Music : Jazz

Saxophonist and composer Wayne Shorter has not only left his footprints on our musical terrain, he has created a body of work that is a monument to artistic imagination. Throughout Shorter's extraordinary fifty-year career, his compositions have helped define the sounds of each distinct era in the history of jazz. Filled with musical analysis by Mercer, enlivened by Shorter's vivid recollections, and enriched by more than seventy-five original interviews with his friends and associates, this book is at once an invaluable history of music from bebop to pop, an intimate and moving biography, and a story of a man's struggle toward the full realization of his gifts and of himself. more...

Price: $14.95

Albert provides a survey of the impact of jazz on both American and foreign fiction, along with an annotated listing of almost 400 short stories, novels, plays, and jazz fiction criticism. Access is augmented by an index of novels, plays, and short stories and by a general index.||Albert examines the strong impact jazz and the blues have had on fiction. The annotated listing of 400 novels, short stories, and jazz fiction criticism will serve as a resource for those doing research in both music and literature, as well as serving as a reading guide for jazz devotees who are looking for literature with a jazz motif. Access is augmented by an index of novels, plays, and short stories and by a general index. more...

Price: $116.00

When bebop was new, writes Thomas Owens, "many jazz musicians and most of the jazz audience heard it as radical, chaotic, bewildering music." For a nation swinging to the smoothly orchestrated sounds of the big bands, this revolutionary movement of the 1940s must have seemed destined for a short life on the musical fringe. But today, Owens writes, bebop is nothing less than "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 with deft musical analysis, he ranges from the early classics of modern jazz (starting with the 1943 Onyx Club performances of Dizzy Gillespie, Max Roach, Oscar Pettiford, Don Byas, and George Wallington) through the central role of Charlie Parker, to an instrument-by-instrument look at the key players and their innovations. Illustrating his discussion with numerous musical excerpts, Owens skillfully demonstrates why bebop was so revolutionary, with fascinating glimpses of the tempestuous jazz world: Thelonious Monk, for example, did "everything 'wrong' in the sense of traditional piano technique....Because his right elbow fanned outward away from his body, he often hit the keys at an angle rather than in parallel. Sometimes he hit a single key with more than one finger, and divided single-line melodies between two hands." In addition to his discussions of individual instruments and players, Owens examines ensembles, with their sometimes volatile collaborations: in the Jazz Messengers, Benny Golson told of how his own mellow saxophone playing would get lost under Art Blakey's furious drumming: "He would do one of those famous four-bar drum rolls going into the next chorus, and I would completely disappear. He would holler over at me, 'Get up out of that hole!'" In this marvelous account, Owens comes right t more...

Price: $19.95

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. more...

Price: $37.00

The first volume of Barker's memoirs, A Life in Jazz, followed him from New Orleans into the big bands of Cab Calloway and Benny Carter. He was working on this-the second volume-for some years before his death in 1994. Beginning with an extended portrait of Buddy Bolden as recalled by the likes of Jelly Roll Morton and Bunk Johnson as well as Barker himself, this book draws together a lifetime of stories and the vivid characters who populated "Storyville."Danny Barker (1909-1994) sang and played the guitar and banjo on over 1,000 jazz, swing, blues, and bebop records. He is a member of the Jazz Hall of Fame and recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Music Master Award. Alyn Shipton is a writer and broadcaster on jazz. He is the editor of A Life in Jazz, the first volume of Danny Barker's memoirs. more...

Price: $110.00