Jazz In Search Of Itself

Author : Larry Kart
Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 0300128193
Total Pages : 352 pages
Book Rating : 4.92/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Jazz in Search of Itself written by Larry Kart and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2008-10-01 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this engaging and astute anthology of jazz criticism, Larry Kart casts a wide net. Discussing nearly seventy major jazz figures and many of the music’s key stylistic developments, Kart sees jazz as a unique perpetual narrative—one in which musicians, their audiences, and the evolving music itself are intimately intertwined. Because jazz arose from the collision of specific peoples under particular conditions, says Kart, its development has been unusually immediate, visible, and intense. Kart has reacted to and judged the music in a similarly active, attentive, and personal manner. His involvement and attention to detail are visible in these pieces: essays that analyze the supposed return to tradition that the music of Wynton Marsalis has come to exemplify; searching accounts of the careers of Miles Davis, Thelonius Monk, Bill Evans, and Lennie Tristano; and writing that explores jazz’s relationship to American popular song and examines the jazz musician’s role as actual and would-be social rebel.

Author : Mark Levine
Publisher : "O'Reilly Media, Inc."
ISBN 13 : 1457101459
Total Pages : 725 pages
Book Rating : 4.58/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Jazz Theory Book written by Mark Levine and published by "O'Reilly Media, Inc.". This book was released on 2011-01-12 with total page 725 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The most highly-acclaimed jazz theory book ever published! Over 500 pages of comprehensive, but easy to understand text covering every aspect of how jazz is constructed---chord construction, II-V-I progressions, scale theory, chord/scale relationships, the blues, reharmonization, and much more. A required text in universities world-wide, translated into five languages, endorsed by Jamey Aebersold, James Moody, Dave Liebman, etc.

Author : Ted Gioia
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN 13 : 0199840296
Total Pages : 481 pages
Book Rating : 4.98/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The History of Jazz written by Ted Gioia and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1997-11-20 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jazz is the most colorful and varied art form in the world and it was born in one of the most colorful and varied cities, New Orleans. From the seed first planted by slave dances held in Congo Square and nurtured by early ensembles led by Buddy Belden and Joe "King" Oliver, jazz began its long winding odyssey across America and around the world, giving flower to a thousand different forms--swing, bebop, cool jazz, jazz-rock fusion--and a thousand great musicians. Now, in The History of Jazz, Ted Gioia tells the story of this music as it has never been told before, in a book that brilliantly portrays the legendary jazz players, the breakthrough styles, and the world in which it evolved. Here are the giants of jazz and the great moments of jazz history--Jelly Roll Morton ("the world's greatest hot tune writer"), Louis Armstrong (whose O-keh recordings of the mid-1920s still stand as the most significant body of work that jazz has produced), Duke Ellington at the Cotton Club, cool jazz greats such as Gerry Mulligan, Stan Getz, and Lester Young, Charlie Parker's surgical precision of attack, Miles Davis's 1955 performance at the Newport Jazz Festival, Ornette Coleman's experiments with atonality, Pat Metheny's visionary extension of jazz-rock fusion, the contemporary sounds of Wynton Marsalis, and the post-modernists of the Knitting Factory. Gioia provides the reader with lively portraits of these and many other great musicians, intertwined with vibrant commentary on the music they created. Gioia also evokes the many worlds of jazz, taking the reader to the swamp lands of the Mississippi Delta, the bawdy houses of New Orleans, the rent parties of Harlem, the speakeasies of Chicago during the Jazz Age, the after hours spots of corrupt Kansas city, the Cotton Club, the Savoy, and the other locales where the history of jazz was made. And as he traces the spread of this protean form, Gioia provides much insight into the social context in which the music was born. He shows for instance how the development of technology helped promote the growth of jazz--how ragtime blossomed hand-in-hand with the spread of parlor and player pianos, and how jazz rode the growing popularity of the record industry in the 1920s. We also discover how bebop grew out of the racial unrest of the 1940s and '50s, when black players, no longer content with being "entertainers," wanted to be recognized as practitioners of a serious musical form. Jazz is a chameleon art, delighting us with the ease and rapidity with which it changes colors. Now, in Ted Gioia's The History of Jazz, we have at last a book that captures all these colors on one glorious palate. Knowledgeable, vibrant, and comprehensive, it is among the small group of books that can truly be called classics of jazz literature.

Author : Benjamin Ehrlich
Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN 13 : 0374718776
Total Pages : 274 pages
Book Rating : 4.70/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Brain in Search of Itself written by Benjamin Ehrlich and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2022-03-15 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Passionate and meticulous . . . [Ehrlich] delivers thought-provoking metaphors, unforgettable scenes and many beautifully worded phrases." —Benjamin Labatut, The New York Times Book Review One of The Telegraph's best books of the year The first major biography of the Nobel Prize–winning scientist who discovered neurons and transformed our understanding of the human mind—illustrated with his extraordinary anatomical drawings Unless you’re a neuroscientist, Santiago Ramón y Cajal is likely the most important figure in the history of biology you’ve never heard of. Along with Charles Darwin and Louis Pasteur, he ranks among the most brilliant and original biologists of the nineteenth century, and his discoveries have done for our understanding of the human brain what the work of Galileo and Sir Isaac Newton did for our conception of the physical universe. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1906 for his lifelong investigation of the structure of neurons: “The mysterious butterflies of the soul,” Cajal called them, “whose beating of wings may one day reveal to us the secrets of the mind.” And he produced a dazzling oeuvre of anatomical drawings, whose alien beauty grace the pages of medical textbooks and the walls of museums to this day. Benjamin Ehrlich’s The Brain in Search of Itself is the first major biography in English of this singular figure, whose scientific odyssey mirrored the rocky journey of his beloved homeland of Spain into the twentieth century. Born into relative poverty in a mountaintop hamlet, Cajal was an enterprising and unruly child whose ambitions were both nurtured and thwarted by his father, a country doctor with a flinty disposition. A portrait of a nation as well a biography, The Brain in Search of Itself follows Cajal from the hinterlands to Barcelona and Madrid, where he became an illustrious figure—resisting and ultimately transforming the rigid hierarchies and underdeveloped science that surrounded him. To momentous effect, Cajal devised a theory that was as controversial in his own time as it is universal in ours: that the nervous system is comprised of individual cells with distinctive roles, just like any other organ in the body. In one of the greatest scientific rivalries in history, he argued his case against Camillo Golgi and prevailed. In our age of neuro-imaging and investigations into the neural basis of the mind, Cajal is the artistic and scientific forefather we must get to know. The Brain in Search of Itself is at once the story of how the brain as we know it came into being and a finely wrought portrait of an individual as fantastical and complex as the subject to which he devoted his life.

Author : Stephon Alexander
Publisher : Basic Books
ISBN 13 : 0465098509
Total Pages : 272 pages
Book Rating : 4.07/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Jazz of Physics written by Stephon Alexander and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2016-04-26 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: More than fifty years ago, John Coltrane drew the twelve musical notes in a circle and connected them by straight lines, forming a five-pointed star. Inspired by Einstein, Coltrane put physics and geometry at the core of his music. Physicist and jazz musician Stephon Alexander follows suit, using jazz to answer physics' most vexing questions about the past and future of the universe. Following the great minds that first drew the links between music and physics-a list including Pythagoras, Kepler, Newton, Einstein, and Rakim-The Jazz of Physics reveals that the ancient poetic idea of the Music of the Spheres," taken seriously, clarifies confounding issues in physics. The Jazz of Physics will fascinate and inspire anyone interested in the mysteries of our universe, music, and life itself.

Author : K. Heather Pinson
Publisher : Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN 13 : 1604734957
Total Pages : 253 pages
Book Rating : 4.59/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Jazz Image written by K. Heather Pinson and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2010-12-01 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Typically, a photograph of a jazz musician has several formal prerequisites: black-and-white film, an urban setting in the mid-twentieth century, and a black man standing, playing, or sitting next to his instrument. That's the jazz archetype that photography created. Author K. Heather Pinson discovers how such a steadfast script developed visually and what this convention meant for the music. Album covers, magazines, books, documentaries, art photographs, posters, and various other visual extensions of popular culture formed the commonly held image of the jazz player. Through assimilation, there emerged a generalized composite of how mainstream jazz looked and sounded. Pinson evaluates representations of jazz musicians from 1945 to 1959, concentrating on the seminal role played by Herman Leonard (b. 1923). Leonard's photographic depictions of African American jazz musicians in New York not only created a visual template of a black musician of the 1950s, but also became the standard configuration of the music's neoclassical sound today. To discover how the image of the musician affected mainstream jazz, Pinson examines readings from critics, musicians, and educators, as well as interviews, musical scores, recordings, transcriptions, liner notes, and oral narratives.

Author : Marc Myers
Publisher : University of California Press
ISBN 13 : 0520305515
Total Pages : 278 pages
Book Rating : 4.19/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Why Jazz Happened written by Marc Myers and published by University of California Press. This book was released on 2019-02-26 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why Jazz Happened is the first comprehensive social history of jazz. 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.

Author : Robert Rawlins
Publisher : Hal Leonard Corporation
ISBN 13 : 1476840873
Total Pages : 275 pages
Book Rating : 4.71/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Jazzology written by Robert Rawlins and published by Hal Leonard Corporation. This book was released on 2005-07-01 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: (Jazz Instruction). A one-of-a-kind book encompassing a wide scope of jazz topics, for beginners and pros of any instrument. A three-pronged approach was envisioned with the creation of this comprehensive resource: as an encyclopedia for ready reference, as a thorough methodology for the student, and as a workbook for the classroom, complete with ample exercises and conceptual discussion. Includes the basics of intervals, jazz harmony, scales and modes, ii-V-I cadences. For harmony, it covers: harmonic analysis, piano voicings and voice leading; modulations and modal interchange, and reharmonization. For performance, it takes players through: jazz piano comping, jazz tune forms, arranging techniques, improvisation, traditional jazz fundamentals, practice techniques, and much more!

Author : Ted Gioia
Publisher : Univ of California Press
ISBN 13 : 9780520217294
Total Pages : 450 pages
Book Rating : 4.92/5 ( download)

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Download or read book West Coast Jazz written by Ted Gioia and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1998-10 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ted Gioia tells the story of jazz as it has never been told before, in a book that brilliantly portrays the legendary players, the breakthrough styles, and the world in which it evolved. Gioia provides readers with lively portraits of great musicians, intertwined with vibrant commentary on the music they created. 9 photos.

Author : Dave Gelly
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781840441420
Total Pages : 168 pages
Book Rating : 4.29/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Icons of Jazz written by Dave Gelly and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In celebration of the first hundred years of jazz, Icons of Jazz presents a selection of representatives from all aspects of the genre: the New Orleans and Dixieland of the first two decades of the 20th century; the swing and jump jive of the 1920s and 1930s; bebop and its legacy of the 1940s and 1950s; the free jazz of the 1960s; jazz-rock from the 1970s; and the melting pot that was jazz in the 1980s and throughout the 1990s. Each entry includes details of the life and work of the artist or band concerned, recommends essential recordings, and is illustrated with stunning black-and-white photographs."--