"From the author of the definitive biography of Frank Sinatra, the story of how jazz arrived at the pinnacle of American culture in 1959, told through the journey of three towering artists-Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Bill Evans-who came together to create the most famous and bestselling jazz album of all time, Kind of Blue The myth of the 60s depends on the 1950s being the before times of conformity, segregation, straightness-The Lonely Crowd and The Organization Man. This all carries some truth, but it does nothing to explain how, in 1959, the great indigenous art form, jazz, reached the height of its power and popularity, led there by a number of Black geniuses so iconic they go by one name-Monk, Mingus, Rollins, Coltrane, and above all, Miles. 1959 saw Miles, Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the other members of Miles's sextet come together to record what is widely considered the greatest jazz album of all time, and certainly the best-selling: Kind of Blue. 3 Shades of Blue is James Kaplan's magnificent account of the paths of the three giants Miles, Coltrane and Evans to the mountaintop of 1959 and their path on from there. It's a book about music, and business, and race, and heroin, and the towns that gave jazz its home, from New York and LA to Philadelphia, Chicago and Kansas City. It's an astonishing meditation on creativity and the strange hothouses that can produce its full flowering. It's a book about the great forebears of this golden age, particularly Charlie Parker, and the people, like Ornette Coleman, who would take the music down strange new paths. And it's about why this period has never been replicated, why the world of jazz most people visit is a museum to it. But above all this is a book about three very different men-their struggles, their choices, their tragedies, their greatness. Bill Evans had a gruesome downward spiral, John Coltrane took the mystic's path into a space far away from mainstream concerns. Miles had three or four sea changes in him before the end. The tapestry of their lives is, in Kaplan's hands, an American Odyssey, with no direction home. It is also a masterpiece, a book about jazz that is as big as America"--

"Comprehensive and intelligently organized. . . . Jazz aficionados . . . should be grateful to have so much good writing on the subject in one place."-- The New York Times Book Review "Alluring. . . . Capture[s] much of the breadth of the music, as well as the passionate debates it has stirred, more vividly than any other jazz anthology to date."-- Chicago Tribune No musical idiom has inspired more fine writing than jazz, and nowhere has that writing been presented with greater comprehensiveness and taste than in this glorious collection. In Reading Jazz , editor Robert Gottlieb combs through eighty years of autobiography, reportage, and criticism by the music's greatest players, commentators, and fans to create what is at once a monumental tapestry of jazz history and testimony to the elegance, vigor, and variety of jazz writing. Here are Jelly Roll Morton, recalling the whorehouse piano players of New Orleans in 1902; Whitney Balliett, profiling clarinetist Pee Wee Russell; poet Philip Larkin, with an eloquently dyspeptic jeremiad against bop. Here, too, are the voices of Billie Holiday and Charles Mingus, Albert Murray and Leonard Bernstein, Stanley Crouch and LeRoi Jones, reminiscing, analyzing, celebrating, and settling scores. For anyone who loves the music--or the music of great prose--Reading Jazz is indispensable. "The ideal gift for jazzniks and boppers everywhere. . . . It gathers the best and most varied jazz writing of more than a century."-- Sunday Times (London)

"A bestselling music historian follows Jelly Roll Morton on a journey through the hidden worlds and forbidden songs of early blues and jazz. In Jelly Roll Blues: Censored Songs and Hidden Histories, Elijah Wald takes readers on a journey into the hidden and censored world of early blues and jazz, guided by the legendary New Orleans pianist Jelly Roll Morton. Morton became nationally famous as a composer and bandleader in the 1920s, but got his start twenty years earlier, entertaining customers in the city's famous bordellos and singing rough blues in Gulf Coast honky-tonks. He recorded an oral history of that time in 1938, but the most distinctive songs were hidden away for over fifty years, because the language and themes were as wild and raunchy as anything in gangsta rap. Those songs inspired Wald to explore how much other history had been locked away and censored, and this book is the result of that quest. Full of previously unpublished lyrics and stories, it paints a new and surprising picture of the dawn of American popular music, when jazz and blues were still the private, after-hours music of the Black 'sporting world.' It gives new insight into familiar figures like Buddy Bolden and Louis Armstrong, and introduces forgotten characters like Ready Money, the New Orleans sex worker and pickpocket who ended up owning one of the largest Black hotels on the West Coast. Revelatory and fascinating, these songs and stories provide an alternate view of Black culture at the turn of the twentieth century, when a new generation was shaping lives their parents could not have imagined and art that transformed popular culture around the world--the birth of a joyous, angry, desperate, loving, and ferociously funny tradition that resurfaced in hip-hop and continues to inspire young artists in a new millennium"--

"The quintessential American artist Louis Armstrong was born in 1901 in New Orleans and died in 1971 in New York City, where he had lived for many years in a modest house in Queens. The house is now a museum in his honour. This work tells the story of Armstrong's life through his writings, scrapbooks and artworks".--Publisher's description.

Mel Tormé is world renowned as a leading jazz vocalist. He has performed in MGM musicals, co-written one of the enduring Christmas classics, "The Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire)," and was recently profiled in Life magazine as one of the greatest living jazz singers. But Tormé has also written five books, including The Other Side of the Rainbow, Tormé's account of his year working on the Judy Garland television show--considered the best portrait of Garland ever written. In this book, Tormé writes a brilliant biography of his friend of forty years--the drummer Buddy Rich. Buddy Rich was one of the most famous drummers of the Swing Era, having starred in the Artie Shaw and Tommy Dorsey bands. After World War II he successfully led several of his own bands. Born into a vaudeville family, Buddy performed on the drums in his parents' act before he was two years old--where he was billed as "Traps, the Drum Wonder"--and became the highest paid child performer in the world by age four. This early fame--and Buddy's abusive father--left psychological scars on Rich, who developed an abrasive personality, and would beat his drums as an outlet for his frustrations. Although a close friend and admirer, Tormé pulls no punches when it comes to describing Rich's occasional outbursts and his sometimes childish pranks. But, as Tormé shows, Buddy could also be charming, affectionate, and funny, as he demonstrated during his frequent appearances as a guest on the Tonight show. We also find tales of Buddy's stormy friendship with Frank Sinatra, and his romance with Lana Turner (Buddy's first serious love affair). More than anything, of course, Rich was a brilliant musician, and he earned many tributes from jazz musicians. Torme shows a deep understanding of the life of a jazzman, and the many challenges and vicissitudes that are involved with it. We learn of the problems of holding a swing band together during an era when bebop ruled, follow Buddy in his search for the perfect snare drum, and observe the many "drum-offs" when Rich proved his unmatchable talent in friendly competition with other talented drummers, such as Gene Krupa. The Buddy Rich story is a fascinating one, as much for what it says about the world of American music and entertainment as for the remarkable life it portrays. Drawing from magazines and many personal reminiscences, Torme's personal touch and his in-depth knowledge of jazz make for a moving, insightful, and often hilarious biography.

The struggles and triumphs of the man behind the Newport Jazz and Folk Festivals, the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, and music festivals all over the world.

Book by Smith, Willie

"Good Things Happen Slowly is [Fred Hersch's] memoir. It's the story of the first openly gay, HIV-positive jazz player; a deep look into the cloistered jazz culture that made such a status both transgressive and ground-breaking; and a profound exploration of how Hersch's two-month-long coma in 2007 led to his creating some of the finest, most direct, and most emotionally compelling music of his career."--Jacket.

A poetic meditation on the last year of tenor saxophonist Lester Young’s life, of joyful playing and self-willed dying. In 1959, at the age of fifty, jazz greaet Lester Young―a lyrical player, his airy tone haunted by a breathy melancholy―died alone in the Arvin Hotel in Manhattan. As Meltzer explains, “No Eyes is a book about death, and Young sits in for a metaphor for the artist living and dying for and with his art.” An “inside” biography, No Eyes is a brilliant jazz-world evocation, composed in free verse whose flow is arrested to capture significant moments, Meltzer creates a layered narrative of vivid colors and textures, the material facts of Young’s story dissolving into internalized, projected truths of erotic understanding and spiritual sympathy with the “sweet and isolate lovely other.”

this is the true story of the man who created, nurtured, and dominated the most popular and the most memorable of all the big dance bands. The book traces the career of Glenn Miller from his early days as an under-privileged Midwestern schoolboy who "just had to have a trombone. through his struggling years as a sideman, and his development as a successful musician.

Terry Gibbs, legendary jazz vibraphonist and bandleader, was 12 years old when he kicked off his career as a professional musician, winning first place in an amateur performance. Born and raised in the heart of Brooklyn and possessing tremendous musical talent, Gibbs learned the ins and outs of bebop from pioneers like Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, and Bud Powell. In 1959 his ensemble, later dubbed The Dream Band, became the toast of Hollywood. Four decades, 65 albums, and 300 compositions later, his story is one of great substance-his foot-tapping music, revolutionary. Good Vibes is a rollicking autobiography that tracks jazz from the turbulent post-war years through the rise of bebop, traversing its changes through the eyes of one of its greatest practitioners. Gibbs's hilarious, poignant, and always fascinating anecdotes reveal little-known attributes and quirks about legendary personalities such as Benny Goodman, Buddy Rich, Steve Allen, Frank Sinatra, Don Rickles, Billie Holiday, and many more. A foreword by Chubby Jackson, a discography, and an index round out this work.

In this book, leading musician, jazz club founder, and compere Ronnie Scott recalls the highlights, tribulations, multiple frustrations and moments of intense musical gratification in running his leading London jazz club, due to celebrate its 45th year in October 2004. He also writes of his early days as a musician and band-leader. The book is full of his wry and witty observations and is informed by a shrewd appreciation of the eccentricities of human nature.

1st edition Futura 1985 paperback, vgIn stock shipped from our UK warehouse -