Download or read book Riding on a Blue Note written by Gary Giddins and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1982 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The most imposing figure in jazz writing today" ("JazzTimes") on artists from Duke Ellington to Elvis Presley to Irving Berlin--all with that pervasive "blue note" of jazz in common.
Download or read book Blue Notes written by Robert P. Vande Kappelle and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2011-04-07 with total page 493 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Music, like romance, is the language of the soul. Music allows us to express ourselves, and in so doing makes us feel alive. Jazz music, the only art form created by Americans, reminds us that the genius of America is improvisation; a good beat, a contagious rhythm, an emotional ballad, creative improvisation, jazz has it all. Jazz is the story of extraordinary human beings, black and white, male and female, children of privilege and children of despair, who were able to do what most of us only dream of doing: create art on the spot. Their stories are told in Blue Notes. Blue Notes contains profiles of 365 jazz personalities, one for each day of the year. Each vignette tells a story, some heartwarming, others tragic, but all memorable. The daily entries also provide valuable information on jazz styles, jazz history, instruments and instrumentalists, and such related topics as jazz and religion, women in jazz, drug and alcohol abuse, and racism. These topics can be referenced through an extensive set of indexes. The book's appendix includes helpful background information, a concise overview of jazz music, and even a quiz on jazz biography. While Blue Notes is written for jazz fans in general, experts will value its comprehensive nature. So whether you are curious about jazz or simply love and appreciate music, Blue Notes will provide daily moments of discovery and help you recognize what the rest of the world already has, a music so compelling that it can be said to define the human being in the twentieth century.
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: “The Ellington Century is a wonderful journey through the world of music and art. If you are already an aficionado of Ellington's music, you will enjoy the author's informative and detailed analysis of the composer's work and musical influences. If you are less familiar, this book puts Ellington's music in perspective with the great ‘classical’ composers of the twentieth century. David Schiff's remarkable insight into the historical and musical parallels between these composers is a delight to read and his references are vast, from Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire and Stravinsky’s Agon to television’s Sesame Street. Schiff writes with a sense of humor and an enthusiasm for Ellington's music that comes out on every page.”—George Manahan, Music Director, American Composers Orchestra “David Schiff points us forward, observing that ‘Ellington’s music asks us to see with our ears and hear with our eyes.’ Writing as a composer and scholar, he has a gift for making complex ideas strikingly clear. His insights move across a huge terrain of twentieth-century culture, as he builds bridges in his musical and cultural analysis where many have not seen a connection. Yet each musical work, each artist, is given his or her equal due. In this sense, he has met the spiritual and cultural challenge of Ellington’s life work.”—Marty Ehrlich, Composer/Instrumentalist, Associate Professor of Improvisation and Contemporary Music, Hampshire College
Download or read book All night Party written by Andrea Barnet and published by Algonquin Books. This book was released on 2004-01-01 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: They were smart. Sassy. Daring. Exotic. Eclectic. Sexy. And influential. One could call them the first divas--and they ran absolutely wild. They were poets, actresses, singers, artists, journalists, publishers, baronesses, and benefactresses. They were thinkers and they were drinkers. They eschewed the social conventions expected of them--to be wives and mothers--and decided to live on their own terms. In the process, they became the voices of a new, fierce feminine spirit. There's Mina Loy, a modernist poet and much-photographed beauty who traveled in pivotal international art circles; blues divas Bessie Smith and Ethel Waters; Edna St. Vincent Millay, the lyric poet who, with her earthy charm and passion, embodied the '20s ideal of sexual daring; the avant-garde publishers Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap; and the wealthy hostesses of the salons, A'Lelia Walker and Mabel Dodge. Among the supporting cast are Emma Goldman, Isadora Duncan, Ma Rainey, Margaret Sanger, and Gertrude Stein. Andrea Barnet's fascinating accounts of the emotional and artistic lives of these women--together with rare black-and-white photographs, taken by photographers such as Berenice Abbott and Man Ray--capture the women in all their glory. This is a history of the early feminists who didn't set out to be feminists, a celebration of the rebellious women who paved the way for future generations.
Download or read book Sing written by Elisabeth Howard and published by Alfred Music Publishing. This book was released on 2006 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Featuring the original Elisabeth Howard Vocal Power Method of Singing, this voice training program includes four CDs that focus on the following: Singing Techniques such as power, range expansion, vibrato control, volume, dynamics, pitch; Singing Styles such as Pop, Rock, Country, Blues, R&B, Broadway, Phrasing, Improvisation, Personal Style; Super Vocals, which includes "Licks and Tricks" for every style; Sing-Aerobics, which includes a 30 minute (at home or in the car) workout for the male and female voices.
Download or read book A Right to Sing the Blues written by Jeffrey Melnick and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2001-03-16 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: All too often an incident or accident, such as the eruption in Crown Heights with its legacy of bitterness and recrimination, thrusts Black-Jewish relations into the news. A volley of discussion follows, but little in the way of progress or enlightenment results--and this is how things will remain until we radically revise the way we think about the complex interactions between African Americans and Jews. A Right to Sing the Blues offers just such a revision. Black-Jewish relations, Jeffrey Melnick argues, has mostly been a way for American Jews to talk about their ambivalent racial status, a narrative collectively constructed at critical moments, when particular conflicts demand an explanation. Remarkably flexible, this narrative can organize diffuse materials into a coherent story that has a powerful hold on our imagination. Melnick elaborates this idea through an in-depth look at Jewish songwriters, composers, and perfomers who made Black music in the first few decades of this century. He shows how Jews such as George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Al Jolson, and others were able to portray their natural affinity for producing Black music as a product of their Jewishness while simultaneously depicting Jewishness as a stable white identity. Melnick also contends that this cultural activity competed directly with Harlem Renaissance attempts to define Blackness. Moving beyond the narrow focus of advocacy group politics, this book complicates and enriches our understanding of the cultural terrain shared by African Americans and Jews.
Download or read book Sonny Rollins written by Richard Palmer and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2004-01-01 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the world's great tenor saxophonists, Sonny Rollins has always been committed to the fundamental truths of jazz, especially swing. He has managed to be consistently experimental and forward-looking, and he has recorded at least a dozen essential albums. Here, Richard Palmer charts Rollins's career in full.
Download or read book Interpreting Popular Music written by David Brackett and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2000-10-25 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book David Brackett crosses the disciplines of cultural studies in music theory to consider how listeners evaluate popular songs and how they come to attribute a rich variety of meanings to them.
Download or read book Jazz Matters written by Doug Ramsey and published by University of Arkansas Press. This book was released on 1989-01-01 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rich in anecdote and insight, Jazz Matters is a collection of essays, profiles, and reviews, by Doug Ramsey, an observer of jazz and its musicians for more than 30 years.
Download or read book Epistrophies written by Brent Hayes Edwards and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2017-06-05 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hearing across media is the source of innovation in a uniquely African American sphere of art-making and performance, Brent Hayes Edwards writes. He explores this fertile interface through case studies in jazz literature—both writings informed by music and the surprisingly large body of writing by jazz musicians themselves.
Download or read book Ellingtonia written by W. E. Timner and published by Scarecrow Press. This book was released on 2000-01-01 with total page 684 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: More than a discography, this book compiles the complete recorded music of Duke Ellington and his sidemen, including studio recordings, movie soundtracks, concerts, dance dates, radio broadcasts, telecasts, and private recordings, creating an easy to use reference source for Jazz collectors and scholars.
Download or read book Clifford Brown written by Nick Catalano and published by Life and Art of the Legendary. This book was released on 2001 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Clifford Brown is one of the most important trumpet players in the history of jazz, despite dying at the young age of 25 in 1956. He was an accomplished virtuoso, the product of a middle-class, cultivated African American family.
Download or read book Soul on Soul written by Tammy L. Kernodle and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2020-10-26 with total page 475 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First time in paperback and e-book! The jazz musician-composer-arranger Mary Lou Williams spent her sixty-year career working in—and stretching beyond—a dizzying range of musical styles. Her integration of classical music into her works helped expand jazz's compositional language. Her generosity made her a valued friend and mentor to the likes of Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, and Dizzy Gillespie. Her late-in-life flowering of faith saw her embrace a spiritual jazz oriented toward advancing the civil rights struggle and helping wounded souls. Tammy L. Kernodle details Williams's life in music against the backdrop of controversies over women's place in jazz and bitter arguments over the music's evolution. Williams repeatedly asserted her artistic and personal independence to carve out a place despite widespread bafflement that a woman exhibited such genius. Embracing Williams's contradictions and complexities, Kernodle also explores a personal life troubled by lukewarm professional acceptance, loneliness, relentless poverty, bad business deals, and difficult marriages. In-depth and epic in scope, Soul on Soul restores a pioneering African American woman to her rightful place in jazz history.
Download or read book ABC s of Vocal Harmony written by Elisabeth Howard and published by Alfred Music Publishing. This book was released on 2005 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An absolute must for singers, church choirs, barbershop quartets, school chorus and back-up vocals! Includes additional sight-reading exercises and tear-out worksheets for writing music and exams. Also includes four CDs that focus on scales, intervals, chords, and rhythm.
Download or read book Bebop written by Thomas Owens and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1996-05-23 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "When bebop was new," writes Thomas Owens, "many jazz musicians and most of the jazz audience heard it as radical, chaotic, bewildering music." For a nation swinging to the smoothly orchestrated sounds of the big bands, this revolutionary movement of the 1940s must have seemed destined for a short life on the musical fringe. But today, Owens writes, bebop is nothing less than "the lingua franca of jazz, serving as the principal musical language of thousands of jazz musicians." In Bebop, Owens conducts us on an insightful, loving tour through the music, players, and recordings that changed American culture. Combining vivid portraits of bebop's gigantic personalities with deft musical analysis, he ranges from the early classics of modern jazz (starting with the 1943 Onyx Club performances of Dizzy Gillespie, Max Roach, Oscar Pettiford, Don Byas, and George Wallington) through the central role of Charlie Parker, to an instrument-by-instrument look at the key players and their innovations. Illustrating his discussion with numerous musical excerpts, Owens skillfully demonstrates why bebop was so revolutionary, with fascinating glimpses of the tempestuous jazz world: Thelonious Monk, for example, did "everything 'wrong' in the sense of traditional piano technique....Because his right elbow fanned outward away from his body, he often hit the keys at an angle rather than in parallel. Sometimes he hit a single key with more than one finger, and divided single-line melodies between two hands." In addition to his discussions of individual instruments and players, Owens examines ensembles, with their sometimes volatile collaborations: in the Jazz Messengers, Benny Golson told of how his own mellow saxophone playing would get lost under Art Blakey's furious drumming: "He would do one of those famous four-bar drum rolls going into the next chorus, and I would completely disappear. He would holler over at me, 'Get up out of that hole!'" In this marvelous account, Owens comes right to the present day, with accounts of new musicians ranging from the Marsalis brothers to lesser-known masters like pianist Michel Petrucciani. Bebop is a jazz-lover's dream--a serious yet highly personal look at America's most distinctive music.
Download or read book The Swing Era written by Gunther Schuller and published by History of Jazz. This book was released on 1989 with total page 948 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focuses on the period in American musical history from 1930 to 1945 when jazz was synonymous with America's popular music.
Download or read book Wes Montgomery written by Oliver Dunskus and published by BoD – Books on Demand. This book was released on 2023-03-03 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Following Charlie Christian and Django Reinhardt, Wes Montgomery was the third major innovator in jazz guitar. 55 years after his death, we are celebrating his 100th birthday. His outstanding musicality, his virtuosity and his style of playing have been influential to major players like Pat Metheny and George Benson, and to most younger players. Wes Montgomery broadened the vocabulary of jazz guitar like no other player, and it seems that even decades after his passing, his importance is increasing to a level that many players agree he was the most important guitarist in jazz. This is the first biography on Wes Montgomery in over 40 years. It covers details of his family background, his early days as an amateur musician in Indianapolis, reviews of over 50 albums and it includes a full chronological discography.
