Exploring Top Books of Shelfari

For more than forty years Miles Davis has been in the front rank of American music. Universally acclaimed as a musical genius, Miles is one of the most important and influential musicians in the world. The subject of several biographies, now Miles speaks out himself about his extraordinary life. Miles: The Autobiography, like Miles himself, holds nothing back. For the first time Miles talks about his five-year... (more)

Thinking in Jazz : The Infinite Art of Improvisation (Chicago Studies in Ethnomusicology Series)

Thinking in Jazz : The Infinite Art of Improvisation (Chicago Studies in Ethnomusicology Series)

by Paul Berliner

A landmark in jazz studies, Thinking in Jazz reveals as never before how musicians, both individually and collectively, learn to improvise. Chronicling leading musicians from their first encounters with jazz to the development of a unique improvisatory voice, Paul Berliner documents the lifetime of preparation that lies behind the skilled improviser's every idea. The product of more than fifteen years of... (more)

Kind of Blue: The Making of the Miles Davis Masterpiece

Kind of Blue: The Making of the Miles Davis Masterpiece

by Ashley Kahn

Now in paperback: "A small treasure" ( The New Yorker ) and the best-selling account of the creation of a jazz classic. This critically and commercially acclaimed tribute to the most popular jazz album of all time is now available in paperback. With transcriptions of the unedited session tapes; in-depth interviews with musicians; freshly discovered Columbia Records files; never-before-seen photographs; and a... (more)

The Making of Kind of Blue: Miles Davis and His Masterpiece

The Making of Kind of Blue: Miles Davis and His Masterpiece

by Eric Nisenson

From the moment it was recorded, more than forty years ago, Miles Davis's Kind of Blue was hailed as a jazz classic. To this day, it remains the bestselling jazz album of all time, embraced by fans of all music genres. The album represented a true watershed moment in jazz history, and helped to usher in the first great jazz revolution since bebop. The Making of Kind of Blue is an exhaustively researched... (more)

Blues Up and Down

by Tom Piazza

In these pages Tom Piazza, the award-winning author of The Guide to Classic Recorded Jazz , chronicles two decades of upheaval in the jazz world--and presents a persuasive vision of the music's continuing role in our culture. A tour-de-force mixture of reportage, criticism, and essay, Blues Up and Down confronts the central questions facing the music today: Is there a conflict between innovation and tradition? ... (more)

Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies

Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies

Jackson Pollock dancing to the music as he painted; Romare Bearden's stage and costume designs for Alvin Ailey and Dianne McIntyre; Stanley Crouch stirring his high-powered essays in a room where a drumkit stands at the center: from the perspective of the new jazz studies, jazz is not only a music to define -- it is a culture. Considering musicians and filmmakers, painters and poets, the intellectual... (more)

Jazz in the Bittersweet Blues of Life

by Wynton Marsalis, Carl Vigeland

Travel into the creative heart of the world's most famous jazz musician. Experience the inspiration and joy of creation and performance in Jazz in the Bittersweet Blues of Life, an intimate portrait of a unique artist and his audience. Set in the studio, on the stage, and in great cities and small towns across the country, this book captures life on the road for Marsalis and his musicians, evoking its ritual... (more)

What Is This Thing Called Jazz?: African American Musicians as Artists, Critics, and Activists (Music of the African Diaspora)

What Is This Thing Called Jazz?: African American Musicians as Artists, Critics, and Activists (Music of the African Diaspora)

by Eric Porter

Despite the plethora of writing about jazz, little attention has been paid to what musicians themselves wrote and said about their practice. An implicit division of labor has emerged where, for the most part, black artists invent and play music while white writers provide the commentary. Eric Porter overturns this tendency in his creative intellectual history of African American musicians. He foregrounds... (more)

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Tags: jazz studies

Miles

by Miles Davis, Quincy Troupe