"May be the best book ever written about jazz."--David Thomson, "Los Angeles Times" In eight poetically charged vignettes, Geoff Dyer skillfully evokes the music and the men who shaped modern jazz. Drawing on photos, anecdotes, and, most important, the way he hears the music, Dyer imaginatively reconstructs scenes from the embattled lives of some of the greats: Lester Young fading away in a hotel room; Charles Mingus storming down the streets of New York on a too-small bicycle; Thelonious Monk creating his own private language on the piano. However, music is the driving force of "But Beautiful, " and wildly metaphoric prose that mirrors the quirks, eccentricity, and brilliance of each musician's style.

Although Frank Zappa died over 20 years ago, he continues to be regarded as an iconic figure in 20th century culture. In 1973 he famously said 'Jazz is not dead... it just smells funny,' and in this new book Geoff Wills takes a look at Zappa's widely assumed antipathy for the jazz genre. Along the way, he throws up some very interesting facts. Frank Zappa's music has a unique and easily recognisable quality, and it brilliantly synthesizes a wide range of cultural influences. Zappa and Jazz focuses on the influence of jazz on Zappa in an attempt to clarify the often-confusing nature of his relationship with it. Zappa's early years are examined, from his first foray into a recording studio to the formation and progress of his band The Mothers of Invention. There are exhaustive critiques here of the key jazz-related albums Hot Rats, King Kong, The Grand Wazoo and Waka/Jawaka. Along the way, Wills analyses Zappa's music and the wider influences that were crucial in forming his attitudes, not only to jazz but to society in general. The book concludes with a discussion of Zappa's similarity to more orthodox jazz leaders, his legacy and the influence on jazz-related music. Guaranteed to appeal to all Zappa fans who seek new insights into his music, to open-minded jazz listeners and to anyone with an interest in the melting pot of 20th century music.

Five superb albums of graded pieces provide a wealth of jazz repertoire. Throughout, there is a huge range of styles, from bebop blues to calypsos, boogie-woogie to ballads, jazz waltzes to free jazz. There are classic tunes by the jazz greats, including Duke Ellington, Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk. And there are brand-new pieces specially commissioned from professional British jazz musicians and educators. Each album presents 15 pieces in three lists: blues, standards and contemporary jazz. The head of each piece is set out with all the characteristic voicings, phrasing and rhythmic patterns you need for a stylish performance. The improvised section gives guideline pitches and left-hand voicings as a practical starting-point. Accessible, student-centred and of the highest musical standards, these pieces will get you playing jazz confidently and creatively.

During America's Swing Era, no musician was more successful or controversial than Artie Shaw: the charismatic and opinionated clarinetist-bandleader whose dozens of hits became anthems for "the greatest generation." But some of his most beautiful recordings were not issued until decades after he'd left the scene. He broke racial barriers by hiring African American musicians. His frequent "retirements" earned him a reputation as the Hamlet of jazz. And he quit playing for good at the height of his powers. The handsome Shaw had seven wives (including Lana Turner and Ava Gardner). Inveterate reader and author of three books, he befriended the best-known writers of his time. Tom Nolan, who interviewed Shaw between 1990 and his death in 2004 and spoke with one hundred of his colleagues and contemporaries, captures Shaw and his era with candor and sympathy, bringing the master to vivid life and restoring him to his rightful place in jazz history. Originally published in hardcover under the title Three Chords for Beauty's Sake.

(Fake Book). This must-own collection includes 635 songs spanning all jazz styles from more than 9 decades from traditional to swing to modern jazz, carefully chosen chords with common practice chord substitutions, lyrics to accomodate vocalists, easy-to-read music, and composer and performer indexes. Songs include: Maple Leaf Rag * Basin Street Blues * A Night in Tunisia * Lullaby of Birdland * The Girl from Ipanema * Bag's Groove * I Can't Get Started * All the Things You Are * and many more Editions also available in B-flat and E-flat.

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.

Jackson Pollock dancing to the music as he painted; Romare Bearden's stage and costume designs for Alvin Ailey and Dianne McIntyre; Stanley Crouch stirring his high-powered essays in a room where a drumkit stands at the center: from the perspective of the new jazz studies, jazz is not only a music to define -- it is a culture. Considering musicians and filmmakers, painters and poets, the intellectual improvisations in "Uptown Conversation" reevaluate, reimagine, and riff on the music that has for more than a century initiated a call and response across art forms, geographies, and cultures.

Building on Robert G. O'Meally's acclaimed "Jazz Cadence of American Culture, " these original essays offer new insights in jazz historiography, highlighting the political stakes in telling the story of the music and evaluating its cultural import in the United States and worldwide. Articles contemplating the music's experimental wing -- such as Salim Washington's meditation on Charles Mingus and the avant-garde or George Lipsitz's polemical juxtaposition of Ken Burns's documentary "Jazz" and Horace Tapscott's autobiography "Songs of the Unsung" -- share the stage with revisionary takes on familiar figures in the canon: Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, and Louis Armstrong.

Django Reinhardt was arguably the greatest guitarist who ever lived, an important influence on Les Paul, Charlie Christian, B.B. King, Jerry Garcia, Chet Atkins, and many others. Yet there is no major biography of Reinhardt.
Now, in Django, Michael Dregni offers a definitive portrait of this great guitarist. Handsome, charismatic, childlike, and unpredictable, Reinhardt was a character out of a picaresque novel. Born in a gypsy caravan at a crossroads in Belgium, he was almost killed in a freak fire that burned half of his body and left his left hand twisted into a claw. But with this maimed left hand flying over the frets and his right hand plucking at dizzying speed, Django became Europe's most famous jazz musician, commanding exorbitant fees--and spending the money as fast as he made it. Dregni not only chronicles this remarkably colorful life--including a fascinating account of gypsy culture--but he also sheds much light on Django's musicianship. He examines his long musical partnership with violinist Stephane Grappelli--the one suave and smooth, the other sharper and more dissonant--and he traces the evolution of their novel string jazz ensemble, Quintette du Hot Club de France. Indeed, the author spotlights Django's amazing musical diversity, describing his swing-styled Nouveau Quintette, his big band Django's Music, and his later bebop ensemble, as well as his many compositions, including symphonic pieces influenced by Ravel and Debussy and his unfinished organ mass inspired by Bach. And along the way, the author offers vivid snapshots of the jazz scene in Paris--colorful portraits of Josephine Baker, Bricktop, Louis Armstrong, Coleman Hawkins, and countless others--and of Django's vagabond wanderings around France, Europe, and the United States, where he toured with Duke Ellington.
Capturing the extraordinary life and times of one of the great musicians of the twentieth century, Django is a must-read portrait of a true original."

Harry James was one of the major figures of the Swing Era of the 1930s and 1940s. As a trumpet-player he had few peers. The band he led was the most popular in the United States during the war years, but it was also the band that first introduced Frank Sinatra. His fame was even wider as husband to the most famous Hollywood star of the period-Betty Grable- as a film star himself, and as a long term headliner in Las Vegas casinos. But he also had a dark side-as a womanizer, alcoholic, compulsive gambler. In this dramatic, understanding biography, Peter Levinson brilliantly delineates James and the role he played in American culture.

Charles Mingus was one of the most innovative jazz musicians of the 20th century, and ranks with Charles Ives and Duke Ellington as one of America's greatest composers. By temperament, he was a high-strung and sensitive romantic, a towering figure whose tempestuous personal life found powerfully coherent expression in the ever-shifting textures of his music. Now, acclaimed music critic Gene Santoro strips away the myths shrouding "Jazz's Angry Man," revealing Mingus as more complex than even his close friends knew. Written in a lively, novelistic style, Myself When I Am Real draws on dozens of new interviews and previously untapped letters and archival materials to explore the intricate connections between this extraordinary man and the extraordinary music he made.

Jazz is one of the most influential American art forms of our times. It shapes our ideas about musical virtuosity, human action and new forms of social expression. In "Going for Jazz, " Nicholas Gebhardt shows how the study of jazz can offer profound insights into American historical consciousness. Focusing on the lives of three major saxophonists--Sidney Bechet, Charlie Parker, and Ornette Coleman--Gebhardt demonstrates how changing forms of state power and ideology framed and directed their work.
Weaving together a range of seemingly disparate topics, from Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis to the invention of bebop, from Jean Baudrillard's "Seduction" to the Cold War atomic regime, Gebhardt addresses the meaning and value of jazz in the political economy of American society. In "Going for Jazz, " jazz musicians assume dynamic and dramatic social positions that demand a more conspicuous place for music in our understanding of the social world.

Declared a "national treasure" by the White House in 1990, John Birks "Dizzy" Gillespie was a not only a great musician but also a major innovator in the jazz world. While his first and foremost claim to fame is helping to create the style known as bebop, Gillespie also did much to establish the inclusion of Latin American elements in jazz and was partially responsible for the inception of both Afro-Cuban jazz and bossa nova. Covering Dizzy's days as a flashy trumpet player in the swing bands of the 1930s, the worldwide fame and adoration he earned through a State Department-backed tour of his big band in the 1950s, and the many recordings and performances which defined a career that ran clear up to the early 1990s, this book fully traces the path and progress of an extraordinary--and most exploratory--American musician.

This book includes previously unpublished essays, letters, and memoirs written by one of the giants of American music. Armstrong recounts his early life in New Orleans, his experiences in Chicago and New York during the 1920s, his infamous crowning as "King of the Zulus," and his late years in Queens, New York. Here is a little-known dimension of Louis Armstrong that will stand as a treasure for the history of jazz and, indeed, the history of American culture.

A collection of the original sheet music for 39 classic standards, featuring the arrangements of 'Fats' Waller, Art Tatum, Duke Ellington, James P. Johnson, Albert Ammons, Pete Johnson, Count Basie, Clarence Williams, Jay McShann, Billy Kyle, Zez Confrey. Songs include: "A" Flat to "C" * Ain't Misbehavin' * Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea * Bugle Call Rag * Central Avenue Drag * Dinah * For Me and My Gal * I Can't Give You Anything but Love * Mood Indigo * Organ Grinder Blues * Sophisticated Lady * Stardust * When You're Smiling (The Whole World Smiles with You) * and more.

(Jazz Play Along). For use with all Bb, Eb, C and bass clef instruments, the Jazz Play-Along Series is the ultiimate learning tool for all jazz musicians. With musician-friendly lead sheets, melody cues and other split-track choices on the included CD, this first-of-its-kind package makes learning to play jazz easier than ever before. FOR STUDY, each tune includes a split track with: * Melody cue with proper style and inflection * Professional rhythm tracks * Choruses for soloing * Removable bass part * Removable piano part. FOR PERFORMANCE, each tune also has: * An additional full stereo accompaniment track (no melody) * Additional choruses for soloing. 10 songs: Acapulco 1922 * The Lonely Bull * Mame * Rise * Spanish Flea * Spanish Harlem * Street Life * A Taste of Honey * What Now My Love * Work Song.

Pepper Adams' Joy Road is more than a compendium of sessions and gigs done by the greatest baritone saxophone soloist in history. It's a fascinating overview of Adams' life and times, thanks to colorful interview vignettes, drawn from the author's unpublished conversations with Adams and other musicians. These candid observations from jazz greats about Adams and his colleagues reveal previously unknown, behind-the-scenes drama about legendary recordings made by John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Pearson, Thad Jones, David Amram, Elvin Jones, and many others. All types of sound material studio recordings, private tapes and broadcasts, film scores, audience tapes, and even jingles are listed, and Adams' oeuvre is pushed back from 1956 to 1947, when Adams was 16 years old, before he played baritone saxophone. Because of Carner's access to Adams' estate, just prior to its disposition in 1987, much new discographical material is included, now verified by Adams' date books and correspondence. Since Adams worked in so many of the great bands of his era, Pepper Adams' Joy Road is a refreshing, sometimes irreverent walk through a large swath of jazz history. This work also functions as a nearly complete band discography of the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Orchestra, the most influential big band of its time. Adams was a founding member and stayed with the band until a year before Jones left to relocate in Denmark. Finally, Carner charts the ascent of Adams as an original yet still underappreciated composer, one who wrote 43 unique works, nearly half of them after August, 1977, when he left Jones-Lewis to tour the world as a soloist. Pepper Adams' Joy Road, the first book ever published about Pepper Adams, is a companion to the author's forthcoming biography on Adams.

Gene Lees is probably the best jazz essayist in America today, and the book that consolidated his reputation was Singers and the Song, which appeared in 1987. Now this classic work is being released in an expanded edition: Singers and the Song II. This volume includes famous selections from the original edition, including Lees' classic profile of Frank Sinatra, as well as new essays.

This is a book about artistic modernism contending with the historical transfigurations of modernity. As a conscientious engagement with modernity's restructuring of the lifeworld, the modernist avant-garde raised the stakes of this engagement to programmatic explicitness. But even beyond the vanguard, the global phenomenon of jazz combined somatic assault with sensory tutelage. Jazz, like the new technologies of modernity, re-calibrated sensory ratios. The criterion of the new as self-making also extended to names: pseudonyms and heteronyms. The protocols of modernism solicited a pragmatic arousal of bodily sensation as artistic resource, validating an acrobatic sensibility ranging from slapstick and laughter to the pathos of bereavement. Expressivity trumped representation. The artwork was a diagram of perception, not a mimetic rendering. For artists, the historical pressures of altered perception provoked new models, and Ezra Pound's slogan 'Make It New' became the generic rallying cry of renovation. The paradigmatic stance of the avant-garde was established by Futurism, but the discovery of prehistoric art added another provocation to artists. Paleolithic caves validated the spirit of all-over composition, unframed and dynamic. Geometric abstraction, Constructivism and Purism, and Surrealism were all in quest of a new mythology. Making it new yielded a new pathos in the sensation of radical discrepancy between futurist striving and remotest antiquity. The Paleolithic cave and the USSR emitted comparable siren calls on behalf of the remote past and the desired future. As such, the present was suffused with the pathos of being neither, but subject to both.

Any listener knows the power of music to define a place, but few can describe the how or why of this phenomenon. In "Lonesome Roads and Streets of Dreams", Andrew S. Berish attempts to right this wrong, showcasing how American jazz defined a culture particularly preoccupied with place. By analyzing both the performances and cultural context of leading jazz figures, including the many famous venues where they played, Berish bridges two dominant scholarly approaches to the genre, offering not only a new reading of swing era jazz but an entirely new framework for musical analysis in general, one that examines how the geographical realities of daily life can be transformed into musical sound. Focusing on white bandleader Jan Garber, black bandleader Duke Ellington, white saxophonist Charlie Barnet, and black guitarist Charlie Christian, as well as traveling from Catalina Island to Manhattan to Oklahoma City, "Lonesome Roads and Streets of Dreams" depicts not only a geography of race but how this geography was disrupted, how these musicians crossed physical and racial boundaries - from black to white, South to North, and rural to urban - and how they found expression for these movements in the insistent music they were creating.

Nadine Jansen, a flugelhornist and pianist, remembers a night in the 1940s when a man came out of the audience as she was playing both instruments. "I hate to see a woman do that," he explained as he hit the end of her horn, nearly chipping her tooth. Half a century later, a big band named Diva made its debut in New York on March 30, 1993, with Melissa Slocum on bass, Sue Terry on alto sax, Lolly Bienenfeld on trombone, Sherrie Maricle on drums, and a host of other first rate instrumentalists. The band made such a good impression that it was immediately booked to play at Carnegie Hall the following year. For those who had yet to notice, Diva signaled the emergence of women musicians as a significant force in jazz.
Madame Jazz is a fascinating invitation to the inside world of women in jazz. Ranging primarily from the late 1970s to today's vanguard of performance jazz in New York City and on the West Coast, it chronicles a crucial time of transition as women make the leap from novelty acts regarded as second class citizens to sought-out professionals admired and hired for their consummate musicianship. Author Leslie Gourse surveys the scene in the jazz clubs, the concert halls, the festivals, and the recording studios from the musicians' point of view. She finds exciting progress on all fronts, but also lingering discrimination. The growing success of women instrumentalists has been a long time in coming, she writes. Long after women became accepted as writers and, to a lesser extent, as visual artists, women in music--classical, pop, or jazz--faced the nearly insuperable barrier of chauvinism and the still insidious force of tradition and habit that keeps most men performing with the musicians they have always worked with, other men.
Gourse provides dozens of captivating no-holds-barred interviews with both rising stars and seasoned veterans. Here are up-and-coming pianists Renee Rosnes and Rachel Z., trumpeter Rebecca Coupe Frank, saxophonist Virginia Mayhew, bassist Tracy Wormworth, and drummer Terri Lynne Carrington, and enduring legends Dorothy Donegan, Marian McParland and Shirley Horne. Here, as well, are conversations with three pioneering business women: agent and producer Helen Keane, manager Linda Goldstein, and festival and concert producer Cobi Narita. All of the women speak insightfully about their inspiration and their commitment to pursuing the music they love. They are also frank about the realities of life on the road, and the extra dues women musicians pay in a tough and competitive field where everybody pays dues. A separate chapter offers a closer look at women musicians and the continual stress confronting those who would combine love, marriage, and/or motherhood with a life in music.
Madame Jazz is about the history that women jazz instrumentalists are making now, as well as an inspiring preview of the even brighter days ahead. It concludes with Frankie Nemko's lively evaluation of the West Coast jazz scene, and appends the most comprehensive list ever assembled of women currently playing instruments professionally.

Bold and original, The Power of Black Music offers a new way of listening to the music of black America, and appreciating its profound contribution to all American music.

Created in the jazz clubs of New York City, and initially treated by most musicians and audiences as radical, chaotic, and bewildering: bebop has become, Thomas Owen writes, `the lingua franca of jazz, serving as the principal musical language of thousands of jazz musicians.'

In Bebop, Owens conducts us on an insightful, loving tour through the music, players, and recordings that changed American culture. Combining vivid portraits of bebop's gigantic personalities - among them Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Miles Davis - with deft musical analysis, he offers an instrument-by-instrument look at the key players and their innovations.

Art Tatum was the greatest virtuoso performer in the history of jazz piano; his technique overwhelmed almost every jazz player who heard him and caused classical virtuosos to take notice.

Through extensive interviews with Tatum's friends and fellow musicians, James Lester captures the complexities of this remarkable talent and the vibrant jazz world of the 1930s and 1940s in which he played.