Jazz category: 919 books

It was 1969, and Miles Davis, prince of cool, was on the edge of being left behind by a dynamic generation of young musicians, an important handful of whom had been in his band. Rock music was flying off in every direction, just as America itself seemed about to split at its seams. Following the circumscribed...

Charles Mingus is one of the most important—and most mythologized—composers and performers in jazz history. Classically trained and of mixed race, he was an outspoken innovator as well as a bandleader, composer, producer, and record-label owner. His vivid autobiography, Beneath the Underdog, has...

*Cool. *It was a new word and a new way to be, and in a single generation, it became the supreme compliment of American culture. The Origins of Cool in Postwar America uncovers the hidden history of this concept and its new set of codes that came to define a global attitude and style. As Joel Dinerstein...

Fred Astaire: one of the great jazz artists of the twentieth century? Astaire is best known for his brilliant dancing in the movie musicals of the 1930s, but in Music Makes Me, Todd Decker argues that Astaire’s work as a dancer and choreographer —particularly in the realm of tap dancing—made...

Detroit has always been at the forefront of American popular music development, and the ragtime years and jazz age are no exception. The city�s long history of diversity has served the region well, providing a fertile environment for creating and nurturing some of America�s most distinctly indigenous...

Anyone who knows R. Crumb’s work as an illustrator knows of his passion for music. And all those who collect his work prize the Heroes of the Blues, Early Jazz Greats, and Pioneers of Country Music trading card sets he created in the early to- mid-1980s. Now they are packaged together for the first...

Fats Waller (1904-1943) was an outsize man in all respects: five feet eleven inches tall, he weighed 285 pounds. He was the greatest of the Harlem "stride" pianists, he composed hundreds of songs, he led a band which made over 400 recordings and he wrote several Broadway shows. Waller is...

Guitarists face a sometimes overwhelming number of choices as to where to play a given note or phrase and what fingering to use. While a given fingering for a scale or phrase may be possible, it may not be practical. In this book, jazz guitarist Jimmy Bruno lays out six fingerings for the major scales...

This theoretical book is meant to improve contemporary jazz styles techniques for all musician players of modern jazz. These exercises were made as an extension of my book "240 Chromatic Exercises + 1165 Jazz Lines Phrases For The Modern Improviser".

The Music and Life of Theodore 'Fats' Navarro: Infatuation is the first comprehensive study of the jazz trumpeter Theodore 'Fats' Navarro. It provides biographical and discographical information on this talented musician, whose premature death from tuberculosis at 26 robbed the jazz world of his brilliance....

Playboy—the magazine, the empire, the lifestyle—is one of the world's best-known brands. Since the launch of Playboy magazine in 1953, two elements have been remarkably consistent: the first, obviously, is the celebration of nubile, female flesh. The second, readers may be surprised to learn,...

Music Is My Life is the first comprehensive analysis of Louis Armstrong's autobiographical writings (including his books, essays, and letters) and their relation to his musical and visual performances. Combining approaches from autobiography theory, literary criticism, intermedia studies, cultural...

“A lively and anecdotal history” of the tiny family-run studio where jazz greats from Jelly Roll Morton to Louis Armstrong made their first recordings (Jazz Times).   From 1917 to 1932, in a primitive studio next to the railroad tracks, the Gennett family of Richmond, Indiana, recorded some of...

Among the great American modern jazz saxophonists, Mobley had been the most unjustly neglected – the truly forgotten man. Yet he played and recorded prolifically with the greatest legends of his era such as Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Dizzy Gillespie, Lee Morgan, Johnny Griffin and Art Blakey, helping...