The early swing era of jazz, from 1930 to 1941, represents both an extension of developments of the previous decade and an introduction of new tendencies that influenced subsequent periods of jazz history. Major big bands and individual artists established important styles that brought wide popularity to the music, while small groups created innovative approaches that determined the directions jazz would take in the years to come. This was a time marked by colorful band leaders, flashy instrumental soloists, showy orchestras, and engaging singers, and Oliphant's reference guide to this period is an invaluable source of information on its artists, methods, innovations, and recordings.

Directing readers to outstanding performances available on compact disc, it serves not only as a scholarly historical and cultural overview, but also as a helpful guide for the layman. Organized in a biographical format, the volume discusses many individuals and groups that have not been considered so fully before, and provides a critical assessment of a major period in American music.

Dave Oliphant is widely considered the finest poetry critic ever produced by Texas. This volume brings together some 40 years of essays, articles, and reviews on the topic of Texas poetry-its history as well as addressing individual poets and their books. Only one other book in the last two decades addressed the topic, and Generations of Texas Poets is larger, more comprehensive, and of superior literary quality. In 1971, Larry McMurtry famously descried the lack of good Texas poetry; Oliphant hasspent a lifetime nurturing it, publishing it, and has become its best critic.

Texas musicians and jazz share a history that goes all the way back to the origins of jazz in ragtime, blues, and boogie-woogie. Texans have left their mark on all of jazz's major movements, including hot jazz, swing, bebop, the birth of the cool, hard bop, and free jazz. Yet these musicians are seldom identified as Texans because their careers often took them to the leading jazz centers in New Orleans, Chicago, New York, Kansas City, and Los Angeles.

In Texan Jazz, Dave Oliphant reclaims these musicians for Texas and explores the vibrant musical culture that brought them forth. Working through the major movements of jazz, he describes the lives, careers, and recordings of such musicians as Scott Joplin, Hersal Thomas, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Sippie Wallace, Jack Teagarden, Buster Smith, Hot Lips Page, Eddie Durham, Herschel Evans, Charlie Christian, Red Garland, Kenny Dorham, Jimmy Giuffre, Ornette Coleman, John Carter, and many others.

The great strength of Texan Jazz is its record of the contributions to jazz made by African-American Texans. The first major book on this topic ever published, it will be fascinating reading for everyone who loves jazz.

In the tradition of literary pilgrimages, the one is this book is both physical and spiritual. Dave Oliphant moves us around West, Central, and East Texas in poems named after towns: Wink, Denton, Houston, Honey Island. These poems find the spiritual in the ordinary and share such insights through sight and sound-especially the many sounds of music. Read the poems aloud and listen; you will hear music through the entire collection. The first poem starts the book's pilgrimage with a psalm of daily life, and the final poem offers a magnificent chorus of folk songs, symphonies, yodels, pop music, and more. Oliphant's pilgrimage presents a montage of striking personalities, from the saintly to the damned, from the famous to the unnamed. Lovers of poetry will return often to this book, always finding lines to ponder and treasure.

Hallazgo y traduccion de poesia chilena es una coleccion de escrituras que traza mas de cincuenta anos de la carrera de Dave Oliphant, aficionado y traductor de la gran tradicion de la poesia de Chile. De los veinte articulos, ensayos, resenas e introducciones en esta coleccion, tres estudios comparativos sobre Vicente Huidobro y Nicanor Parra, Parra y Miguel de Cervantes, y Enrique Lihn y Federico Garcia Lorca representan novedosas aproximaciones a las obras de estos maestros literarios. Otras piezas ofrecen un refrescante analisis de la poesia de generaciones posteriores y un tema como el jazz en su poesia. Una resena esta dedicada a Cantico cosmico, la epica del poeta nicaraguense Ernesto Cardenal, debido a la fascinacion de Oliphant por dicho genero que el mismo confiesa en un articulo escrito sobre su propia ""imagen y poesia"" y en una entrevista que poetas chilenos le realizaron al traductor, que tambien es vate tejano.