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Martin Williams has probably introduced more people to jazz than anyone alive, as editor of "The Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz", editor of "The Jazz Masters Series", and author of this superb beginner's guide to jazz. The book addresses the basic questions -- what jazz players do to a popular melody when they improvise and how best to hear and appreciate it. With chapters on the blues, the art of Billie Holiday, Oscar Peterson, Dave Brubeck, and notes on live jazz -- close-ups of Thelonious Monk and Big Joe Turner in performance -- and suggestions for a basic library of jazz records, this book will aid the perplexed and reward the already knowledgeable. -- From publisher's description.
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.
The vibrant world of jazz may be viewed from many perspectives, from social and cultural history to music analysis, from economics to ethnography. It is challenging and exciting territory. This volume of nineteen specially commissioned essays provides informed and accessible guidance to the challenge, offering the reader a range of expert views on the character, history and uses of jazz. The book starts by considering what kind of identity jazz has acquired and how, and goes on to discuss the crucial practices that define jazz and to examine some specific moments of historical change and some important issues for jazz study. Finally, it looks at a set of perspectives that illustrate different 'takes' on jazz - ways in which jazz has been valued and represented.
Jazz: Research and Pedagogy is the third edition of an annotated bibliography to books, recordings, videos, and websites in the field of jazz. Since the publication of the 2nd edition in 1995, the quantity and quality of books on jazz research, performance, and teaching materials have increased. Although the 1995 book was the most comprehensive annotated jazz bibliography published to that date, several books on research, performance, and teaching materials were omitted. In addition, given the proliferation of new books in all jazz areas since 1995, the need for a new, comprehensive, and annotated reference book on jazz is apparent. Multiply indexed, this book will serve as an excellent tool for librarians, researchers, and scholars in sorting through the massive amount of new material that has appeared in the field over the last decade.
American composer, pianist and orchestra leader Duke Ellington was the first genuine jazz composer of truly international status. In this book Ken Rattenbury offers a thorough musical analysis of Ellington's works, assessing the extent to which Ellington drew on the black music traditions of blues and ragtime and the music of Tin Pan Alley, and examining how he integrated black folk music practices with elements of European art music. Rattenbury investigate's Ellington's methods of composition, focusing on works written, performed and recorded between 1939 and 1941, years that witnessed the full flowering of Ellington's genius. He also discusses the criteria Ellington used to select his musicians.
New Orleans jazz, Dixieland, Chicago jazz, swing, bebop, cool jazz, hard bop, and free jazz: up until today, the history of jazz is told as a "tradition" consisting of fixed components including a succession of jazz styles. How did this construction of music history emerge? What were the alternative perspectives? And why did the narrative of a fixed tradition catch on? In this study, Mario Dunkel examines narratives of jazz history from the beginnings of jazz until the late 1950s. According to Dunkel, the jazz tradition is simultaneously an attempt to approach historical reality and the product of competition between different narratives and cultural myths. From the middlebrow culture of the 1920s to the New Deal, the African American civil rights movement and the role of the U.S. in the Cold War, Dunkel shows in detail how the jazz tradition, as a global narrative of the twentieth century, is intertwined with greater social and cultural developments.
Traditional jazz studies have tended to see jazz in purely musical terms, as a series of changes in rhythm, tonality, and harmony, or as a parade of great players. But jazz has also entered the cultural mix through its significant impact on novelists, filmmakers, dancers, painters, biographers, and photographers. Representing Jazz explores the "other" history of jazz created by these artists, a history that tells us as much about the meaning of the music as do the many books that narrate the lives of musicians or describe their recordings. Krin Gabbard has gathered essays by distinguished writers from a variety of fields. They provide engaging analyses of films such as Round Midnight, Bird, Mo' Better Blues, Cabin in the Sky, and Jammin' the Blues; the writings of Eudora Welty and Dorothy Baker; the careers of the great lindy hoppers of the 1930s and 1940s; Mura Dehn's extraordinary documentary on jazz dance; the jazz photography of William Claxton; painters of the New York School; the traditions of jazz autobiography; and the art of "vocalese." The contributors to this volume assess the influence of extramusical sources on our knowledge of jazz and suggest that the living contexts of the music must be considered if a more sophisticated jazz scholarship is ever to evolve. Transcending the familiar patterns of jazz history and criticism, Representing Jazz looks at how the music actually has been heard and felt at different levels of American culture. With its companion anthology, Jazz Among the Discourses, this volume will enrich and transform the literature of jazz studies. Its provocative essays will interest both aficionados and potential jazz fans. Contributors. Karen Backstein, Leland H. Chambers, Robert P. Crease, Krin Gabbard, Frederick Garber, Barry K. Grant, Mona Hadler, Christopher Harlos, Michael Jarrett, Adam Knee, Arthur Knight, James Naremore
From its very beginnings, the nature of jazz has been to reinvent itself. As the musical genre evolved from its roots--blues, European music, Voodoo ceremonies, and brass bands that played at funerals, parades and celebrations--the sound reflected the tenor of the times, from the citified strains of the Roaring '20s to the Big Band swing of pre-World War II to the bop revolution that grew out of the minimalist sound the war forced upon the art form. That the music continued to develop and evolve is a tribute to the power and creativity of its musicians. Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Sarah Vaughan, Art Blakey, Dave Brubeck, Sun Ra, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Diana Krall, Archie Shepp, Chick Corea, Branford Marsalis, Larry Coryell, and Kenny Kirkland are just some of the jazz greats profiled here. The five major periods of jazz--the bop revolution, hard bop and cool jazz, the avant-garde, fusion, and contemporary--form the basis for the sections in this reference work, with a brief history of each period provided. The artists who were integral to the evolution of each period are then profiled. Each biographical entry focuses on the artist's life and his or her influence on jazz and on music as a whole. A complete discography for each musician is also provided.
A new edition of the musical biography of jazz tenor saxophonist Lester Young, with a revised discography
This is a comprehensive guide to popular music literature, first published in 1986. Its main focus is on American and British works, but it includes significant works from other countries, making it truly international in scope.