Author: Scott DeVeaux
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520922107
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 610
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Book Description
The richest place in America's musical landscape is that fertile ground occupied by jazz. Scott DeVeaux takes a central chapter in the history of jazz—the birth of bebop—and shows how our contemporary ideas of this uniquely American art form flow from that pivotal moment. At the same time, he provides an extraordinary view of the United States in the decades just prior to the civil rights movement. DeVeaux begins with an examination of the Swing Era, focusing particularly on the position of African American musicians. He highlights the role played by tenor saxophonist Coleman Hawkins, a "progressive" committed to a vision in which black jazz musicians would find a place in the world commensurate with their skills. He then looks at the young musicians of the early 1940s, including Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Thelonious Monk, and links issues within the jazz world to other developments on the American scene, including the turmoil during World War II and the pervasive racism of the period. Throughout, DeVeaux places musicians within the context of their professional world, paying close attention to the challenges of making a living as well as of making good music. He shows that bebop was simultaneously an artistic movement, an ideological statement, and a commercial phenomenon. In drawing from the rich oral histories that a living tradition provides, DeVeaux's book resonates with the narratives of individual lives. While The Birth of Bebop is a study in American cultural history and a critical musical inquiry, it is also a fitting homage to bebop and to those who made it possible.
Author: Jan Evensmo
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Jazz musicians
Languages : en
Pages :
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Book Description
Author: Frank Buchmann-Moller
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 9780472025985
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 412
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Book Description
For a half century, Ben Webster, one of the "big three" of swing tenors-along with Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young-was one of the best-known and most popular saxophonists. Early in his career, Webster worked with many of the greatest orchestras of the time, including those led by Willie Bryant, Cab Calloway, Benny Carter, Fletcher Henderson, Andy Kirk, Bennie Moten, and Teddy Wilson. In 1940 Webster became Duke Ellington's first major tenor soloist, and during the next three years he played on many famous recordings, including "Cotton Tail." Someone to Watch Over Me tells, for the first time, the complete story of Ben Webster's brilliant and troubled career. For this comprehensive study of Webster, author Frank Büchmann-Møller interviewed more than fifty people in the United States and Europe, and he includes numerous translated excerpts from European periodicals and newspapers, none previously available in English. In addition, the author studies every known Webster recording and film, including many private recordings from Webster's home collection not available to the public. Exhaustively researched, this is a much needed and long overdue study of the life and music of one of jazz's most important artists.
Author: Chan Parker
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN: 164336278X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 234
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Book Description
A memoir of the Jazz Age and a life profoundly influenced by it My Life in E-flat is the remarkable memoir of a woman who witnessed some of the most important movements in the history of jazz. Through her autobiography, Chan Parker provides intimate insights into the music and into life with Charlie Parker, the key figure in the development of bebop and one of the most important of all jazz musicians. Born Beverly Dolores Berg in New York City at the height of the Jazz Age, Parker's father was a producer of vaudeville shows and her mother was a dancer in Florenz Ziegfeld's Midnight Frolic. Parker became part of the jazz culture as a nightclub dancer and later as the wife of jazz saxophonists Charlie Parker and then Phil Woods. In a moving and candid portrait of Charlie Parker, the author describes in harrowing detail a man of incredible talent besieged with addictions and self-destructiveness. She painfully recounts his death at the age of 35 while married to her and its effect on her life as well as on the musical world. Parker's honest portrait of one of the most gifted musicians in jazz provides unique insight into the history of the music and the difficulties faced by African American performers during the 1940s. Parker also reflects on her struggle to find her own voice and on her work with Clint Eastwood on the film biography of Charlie Parker, Bird (1988).
Author: Buddy Collette
Publisher: Burns & Oates
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 240
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Book Description
Buddy Collette has been a key figure in American jazz since the early 1940s. He is particularly noted as a principal participant in the Central Avenue jazz scene of Los Angeles, which rivals Harlem and New Orleans in its influence on the development of jazz. Collette worked closely with Charles Mingus and Eric Dolphy and went on to join the Chico Hamilton Quintet. He has led his own bands for thirty years as well as writing, arranging and playing on film soundtracks. In this fascinating autobiography, he illuminates the world of the studio musician and charts the developing jazz and social scene on the West Coast from the 1930s, through the Watts upheavals in the 1960s, to the present. He offers moving, first-hand portraits of his friends Charles Mingus, Eric Dolphy and Chico Hamilton, as well as personal accounts of Frank Sinatra, Paul Robeson and Charlie Parker. The book concludes with a fascinating review of Collette's recent activities as a teacher and performer. Book jacket.
