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Books > Music > Contemporary popular music > Jazz
How is the Beatles' "Help " similar to Stravinsky's "Dance of the
Adolescents?" How does Radiohead's "Just" relate to the
improvisations of Bill Evans? And how do Chopin's works exploit the
non-Euclidean geometry of musical chords?
In this groundbreaking work, author Dmitri Tymoczko describes a new
framework for thinking about music that emphasizes the
commonalities among styles from medieval polyphony to contemporary
rock. Tymoczko identifies five basic musical features that jointly
contribute to the sense of tonality, and shows how these features
recur throughout the history of Western music. In the process he
sheds new light on an age-old question: what makes music sound
good?
A Geometry of Music provides an accessible introduction to
Tymoczko's revolutionary geometrical approach to music theory. The
book shows how to construct simple diagrams representing
relationships among familiar chords and scales, giving readers the
tools to translate between the musical and visual realms and
revealing surprising degrees of structure in otherwise
hard-to-understand pieces.
Tymoczko uses this theoretical foundation to retell the history of
Western music from the eleventh century to the present day. Arguing
that traditional histories focus too narrowly on the "common
practice" period from 1680-1850, he proposes instead that Western
music comprises an extended common practice stretching from the
late middle ages to the present. He discusses a host of familiar
pieces by a wide range of composers, from Bach to the Beatles,
Mozart to Miles Davis, and many in between.
A Geometry of Music is accessible to a range of readers, from
undergraduate music majors to scientists and mathematicians with an
interest in music. Defining its terms along the way, it presupposes
no special mathematical background and only a basic familiarity
with Western music theory. The book also contains exercises
designed to reinforce and extend readers' understanding, along with
a series of appendices that explore the technical details of this
exciting new theory.
for SSAA, piano, and optional bass and drum kit The Nidaros Jazz
Mass draws on a variety of jazz styles to present a fun and
innovative setting of the Latin Missa brevis. With a gentle Kyrie,
funky Gloria, ballad-like Sanctus, laid-back Benedictus, and
passionate Agnus Dei, this work breathes new life into familiar
words, perfectly combining the contemporary with the ancient. The
stylistic piano part can be played as written or serve as a guide,
and an optional bass and drum kit part is available separately for
jazz trio accompaniment. Ideal for all upper-voice choirs, the
Nidaros Jazz Mass will make a groovy and soulful addition to any
concert programme. This work was commissioned by the Nidaros
Cathedral Girls' Choir of Trondheim, Norway.
(Faber Piano Adventures ). BigTime Piano Jazz & Blues is a
great collection of jazz and blues pieces. Standards such as "Take
the 'A' Train" and "Desafinado" provide an introduction to basic
jazz styles such as swing and bossa nova. Other moods and styles
are featured in classics such as "Autumn Leaves," "Misty," and
"Night Train," and in original compositions such as "Equinox" and
"Big City Blues." The book is arranged for the intermediate-level
pianist and is especially written to create a "big" sound while
remaining within the level.
Jazz on a Summer's Day is a unique collection of stylish jazz
arrangements and original compositions for solo piano. It conveys
the many sides of summer through swing, blues, samba, calypso, and
folk, and draws inspiration from jazz artists including Oscar
Peterson, Bill Evans, Grover Washington Jr, and Sonny Rollins. The
author's credentials, as a celebrated jazz pianist and composer,
guarantee a perfect introduction to jazz and to sounding like the
best.
This selection of twelve pieces draws on a variety of jazz styles
associated with famous artists including Duke Ellington, Billie
Holiday, and Ella Fitzgerald. The pieces are simple yet delightful,
and this volume presents a refreshing approach to exploring jazz
while improving your piano technique. This volume is perfect for
intermediate standard players (approximately Grades 4-5) of any
age, and includes a CD with performances by the composer.
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.
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.
This book is a critical reflection on the life and career of the
late legendary Zimbabwean music icon, Oliver "Tuku" Mtukudzi, and
his contribution towards the reconstruction of Zimbabwe, Africa and
the globe at large. Mtukudzi was a musician, philosopher, and human
rights activist who espoused the agenda of reconstruction in order
to bring about a better world, proposing personal, cultural,
political, religious and global reconstruction. With twenty
original chapters, this vibrant volume examines various themes and
dimensions of Mtukudzi's distinguished life and career, notably,
how his music has been a powerful vehicle for societal
reconstruction and cultural rejuvenation, specifically speaking to
issues of culture, human rights, governance, peacebuilding,
religion and identity, humanism, gender and politics, among others.
The contributors explore the art of performance in Mtukudzi's music
and acting career, and how this facilitated his reconstruction
agenda, offering fresh and compelling perspectives into the role of
performing artists and cultural workers such as Mtukudzi in
presenting models for reconstructing the world.
The ability to improvise represents one of the highest levels of
musical achievement. An improviser must master a musical language
to such a degree as to be able to spontaneously invent
stylistically idiomatic compositions on the spot. This feat is one
of the pinnacles of human creativity, and yet its cognitive basis
is not completely understood. What musical knowledge is required
for improvisation? How does a musician learn to improvise? How is
this knowledge used in performance? What are the neural correlates
of improvised performance? In 'The Improvising Mind', these
questions are explored through an interdisciplinary approach that
draws on cognitive neuroscience, the study of historical
pedagogical treatises on improvisation, interviews with
improvisers, and musical analysis of improvised performances.
Findings from these treatises and interviews are discussed from the
perspective of cognitive psychological theories of learning,
memory, and expertise. Musical improvisation has often been
compared to 'speaking a musical language'. While past research has
focused on comparisons of music and language perception, few have
dealt with the music - language comparison in the performance
domain. In this book, learning to improvise is compared with
language acquisition, and improvised performance is compared with
spontaneous speech from both theoretical and neurobiological
perspectives. Tackling a topic that has hitherto received little
attention,The Improvising Mind is a valuable addition to the
literature in music cognition. This book will be of interest to
musicologists, music theorists, cognitive neuroscientists and
psychologists, musicians, music educators, and anyone with an
interest in creativity.
The widespread presence of jazz and blues in African American
visual art has long been overlooked. The Hearing Eye makes the case
for recognizing the music's importance, both as formal template and
as explicit subject matter. Moving on from the use of iconic
musical figures and motifs in Harlem Renaissance art, this
groundbreaking collection explores the more allusive - and elusive
- references to jazz and blues in a wide range of mostly
contemporary visual artists.
There are scholarly essays on the painters Rose Piper (Graham
Lock), Norman Lewis (Sara Wood), Bob Thompson (Richard H. King),
Romare Bearden (Robert G. O'Meally, Johannes Volz) and Jean-Michel
Basquiat (Robert Farris Thompson), as well an account of early
blues advertising art (Paul Oliver) and a discussion of the
photographs of Roy DeCarava (Richard Ings). These essays are
interspersed with a series of in-depth interviews by Graham Lock,
who talks to quilter Michael Cummings and painters Sam Middleton,
Wadsworth Jarrell, Joe Overstreet and Ellen Banks about their
musical inspirations, and also looks at art's reciprocal effect on
music in conversation with saxophonists Marty Ehrlich and Jane Ira
Bloom.
With numerous illustrations both in the book and on its companion
website, The Hearing Eye reaffirms the significance of a
fascinating and dynamic aspect of African American visual art that
has been too long neglected.
"Jones has learned--and this has been very rare in jazz
criticism--to write about music as an artist."--Nat Hentoff ks
"Black Music" is a book about the brilliant young jazz musicians of
the early 1960s: John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis,
Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Archie Shepp, Sun Ra, and others. It
is composed of essays, reviews, interviews, liner notes, musical
analyses, and personal impressions from 1959-1967. Also includes
Amiri Baraka's reflections in a 2009 interview with Calvin Reid of
"Publishers Weekly."
LeRoi Jones (now known as Amiri Baraka) is the author of numerous
books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. He was named Poet
Laureate of New Jersey from 2002 to 2004 by the New Jersey
Commission on Humanities. His most recent book, "Tales of the Out
& the Gone" (Akashic Books, 2007), was a "New York Times"
Editors' Choice and winner of a PEN/Beyond Margins Award. He lives
in Newark, New Jersey.
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.
This fabulous collection of easy duets in jazzy and light styles is
just the thing to liven up any lesson or practice session. Expertly
written for students around the level of Piano Time 3, these
stylish and toe-tapping duets provide accessible and fun material
for all young jazz players.
Cool syncopation, funky riffs and smooth, stylish tunes---from
dynamic to nostalgic, Pam Wedgwood's series has it all. Jazzin'
About is a vibrant collection of original pieces in a range of
contemporary styles, tailor-made for the intermediate player. This
new edition features a fantastic accompanying CD, complete with
performances, backing tracks and slowed-down backings for practice.
So take a break from the classics and get into the groove as you
cruise from blues, to rock, to jazz.
Ethel Waters overcame her disadvantaged childhood to become the
most famous African American actress, singer, and entertainer of
her time. Her critically acclaimed move to Broadway in the mid
1920s-after having first triumphed in Black vaudeville during the
Harlem Renaissance-brought the startlingly innovative and subtle
character of Black Theatre into the mainstream. Ethel transformed
such songs as "Dinah," "Am I Blue?," "Stormy Weather," and Irving
Berlin's "Heat Wave" into classics and inspired the next generation
of Black female vocalists. She gave sophistication and class to the
blues and American popular song, and she influenced countless
singers including Judy Garland and Frank Sinatra. Tough,
uncompromising, courageous, and ambitious, Ethel Waters became one
of the first African American women to be given equal billing with
white stars on the Broadway stage. In 1943, the film version of her
Broadway success, Cabin in the Sky, established her as Hollywood's
first Black-leading lady. In such plays as Mamba's Daughters and
films including The Member of the Wedding, she shattered the myth
that Black women could perform only as singers. For her work in
Pinky, she received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting
Actress, the second African American to be so honored. Although she
was arguably the most influential female blues and jazz singer of
the 1920s and 1930s, as well as a major Black figure in 20th
century theatre, cinema, radio, and television, she is now the
least remembered. In Ethel Waters: Stormy Weather, Stephen Bourne
documents the career of this monumental figure in American popular
culture, offering new insights into the work of this forgotten
legend. Supplemented by fourteen photographs, this biography leaves
little doubt as to why-for decades-no other Black star was held in
such high regard.
Giant Steps examines the most important figures in the creation of
modern jazz, detailing the emergence of bebop through the likes of
Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Fats Navarro, Bud Powell and
Thelonious Monk. Using this as its starting point, Giant Steps
subsequently delves into the developments of jazz composition,
modal jazz and free jazz. The music of each of these great masters
is examined in detail and will provide both a fine introduction for
the large audience newly attracted to the music but unsure of their
direction through it, as well as an entertaining and informative
read for those with a more substantial background.
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 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's 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.
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
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