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"When bebop was new," writes Thomas Owens, "many jazz musicians and most of the jazz audience heard it as radical, chaotic, bewildering music." For a nation swinging to the smoothly orchestrated sounds of the big bands, this revolutionary movement of the 1940s must have seemed destined for a short life on the musical fringe. But today, Owens writes, bebop is nothing less than "the lingua franca of jazz, serving as the principal musical language of thousands of jazz musicians." In Bebop, Owens conducts us on an insightful, loving tour through the music, players, and recordings that changed American culture. Combining vivid portraits of bebop's gigantic personalities with deft musical analysis...
Compiles information and interpretations on the past 500 years of African American history, containing essays on historical research aids, bibliographies, resources for womens' issues, and an accompanying CD-ROM providing bibliographical entries.
A candid account of Wilson's life and career, from his childhood to his association with the critic and producer John Hammond, with Benny Goodman, Billie Holliday, his own bands, Earl Hines, and Art Tatum.
Today, jazz is considered high art, America’s national music, and the catalog of its recordings—its discography—is often taken for granted. But behind jazz discography is a fraught and highly colorful history of research, fanaticism, and the intense desire to know who played what, where, and when. This history gets its first full-length treatment in Bruce D. Epperson’s More Important Than the Music. Following the dedicated few who sought to keep jazz’s legacy organized, Epperson tells a fascinating story of archival pursuit in the face of negligence and deception, a tale that saw curses and threats regularly employed, with fisticuffs and lawsuits only slightly rarer. Epperson exami...
An exceptionally diverse look at blues history, styles, and performances
The African Diaspora presents musical case studies from various regions of the African diaspora, including Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, North America, and Europe, that engage with broader interdisciplinary discussions about race, gender, politics, nationalism, and music. Featured here are jazz, wassoulou music, and popular and traditional musics of the Caribbean and Africa, framed with attention to the reciprocal relationships of the local and the global.
With his catchphrase "Hi-de-ho" and his dramatic singing and dancing, Cab Calloway became the highest-earning African American bandleader of the 1930s. This book traces his remarkable career, his vocal innovations and his bandleading triumphs. It then follows his later career as a star of musical theater.
American National Biography is the first new comprehensive biographical dicionary focused on American history to be published in seventy years. Produced under the auspices of the American Council of Learned Societies, the ANB contains over 17,500 profiles on historical figures written by an expert in the field and completed with a bibliography. The scope of the work is enormous--from the earlest recorded European explorations to the very recent past.
Employing modes of criticism and theory that have transformed study in the humanities, this title addresses questions seldom if ever raised in jazz writing: What are the implications of building jazz history around the medium of the phonograph record? Why did jazz writers first make the claim that jazz is an art?
"Essays cover major historical trends and figures, discuss jazz in different countries, review the role of most instruments and consider the place of jazz in other arts, like dance, literature and film." N.Y. Times Book Rev. "This work is an effective single-volume device, leading current listeners to the music while including enough newer scholarship to retain the interest of connoisseurs." Libr J.