Jazz on the Road

Jazz on the Road
Author: Christopher Wilkinson
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 308
Release: 2001-10-30
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0520229835

In addition to providing a vivid account of life on the road and imparting new insight into the daily existence of working musicians, this book illustrates how the fundamental issue of race influenced Albert's life, as well as the music of the era."

Friends Along the Way

Friends Along the Way
Author: Gene Lees
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 384
Release: 2003-01-01
Genre: Music
ISBN: 9780300099676

A celebrated jazz writer offers fascinating portraits of friends he's known during a lifetime in jazz For more than half a century, jazz writer and lyricist Gene Lees has been the friend of many in the world of jazz music. In this delightful book he offers minibiographies of fifteen of these friends--some of them jazz greats, some lesser-known figures, and some up-and-comers. Combining conversations and memoirs with critical commentary, Lees's insightful and intimate profiles will captivate jazz fans, performers, and historians alike. The subjects of the book range from the versatile orchestrator and arranger Claus Ogerman to legendary jazz broadcaster Willis Conover, from the gifted young Chinese violinist Yue Deng to undersung pianist Junior Mance. Lees writes about these figures both as musicians and as human beings, and he writes out of a conviction that jazz as an art form represents the highest values of American culture. Inviting us into the lives of these unique individuals, Lees offers an affectionate view of the jazz community that only an insider could provide.

Lonesome Roads and Streets of Dreams

Lonesome Roads and Streets of Dreams
Author: Andrew S. Berish
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 326
Release: 2012-02-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 0226044963

Any listener knows the power of music to define a place, but few can describe the how or why of this phenomenon. In Lonesome Roads and Streets of Dreams: Place, Mobility, and Race in Jazz of the 1930s and ’40s, Andrew Berish attempts to right this wrong, showcasing how American jazz defined a culture particularly preoccupied with place. By analyzing both the performances and cultural context of leading jazz figures, including the many famous venues where they played, Berish bridges two dominant scholarly approaches to the genre, offering not only a new reading of swing era jazz but an entirely new framework for musical analysis in general, one that examines how the geographical realities of daily life can be transformed into musical sound. Focusing on white bandleader Jan Garber, black bandleader Duke Ellington, white saxophonist Charlie Barnet, and black guitarist Charlie Christian, as well as traveling from Catalina Island to Manhattan to Oklahoma City, Lonesome Roads and Streets of Dreams depicts not only a geography of race but how this geography was disrupted, how these musicians crossed physical and racial boundaries—from black to white, South to North, and rural to urban—and how they found expression for these movements in the insistent music they were creating.

Rooted Jazz Dance

Rooted Jazz Dance
Author: Lindsay Guarino
Publisher: University Press of Florida
Total Pages: 279
Release: 2022-02-01
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0813072115

National Dance Education Organization Ruth Lovell Murray Book Award UNCG | Susan W. Stinson Book Award for Dance Education An African American art form, jazz dance has an inaccurate historical narrative that often sets Euro-American aesthetics and values at the inception of the jazz dance genealogy. The roots were systemically erased and remain widely marginalized and untaught, and the devaluation of its Africanist origins and lineage has largely gone unchallenged. Decolonizing contemporary jazz dance practice, this book examines the state of jazz dance theory, pedagogy, and choreography in the twenty-first century, recovering and affirming the lifeblood of jazz in Africanist aesthetics and Black American culture. Rooted Jazz Dance brings together jazz dance scholars, practitioners, choreographers, and educators from across the United States and Canada with the goal of changing the course of practice in future generations. Contributors delve into the Africanist elements within jazz dance and discuss the role of Whiteness, including Eurocentric technique and ideology, in marginalizing African American vernacular dance, which has resulted in the prominence of Eurocentric jazz styles and the systemic erosion of the roots. These chapters offer strategies for teaching rooted jazz dance, examples for changing dance curricula, and artist perspectives on choreographing and performing jazz. Above all, they emphasize the importance of centering Africanist and African American principles, aesthetics, and values. Arguing that the history of jazz dance is closely tied to the history of racism in the United States, these essays challenge a century of misappropriation and lean into difficult conversations of reparations for jazz dance. This volume overcomes a major roadblock to racial justice in the dance field by amplifying the people and culture responsible for the jazz language. Contributors: LaTasha Barnes | Lindsay Guarino | Natasha Powell | Carlos R.A. Jones | Rubim de Toledo | Kim Fuller | Wendy Oliver | Joanne Baker | Karen Clemente | Vicki Adams Willis | Julie Kerr-Berry | Pat Taylor | Cory Bowles | Melanie George | Paula J Peters | Patricia Cohen | Brandi Coleman | Kimberley Cooper | Monique Marie Haley | Jamie Freeman Cormack | Adrienne Hawkins | Karen Hubbard | Lynnette Young Overby | Jessie Metcalf McCullough | E. Moncell Durden Publication of this work made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

On Highway 61

On Highway 61
Author: Dennis McNally
Publisher: Catapult
Total Pages: 403
Release: 2014-09-22
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1619024128

On Highway 61 explores the historical context of the significant social dissent that was central to the cultural genesis of the sixties. The book is going to search for the deeper roots of American cultural and musical evolution for the past 150 years by studying what the Western European culture learned from African American culture in a historical progression that reaches from the minstrel era to Bob Dylan. The book begins with America's first great social critic, Henry David Thoreau, and his fundamental source of social philosophy:–––his profound commitment to freedom, to abolitionism and to African–American culture. Continuing with Mark Twain, through whom we can observe the rise of minstrelsy, which he embraced, and his subversive satirical masterpiece Huckleberry Finn. While familiar, the book places them into a newly articulated historical reference that shines new light and reveals a progression that is much greater than the sum of its individual parts. As the first post–Civil War generation of black Americans came of age, they introduced into the national culture a trio of musical forms—ragtime, blues, and jazz— that would, with their derivations, dominate popular music to this day. Ragtime introduced syncopation and become the cutting edge of the modern 20th century with popular dances. The blues would combine with syncopation and improvisation and create jazz. Maturing at the hands of Louis Armstrong, it would soon attract a cluster of young white musicians who came to be known as the Austin High Gang, who fell in love with black music and were inspired to play it themselves. In the process, they developed a liberating respect for the diversity of their city and country, which they did not see as exotic, but rather as art. It was not long before these young white rebels were the masters of American pop music – big band Swing. As Bop succeeded Swing, and Rhythm and Blues followed, each had white followers like the Beat writers and the first young rock and rollers. Even popular white genres like the country music of Jimmy Rodgers and the Carter Family reflected significant black influence. In fact, the theoretical separation of American music by race is not accurate. This biracial fusion achieved an apotheosis in the early work of Bob Dylan, born and raised at the northern end of the same Mississippi River and Highway 61 that had been the birthplace of much of the black music he would study. As the book reveals, the connection that began with Thoreau and continued for over 100 years was a cultural evolution where, at first individuals, and then larger portions of society, absorbed the culture of those at the absolute bottom of the power structure, the slaves and their descendants, and realized that they themselves were not free.

Pepper Adams' Joy Road

Pepper Adams' Joy Road
Author: Gary Carner
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 566
Release: 2012
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0810882566

Pepper Adams' Joy Road not only compiles the sessions and gigs of the greatest baritone saxophone soloist in history, but it's a fascinating overview of Adams' life and times through colorful interviews with Adams and other musicians. These candid observations open a window onto the behind-the-scenes drama that surrounded legendary recordings by John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Pearson, Thad Jones, David Amram, Elvin Jones, and many others.

Jackson Street After Hours

Jackson Street After Hours
Author: Paul De Barros
Publisher:
Total Pages: 318
Release: 1993
Genre: Music
ISBN:

"Vintage photographs and 24 contemporary portraits capture the style and flavor of Jackson Street and its jazz legacy. Based on extensive interviews with jazz musicians, this significant new volume documents the smokey rooms, Prohibition antics, wartime parties, and unforgettable riffs that characterized great moments in Pacific Northwest jazz." -- Amazon.com viewed July 8, 2020.

The Real Jazz Pedagogy Book

The Real Jazz Pedagogy Book
Author: Ray Smith
Publisher: Outskirts Press
Total Pages: 504
Release: 2019-01-16
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1977208150

Written by a jazz teacher for jazz teachers, "The Real Jazz Pedagogy Book" is based on the premise that successful jazz teachers must be constantly working four main areas: 1) the wind instruments-including tone production, intonation, and section playing skills; 2) playing styles correctly-such as rhythmic and time feel approach, articulation approach, and phrasing; 3) the rhythm section-playing the instruments, time feel and concept, coordination of comping, harmonic voicings, drum fills and setups, stylistic differences; and 4) the soloists-developing improvisational skills (both right brain and left brain), jazz theory, the ballad soloist, and the vocal soloist. Ray Smith, who has taught and directed jazz ensembles, including the acclaimed Brigham Young University group, Synthesis, and given private lessons for over forty years, also discusses the details of running school programs. Smith's YouTube channel complements "The Real Jazz Pedagogy Book."

Highway 61 Revisited

Highway 61 Revisited
Author: Gene Santoro
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2004
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0195154819

An exploration of the pervasive influence of jazz on all forms of American music, this work maps the unexpected musical and cultural links between Louis Armstrong, Willie Nelson, Bob Dylan, Herbie Hancock and many others.

Jack Kerouac's On the Road

Jack Kerouac's On the Road
Author: Harold Bloom
Publisher: Infobase Publishing
Total Pages: 261
Release: 2004
Genre: AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL FICTION, AMERICAN--HISTORY AND CRITICISM
ISBN: 0791075818

Presents ten critical essays published between 1973 and 2001 on Jack Kerouac's "On the Road," and includes a chronology, a bibliography, and an introduction by Harold Bloom.