Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman, and Cecil Taylor revolutionized music from the end of the twentieth century into the twenty-first, expanding on jazz traditions with distinctly new concepts of composition, improvisation, instrumentation, and performance. They remain figures of controversy due to their border-crossing processes.
Miles, Ornette, Cecil is the first book to connect these three icons of the avant-garde, examining why they are lionized by some critics and reviled by others, while influencing musicians across such divides as genre, geography, and racial and ethnic backgrounds. Mandel offers fresh insights into their careers from interviews with all three artists and many of their significant collaborators, as well as a thorough overview of earlier interpretations of their work. Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman, and Cecil Taylor revolutionized music from the end of the twentieth century into the twenty-first, expanding on jazz traditions with distinctly new concepts of composition, improvisation, instrumentation, and performance. They remain figures of controversy due to their border-crossing processes.
Miles, Ornette, Cecil is the first book to connect these three icons of the avant-garde, examining why they are lionized by some critics and reviled by others, while influencing musicians across such divides as genre, geography, and racial and ethnic backgrounds. Mandel offers fresh insights into their careers from interviews with all three artists and many of their significant collaborators, as well as a thorough overview of earlier interpretations of their work.
An essential work for rock fans and scholars, Before Elvis: The Prehistory of Rock n Roll surveys the origins of rock n roll from the minstrel era to the emergence of Bill Haley and Elvis Presley. Unlike other histories of rock, Before Elvis offers a far broader and deeper analysis of the influences on rock music. Dispelling common misconceptions, it examines rock s origins in hokum songs and big-band boogies as well as Delta blues, detailing the embrace by white artists of African-American styles long before rock n roll appeared. This unique study ranges far and wide, highlighting not only the contributions of obscure but key precursors like Hardrock Gunter and Sam Theard but also the influence of celebrity performers like Gene Autry and Ella Fitzgerald. Too often, rock historians treat the genesis of rock n roll as a bolt from the blue, an overnight revolution provoked by the bland pop music that immediately preceded it and created through the white appropriation of music till then played only by and for black audiences. In Before Elvis, Birnbaum daringly argues a more complicated history of rock s evolution from a heady mix of ragtime, boogie-woogie, swing, country music, mainstream pop, and rhythm-and-blues a melange that influenced one another along the way, from the absorption of blues and boogies into jazz and pop to the integration of country and Caribbean music into rhythm-and-blues.
Written in an easy style, Before Elvis presents a bold argument about rock s origins and required reading for fans and scholars of rock n roll history.' 'Jones has learned—and this has been very rare in jazz criticism—to write about music as an artist.'
—Nat Hentoff ks Black Music is a book about the brilliant young jazz musicians of the early 1960s: John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Archie Shepp, Sun Ra, and others. It is composed of essays, reviews, interviews, liner notes, musical analyses, and personal impressions from 1959–1967. Also includes Amiri Baraka's reflections in a 2009 interview with Calvin Reid of Publishers Weekly. LeRoi Jones (now known as Amiri Baraka) is the author of numerous books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. He was named Poet Laureate of New Jersey from 2002 to 2004 by the New Jersey Commission on Humanities. His most recent book, Tales of the Out & the Gone (Akashic Books, 2007), was a New York Times Editors' Choice and winner of a PEN/Beyond Margins Award. He lives in Newark, New Jersey.
Free Jazz, Harmolodics, and Ornette Coleman discusses Ornette Coleman’s musical philosophy of 'Harmolodics,' an improvisational system deeply inspired by the Civil Rights Movement. Falling under the guise of 'free jazz,' Harmolodics can be difficult to understand, even for seasoned musicians and musicologists. Yet this book offers a clear and thorough approach to these complex methods, outlining Coleman’s position as the developer of a logical—and historically significant—system of jazz improvisation. Included here are detailed musical analyses of improvisations, accompanied by full transcriptions. Intimate interviews between the author and Coleman explore the deeper issues at work in Harmolodics, issues of race, class, sex, and poverty. The principle of human equality quickly emerges as a central tenet of Coleman’s life and music.
Harmolodics is best understood when viewed in its essential form, both as a theory of improvisation and as an artistic expression of racial and human equality. ABOUT THE BOOK Ganga Ghose, a jazz singer in Varanasi, hears pianist Ghost Wakefield on her radio and stays up all night enchanted by his playing. Although it's shut off, her radio tells her, 'Go ride the music,' setting into motion a wild road story and romance, at turns comical, seductive, criminal and redemptive. They meet in Mexico, build a duet in New York and discover during a tour of the South that she becomes, through his haunted, New Orleans-flavored introductions, the voice and presence of Billie Holiday, Lena Horne and the other immortals she impersonates, a gift she returns to Ghost in a most unusual way and at a most opportune hour. ADVANCE PRAISE 'From the moment you sit yourself down beside Ghost, who is behind the wheel of an infinitely blue Dodge on the outskirts of Baltimore, you know you're in for a fabulous journey where all the exotic songbirds will sing and the gods of every chakra will chime in.
From its tongue down to its toes Ghost & Ganga lets it fly. Here is Kirpal Gordon, spiritual visionary and sensual word master, at his best, propelling us like Ornette Coleman beyond our conventional orbits through double doors of mundane existence to new and compelling worlds. Come ride these words - it'll be the holiest funkiest ride of your life, a full barreled open throated six cylinder love supreme.' George Wallace editor, PoetryBay 'Ghost & Ganga is utterly original, starting as a super X romp, backtracking and fast-forwarding to flesh out its tender love story. I love the language!
- which dances, sings and delves deeply into both visionary Buddhism and contra-Buddhist satire, riding the music of a yin/yang beat - and dig the characters, presented inside-out. Praise to Kirpal Gordon for creating such a bluesy, true and deliciously rueful novel, a sweet, hip, jazzy pas de deux.' Howard Mandel author of Future Jazz and Miles Ornette Cecil - Jazz Beyond Jazz. Free Jazz, Harmolodics, and Ornette Coleman discusses Ornette Coleman’s musical philosophy of 'Harmolodics,' an improvisational system deeply inspired by the Civil Rights Movement. Falling under the guise of 'free jazz,' Harmolodics can be difficult to understand, even for seasoned musicians and musicologists. Yet this book offers a clear and thorough approach to these complex methods, outlining Coleman’s position as the developer of a logical—and historically significant—system of jazz improvisation. Included here are detailed musical analyses of improvisations, accompanied by full transcriptions.
A Love Supreme John Coltrane Pdf Editor Free
Intimate interviews between the author and Coleman explore the deeper issues at work in Harmolodics, issues of race, class, sex, and poverty. The principle of human equality quickly emerges as a central tenet of Coleman’s life and music. Harmolodics is best understood when viewed in its essential form, both as a theory of improvisation and as an artistic expression of racial and human equality.
Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew is one of the most iconic albums in American music, the preeminent landmark and fertile seedbed of jazz-fusion. Fans have been fortunate in the past few years to gain access to Davis’s live recordings from this time, when he was working with an ensemble that has come to be known as the Lost Quintet.
In this book, jazz historian and musician Bob Gluck explores the performances of this revolutionary group—Davis’s first electric band—to illuminate the thinking of one of our rarest geniuses and, by extension, the extraordinary transition in American music that he and his fellow players ushered in. Gluck listens deeply to the uneasy tension between this group’s driving rhythmic groove and the sonic and structural openness, surprise, and experimentation they were always pushing toward. There he hears—and outlines—a fascinating web of musical interconnection that brings Davis’s funk-inflected sensibilities into conversation with the avant-garde worlds that players like Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane were developing. Going on to analyze the little-known experimental groups Circle and the Revolutionary Ensemble, Gluck traces deep resonances across a commercial gap between the celebrity Miles Davis and his less famous but profoundly innovative peers. The result is a deeply attuned look at a pivotal moment when once-disparate worlds of American music came together in explosively creative combinations.
Jazz & Blues The origins of Western popular music can often be traced back to the two strains of African-American music that developed towards the end of the nineteenth century - jazz, hot from the urban melting pot of New Orleans, and blues, from the desolate landscapes of Texas and the Mississippi Delta. The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Jazz & Blues explores the history and developments of jazz and blues, from New Orleans marching bands and the slave hollers of the Mississippi cotton fields to fusion jazz and modern-day electric blues heroes. Organised by decade, each chapter includes background information and discussion of how the music evolved during the period, while biographical sections explore the lives of important musical figures. The informative text is supported by hundreds of atmospheric photographs, painting a vivid picture of the people and places that have informed the development of jazz and blues music over the years. Written by a team of experts, The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Jazz & Blues is an ideal reference volume for anyone with an interest in these two most influential and enduring of musical styles. As the 1960s ended, Herbie Hancock embarked on a grand creative experiment.
Having just been dismissed from the celebrated Miles Davis Quintet, he set out on the road, playing with his first touring group as a leader until he eventually formed what would become a revolutionary band. Taking the Swahili name Mwandishi, the group would go on to play some of the most innovative music of the 1970s, fusing an assortment of musical genres, American and African cultures, and acoustic and electronic sounds into groundbreaking experiments that helped shape the American popular music that followed. In You’ll Know When You Get There, Bob Gluck offers the first comprehensive study of this influential group, mapping the musical, technological, political, and cultural changes that they not only lived in but also effected. Beginning with Hancock’s formative years as a sideman in bebop and hard bop ensembles, his work with Miles Davis, and the early recordings under his own name, Gluck uncovers the many ingredients that would come to form the Mwandishi sound. He offers an extensive series of interviews with Hancock and other band members, the producer and engineer who worked with them, and a catalog of well-known musicians who were profoundly influenced by the group.
Paying close attention to the Mwandishi band’s repertoire, he analyzes a wide array of recordings—many little known—and examines the group’s instrumentation, their pioneering use of electronics, and their transformation of the studio into a compositional tool. From protofunk rhythms to synthesizers to the reclamation of African identities, Gluck tells the story of a highly peculiar and thrillingly unpredictable band that became a hallmark of American genius.
Coltrane A Love Supreme Analysis
'The best thing to happen to Bing Crosby since Bob Hope,' (WSJ) Gary Giddins presents the second volume of his masterful multi-part biography Bing Crosby dominated American popular culture in a way that few artists ever have. From the dizzy era of Prohibition through the dark days of the Second World War, he was a desperate nation's most beloved entertainer. But he was more than just a charismatic crooner: Bing Crosby redefined the very foundations of modern music, from the way it was recorded to the way it was orchestrated and performed. In this much-anticipated follow-up to the universally acclaimed first volume, NBCC Winner and preeminent cultural critic Gary Giddins now focuses on Crosby's most memorable period, the war years and the origin story of White Christmas. Set against the backdrop of a Europe on the brink of collapse, this groundbreaking work traces Crosby's skyrocketing career as he fully inhabits a new era of American entertainment and culture. While he would go on to reshape both popular music and cinema more comprehensively than any other artist, Crosby's legacy would be forever intertwined with his impact on the home front, a unifying voice for a nation at war. Over a decade in the making and drawing on hundreds of interviews and unprecedented access to numerous archives, Giddins brings Bing Crosby, his work, and his world to vivid life-firmly reclaiming Crosby's central role in American cultural history.
Few albums in the canon of popular music have had the influence, resonance, and endurance of John Coltrane's 1965 classic A Love Supreme-a record that proved jazz was a fitting medium for spiritual exploration and for the expression of the sublime. Bringing the same fresh and engaging approach that characterized his critically acclaimed Kind of Blue: The Making of the Miles Davis Masterpiece, Ashley Kahn tells the story of the genesis, creation, and aftermath of this classic recording. Featuring interviews with more than one hundred musicians, producers, friends, and family members; unpublished interviews with Coltrane and bassist Jimmy Garrison; and scores of never-before-seen photographs, A Love Supreme balances biography, cultural context, and musical analysis in a passionate and revealing portrait.
One of the Best Books of the Year: NPR, GQ, Billboard, JazzTimes In jazz parlance, 'playing changes' refers to an improviser's resourceful path through a chord progression. In this definitive guide to the jazz of our time, leading critic Nate Chinen boldly expands on that idea, taking us through the key changes, concepts, events, and people that have shaped jazz since the turn of the century-from Wayne Shorter and Henry Threadgill to Kamasi Washington and Esperanza Spalding; from the phrase 'America's classical music' to an explosion of new ideas and approaches; from claims of jazz's demise to the living, breathing scene that exerts influence on mass culture, hip-hop, and R&B.
Grounded in authority and brimming with style, packed with essential album lists and listening recommendations, Playing Changes takes the measure of this exhilarating moment-and the shimmering possibilities to come.