Jazz category: 919 books
The Jazz Style
A Comprehensive Introduction
Language: English
Release Date: September 15, 2014
Jazz is essentially an aural tradition and is dependent on this method of learning for success in developing a true understanding of the style. It is impossible to become a jazz musician without familiarity of the players that have brought about its development. The only true and tested method of...
Creating the Jazz Solo
Louis Armstrong and Barbershop Harmony
Language: English
Release Date: October 9, 2018
Throughout his life, Louis Armstrong tried to explain how singing with a barbershop quartet on the streets of New Orleans was foundational to his musicianship. Until now, there has been no in-depth inquiry into what he meant when he said, “I figure singing and playing is the same,” or, “Singing...
Myself When I Am Real
The Life and Music of Charles Mingus
Language: English
Release Date: November 29, 2001
Charles Mingus was one of the most innovative jazz musicians of the 20th Century, and ranks with Ives and Ellington as one of America's greatest composers. By temperament, he was a high-strung and sensitive romantic, a towering figure whose tempestuous personal life found powerfully coherent expression...
Mitchell & Ruff
An American Profile in Jazz
Language: English
Release Date: October 27, 2015
"Highly recommended"—Library Journal
"In this account of the world adventures of two splendid jazz artists, Bill Zinsser has given us one of the most exciting books about America's original art form that I've ever read. It's a revelation."—Studs Terkel
Since...
Glorious Days and Nights
A Jazz Memoir
Language: English
Release Date: January 4, 2011
Glorious Days and Nights is a personal account of the fifty-year career of jazz photographer Herb Snitzer, with a special focus on his years in New York City from 1957 to 1964. A photojournalist for Life, Look, and Fortune, Snitzer was the photo editor and later associate editor of the influential...
Hard Bop
Jazz and Black Music 1955-1965
Language: English
Release Date: September 9, 1993
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...
When Genres Collide
Down Beat, Rolling Stone, and the Struggle between Jazz and Rock
Language: English
Release Date: February 23, 2017
When Genres Collide is a provocative history that rethinks the relationship between jazz and rock through the lens of the two oldest surviving and most influential American popular music periodicals: Down Beat and Rolling Stone. Writing in 1955, Duke Ellington argued that the new music called rock...
Kansas City Jazz
From Ragtime to Bebop--A History
Language: English
Release Date: May 1, 2005
There were but four major galaxies in the early jazz universe, and three of them--New Orleans, Chicago, and New York--have been well documented in print. But there has never been a serious history of the fourth, Kansas City, until now. In this colorful history, Frank Driggs and Chuck Haddix range...
Circular Breathing
The Cultural Politics of Jazz in Britain
Language: English
Release Date: November 23, 2005
In Circular Breathing, George McKay, a leading chronicler of British countercultures, uncovers the often surprising ways that jazz has accompanied social change during a period of rapid transformation in Great Britain. Examining jazz from the founding of George Webb’s Dixielanders in 1943 through...
by Nat Hentoff, Nat Shapiro
Language: English
Release Date: August 16, 2012
Language: English
Release Date: August 16, 2012
"Music is your own experience, your thoughts, your wisdom. If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn." — Charlie Parker
"What is jazz? The rhythm — the feeling." — Coleman Hawkins
"The best sound usually comes the first time you do something. If it's spontaneous,...
A Trumpet around the Corner
The Story of New Orleans Jazz
Language: English
Release Date: February 17, 2010
Samuel Charters has been studying and writing about New Orleans music for more than fifty years. A Trumpet around the Corner: The Story of New Orleans Jazz is the first book to tell the entire story of a century of jazz in New Orleans. Although there is still controversy over the racial origins and...
by Ken Karsh
Language: English
Release Date: February 20, 2018
Language: English
Release Date: February 20, 2018
In the pursuit of improvisation (jazz or other styles), scales are the 'palettes' utilized for creating melodies. Often, scales are only practiced ascending or descending step-wise. 'Jazz Scale Workout' by Ken Karsh contains eight measure through-composed continuous eighth note exercises (or 'workouts')...
Cookin': Hard Bop and Soul Jazz 1954-65
Hard Bop and Soul Jazz 1954-65
Language: English
Release Date: March 1, 2012
Following on from Giant Steps, comes the second instalment in Kenny Mathieson's series of jazz histories. Cookin' examines the birth and development of two of the key jazz styles of the post-war era, hard bop and its related offshoot, soul jazz. Hard bop was the most exciting jazz style of its day,...
Boston Boy
Growing up with Jazz and Other Rebellious Passions
Language: English
Release Date: October 27, 2015
Boston Boy is Nat Hentoff's memoir of growing up in the Roxbury section of Boston in the 1930s and 1940s. He grapples with Judaism and anti-Semitism. He develops a passion for outspoken journalism and First Amendment freedom of speech. And he discovers his love of jazz music as he follows, and...