On The Bookshelf

Original Jazz Classics Collector’s Guide

An easy guide to 200 of the most popular classic jazz albums currently available on CD. Includes complete listings of tunes and personnel, cover graphics, historical and contemporary critical notes, selected biographies, and never-before-seen-photographs plus a complete numerical listing of OJCs on compact disc.

Original Jazz Classics Collector’s Guide: 1995
Fantasy Inc.

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Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Adam Cordero was born on November 18, 1999 and grew up in Roslyn Heights, New York. He became captivated by the sounds of nature which he has incorporated in his compositions. Attending the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music he graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts

Adam holds a BFA degree with high honors from The New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music. He is also an adjunct professor at the New School and teaches privately.

Cordero teaches his own studio of students privately and is an adjunct faculty member at The New School for Jazz & Contemporary Music. He has played the established jazz venues in New York City, and has toured internationally to Switzerland and South Korea.

His quintet, Arcadia, strives to unite people in the common cause of protecting the environment. Cordero is a leading founder of the music venue Julian’s NYC and the music label, Tidebloom Records.

Saxophonist, composer, educator, and multi-instrumentalist Adam Cordero, who also plays clarinet, bass clarinet, and flute, continues to perform, tour and record.


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On The Bookshelf

Lush Life: A Biography Of Billy Strayhorn

Billy Strayhorn, one of the greatest composers in the history of American music, the creator of a body of work of standards like Take the A Train.  Yet, as a composer with no stage presence many see him as overshadowed by his friend and collaborator Duke Ellington, with whom he worked with for the two and a half decades.

The songwriter and arranger was an integral component of the Harlem Renaissance and the evolution of jazz. Lush Life is a vibrant and absorbing account of the Strayhorn’s life and the times that other jazz musicians led in Harlem and Paris. While composing some of the most gorgeous American music of this century, Strayhorn labored under a complex agreement whereby Ellington took the bows for his work.

Fifty-one years from the date of his birth, Billy Strayhorn transitioned due to cancer and alcohol abuse. The small, shy black composer carried himself with singular style and grace as one of the few jazzmen to be openly homosexual. This biography has sparked an enthusiastic revival of interest in Billy Strayhorn’s work and is already acknowledged as a jazz classic.

Lush Life: 1996 | David Hajdu
Granta Publications

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On The Bookshelf

Seeing Jazz: Artists & Writers On Jazz

Within these 144 pages, Seeing Jazz is a showcase of 77 paintings, sculptures, drawings, collages, and photographs, accompanied by literary selections, that express the many moods of jazz. This is jazz, art, and literature in concert.

In this museum of artists are, but not limited to, include Romare Bearden, Sam Gilliam, James Phillips, Miles Davis, Gjon Mili, Jacob Lawrence, Stuart Davis, Ann Tanksley, Archibald Motley, Ed Love, Gordon Parks, JeanMichel Basquiat, Henri Matisse, William Claxton, Stuart Davis, Ed Love, and Man Ray,

A representation of authors include Julio Cortazar, Ntozake Shange, Ralph Ellison, and Toni Morrison. The Foreword was written by trumpeter Calrk Terry, the Afterword by bassist Milt Hinton. The introduction is by Columbia University jazz scholar Robert O’Meally.

Whether it is improvisation, spontaneity, fusion, freedom or innovation, jazz has always been about more than music, and the ideas and moods of jazz have ruffled the minds of creatives throughout every category of the arts.

Seeing Jazz: 1997 | Marquette Folley-Cooper, Deborah Macanic, Janice McNeil

Chronicle Books | Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service

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On The Bookshelf

The Jazz Poetry Anthology

Since the turn of the century, poets have responded to jazz in all its musical and cultural overtones. The poems here cover the range of jazz itself: from early blues to free jazz and experimental music. Among the 132 poets included are James Baldwin, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Langston Hughes, Jack Kerouac, Mina Loy, Ishmael Reed, Sonia Sanchez, Amiri Baraka, Carol Bergé, Sterling A. Brown, Alice Fulton, and Carl Sandburg. 

The poems give the reader a sense of jazz imagery through the history of the music, yet have been lost to so many jazz enthusiasts and aficionados of the 20th century. Many of the names in this publication will be familiar but most one will discover anew.

Each poet has heard, felt the emotion of and experienced the music from a different perspective, writing in that voice. This makes for a pleasurable journey through time for the reader, especially those familiar with the music and the musicians.

This anthology represents the broad appreciation for jazz as poetic inspiration, not only from the Beat movement but from writers across the decades and around the world.

The Jazz Poetry Anthology: 1991 | Sasha Feinstein & Yusef Komunyakaa 

Indiana University Press

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