A "definitive" corrective (USA Today) to decades of patchwork scholarship and journalism about this giant of jazz, David Hajdu's Lush Life is a vibrant and absorbing account of the "lush life" that Strayhorn and other jazz musicians led in Harlem and Paris. While composing some of the most gorgeous American music of the twentieth century, Strayhorn labored under a complex agreement whereby Ellington took the bows for his work. Until his life was tragically cut short by cancer and alcohol abuse, the small, shy composer carried himself with singular style and grace as one of the few jazzmen to be openly homosexual. Lush Life has sparked an enthusiastic revival of interest in Strayhorn's work and is already acknowledged as a jazz classic.

    . . .  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 TribuneNo 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 study of three basic outlines used in jazz improv and composition, based on a study of hundreds of examples from great jazz artists.

    Includes a bio, notation guide, alternate fingerings, and discography with historical notes on the recordings.

    Leonard Feather, writing in The Los Angeles Times, said no other writer now living can write with comparable grace and equal enthusiasm about everyone from Jack Teagarden and Art Tatum to Cecil Taylor and Ornette Coleman. And Bruce Cook in The New Leader called the book the quintessential Whitney Balliett, the cream of the cream, a collection that leaves no doubt about his strength. Now greatly expanded with sixteen new essays, American Musicians II remains a superb introduction to the giants of jazz, or as Balliett himself calls it, a highly personal encyclopedia, a series of close accounts of how a beautiful music grew, flourished, and (possibly) began the long trek back to its native silences. Breathtaking in its scope, the book features Balliett's singular portraits of jazz greats who have shaped this uniquely American tradition from its earliest days to the present, from inimitable innovators like Joe King Oliver and Jelly Roll Morton, to swing-era mainstays Fats Waller and Lester Young, to avant-garde pioneers such as Cecil Taylor and Ornette Coleman. We are treated to profiles of Pee Wee Russell, Red Allen, Earl Hines, and Mary Lou Williams, written when they were at the height of their powers; reconstructions of the lives of Art Tatum, Coleman Hawkins, Jack Teagarden, Zoot Sims, and Dave Tough; quick but indelible glimpses into the daily (or nocturnal) lives of Duke Ellington and Charles Mingus; and vivid portrayals of such modern masters as Red Norvo, Buddy Rich, Elvin Jones, Art Farmer, Michael Moore, and Tommy Flanagan. This new edition adds essays on such major musicians as Benny Goodman, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, George Shearing, and Paul Desmond. In the forty years that he has written for The New Yorker, Whitney Balliett has earned the reputation as America's foremost jazz critic. The late Philip Larkin described him as a writer who brings jazz journalism to the verge of poetry. Alistair Cook wrote that he is, without a rival in sight, the most literate and knowledgeable living writer on jazz. And Gene Lees called him one of the most graceful essayists in the English language on any subject. Now, with the second edition of American Musicians in hand, music lovers can experience Balliett's peerless observations on the jazz scene, as he takes you into the hearts and minds of jazz's great practitioners.

    This, the first book of photos devoted entirely to the great pioneers of jazz, will captivate jazz aficionados and art lovers alike.