Download or read book Clawing at the Limits of Cool written by Farah Jasmine Griffin and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2013-10-22 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When the renowned trumpeter and bandleader Miles Davis chose the members of his quintet in 1955, he passed over well-known, respected saxophonists such as Sonny Rollins to pick out the young, still untested John Coltrane. What might have seemed like a minor decision at the time would instead set the course not just for each of their careers but for jazz itself. Clawing at the Limits of Cool is the first book to focus on Davis and Coltrane's musical interaction and its historical context, on the ways they influenced each other and the tremendous impact they've had on culture since then. It chronicles the drama of their collaboration, from their initial historic partnership to the interlude of their breakup, during which each man made tremendous progress toward his personal artistic goals. And it continues with the last leg of their journey together, a time when the Miles Davis group, featuring John Coltrane, forever changed the landscape of jazz. Authors Farah Jasmine Griffin and Salim Washington examine the profound implications that the Davis/Coltrane collaboration would have for jazz and African American culture, drawing parallels to the changing standards of African American identity with their public personas and private difficulties. With vastly different personal and musical styles, the two men could not have been more different. One exemplified the tough, closemouthed cool of the fifties while the other made the transition during this time from unfocused junkie to a religious pilgrim who would inspire others to pursue spiritual enlightenment in the coming decade. Their years together mark a watershed moment, and Clawing at the Limits of Cool draws on both cultural history and precise musical detail to illuminate the importance that their collaboration would have for jazz and American history as a whole.
Download or read book Miles Davis written by and published by Voyageur Press. This book was released on 2012-11-17 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Here is the illustrated history of Miles Davis, the world’s most popular jazz trumpeter, composer, bandleader, and musical visionary. Davis is one of the most innovative, influential, and respected figures in the history of music. He’s been at the forefront of bebop, cool jazz, hard bop, modal jazz, and jazz-rock fusion, and remains the favorite and best-selling jazz artist ever, beloved worldwide.He’s also a fascinating character—moody, dangerous, brilliant. His story is phenomenal, including tempestous relationships with movie stars, heroin addictions, police busts, and more; connections with other jazz greats like Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonius Monk, John Coltrane, Gil Evans, John McLaughlin, and many others; and later fusion ventures that outraged the worlds of jazz and rock.Written by an all-star team, including Sonny Rollins, Bill Cosby, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, Clark Terry, Lenny White, Greg Tate, Ashley Kahn, Robin D. G. Kelley, Francis Davis, George Wein, Vincent Bessières, Gerald Early, Nate Chinen, Nalini Jones, Dave Liebman, Garth Cartwright, and more.
Download or read book So What written by John Szwed and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2004-01-09 with total page 508 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on interviews with family and friends, this account of the jazz great's life reveals the influence of Miles Davis' life on his work as well as the musician's persistent desire to re-invent himself.
Download or read book The Studio Recordings of the Miles Davis Quintet 1965 68 written by Keith Waters and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-03-11 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The "Second Quintet" -- the Miles Davis Quintet of the mid-1960s -- was one of the most innovative and influential groups in the history of the genre. Each of the musicians who performed with Davis--saxophonist Wayne Shorter, pianist Herbie Hancock, bassist Ron Carter, and drummer Tony Williams--went on to a successful career as a top player. The studio recordings released by this group made profound contributions to improvisational strategies, jazz composition, and mediation between mainstream and avant-garde jazz, yet most critical attention has focused instead on live performances or the socio-cultural context of the work. Keith Waters' The Studio Recordings of the Miles Davis Quintet, 1965-68 concentrates instead on the music itself, as written, performed, and recorded. Treating six different studio recordings in depth--ESP, Miles Smiles, Sorcerer, Nefertiti, Miles in the Sky, and Filles de Kilimanjaro--Waters has tracked down a host of references to and explications of Davis' work. His analysis takes into account contemporary reviews of the recordings, interviews with the five musicians, and relevant larger-scale cultural studies of the era, as well as two previously unexplored sources: the studio outtakes and Wayne Shorter's Library of Congress composition deposits. Only recently made available, the outtakes throw the master takes into relief, revealing how the musicians and producer organized and edited the material to craft a unified artistic statement for each of these albums. The author's research into the Shorter archives proves to be of even broader significance and interest, as Waters is able now to demonstrate the composer's original conception of a given piece. Waters also points out errors in the notated versions of the canonical songs as they often appear in the main sources available to musicians and scholars. An indispensible resource, The Miles Davis Quintet Studio Recordings: 1965-1968 is suited for the jazz scholar as well as for jazz musicians and aficionados of all levels.
Download or read book Everything Is Cinema written by Richard Brody and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2008-05-13 with total page 721 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From New Yorker film critic Richard Brody, Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard presents a "serious-minded and meticulously detailed . . . account of the lifelong artistic journey" of one of the most influential filmmakers of our age (The New York Times). When Jean-Luc Godard wed the ideals of filmmaking to the realities of autobiography and current events, he changed the nature of cinema. Unlike any earlier films, Godard's work shifts fluidly from fiction to documentary, from criticism to art. The man himself also projects shifting images—cultural hero, fierce loner, shrewd businessman. Hailed by filmmakers as a—if not the—key influence on cinema, Godard has entered the modern canon, a figure as mysterious as he is indispensable. In Everything Is Cinema, critic Richard Brody has amassed hundreds of interviews to demystify the elusive director and his work. Paying as much attention to Godard's technical inventions as to the political forces of the postwar world, Brody traces an arc from the director's early critical writing, through his popular success with Breathless, to the grand vision of his later years. He vividly depicts Godard's wealthy conservative family, his fluid politics, and his tumultuous dealings with women and fellow New Wave filmmakers. Everything Is Cinema confirms Godard's greatness and shows decisively that his films have left their mark on screens everywhere.
Download or read book Considering Genius written by Stanley Crouch and published by Civitas Books. This book was released on 2007-04-10 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From a preeminent--and always controversial--jazz critic and intellectual firebrand comes the long-awaited collections of essential essays on the great music and performers of the jazz world.
Download or read book Kind of Blue written by Ashley Kahn and published by Granta Books. This book was released on 2002 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now in paperback and illustrated with vintage photos, "Kind of Blue" is "a small treasure" ("The New Yorker") and the bestselling account of the creation of a jazz classic. 50 photos.
Download or read book The Making of Kind of Blue written by Eric Nisenson and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2013-09-10 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A masterpiece in its own right, this work comprehensively covers Miles Davis’s 1959 landmark album, Kind of Blue. . . . valuable and discerning.” —Publishers Weekly From the moment it was recorded more than forty years ago, Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue was hailed as a jazz classic. To this day it remains the bestselling jazz album of all time, embraced by fans of all musical genres. The album represented a true watershed moment in jazz history, and helped to usher in the first great jazz revolution since bebop. The Making of Kind of Blue is an exhaustively researched examination of how this masterpiece was born. Recorded with pianist Bill Evans, tenor saxophonist John Coltrane, composer/theorist George Russell and Miles himself, the album represented a fortuitous conflation of some of the real giants of the jazz world, at a time when they were at the top of their musical game. The end result was a recording that would forever change the face of American music. Through extensive interviews and access to rare recordings Nisenson pieced together the whole story of this miraculous session, laying bare the genius of Miles Davis, other musicians, and the heart of jazz itself. “Astute and entertaining” —Booklist “Worth reading just for the stories of how one of the greatest albums of all time came into being, but it offers so much more—a low-key but superb education in the way jazz is made and how it comes to mean the things it does.” —Dave Marsh, Playboy pop critic and editor of Rock and Rap Confidential
Download or read book Miles Davis written by Ian Carr and published by Da Capo Press. This book was released on 2009-04-30 with total page 681 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This exhaustively researched, revised edition of Ian Carr's classic biography throws new light on Davis' life and career: from the early days in New York with Charlie Parker; to the Birth of Cool; through his drug addiction in the early 1950s and the years of extraordinary achievements (1954-1960), during which he signed with Columbia and collaborated with such unequaled talents as John Coltrane, Bill Evans, Wynton Kelly and Cannonball Adderly. Carr also explores Davis' dark, reclusive period (1975-1980), offering firsthand accounts of his descent into addiction, as well as his dramatic return to life and music. Carr has talked with the people who knew Miles and his music best including Bill Evans, Joe Zawinul, Keith Jarrett, and Jack DeJohnette, and has conducted interviews with Ron Carter, Max Roach, John Scofield and others.
Download or read book The Practice of Practice written by Jonathan Harnum and published by . This book was released on 2014-07-01 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: talent means almost nothing when it comes to getting better at anything, especially music. Practice is everything. This book covers essential practice strategies and mindsets you won't find in any other book. You'll learn the What, Why, When, Where, Who, and especially the How of great music practice. You'll learn what research tells us about practice, but more importantly, you'll learn how the best musicians in many genres of music think about practice, and you'll learn the strategies and techniques they use to improve. This book will help you get better faster, whether you play rock, Bach, or any other kind of music.
Download or read book It s about that Time written by Richard Cook and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2007 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Publisher description
Download or read book Coltrane on Coltrane written by Chris DeVito and published by Musicians in Their Own Words. This book was released on 2012 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Coltrane on Coltrane includes every known Coltrane interview, many in new transcriptions, and several previously unpublished; articles, reminiscences, and liner notes that rely on interviews; and some of Coltrane's personal writings and correspondence [Publisher description].
Download or read book The Miles Davis Lost Quintet and Other Revolutionary Ensembles written by Bob Gluck and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2016-01-11 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew is one of the most iconic albums in American music, the preeminent landmark and fertile seedbed of jazz-fusion. Fans have been fortunate in the past few years to gain access to Davis’s live recordings from this time, when he was working with an ensemble that has come to be known as the Lost Quintet. In this book, jazz historian and musician Bob Gluck explores the performances of this revolutionary group—Davis’s first electric band—to illuminate the thinking of one of our rarest geniuses and, by extension, the extraordinary transition in American music that he and his fellow players ushered in. Gluck listens deeply to the uneasy tension between this group’s driving rhythmic groove and the sonic and structural openness, surprise, and experimentation they were always pushing toward. There he hears—and outlines—a fascinating web of musical interconnection that brings Davis’s funk-inflected sensibilities into conversation with the avant-garde worlds that players like Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane were developing. Going on to analyze the little-known experimental groups Circle and the Revolutionary Ensemble, Gluck traces deep resonances across a commercial gap between the celebrity Miles Davis and his less famous but profoundly innovative peers. The result is a deeply attuned look at a pivotal moment when once-disparate worlds of American music came together in explosively creative combinations.
Download or read book Round About Midnight written by Eric Nisenson and published by Da Capo Press. This book was released on 1996-03-22 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The result was 'Round About Midnight, an engaging firsthand account of Miles's fascinating and difficult career.
Download or read book Running the Voodoo Down written by Phil Freeman and published by Hal Leonard Corporation. This book was released on 2005 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: RUNNING THE VOODOO DOWN
Download or read book Coltrane written by Ben Ratliff and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2008-10-28 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Coltrane left an indelible mark on the world, but what was the essence of his achievement that makes him so prized forty years after his death? What were the factors that helped Coltrane become who he was? And what would a John Coltrane look like now--or are we looking for the wrong signs? In this deftly written, riveting study, New York Times jazz critic Ben Ratliff answers these questions and examines the life of Coltrane, the acclaimed band leader and deeply spiritual man who changed the face of jazz music. Ratliff places jazz among other art forms and within the turbulence of American social history, and he places Coltrane not just among jazz musicians but among the greatest American artists.
Download or read book The Jazz Ear written by Ben Ratliff and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2008-11-11 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An intimate exploration into the musical genius of fifteen living jazz legends, from the longtime New York Times jazz critic Jazz is conducted almost wordlessly: John Coltrane rarely told his quartet what to do, and Miles Davis famously gave his group only the barest instructions before recording his masterpiece "Kind of Blue." Musicians are often loath to discuss their craft for fear of destroying its improvisational essence, rendering jazz among the most ephemeral and least transparent of the performing arts. In The Jazz Ear, the acclaimed music critic Ben Ratliff sits down with jazz greats to discuss recordings by the musicians who most influenced them. In the process, he skillfully coaxes out a profound understanding of the men and women themselves, the context of their work, and how jazz—from horn blare to drum riff—is created conceptually. Expanding on his popular interviews for The New York Times, Ratliff speaks with Sonny Rollins, Ornette Coleman, Branford Marsalis, Dianne Reeves, Wayne Shorter, Joshua Redman, and others about the subtle variations in generation, training, and attitude that define their music. Playful and keenly insightful, The Jazz Ear is a revelatory exploration of a unique way of making and hearing music.
