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.
On The Bookshelf
Jazz: America’s Classical Music | Grover Sales
Jazz critic Grover Sales takes the reader on a journey of introduction to the history, complexity and criticism of the music in Jazz: America’s Classical Music. This book illustrated with photographs, is considered a classic text and an ideal guide for both beginners and those familiar with the genre.
In an engaging and conversational style, the renowned jazz teacher tells of the lives and music of the greats like Ellington, Tatum, Hawkins, Coltrane, Parker, Hines, Goodman, Armstrong, and many others. He does this with a mix of important facts, fascinating anecdotes, and brilliant interpretations.
The author was a prominent figure in the jazz world, he taught at Stanford University and worked as the publicity director for the Monterey Jazz Festival.
Jazz: 1984 | Grover Sales
Prentiss-Hall Press
On The Bookshelf…
The Story Of Jazz | Marshall W. Stearns
Beginning with the African musical heritage and its fusion with European forms in America, Marshall Stearns’s history of jazz guides the reader through work songs, spirituls, ragtime, and the blues, to the birth of jazz in New Orleans, Louisiana and its adoption through the Great Migration by St Louis, Chicago, Kansas City, and New York.
The effect of jazz upon American culture and the American character has been all pervasive. This superlative history is the first and the most renowned systematic outline of the evolution of this Black American musical phenomenon. The book follows its course through the era of swing and bop to the beginnings of rock in the 50s, vividly depicting the great innovators, and covering such technical elements as the music’s form and structure.
The Story Of Jazz: 1956 | Marshall W. Stearns Oxford University Press
On The Bookshelf
Talking Jazz | Max Jones
Max Jones, known affectionately as “the Boswell of bebop” by Time Out, was famed in England for nearly four decades of insightful, ardent writing on jazz. With this luminous collection of interviews, his work will at last be widely accessible to American readers. Here are the voices of jazz — Coleman Hawkins, Johnny Hodges, Billie Holiday, and Mary Lou Williams, to name but a few — in conversation with Jones, who could turn a casual chat into an indelible portrait and who gives American readers a view of these musicians they have never had before.
In this book, the author Max Jones tells the story of jazz from its roots in the African-American community to its development as an international art form. Jones covers a variety of topics, including the development of improvisation, the influence of Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, and the rise of bebop. He also provides historical context and examines the different styles of jazz, from ragtime to free jazz. This book is an excellent resource for students interested in learning more about jazz and its history.; B & W Photographs; 8vo; 293 pages
Talking Jazz: 1987 | Max Jones
Anchor Brendon Limited
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