set on a musical career by age eight. Lisa Sokolov played classical piano, sang opera and choral music, and was in a jazz band--all by high school. But Carol Sudhalter, though born into a very musical family ("a Bix Beiderbecke family"), was a botany major at Smith, and only became a serious musician after college, quitting a government job to study the flute and saxophone in Italy.
From Art Blakey to Claire Daly to Don Byron, here are the compelling stories of two dozen top musicians finding their way in the world of jazz.

Expertise in Jazz Guitar Improvisation is an examination of musical interplay and the ways implicit (sub-conscious) and explicit (conscious) knowledge appear during improvisation. The practice-based research inquiry includes: interviews and interplay with five world-class jazz guitarists, Lage Lund, Jack Wilkins, Ben Monder, Rez Abbasi and Adam Rogers; a modal matrix for analyzing structure, time and form in jazz guitar improvisation, and musical analysis based on cognitive theories. By explaining the cognitive and musical foundations for expertise in jazz guitar improvisation, this book illuminates how jazz guitarists' strategies are crucially dependent on context, style and type of interplay. With accompanying video provided as an e-resource, this material will be of interest to anyone fascinated by Jazz and Psychology of Music.

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.

Thanks to the pioneering tours of the Creole Band, jazz began to be heard nationwide on the vaudeville stages of America from 1914 to 1918. This seven-piece band toured the country, exporting for the first time the authentic jazz strains that had developed in New Orleans at the start of the 20th century. The band's vaudeville routines were deeply rooted in the minstrel shows and plantation cliches of American show business in the late 19th century, but its instrumental music was central to its performance and distinctive and entrancing to audiences and reviewers.
Pioneers of Jazz reveals at long last the link between New Orleans music and the jazz phenomenon that swept America in the 1920s. While they were the first important band from New Orleans to attain national exposure, The Creole Band has not heretofore been recognized for its unique importance. But in his monumental, careful research, jazz scholar Lawrence Gushee firmly establishes the group's central role in jazz history.
Gushee traces the troupe's activities and quotes the reaction of critics and audiences to their first encounters with this new musical phenomenon. While audiences, who often expected (and got) a kind of minstrel show, the group transcended expectations, taking pride in their music and facing down the theatrical establishment with courage. Although they played the West Coast and Canada, most of their touring centered in the heartland. Most towns of any size in Iowa, Illinois, and Indiana heard them, often repeatedly, and virtually all of their appearances were received with wild enthusiasm. After four years of nearly incessant traveling, members of the band founded or joined groups in Chicago South Side cabaret scene, igniting the craze for hot New Orleans music for which the Windy City was renowned in the early 1920s. The best-known musicians in the group--cornetist Freddie Keppard, clarinetist Jimmy Noone and string bassist Bill Johnson--would play a significant role in jazz, becoming famous for recordings in the 1920s. Gushee effectively brings to life each member of the band and discusses their individual contributions, while analyzing the music with precision, skillful and exacting documentation. Including many never before published photos and interviews, the book also provides an invaluable and colorful look at show business, especially vaudeville, in the 1910s.
While some of the first jazz historians were aware of the band's importance, attempts to locate and interview surviving members (three died before 1935) were sporadic and did little or nothing to correct the mostly erroneous accounts of the band's career. The jazz world has long known about Gushee's original work on this previously neglected subject, and the book represents an important event in jazz scholarship. Pioneers of Jazz brilliantly places this group's unique importance into a broad cultural and historical context, and provides the crucial link between jazz's origins in New Orleans and the beginning of its dissemination across the country.

Jazz Improvisation for Keyboard Players is a straightforward, no-nonsense improvisation series. It deals with creating melodies, using the left hand, pianistic approaches to soloing, scale choices for improvisation and much more.

The definitive biography of Bessie Smith, the great singer known as the "Empress of the Blues" Considered by many to be the greatest blues singer of all time, Bessie Smith was also a successful vaudeville entertainer who became the highest paid African-American performer of the roaring twenties. This book-a revised and expanded edition of the classic biography of this extraordinary artist-debunks many of the myths that have circulated since her untimely death in 1937. Chris Albertson writes with insight and candor about the singer's personal life and her career, supplementing his historical research with dozens of interviews with her relatives, friends, and associates, in particular Ruby Walker Smith, a niece by marriage who toured with Bessie for over a decade. For this new edition he includes more details of Bessie's early years, new interview material, and a chapter devoted to events and responses that followed the original publication in 1971.

Peter King's book ranks among the great jazz autobiographies. One of the world's leading alto saxophonists, he tells his story with searing honesty, revealing the obsessions and motivations that have driven him and the dilemmas of surviving as a top creative musician in an often inhospitable world. With cool, unsparing self-analysis, he describes the difficulties that accompanied his brilliant career for many years. Internationally recognised as a jazz star, he has performed and recorded with a galaxy of musical legends, many of them his close friends. Among those vividly recalled in this book are Bud Powell, Ray Charles, Anita O'Day, Elvin Jones, Max Roach, Hampton Hawes, Al Haig, Philly Joe Jones, Zoot Sims, Jimmy Witherspoon, Dakota Staton, Red Rodney, Jon Hendricks, Tony Bennett and Marlene Dietrich. But while the story here centres on Peter King's life in jazz it shows other important sides of him too: his ambitions and achievements in classical composing, his interests outside music (he is a leading figure and writer in the aero-modelling world) and, above all, the treasured personal relationships that have sustained him through a turbulent life. "Flying High" tells of an exhilarating high altitude journey, in the jazz world and beyond.