Global Jazz Research

Consult this reference for biographical information on more than 4, 500 figures in todays musical arena. Covering all genres of modern music, Contemporary Musicians profiles artists involved in rock, jazz, pop, rap, rhythm and blues, folk, New Age, country, gospel and reggae. Looking for information on Front man Trent Reznor? Need a list of Van Cliburns early recordings or background details on Johnny Mercers musical career? Music lovers, students, teachers, journalists and other researchers will appreciate and enjoy the lively and descriptive essays of this excellent series. Contemporary Musicians offers biographical statistics, detailed source information, critical essays, selected discographies and, whenever available addresses for the leaders, the legends and the up-and-coming celebrities of popular and classical music. Also provided is a list of selected books, magazines, newspapers and other sources where more information can be found. Nearly every entry contains a photograph of the featured subject. This source is up-to-date with coverage of the performers and writers who interest readers, drawn from the various musical genres as represented by the breakdown of record sales. The series also covers past artists whose accomplishments still have an impact on todays music. This reference is appealing to students because of its contemporary focus, easy format and style. Each volume is alphabeticall

Ken Prouty argues that knowledge of jazz, or more to the point, claims to knowledge of jazz, are the prime movers in forming jazz's identity, its canon, and its community. Every jazz artist, critic, or fan understands jazz differently, based on each individual's unique experiences and insights. Through playing, listening, reading, and talking about jazz, both as a form of musical expression and as a marker of identity, each aficionado develops a personalized relationship to the larger jazz world. Through the increasingly important role of media, listeners also engage in the formation of different communities that not only transcend traditional boundaries of geography, but increasingly exist only in the virtual world. The relationships of ""jazz people"" within and between these communities is at the center of Knowing Jazz. Some groups, such as those in academia, reflect a clash of sensibilities between historical traditions. Others, particularly online communities, represent new and exciting avenues for everyday fans, whose involvement in jazz has often been ignored. Other communities seek to define themselves as expressions of national or global sensibility, pointing to the ever-changing nature of jazz's identity as an American art form in an international setting. What all these communities share, however, is an intimate, visceral link to the music and the artists who make it, brought to life through the medium of recording. Informed by an interdisciplinary approach and approaching the topic from a number of perspectives, Knowing Jazz charts a philosophical course in which many disparate perspectives and varied opinions on jazz can find common ground.

Jazz Italian Style explores a complex era in music history, when politics and popular culture collided with national identity and technology. When jazz arrived in Italy at the conclusion of World War I, it quickly became part of the local music culture. In Italy, thanks to the gramophone and radio, many Italian listeners paid little attention to a performer's national and ethnic identity. Nick LaRocca (Italian-American), Gorni Kramer (Italian), the Trio Lescano (Jewish-Dutch), and Louis Armstrong (African-American), to name a few, all found equal footing in the Italian soundscape. The book reveals how Italians made jazz their own, and how, by the mid-1930s, a genre of jazz distinguishable from American varieties and supported by Mussolini began to flourish in northern Italy and in its turn influenced Italian-American musicians. Most importantly, the book recovers a lost repertoire and an array of musicians whose stories and performances are compelling and well worth remembering.

Jazz emerged during the political and social upheaval of world war, communist revolution, Red Scares, and the Black Migration. The tumult bred disagreements about the cultural significance of jazz that concerned both its African American roots and its international appeal. The questions about what was new or even radical about the music initiated debates that writers recapitulated for decades. Jazz Internationalism offers a bold reconsideration of jazz's influence in Afro-modernist literature. Ranging from the New Negro Renaissance through the social movements of the 1960s, John Lowney articulates nothing less than a new history of Afro-modernist jazz writing. Jazz added immeasurably to the vocabulary for discussing radical internationalism and black modernism in leftist African American literature. Lowney examines how Claude McKay, Ann Petry, Langston Hughes, and many other writers employed jazz as both a critical social discourse and mode of artistic expression to explore the possibilities--and challenges--of black internationalism. The result is an expansive understanding of jazz writing sure to spur new debates.

Finalist for the 2019 Jazz Journalists Association Book of the Year About Jazz, Jazz Awards for Journalism "Is there jazz in China?" This is the question that sent author Eugene Marlow on his quest to uncover the history of jazz in China. Marlow traces China's introduction to jazz in the early 1920s, its interruption by Chinese leadership under Mao in 1949, and its rejuvenation in the early 1980s with the start of China's opening to the world under Premier Deng Xiaoping. Covering a span of almost one hundred years, Marlow focuses on a variety of subjects--the musicians who initiated jazz performances in China, the means by which jazz was incorporated into Chinese culture, and the musicians and venues that now present jazz performances. Featuring unique, face-to-face interviews with leading indigenous jazz musicians in Beijing and Shanghai, plus interviews with club owners, promoters, expatriates, and even diplomats, Marlow marks the evolution of jazz in China as it parallels China's social, economic, and political evolution through the twentieth and into the twenty-first century. Also featured is an interview with one of the extant members of the Jimmy King Big Band of the 1940s, one of the first major all-Chinese jazz big bands in Shanghai. Ultimately, Jazz in China: From Dance Hall Music to Individual Freedom of Expression is a cultural history that reveals the inexorable evolution of a democratic form of music in a Communist state.

A sustained engagement with Theodor Adorno, Jazz As Critique looks to jazz for ways of understanding the inadequacies of contemporary life. Adorno's writings on jazz are notoriously dismissive. Nevertheless, Adorno does have faith in the critical potential of some musical traditions. Music, he suggests, can provide insight into the controlling, destructive nature of modern society while offering a glimpse of more empathetic and less violent ways of being together in the world. Taking Adorno down a path he did not go, this book calls attention to an alternative sociality made manifest in jazz. In response to writing that tends to portray it as a mirror of American individualism and democracy, Fumi Okiji makes the case for jazz as a model of "gathering in difference."Noting that this mode of subjectivity emerged in response to the distinctive history of black America, she reveals that the music cannot but call the integrity of the world into question.

Leonard Bernstein's gifts for drama and connecting with popular audiences made him a central figure in twentieth century American music. Though a Bernstein work might reference anything from modernism to cartoon ditties, jazz permeated every part of his musical identity as a performer, educator, and intellectual. Katherine Baber investigates how jazz in its many styles served Bernstein as a flexible, indeed protean, musical idea. As she shows, Bernstein used jazz to signify American identity with all its tensions and contradictions and to articulate community and conflict, irony and parody, and timely issues of race and gender. Baber provides a thoughtful look at how Bernstein's use of jazz grew out of his belief in the primacy of tonality, music's value as a unique form of human communication, and the formation of national identity in music. She also offers in-depth analyses of On the Town, West Side Story, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and other works to explore fascinating links between Bernstein's art and issues like eclecticism, music's relationship to social engagement, black-Jewish relations, and his own musical identity.

What is jazz? What is gained--and what is lost--when various communities close ranks around a particular definition of this quintessentially American music? Jazz/Not Jazz explores some of the musicians, concepts, places, and practices which, while deeply connected to established jazz institutions and aesthetics, have rarely appeared in traditional histories of the form. David Ake, Charles Hiroshi Garrett, and Daniel Goldmark have assembled a stellar group of writers to look beyond the canon of acknowledged jazz greats and address some of the big questions facing jazz today. More than just a history of jazz and its performers, this collections seeks out those people and pieces missing from the established narratives to explore what they can tell us about the way jazz has been defined and its history has been told.

Jazz great Gerald Wilson (1918-2014), born in Shelby, Mississippi, left a global legacy of paramount significance through his progressive musical ideas and his orchestra's consistent influence on international jazz. Aided greatly by interviews that bring Wilson's voice to the story, Steven Loza presents a perspective on what the musician and composer called his ""jazz pilgrimage."" Wilson uniquely adapted Latin influences into his jazz palette, incorporating many Cuban and Brazilian inflections as well as those of Mexican and Spanish styling. Throughout the book, Loza refers to Wilson's compositions and arrangements, including their historical contexts and motivations. Loza provides savvy musical readings and analysis of the repertoire. He concludes by reflecting upon Wilson's ideas on the place of jazz culture in America, its place in society and politics, its origins, and its future. With a foreword written by Wilson's son, Anthony, and such sources as essays, record notes, interviews, and Wilson's own reflections, the biography represents the artist's ideas with all their philosophical, historical, and cultural dimensions. Beyond merely documenting Wilson's many awards and recognitions, this book ushers readers into the heart and soul of a jazz creator. Wilson emerges a unique and proud African American artist whose tunes became a mosaic of the world.

A People's Music presents the first full history of jazz in East Germany, drawing on new and previously unexamined sources and vivid eyewitness accounts. Helma Kaldewey chronicles the experiences of jazz musicians, fans, and advocates, and charts the numerous policies state socialism issued to manage this dynamic art form. Offering a radical revision of scholarly views of jazz as a musical genre of dissent, this vivid and authoritative study marks developments in the production, performance, and reception of jazz decade by decade, from the GDR's beginning in the 1940s to its end in 1990, examining how members of the jazz scene were engaged with (and were sometimes complicit with) state officials and agencies throughout the Cold War. From postwar rebuilding, to Stalinism and partition, to détente, Ostpolitik, and glasnost, and finally to its acceptance as a national art form, Kaldewey reveals just how many lives jazz has lived.

In Tropical Riffs Jason Borge traces how jazz helped forge modern identities and national imaginaries in Latin America during the mid-twentieth century. Across Latin America jazz functioned as a conduit through which debates about race, sexuality, nation, technology, and modernity raged in newspapers, magazines, literature, and film. For Latin American audiences, critics, and intellectuals--who often understood jazz to stem from social conditions similar to their own--the profound penetration into the fabric of everyday life of musicians like Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, and Charlie Parker represented the promises of modernity while simultaneously posing a threat to local and national identities. Brazilian antijazz rhetoric branded jazz as a problematic challenge to samba and emblematic of Americanization. In Argentina jazz catalyzed discussions about musical authenticity, race, and national culture, especially in relation to tango. And in Cuba, the widespread popularity of Chano Pozo and Dámaso Pérez Prado popularity challenged the United States' monopoly on jazz. Outlining these hemispheric flows of ideas, bodies, and music, Borge elucidates how "America's art form" was, and remains, a transnational project and a collective idea.

Reviews and rates more than 20,000 sizzling recordings by over 1,700 musicians from New Orleans jazz to bebop, fusion and beyond. "Music Maps" chart the evolution of jazz instruments, plus the influence of significant players, vocalists and sidemen.

This classic chronological survey of jazz history brings the various historical styles to life by exploring them through the lives of the musicians and a study of their recordings. KEY TOPICS An eight-part organization covers THE BLUES;PIANO STYLES--1890-1940; NEW ORLEANS JAZZ AND DIXIELAND--1910-1940; SWING--1934-1945; BEBOP--1943-1960; THIRD STREAM, COOL, AND BEYOND--1949- ; FREE JAZZ--1960- ; and JAZZ/ROCK FUSION--1968- . MARKET: For jazz lovers.

The third edition of the Rough Guide to Jazz has over 2,100 critical biographies, ranging from greats like Louis Armstrong and Miles Davis to rising stars like Stacey Kent and Jamie Cullum. As well as outlining every artist''s career, each entry concludes with recommendations of the best of their recordings on CD. The guide includes many illustrations by top jazz photographers.

It's been called America's classical music. The infinite art. The heart and soul of all popular music. But whatever the label, jazz has played an immense cultural role worldwide, opening up vast vistas of musical creativity, generating unforgettable performances, and giving us such iconic artists as Miles Davis, Louis Armstrong, and Duke Ellington. Jazz: The First Century marks the passage of the music's first hundred years by bringing together text and art in a rich, illustrated chronicle that opens up the vibrant world of jazz to everyone. Jazz: The First Century is edited by John Edward Hasse, Curator of American Music at the Smithsonian Institution, leading a writing team of today's finest and most widely respected jazz authorities. Their compelling essays are complemented by an engrossing and sophisticated design packed with more than 300 images, including vintage photographs, sheet music covers, rare album jackets, posters, and more. From the beginning, jazz offered a new kind of musical expression perfectly suited to the innovation and rapid pace of life in the twentieth century. Jazz: The First Century vividly illuminates the circumstances of the music's birth, examines the contributions of its most consequential musicians, and brings to life its many pleasures, from the emotionalism of early blues and the infectious syncopation of ragtime to the exhilaration of 1930s big-band swing and the awesome musical flights of bebop-from the understated sophistication of cool jazz and the boundless expressiveness of free improvisation to the electrifying power of fusion and the potent grooves of jazz-rap and hip-hop. In addition, seventy concise sidebars focus on important songs, key landmarks and personalities, and conventions of jazz performance and composition. They also examine the confluence of jazz with radio and television and with such art forms as film, painting, literature, poetry, classical music, and dance. Here also are hundreds of recommended recordings-selections based on opinions gathered in an international survey of historians, educators, critics, musicians, and broadcasters. For newcomers and aficionados alike, Jazz: The First Century offers a wealth of enlightening information. It's an essential and comprehensive overview of the music Tony Bennett calls "Amrica's greatest contribution to the world...a celebration of life itself."

"Bob Blumenthal has been an excellent and principled jazz writer for many years. I respect his views and I recommend his new book." -- Sonny Rollins The supreme illustrated guide to every aspect of jazz and jazz culture If you've heard of the Cotton Club, but you're not quite a "hep cat" yet, this is the perfect introduction to jazz, complete with a detailed history of the genre, features on the legendary artists, and everything else one needs to become a jazz connoisseur. From the music's beginnings and the cities where it all started to the artists and independent record labels that spread it around the world, Jazz shows how the musical style evolved into a major contribution to the cultural world, and includes: * Breakdowns of key elements--improvisation, blues, swing, solos, and interplay * In-depth accounts of musicians from Duke Ellington to Dizzy Gillespie * History of the various eras and their development * Jazz dictionary and slang usages

First published in 2006. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Alyn Shipton provides a comprehensive and entertaining account of jazz history, while challenging many of the assumptions and mythologies that have surrounded jazz since its birth.