If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn." — Charlie Parker"What is jazz? The rhythm — the feeling." — Coleman Hawkins"The best sound usually comes the first time you do something. If it's spontaneous, it's going to be rough, not clean, but it's going to have the spirit which is the essence of jazz." — Dave BrubeckHere, in their own words, such famous jazz musicians as Louis Armstrong, King Oliver, Fletcher Henderson, Bunk Johnson, Duke Ellington, Fats Waller, Clarence Williams, Jo Jones, Jelly Roll Morton, Mezz Mezzrow, Billie Holiday, and many others recall the birth, growth, and changes in jazz over the years. From its beginnings at the turn of the twentieth century in the red-light district in New Orleans (or Storyville, as it came to be known), to Chicago's Downtown section and the Original Dixieland Jazz Band and Chicago's South Side to jam sessions in Kansas City to Harlem during the Depression years, the West Coast and modern developments, the story of jazz is vividly and colorfully documented in hundreds of personal interviews, letters, tape recorded and telephone conversations, and excerpts from previously printed articles that appeared in books and magazines.There is no more fascinating and lively history of jazz than this firsthand telling by the men who made it. It should be read and re-read by all jazz enthusiasts, musicians, students of music and culture, students of American history, and other readers. "A lively book bearing the stamp of honesty and naturalness." — Library Journal. "A work of considerable substance." — The New Yorker. "Some of the quotations are a bit racy but they give the book a wonderful flavor." — San Francisco Chronicle.

    Through her lyrics and iconic persona, Odetta made lasting political, social, and cultural change.A leader of the 1960s folk revival, Odetta is one of the most important singers of the last hundred years. Her music has influenced a huge number of artists over many decades, including Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, the Kinks, Jewel, and, more recently, Rhiannon Giddens and Miley Cyrus.But Odetta's importance extends far beyond music. Journalist Ian Zack follows Odetta from her beginnings in deeply segregated Birmingham, Alabama, to stardom in San Francisco and New York. Odetta used her fame to bring attention to the civil rights movement, working alongside Joan Baez, Harry Belafonte, and other artists. Her opera-trained voice echoed at the 1963 March on Washington and the Selma to Montgomery march, and she arranged a tour throughout the deeply segregated South. Her "Freedom Trilogy" songs became rallying cries for protesters everywhere.Through interviews with Joan Baez, Harry Belafonte, Judy Collins, Carly Simon, and many others, Zack brings Odetta back into the spotlight, reminding the world of the folk music that powered the civil rights movement and continues to influence generations of musicians today.

    This landmark book documents the magazine’s rise to prominence as the voice of rock and roll and a leading showcase for era-defining photography. From the 1960s to the present day, the book offers a decade-by-decade exploration of American music and history. Interviews with rock legends—Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, Kurt Cobain, Bruce Springsteen, and more—appear alongside iconic photographs by Baron Wolman, Annie Leibovitz, Mark Seliger, and other leading image-makers. With feature articles, excerpts, and exposés by such quintessential writers as Hunter S. Thompson, Matt Taibbi, and David Harris, this book is an irresistible and essential keepsake of the magazine that has defined American music for generations of readers.

    The secret history of rock and roll is the story of lesser-known artists whose work has shaped modern rock. Investigating 15 separate genres and influences, this book discusses, identifies and annotates the most significant, if not the most celebrated, rock and roll talents of all time.

    Medill personally influenced the political tide that transformed America during the midnineteenth century by fostering the Republican Party, engineering the election of Abraham Lincoln and serving as a catalyst for the outbreak of the Civil War. The dynasty he established, filled with colorful characters, went on to take American journalism by storm. His grandson, Colonel Robert R. McCormick, personified Chicago, as well as its great newspaper, the Chicago Tribune, throughout much of the twentieth century. Robert’s cousin, Joseph Medill Patterson, started the New York Daily News, and Joe’s sister, Cissy Patterson, was the innovative editor of the Washington Times-Herald. In the fourth generation, Alicia Patterson founded Long Island’s Newsday, the most stunning journalistic accomplishment of post–World War II America. Printer’s ink raged in the veins of the Medills, the McCormicks and the Pattersons throughout a century, and their legacy prevailed for another five decades—always in the forefront of events, shaping the intellectual and social pulse of America. At the same time, the dark side of the intellectual stardom driving the dynasty was a destructive compulsion that left clan members crippled by their personal demons of chronic depression, alcoholism, drug abuse and even madness and suicide. Rife with authentic conversations and riveting quotes, The Magnificent Medills is the premiere cultural history of America’s first media empire. This dynamic family and their brilliance, eccentricities and ultimate self-destruction are explored in a sweeping narrative that interweaves the family’s personal activities and public achievements against a larger historical background. Authoritative, compelling and thoroughly engaging, The Magnificent Medills brings the pages of history that the Medills wrote vividly to life.

    Mine is predicated on formative years spent cleaning my father’s calf pens: Just keep shoveling until you’ve got a pile so big, someone has to notice. The fact that I cast my life’s work as slung manure simply proves that I recognize an apt metaphor when I accidentally stick it with a pitchfork. . . . Poetry was my first love, my gateway drug—still the poets are my favorites—but I quickly realized I lacked the chops or insights to survive on verse alone. But I wanted to write. Every day. And so I read everything I could about freelancing, and started shoveling."  The pieces gathered within this book draw on fifteen years of what Michael Perry calls "shovel time"—a writer going to work as the work is offered. The range of subjects is wide, from musky fishing, puking, and mountain-climbing Iraq War veterans to the frozen head of Ted Williams. Some assignments lead to self-examination of an alarming magnitude (as Perry notes, "It quickly becomes obvious that I am a self-absorbed hypochondriac forever resolving to do better nutritionally and fitness-wise but my follow-through is laughable.") But his favorites are those that allow him to turn the lens outward: "My greatest privilege," he says, "lies not in telling my own story; it lies in being trusted to tell the story of another."

    It's a perfect example of the wry humour that permeates the mind-set of Service personnel, and it resonates throughout this book. Whether the tale is set in the air or on the ground, it offers a glimpse of what life was, and probably still is, really like in the RAF.Over a period of two years, three ex-military pilots, who joined the RAF on the same day and have been life-long friends, collected the stories. Sometimes terrifying, occasionally outrageous, and frequently funny, they show that the business of flying military aircraft sporadically throws up challenges that even the most capable of aviators struggle to meet. Without exception, the stories are related with a refreshing candour that acknowledges the failures as well as the triumphs on each author's part. Equally importantly, they are presented in a way that anyone can enjoy, regardless of whether or not they have any knowledge of flying or military life.Many of the events recounted here happened during the Cold War, when the surreal world of potential nuclear conflict was the backdrop to day-to-day operations, and nearly all the stories appear in print for the first time. Indeed, it is true to say that, from an aviation perspective, they are frequently more remarkable for the fact that the protagonist got away with it rather than demonstrated great flying skill.Amount going to charity £3.32/$5.43 (at current rate)

    Robert Anasi took up boxing in his twenties to keep in shape, attract women, and sharpen his knuckles for the odd bar fight. He thought of entering "the Gloves," but put it off. Finally, at age thirty-two-his last year of eligibility-he vowed to fight, although he was an old man in a sport of teenagers and a light man who had to be even lighter (125 pounds) to fight others his size.So begins Anasi's obsessive preparation for the Golden Gloves. He finds Milton, a wily and abusive trainer, and joins Milton's "Supreme Team": a black teenager who used to deal guns in Harlem, a bus driver with five kids, a hard-hitting woman champion who becomes his sparring partner. Meanwhile, he observes the changing world of amateur boxing, in which investment bankers spar with ex-convicts and everyone dreads a fatal blow to the head. With the Supreme Team, he goes to the tournament, whose outcome, it seems, is rigged, like so much in boxing life today. Robert Anasi tells his story not as a journalist on assignment but as a man in the midst of one of the great adventures of his life. The Gloves, his first book, has the feel of a contemporary classic.

    and the Clash. The East Coast editor of Launch magazine, Randall is undoubtedly one of the many journalists eager to exclaim "genius!" again, but his biography of the Grammy winners is economical, restrained and unauthorized (band members "respectfully declined" Randall's requests to cooperate). After briefly reenacting the now mythic June 1997 concert at New York City's Irving Plaza, attended by rock's superstar aristocracy (Bono, Lenny Kravitz, Madonna, etc.), Randall smartly spends most of his narrative on the band's fascinating, decade-long conception in and around culturally barren Oxford, whose Radiohead landmarks he visited and lays out. Non- and neo-Anglophiles will especially appreciate Randall's definitions of British terms and background on the British music industry, music press and education system (all five musicians met at the all-male Abingdon School). As for the inevitable "record critique" chapters, Randall rarely throws in his two cents, preferring to sprinkle passages with the band's own pithy observations and recording-session anecdotes culled from magazine interviews. Exit music? Not quite, as Radiohead are pushing the boundaries of pop music (the new record is rumored to include Miles Davis and backwards singing). Because the book will be published right before the new album debuts, it will be nearly out of date by the time it hits bookstores. However, Randall's work will still serve as a reliable introduction to an ever-evolving band.

    In the battle of his life over the ragingly successful music label he had helped found, Ruthless Records, Heller had seen death threats, strong-arming, and beatings. Now the violence had come home when his enemies burglarized his house, jacked his Corvette, and left behind this sneering piece of graffito.Heller didn't get mad; he got even. "Ruthless" tells the explosive story of Jerry Heller's alliance with Eric Wright, aka Eazy-E, one of the legends of rap music and a founding member of N.W.A., "the world's most dangerous band." As a longtime music industry superagent, Heller had the skill and insight necessary to guide N.W.A.'s cometlike rise to the top of the charts. Along the way there were raucous nationwide tours, out-of-control MTV pool parties, and X-rated business meetings. Heller held on through the brutal shocks and reversals of the Ruthless Records era, which saw the label being targeted by the FBI, and its principal artists locked in bitter conflict, until a final turnaround placed Ruthless at the top of the heap once more. Always in the middle of the whirlwind were Jerry and Eazy, an odd-couple pairing that represents one of the deepest and most appealing stories in American music.You don't have to be an N.W.A. fan to love "Ruthless," Heller turns the music industry inside out, exposing its strange logic and larger-than-life personalities. "Ruthless" provides keen insight into the popular music scene, with an unforgettable portrait of its rollicking excesses, life-churning drama, and multimillion-dollar highs.

    It is filled with new interviews with music legends such as Brian Wilson, Mike Love, Alan Jardine, Bruce Johnston, David Marks, Blondie Chaplin, Randy Bachman, Roger McGuinn, John Sebastian, Lyle Lovett, Alice Cooper, and Al Kooper, and commentary from a younger generation such as Matthew Sweet, Carnie Wilson, Daniel Lanois, Cameron Crowe, and Zooey Deschanel. Even hardcore fans will be delighted by the breadth of this musical-history volume. Plans for celebrating the golden anniversary of "America's band" include the long-awaited release of 1967's Smile--the most famous aborted album in rock history--and concerts reuniting the group's five main surviving members. The band's music is as influential as it was 50 years ago, and this retelling of how the iconic rock group found itself in the annals of pop culture couldn't come at a better time.

    King uncovered some of the strangest—and most hypnotic—sounds he had ever heard. The 78s were immensely moving, seeming to tap into a primal well of emotion inaccessible through contemporary music. The songs, King learned, were from Epirus, an area straddling southern Albania and northwestern Greece and boasting a folk tradition extending back to the pre-Homeric era. To hear this music is to hear the past.Lament from Epirus is an unforgettable journey into a musical obsession, which traces a unique genre back to the roots of song itself. As King hunts for two long-lost virtuosos—one of whom may have committed a murder—he also tells the story of the Roma people who pioneered Epirotic folk music and their descendants who continue the tradition today.King discovers clues to his most profound questions about the function of music in the history of humanity: What is the relationship between music and language? Why do we organize sound as music? Is music superfluous, a mere form of entertainment, or could it be a tool for survival? King’s journey becomes an investigation into song and dance’s role as a means of spiritual healing—and what that may reveal about music’s evolutionary origins.

    This collection provides a complete picture of the man, his influence, and the impact of his life and death on his fans. Color photos. 72 b&w photos.

    A role model for generations of writers and performers, Doc was renowned for his mastery of virtually every popular style, from the gutbucket rhythm and blues of “Lonely Avenue” to the symphonic soul of “Save the Last Dance for Me” to the pure pop of “Viva Las Vegas.” His songs-“This Magic Moment,” “A Teenager in Love,” “Hushabye,” “Little Sister,” “Turn Me Loose,” and many others-have been recorded by everyone from Ray Charles, Elvis Presley, and B. B. King to Bob Dylan, Led Zeppelin, and Bruce Springsteen, with sales exceeding $100 million. Doc was ready-made for literature. His collaborator Mort Shuman once described him as an “entire rollicking soul neighborhood rolled into one man.” Garrulous, profane, hilarious, and Rabelaisian, Doc was never inhibited about offering his opinions and his friendship. His confidants, collaborators, and discoveries included Duke Ellington, John Lennon, Dr. John, Jimmy Scott, Bette Midler, and Lou Reed. In the words of renowned producer Jerry Wexler, “If the music industry had a heart, it would be Doc Pomus.” Despite, or more likely because of, his successes, few acquaintances knew that this writer of jukebox hits led one of the most dramatic and unlikely lives of his time. Spanning extravagant wealth and desperate poverty, suburban domesticity and the depths of New York’s underworld, worldwide fame and near-total obscurity, enduring love and persistent loneliness, Doc’s story remains one of the great untold American lives. Its chapters comprise a back-room history of rock ’n’ roll, touching on more than a half-century of American popular music-from the blues Doc performed with Lester Young to his collaborations with the luminaries of New York’s punk scene, shot through with vivid portraits of virtually every major player. Lonely Avenue is the first biography of this American original, so elegantly rendered that it reads like a novel, and fortified by full, exclusive access to Doc Pomus’s family, friends, voluminous journals, and archives.

    Since lions were considered a suitable gift for royalty, one tower - the Lion Tower - was a menagerie. Many historic events, stately and ceremonial, pathetic or dreadful - from the murder of King Edward IV's young sons to the beheadings of Henry VIII's queens to the imprisonment of Elizabeth I - took place in the Tower. It was customary for kings and queens to spend the night, or a few days, in these apartments before their coronation; from there they proceeded to Westminster. Charles II's was the last; after that, the royal lodgings fell into disuse and were ultimately abandoned. Here is the vivid story of the Tower of London, the monarchs who slept there, and the men and women who lost their lives there.