Author: Michael Dregni
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199883289
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 345
Book Description
Django Reinhardt was arguably the greatest guitarist who ever lived, an important influence on Les Paul, Charlie Christian, B.B. King, Jerry Garcia, Chet Atkins, and many others. Yet there is no major biography of Reinhardt. Now, in Django, Michael Dregni offers a definitive portrait of this great guitarist. Handsome, charismatic, childlike, and unpredictable, Reinhardt was a character out of a picaresque novel. Born in a gypsy caravan at a crossroads in Belgium, he was almost killed in a freak fire that burned half of his body and left his left hand twisted into a claw. But with this maimed left hand flying over the frets and his right hand plucking at dizzying speed, Django became Europe's most famous jazz musician, commanding exorbitant fees--and spending the money as fast as he made it. Dregni not only chronicles this remarkably colorful life--including a fascinating account of gypsy culture--but he also sheds much light on Django's musicianship. He examines his long musical partnership with violinist Stéphane Grappelli--the one suave and smooth, the other sharper and more dissonant--and he traces the evolution of their novel string jazz ensemble, Quintette du Hot Club de France. Indeed, the author spotlights Django's amazing musical diversity, describing his swing-styled Nouveau Quintette, his big band Django's Music, and his later bebop ensemble, as well as his many compositions, including symphonic pieces influenced by Ravel and Debussy and his unfinished organ mass inspired by Bach. And along the way, the author offers vivid snapshots of the jazz scene in Paris--colorful portraits of Josephine Baker, Bricktop, Louis Armstrong, Coleman Hawkins, and countless others--and of Django's vagabond wanderings around France, Europe, and the United States, where he toured with Duke Ellington. Capturing the extraordinary life and times of one of the great musicians of the twentieth century, Django is a must-read portrait of a true original.
Django
Author: Michael Dregni
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199883289
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 345
Book Description
Django Reinhardt was arguably the greatest guitarist who ever lived, an important influence on Les Paul, Charlie Christian, B.B. King, Jerry Garcia, Chet Atkins, and many others. Yet there is no major biography of Reinhardt. Now, in Django, Michael Dregni offers a definitive portrait of this great guitarist. Handsome, charismatic, childlike, and unpredictable, Reinhardt was a character out of a picaresque novel. Born in a gypsy caravan at a crossroads in Belgium, he was almost killed in a freak fire that burned half of his body and left his left hand twisted into a claw. But with this maimed left hand flying over the frets and his right hand plucking at dizzying speed, Django became Europe's most famous jazz musician, commanding exorbitant fees--and spending the money as fast as he made it. Dregni not only chronicles this remarkably colorful life--including a fascinating account of gypsy culture--but he also sheds much light on Django's musicianship. He examines his long musical partnership with violinist Stéphane Grappelli--the one suave and smooth, the other sharper and more dissonant--and he traces the evolution of their novel string jazz ensemble, Quintette du Hot Club de France. Indeed, the author spotlights Django's amazing musical diversity, describing his swing-styled Nouveau Quintette, his big band Django's Music, and his later bebop ensemble, as well as his many compositions, including symphonic pieces influenced by Ravel and Debussy and his unfinished organ mass inspired by Bach. And along the way, the author offers vivid snapshots of the jazz scene in Paris--colorful portraits of Josephine Baker, Bricktop, Louis Armstrong, Coleman Hawkins, and countless others--and of Django's vagabond wanderings around France, Europe, and the United States, where he toured with Duke Ellington. Capturing the extraordinary life and times of one of the great musicians of the twentieth century, Django is a must-read portrait of a true original.
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199883289
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 345
Book Description
Django Reinhardt was arguably the greatest guitarist who ever lived, an important influence on Les Paul, Charlie Christian, B.B. King, Jerry Garcia, Chet Atkins, and many others. Yet there is no major biography of Reinhardt. Now, in Django, Michael Dregni offers a definitive portrait of this great guitarist. Handsome, charismatic, childlike, and unpredictable, Reinhardt was a character out of a picaresque novel. Born in a gypsy caravan at a crossroads in Belgium, he was almost killed in a freak fire that burned half of his body and left his left hand twisted into a claw. But with this maimed left hand flying over the frets and his right hand plucking at dizzying speed, Django became Europe's most famous jazz musician, commanding exorbitant fees--and spending the money as fast as he made it. Dregni not only chronicles this remarkably colorful life--including a fascinating account of gypsy culture--but he also sheds much light on Django's musicianship. He examines his long musical partnership with violinist Stéphane Grappelli--the one suave and smooth, the other sharper and more dissonant--and he traces the evolution of their novel string jazz ensemble, Quintette du Hot Club de France. Indeed, the author spotlights Django's amazing musical diversity, describing his swing-styled Nouveau Quintette, his big band Django's Music, and his later bebop ensemble, as well as his many compositions, including symphonic pieces influenced by Ravel and Debussy and his unfinished organ mass inspired by Bach. And along the way, the author offers vivid snapshots of the jazz scene in Paris--colorful portraits of Josephine Baker, Bricktop, Louis Armstrong, Coleman Hawkins, and countless others--and of Django's vagabond wanderings around France, Europe, and the United States, where he toured with Duke Ellington. Capturing the extraordinary life and times of one of the great musicians of the twentieth century, Django is a must-read portrait of a true original.
Town Journal
Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 588
Book Description
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 588
Book Description
Equity
Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Acting
Languages : en
Pages : 1032
Book Description
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Acting
Languages : en
Pages : 1032
Book Description
Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance
Author: Aberjhani
Publisher: Infobase Publishing
ISBN: 1438130171
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 449
Book Description
Presents articles on the period known as the Harlem Renaissance, during which African American artists, poets, writers, thinkers, and musicians flourished in Harlem, New York.
Publisher: Infobase Publishing
ISBN: 1438130171
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 449
Book Description
Presents articles on the period known as the Harlem Renaissance, during which African American artists, poets, writers, thinkers, and musicians flourished in Harlem, New York.
The Cosmopolitan
Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 944
Book Description
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 944
Book Description
The Perfect Sound
Author: Garrett Hongo
Publisher: Pantheon
ISBN: 0375425063
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 545
Book Description
A poet’s audio obsession, from collecting his earliest vinyl to his quest for the ideal vacuum tubes. A captivating book that “ingeniously mixes personal memoir with cultural history and offers us an indispensable guide for the search of acoustic truth” (Yunte Huang, author of Charlie Chan). Garrett Hongo’s passion for audio dates back to the Empire 398 turntable his father paired with a Dynakit tube amplifier in their modest tract home in Los Angeles in the early 1960s. But his adult quest begins in the CD-changer era, as he seeks out speakers and amps both powerful and refined enough to honor the top notes of the greatest opera sopranos. In recounting this search, he describes a journey of identity where meaning, fulfillment, and even liberation were often most available to him through music and its astonishingly varied delivery systems. Hongo writes about the sound of surf being his first music as a kid in Hawai‘i, about doo-wop and soul reaching out to him while growing up among Black and Asian classmates in L.A., about Rilke and Joni Mitchell as the twin poets of his adolescence, and about feeling the pulse of John Coltrane’s jazz and the rhythmic chords of Billy Joel’s piano from his car radio while driving the freeways as a young man trying to become a poet. Journeying further, he visits devoted collectors of decades-old audio gear as well as designers of the latest tube equipment, listens to sublime arias performed at La Scala, hears a ghostly lute at the grave of English Romantic poet John Keats in Rome, drinks in wisdom from blues musicians and a diversity of poetic elders while turning his ear toward the memory-rich strains of the music that has shaped him: Hawaiian steel guitar and canefield songs; Bach and the Band; Mingus, Puccini, and Duke Ellington. And in the decades-long process of perfecting his stereo setup, Hongo also discovers his own now-celebrated poetic voice.
Publisher: Pantheon
ISBN: 0375425063
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 545
Book Description
A poet’s audio obsession, from collecting his earliest vinyl to his quest for the ideal vacuum tubes. A captivating book that “ingeniously mixes personal memoir with cultural history and offers us an indispensable guide for the search of acoustic truth” (Yunte Huang, author of Charlie Chan). Garrett Hongo’s passion for audio dates back to the Empire 398 turntable his father paired with a Dynakit tube amplifier in their modest tract home in Los Angeles in the early 1960s. But his adult quest begins in the CD-changer era, as he seeks out speakers and amps both powerful and refined enough to honor the top notes of the greatest opera sopranos. In recounting this search, he describes a journey of identity where meaning, fulfillment, and even liberation were often most available to him through music and its astonishingly varied delivery systems. Hongo writes about the sound of surf being his first music as a kid in Hawai‘i, about doo-wop and soul reaching out to him while growing up among Black and Asian classmates in L.A., about Rilke and Joni Mitchell as the twin poets of his adolescence, and about feeling the pulse of John Coltrane’s jazz and the rhythmic chords of Billy Joel’s piano from his car radio while driving the freeways as a young man trying to become a poet. Journeying further, he visits devoted collectors of decades-old audio gear as well as designers of the latest tube equipment, listens to sublime arias performed at La Scala, hears a ghostly lute at the grave of English Romantic poet John Keats in Rome, drinks in wisdom from blues musicians and a diversity of poetic elders while turning his ear toward the memory-rich strains of the music that has shaped him: Hawaiian steel guitar and canefield songs; Bach and the Band; Mingus, Puccini, and Duke Ellington. And in the decades-long process of perfecting his stereo setup, Hongo also discovers his own now-celebrated poetic voice.
Édith Piaf
Author: David Looseley
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 1781382573
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 264
Book Description
The world-famous French singer Édith Piaf (1915-63) was never just a singer. This book suggests new ways of understanding her, her myth and her meanings over time at home and abroad, by proposing the notion of an 'imagined Piaf.
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 1781382573
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 264
Book Description
The world-famous French singer Édith Piaf (1915-63) was never just a singer. This book suggests new ways of understanding her, her myth and her meanings over time at home and abroad, by proposing the notion of an 'imagined Piaf.
Harlem in Montmartre
Author: William A. Shack
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520225376
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 214
Book Description
Illuminates the expatriate African American community of jazz musicians that thrived in the Montmartre district of Paris in the '20s and '30s and helped turn the "city of lights" into the major jazz capital it remains today.
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520225376
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 214
Book Description
Illuminates the expatriate African American community of jazz musicians that thrived in the Montmartre district of Paris in the '20s and '30s and helped turn the "city of lights" into the major jazz capital it remains today.
Operation Heartbreak
Author: Duff Cooper
Publisher: Pickle Partners Publishing
ISBN: 1787200892
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 191
Book Description
First published in 1950, Operation Heartbreak tells the fictional story of Wilie Marygton, a career soldier who was too young for WWI and too old for WWII. Born into a military family, Willie’s one goal in life is to take part in a battle, so he is exhilarated when he receives his commission, and is scheduled to leave for the Western Front on November 9, 1918. However, news of the Armistice changes his orders, and he instead spends the next 20 years in various posts in India and Africa, where his main occupation seems to be big game hunting and polo. With the rise of fascism, he is ready to resign his commission to fight in Spain, but is persuaded otherwise and spends WWII training recruits, lamenting his military status. But in an ironic twist of fate, he does end up playing an important part in the war effort....
Publisher: Pickle Partners Publishing
ISBN: 1787200892
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 191
Book Description
First published in 1950, Operation Heartbreak tells the fictional story of Wilie Marygton, a career soldier who was too young for WWI and too old for WWII. Born into a military family, Willie’s one goal in life is to take part in a battle, so he is exhilarated when he receives his commission, and is scheduled to leave for the Western Front on November 9, 1918. However, news of the Armistice changes his orders, and he instead spends the next 20 years in various posts in India and Africa, where his main occupation seems to be big game hunting and polo. With the rise of fascism, he is ready to resign his commission to fight in Spain, but is persuaded otherwise and spends WWII training recruits, lamenting his military status. But in an ironic twist of fate, he does end up playing an important part in the war effort....
Carmen Abroad
Author: Richard Langham Smith
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108481612
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 387
Book Description
A transnational history of the performance, reception, translation, adaptation and appropriation of Bizet's Carmen from 1875 to 1945. This volume explores how Bizet's opera swiftly travelled the globe, and how the story, the music, the staging and the singers appealed to audiences in diverse contexts.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108481612
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 387
Book Description
A transnational history of the performance, reception, translation, adaptation and appropriation of Bizet's Carmen from 1875 to 1945. This volume explores how Bizet's opera swiftly travelled the globe, and how the story, the music, the staging and the singers appealed to audiences in diverse contexts.