From The Minds Of Jazz Musicians

From the Minds of Jazz Musicians: Conversations with the Creative and Inspired celebrates contemporary jazz artists who have toiled, struggled and succeeded in finding their creative space. The volume was developed through transcribing and editing selected interviews with 35 jazz artists, conducted by the author between 2009 and 2012 in New York City, with a historical essay on each artist to provide context. The interviews feature musicians from a broad range of musical styles and experiences, ranging from Gerald Wilson, born in 1918, to Chris Potter, born in 1971. Topics range from biographical life histories to artists’ descriptions of mentor relationships, revealing the important life lessons they learned along the way. With the goal to discover the person behind the persona, the author elicits conversations that speak volumes on the creative process, mining the individualistic perspectives of seminal artists who witnessed history in the making. The interviews present the artists’ candid and direct opinions on music and how they have succeeded in pursuing their unique and creative lives.

From the Minds of Jazz Musicians, Volume II is a follow-up to Volume I’s celebration of contemporary jazz artists who have toiled, struggled and succeeded in finding their creative space. Volume II was developed through transcribing and editing selected interviews with 29 jazz artists, conducted by the author since 2011, along with a historical essay on each artist. The interviews feature musicians from a broad range of musical styles and experiences, with their beginnings ranging from the 50s to the early 80s. Topics range from biographical life histories to descriptions of mentor relationships, revealing the important life lessons they learned along the way. With the goal to discover the person behind the persona, the author elicits conversations that speak of the creative process, mining the individualistic perspectives of seminal artists who witnessed history in the making. By comparing and contrasting each artist’s perspective to discover similarities in their career paths. these volumes are an important research tool for students and academics, offering direct information from leading figures in the jazz world.

Dr. Herb Wong (1926-2014) was an internationally recognized jazz industry leader and the author of more than 400 liner notes from the 1940s through the early 2000s. He reviewed not only the tracks on those albums but the artists and their eras as well. This book features the best of Wong's liner notes, articles and album selections, his personal stories about the artists, and his illuminating one-on-one conversations with many jazz greats, providing an insightful jazz primer and invaluable discography.

The diversity of jazz writing represents the many interests brought to it. Like jazz itself, writing about jazz combines various points of view, purposes, and styles, and it must express strong personal engagement with the music. Jazz continues to penetrate elite culture and mainstream popular culture. Hence there is a growing interest in jazz as a subject of inquiry and criticism. Listeners and interpreters explore and often dispute standards of performance and the essentials of what will constitute the interpretation of jazz and its history. Jazz in Mind explores the impact of jazz, particularly on American culture, since World War II. The essays are written by leading scholars from the fields of music, literature, history, sociology, philosophy, and American studies who share an interest in the application of scholarly methods to jazz themes. Representing both "pure" and "applied" approaches to jazz history and criticism, the book illustrates the vitality of written inquiry into jazz. A variety of historical, philosophical, and literary themes are covered in Jazz in Mind. There is an essay on James Reese Europe and his relationship and that of his music to the actual development of jazz during the period prior to 1920. The first black band leader to be offered a major recording contract, he opened an essential door for jazz without which the future development of the music would be inconceivable. In exploring the "self' presented by the jazz autobiographer, a second essay focuses on Louis Armstrong, jazz's most influential musician, and its first, and most prolific, black autobiographer. In an unusual departure in jazz criticism, the uses of music in thinking about management and organizational life are considered. Other essays explore the history of jazz in the Soviet Union and the vital and energetic Soviet jazz scene today, the problems of local jazz history, the art of quotation in jazz, and the shifts in meaning with respect to the jazz tradition and the various ways in which jazz and modernism have been related.

More than fifty years ago, John Coltrane drew the twelve musical notes in a circle and connected them by straight lines, forming a five-pointed star. Inspired by Einstein, Coltrane put physics and geometry at the core of his music. Physicist and jazz musician Stephon Alexander follows suit, using jazz to answer physics' most vexing questions about the past and future of the universe. Following the great minds that first drew the links between music and physics-a list including Pythagoras, Kepler, Newton, Einstein, and Rakim-The Jazz of Physics reveals that the ancient poetic idea of the Music of the Spheres," taken seriously, clarifies confounding issues in physics. The Jazz of Physics will fascinate and inspire anyone interested in the mysteries of our universe, music, and life itself.

A collection of essays originally appearing principally in the New Yorker.

At the height of the ideological antagonism of the Cold War, the U.S. State Department unleashed an unexpected tool in its battle against Communism: jazz. From 1956 through the late 1970s, America dispatched its finest jazz musicians to the far corners of the earth, from Iraq to India, from the Congo to the Soviet Union, in order to win the hearts and minds of the Third World and to counter perceptions of American racism. Penny Von Eschen escorts us across the globe, backstage and onstage, as Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and other jazz luminaries spread their music and their ideas further than the State Department anticipated. Both in concert and after hours, through political statements and romantic liaisons, these musicians broke through the government's official narrative and gave their audiences an unprecedented vision of the black American experience. In the process, new collaborations developed between Americans and the formerly colonized peoples of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East--collaborations that fostered greater racial pride and solidarity. Though intended as a color-blind promotion of democracy, this unique Cold War strategy unintentionally demonstrated the essential role of African Americans in U.S. national culture. Through the tales of these tours, Von Eschen captures the fascinating interplay between the efforts of the State Department and the progressive agendas of the artists themselves, as all struggled to redefine a more inclusive and integrated American nation on the world stage.