SUNY Press Jazz Styles – serie

A new and accessible introduction to this exciting, controversial, and often misunderstood music, drawing on extensive research, close listening, and the author's experience as a performer.In the late 1950s, free jazz broke all the rules, liberating musicians both to create completely spontaneous and unplanned performances and to develop unique personal musical systems. This genre emerged alongside the radical changes of the 1960s, particularly the Civil Rights, Black Arts, and Black Power movements. Free Jazz is a new and accessible introduction to this exciting, controversial, and often misunderstood music, drawing on extensive research, close listening, and the author's experience as a performer. More than a catalog of artists and albums, the book explores the conceptual areas they opened: freedom, spirituality, energy, experimentalism, and self-determination. These are discussed in relation to both the political and artistic currents of the times and to specific musical techniques, explained in language clear to ordinary readers but also useful for musicians.

A new and accessible introduction to this exciting, controversial, and often misunderstood music, drawing on extensive research, close listening, and the author's experience as a performer.In the late 1950s, free jazz broke all the rules, liberating musicians both to create completely spontaneous and unplanned performances and to develop unique personal musical systems. This genre emerged alongside the radical changes of the 1960s, particularly the Civil Rights, Black Arts, and Black Power movements. Free Jazz is a new and accessible introduction to this exciting, controversial, and often misunderstood music, drawing on extensive research, close listening, and the author's experience as a performer. More than a catalog of artists and albums, the book explores the conceptual areas they opened: freedom, spirituality, energy, experimentalism, and self-determination. These are discussed in relation to both the political and artistic currents of the times and to specific musical techniques, explained in language clear to ordinary readers but also useful for musicians.

A concise history of early jazz, from its major innovators to its unrecognized heroes.Early Jazz is an overview of the beginnings of jazz from its nineteenth-century roots through 1929, when elements of the Swing Era began to emerge. It is the first book on early jazz history in over fifty years and fills a compelling need for an update that reflects recent research. With a broad definition of jazz that encompasses the artistic and the commercial, the book's inclusive tone allows for a wide spectrum of musicians, including not only pioneering African American and white musicians but also those who are commonly skipped or skimmed over in jazz history textbooks-lesser-known sidemen, prominent instrumentalists, entertainers or novelty performers, women, vocalists, and American jazz musicians who introduced jazz on their travels around the world. Twenty songs are analyzed in depth, but no musical knowledge is required to understand or to read Early Jazz. The book is written as an introduction for fans, students, musicians, historians, scholars, and anyone who is interested in this fascinating era of jazz history.