This essential book for music lovers tells the story of more than 250 key jazz songs, and includes a listening guideto more than 2,000 recordings.Many books recommend jazz CDs or discuss musicians and styles, but this is the first to tell the story of the songs themselves. The fan who wants to know more about a jazz song heard at the club or on the radio will find this book indispensable. Musicians who play these songs night after nightnow have a handy guide, outlining their history and significance and telling how they have been performed by different generations of jazz artists. Students learning about jazz standards now have a complete reference work for all of these cornerstones of the repertoire.Author Ted Gioia, whose body of work includes the award-winning The History of Jazz and Delta Blues, is the perfect guide to lead readers through the classics of the genre. As a jazz pianist and recording artist, he has performed these songs for decades. As a music historian and critic, he hasgained a reputation as a leading expert on jazz. Here he draws on his deep experience with this music in creating the ultimate work on the subject.An introduction for new fans, a useful handbook for jazz enthusiasts and performers, and an important reference for students and educators, The Jazz Standards belongs on the shelf of every serious jazz lover or musician.

    It covered jazz, of course, but it also included Davis’s ruminations on race, politics and culture. Fascinated, Hef sent the writer—future Pulitzer-Prize-winning author Alex Haley, an unknown at the time—back to glean even more opinion and insight from Davis. The resulting exchange, published in the September 1962 issue, became the first official Playboy Interview and kicked off a remarkable run of public inquisition that continues today—and that has featured just about every cultural titan of the last half century.To celebrate the Interview’s 50th anniversary, the editors of Playboy have culled 50 of its most (in)famous Interviews and will publish them over the course of 50 weekdays (from September 4, 2012 to November 12, 2012) via Amazon’s Kindle Direct platform. Here is that first Interview with Miles Davis.

    His work began primarily from photographs he took of young men on the street in Harlem that he remixed with a fusion of historic painting styles, including elements of the French rococo. As rich visually as it is conceptually, Wiley’s work has drawn attention since his earliest shows in 2001. In the last decade, he has become one of the most important artists of the moment, with work as relevant and resonant to the hip-hop generation as it is to high-end collectors and major museums.This volume—the only comprehensive monograph on Wiley’s work—offers an in-depth understanding of this important artist’s work. It chronicles both the earliest paintings and photographs and his recent forays into sculpture—bust portraits in bronze in the manner of Renaissance artists.

    In Ghana and South Africa, drummer Guy Warren and vocalist Sathima Bea Benjamin fused local musical forms with the dizzying innovations of modern jazz. These four were among hundreds of musicians in the 1950s and ’60s who forged connections between jazz and Africa that definitively reshaped both their music and the world.Each artist identified in particular ways with Africa’s struggle for liberation and made music dedicated to, or inspired by, demands for independence and self-determination. That music was the wild, boundary-breaking exultation of modern jazz. The result was an abundance of conversation, collaboration, and tension between African and African American musicians during the era of decolonization. This collective biography demonstrates how modern Africa reshaped jazz, how modern jazz helped form a new African identity, and how musical convergences and crossings altered politics and culture on both continents.In a crucial moment when freedom electrified the African diaspora, these black artists sought one another out to create new modes of expression. Documenting individuals and places, from Lagos to Chicago, from New York to Cape Town, Robin Kelley gives us a meditation on modernity: we see innovation not as an imposition from the West but rather as indigenous, multilingual, and messy, the result of innumerable exchanges across a breadth of cultures.

    It provides an intimate and compelling look at the many forces that shaped this most American of art forms and the many influences that gave rise to jazz’s post-war styles. Rich with the voices of musicians, producers, promoters, and others on the scene during the decades following World War II, this book views jazz’s evolution through the prism of technological advances, social transformations, changes in the law, economic trends, and much more.In an absorbing narrative enlivened by the commentary of key personalities, Marc Myers describes the myriad of events and trends that affected the music's evolution, among them, the American Federation of Musicians strike in the early 1940s, changes in radio and concert-promotion, the introduction of the long-playing record, the suburbanization of Los Angeles, the Civil Rights movement, the “British invasion” and the rise of electronic instruments. This groundbreaking book deepens our appreciation of this music by identifying many of the developments outside of jazz itself that contributed most to its texture, complexity, and growth.

    However, the true diversity and complexity of his oeuvre is little understood, and the full scope of his career is largely absent from the existing literature. Presenting over 130 paintings and sculptures, as well as over thirty seldom- or never-before-seen drawings and collages, this book examines all periods in Lichtenstein's career, going well beyond his brushstrokes and the classic Pop romance and war cartoon paintings that made him famous.Roy Lichtenstein: A Retrospective features exciting new scholarship by an international team of distinguished curators, critics, and art historians. Essays by Yve-Alain Bois, Chrissie Iles, and Stephen Little, among others, give special consideration to Lichtenstein's historical influences, from Picasso and Cubism through Surrealism, Futurism, and British Pop. Contributions by James Rondeau and Sheena Wagstaff evaluate the artist's abstract work and late nudes. Complemented by photographs of the artist and his seminal exhibitions, the essays examine the various styles and subjects featured in paintings created throughout his lifetime. The inclusion of a complete chronology of Lichtenstein's life and work—compiled by Clare Bell of the Lichtenstein Foundation—makes this retrospective the most authoritative publication on the artist since his death in 1997.

    Focusing on eight of Coltrane's pieces, themes under consideration include lament ("Alabama"), improvisation ("My Favorite Things" and "Ascension"), grace ("A Love Supreme"), and the Trinity ("The Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost"). By attending to the traditions of theology and of jazz criticism, and through a series of interviews with musicians, theologians, and jazz writers, Jamie Howison draws the worlds of theology and jazz into an active and vibrant conversation with each other. Built around a focused listening to John Coltrane's music as heard against the background of his life and social context, and interacting with the work of a range of writers including James Baldwin, Dorothee Soelle, Jeremy Begbie, and James Cone, God's Mind in that Music will be of interest not only to those interested in the intersection of music and theology, but also to Coltrane fans, students of jazz studies, and anyone who believes that music matters.

    Founded by the legendary producer Manfred Eicher in 1969, a moment when contemporary music was being redefined across all genres, ECM (Edition of Contemporary Music) aimed to bring jazz, improvised, and written music out of the studio and into living rooms around the world. Acoustically rich and expansive, ECM's productions set new standards in sonic complexity. ECM recorded some of the world's most extraordinary music, and its stable features some of the most influential musicians of the 20th century, including Keith Jarrett, Chick Corea, Steve Reich, Carla Bley, Meredith Monk, Marion Brown, Codona, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, and Arvo P rt. Renowned for its high standards of quality, clarity, and freshness, ECM remains a cornerstone in the industry today. This comprehensive volume showcases ECM's cultural breadth, not just in the music world but also within the broader artistic universe. It highlights aspects of African American music of the 1960s in Europe, during the height of the American Civil Rights era, as well as the changing relationships between musicians, music, and listeners. In exploring the work of ECM, this catalog brings together a range of visual arts--installation pieces, photography, and film--alongside essays and an anthology of liner notes.

    This colorful memoir of the great jazz drummer and witty storyteller recounts his life story and career through tributes, recollections and anecdotes many of them his own hilarious quips from more than 170 friends, fans, and fellow performers including Toshiko Akiyoshi, Marian McPartland, Eiji Kitamura and Jeff Hamilton; musicians he mentored such as Howard Alden, Harry Allen, Dan Barrett and Scott Hamilton; and fans such as Harry Crosby, Charlie Watts, Vic Firth and Jim Keltner. His performances with Woody Herman, Maynard Ferguson, Harry James, Supersax, Hanna-Fontana, Bing Crosby, Rosemary Clooney, Tony Bennett, Oscar Peterson, Count Basie, the Merv Griffin Show band and over 250 albums are legendary!

    Davis is one of the most innovative, influential, and respected figures in the history of music. He’s been at the forefront of bebop, cool jazz, hard bop, modal jazz, and jazz-rock fusion, and remains the favorite and best-selling jazz artist ever, beloved worldwide. He’s also a fascinating character—moody, dangerous, brilliant. His story is phenomenal, including tempestous relationships with movie stars, heroin addictions, police busts, and more; connections with other jazz greats like Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonius Monk, John Coltrane, Gil Evans, John McLaughlin, and many others; and later fusion ventures that outraged the worlds of jazz and rock. Written by an all-star team, including Sonny Rollins, Bill Cosby, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, Clark Terry, Lenny White, Greg Tate, Ashley Kahn, Robin D. G. Kelley, Francis Davis, George Wein, Vincent Bessières, Gerald Early, Nate Chinen, Nalini Jones, Dave Liebman, Garth Cartwright, and more.

    book covers every aspect of the crucial three-note voicings every guitarist needs to know. It has received glowing endorsements from Pat Metheny, Jim Hall, Mike Stern, Ben Monder, Vic Juris, Gene Bertoncinni, Julian Lage, etc. Three-Note Voicings and Beyond is for everyone from intermediate newcomers to jazz guitar to very advanced players. The book develops a unique dynamic concept of harmony where three independently moving lines team up to create beautiful harmonies that are valuable for comping, chord melodies and chordal jazz improvisations. Topics include: Three-note shell voicings and special derived comp voicings Compete triad review including all close and open inversions on all strings A section on developing walking guitar voicings, harmonized bass lines perfect for accompaniments in situations where no bass or keyboard is present Sections on triad applications such as slash chords, upper structures, hexatonic triad-pairs and special hybrid voicings Quartal and secundal voicings perfect for modal comping and soloing Drop-2 reductions perfect for melody harmonizations A complete method to develop a realistic simulation of Shearing-style block-chord voicings on guitar. Plus much more!

    Placing Duke Ellington (1899-1974) at the center of the story, David Schiff explores music written during the composer's lifetime in terms of broad ideas such as rhythm, melody, and harmony. He shows how composers and performers across genres shared the common pursuit of representing the rapidly changing conditions of modern life. The Ellington Century demonstrates how Duke Ellington's music is as vital to musical modernism as anything by Stravinsky, more influential than anything by Schoenberg, and has had a lasting impact on jazz and pop that reaches from Gershwin to contemporary R&B.

    More than merely the Peanuts guy, Guaraldi cut his jazz teeth as a member of combos fronted by Cal Tjader and Woody Herman, and garnered Top 40 fame with his Grammy Award-winning hit Cast Your Fate to the Wind. This career study gives Guaraldi long-overdue recognition, chronicling his years as a sideman; his attraction to the emerging bossa nova sound of the late 1950s; his collaboration with Brazilian guitarist Bola Sete; his development of the Grace Cathedral Jazz Mass; his selection as the fellow to put the jazz swing in Charlie Brown's step; and his emergence as a respected veteran in the declining Northern California jazz club scene of the 1970s. Throughout, this welcome volume conveys the magic and legacy of one of jazz music's overlooked treasures.

    His Köln Concert stands among the most important jazz recordings of the past four decades, not only because of the music on the record, but also because of the remarkable reception it has received from musicians and lay-listeners alike. Since the album's 1975 release, it has sold over three million copies: a remarkable achievement for any jazz record, but an unprecedented feat for a two-disc set of solo piano performances featuring no well-known songs. This book seeks to uncover what it is about this recording, about Jarrett's performance, that elicits such success. Recognizing The Köln Concert as a multi-faceted text, the author engages with it musically, culturally, aesthetically, and historically in order to understand the concert and album as a means through which Jarrett articulated his own cultural and musical outlook, and established himself as a serious artist. Through these explorations of the concert as text, of the recording and of the live performance, this book fills a major hole in jazz scholarship, and is essential reading for jazz scholars and musicians alike, as well as Keith Jarrett's many fans.

    Includes an insider’s list featuring bars for the cocktail connoisseur, venues for the music maven, and can’t-miss restaurants for the gourmand.

    Prominently known for performing with Miles Davis and Elvin Jones, he has exerted considerable influence as a saxophonist, bandleader, composer, author, and educator. In What It Is: The Life of a Jazz Artist, friend, pianist, and noted jazz scholar Lewis Porter conducts a series of in-depth interviews with Liebman, who discusses his professional, personal, and musical relationships with notable musicians, as well as such personal matters as contracting polio as a child. Featuring rare photos from Liebman's personal collection, this fascinating and witty story will not only appeal to jazz fans and scholars but also to those readers interested in the story of how a young man followed his dream to become one of the leading jazz artists of our time.