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AllAboutJazz-New York September 2009 Issue Now Available!
Source:
Michael Ricci
This month, we mourn the passing of the seminal composer George Russell, whose book, Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization, was the precursor for a modal approach to jazz and such masterworks as Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue. But for such a pedigree, Russell may not be well-known to some readers. The history of jazz, for all its iconic figures like Miles, is made richer for its more obscure participants. These may play a less assertive instrument or just have ...
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"Maynard!" -- New Book About Maynard Ferguson Now Available
Source:
Michael Ricci
MAYNARD! becomes the first new book on bandleader and jazz trumpet phenomenon Maynard Ferguson in nearly a dozen years. It's 240 pages of raw MF as remembered in interviews by 30 musicians and others from his earliest U.S. gigs in the late 40s to the peak of his career on Columbia Records in the 70s. Grammy winning producer Ralph Jungheim rolled tape on this hand-picked group of Ferguson intimates, revealing the innermost workings of Maynard--the man, the musician, and the ...
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New Book by Kevin Belford Chronicles Pre-WWII History of St. Louis Blues
Source:
St. Louis Jazz Notes by Dean Minderman
St. Louis artist and author Kevin Belford, who has made local musicians a frequent subject of his work over the course of his career, has a new book coming out that chronicles St. Louis blues musicians of the 1920s and 1930s.Issued by St. Louis-based Virginia Publishing, Devil at the Confluence: The Pre-War Blues Music of St. Louis is a coffee-table book recounting the stories and songs of legends including Peetie Wheatstraw, Henry Townsend, St. Louis Bessie and many ...
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Nathanael West and the Writing of 'The Day of the Locust'
Source:
Michael Ricci
The year 1939, when Europe was going up in flames and America clung to the hope that it need not become part of a world at war, turned out to be a miracle moment for Los Angeles fiction.
The publication of “The Big Sleep" by Raymond Chandler, John Fante's “Ask The Dust," and “The Day of the Locust" by Nathanael West (the latter just reissued in a new edition, along with “Miss Lonelyhearts," by New Directions, $11.95), three books that ...
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Ellington Uptown: Duke Ellington, James P. Johnson and the Birth of Concert Jazz
Source:
Michael Ricci
By Daniel Kassell In the first Chapter “On Tone Parallels to Harlem" John Howland states the premise that Symphonic Jazz of the 1920's influenced “a wide variety of American musical traditions" covering an awful lot of ground but stipulating it was merely “a minor footnote" in its own time.
Mr. Howland writes, “Why our we to take note of it now?" Because George Gershwin's 1924 performance of “Rhapsody in Blue" with Paul Whiteman's Orchestra in New York City's Aeolian Hall ...
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Album Jackets Make a Classic Fit for Cool Jazz
Source:
Michael Ricci
A psychedelic flowered skull laughing into the darkness. A wave of text twisted across a blank field like a quicksilver melody line.
A photographic lineup of serious young men in dark suits, staring back at the viewer with jarringly direct eye contact that offers an invitation as much as a confrontation.
These are just a few of the sometimes simple but evocative images in Taschen's new book “Jazz Covers," a lush compendium of album art from more than 700 records ...
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AllAboutJazz-New York August 2009 Issue Now Available!
Source:
All About Jazz
One of the more compelling facets of jazz as a musical form is the pliability of its practitioners. Unlike most classical musicians who play scores written for them or rockers who are serial monogamists when it comes to bands, jazz players, for reasons both artistic and economic, usually exist simultaneously as leaders and sidemen. Some start out as one and then become the other but many keep up this balancing act for their entire careers. Jazz is richer for it ...
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The 3 Biggest Reasons Music Magazines Are Dying
Source:
HypeBot
It's no secret that music magazines a rapidly becoming a relic of another era. Most blame a decline in advertising revenue coupled with the growth of free online music media. But ex-Blender staffer Jonah Weiner suggests there are other factors killing our once beloved music rags in his Slate piece “Spinning In The Grave“.
There are fewer superstars, and the same musicians show up on every magazine cover. Music mags have less to offer music lovers, ...Continue Reading
