Download or read book Louis Armstrong Master of Modernism written by Thomas David Brothers and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2014-02-03 with total page 608 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The definitive account of Louis Armstrong—his life and legacy—during the most creative period of his career. Nearly 100 years after bursting onto Chicago’s music scene under the tutelage of Joe "King" Oliver, Louis Armstrong is recognized as one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century. A trumpet virtuoso, seductive crooner, and consummate entertainer, Armstrong laid the foundation for the future of jazz with his stylistic innovations, but his story would be incomplete without examining how he struggled in a society seething with brutally racist ideologies, laws, and practices. Thomas Brothers picks up where he left off with the acclaimed Louis Armstrong's New Orleans, following the story of the great jazz musician into his most creatively fertile years in the 1920s and early 1930s, when Armstrong created not one but two modern musical styles. Brothers wields his own tremendous skill in making the connections between history and music accessible to everyone as Armstrong shucks and jives across the page. Through Brothers's expert ears and eyes we meet an Armstrong whose quickness and sureness, so evident in his performances, served him well in his encounters with racism while his music soared across the airwaves into homes all over America. Louis Armstrong, Master of Modernism blends cultural history, musical scholarship, and personal accounts from Armstrong's contemporaries to reveal his enduring contributions to jazz and popular music at a time when he and his bandmates couldn’t count on food or even a friendly face on their travels across the country. Thomas Brothers combines an intimate knowledge of Armstrong's life with the boldness to examine his place in such a racially charged landscape. In vivid prose and with vibrant photographs, Brothers illuminates the life and work of the man many consider to be the greatest American musician of the twentieth century.
Download or read book Louis Armstrong s New Orleans written by Thomas Brothers and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2007-03-27 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on first-person accounts, this book tells the rags-to-riches tale of Louis Armstrong's early life and the social and musical forces in New Orleans that shaped him, their unique relationship, and their impact on American culture. Illustrations.
Download or read book Help written by Thomas Brothers and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2018-10-23 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The fascinating story of how creative cooperation inspired two of the world’s most celebrated musical acts. The Beatles and Duke Ellington’s Orchestra stand as the two greatest examples of collaboration in music history. Ellington’s forte was not melody—his key partners were not lyricists but his fellow musicians. His strength was in arranging, in elevating the role of a featured soloist, in selecting titles: in packaging compositions. He was also very good at taking credit when the credit wasn’t solely his, as in the case of Mood Indigo, though he was ultimately responsible for the orchestration of what Duke University musicologist Thomas Brothers calls "one of his finest achievements." If Ellington was often reluctant to publicly acknowledge how essential collaboration was to the Ellington sound, the relationship between Lennon and McCartney was fluid from the start. Lennon and McCartney "wrote for each other as primary audience." Lennon’s preference for simpler music meant that it begged for enhancement and McCartney was only too happy to oblige, and while McCartney expanded the Beatles’ musical range, Lennon did "the same thing with lyrics." Through his fascinating examination of these two musical legends, Brothers delivers a portrait of the creative process at work, demonstrating that the cooperative method at the foundation of these two artist-groups was the primary reason for their unmatched musical success. While clarifying the historical record of who wrote what, with whom, and how, Brothers brings the past to life with a lifetime of musical knowledge that reverberates through every page, and analyses of songs from Lennon and McCartney’s Strawberry Fields Forever to Billy Strayhorn’s Chelsea Bridge. Help! describes in rich detail the music and mastery of two cultural leaders whose popularity has never dimmed, and the process of collaboration that allowed them to achieve an artistic vision greater than the sum of their parts.
Download or read book Heart Full of Rhythm written by Ricky Riccardi and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-08-05 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nearly 50 years after his death, Louis Armstrong remains one of the 20th century's most iconic figures. Popular fans still appreciate his later hits such as "Hello, Dolly!" and "What a Wonderful World," while in the jazz community, he remains venerated for his groundbreaking innovations in the 1920s. The achievements of Armstrong's middle years, however, possess some of the trumpeter's most scintillating and career-defining stories. But the story of this crucial time has never been told in depth until now. Between 1929 and 1947, Armstrong transformed himself from a little-known trumpeter in Chicago to an internationally renowned pop star, setting in motion the innovations of the Swing Era and Bebop. He had a similar effect on the art of American pop singing, waxing some of his most identifiable hits such as "Jeepers Creepers" and "When You're Smiling." However as author Ricky Riccardi shows, this transformative era wasn't without its problems, from racist performance reviews and being held up at gunpoint by gangsters to struggling with an overworked embouchure and getting arrested for marijuana possession. Utilizing a prodigious amount of new research, Riccardi traces Armstrong's mid-career fall from grace and dramatic resurgence. Featuring never-before-published photographs and stories culled from Armstrong's personal archives, Heart Full of Rhythm tells the story of how the man called "Pops" became the first "King of Pop."
Download or read book The Louis Armstrong Companion written by Joshua Berrett and published by Schirmer Trade Books. This book was released on 1999 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on the rich resources of the Louis Armstrong Archives, jazz historian Joshua Berrett has compiled a wonderful tribute to the multitalented trumpeter, vocalist, and "Ambassador of Jazz". 20 photos.
Download or read book Louis Armstrong in His Own Words written by Louis Armstrong and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2001 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Louis Armstrong has been the subject of countless biographies and music histories. Yet scant attention has been paid to the remarkable array of writings he left behind. Louis Armstrong: In His Own Words introduces readers to a little-known facet of this master trumpeter, bandleader, and entertainer. Based on extensive research through the Armstrong archives, this important volume includes some of his earliest letters, personal correspondence, autobiographical writings, magazine articles, and essays.
Download or read book Struggling to Define a Nation written by Charles Hiroshi Garrett and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2008-10-12 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Identifying music as a vital site of cultural debate, this book captures the dynamic, contested nature of musical life in the United States. It examines an array of genres - including art music, jazz, popular song, ragtime, and Hawaiian music - and well-known musicians, such as Charles Ives, Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong, and Irving Berlin.
Download or read book Jazz Italian Style written by Anna Harwell Celenza and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-03-06 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the arrival of jazz in Italy, its reception and development, and how its distinct style influenced musicians in America.
Download or read book Freedom Sounds written by Ingrid Monson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2007-10-18 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An insightful examination of the impact of the Civil Rights Movement and African Independence on jazz in the 1950s and 60s, Freedom Sounds traces the complex relationships among music, politics, aesthetics, and activism through the lens of the hot button racial and economic issues of the time. Ingrid Monson illustrates how the contentious and soul-searching debates in the Civil Rights, African Independence, and Black Power movements shaped aesthetic debates and exerted a moral pressure on musicians to take action. Throughout, her arguments show how jazz musicians' quest for self-determination as artists and human beings also led to fascinating and far reaching musical explorations and a lasting ethos of social critique and transcendence. Across a broad body of issues of cultural and political relevance, Freedom Sounds considers the discursive, structural, and practical aspects of life in the jazz world in the 1950s and 1960s. In domestic politics, Monson explores the desegregation of the American Federation of Musicians, the politics of playing to segregated performance venues in the 1950s, the participation of jazz musicians in benefit concerts, and strategies of economic empowerment. Issues of transatlantic importance such as the effects of anti-colonialism and African nationalism on the politics and aesthetics of the music are also examined, from Paul Robeson's interest in Africa, to the State Department jazz tours, to the interaction of jazz musicians such Art Blakey and Randy Weston with African and African diasporic aesthetics. Monson deftly explores musicians' aesthetic agency in synthesizing influential forms of musical expression from a multiplicity of stylistic and cultural influences--African American music, popular song, classical music, African diasporic aesthetics, and other world musics--through examples from cool jazz, hard bop, modal jazz, and the avant-garde. By considering the differences between aesthetic and socio-economic mobility, she presents a fresh interpretation of debates over cultural ownership, racism, reverse racism, and authenticity. Freedom Sounds will be avidly read by students and academics in musicology, ethnomusicology, anthropology, popular music, African American Studies, and African diasporic studies, as well as fans of jazz, hip hop, and African American music.
Download or read book Jazz Modernism written by Alfred Appel and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How does the jazz of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Fats Waller, Billie Holiday, and Charlie Parker fit into the great tradition of modernist art? In this book, an eminent cultural historian provides the answer and offers a new way of understanding jazz.
Download or read book The Blues A Very Short Introduction written by Elijah Wald and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2010-08-03 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Praised as "suave, soulful, ebullient" (Tom Waits) and "a meticulous researcher, a graceful writer, and a committed contrarian" (New York Times Book Review), Elijah Wald is one of the leading popular music critics of his generation. In The Blues, Wald surveys a genre at the heart of American culture. It is not an easy thing to pin down. As Howlin' Wolf once described it, "When you ain't got no money and can't pay your house rent and can't buy you no food, you've damn sure got the blues." It has been defined by lyrical structure, or as a progression of chords, or as a set of practices reflecting West African "tonal and rhythmic approaches," using a five-note "blues scale." Wald sees blues less as a style than as a broad musical tradition within a constantly evolving pop culture. He traces its roots in work and praise songs, and shows how it was transformed by such professional performers as W. C. Handy, who first popularized the blues a century ago. He follows its evolution from Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith through Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix; identifies the impact of rural field recordings of Blind Lemon Jefferson, Charley Patton and others; explores the role of blues in the development of both country music and jazz; and looks at the popular rhythm and blues trends of the 1940s and 1950s, from the uptown West Coast style of T-Bone Walker to the "down home" Chicago sound of Muddy Waters. Wald brings the story up to the present, touching on the effects of blues on American poetry, and its connection to modern styles such as rap. As with all of Oxford's Very Short Introductions, The Blues tells you--with insight, clarity, and wit--everything you need to know to understand this quintessentially American musical genre.
Download or read book Group Harmony written by Stuart L. Goosman and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2013-07-17 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1948, the Orioles, a Baltimore-based vocal group, recorded "It's Too Soon to Know." Combining the sound of Tin Pan Alley with gospel and blues sensibilities, the Orioles saw their first hit reach #13 on the pop charts, thus introducing the nation to vocal rhythm & blues and paving the way for the most successful groups of the 1950s. In the first scholarly treatment of this influential musical genre, Stuart Goosman chronicles the Orioles' story and that of myriad other black vocal groups in the postwar period. A few, like the Orioles, Cardinals, and Swallows from Baltimore and the Clovers from Washington, D.C., established the popularity of vocal rhythm & blues nationally. Dozens of other well-known groups (and hundreds of unknown ones) across the country cut records and performed until about 1960. Record companies initially marketed this music as rhythm & blues; today, group harmony continues to resonate for some as "doo-wop." Focusing in particular on Baltimore and Washington and drawing significantly from oral histories, Group Harmony details the emergence of vocal rhythm & blues groups from black urban neighborhoods. Group harmony was a source of empowerment for young singers, for it provided them with a means of expression and some aspect of control over their lives where there were limited alternatives. Through group harmony, young black males celebrated and musically confounded, when they could not overcome, complex issues of race, separatism, and assimilation during the postwar period. Group harmony also became a significant resource for the popular music industry. Goosman interviews dozens of performers, deejays, and industry professionals to examine the entrepreneurial promise of midcentury popular music and chronicle the convergence of music, place, and business, including the business of records, radio, promotion, and song writing. Featured in the book's account of the black urban roots of rhythm & blues are the recollections of singers from groups such as the Cardinals, Clovers, Dunbar Four, Four Bars of Rhythm, Five Blue Notes, Hi Fis, Plants, Swallows, and many others, including Jimmy McPhail, a well-known Washington vocalist; Deborah Chessler, the manager and songwriter for the original Orioles; Jesse Stone, the writer and arranger from Atlantic Records; Washington radio personality Jackson Lowe; and seminal black deejays Al ("Big Boy") Jefferson, Maurice ("Hot Rod") Hulbert, and Tex Gathings.
Download or read book Fascinating Rhythm written by David Yaffe and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009-02-09 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How have American writers written about jazz, and how has jazz influenced American literature? In Fascinating Rhythm, David Yaffe explores the relationship and interplay between jazz and literature, looking at jazz musicians and the themes literature has garnered from them by appropriating the style, tones, and innovations of jazz, and demonstrating that the poetics of jazz has both been assimilated into, and deeply affected, the development of twentieth-century American literature. Yaffe explores how Jewish novelists such as Norman Mailer, J. D. Salinger, and Philip Roth engaged issues of racial, ethnic, and American authenticity by way of jazz; how Ralph Ellison's descriptions of Louis Armstrong led to a "neoconservative" movement in contemporary jazz; how poets such as Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, Langston Hughes, and Frank O'Hara were variously inspired by the music; and how memoirs by Billie Holiday, Charles Mingus, and Miles Davis both reinforced and redeemed the red light origins of jazz. The book confronts the current jazz discourse and shows how poets and novelists can be placed in it--often with problematic results. Fascinating Rhythm stops to listen for the music, demonstrating how jazz continues to speak for the American writer.
Download or read book Bill Frisell Beautiful Dreamer written by Philip Watson and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2022-03-15 with total page 499 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The definitive biography of guitar icon and Grammy Award-winning artist Bill Frisell. FEATURING EXCLUSIVE LISTENING SESSIONS WITH: Paul Simon; Justin Vernon of Bon Iver; Gus Van Sant; Rhiannon Giddens; The Bad Plus; Gavin Bryars; Van Dyke Parks; Sam Amidon; Hal Willner; Jim Woodring; Martin Hayes & Dennis Cahill 'A beautiful and long overdue portrait of one of America's true living cultural treasures.' JOHN ZORN 'The perfect companion-piece to the music of its subject.' MOJO 'Outlines the subject's life in a series of scrupulous strokes and intimate interviews that are rare in such undertakings . . . a cool, casual victory.' IRISH TIMES Over a period of forty-five years, Bill Frisell has established himself as one of the most innovative and influential musicians at work today. A quietly revolutionary guitar hero for our genre-blurring times, he connects to a diverse range of artists and admirers, including Paul Simon, Elvis Costello, Rhiannon Giddens, Gus Van Sant and Justin Vernon of Bon Iver, all of whom feature in this book. A vital addition to any music lover's book collection, Bill Frisell, Beautiful Dreamer tells the legendary guitarist's story for the first time. 'Stuffed with musical encounters, so many that every couple of pages there's an unheard Frisell recording for the reader to chase down.' NEW YORKER ' Bill Frisell, Beautiful Dreamer is the definitive biography.' BILL MILKOWSKI, DOWNBEAT 'Superb . . . the book races along like Sonny Rollins in full sail. Like subject, like writer: this is super-articulate, adventurous prose.' PERSPECTIVE '[Watson's] writing balances unbridled passion and dispassionate research nearly as deftly as Mr. Frisell's playing does sound and silence . . . compelling.' WALL STREET JOURNAL
Download or read book The Ellington Century written by David Schiff and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2012-01-07 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores music produced during the lifetime of Duke Ellington and the pursuit of musicians to keep up with constantly changing modern life.
Download or read book Sondheim on Music written by Mark Eden Horowitz and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2019-03-13 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this collection of interviews conducted by Mark Horowitz of the Library of Congress, musical theatre legend Stephen Sondheim discusses the art of musical composition, lyric writing, the collaborative process of musical theater, and how he thinks about his own work. A postlude features a more recent conversation with Sondheim.
Download or read book Sight Readings written by Alan John Ainsworth and published by Intellect (UK). This book was released on 2022-01-17 with total page 472 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A revelatory look at the photography that shaped the American jazz age. In this book, Alan John Ainsworth considers the work of a range of American jazz photographers from the turn of the twentieth century through the Jazz Age and into the 1960s. Drawing on extensive archival research, Ainsworth examines jazz as a visual subject, explores its attraction to different types of photographers, and analyzes why and how they approached the subject in the ways they did. While some of the photographers are widely recognized today, the volume also explores lesser-known figures of the period--including African American photojournalists, studio photographers, early twentieth-century emigres, and Jewish exiles of the 1930s--whose contributions are often overlooked. Informed by ideas from contemporary photographic theory and with a foreword by Darius Brubeck, Sight Readings is a wide-ranging, eye-opening new look at twentieth-century jazz photography and the people behind it.
