Dixie In The Search For Big Ears

Big Ears listens through thin walls. Big Ears hears everything. After over hearing her mom tell someone on the phone big ears could be around here, Dixie sets off on an investigation to find out who Big Ears is, and where Big Ears might be hiding. Join Dixie on her search. Do you think you know where Big Ears is?

In jazz circles, players and listeners with “big ears” hear and engage complexity in the moment, as it unfolds. Taking gender as part of the intricate, unpredictable action in jazz culture, this interdisciplinary collection explores the terrain opened up by listening, with big ears, for gender in jazz. Essays range from a reflection on the female boogie-woogie pianists who played at Café Society in New York during the 1930s and 1940s to interpretations of how the jazzman is represented in Dorothy Baker’s novel Young Man with a Horn (1938) and Michael Curtiz’s film adaptation (1950). Taken together, the essays enrich the field of jazz studies by showing how gender dynamics have shaped the production, reception, and criticism of jazz culture. Scholars of music, ethnomusicology, American studies, literature, anthropology, and cultural studies approach the question of gender in jazz from multiple perspectives. One contributor scrutinizes the tendency of jazz historiography to treat singing as subordinate to the predominantly male domain of instrumental music, while another reflects on her doubly inappropriate position as a female trumpet player and a white jazz musician and scholar. Other essays explore the composer George Russell’s Lydian Chromatic Concept as a critique of mid-twentieth-century discourses of embodiment, madness, and black masculinity; performances of “female hysteria” by Les Diaboliques, a feminist improvising trio; and the BBC radio broadcasts of Ivy Benson and Her Ladies’ Dance Orchestra during the Second World War. By incorporating gender analysis into jazz studies, Big Ears transforms ideas of who counts as a subject of study and even of what counts as jazz. Contributors: Christina Baade, Jayna Brown, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Monica Hairston, Kristin McGee, Tracy McMullen, Ingrid Monson, Lara Pellegrinelli, Eric Porter, Nichole T. Rustin, Ursel Schlicht, Julie Dawn Smith, Jeffrey Taylor, Sherrie Tucker, João H. Costa Vargas

Pelops is a Spetnatz-trained commando. This former East German soldier is hired by MI5 in a plot to 'bury' a failed military project. He allows no one to stand in his way and tell the tale. Marty Rebel is an insurance litigation investigator. Driving ambition and Celtic obstinacy compel him to seek answers to unheeded questions regarding the death of the assassin's latest victim. A martial arts expert, he cowers in no man's shadow; but he is pitted against an adversary aware of his every move. Mixed fortunes misdirect bullets meant for him, and then he survives his first one-on-one confrontation with Pelops. But Marty cannot halt his opponent's rampage, nor determine its objective. The attention of Domino, an EEC-funded anti-terrorist group, is attracted. With these experienced, armed allies, Marty wages mortal battle; in pursuit of Pelops, from the Essex coast to the winter mist on the Channel Islands waters. Marty is determined to exact retribution – the assassin is hell-bent on survival...

The #1 NEW YORK TIMES bestseller -- now in a digest edition (Age 7 and up) Once, in a house on Egypt Street, there lived a china rabbit named Edward Tulane. The rabbit was very pleased with himself, and for good reason: he was owned by a girl named Abilene, who adored him completely. And then, one day, he was lost. . . . Kate DiCamillo takes us on an extraordinary journey, from the depths of the ocean to the net of a fisherman, from the bedside of an ailing child to the bustling streets of Memphis. Along the way, we are shown a miracle -- that even a heart of the most breakable kind can learn to love, to lose, and to love again. This beloved classic is now available in an accessible digest edition with black-and-white interior illustrations.

Alone on a wagon train and threatened by the man who murdered her mother, Dixie Dandelion steals a horse belonging to an undercover Pinkerton agent and escapes to the town of Six Shooter Siding. Hired at first to cook in a railroad camp, she begins to make friends, even the town’s soiled doves assist her when she buys the abandoned ranch. Determined never to depend on others, especially men, Dixie is torn between trusting Pinkerton Jackson McCullough and standing on her own. But will this new independence be enough to save Dixie when the past catches up with her?

HE HAD A WAY OF TALKING. I BRUSHED HIS GAT AWAY FROM MY FACE AND BROUGHT MY CUFFS INTO PLAY. THEY MOPPED AT THE BLOOD ON MY FACE. I PLAYED ONE OF MY TUNES. “SOMEDAY STACEY, WHEN YOU’RE OUT FROM BEHIND THE TIN; OR MAYBE SOME DARK NIGHT IN SOME LONELY PLACE; ONE OF THOSE NIGHTS THAT ARE BAD FOR COPS, I’LL BE THERE. YOU WILL NEVER KNOW WHEN, BUT I’LL BE THERE; UNTIL THEN KEEP LOOKING OVER YOUR SHOULDER.” IT WAS A BIT OF A LONG TALK FOR ME THEN, IN THAT SITUATION. HE REPLIED. “YOU STILL PLAYING THAT WORN OUT SPEECH? IT WAS OLD WHEN YOU PLAYED IT THE FIRST TIME.” THE CONTEMPT IN HIS VOICE FILLED THE INTERIOR OF THE CAR. IT WAS MATCHED ONLY BY HIS DEAD-EYE STARE. I LOOKED BEYOND HIM, BACK AT THE HOUSE; HIS GAZE REMAINED FIXED ON MY FACE. THE COPS AROUND THE HOUSE WERE ALL PRE-OCCUPIED. I SAID TO HIM. “NO TIME LIKE THE PRESENT.” IN THE BARS, BACK IN ATLANTIC CITY, THEY TALK ABOUT SCOTLAND, OVER IN EUROPE. OVER THERE, IN SCOTLAND, THERE IS A LITTLE PLACE ON THE CLYDE RIVER. WELL, IT’S JUST ABOUT THE BIGGEST DARN TOWN IN THE COUNTRY OF SCOTLAND. IN THAT LITTLE PLACE CALLED GLASGOW, A GUY KISSES HIS OPPONENT, TO GET THE UPPER HAND. I GAVE LIEUTENANT BEN STACEY A GLASGOW KISS. AS HE SLUMPED BACK AGAINST THE SEAT I TUMBLED HIS BODY OUT THE OPEN DOOR AND ONTO THE ROADSIDE. I TOOK THE MOTOR OUT FROM THERE, LIKE IT WAS THE START OF THE INDIANAPOLIS 500.

The extraordinary story of how Coach Paul "Bear" Bryant and Joe Namath, his star quarterback at the University of Alabama, led the Crimson Tide to victory and transformed football into a truly national pastime. During the bloodiest years of the civil rights movement, Bear Bryant and Joe Namath-two of the most iconic and controversial figures in American sports-changed the game of college football forever. Brilliantly and urgently drawn, this is the gripping account of how these two very different men-Bryant a legendary coach in the South who was facing a pair of ethics scandals that threatened his career, and Namath a cocky Northerner from a steel mill town in Pennsylvania-led the Crimson Tide to a national championship. To Bryant and Namath, the game was everything. But no one could ignore the changes sweeping the nation between 1961 and 1965-from the Freedom Rides to the integration of colleges across the South and the assassination of President Kennedy. Against this explosive backdrop, Bryant and Namath changed the meaning of football. Their final contest together, the 1965 Orange Bowl, was the first football game broadcast nationally, in color, during prime time, signaling a new era for the sport and the nation. Award-winning biographer Randy Roberts and sports historian Ed Krzemienski showcase the moment when two thoroughly American traditions-football and Dixie-collided. A compelling story of race and politics, honor and the will to win, RISING TIDE captures a singular time in America. More than a history of college football, this is the story of the struggle and triumph of a nation in transition and the legacy of two of the greatest heroes the sport has ever seen.