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Do you want to know when Duke Ellington was king of The Cotton
Club? Have you ever wondered how old Miles Davis was when he got
his first trumpet?
From birth dates to gig dates and from recordings to television
specials, Leonard Feather and Ira Gitler have left no stone
unturned in their quest for accurate, detailed information on the
careers of 3.300 jazz musicians from around the world. We learn
that Duke Ellington worked his magic at The Cotton Club from 1927
to 1931, and that on Miles Davis's thirteenth birthday, his father
gave him his first trumpet. Jazz is fast moving, and this edition
clearly and concisely maps out an often dizzying web of
professional associations. We find, for instance, that when Miles
Davis was a St. Louis teenager he encountered Charlie Parker and
Dizzy Gillespie for the first time. This meeting proved fateful,
and by 1945 a nineteen-year-old Davis had left Juilliard to play
with Parker on 52nd Street. Knowledge of these professional
alliances, along with the countless others chronicled in this book,
are central to tracing the development of significant jazz
movements, such as the "cool jazz" that became one of Miles Davis's
hallmarks.
Arranged alphabetically according to last name, each entry of this
book chronologically lists the highlights of every jazz musician's
career. Highly accessible and vigorously researched, The
Biographical Encyclopedia of Jazz is, quite simply, the most
comprehensive jazz encyclopedia available.
Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald,
Count Basie, Lester Young, Charlie Parker, Norman Granz, Oscar
Peterson, Ray Charles, Don Ellis, and Miles Davis--these are the
dozen jazz figures whom Leonard Feather chose to describe the
development of jazz. This is the first Feather book to examine
in-depth the innovative figures who have led the way throughout the
music's history. As composer, producer, and for almost
half-a-century one of its leading critics, Feather has a unique
perspective of these jazz immortals. He has worked with and known
all of them. "These are portraits of human beings first, analyses
of musicians or musical history only peripherally if at all," says
Feather in his new foreword. A warm, affectionate, and perceptive
inside account of twelve originals, the book is packed with
wonderful stories. As Feather says: "Most of all I am grateful for
the inspiration and friendship of the artists themselves. Armstrong
and Ellington were directly responsible, through their records, for
drawing me to jazz. After their magic had worked on me, the others,
one by one, sustained and refreshed and invigorated my interest in,
an involvement with, this liveliest of twentieth-century arts."
Leonard Feather's autobiography is also the story of jazz over the
last half-century. Since arriving in New York from London in 1935,
he has managed to distinguish himself as a producer, composer,
pianist, and one of the music's most acute critics. He was one of
the first to champion the innovations of bebop in the pages of
Esquire and Downbeat, also an ardent campaigner against racial
barriers, and a friend to dozens of musicians. There are stories
here about Feather's relationship with Louis Armstrong, Billie
Holiday, Dinah Washington, Dizzy Gillespie, George Shearing, Joe
Williams, Toshiko Akiyoshi, and many others. Filled with
information about the recording business and the tricky art of
criticism, this earwitness account of a lifetime in jazz caps a
career that has been dedicated to the best that American culture
has to offer.
By 1940 the big band sound had grown stale, and jazz musicians
began to search out new sounds and styles. At the Harlem nightclub
Minton's Playhouse, a small group of musicians -- John Birks, Dizzy
Gillespie, Coleman Beau Hawkins, and Thelonious Monk, among
sounding blend of flatted fifths, unfamiliar chord lines, and
accelerated offbeat rhythms. They were joined on 52nd Street by
alto saxist Charles Bird Parker, and bop -- or bebop, as it was
first called, from the triplet figure buh-BE-bop -- was born. Bop
was aggressive, provocative, and belligerent, Its proponents wore
gears and berets and refereed to the Dixieland and New Orleans
diehards as moldy figs who in tureen labelled the new jazz the
modern complex chord, and a new reperatory into jazz, and by the
end of the forties the moldy figs were forced to concede that bop
was indeed the harbinger of a new direction in American jazz.
Critic Leonard Feather was one of the earliest and most persistent
champions of bop. It was he who persuaded RCA Victor that the new
music was worth recording. His Inside Jazz is a full-length account
of bop: its origins and development and the personalities of the
musicians who created it. Numerous photographs and anecdotes bring
this innovative era in jazz history to life once more.
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Savoy At 60 CD (2002) (CD)
Various Artists; Contributions by Paul Reid III; Produced by Billy Vera, David Usher, Dick Bock, …
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R398
Discovery Miles 3 980
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Out of stock
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