Jazz Blues category: 910 books

Compelling from cover to cover, this is the story of one of the most recorded and beloved jazz trumpeters of all time. With unsparing honesty and a superb eye for detail, Clark Terry, born in 1920, takes us from his impoverished childhood in St. Louis, Missouri, where jazz could be heard everywhere,...

Charles Mingus is among jazz’s greatest composers and perhaps its most talented bass player. He was blunt and outspoken about the place of jazz in music history and American culture, about which performers were the real thing (or not), and much more. These in-depth interviews, conducted several...

Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman, and Cecil Taylor revolutionized music from the end of the twentieth century into the twenty-first, expanding on jazz traditions with distinctly new concepts of composition, improvisation, instrumentation, and performance. They remain figures of controversy due to their...

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...

“Everybody has to start somewhere. Businessmen start on the ground floor and try to work their way up the corporate ladder. Baseball players bide their time in the minor leagues wishing for an opportunity to move up and play in the majors. Musical compositions aren’t very different—some songs...

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...

“I don’t know where he’s buried, but if I did I’d piss on his grave.” –Jerry Wexler, best friend and mentor Here Comes the Night: Bert Berns and the Dirty Business of Rhythm and Blues is both a definitive account of the New York rhythm and blues world of the early ‘60s, and the harrowing,...

Whether your favourite blues guitarist is Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, Blind Blake, John Lee Hooker, Big Bill Broonzy, or Mississippi John Hurt, studying the basic techniques presented in this program is the first step toward being able to capture the essence of their traditional styles.

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,...