You already know about the Bunnies, now learn about the music that helped shape Playboy.Playboy—the magazine, the empire, the lifestyle—is one of the world's best known brands. Since the launch of Playboy magazine in 1953, two elements have been remarkably consistent: the first, is the celebration of the female form. The second, readers may be surprised to learn, is Playboy's involvement in the music scene. The playboy experience has never been just about sex, but a...

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...

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...

Don't read another book on pentatonic scales until you have read this book. Culture and the Pentatonic Scale is an inside look into the history of the pentatonic scale and its uses. Teachers will be able to use this as an excellent resource for their students. Musicians and non-musicians will read more information about pentatonic scales that they may not have known. Truly a fantastic music guide.

This theoretical book is meant to improve contemporary jazz styles techniques for all musician players of modern jazz.The book is divided into scale exercises, arpeggio exercises, jazz line phrases as well as contemporary chord progressions.

Keith Jarrett ranks among the most accomplished and influential pianists in jazz history. His The Köln Concert stands among the most important jazz recordings of the past four decades, not only because of the music on the record, but also because of the remarkable reception it has received from musicians and lay-listeners alike. Since the album's 1975 release, it has sold over three million copies: a remarkable achievement for any jazz record, but an unprecedented feat fo...

Here is the book jazz lovers have eagerly awaited, the second volume of Gunther Schuller's monumental The History of Jazz. When the first volume, Early Jazz, appeared two decades ago, it immediately established itself as one of the seminal works on American music. Nat Hentoff called it "a remarkable breakthrough in musical analysis of jazz," and Frank Conroy, in The New York Times Book Review, praised it as "definitive.... A remarkable book by any standard...unpa...

When it was first published in 1994, King of Ragtime: Scott Joplin and his Era was widely heralded not only as the most thorough investigation of Scott Joplin's life and music, but also as a gripping read, almost a detective story. This new and expanded edition-more than a third larger than the first-goes far beyond the original publication in uncovering new details of the composer's life and insights into his music. It explores Joplin's early, pre-ragtime career as a quartet sing...

This book is a summary of exercises and jazz improvisation lines designed to improve contemporary jazz style techniques.The book is divided in scale, arpeggios, chromatic exercises and jazz lines phrases from Chris Potter.These exercises should be transposed to all twelve (12) tones, so we can achieve perfect coordination.Major, minor and dominant chords, extended to their highest level, scale wise, arpeggios and chromatic passages.There are none signature c...

This Is Our Music, declared saxophonist Ornette Coleman's 1960 album title. But whose music was it? At various times during the 1950s and 1960s, musicians, critics, fans, politicians, and entrepreneurs claimed jazz as a national art form, an Afrocentric race music, an extension of modernist innovation in other genres, a music of mass consciousness, and the preserve of a cultural elite. This original and provocative book explores who makes decisions about the value of a cultural fo...

In the 1920s and 30s, musicians from Latin America and the Caribbean were flocking to New York, lured by the burgeoning recording studios and lucrative entertainment venues. In the late 1940s and 50s, the big-band mambo dance scene at the famed Palladium Ballroom was the stuff of legend, while modern-day music history was being made as the masters of Afro-Cuban and jazz idiom conspired to create Cubop, the first incarnation of Latin jazz. Then, in the 1960s, as the Latino population came t...

Guitarists face a sometimes-overwhelming number of choices as to where to play a given note or phrase and what fingering to use. While a given fingering for a scale or phrase may be possible, it may not be practical. In this book, jazz guitarist Jimmy Bruno lays out six fingerings for the major scales found to be the most efficient in his thirty years of professional playing. These patterns are then used to derive fingerings for the Dorian mode, mixolydian mode, natural minor, harmonic min...