Visions of Jazz

Visions of Jazz
Author: Gary Giddins
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 703
Release: 2000-05-18
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0199715203

Poised to become a classic of jazz literature, Visions of Jazz: The First Century offers seventy-nine chapters illuminating the lives of virtually all the major figures in jazz history. From Louis Armstrong's renegade-style trumpet playing to Sarah Vaughan's operatic crooning, and from the swinging elegance of Duke Ellington to the pioneering experiments of Ornette Coleman, jazz critic Gary Giddins continually astonishes the reader with his unparalleled insight. Writing with the grace and wit that have endeared his prose to Village Voice readers for decades, Giddins also widens the scope of jazz to include such crucial American musicians as Irving Berlin, Rosemary Clooney, and Frank Sinatra, all primarily pop performers who are often dismissed by fans and critics as mere derivatives of the true jazz idiom. And he devotes an entire quarter of this landmark volume to young, still-active jazz artists, boldly expanding the horizons of jazz--and charting and exploring the music's influences as no other book has done.

Visions of Jazz

Visions of Jazz
Author: Gary Giddins
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 706
Release: 1998
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780195132410

On jazz and jazz players

Jazz Visions

Jazz Visions
Author: Peter Ind
Publisher: Equinox Publishing (UK)
Total Pages: 228
Release: 2007
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN:

Lennie Tristano was one of jazz's most extraordinary innovators, possessing a superb piano technique and an awesome musical imagination. Unheralded by the general public, the blind pianist's work was revered by many jazz greats including the legendary Charlie Parker. Tristano's persuasive personality made him an ideal teacher, and he proved that (against the accepted theory of the time) jazz improvisation could be taught. His guidance played a big part in the development of many instrumentalists including saxophonists Lee Konitz and Warne Marsh and double-bassist Peter Ind. It is Ind's long, direct involvement with his subject that makes this such a revealing book: the story of an English musician going to New York to study with a neglected Jazz giant. In the process, Tristano's genius is examined and his reputation revalued, with Ind making a persuasive case for the pianist to be placed at the centre of jazz developments in the mid-20th century.

Jade Visions

Jade Visions
Author: Helene LaFaro-Fernandez
Publisher: University of North Texas Press
Total Pages: 340
Release: 2009
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1574412736

Winner of the Best Book of 2009, Jazz Division, sponsored by AllAboutJazz-New York, 2009. Selected for "The Best of the Best" from University Presses, ALA Conference, 2010. Winner of the 2010 Association for Recorded Sound Collections Award for Excellence in Historical Recorded Sound Research in Jazz, 2010. Jade Visions is the first biography of one of the twentieth century's most influential jazz musicians, bassist Scott LaFaro. Best known for his landmark recordings with Bill Evans, LaFaro played bass a mere seven years before his life and career were tragically cut short by an automobile accident when he was only 25 years old. Told by his sister, this book uniquely combines family history with insight into LaFaro's music by well-known jazz experts and musicians Gene Lees, Don Thompson, Jeff Campbell, Phil Palombi, Chuck Ralston, Barrie Kolstein, and Robert Wooley. Those interested in Bill Evans, the history of jazz, and the lives of working musicians of the time will appreciate this exploration of LaFaro’s life and music as well as the feeling they’ve been invited into the family circle as an intimate.

Weather Bird

Weather Bird
Author: Gary Giddins
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 657
Release: 2004-11-15
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0199882622

Gary Giddins's Weather Bird is a brilliant companion volume to his landmark in music criticism, Visions of Jazz, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. More then 140 pieces, written over a 14-year period, are brought together for the first time in this superb collection of essays, reviews, and articles. Weather Bird is a celebration of jazz, with illuminating commentaryon contemporary jazz events, today's top muscicians, the best records of the year, and on leading figures from jazz's past. Readers will find extended pieces on Louis Armstrong, Erroll Garner, Benny Carter, Sonny Rollins, Dave Brubeck, Ornette Coleman, Billie Holiday, Cassandra Wilson, Tony Bennett, and many others. Giddins includes a series of articles on the annual JVC Jazz Festival, which offers a splendid overview of jazz in the 1990s. Other highlights include an astute look at avant-garde music ("Parajazz") and his challenging essay, "How Come Jazz Isn't Dead?" which advances a theory about the way art is born, exploited, celebrated, and sidelined to the museum. A radiant compendium by America's leading music critic, Weather Bird offers an unforgettable look at the modern jazz scene.

Collected Works

Collected Works
Author: Whitney Balliett
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 892
Release: 2002-04-15
Genre: Music
ISBN: 9780312270087

Jazz critic for The New Yorker since 1957 and the author of some fifteen books, Whitney Balliett has spent a lifetime listening to and writing about jazz. "All first-rate criticism," he once wrote in a review, "first defines what we are confronting." He could as easily have been describing his own work. For nearly half a century, Balliett has been telling us, in his widely acclaimed pitch-perfect prose, what we are confronting when we listen to America's greatest—and perhaps only original—musical form. Collected Works: A Journal of Jazz 1954-2001 is a monumental achievement, capturing the full range and register of the jazz scene, from the very first Newport Jazz Festival to recent performances (in clubs and on CDs) by a rising generation of musicians. Here are definitive portraits of such major figures as Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Django Reinhardt, Martha Raye, Buddy Rich, Charles Mingus, Louis Armstrong, Billie Holliday, Art Tatum, Bessie Smith, and Earl Hines—a list that barely scratches the surface. Generations of readers have learned to listen to the music with Balliett's graceful guidance. For five decades he has captured those moments during which jazz history is made. Though Balliett's knowledge is an encyclopedic treasure, he has always written as if he were listening for the first time. Since its beginnings in New Orleans at the turn of the century, jazz has been restlessly and relentlessly evolving. This is an art form based on improvising, experimenting, shapeshifting—a constant work in progress of sounds and tonal shades, from swing and Dixieland, through boogie-woogie, bebop, and hard bop, to the "new thing," free jazz, abstract jazz, and atonal jazz. Yet, in all its forms, the music is forever sustained by what Balliett calls a "secret emotional center," an "aural elixir" that "reveals itself when an improvised phrase or an entire solo or even a complete number catches you by surprise." Balliett's celebrated essays invariably capture the so-called "sound of surprise"—and then share this sound with general readers, music students, jazz lovers, and popular American culture buffs everywhere. As The Los Angeles Times Book Review has observed, "Few people can write as well about anything as Balliett writes about jazz."

Folk Visions & Voices

Folk Visions & Voices
Author: Art Rosenbaum
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2013-10-01
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0820346497

Sampling virtually all of the old-time styles within the musical traditions still extant in north Georgia, Folk Visions and Voices is a collection of eighty-two songs and instrumentals, enhanced by photographs, illustrations, biographical sketches of performers, and examples of their narratives, sermons, tales, and reminiscences.

Mondo Exotica

Mondo Exotica
Author: Francesco Adinolfi
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 377
Release: 2008-04-25
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0822389088

Tiki torches, cocktails, la dolce vita, and the music that popularized them—Mondo Exotica offers a behind-the-scenes look at the sounds and obsessions of the Space Age and Cold War period as well as the renewed interest in them evident in contemporary music and design. The music journalist and radio host Francesco Adinolfi provides extraordinary detail about artists, songs, albums, and soundtracks, while also presenting an incisive analysis of the ethnic and cultural stereotypes embodied in exotica and related genres. In this encyclopedic account of films, books, TV programs, mixed drinks, and above all music, he balances a respect for exotica’s artistic innovations with a critical assessment of what its popularity says about postwar society in the United States and Europe, and what its revival implies today. Adinolfi interviewed a number of exotica greats, and Mondo Exotica incorporates material from his interviews with Martin Denny, Esquivel, the Italian film composers Piero Piccioni and Piero Umiliani, and others. It begins with an extended look at the postwar popularity of exotica in the United States. Adinolfi describes how American bachelors and suburbanites embraced the Polynesian god Tiki as a symbol of escape and sexual liberation; how Les Baxter’s album Ritual of the Savage (1951) ushered in the exotica music craze; and how Martin Denny’s Exotica built on that craze, hitting number one in 1957. Adinolfi chronicles the popularity of performers from Yma Sumac, “the Peruvian Nightingale,” to Esquivel, who was described by Variety as “the Mexican Duke Ellington,” to the chanteuses Eartha Kitt, Julie London, and Ann-Margret. He explores exotica’s many sub-genres, including mood music, crime jazz, and spy music. Turning to Italy, he reconstructs the postwar years of la dolce vita, explaining how budget spy films, spaghetti westerns, soft-core porn movies, and other genres demonstrated an attraction to the foreign. Mondo Exotica includes a discography of albums, compilations, and remixes.

Blutopia

Blutopia
Author: Graham Lock
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 342
Release: 1999
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780822324409

An analysis of the portrayal of African American life, history, and possibility in the work of three important jazz composers.