Product Description Few musical genres inspire the passionate devotion of jazz. Its mystique goes far beyond the melodies and rhythms, with its key players and singers discussed by aficionados with a respect that borders on reverence. Some books on jazz offer little more than theory or dry facts, thereby relinquishing the 'essence' of the music. This book is different. One of the most influential and internationally known writers on the subject describes, through vivid personal contacts, reminiscences and zesty anecdotes, his life in jazz as a player, broadcaster and observer. Alyn Shipton recalls friendships with legendary musicians, while revealing fresh discoveries about such luminaries as Fats Waller, Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Abbey Lincoln and Geri Allen. On Jazz powerfully evokes the atmosphere of clubs and dancehalls, and takes us behind the scenes and up onto the stage, so that this electrifying world is unforgettably spotlighted as never before. Review ‘This is the back story of the gods who create the magic. I loved it.' Sonny Rollins‘This immensely readable and compelling book describes unique encounters with the leading figures of jazz – including extensive interviews with Sonny Rollins and Oscar Peterson – from the perspective of one of the world's leading jazz authorities. Respected by musicians, fans and academics for his encyclopaedic knowledge, Alyn Shipton is familiar to wider audiences through his prolific writing, broadcasting, bass playing and bandleading. He now offers the reader fascinating insights from his life in jazz, and vividly narrates many great stories which appear in print here for the first time.' Catherine Tackley, Professor of Music, University of Liverpool, author of Benny Goodman's Famous 1938 Carnegie Hall Jazz Concert and co-author of Black British Jazz‘I've really enjoyed the convivial chat with Roy Haynes, Harry Dial's off the cuff remarks and apocryphal stories about Bud Powell. It's not hard to be re-seduced by the music – as every page is filled with unmined gemstones, from an artform you thought you knew. All too often, jazz tomes seem unnecessarily lofty, or purely academic. However, this is both a very personal semi-autobiographical journey through jazz, and it describes the social context and cultural milieu that these great innovators emerged from.' Soweto Kinch, Musician and broadcaster'This lively book hits all the right notes and will delight both jazz aficionados and neophytes.' Carolyn M. Mulac, Library Journal‘On Jazz covers a spectacularly extensive waterfront … this book is not a smorgasbord, it’s a feast.’ Ben Thompson, Mojo'Before you even turn the dustcover, an Alyn Shipton book deserves respect.' Jazzwise Book Description A vivid and fascinating up-close encounter with jazz, brim-full of anecdote and personal reminiscence, by an internationally known broadcaster and writer. About the Author Alyn Shipton is a writer, publisher, broadcaster and jazz double bassist. He has broadcast about jazz since 1989, and currently hosts BBC Radio 3's long-running and much loved programme Jazz Record Requests. His biographies of Dizzy Gillespie (1999) and singer-songwriter Harry Nilsson (2013) both won Association for Recorded Sound Collections (ARSC) Awards for Excellence; and Nilsson also gained an American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) Foundation Deems Taylor/Virgil Thompson Award. His New History of Jazz (2001) was the Jazz Journalists' Association (JJA) book of the year and named 'the most outstanding single-volume history of jazz' by the Jazz Institute of Chicago. His most recent work, The Art of Jazz: A Visual History (2020), was described as 'indispensible' by Publishers Weekly. He leads the Buck Clayton Legacy Band, and is a research fellow of the Royal Academy of Music in London.

A landmark in jazz studies, Thinking in Jazz reveals as never before how musicians, both individually and collectively, learn to improvise. Chronicling leading musicians from their first encounters with jazz to the development of a unique improvisatory voice, Paul Berliner documents the lifetime of preparation that lies behind the skilled improviser's every idea.The product of more than fifteen years of immersion in the jazz world, Thinking in Jazz combines participant observation with detailed musicological analysis, the author's experience as a jazz trumpeter, interpretations of published material by scholars and performers, and, above all, original data from interviews with more than fifty professional musicians: bassists George Duvivier and Rufus Reid; drummers Max Roach, Ronald Shannon Jackson, and Akira Tana; guitarist Emily Remler; pianists Tommy Flanagan and Barry Harris; saxophonists Lou Donaldson, Lee Konitz, and James Moody; trombonist Curtis Fuller; trumpeters Doc Cheatham, Art Farmer, Wynton Marsalis, and Red Rodney; vocalists Carmen Lundy and Vea Williams; and others. Together, the interviews provide insight into the production of jazz by great artists like Betty Carter, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Coleman Hawkins, and Charlie Parker.Thinking in Jazz overflows with musical examples from the 1920s to the present, including original transcriptions (keyed to commercial recordings) of collective improvisations by Miles Davis's and John Coltrane's groups. These transcriptions provide additional insight into the structure and creativity of jazz improvisation and represent a remarkable resource for jazz musicians as well as students and educators.Berliner explores the alternative ways—aural, visual, kinetic, verbal, emotional, theoretical, associative—in which these performers conceptualize their music and describes the delicate interplay of soloist and ensemble in collective improvisation. Berliner's skillful integration of data concerning musical development, the rigorous practice and thought artists devote to jazz outside of performance, and the complexities of composing in the moment leads to a new understanding of jazz improvisation as a language, an aesthetic, and a tradition. This unprecedented journey to the heart of the jazz tradition will fascinate and enlighten musicians, musicologists, and jazz fans alike.

Keith Jarrett is one of the great pianists of our times. Before achieving worldwide fame for his solo improvisations, he had already collaborated with Art Blakey, Charles Lloyd and Miles Davis. His 'Koln Concert' album (1975) has now sold around four million copies and become the most successful solo recording in jazz history. His interpretations of the music of Bach, Handel, Bartok or Shostakovich, have also received much attention in later years. Jarrett is considered difficult and inaccessible, and has often abandoned the stage during his concerts due to restless audiences or disturbing photographers. Only few writers have come as close to Keith Jarrett as Wolfgang Sandner, who has not only been following Jarrett's remarkable career from the nineteen-sixties onward, but has actually had the opportunity to visit him in his home in Oxford, New Jersey. Sandner squelches some legends here, such as the one concerning Jarrett's alleged Hungarian Roma family background. For this biography, which is full of detailed musical analyses and cross-references to other artistic genres, Wolfgang Sandner has also collected new information about the origins of Jarrett's paternal family from today's Baden-Wurttemberg region in Germany - this, not least, thanks to the translator, Keith Jarrett's youngest brother Chris. This English edition is a significantly extended and updated version of the German original as concerns important aspects of Keith Jarrett's life and work.

This book is about women in jazz. It charts their journeys, celebrates their presence, hears their voices, wonders at their prowess and revels in their being. We hear from female agents, arrangers, composers, musicians, PR people, radio hosts, record label managers, singers, writers and more. These are their stories; their views of jazz and how they see the future. The established performers share their years of experience whilst those newer to jazz reflect on observations and changes they have seen. Containing interviews and first-hand accounts, this book is witness to the generosity, profundity and positivity with which women have responded and the energy they have put into their lives in overcoming challenges.

Poised to become a classic of jazz literature, Visions of Jazz: The First Century offers seventy-nine chapters illuminating the lives of virtually all the major figures in jazz history. From Louis Armstrong's renegade-style trumpet playing to Sarah Vaughan's operatic crooning, and from the swinging elegance of Duke Ellington to the pioneering experiments of Ornette Coleman, jazz critic Gary Giddins continually astonishes the reader with his unparalleled insight. Writing with the grace and wit that have endeared his prose to Village Voice readers for decades, Giddins also widens the scope of jazz to include such crucial American musicians as Irving Berlin, Rosemary Clooney, and Frank Sinatra, all primarily pop performers who are often dismissed by fans and critics as mere derivatives of the true jazz idiom. And he devotes an entire quarter of this landmark volume to young, still-active jazz artists, boldly expanding the horizons of jazz--and charting and exploring the music's influences as no other book has done.

It's nineteen fifty-something, in a dark, cramped, smoke-filled room. Everyone's wearing black. And on-stage a tenor is blowing his heart out, a searching, jagged saxophone journey played out against a moody, walking bass and the swish of a drummer's brushes. To a great many listeners--from African American aficionados of the period to a whole new group of fans today--this is the very embodiment of jazz. It is also quintessential hard bop. In this, the first thorough study of the subject, jazz expert and enthusiast David H. Rosenthal vividly examines the roots, traditions, explorations and permutations, personalities and recordings of a climactic period in jazz history. Beginning with hard bop's origins as an amalgam of bebop and R&B, Rosenthal narrates the growth of a movement that embraced the heavy beat and bluesy phrasing of such popular artists as Horace Silver and Cannonball Adderley; the stark, astringent, tormented music of saxophonists Jackie McLean and Tina Brooks; the gentler, more lyrical contributions of trumpeter Art Farmer, pianists Hank Jones and Tommy Flanagan, composers Benny Golson and Gigi Gryce; and such consciously experimental and truly one-of-a-kind players and composers as Andrew Hill, Sonny Rollins, John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, and Charles Mingus. Hard bop welcomed all influences--whether Gospel, the blues, Latin rhythms, or Debussy and Ravel--into its astonishingly creative, hard-swinging orbit. Although its emphasis on expression and downright "badness" over technical virtuosity was unappreciated by critics, hard bop was the music of black neighborhoods and the last jazz movement to attract the most talented young black musicians. Fortunately, records were there to catch it all. The years between 1955 and 1965 are unrivaled in jazz history for the number of milestones on vinyl. Miles Davis's Kind of Blue, Charles Mingus's Mingus Ah Um, Thelonious Monk's Brilliant Corners, Horace Silver's Further Explorations--Rosenthal gives a perceptive cut-by-cut analysis of these and other jazz masterpieces, supplying an essential discography as well. For knowledgeable jazz-lovers and novices alike, Hard Bop is a lively, multi-dimensional, much-needed examination of the artists, the milieus, and above all the sounds of one of America's great musical epochs.

"Jones has learned—and this has been very rare in jazz criticism—to write about music as an artist."—Nat Hentoff ksBlack Music is a book about the brilliant young jazz musicians of the early 1960s: John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Archie Shepp, Sun Ra, and others. It is composed of essays, reviews, interviews, liner notes, musical analyses, and personal impressions from 1959–1967. Also includes Amiri Baraka's reflections in a 2009 interview with Calvin Reid of Publishers Weekly.LeRoi Jones (now known as Amiri Baraka) is the author of numerous books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. He was named Poet Laureate of New Jersey from 2002 to 2004 by the New Jersey Commission on Humanities. His most recent book, Tales of the Out & the Gone (Akashic Books, 2007), was a New York Times Editors' Choice and winner of a PEN/Beyond Margins Award. He lives in Newark, New Jersey.

2021 Book of the Year - Jazz Journalists Association\\nPhil Woods was an American original. One of the greatest saxophonists of all time, he was the first call for Quincy Jones, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, and Oliver Nelson. His iconic improvisation on Billy Joel’s hit song "Just the Way You Are" is quite likely the most played instrumental solo in the world. His popularity soared while an expat in Europe during the cultural revolution of the late sixties and early seventies. Upon his return to the States, Woods formed a band that would perform together for four decades. Grammy Awards, dozens of DownBeat Readers Poll victories, and designation as a National Endowment of the Arts Jazz Master would follow. Life in E Flat is the unvarnished self-portrait of an artist who loved and lived a life of bebop.\\n"Phil Woods lived all the tropes of the 20th century American artist: defiant modernist, reverent traditionalist, mid-century family man, countercultural nonconformist, homebody, expatriate and road rat; young Turk and grand master. He possessed an abundance of gifts along with the determination to put the hard work in to realize every facet of them, and the great good fortune to grow up blessed by the mentorship of the most distinguished exponents of a golden age of Black American Music. His story tracks the changes of “this old world” through over three quarters of a century of music and life, informing us of what has been gained and lost, reminding us of what happened and what still needs to be done."\n– Brian Lynch, Grammy Award-winning trumpeter, composer, and educator\\n"I would have to give Phil Woods’ sax solo on Just The Way You Are credit for making that a hit record."\n– Billy Joel\\n"Mr. Phil Woods left an indelible impression on me as a composer, arranger, and instrumentalist. A sincere active transmitter on the stage!"\n– Eddie Palmieri, ten time Grammy Award winner and NEA Jazz Master\\n"I never worked with a better musician at the same time so unpretentious about the depth, breadth, and total scope of his knowledge and his playing. You hear his unmistakable voice in both his alto saxophone and every note of his very much underrated writing. Phil Woods was a supreme singer and swinger of the music he loved and served so passionately. Equally jazz and man…"\n– Todd Barkan, Keystone Korner Baltimore and NEA Jazz Master\\n"Phil Woods was a wonderful alto player, a great musician that was at home in any musical situation. His autobiography is a must-read for all jazz fans and musician alike."\n– Charles McPherson, saxophonist and composer\\n"Phil was in a class of his own….musically of course. But he also had an ear for language… caustic at times, but always honest and heartfelt… truly one of a kind!"\n– Dave Liebman, NEA Jazz Master

Notes and Tones is one of the most controversial, honest, and insightful books ever written about jazz. It consists of twenty-nine no-holds-barred conversations which drummer Arthur Taylor held with the most influential jazz musicians of the '60s and '70s-including:Art BlakeyBetty CarterDon CherryKenny ClarkeOrnette ColemanMiles DavisKenny DorhamDizzy GillespieHampton HawesFreddie HubbardElvin JonesCarmen McRaeMax RoachSonny RollinsNina SimoneRandy WestonAs a black musician himself, Arthur Taylor was able to ask his subjects hard questions about the role of black artists in a white society. Free to speak their minds, these musicians offer startling insights into their music, their lives, and the creative process itself. This expanded edition is supplemented with previously unpublished interviews with Dexter Gordon and Thelonious Monk, a new introduction by the author, and new photographs.