Ray Brown: His Life and Music is the first full-length biography of Ray Brown, one of the most outstanding practitioners of bass playing in jazz music. Brown's career spans the most popular and creative eras of jazz, from 1940 to the dawn of the 21st century. During his early professional career, Ray Brown first toured with territory bands, and by 1946, he was hired by Dizzy Gillespie to play in his small group and big band. At this time, Brown became the first call New York bassist to acc...

**The National Bestseller • One of The Minneapolis Star Tribune's Best Books of the Year“A superb book...[Kaplan is] a master biographer, a dogged researcher and shaper of narrative, and this is his most ambitious book to date.” —Los Angeles TimesFrom the author of the definitive biography of Frank Sinatra, the story of three towering artists—Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Bill Evans—and how they came together to create the most iconic jazz album of all t...

The Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings is firmly established as the world's leading guide to recorded jazz, a mine of fascinating information and a source of insightful - often wittily trenchant - criticism. This is something rather different: Brian Morton (who taught American history at UEA) has picked out the 1000 best recordings that all jazz fans should have and shows how they tell the history of the music and with it the history of the twentieth century. He has completely revis...

An entertaining trivia compendium flush with fun facts about all things music.From boogie-woogie to Beethoven, from Prince to Pavarotti, from the bards of Broadway to the rebels of rock 'n' roll—it's all here. Uncle John has created this harmonious collection of tuneful tales for music lovers everywhere.Uncle John has proven once again that he is in tune with our legion of loyal readers. This 516-page musical masterpiece dedicated to all things noteworthy r...

An updated new edition of Ted Gioia's acclaimed compendium of jazz standards, featuring 15 additional selections, hundreds of additional recommended tracks, and enhancements and additions on almost every page. Since the first edition of The Jazz Standards was published in 2012, author Ted Gioia has received almost non-stop feedback and suggestions from the passionate global community of jazz enthusiasts and performers requesting crucial additions and corrections t...

The acclaimed classic biography, now available as an ebook.Please note that this edition does not include illustrations.The revised edition of Ian Carr’s classic biography of Miles Davis throws new light on his life and career from the early days in New York, with Charlie Parker, to his Birth of the Cool band, through his drug addiction in the early 1950s, and the years of extraordinary achievements, 1954-1960, during which he created a whole series of masterpieces on recor...

A guide to the all-time must-have jazz recordings by a maven of the genre.Possibly the twentieth century’s greatest musical innovation, jazz is now more popular than it has been for the past fifty years. But with the plethora of new recordings and the phenomenon in jazz of the same standards being recorded seemingly by almost every artist and band or trio, it’s very hard to know where to start or to improve a CD collection.The Essential Jazz Recordings provides a t...

A music journalist offers a lively history of modern jazz through its formative and most vital decades—from Charlie Parker to John Coltrane.In Giant Steps, Kenny Mathieson examines the most important figures in the creation of modern jazz, detailing the emergence and evolution of bebop through the likes of Dizzy Gillespie, Fats Navarro, Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk and Miles Davis. Using this as its starting point, Mathieson then delves into the developments...

"There are no definitive histories," writes Elijah Wald, in this provocative reassessment of American popular music, "because the past keeps looking different as the present changes." Earlier musical styles sound different to us today because we hear them through the musical filter of other styles that came after them, all the way through funk and hiphop. As its blasphemous title suggests, How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll rejects the conventional pieties of mainstream jazz and rock ...

An intimate exploration into the musical genius of fifteen living jazz legends, from the longtime New York Times jazz criticJazz is conducted almost wordlessly: John Coltrane rarely told his quartet what to do, and Miles Davis famously gave his group only the barest instructions before recording his masterpiece "Kind of Blue." Musicians are often loath to discuss their craft for fear of destroying its improvisational essence, rendering jazz among the most e...

Charlie Gillett, a British journalist, loves the music, and his passion is evident throughout The Sound of the City. Yet the greatest strength of the book is the way Gillett tracks the resistance of the music industry to early rock-and-roll, which was followed (needless to say) by a frantic rush to engulf and devour it.When first published The Sound of the City was hailed as having 'never been bettered as the definitive history of rock' (Guardian). Now th...

"Arguably the finest biography yet written about a jazz musician . . . [It] will fascinate readers who have never heard a note of Strayhorn's music." —Joel E. Seigel, Washington City PaperA finalist for the National Book Critics Circle AwardBilly Strayhorn (1915–67) was one of the greatest composers in the history of American music, the creator of a body of work that includes such standards as "Take the 'A' Train." Yet all his life...