Popular Music History – serie

As an innovative and constantly inventive jazz pianist, Brad Mehldau has attracted a sizable following over the years, one that has grown to expect a singular, intense experience from his performances. With Formation, Brad seeks to extend that experience to the page, by sharing some of the deeply personal elements of his life, and how these came together for him to become the musician and person that he is today. For the first time, he offers an in-depth look at how he came to understand his adoption, survive sexual abuse, and overcome heroin addiction. The book creates a vibrantly-written portrait of the jazz world in New York in the late 1980s and early 1990s, showing how a generation of musicians met and sparked off one another to take the music in new directions, drawing on a wealth of influences but also keeping sight of tradition, including those rooted in both the jazz and classical worlds. The atmosphere of the clubs, the creative scene in Manhattan and Brooklyn, and Brad's early experiences of touring are brilliantly brought to life. The formation of the "Mood Swing" quartet with Joshua Redman is described, as is the growth of Brad's own groups, leading to his acclaimed Art of the Trio series of recordings with bassist Larry Grenadier and drummer Jorge Rossy. The trio's later life with Jeff Ballard joining in place of Rossy; Brad's solo ventures; and his explorations of other areas of music, are also covered. There is no holding back when it comes to Brad's period of heroin addiction - his painful personal decline and ultimate redemption make for compelling and often distressing reading. Yet throughout the book, his own reading and listening are a constant frame of reference and often inspiration, from the works of James Joyce and Thomas Mann to the sounds of Prog rock and Bob Dylan, not to mention critics from Harold Bloom to Terry Eagleton. The book can be read as a bildungsroman, but this coming-of-age is no novel, it is vividly lived personal experience. Intimate, vulnerable and profound, Formation is a rare look inside the mind of an artist at the top of his field, in his own words.

The Small Faces epitomised the maxim, "Never mind the width, feel the quality." In their brief original lifespan, they released just three official albums and a dozen-and-a-half authorised non-album singles and B-sides. Yet more than five decades after the London quartet's split the phenomenal quality of that compact body of work has ensured a continuing and unassailable musical esteem bordering on legend.Gut-bucket vocalist Steve Marriott brought a bluesy grit to both compositions of gravitas and effervescent pop numbers. Bassist Ronnie Lane collaborated with him to form one of the most formidable songwriting partnerships of the era. Ian McLagan was an exhilaratingly blurred-fingered keyboardist. Kenney Jones brought up the rear with blistering drum patterns, with his rolls often used to provide an explosive fanfare to Small Faces singles. Such a talent-oozing line-up was virtually predestined to conjure excellence. 'Tin Soldier', their exquisitely sophisticated psychedelic-soul release of 1967, regularly appears in polls to decide history's greatest singles. However, the band are just as much loved for rip-roaring power-pop like 'Sha-La-La- La-Lee' and 'All or Nothing' and storming instrumental B-sides such as 'Grow Your Own' and 'Almost Grown'. Their acknowledged masterpiece is Ogdens' Nut Gone Flake (1968), an album that was not only artistically superb but boasted a second-side narrative suite that paved the way for rock operas such as the Pretty Things' SF Sorrow and the Who's Tommy. Regardless of style, quality and innovativeness, the Small Faces' music was characterised by a life-affirming joyousness. All this explains why their catalogue is endlessly recycled and why their oeuvre has been disproportionately inspirational.Long Agos and Worlds Apart covers the Small Faces' full, tumultuous story. The book draws on lengthy new interviews, including ones with Jones, Lane’s close friend Pete Townshend and original Small Faces member Jimmy Winston. It features contributions from many associates and intimates, including managers, agents, publicists, songwriters, auxiliary musicians, fan-club personnel, recording engineers, journalists, friends and wives. It also draws on numerous interviews the author conducted down the years with both Jones and McLagan, much of which material is previously unpublished. It is a revealing, impartial, exhaustive and definitive exploration of the corpus and career of a truly great band.

Tomasz Stanko is arguably the greatest jazz musician Poland has ever produced. His career spanned almost 60 years until his death in 2018. A visionary trumpeter and composer, a protege of Krzysztof Komeda and a colleague of musicians from Poland, Sweden, Norway, Britain, Cuba and the USA, his impact on jazz internationally was profound, proving that jazz was not exclusively an American art form but truly world-wide. In 2014 he was awarded the Polytika Passport in Poland, the Prix de musician European in Paris and the Preis der deutschen schallplattenkritik. The book is a no-holds-barred extended interview with broadcaster Rafal Ksiezyk originally published in Polish by Wydawnictwo Literackie.

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 accompany other bop musicians like Charlie Parker and Bud Powell. He also served as the bassist with Norman Granz’s Jazz at the Philharmonic and frequently recorded with an impressive stable of jazz musicians. In 1947 Ray Brown married legendary singer Ella Fitzgerald and soon divided his time by working as the leader of Fitzgerald’s trio while playing with Gillespie, Jazz at the Philharmonic, and as a guest accompanist.After first playing together at Carnegie Hall in 1949, Ray Brown began regularly working with Canadian piano sensation Oscar Peterson until 1965. The Peterson Trio would become one of the most lucrative acts in jazz history. After leaving Peterson, Ray Brown worked as a Los Angeles studio musician and played on numerous commercial recordings but never abandoned swing-based jazz. During these years, he also became involved as a manager, promoter, and teacher. Throughout the mid-1970s until he died in 2002, Ray Brown remained one of the most excellent practitioners of mainstream jazz during a time when some elements of the music moved far away from this style. With so many bop musicians succumbing to drugs and tragedy, Ray Brown’s longevity and professionalism are a testament to his talents, intelligence, and professionalism.

The Ultimate Guide to Great Reggae celebrates (and helps you find) the greatest songs of reggae. It focuses on every style of reggae, from mento to Jamaican R&B, ska, rock steady, dub, DJ roots, dancehall and more. It opens with an exceptionally comprehensive brief history of reggae. This is followed by 52 chapters, each devoted to in-depth descriptions of the greatest songs for a particular artist or style. Over 750 great songs are detailed, and many more are discussed. More than 200 of reggae's stars, cult artists, one-hit wonders and forgotten greats are profiled, encompassing the music's full six decade span. Many of the songs and artists receive their overdue first coverage in print. The seven chapters on Bob Marley describe every one of his more than 600 recordings, his 200 best songs receiving detailed profiles. Well written, insightful and engaging, The Ultimate Guide to Great Reggae is more than an invaluable buyer's guide and more than a comprehensive history. It's a love letter to reggae that's joy to read. It's the one essential book for any reggae fan, and is interesting and accessible for anyone who enjoys reading about music.

Scouse Pop is a journey into the personalities and music of the successful pioneering Liverpool pop bands of the late seventies and eighties. It examines their motivations, their uniqueness and the routes to success which made them into enduring musical innovators. It looks at the reasons why art-pop bands such as OMD, China Crisis, Echo and the Bunnymen, Black and Frankie Goes to Hollywood managed to combine art and commerce with such spectacular success. The bands experienced their own ‘revolutions in the head,’ internal revolutions than eventually made many of them household names.The development of these suburban romantics from Liverpool represented a period of intensive creativity and musical romanticism that still resonates today. The spirit of (internal) revolution at the heart of these bands retains a strong fascination for those interested in artistic creation and popular culture. Given the bleak and uninspiring context within which the bands surfaced, how did these musicians achieve great success? Scouse Pop explores this question in detail, and examines the factors that facilitated the transformation of Liverpool teenage dreams into commercial and cultural impact. The music industry, radio and DJs, producers and engineers, the record-buying public and the bands themselves comprise the heart of this account.

Born in 1905, Bill Russell demonstrated diverse musical interests from an early age. Having been a contemporary of John Cage, Henry Cowell, and Lou Harrison, amongst others, his significance as a percussion composer is well known amongst aficionados. His work as a musicologist of New Orleans jazz music is equally acclaimed. He became the first Curator of the newly formed Tulane Jazz Archives at New Orleans in 1958. He was a major figure in the development of the revival of interest in the music of that City, notably from his recordings of trumpet player Bunk Johnson in the 1940s.This is the first full-length book about Mr. Russell's life to be largely "in his own words." The book is based largely on personal interviews conducted with Russell about the great diversity of his life's work, interspersed with views and anecdotes about him from his friends and associates written especially for the book, together with archival material. These sources are woven together to give a portrait of an extremely talented, modest man who forsook an academic career to become a champion of the music and musicians of New Orleans.

Trumpeter and composer Kenny Wheeler (1930–2014) was one of the most enigmatic and influential musicians in recent memory. His instantly recognisable sound was a driving force within every major innovation in modern European jazz during the last half of the 20th century. More importantly, his life provides us with a profound example of the way music can manifest itself in the most unlikely of vessels. As a lonely and shy teenager in Canada, he sought refuge from his difficult home life in the friendships he forged through a mutual love of bebop. After an unexpectedly bold move to London at the age of 22, he struggled with his confidence for years before making his first big break with the John Dankworth Orchestra. Kenny would soon find his voice in a triumvirate of musical communities: straight-ahead jazz, the burgeoning free scene, and in the busy recording studios.Throughout his life, he constantly pursued personal growth while investing in his friends from every corner of the music business who would bring the inimitable beauty, precision, and chaos in his compositions to life. And in an artform where individuality represents the highest level of expression, Kenny was peerless. Indeed, few jazz artists of any era developed such a fingerprint in one area, let alone becoming immediately identifiable as virtuoso instrumentalists, improvisors, and composers.Kenny Wheeler’s life is a compelling – and fundamentally human – story. This book brings together over 130 original interviews and new archival and biographical research on Wheeler’s life and music, chronicling his journey from small town Canada to international acclaim. It is as much a perspective on the history and development of jazz in Britain and Europe as it is the extraordinary tale of this improbable pioneer.

Graham Collier's career in jazz lasted over five decades. He was a bassist, a band-leader, a composer, an educator and an author, who wrote extensively about the music. His working life was littered with 'firsts'. Amongst his many achievements, he was the first British jazz musician to study at the Berklee School of music in Boston and the first to receive an Arts Council grant. In 1985, Collier began teaching at the Royal Academy of Music, where he later established the first full-time jazz degree course in the UK in 1987. Mosaics draws extensively on Collier's personal archive, as well as on interviews with fellow musicians, ex-students and colleagues from the Royal Academy of Music. It locates Collier and his work within the social and cultural changes which occurred during his life and, particularly, in relation to developments in British and European jazz of the 1960s and 70s. Collier's work as a composer-bandleader represented an attempt to resolve the paradoxes inherent in jazz between composition and improvisation, familiarity and spontaneity and change and tradition. In this regard, Mosaics compares Collier's work with other composers such as Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus, Gil Evans, Mike Westbrook, Stan Tracey, Barry Guy and Butch Morris. Throughout, Collier emerges as a contradictory figure falling between several different camps. He was never an out-and-out musical, cultural or political radical but rather an individualist continually forced to confront the contradictions in his own position - a musical outsider working within a marginalised area of cultural activity; a gay man operating in a very male area of the music business and within heterosexist culture in general; a man of working class origins stepping outside traditionally prescribed class boundaries; and a musician-composer seeking individual solutions to collective problems of aesthetic and ethical value.

This is the first book about the life of jazz pianist and composer Stan Tracey CBE (1926-2013). Drawn largely from his personal diaries and some of his many interviews, his son Clark Tracey pieces together what made the late Stan Tracey a unique character in jazz music. Stan's wit and wisdom also come shining through in abundance in this long overdue account of one of the UK's most important jazz musicians. In a career that spanned 70 years, Stan Tracey recalls his earliest memories in war torn London and his first experiences of hearing jazz. As a teenager, he joined ENSA and the RAF Gang Show and for the next three years played at more venues than many musicians do in a lifetime. Once demobbed, Stan befriends pianist Eddie Thomson, vibist and drummer Victor Feldman and clarinettist Vic Ash and begins his career in music. He toured with Kenny Baker's band and the Kirchin Band before joining the Ted Heath Orchestra, then began recording under his own name. He was asked by Ronnie Scott to be the house pianist at Scott's new club, where Stan's legendary status grew for the next six years. He accompanied giants of American jazz such as Stan Getz, Sonny Rollins, Roland Kirk, Dexter Gordon, Freddie Hubbard and many others. During this period he wrote and recorded the seminal album Under Milk Wood, which to this day remains his best selling work. Stan left Ronnie's club following a drug addiction and in the 1970s found himself penniless. His wife Jackie employed her skill in the music business as an A&R from previous years and began presenting concerts to keep Stan afloat, as he formed new musical friendships in the free/improvised idiom at that time, such as Mike Osborne and Keith Tippett. Commissions for suites emerged and Stan's writing skills found an outlet again through the formation of his various groups that were to last for nearly 30 years. Stan's achievements and awards are ample and in many cases unique. Recipient of an OBE and a CBE, Stan also received several lifetime achievement awards and in his last year became the first recipient of the Ivor Novello Jazz Award. The book includes a complete discography of all commercial recordings featuring Stan Tracey, compiled by Stephen Didymus.

When Mark Murphy died in October 2015, some of the obituaries mourned the passing of the greatest jazz singer in history. Murphy was the last of his kind, a hipster of the Kerouac generation, who rejected the straight life of prosperity and numb consumerism. With a catalogue of more than 40 albums under his own name as well as numerous guest appearances, Mark Murphy was a consummate improviser, who never sang a song the same way twice. He could have enjoyed a successful mainstream career in the vein of Mel Torme or Jack Jones. But his ambition was greater - to be an artist, to rebel against the commercial music industry and to carry the jazz vocal flame wherever it led him. Murphy was a master of scat and vocalese, of songwriting and the spoken word. He expanded the jazz singing repertoire, adding his own lyrics to instrumentals like John Coltrane's Naima, Freddie Hubbard's Red Clay, and Oliver Nelson's Stolen Moments. Unrivalled as an interpreter of ballads, he was able to express longing and regret to a degree lacking in any other jazz singer. For years he roamed the world, playing thousands of gigs. Rediscovered in the Eighties by a new audience of jazz dancers, and again in the 21st century by a digital generation who remixed him and invited him to guest on their recordings, he remains a crucial though unjustly neglected figure in vocal jazz. This Is Hip is more than a biography: it also explores Murphy's innovative approaches both to singing and to the teaching of singers. Based on numerous interviews with those who knew him best, the book delves into a performing and recording career that spanned 60 years and earned him five Grammy nominations.

Over forty years have elapsed since the death of the British jazz legend Tubby Hayes and yet his story still continues to captivate. Beginning as a precociously talented teenage saxophonist, he took first the local and then the international jazz scene by storm, displaying gifts equal to the finest American jazzmen. He appeared with none other than Duke Ellington and proved almost single-handedly that British jazz need not labour under an inferiority complex. Hayes's triumphs during the 1950s and 60s enabled still later generations of English musicians to take their music onto the world stage. However, his story, distorted by the folklore surrounding his tragically early death, aged only 38, has rarely been accurately recorded. Much of what has been written, broadcast and recounted about Hayes has added only confusion to our understanding of his short but brilliant life. In this new, expanded paperback edition, award-winning saxophonist and writer Simon Spillett, widely regarded as the world's leading authority on Hayes and his work, painstakingly outlines a career that alternated professional success and personal downfall. Using credible eye-witness recollection, drawn from conversations with Hayes's family, partners, friends and musical colleagues, unique access to Hayes's own tape, photographic and personal archives - including papers that have only recently come to light - and extensive contemporary research material, Spillett has reconstructed the trajectory of his subject's life both candidly and respectfully.

Canadian-American singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright (b. 1973) is famous around the world for his multi-faceted musical style, shown through both his recorded output and his engaging live performances. In this book, Katherine Williams combines aspects of his life story with scholarly readings drawn from several methodologies. Popular music studies, opera, queer studies, music and geography, the sound-box: all combine to give a rich biographical and interpretative overview of Wainwright's life and music. Williams brings together close musical analysis with such varied disciplinary perspectives with a tone that is both in-depth and scholarly, and accessible. The book is a must-read for fans, students and scholars alike.

If any man could be defined as the epitome of the modern jazz singer, it would surely be Jon Hendricks. His contributions to jazz as a whole were colossal: a hipster, a bopster, a comic and raconteur, a wordsmith par excellence, and a fearless improviser who took the arts of scatting and vocalese to new heights. As a founder member of the groundbreaking vocal trio Lambert, Hendricks and Ross, he changed forever the public perception of what a jazz singer could be. Jon Hendricks started singing professionally at the age of seven. Within five years he was supporting his entire family - including three sisters, eleven brothers and a niece - with his earnings from radio appearances. He was active in jazz long before the birth of bebop, and didn't stop until he was in his nineties. Taught by the pioneering bebop pianist Art Tatum, Hendricks performed with everyone of any consequence in jazz, from Louis Armstrong to Charlie Parker. Before Lambert, Hendricks and Ross astonished the world with their album Sing A Song Of Basie, he was writing songs for Louis Jordan. Later he wrote for stage, screen and the press, and influenced and worked with Manhattan Transfer, Bobby McFerrin and Kurt Elling. Not content with writing lyrics for jazz instrumentals, he turned his hand later in life to classical works by Rimsky-Korsakov and Rachmaninoff. When Jon Hendricks died in 2017, he left behind a final masterwork - his fully-lyricized adaptation of the Miles Davis album Miles Ahead.

Scouse Pop is a journey into the personalities and music of the successful pioneering Liverpool pop bands of the late seventies and eighties. It examines their motivations, their uniqueness and the routes to success which made them into enduring musical innovators. It looks at the reasons why art-pop bands such as OMD, China Crisis, Echo and the Bunnymen, Black and Frankie Goes to Hollywood managed to combine art and commerce with such spectacular success. The bands experienced their own ‘revolutions in the head,’ internal revolutions than eventually made many of them household names.The development of these suburban romantics from Liverpool represented a period of intensive creativity and musical romanticism that still resonates today. The spirit of (internal) revolution at the heart of these bands retains a strong fascination for those interested in artistic creation and popular culture. Given the bleak and uninspiring context within which the bands surfaced, how did these musicians achieve great success? Scouse Pop explores this question in detail, and examines the factors that facilitated the transformation of Liverpool teenage dreams into commercial and cultural impact. The music industry, radio and DJs, producers and engineers, the record-buying public and the bands themselves comprise the heart of this account.

Two Bold Singermen and the English Folk Revival explores the lives and song traditions of two of the most influential English traditional singers: Sam Larner and Harry Cox. Using extensive primary evidence, including recorded interviews with both men, the book provides the first detailed biographies of these great singers, placing their singing and repertoires within the social and cultural contexts in which they lived. Larner and Cox were born within six years and 15 miles of each other, in late-nineteenth century Norfolk. Both men grew up in large, working-class, families, started work before their teens, spent their working lives in hard manual labour - Sam as a trawlerman, Harry as a farm labourer - married late and lived into their 80s. Crucially, both men were singers from an early age, amassed large repertoires of songs that are now established in the traditional canon and became key figures in the 'folk revival' of the 1950s and 60s. They directly influenced performers such as Martin Carthy, Shirley Collins, Peggy Seeger, Young Tradition and Steeleye Span, and indirectly influenced Paul Simon and Bob Dylan. Their impact extends to the current generation of performers and composers in the folk, Americana and singer/songwriter fields and even to Hollywood.

Komeda: A Private Life in Jazz is the biography of Krzysztof (Trzciński) Komeda (1931-1969), composer of no fewer than 40 soundtracks, including film scores to all of Roman Polański's early films such as Knife in the Water and Rosemary's Baby; and revered figure in the world of jazz, which regards his album, Astigmatic (released in 1966), as a key album in the history of European jazz. This biography of Komeda, originally published in Polish by Znak in 2018, the first to be published in the English language, not only traces Komeda's life, but also the development of Polish jazz during this period, showing how this arose in large part out of a need for self-expression and personal freedom during a repressive period of Soviet communist dominance. The book is full of interviews between the biographer and people who worked with and knew Krzysztof Komeda personally, and, while thoroughly-grounded in primary sources, it is written in a playful, questioning, engaging style.

Rounder Records was born in 1970, a "hobby that got out of control," a fledging record company more or less conceived while the Sixties were still in flower, which began on just over $1,000. Founded by three friends just out of college, the Boston-area company produced over 3,000 record albums, the most active company of the last half-century specializing in roots music and its contemporary offshoots. Rounder won 56 Grammy Awards and documented a swath of music that in many cases might otherwise never have been presented to a broader public. It's arguably a quintessentially American success story. This book focuses on the early years up to and just through when Rounder evolved to a second stage, with a generational change that has kept the label healthy and flourishing when so many other cultural enterprises from the era have folded or gone dark. It's the story of three people with no background in business who took an idea and, through hard work and passion, built up something of lasting cultural significance. Rounder Records: A Biography is less a standard history and more an idiosyncratic memoir written by one of the three Rounder founders. The book includes original photographs taken by the author or drawn from the Rounder archives.

Keith Jarrett is one of the great pianists of our times. Before achieving worldwide fame for his solo improvisations, he had already collaborated with Art Blakey, Charles Lloyd and Miles Davis. His 'Koln Concert' album (1975) has now sold around four million copies and become the most successful solo recording in jazz history. His interpretations of the music of Bach, Handel, Bartok or Shostakovich, have also received much attention in later years. Jarrett is considered difficult and inaccessible, and has often abandoned the stage during his concerts due to restless audiences or disturbing photographers. Only few writers have come as close to Keith Jarrett as Wolfgang Sandner, who has not only been following Jarrett's remarkable career from the nineteen-sixties onward, but has actually had the opportunity to visit him in his home in Oxford, New Jersey. Sandner squelches some legends here, such as the one concerning Jarrett's alleged Hungarian Roma family background. For this biography, which is full of detailed musical analyses and cross-references to other artistic genres, Wolfgang Sandner has also collected new information about the origins of Jarrett's paternal family from today's Baden-Wurttemberg region in Germany - this, not least, thanks to the translator, Keith Jarrett's youngest brother Chris. This English edition is a significantly extended and updated version of the German original as concerns important aspects of Keith Jarrett's life and work.

Although his activity as a recording artist spanned a period of just three years, from 1967, the year of his arrival in England from America to 1970, the year of his death, Jimi Hendrix created a body of work that has exerted a significant influence on a number of artists in the 20th century and beyond. A headline-grabbing, explosive performer, he is widely recognized as an innovative guitarist who broadened the vocabulary of his instrument through both his technique and daring use of technology. For several generations of critics and audiences, he remains the archetypal rock star who framed his immeasurable talent with lifestyle excesses inherent to his profession.Hear My Train A Comin' seeks to appraise Hendrix's legacy in different terms. His ability as a soloist is undeniable, but it is not necessarily the defining aspect of his genius. This book focuses on Hendrix the songwriter, a superlative storyteller who was able to combine melody, lyric and arrangement in order to create pieces that take pride of place in the pantheon of post-war popular music. Why do anthems such as Crosstown Traffic, The Wind Cries Mary, Little Wing, Voodoo Child [Slight Return] Purple Haze or Foxy Lady still affect us today? They alchemize word and sound.These are just a few examples of Hendrix crafting a composition in the most complete sense of the term, making judicious decisions with regard to mood, texture, contrast and overall orchestral richness, looking at his basic resource, the guitar-bass-drums set up as a unit to be enhanced by a range of other instruments and studio production.This book investigates the artist's immense creativity, and the intriguing relationship he had with the art of song, a platform for a multitude of ideas and improvisation.

Eberhard Weber is a virtuoso who revolutionized jazz bass playing. He brought his instrument from the far corner of the stage into the spotlight - and turned it into a solo force. He began his career as a jazz bassist in the 1960s, and his band Colours with the saxophonist Charlie Mariano became one of the most successful jazz groups in Europe. His record Colours of Chloe (made for ECM) was a cult album in its time. Weber went on to perform with many the big stars of the international jazz scene, including Wolfgang Dauner, Gary Burton, Pat Metheney and Jan Garbarek. He was also a key member of the United Jazz and Rock Ensemble. Playing the five-string instrument, both in acoustic and electric form, he also became a master of the solo recital, using electronics to accompany his own dexterous improvisations. Weber has not been able to play the bass since he suffered a stroke in April 2007 during a sound check with the Jan Garbarek Group at the Berlin Philharmonic Hall. But he had already created an oeuvre that is second to none. The charismatic bassist made jazz history with his explorations, both in terms of his own instrument and with his range of creative musical companions. His remarkable "resume" is at the same time a humorous and exciting testimony to a vital period in German jazz history. This is the first English translation of the original autobiography published in German by Sagas in 2015.

Everybody knows John Altman's music, but not so many people know his name. Yet he is one of the most prolific composers, conductors and arrangers in history and his saxophone playing has been heard live and on record with many great names. In this vivid account of over fifty years in the world of popular music, Altman explains why he is the 'Hidden Man', whose scores include such well-known film sequences as 'Always Look on the Bright Side of Life' from Life of Brian, which he arranged, conducted and whistled; the tank chase through St. Petersburg in the James Bond movie Goldeneye and the ship sinking in Titanic, with the orchestra playing on deck. In all, he has composed the music for over 50 movies, and won most major film awards in his long and distinguished career. His orchestrations can be heard in film scores by legends like Elmer Bernstein and Jule Styne, and he was musical director for several television series, notably Miss Marple, starring Joan Hickson, as well as Peak Practice. As an arranger/conductor he has worked on hit records for numerous stars, among them Rod Stewart, George Michael, Tina Turner, Barry White, Diana Ross, Bjork, and Alison Moyet. As a saxophonist, flautist and clarinet player he has performed with an equally stellar list of musicians. John Altman has also found time to write, produce and arrange over 4,000 commercials worldwide, including his theme for the 'Sheila's Wheels' advertisement. Such anonymity coupled with universally-known themes is why Monty Python's Terry Gilliam named Altman the 'Hidden Man'. In this entertaining, fast-paced memoir you will discover how Ingrid Bergman smiled at his back; how a Beatle always greeted him by singing one of his musical phrases; how he tried in vain to persuade Nick Drake to continue performing in public; how he reduced Freddy Mercury to helpless laughter; how he got Pierce Brosnan his big movie break; how he sat with Charlie Chaplin watching a movie that hadn't been seen for a quarter of a century (with a running commentary from the great man himself); how he sang over a mobile phone to James Cameron and the cast of Titanic; how he inspired a five-year-old George Michael to become a musician; how he was the Wailers' tour guide around London, and how Tina Turner made him a cup of tea. One of the most poignant parts of the story is how he mentored the young Amy Winehouse.

Everybody knows John Altman's music, but not so many people know his name. Yet he is one of the most prolific composers, conductors and arrangers in history and his saxophone playing has been heard live and on record with many great names. In this vivid account of over fifty years in the world of popular music, Altman explains why he is the 'Hidden Man', whose scores include such well-known film sequences as 'Always Look on the Bright Side of Life' from Life of Brian, which he arranged, conducted and whistled; the tank chase through St. Petersburg in the James Bond movie Goldeneye and the ship sinking in Titanic, with the orchestra playing on deck. In all, he has composed the music for over 50 movies, and won most major film awards in his long and distinguished career. His orchestrations can be heard in film scores by legends like Elmer Bernstein and Jule Styne, and he was musical director for several television series, notably Miss Marple, starring Joan Hickson, as well as Peak Practice. As an arranger/conductor he has worked on hit records for numerous stars, among them Rod Stewart, George Michael, Tina Turner, Barry White, Diana Ross, Bjork, and Alison Moyet. As a saxophonist, flautist and clarinet player he has performed with an equally stellar list of musicians. John Altman has also found time to write, produce and arrange over 4,000 commercials worldwide, including his theme for the 'Sheila's Wheels' advertisement. Such anonymity coupled with universally-known themes is why Monty Python's Terry Gilliam named Altman the 'Hidden Man'. In this entertaining, fast-paced memoir you will discover how Ingrid Bergman smiled at his back; how a Beatle always greeted him by singing one of his musical phrases; how he tried in vain to persuade Nick Drake to continue performing in public; how he reduced Freddy Mercury to helpless laughter; how he got Pierce Brosnan his big movie break; how he sat with Charlie Chaplin watching a movie that hadn't been seen for a quarter of a century (with a running commentary from the great man himself); how he sang over a mobile phone to James Cameron and the cast of Titanic; how he inspired a five-year-old George Michael to become a musician; how he was the Wailers' tour guide around London, and how Tina Turner made him a cup of tea. One of the most poignant parts of the story is how he mentored the young Amy Winehouse.

The brand of jazz that developed in the Kansas City area in the period from the late 1920s to the late 1930s is recognised as both a distinct stylistic variation within the larger genre and a transitional stage between earlier forms of African-American music, such as ragtime and blues, and later, more modern forms, up to and including bebop. Kansas City's brand of jazz has been described as "the most straightforward and direct style which has been developed outside New Orleans," by Hughues Panassie and Madeleine Gautier in their Dictionary of Jazz. Kansas City jazz has inspired the creation of a museum and has been the subject of a feature-length film, Robert Altman's 1996 "Kansas City," and even a sentimental rock song, "Eternal Kansas City" by Van Morrison. The first comprehensive work on the subject in over 15 years, this book draws on new research to delve deeper into music of the American Midwest that evolved into Kansas City jazz, and includes profiles of individual musicians who developed very different styles within or beyond the framework of the sub-genre. Kansas City Jazz focuses on the broader themes and the stories of the major personalities whose individual talents came together to create the larger whole of Kansas City's distinctive brand of jazz.

Graham Collier's career in jazz lasted over five decades. He was a bassist, a band-leader, a composer, an educator and an author, who wrote extensively about the music. His working life was littered with 'firsts'. Amongst his many achievements, he was the first British jazz musician to study at the Berklee School of music in Boston and the first to receive an Arts Council grant. In 1985, Collier began teaching at the Royal Academy of Music, where he later established the first full-time jazz degree course in the UK in 1987. Mosaics draws extensively on Collier's personal archive, as well as on interviews with fellow musicians, ex-students and colleagues from the Royal Academy of Music. It locates Collier and his work within the social and cultural changes which occurred during his life and, particularly, in relation to developments in British and European jazz of the 1960s and 70s. Collier's work as a composer-bandleader represented an attempt to resolve the paradoxes inherent in jazz between composition and improvisation, familiarity and spontaneity and change and tradition. In this regard, Mosaics compares Collier's work with other composers such as Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus, Gil Evans, Mike Westbrook, Stan Tracey, Barry Guy and Butch Morris. Throughout, Collier emerges as a contradictory figure falling between several different camps. He was never an out-and-out musical, cultural or political radical but rather an individualist continually forced to confront the contradictions in his own position - a musical outsider working within a marginalised area of cultural activity; a gay man operating in a very male area of the music business and within heterosexist culture in general; a man of working class origins stepping outside traditionally prescribed class boundaries; and a musician-composer seeking individual solutions to collective problems of aesthetic and ethical value.

Ivor Cutler: A Life Outside the Sitting Room is the first biography of one of post-war Britain's most recognisable authors, poets and performers. Mr Cutler (as he preferred to be known) wrote and recorded some of the most unusual and memorable songs and poems in British popular culture, including the hilarious and unsettling 'Life in a Scotch Sitting Room' series. Described by fans and commentators as an outsider because of his eccentric behaviour on and off stage, in many ways he was an insider, working for thirty years as a primary school teacher, gathering a body of fans from the heart of the cultural and social establishment, and regularly appearing on mainstream media. He was one of the first - if not the first - performers to appear on BBC radio 1, 2, 3 and 4 and famously recorded more John Peel sessions than any other act except The Fall. This book is based on evidence from official documents, print and broadcast media; archive interviews with Ivor Cutler, his close friends and family, fans and collaborators; and new interviews with fans, friends and fellow performers. Contributors include musical and acting collaborators who have never been interviewed about their experiences with Mr Cutler.

How did Anita O’Day—the legendary jazz singer who, along with Chet Baker, Miles Davis, Gerry Mulligan, and Stan Getz, led the so-called “cool school” of modern jazz—define cool?“That means doing everything that you like to do and getting away with it, you dig?”Her traits included a frosted tone with a dash of vinegar; a blithe, airy rhythmic sense that could make almost any band swing; an ultra-hip bebop vocabulary; and a wisecracking insouciance, as though all this were just a lark. O’Day emerged in 1941 as a big-band singer whose tough look and take-charge style established her as a musically savvy leader of men, not a begowned accessory. Thereafter, while creating a historic body of recordings on Verve Records, O’Day became “one of the boys” in another regard: She spent much of the ‘50s and ‘60s hooked on heroin. Finally clean by the ‘70s, she had a stunning renaissance, touring the world each year and releasing dozens of albums; even the TV program 60 Minutes profiled her in 1980.Her memoir, High Times Hard Times, while vividly written (it was optioned more than once for films that didn’t happen), cuts off in 1980, and contains almost no reflections on why she sang the way she did. Author James Gavin, whose biography subjects include Chet Baker, Lena Horne, Peggy Lee, and George Michael, now turns his attention to O’Day’s mad roller-coaster life, a nonstop procession of thrills, laughs, outrageous stories, and unforgettable music-making. Gavin, a Grammy nominee and a two-time winner of ASCAP’s Deems Taylor-Virgil Thomson Award for excellence in musical journalism, draws upon a wealth of unpublished material, including interviews with many of the people who knew her best making this a definitive portrait of one of the great characters and innovators in jazz history.

The history of disco and its predecessors is often portrayed as one of glamour and excess. Dancehalls, Glitterballs and DJs expands this history, to encompass tatty but much-loved provincial dancehalls, mobile DJs with home-made light shows and rusty vans, one-hit-wonders on the chicken-in-a-basket circuit, and nights out with Jane Austen. It’s a vital, fun-packed history of a cultural movement that, despite the vagaries of fashion, remains part of the entertainment scene today.Dancehalls, Glitterballs and DJs begins in Georgian Britain’s Assembly Rooms and Pleasure Gardens, then moves through the “vulgar” activities in the penny gaffes, the arrival of the first gramophone and “disc jockey,” the Jazz Age, the swing-era dance bands, and the post-war ascendency of recorded music and the discotheque. It then explores the dance music scene that spread across Britain’s towns and cities, when teens and twenty-somethings danced where glamour meant “no denim, no trainers” — a world epitomised by the disco music boom of the 1970s.The story closes at the end of the ‘70s, when mainstream culture did much to turn disco from a cutting-edge movement to something of a laughing stock among trendsetters and popular music fans. The book ends by appraising disco’s place in the entertainment scene of the 2020s, where classics of the genre are as popular as ever.

As an innovative and constantly inventive jazz pianist, Brad Mehldau has attracted a sizable following over the years, one that has grown to expect a singular, intense experience from his performances. With Formation, Brad seeks to extend that experience to the page, by sharing some of the deeply personal elements of his life, and how these came together for him to become the musician and person that he is today. For the first time, he offers an in-depth look at how he came to understand his adoption, survive sexual abuse, and overcome heroin addiction. The book creates a vibrantly-written portrait of the jazz world in New York in the late 1980s and early 1990s, showing how a generation of musicians met and sparked off one another to take the music in new directions, drawing on a wealth of influences but also keeping sight of tradition, including those rooted in both the jazz and classical worlds. The atmosphere of the clubs, the creative scene in Manhattan and Brooklyn, and Brad's early experiences of touring are brilliantly brought to life. The formation of the "Mood Swing" quartet with Joshua Redman is described, as is the growth of Brad's own groups, leading to his acclaimed Art of the Trio series of recordings with bassist Larry Grenadier and drummer Jorge Rossy. The trio's later life with Jeff Ballard joining in place of Rossy; Brad's solo ventures; and his explorations of other areas of music, are also covered. There is no holding back when it comes to Brad's period of heroin addiction - his painful personal decline and ultimate redemption make for compelling and often distressing reading. Yet throughout the book, his own reading and listening are a constant frame of reference and often inspiration, from the works of James Joyce and Thomas Mann to the sounds of Prog rock and Bob Dylan, not to mention critics from Harold Bloom to Terry Eagleton. The book can be read as a bildungsroman, but this coming-of-age is no novel, it is vividly lived personal experience. Intimate, vulnerable and profound, Formation is a rare look inside the mind of an artist at the top of his field, in his own words.