Download or read book Ode to a Tenor Titan written by Bill Milkowski and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2021-10-01 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After John Coltrane, there was no more revered and profoundly influential saxophonist on the planet than Michael Brecker. For those coming of age in the 1970s, during that transitional decade when the boundaries between rock and jazz had begun to blur, Brecker stood as a transcendent figure. He was their Trane. Ode to a Tenor Titan follows Michael's story from growing up in Philadelphia, finding his tenor sax voice during his brief stint at Indiana University, making his move to New York City in 1969 and taking the Big Apple by storm through the sheer power of his monstrous chops on the instrument. A commanding voice in jazz for four decades, Brecker possessed peerless technique (a byproduct of his remarkable work ethic and relentless woodshedding) and an uncanny ability to fit into every musical situation he encountered, whether it was as a ubiquitous studio musician (more than nine hundred sessions) for such pop stars as Paul Simon, James Taylor, Bruce Springsteen, Todd Rundgren, Chaka Khan, and Steely Dan; playing with seminal fusion bands like Dreams, Billy Cobham, and the Brecker Brothers; or collaborating with the likes of Frank Zappa, Charles Mingus, Pat Metheny, and Herbie Hancock. But his biggest triumphs came as a bandleader during the last twenty years of his career, when he produced some of the most challenging, inspired, and visionary modern jazz recordings of his time. A preternaturally gifted player whose facility seemed almost superhuman, he was also modest to a fault and universally beloved by fellow musicians. After coming through a dark decade of heroin addiction, he turned his life around and became a beacon for countless others to lead clean and sober lives. At the peak of his powers, he was struck down by a rare preleukemic blood disease that sidelined him for two and a half years. He got off a sick bed to make a heroic comeback with his swan song, Pilgrimage, which Pat Metheny called "one of the great codas in modern music history" and which earned him a posthumous Grammy Award in 2007. Michael Brecker was a player of tremendous heart and conviction as well a person of rare humility and kindness, and his story is one for the ages.
Download or read book Jaco written by Bill Milkowski and published by Hal Leonard Corporation. This book was released on 2005 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: (Book). A fitting tribute to the troubled genius who revolutionized electric bass playing and bridged the gaps between jazz, R&B, rock and funk. From his early days in R&B club bands through his international stardom with fusion group Weather Report and on to his solo career and tragic death at age 35, this book portrays the life and music of Jaco Pastorius, the self-proclaimed "world's greatest bass player." This special anniversary edition features new interviews with Jaco's childhood friends, prominent bass players of Jaco's era and afterward, and girlfriend Teresa Nagell, who was with Jaco in the last few years of his life. Some incidents from the first edition have been further researched and expanded to become full chapters. Exclusive to this edition, the CD features newly revealed music tracks from Jaco's early years along with spoken testimonials from Jaco's friends and colleagues. The book also contains new, never-before-seen photos acquired from the Pastorius estate.
Download or read book The Love Song of Andr P Brink written by Leon de Kock and published by Jonathan Ball Publishers. This book was released on 2019-05-08 with total page 543 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Love Song of André P Brink is the first biography of this major South African novelist who, during his lifetime, was published in over 30 languages and ranked with the likes of Gabriel García Márquez, Peter Carey and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Leon de Kock's eagerly awaited account of Brink's life is richly informed by a previously unavailable literary treasure: the dissident Afrikaner's hoard of journal-writing, a veritable chronicle that was 54 years in the making. In this massive new biographical source – running to a million words – Brink does not spare himself, or anyone else for that matter, as he narrates the ups and downs of his five marriages and his compulsive affairs with a great number of women. These are precisely the topics that the rebel in both politics and sex skated over in his memoir, A Fork in the Road. De Kock's biographical study of the author who came close to winning the Nobel Prize for Literature not only synthesises the journals but also subjects them to searching critical analysis. In addition, the biographer measures the journals against additional sources, both scholarly and otherwise, among them the testimony of Brink's friends, family, wives and lovers. The Love Song of André P Brink subjects Brink's literary legacy to a bracing scholarly re-evaluation, making this major new biography a crucial addition to scholarship on Brink.
Download or read book Controversy in French Drama written by J. Prest and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-01-01 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1664, Molière's Tartuffe was banned from public performance. This book provides a detailed, in-depth account of five-year struggle (1664-69) to have the ban lifted and, so doing, sheds important new light on 1660s France and the ancien régime more broadly.
Download or read book Nicolas Nabokov written by Vincent Giroud and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2015 with total page 617 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This first biography of Nicolas Nabokov (1903-78) reevaluates the role of the Russian-born American composer as a postwar cultural force, notably as secretary general of the Congress for Cultural Freedom in the 1950s and 1960s, and the contribution to twentieth-century music of this collaborator of Diaghilev, Stravinsky, and Balanchine.
Download or read book Saxophone Colossus written by Bob Blumenthal and published by Harry N. Abrams. This book was released on 2010-09-01 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jazz legend Sonny Rollins will celebrate his 80th birthday this fall, and Saxophone Colossus will be published to mark this occasion and honor his incredibly prolific career. This intimate appreciation combines the images of John Abbott, who as Rollins's photographer of choice for the past 20 years has captured the saxophonist at home and at work, and the essays of Bob Blumenthal, a jazz critic who has chronicled Rollins and his art for nearly four decades. Sonny Rollins has been at the center of jazz and its evolution virtually from his birth. Growing up in Harlem in the heyday of swing and coming of age as the first wave of modernists announced their discoveries, he quickly found himself sharing bandstands with his idols and making music of his own that continues to influence and inspire. Saxophone Colossus, named for the 1956 masterpiece of the same title, is Abbott and Blumenthal's tribute to Rollins's music and spirit.
Download or read book Ethos written by Aaron Dworkin and published by Morgan James Fiction. This book was released on 2018-02-06 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 500 years from now, on the planet of Ethos, discovering the purpose of your life grants you immortality. Yet, some people chose aging and death over immortality. The dichotomy of life on Ethos mirrors life on earth today, and explores the natural life cycle and the unintended consequences of human action.
Download or read book Rabbit s Blues written by Con Chapman and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2019 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his eulogy of saxophonist Johnny Hodges (1907-70), Duke Ellington ended with the words, "Never the world's most highly animated showman or greatest stage personality, but a tone so beautiful it sometimes brought tears to the eyes--this was Johnny Hodges. This is Johnny Hodges." Hodges' unforgettable tone resonated throughout the jazz world over the greater part of the twentieth century. Benny Goodman described Hodges as "by far the greatest man on alto sax that I ever heard," and Charlie Parker compared him to Lily Pons, the operatic soprano. As a teenager, Hodges developed his playing style by imitating Sidney Bechet, the New Orleans soprano sax player, then honed it in late-night cutting sessions in New York and a succession of bands lead by Chick Webb, Willie "The Lion" Smith, and Luckey Roberts. In 1928 he joined Duke Ellington, beginning an association that would continue, with one interruption, until Hodges' death. Hodges' celebrated technique and silky tone marked him then, and still today, as one of the most important and influential saxophone players in the history of jazz. As the first ever biography on Johnny Hodges, Rabbit's Blues details his place as one of the premier artists of the alto sax in jazz history, and his role as co-composer with Ellington.
Download or read book Betrayed By Hope written by Namita Gokhale and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2020-12-06 with total page 100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WINNER OF THE KALINGA LITERARY FESTIVAL FICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD 2020-2021 Michael Madhusdan Dutt (1824--1872), a maverick who changed the scope of Bengali poetry in the nineteenth century, especially with his free-verse epic, 'Meghnadhbadh Kabya', was a genius who never got his due. Throughout his life, Madhusudan was caught in an identity crisis: he wrote in the English language, changed his religion and was a restless traveller, yearning to belong somewhere. After an extended sojourn in London and Paris, with misery and poverty as his constant companions, the poet finally found his metier in his mother tongue. Betrayed By Hope, a play-script based on the letters Michael Madhusudan Dutt wrote to friends, well-wishers and patrons, paints the portrait of an artist as he plunges headlong into crisis after crisis, even as his imagination and creativity soar. Namita Gokhale and Malashri Lal pay tribute to his extraordinary life in a story that will lay bare our deep-set contradictions about art and life.
Download or read book Legends of Jazz written by Bill Milkowski and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contains photographs and brief biographies of 50 well-known jazz musicians, singers, and composers.
Download or read book Here and Now written by Pat Martino and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2011-09-01 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: HERE AND NOW! THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF PAT MARTINO WITH BILL MILKOWSKI
Download or read book La Meri and Her Life in Dance written by Nancy Lee Chalfa Ruyter and published by University Press of Florida. This book was released on 2019-10-01 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This intriguing biography details the life and work of world dance pioneer La Meri (1899–1988). An American dancer, choreographer, teacher, and writer, La Meri was ahead of her time in championing cross-cultural dance performances and education, yet she is almost totally forgotten today. In La Meri and Her Life in Dance, Nancy Ruyter introduces readers to a visionary artist who played a pivotal role in dance history. Born in Texas as Russell Meriwether Hughes, La Meri toured throughout Latin America, Europe, Asia, the Pacific, and the United States in the 1920s and ’30s, immersing herself in different dance traditions at a time when few American dancers explored styles outside their own. She learned about Indian dance culture from the celebrated Uday Shankar, studied belly dancing with the Moroccan sultan’s top dancer, and took flamenco lessons in Spain. La Meri spread awareness and enjoyment of the world’s myriad forms of expression before it was common for performing artists from these countries to tour internationally. Ruyter describes how La Meri founded the Ethnologic Dance Center in New York City, choreographed innovative works based on various dance cultures for Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival and other venues, and wrote widely on the styles and techniques of international dance genres. This long-overdue book illustrates that the popularity of world dance today owes much to the trailblazing efforts of La Meri.
Download or read book Chris de Burgh written by Chris De Burgh and published by Music Sales. This book was released on 2001 with total page 48 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Ghetto Diamond written by Markanthony Claiborne and published by . This book was released on 2020-11-24 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite being born as a dusty coal in the eyes of society, Mark-Anthony "MAC" Claiborne's story corresponds with the mantra of Fall Down 7 Times, Stand Up 8 as he details how failure, mistakes, and heartache ultimately became the vital attributes of his formidable success. Born and raised within the often harsh, cold, and unforgiving climate of Chicago's South Side, Claiborne details how quitting and settling for less were simply never an option throughout his travels from the boulevard to the boardroom. From a failed businessman to a Fortune 15 telecommunications executive, Claiborne's coming of age story depicts the countless slippery slopes encountered along the way which helped to mold him as not only a visionary, but also a devoted father and inspiration to anyone stuck between a rock and a hard place. "Now what that take? Timing. Coal under pressure, what that make? Diamonds - J. Cole"
Download or read book Chris Potter Jazz Styles written by Olegario Diaz and published by eBookIt.com. This book was released on 2016-09-30 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a summary of exercises and jazz improvisation lines designed to improve contemporary jazz style techniques. The book is divided in scale, arpeggios, chromatic exercises and jazz lines phrases from Chris Potter. These exercises should be transposed to all twelve (12) tones, so we can achieve perfect coordination. Major, minor and dominant chords, extended to their highest level, scale wise, arpeggios and chromatic passages. There are none signature centers, so all these exercises will be worked accidentally. This project is an extension of my last three methods of improvisation: * Improvise Now *220 Chromatic Exercises + 1165 Jazz lines phrases *Herbie Hancock lines voicings and rhythms from transcriptions. *John Coltrane & Michael Brecker Legacy
Download or read book Rilke written by Charlie Louth and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020-05-21 with total page 648 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A full-length study of the work of the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) that studies the breadth of his work, including the translations and the late poems written in French.
