The Jazz Life of Dr. Billy Taylor: America's Classical Musician is the autobiography of the legendary jazz ambassador whose work spans more than six decades, from the heyday of 52nd Street in 1940s New York City to CBS Sunday Morning. Beginning with his childhood in segregation-era Washington D.C., Billy Taylor recounts how he came of age as a jazz musician in smoke-filled clubs pulsating with the rhythms of bebop, and later climbed to world acclaim as an internationally recognized music educator and popular media figure. Through his life's work, Taylor fought not only for the recognition of jazz music as "America's classical music" but also for the recognition of black musicians as key contributors to the American music repertoire. Peppered with anecdotes detailing encounters with other jazz legends such as Fats Waller, Jelly Roll Morton, Duke Ellington, Art Tatum, Ben Webster, Count Basie, Billie Holiday, Dinah Washington, and many others, this autobiography is not only the life story of a jazz musician and spokesman, but is also the history of a nation grappling with racism and modernity.

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.

Jazz Theory: From Basic to Advanced Study, Second Edition, is a comprehensive textbook for those with no previous study in jazz, as well as those in advanced theory courses. Written with the goal to bridge theory and practice, it provides a strong theoretical foundation from music fundamentals to post-tonal theory, while integrating ear training, keyboard skills, and improvisation. It hosts "play-along" audio tracks on a Companion Website, including a workbook, ear-training exercises, and an audio compilation of the musical examples featured in the book. Jazz Theory is organized into three parts: Basics, Intermediate, and Advanced. This approach allows for success in a one-semester curriculum or with subsequent terms. If students sense that theory can facilitate their improvisational skills or can help them develop their ears, they become more engaged in the learning process. The overall pedagogical structure accomplishes precisely that in an original, creative-and above all, musical-manner. KEY FEATURES include 390 musical examples, ranging from original lead sheets of standard tunes, jazz instrumentals, transcriptions, and original compositions, to fully realized harmonic progressions, sample solos, and re-harmonized tunes. The completely revamped Companion Website hosts: 46 "Play Along Sessions" audio tracks, offering experiences close to real-time performance scenarios. Over 1,000 (audio and written) exercises covering ear training, rhythm, notation, analysis, improvisation, composition, functional keyboard, and others. Recordings of all 390 musical examples from the textbook. Links: Guide to Making Transcriptions, List of Solos to Transcribe, Selected Discography, Classification of Standard Tunes, and more. Lists of well-known standard tunes, including a comprehensive list of 999 Standard Tunes - Composers and Lyricists. NEW TO THE SECOND EDITION are instructors' tools with answer keys to written and ear-training exercises, 380 rhythmic calisthenics featuring exercises from the swing, bebop, and Latin rhythmic traditions, a new improvisation section, a set of 140 Comprehensive Keyboard exercises, plus an expanded ear-training section with 125 melodic, 50 rhythmic dictations, and 170 harmonic dictations, plus 240 written exercises, 25 composition assignments, and 110 singing exercises. The paperback TEXTBOOK is also paired with the corresponding paperback WORKBOOK in a discounted PACKAGE (9780367321963).

In Tropical Riffs Jason Borge traces how jazz helped forge modern identities and national imaginaries in Latin America during the mid-twentieth century. Across Latin America jazz functioned as a conduit through which debates about race, sexuality, nation, technology, and modernity raged in newspapers, magazines, literature, and film. For Latin American audiences, critics, and intellectuals-who often understood jazz to stem from social conditions similar to their own-the profound penetration into the fabric of everyday life of musicians like Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, and Charlie Parker represented the promises of modernity while simultaneously posing a threat to local and national identities. Brazilian antijazz rhetoric branded jazz as a problematic challenge to samba and emblematic of Americanization. In Argentina jazz catalyzed discussions about musical authenticity, race, and national culture, especially in relation to tango. And in Cuba, the widespread popularity of Chano Pozo and Damaso Perez Prado popularity challenged the United States' monopoly on jazz. Outlining these hemispheric flows of ideas, bodies, and music, Borge elucidates how "America's art form" was, and remains, a transnational project and a collective idea.

(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.

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.

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.

The tale of British Jazz music over the 20 years from the end of the Second World War. Told by the 9 musicians interviewed over the last 12 years, who were lucky enough to be there at the time. The likes of Chris Barber (band leader and trombonist), John Critchinson (Ronnie Scott's pianist), Paul Jones (the singer in Manfred Mann), Don Rendell (John Dankworth's tenor saxophonist), Wally Houser (Ronnie's Club solicitor), Harold Pendleton (The Marquee Club owner/Reading & Leeds Festival founder). The UK at its hardest up about to live it up as best it can! Bringing to life the boom of the traditional jazz revival, the first British popular music. Telling the story of the birth of British modern jazz. Providing an entire chapter on the London jazz clubs that are no more. Illustrating the early negotiations in New York that led to the touring in the US of British jazz groups, and the return of Americans to the UK during the MU/AFM trade dispute. The jazz that in turn led to GB's rhythm and blues and the break-out from that into our popular music of today.

This enthralling book is the first biography in English of Bill Evans, one of the most influential of all jazz pianists. Peter Pettinger, himself a concert pianist, describes Evans's life (the personal tragedies and commercial successes), his musicmaking (technique, compositional methods, and approach to group playing), and his legacy. The book also includes a full discography and dozens of photographs.

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 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.

The companion volume to the ten-part PBS TV series by the team responsible for
The Civil War and Baseball.

Continuing in the tradition of their critically acclaimed works, Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns vividly bring to life the story of the quintessential American music—jazz. Born in the black community of turn-of-the-century New Orleans but played from the beginning by musicians of every color, jazz celebrates all Americans at their best.

Here are the stories of the extraordinary men and women who made the music: Louis Armstrong, the fatherless waif whose unrivaled genius helped turn jazz into a soloist's art and influenced every singer, every instrumentalist who came after him; Duke Ellington, the pampered son of middle-class parents who turned a whole orchestra into his personal instrument, wrote nearly two thousand pieces for it, and captured more of American life than any other composer. Bix Beiderbecke, the doomed cornet prodigy who showed white musicians that they too could make an important contribution to the music; Benny Goodman, the immigrants' son who learned the clarinet to help feed his family, but who grew up to teach a whole country how to dance; Billie Holiday, whose distinctive style routinely transformed mediocre music into great art; Charlie Parker, who helped lead a musical revolution, only to destroy himself at thirty-four; and Miles Davis, whose search for fresh ways to sound made him the most influential jazz musician of his generation, and then led him to abandon jazz altogether. Buddy Bolden, Jelly Roll Morton, Dizzy Gillespie, Art Tatum, Count Basie, Dave Brubeck, Artie Shaw, and Ella Fitzgerald are all here; so are Sidney Bechet, Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, and a host of others.

But Jazz is more than mere biography. The history of the music echoes the history of twentieth-century America. Jazz provided the background for the giddy era that F. Scott Fitzgerald called the Jazz Age. The irresistible pulse of big-band swing lifted the spirits and boosted American morale during the Great Depression and World War II. The virtuosic, demanding style called bebop mirrored the stepped-up pace and dislocation that came with peace. During the Cold War era, jazz served as a propaganda weapon—and forged links with the burgeoning counterculture. The story of jazz encompasses the story of American courtship and show business; the epic growth of great cities—New Orleans and Chicago, Kansas City and New York—and the struggle for civil rights and simple justice that continues into the new millennium.

Visually stunning, with more than five hundred photographs, some never before published, this book, like the music it chronicles, is an exploration—and a celebration—of the American experiment.


From the Hardcover edition.

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.

(Berklee Press). When you think of jazz composers, who comes to mind? Jelly Roll Morton, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Charles Mingus, Bob Brookmeyer. This book is about what they (and many others) do. Jazz composition has evolved into a disciplined art that often evidences great emotional depth and breadth of sophistication. Berklee College of Music legend Ted Pease demystifies the processes involved in writing jazz tunes and in composing episodic and extended jazz works. Jazz Composition: Theory and Practice is a by-product of Pease's 25 years of teaching jazz composition. The accompanying CD helps demonstrate melody, harmony and rhythmic elements of jazz and also includes a variety of music-writing exercises focused on learning these same elements to help you begin producing your own effective jazz compositions.

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.

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.

Behind the iconic jazz orchestras, vocalists, and stage productions of the Swing Era lay the talents of popular music's unsung heroes: the arrangers. John Wriggle takes you behind the scenes of New York City's vibrant entertainment industry of the 1930s and 1940s to uncover the lives and work of jazz arrangers, both black and white, who left an indelible mark on American music and culture. Blue Rhythm Fantasy traces the extraordinary career of arranger Chappie Willet--a collaborator of Louis Armstrong, Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, Gene Krupa, and many others--to revisit legendary Swing Era venues and performers from Harlem to Times Square. Wriggle's insightful music analyses of big band arranging techniques explore representations of cultural modernism, discourses on art and commercialism, conceptions of race and cultural identity, music industry marketing strategies, and stage entertainment variety genres. Drawing on archives, obscure recordings, untapped sources in the African American press, and interviews with participants, Blue Rhythm Fantasy is a long-overdue study of the arranger during this dynamic era of American music history.

How did French musicians and critics interpret jazz - that quintessentially American music - in the mid-twentieth century? How far did players reshape what they learned from records and visitors into more local jazz forms, and how did the music figure in those angry debates that so often suffused French cultural and political life? After Django begins with the famous interwar triumphs of Josephine Baker and Django Reinhardt, but, for the first time, the focus here falls on the French jazz practices ofthe postwar era. The work of important but neglected French musicians like Andre Hodeir and Barney Wilen is examined in depth, as are native responses to Americans like Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk. The book provides an original intertwining of musical and historical narrative, supported by extensive archival work. In clear and involving prose, it describes both the music that was made and the arguments to which jazz was recruited, from debates on national identity in the 1930s to the street battles of 1968, following decolonization. By examining musical practices as well as critical discourses, this book seeks to understand those problematic efforts towards aesthetic assimilation and transformation, made by those concerned with jazz in fact and in idea, even after anti-jazz diatribes disappeared from the press.

Offers expansive and intersecting understandings of erotic subjectivity, intimacy, and trauma in performance ethnography and in institutional and disciplinary settings. Focused on research within Africa and the African diaspora, contributors to this volume think through the painful iterations of trauma, systemic racism, and the vestiges of colonial oppression as well as the processes of healing and emancipation that emerge from wounded states. Their chapters explore an acoustemology of intimacy, woman-centered eroticism generated through musical performance, desire and longing in ethnographic knowledge production, and listening as intimacy. On the other end of the spectrum, authors engage with and question the fetishization of race in jazz; examine conceptions of vulgarity and profanity in movement and dance-ethnography; and address pain, trauma, and violation, whether physical, spiritual, intellectual, or political. Authors in this volume strive toward empathetic, ethical, and creative ethnographic engagements that summon vulnerability and healing. They propose pathways to aesthetic, discursive transformation by reorienting conceptions of knowledge as emergent, performative, and sonically enabled. The resulting book explores sensory knowledge that is frequently left unacknowledged in ethnographic work, advancing conversations about performed sonic and somatic modalities through which we navigate our entanglements as engaged scholars.

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.