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Blues Boy: The Life and Music of B.B. King
B B. King has never let up in his fight to become the living personification of the best of the blues for the whole world. He was indeed the first to introduce blues to Japanese, Russian, and Chinese audiences. Although he was born in the days of swing and big bands, his music has blossomed and prospered even as rhythm & blues, rock'n'roll, soul, funk, and rap have taken a turn at becoming the height of music fashion. "I don't think there is a better blues guitarist in the world than B. B. King." This statement by Eric Clapton could have been made also by Buddy Guy, the Rolling Stones, or Ireland's U2. All of them, and many others, have said recurrently that the man they nickname "King of the Blues" was their true mentor. By exploring all aspects of King's life and career, this book like none other before provides an objective description of the man and his music. A revision of the edition published in France in 1993 by `editions du Limon, it supplements B. B. King's moving autobiography Blues All Around Me. Whereas King's is a book of memories, this is an objective story with careful historical perspective and observations from key witnesses. It draws on many printed sources, from King's published interviews, and from the author's recurring encounters with King and his manager since 1977. It shows how in some ways B. B. King's life has conformed to the commonly adopted image of the blues singer's early years of poverty and hardship in the American South, a backdrop of cottonfields and muddy waters of the Mississippi River, a musical apprenticeship in the big city (Memphis), and a career that reaches its peak under the spotlights of Las Vegas. B. B. King's success is shown here as the result of his uncommon doggedness, of his constant attention to fashion and to African-American culture, and of his respect for his audiences and his roots. By exploring all aspects of blues music's leading figure, this book conveys a portrait of a creative genius who also is just a man.
Chasin' That Devil Music: Searching for the Blues
(Book). Chasin' That Devil Music Searching for the Blues presents the results of extensive research by a blues scholar who has researched the artists on old 78 RPM records to uncover their stories. Includes rare interviews and the actual songs which available online using the unique code printed inside each book.
Complete Idiot's Guide to Jazz
This series of student editions of Shakespeare's most widely read plays uses a fresh approach to successfully gain the appropriate balance of emphasis between theatricality and language. Each text features gloss notes, appendices and activity suggestions and is accompanied by teacher resource material targeting the GCSE and AS assessment objectives to support the teaching of the play.
The Guide to Classic Recorded Jazz
A solid introductory guide to classical jazz naming the greats, their influences, and providing neophyte listeners with keys to listening and appreciating this musical genre. Free-lance music critic Piazza explains the science of riffing and the development of bebop and harmonic ensemble thinking.
The Jazz of the Southwest: An Oral History of Western Swing
They may wear cowboy hats and boots and sing about "faded love," but western swing musicians have always played jazz! From Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys to Asleep at the Wheel, western swing performers have played swing jazz on traditional country instruments, with all of the required elements of jazz, and some of the best solo improvisation ever heard. In this book, Jean A. Boyd explores the origins and development of western swing as a vibrant current in the mainstream of jazz. She focuses in particular on the performers who made the music, drawing on personal interviews with some fifty living western swing musicians. From pioneers such as Cliff Bruner and Eldon Shamblin to current performers such as Johnny Gimble, the musicians make important connections between the big band swing jazz they heard on the radio and the western swing they created and played across the Southwest from Texas to California. From this first-hand testimony, Boyd re-creates the world of western swing-the dance halls, recording studios, and live radio shows that broadcast the music to an enthusiastic listening audience. Although the performers typically came from the same rural roots that nurtured country music, their words make it clear that they considered themselves neither "hillbillies" nor "country pickers," but jazz musicians whose performance approach and repertory were no different from those of mainstream jazz. This important aspect of the western swing story has never been told before.
Lightnin' Hopkins: His Life and Blues
By the time of his death in 1982, Sam "Lightnin'" Hopkins was likely the most recorded blues artist in history. This brilliant new biography--the first book ever written about him--illuminates the many contradictions of the man and his myth. Born in 1912 to a poor sharecropping family in the cotton country between Dallas and Houston, Hopkins left home when he was only eight years old with a guitar his brother had given him. He made his living however he could, sticking to the open road, playing the blues, and taking odd jobs when money was short. This biography delves into Hopkins's early years, exploring the myths surrounding his meetings with Blind Lemon Jefferson and Texas Alexander, his time on a chain gang, his relationships with women, and his lifelong appetite for gambling and drinking. Hopkins didn't begin recording until 1946, when he was dubbed "Lightnin'" during his first session, and he soon joined Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker on the national R & B charts. But by the time he was "rediscovered" by Mack McCormick and Sam Charters in 1959, his popularity had begun to wane. A second career emerged--now Lightnin' was pitched to white audiences, not black ones, and he became immensely successful, singing about his country roots and injustices that informed the civil rights era with a searing emotive power. More than a decade in the making, this biography is based on scores of interviews with Lightnin's lover, friends, producers, accompanists, managers, and fans.
Masters of Jazz Guitar
(Book). Written by some of the world's leading jazz authorities, this stunning book honors the brilliant artistry and music of selected virtuoso jazz guitarists past and present, reveals how they have redefined jazz over the years, and explores key developments for the guitar in the world of jazz since the early 1900s. It also includes two hundred compelling color photographs that bring the players and their instruments to life. Hardcover.
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Duke Ellington, Jazz Composer
This analysis of Duke Ellington's works draws on observations by Ellington himself and by members of his orchestra to show how blues, ragtime and Tin Pan Alley influenced Ellington and how he integrated black folk music practices with elements of European art music. The book aims to provide new perspectives on Ellington's life and music, the interpretations of some of his creative soloists and the evolution of the jazz tradition.
Encyclopedia of the History of the Swing Era, Biographies of Big Swing Bands, Arrangers and Sidemen
HARVEY SHELDON HE KNOWS ALL - TELLS ALL - TELLS EVERYTHING - of all the questions and the history of Swing Big Band music and the biographies of the ground breaking Swing Big Bands.
The Ghosts of Harlem
From 1985 to the present, Hank O'Neal interviewed 42 jazz legends who made music in Harlem during its heyday and decline. In their homes or immediate neighborhoods, he took their portraits with a large-format view camera and talked with them about what had been the best places to play, the interaction of the races, and about why the Harlem scene had faded. For each 'session' with a jazz legend, O'Neal has supplemented the interview and portraits with many of his other photographs, historical photographs and memorabilia. From the archives of Chiaroscuro Records, O'Neal has produced a CD that accompanies the book, which features sixteen of the 'ghosts' playing at the ends of their careers, between 1972 and 1996, including Cab Calloway, Milt Hinton, Doc Cheatham, Dizzy Gillespie, Buddy Tate, Eddie Barefield, Earl Hines, and Illinois Jacquet.
Jazz: A History of America's Music
The companion volume to the ten-part PBS TV series by the team responsible for The Civil War and Baseball. Continuing in the tradition of their critically acclaimed works, Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns vividly bring to life the story of the quintessential American music--jazz. Born in the black community of turn-of-the-century New Orleans but played from the beginning by musicians of every color, jazz celebrates all Americans at their best. Here are the stories of the extraordinary men and women who made the music: Louis Armstrong, the fatherless waif whose unrivaled genius helped turn jazz into a soloist's art and influenced every singer, every instrumentalist who came after him; Duke Ellington, the pampered son of middle-class parents who turned a whole orchestra into his personal instrument, wrote nearly two thousand pieces for it, and captured more of American life than any other composer. Bix Beiderbecke, the doomed cornet prodigy who showed white musicians that they too could make an important contribution to the music; Benny Goodman, the immigrants' son who learned the clarinet to help feed his family, but who grew up to teach a whole country how to dance; Billie Holiday, whose distinctive style routinely transformed mediocre music into great art; Charlie Parker, who helped lead a musical revolution, only to destroy himself at thirty-four; and Miles Davis, whose search for fresh ways to sound made him the most influential jazz musician of his generation, and then led him to abandon jazz altogether. Buddy Bolden, Jelly Roll Morton, Dizzy Gillespie, Art Tatum, Count Basie, Dave Brubeck, Artie Shaw, and Ella Fitzgerald are all here; so are Sidney Bechet, Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, and a host of others. But Jazz is more than mere biography. The history of the music echoes the history of twentieth-century America. Jazz provided the background for the giddy era that F. Scott Fitzgerald called the Jazz Age. The irresistible pulse of big-band swing lifted the spirits and boosted American morale during the Great Depression and World War II. The virtuosic, demanding style called bebop mirrored the stepped-up pace and dislocation that came with peace. During the Cold War era, jazz served as a propaganda weapon--and forged links with the burgeoning counterculture. The story of jazz encompasses the story of American courtship and show business; the epic growth of great cities--New Orleans and Chicago, Kansas City and New York--and the struggle for civil rights and simple justice that continues into the new millennium. Visually stunning, with more than five hundred photographs, some never before published, this book, like the music it chronicles, is an exploration--and a celebration--of the American experiment.
Jazz for Dummies
Includes a list of more than 100 recordings for your jazz collection The fun and easy way to explore the world of jazz Jazz is America's greatest music, but with over a century's worth of styles and artists, where do you begin? Relax! This hep cat's guide delivers the scoop on the masters and their music -- from Duke Ellington to Charlie Parker to Wynton Marsalis. It's just what you need to tune in to the history and musical structure of jazz and become a more savvy listener. Discover how to * Understand the traits and roots of jazz * Tune in to jazz styles, from big band to bebop * Listen to great jazz artists * Catch a live jazz performance * Succeed in a jazz ensemble Praise for Jazz For Dummies "Now you can finally know about one of . . . America's greatest contributions to world culture." --Jon Faddis, jazz trumpeter "Fun to read. . . . An important stepping stone to understanding this complex and profound music." --James Moody, jazz saxophonist "Dirk Sutro is madly in love with jazz and . . . he knows what he's talking about." --"Chubby" Jackson, jazz bassist
The Jazz Standards
Written by award-winning jazz historian Ted Gioia, this comprehensive guide offers an illuminating look at more than 250 seminal jazz compositions. In this comprehensive and unique survey, here are the songs that sit at the heart of the jazz repertoire, ranging from "Ain't Misbehavin'" and"Autumn in New York" to "God Bless the Child," "How High the Moon," and "I Can't Give You Anything But Love." Gioia includes Broadway show tunes written by such greats as George Gershwin and Irving Berlin, and classics by such famed jazz musicians as Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Duke Ellington, andJohn Coltrane. The book offers vibrant discussions of each song, packed with information about how the song was written, who recorded it, the song's place in jazz history, and much more. Gioia includes recommendations for more than 2,000 recordings, with a list of suggested tracks for each song. Filled withcolorful anecdotes and expert commentary, The Jazz Standards will appeal to a wide audience, serving as a fascinating introduction for new fans, an invaluable and long-needed handbook for jazz lovers and musicians, and an indispensable reference for students and educators.
Nothing But the Blues : The Music and the Musicians
Like Abbeville's Country: The Music and the Musicians, Nothing but the Blues is an illustrated, comprehensive history of music and musicians, also covering promoters, producers and others who have shaped this powerful and enduringly popular American musical art form. A guide to the best discography is included at the back of the book which will appeal to blues fans and record collectors.
The Original Blues: The Emergence of the Blues in African American Vaudeville
With this volume, Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff complete their groundbreaking trilogy on the development of African American popular music. Fortified by decades of research, the authors bring to life the performers, entrepreneurs, critics, venues, and institutions that were most crucial to the emergence of the blues in black southern vaudeville theaters; the shadowy prehistory and early development of the blues is illuminated, detailed, and given substance. At the end of the nineteenth century, vaudeville began to replace minstrelsy as America's favorite form of stage entertainment. Segregation necessitated the creation of discrete African American vaudeville theaters. When these venues first gained popularity ragtime coon songs were the standard fare. Insular black southern theaters provided a safe haven, where coon songs underwent rehabilitation and blues songs suitable for the professional stage were formulated. The process was energized by dynamic interaction between the performers and their racially-exclusive audience. The first blues star of black vaudeville was Butler "String Beans" May, a blackface comedian from Montgomery, Alabama. Before his bizarre, senseless death in 1917, String Beans was recognized as the "blues master piano player of the world." His musical legacy, elusive and previously unacknowledged, is preserved in the repertoire of country blues singer-guitarists and pianists of the race recording era. While male blues singers remained tethered to the role of blackface comedian, female "coon shouters" acquired a more dignified aura in the emergent persona of the "blues queen." Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and most of their contemporaries came through this portal; while others, such as forgotten blues heroine Ora Criswell and her protégé Trixie Smith, ingeniously reconfigured the blackface mask for their own subversive purposes. In 1921 black vaudeville activity was effectively nationalized by the Theater Owners Booking Association (T.O.B.A.). In collaboration with the emergent race record industry, T.O.B.A. theaters featured touring companies headed by blues queens with records to sell. By this time the blues had moved beyond the confines of entertainment for an exclusively black audience. Small-time black vaudeville became something it had never been before--a gateway to big-time white vaudeville circuits, burlesque wheels, and fancy metropolitan cabarets. While the 1920s was the most glamorous and remunerative period of vaudeville blues, the prior decade was arguably even more creative, having witnessed the emergence, popularization, and early development of the original blues on the African American vaudeville stage.
Showtime at the Apollo by
Writer Ted Fox and artist James Otis Smith bring to life Harlem's legendary theater in this graphic novel adaptation of Fox's definitive, critically acclaimed history of the Apollo. Since its inception as an African-American theater in 1934, the Apollo, and the thousands of entertainers who performed there, have led the way in the presentation of swing, bebop, rhythm and blues, jazz, gospel, soul, funk and hip-hop--along with the latest in dance and comedy. The Apollo has nurtured and featured thousands of artists, many of whom have become legends. The beauty they have given the world--their art--transcends the hatred, ignorance, and intolerance that often made their lives difficult. Today, the Apollo enjoys an almost mythical status. With its breathtaking art, this graphic novel adaptation of Showtime at the Apollo brings to life the theater's legendary significance in music history, African American history, and to the culture of New York City.
Subversive Sounds: Race and Birth of Jazz in New Orleans
Subversive Sounds probes New Orleans’s history, uncovering a web of racial interconnections and animosities that was instrumental to the creation of a vital American art form—jazz. Drawing on oral histories, police reports, newspaper accounts, and vintage recordings, Charles Hersch brings to vivid life the neighborhoods and nightspots where jazz was born. This volume shows how musicians such as Jelly Roll Morton, Nick La Rocca, and Louis Armstrong negotiated New Orleans’s complex racial rules to pursue their craft and how, in order to widen their audiences, they became fluent in a variety of musical traditions from diverse ethnic sources. These encounters with other music and races subverted their own racial identities and changed the way they played—a musical miscegenation that, in the shadow of Jim Crow, undermined the pursuit of racial purity and indelibly transformed American culture. “More than timely . . . Hersch orchestrates voices of musicians on both sides of the racial divide in underscoring how porous the music made the boundaries of race and class.”—New Orleans Times-Picayune
Swing, Swing, Swing : The Life & Times of Benny Goodman
Swing music has for so long been synonymous with the standards and mainstream that we've forgotten how innovative and controversial the form was. The hot world of Swing, spearheaded in the 1930's by the Benny Goodman Orchestra, elicited a social uproar that can be compared only to that of the Beatles. Now Firestone offers a new biography of the brilliant, difficult Benny Goodman.
Write Me a Few of Your Lines: A Blues Reader
A selection of writings, published between 1911 and 1998, on the subject of blues music. Included are contributions by folklorists, anthropologists, sociologists, literary artists, musicians, critics and aficionados. The appeal of blues music is reflected in the range of contributors to the volume, among them Howard W. Odum, Alan Lomax, Richard Alan Waterman, Langston Hughes, Paul Oliver, Sam Charters, Janheinz Jahn, James Baldwin, Leroi Jones, Charles Keil, Jeff Todd Titon, Houston Baker, Hazel Carby and Angela Davis.
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