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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colorful interview vignettes, drawn from the author's unpublished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.
This work puts together in one volume all the book and scholarly
materials related to jazz lives and organizes them in such a way
that the reader, at a glance, can see the entire sweep of writings
on a given artist and grasp the nature of their contents. The
bibliography includes many different kinds of biographical source
material published in all languages from 1921 to the present, such
as biographies, autobiographies, interview collections, musical
treatises, bio-discographies, anthologies of newspaper articles,
Master theses, and Ph.D. dissertations. With few exceptions, a work
of at least 50 pages in length merits inclusion, providing it has a
substantive biographical component or aids jazz research. The main
section of the work is an alphabetical listing of sources on
individual jazz artists and ensembles. Jazz artists, as defined by
Carner, are those who have made their mark as jazz performers and
who have led the "jazz life," playing the clubs and "joints," not
the "legitimate" concert stage, Broadway, Las Vegas, or the like.
Thus, musicians such as Ray Charles or Frank Sinatra, who have
recorded and performed with jazz ensembles, do not qualify for
inclusion. Each bonafide jazz musician is given a separate section
with birth, death, and primary instrumentation provided.
Biographical sources about the artist or ensemble follow. Each
entry is annotated to differentiate it from another and to present
basic data on the source's content, such as the inclusion of a
discography, bibliography, music examples and transcriptions,
footnotes, indexes, illustrations, filmographies, and glossaries.
An invaluable tool for jazz researchers and historians, Jazz
Performers will also appeal tojazz enthusiasts in general.
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