Music : Jazz

Salsa is one of the most popular types of music listened to and danced to in the United States. Until now, the single comprehensive history of the music--and the industry that grew up around it, including musicians, performances, styles, movements, and production--was available only in Spanish. This lively translation provides for English-reading and music-loving fans the chance to enjoy César Miguel Rondón's celebrated El libro de la salsa . For this first English-language edition, Rondón has added a new chapter to bring the story of salsa up to the present. more...

Price: $21.95

When bebop was new, writes Thomas Owens, "many jazz musicians and most of the jazz audience heard it as radical, chaotic, bewildering music." For a nation swinging to the smoothly orchestrated sounds of the big bands, this revolutionary movement of the 1940s must have seemed destined for a short life on the musical fringe. But today, Owens writes, bebop is nothing less than "the lingua franca of jazz, serving as the principal musical language of thousands of jazz musicians." In Bebop, Owens conducts us on an insightful, loving tour through the music, players, and recordings that changed American culture. Combining vivid portraits of bebop's gigantic personalities with deft musical analysis, he ranges from the early classics of modern jazz (starting with the 1943 Onyx Club performances of Dizzy Gillespie, Max Roach, Oscar Pettiford, Don Byas, and George Wallington) through the central role of Charlie Parker, to an instrument-by-instrument look at the key players and their innovations. Illustrating his discussion with numerous musical excerpts, Owens skillfully demonstrates why bebop was so revolutionary, with fascinating glimpses of the tempestuous jazz world: Thelonious Monk, for example, did "everything 'wrong' in the sense of traditional piano technique....Because his right elbow fanned outward away from his body, he often hit the keys at an angle rather than in parallel. Sometimes he hit a single key with more than one finger, and divided single-line melodies between two hands." In addition to his discussions of individual instruments and players, Owens examines ensembles, with their sometimes volatile collaborations: in the Jazz Messengers, Benny Golson told of how his own mellow saxophone playing would get lost under Art Blakey's furious drumming: "He would do one of those famous four-bar drum rolls going into the next chorus, and I would completely disappear. He would holler over at me, 'Get up out of that hole!'" In this marvelous account, Owens comes right t more...

Price: $19.95

Do you want to know when Duke Ellington was king of The Cotton Club? Have you ever wondered how old Miles Davis was when he got his first trumpet?. From birth dates to gig dates and from recordings to television specials, Leonard Feather and Ira Gitler have left no stone unturned in their quest for accurate, detailed information on the careers of 3.300 jazz musicians from around the world. We learn that Duke Ellington worked his magic at The Cotton Club from 1927 to 1931, and that on Miles Davis's thirteenth birthday, his father gave him his first trumpet. Jazz is fast moving, and this edition clearly and concisely maps out an often dizzying web of professional associations. We find, for instance, that when Miles Davis was a St. Louis teenager he encountered Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie for the first time. This meeting proved fateful, and by 1945 a nineteen-year-old Davis had left Juilliard to play with Parker on 52nd Street. Knowledge of these professional alliances, along with the countless others chronicled in this book, are central to tracing the development of significant jazz movements, such as the "cool jazz" that became one of Miles Davis's hallmarks. Arranged alphabetically according to last name, each entry of this book chronologically lists the highlights of every jazz musician's career. Highly accessible and vigorously researched, The Biographical Encyclopedia of Jazz is, quite simply, the most comprehensive jazz encyclopedia available. more...

Price: $37.00

Charlie Parker was one of the influential musicians in jazz, and was the main architect of the jazz revolution of the 1940s. Addicted to drugs and alcohol, and with a tangled private life, he died young. This biography of Charlie Parker provides a discussion of performances and recordings, with discography, notes and bibliography. more...

Price: $18.95

The time: 1936-1938. The mood: Hopeful. It wasn't wartime, not yet. The music: The incomparable Count Basie and Benny Goodman, among others. The setting: Living rooms across America and, most of all, New York City. Dream Lucky covers politics, race, religion, arts, and sports, but the central focus is the period's soundtrack—specifically big band jazz—and the big-hearted piano player William "Count" Basie. His ascent is the narrative thread of the book—how he made it and what made his music different from the rest. But many other stories weave in and out: Amelia Earhart pursues her dream of flying "around the world at its waistline." Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., stages a boycott on 125th Street. And Mae West shocks radio listeners as a naked Eve tempting the snake. Critic Nat Hentoff praises the "precise originality" with which Roxane Orgill writes about music. In Dream Lucky , she magically lets readers hear the past. more...

Price: $19.99