This book willserve as the basic work on the rise and development of bop in jazz. Engendered by Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, bebop, now known as bop, quickly became the most powerful musical force in modern jazz. Today it is still the main musical language of jazz musicians. Over a ten-year period, Ira Gitler interviewed more than 50 of the seminal figures in jazz history to preserve for posterity their recollections of how jazz moved from the big band era in the late '30s and '40s into the modern jazz period. The musicians interviewed recreate not only their own experiences but also evoke the legendary figures of bop who where so influential in its development but were never recorded, people like Clyde Hart and Freddie Webster. Swing to Bop shows how the music first established itself in jam sessions in Harlem and then spread to New York's famed 52nd Street and beyond. Separate chapters describe how young musicians in major cities such as Los Angeles, Chicago and Detroit became swept up in the movement. Along with the music and the personalities who made it, the book vividly recreates the atmosphere of the country in the '30s and '40s: traveling on the ballroom theather curcuit; racial attitudes and interaction; extra-musical pastimes; the relationship to World War II; and the influence of drugs. Thus Swing to Bop reveals not only how the music evolved but the environment in which it flourished and what effect in turn the music had on that environment and the music to follow. About the Author Ira Gitler is the author of Jazz Masters of the '40s and The Encyclopedia of Jazz in the Seventies. He was previously Professor of Jazz History at City College of New York and Associate Editor of Downbeat.

There are big plans for a small town in Nevada. When a world famous architect is commissioned to design a completely enclosed city, he hires a young apprentice named Burke Isadore to translate his sketches into a three-dimensional computer model. The ambitious project is called New Moon City. Burke is a man of his word. When he makes a promise, he intends to keep it. He has promised himself to make a difference in the world, and he sees the new city's design as a solution to environmental degradation, homelessness and isolation. But his youthful idealism leaves him with a blind spot to the intentions of others who are using the project to further their own goals, contrary to the original vision. To complicate matters, there are some long-term employees of the master architect who are not well suited to the challenges of building the city. It falls to Burke to resolve the issues created by their foolish antics. A newspaper reporter named Aliyah Estrella questions the entire premise of the enclosed city, known as an arcology. She thinks she would feel trapped inside a giant anthill if she were forced to live there. She also knows the local ranchers are not happy with the project, and some of her opposition articles in the small-town newspaper have raised the hackles of the powerful people behind the construction of New Moon City. As the opposing forces head toward collision, it is left to Burke to keep his promises.

American architect Morris Lapidus is best known as the designer of glamorous postwar resort hotels in Florida, such as the Fontainebleau (1954) and the Eden Roc (1955) in Miami Beach, and the Americana in Bal Harbour (1956). Yet in a remarkable sixty-year career that began in 1926, he designed more than 500 retail stores, hotels, apartment complexes, and stage sets that captured the popular spirit and changing face of Main Street America in the twentieth century. Lapidus created fantasy environments in which America's middle class, flush with expanding postwar incomes and optimism, could fulfill its desire for glamor, relaxed luxury, and leisure. His signature forms - chevrons, "beanpoles," "woggles," or amoeba shapes, and curving walls and ceilings punctuated by "cheese holes," or cutouts - have become treasured icons of American postwar vernacular architecture. Born in Russia in 1902, Lapidus was brought to New York by his parents a year later, and the family first settled on the Lower East Side. He completed his architecture degree at Columbia University and first earned a reputation by designing stage sets and retail stores in which he developed new theories in store design and essentially created the modern storefront as we now know it. For his famed resort hotels of the 1950s Lapidus designed not only the vast structures but a melange of quasi-French provincial and Italian Renaissance decorative elements that critics would dub "Miami Beach French," including everything from the tableware to his famous "stairways to nowhere." He was one of the first architects to acknowledge the cinema as an overriding influence on American taste.

"Having previously expressed no interest in color photography, Roger Ballen was inspired to engage with the medium after receiving a Leica SL camera as a gift in 2016. Opening to the potential of color in his work, Ballen used light in creative ways, exploring new avenues of experimentation. Spirits and Spaces eloquently captures the absurd and bizarre world of Roger Ballen, where animals and art brut-like drawings dominate, and humanity is reduced to obscure figures or fragmented body parts. The color images in Spirits and Spaces, created in conjunction with Ballen's artistic director, Marguerite Rossouw, were produced in a claustrophobic space, constructed of worn, wallpapered wooden panels and with minimalistic lighting. Here, in this dense, oppressive environment, Ballen creates what might be seen by many as a world that is unexplainable in words: one in which absurdity, chaos, comedy, and tragedy apparently exist side by side. Both a visual revelation and an artistic evolution by one of contemporary photography's most unique voices, Spirits and Spaces will be an essential and much-anticipated photobook for all Roger Ballen fans." - Publisher's description