April is Jazz Appreciation Month, dedicated to the celebration of the rich history of jazz music and its importance to American music culture.
This virtual display coincides with the displays located in Reed Library from April 1 - 30.
Jazz Music Library contains over 10,000 albums, including thousands of jazz artists, ensembles, albums, and genres. It's the largest and most comprehensive collection of streaming jazz available online (part of Music Online from Alexander Street Press).
The Chronicle of Jazz
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A year-by-year history of people and events, this lively multi-layered account tells the whole story of jazz music and its personalities. The Chronicle of Jazz charts the evolution of jazz from its roots in Africa and the southern United States to the myriad urban styles heard around the world today, Mervyn Cooke gives us a narrative rich with innovation, experimentation, controversy, and emotion.
The History of Jazz
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Gioia's story of jazz brilliantly portrays the most legendary jazz players, the breakthrough styles, and the scenes in which they evolved. From Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington at the Cotton Club, Miles Davis's legendary 1955 performance at the Newport Jazz Festival, and Ornette Coleman's experiments with atonality to current innovators such as Kamasi Washington and Esperanza Spalding, Gioia takes readers on a sweeping journey through the history of jazz. As he traces the music through the swamp lands of the Mississippi Delta, the red light district of New Orleans, the rent parties of Harlem, the speakeasies of Chicago, and other key locales of jazz history, Gioia also makes the social contexts in which the music was born come alive.
Jazz Worlds/World Jazz
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Many regard jazz as the soundtrack of America, born and raised in its cities and echoing throughout its tumultuous century of progress. So when Ernest Hemingway wrote about seeing jazz in 1920s Paris, and when British colonial officials danced to jazz in the clubs of Calcutta in the waning years of the Raj, how, exactly, had it gotten there? Jazz Worlds/World Jazz aims to answer these questions and more, bringing together voices from countries as far flung as Azerbaijan, Armenia, and India to show that the story of jazz is not trapped in American history books but alive in global modernity.
Monumental in scope, this book explores the relationship between jazz and culture and how they influence each other across a range of themes and settings. Contributors offer an analysis of the social meaning of jazz in Iran, a look at the genesis of Ethiopian jazz and at Indian fusion, and chapters on jazz diplomacy, Balkan swing, and that French export par excellence: Django Reinhardt. Altogether the contributors approach jazz—in these global iterations—through the themes that have always characterized it at home: place, history, mobility, media, and race. The result is a first-of-its-kind map of jazz around the globe that pays tribute to the players who have given the form its seemingly infinite possibilities.
Latin Jazz: The Other Jazz
Told from the perspective of a long-time jazz insider, Latin Jazz: The Other Jazz corrects the record, providing a historical account that embraces the genre's international nature and explores the dynamic interplay of economics, race, ethnicity, and nationalism that shaped it.
Jazz and American Culture
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Taking the reader through time and across expressive forms, this volume traces jazz as an aesthetic influence, a political force, and a representational focus in American literature and culture. It shows how Jazz has long been a rich source of aesthetic stimulation, influencing writers as stylistically wide-ranging as Langston Hughes, Eudora Welty, and James Baldwin, or artists as diverse as Aaron Douglas, Jackson Pollock, and Gordon Parks.
Magic City
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Magic City is the story of one of American music's essential unsung places: Birmingham, Alabama, birthplace of a distinctive and influential jazz heritage. In a telling replete with colorful characters, iconic artists, and unheralded masters, Burgin Mathews reveals how Birmingham was the cradle and training ground for such luminaries as big band leader Erskine Hawkins, cosmic outsider Sun Ra, and a long list of sidemen, soloists, and arrangers.
Jazz à la Creole
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During the formative years of jazz (1890-1917), the Creoles of Color-as they were then called-played a significant role in the development of jazz as teachers, bandleaders, instrumentalists, singers, and composers. As such, they belong to the Black American and the Franco-American folk music traditions that reflect the rich cultural heritage of Louisiana.
Dave Brubeck
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In Dave Brubeck: A Life in Time, Clark provides us with a thoughtful, thorough, and long-overdue biography of an extraordinary man whose influence continues to inform and inspire musicians today.
Dave Brubeck and the Performance of Whiteness
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Dave Brubeck and the Performance of Whiteness uses Brubeck's performances of whiteness across his professional, private, and political lives as a starting point to understand the ways in which whiteness, privilege, and white supremacy more fully manifested in mid-century America.
Queer Arrangements: Billy Strayhorn and Midcentury Jazz Collaboration
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The legacy of Black queer composer, arranger, and pianist Billy Strayhorn (1915?1967) hovers at the edge of canonical jazz narratives. Queer Arrangements explores the ways in which Strayhorn's identity as an openly gay Black jazz musician shaped his career, including the creative roles he could assume and the dynamics between himself and his collaborators, most famously Duke Ellington, but also iconic singers such as Lena Horne and Ella Fitzgerald. This new portrait of Strayhorn combines critical, historically-situated close readings of selected recordings, scores, and performances with biography and cultural theory to pursue alternative interpretive jazz possibilities, Black queer historical routes, and sounds.
Soul on Soul
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The jazz musician-composer-arranger Mary Lou Williams spent her sixty-year career working in--and stretching beyond--a dizzying range of musical styles. Her integration of classical music into her works helped expand jazz's compositional language. Her generosity made her a valued friend and mentor to the likes of Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, and Dizzy Gillespie. Her late-in-life flowering of faith saw her embrace a spiritual jazz oriented toward advancing the civil rights struggle and helping wounded souls. Tammy L. Kernodle details Williams's life in music against the backdrop of controversies over women's place in jazz and bitter arguments over the music's evolution. Williams repeatedly asserted her artistic and personal independence to carve out a place despite widespread bafflement that a woman exhibited such genius. Embracing Williams's contradictions and complexities, Kernodle also explores a personal life troubled by lukewarm professional acceptance, loneliness, relentless poverty, bad business deals, and difficult marriages. In-depth and epic in scope, Soul on Soul restores a pioneering African American woman to her rightful place in jazz history.
Better Git It in Your Soul
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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 done much to shape the image of Mingus as something of a wild man: idiosyncratic musical genius with a penchant for skirt-chasing and violent outbursts. But, as the autobiography reveals, he was also a hopeless romantic.
Free Jazz, Harmolodics, and Ornette Coleman
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Free Jazz, Harmolodics, and Ornette Coleman discusses Ornette Coleman's musical philosophy of "Harmolodics," an improvisational system deeply inspired by the Civil Rights Movement. Falling under the guise of "free jazz," Harmolodics can be difficult to understand, even for seasoned musicians and musicologists. Yet this book offers a clear and thorough approach to these complex methods, outlining Coleman's position as the developer of a logical--and historically significant--system of jazz improvisation. Included here are detailed musical analyses of improvisations, accompanied by full transcriptions. Intimate interviews between the author and Coleman explore the deeper issues at work in Harmolodics, issues of race, class, sex, and poverty. The principle of human equality quickly emerges as a central tenet of Coleman's life and music. Harmolodics is best understood when viewed in its essential form, both as a theory of improvisation and as an artistic expression of racial and human equality.
Charlie Parker
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As one of the architects of modern jazz (often called "bebop"), Charlie Parker (1920-55) had a profound effect on American music that continues to this day. This book opens with a chapter of biography and then progresses to four chapters focusing on Charlie Parker's music by tracing his artistic evolution and major achievements as a jazz improviser. Much like a guided tour through an artist's retrospective, the book introduces readers to a sampling of Charlie Parker's most illustrative works. The musical discussions and transcribed musical examples are keyed to compact disc timings for easy location--a feature unique to this book.
Becoming Ella Fitzgerald
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Ella Fitzgerald (1917-1996) possessed one of the twentieth century's most astonishing voices. In this first major biography since Fitzgerald's death, historian Judith Tick offers a sublime portrait of this ambitious risk-taker whose exceptional musical spontaneity made her a transformational artist.
Billie Holiday
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Published in celebration of Holiday's centenary, the first biography to focus on the singer's extraordinary musical talent When Billie Holiday stepped into Columbia's studios in November 1933, it marked the beginning of what is arguably the most remarkable and influential career in twentieth-century popular music. Her voice weathered countless shifts in public taste, and new reincarnations of her continue to arrive, most recently in the form of singers like Amy Winehouse and Adele. Most of the writing on Holiday has focused on the tragic details of her life--her prostitution at the age of fourteen, her heroin addiction and alcoholism, her series of abusive relationships--or tried to correct the many fabrications of her autobiography. But now, Billie Holiday stays close to the music, to her performance style, and to the self she created and put into print, on record and on stage. Drawing on a vast amount of new material that has surfaced in the last decade, critically acclaimed jazz writer John Szwed considers how her life inflected her art, her influences, her uncanny voice and rhythmic genius, a number of her signature songs, and her legacy.
The Jazz Standards
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The Jazz Standards is an essential comprehensive guide to some of the most important jazz compositions, telling the story of more than 250 key jazz songs and providing a listening guide to more than 2,000 recordings.
Improvising the score : rethinking modern film music through jazz
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The first book of its kind, Improvising the Score vividly investigates unique collaborations between contemporary jazz artists and influential film directors, providing a behind-the-scenes look at innovative and integrative jazz-film productions that challenge us to rethink the possibilities of movie music. These in-depth case studies include collaborations between Terence Blanchard and Spike Lee (Malcolm X, When the Levees Broke), Dick Hyman and Woody Allen (Hannah and Her Sisters), Antonio Sanchez and Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu (Birdman), and Mark Isham and Alan Rudolph (Afterglow). Grounded in fascinating personal interviews, detailed film production analysis, and examinations of jazz artists' "creative labor" in the context of film production expectations, this book illustrates the dynamic possibilities of integrative artistic collaborations between jazz and film, and more broadly, music and media.
The sonic gaze : jazz, Whiteness, and racialized listening
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This book argues that whiteness is not only a visual orientation; it is a way of hearing. Inspired by formulations of race and whiteness in the existential writings of Frantz Fanon, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, W.E.B. Du Bois, Richard Wright, Lewis Gordon, Angela Davis, bell hooks and Sara Ahmed, this book introduces students to the notion of the white sonic gaze.
Expanding the canon : black composers in the music theory classroom
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Directly addressing the underrepresentation of Black composers in core music curricula, Expanding the Canon: Black Composers in the Music Theory Classroom aims to both demonstrate why diversification is badly needed and help faculty expand their teaching with practical, classroom-oriented lesson plans that focus on teaching music theory with music by Black composers. This collection of 21 chapters is loosely arranged to resemble a typical music theory curriculum, with topics progressing from basic to advanced and moving from fundamentals, diatonic harmony, and chromatic harmony to form, popular music, and music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Creative Jazz Composing and Arranging
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This book is for anyone who writes, plays or listens to jazz. It explains the writing process and the construction of jazz pieces. I've attempted to answer many of the questions that arrangers and composers ask themselves when they are writing. Players who read this book will better understand the arrangements that they play and will get more from their listening which will make them better at interpreting the music they perform. Listeners will get into the creators' heads and appreciate the jazz experience to a greater degree.
The Classroom Guide to Jazz Improvisation
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You don't have to be a jazz expert to give your students a great introduction to improvisation. The Classroom Guide to Jazz Improvisation provides what music educators have sought for decades: an easy, step-by-step guide to teaching jazz improvisation in the music classroom. Offering classroom-tested lesson plans, authors John McNeil and Ryan Nielsen draw on their combined 54 years of teaching experience and extensive work as professional jazz musicians to remove the guesswork and mystique from the teaching process.
Analysis of Jazz
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Analysis of Jazz: A Comprehensive Approach, originally published in French as Analyser le jazz, is available here in English for the first time. In this groundbreaking volume, Laurent Cugny examines and connects the theoretical and methodological processes that underlie all of jazz. Jazz in all its forms has been researched and analyzed by performers, scholars, and critics, and Analysis of Jazz is required reading for any serious study of jazz; but not just musicians and musicologists analyze jazz. All listeners are analysts to some extent. Listening is an active process; it may not involve questioning but it always involves remembering, comparing, and listening again. This book is for anyone who attentively listens to and wants to understand jazz. Divided into three parts, the book focuses on the work of jazz, analytical parameters, and analysis. In part one, Cugny aims at defining what a jazz work is precisely, offering suggestions based on the main features of definition and structure. Part two he dedicates to the analytical parameters of jazz in which a work is performed: harmony, rhythm, form, sound, and melody. Part three takes up the analysis of jazz itself, its history, issues of transcription, and the nature of improvised solos. In conclusion, Cugny addresses the issues of interpretation to reflect on the goals of analysis with regard to understanding the history of jazz and the different cultural backgrounds in which it takes place. Analysis of Jazz presents a detailed inventory of theoretical tools and issues necessary for understanding jazz.
Teaching School Jazz
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Written by an experienced and diverse lineup of veteran jazz educators, Teaching School Jazz presents a comprehensive approach to teaching beginning through high school-level jazz. Thoroughly grounded in the latest research, chapters are supported by case studies woven into the narrative.
Jazz singing : a guide to pedagogy and performance
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Tish Oney presents a cutting-edge guide for those teaching and singing jazz, combining jazz voice stylization techniques and various improvisational approaches with classic voice pedagogy. Legendary jazz singers' approaches and techniques are described to illustrate the various approaches available to jazz singers.
So You Want to Sing Jazz
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Since the 1930s and ̕40s, jazz has stood tall in American popular music, drawing into its embrace not only great horn players, percussionists, guitarists, bassists, and pianists, but also some of the greatest singers in America's musical history. Jazz has laid the groundwork for important innovations in modern singing, opening up entirely new ways of delivering songs through what would eventually become jazz standards--songs that formed the basis of the American Songbook. In So You Want to Sing Jazz, singer and professor of voice Jan Shapiro gives a guided tour through the art and science of the jazz vocal style. Throughout, Shapiro hones in on what makes jazz singing distinctive, suggesting along the way how other types of singers can make use of jazz. She looks at such key matters in jazz singing as the role of improvisation, the place of specific singers who influenced and even defined vocal jazz as we know it today, and the unique way in which jazz incorporates vibrato, conversational delivery, rhythmic phrasing, and melodic embellishment and improvisation. The book includes guest-authored chapters by singing voice researchers Dr. Scott McCoy and Dr. Wendy LeBorgne. In So You Want to Sing Jazz, singers and voice teachers finally have the go-to resource they need for singing vocal jazz. The So You Want to Sing series is produced in partnership with the National Association of Teachers of Singing. Like all books in the series, So You Want to Sing Jazz features online supplemental material on the NATS website. Please visit www.nats.org to access style-specific exercises, audio and video files, and additional resources.
Jazz Day
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When Esquire magazine planned an issue to salute the American jazz scene in 1958, graphic designer Art Kane pitched a crazy idea: how about gathering a group of beloved jazz musicians and photographing them? He didn't own a good camera, didn't know if any musicians would show up, and insisted on setting up the shoot in front of a Harlem brownstone. Could he pull it off? In a captivating collection of poems, Roxane Orgill steps into the frame of Harlem 1958, bringing to life the musicians' mischief and quirks, their memorable style, and the vivacious atmosphere of a Harlem block full of kids on a hot summer's day. Francis Vallejo's vibrant, detailed, and wonderfully expressive paintings do loving justice to the larger-than-life quality of jazz musicians of the era. Includes bios of several of the fifty-seven musicians, an author's note, sources, a bibliography, and a foldout of Art Kane's famous photograph.
Mysterious Thelonious
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Audacious and extraordinary, this picture book is not a portrait of the great pianist and composer Thelonious Monk. Imagine, instead, that the music of Mr. Monk were to sit for a portrait. It might look something like this -- enticing and unexpected, richly colored and patterned, brilliantly executed. Inspired by one of Monk's best-loved compositions, "Mysterioso", Mr. Raschka matched the twelve musical tones of the diatonic scale to the twelve color values of the color wheel, then set paint strokes for notes and color washes for harmonies. "There were", the text says of Mr. Monk, "no wrong notes on his piano". There are, as well, no wrong notes in this astonishing tribute to his genius.
Jazz A-B-Z
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The award-winning book by celebrated jazz composer Wynton Marsalis is now available with an exclusive art print by illustrator Paul Rogers.
Sweethearts of Rhythm
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In the 1940s, as the world was at war, a remarkable jazz band performed on the American home front. This all-female band, originating from a boarding school in the heart of Mississippi, found its way to the most famous ballrooms in the country, offering solace during the hard years of the war. They dared to be an interracial group despite the cruelties of Jim Crow laws, and they dared to assert their talents though they were women in a ?man's? profession. Told in thought-provoking poems and arresting images, this unusual look at our nation's history is deep and inspiring.
Herman and Rosie
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Once upon a time in a very busy city, on a very busy street, in two very small apartments, lived...
Herman and Rosie.
Herman liked playing the oboe, the smell of hot dogs in the winter, and watching films about the ocean.
Rosie liked pancakes, listening to old jazz records, and watching films about the ocean.
They both loved the groovy rhythm of the city, but sometimes the bustling crowds and constant motion left them lonely, until one night...
Duke Ellington
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Another stunning picture book biography of a prominent twentieth-century African-American in the arts, from the creative team behind Alvin Ailey.
Little Melba and Her Big Trombone
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Melba Doretta Liston loved the sounds of music from as far back as she could remember. As a child, she daydreamed about beats and lyrics, and hummed along with the music from her family's Majestic radio. At age seven, Melba fell in love with a big, shiny trombone, and soon taught herself to play the instrument. By the time she was a teenager, Melba's extraordinary gift for music led her to the world of jazz. She joined a band led by trumpet player Gerald Wilson and toured. Overcoming obstacles of race and gender, Melba went on to become a famed trombone player and arranger, spinning rhythms, harmonies, and melodies into gorgeous songs for all the jazz greats of the twentieth century: Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Billie Holliday and Quincy Jones to name just a few.
Jazz
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Fifteen poems, infused with the rhythm and wordplay of jazz music, are paired with bold, stylized illustrations of performers and dancers to convey the history and breadth of this unique musical style. From bebop to New Orleans, from ragtime to boogie, and every style in between, Jazz takes readers on a musical journey from jazz's beginnings to the present day. Created by a celebrated father-son team, Jazz is a Coretta Scott King Honor Book and a Kirkus Best Children's Books Editor's Choice.
Jazz on a Saturday Night
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Two-time Caldecott Medalists Leo and Diane Dillon open your heart with the pure magic of a "dream team" jazz session. Bright colours and musical patterns make the music skip off the page in this toe-tapping homage to many jazz greats. From Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, and Thelonious Monk to Ella Fitzgerald, here is an evening sure to knock your socks off. Learn about this popular music form and read a biography of each player, featured at the end of the book. From start to finish, here is a book to share and savor again and again.
When Louis Armstrong Taught Me Scat
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In a CRACKITY-SNAPPITY-POPPITY-POP bubblegum dream, a young girl learns to scat from the master himself, Louis Armstrong! Written in prose and scat with wild and wonderful illustrations by R. Gregory Christie, this joyful tribute is downright contagious. CHEW-ITEE CHEW-ITEE CHEW-ITEE CHOP, CRACKITY SNAPPITY POPPITY POP!
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