Interviews With The Jazz Greats And More

Here is a collection of insightful interviews with many of the most prominent figures in today's guitar world. Presents 25 articles selected from Charles Chapman's extensive work as a music journalist, including legends such as Johnny Smith, Tim May, Martin Taylor, John Abercrombie, George Benson, John Scofield, and Howard Alden. an interview with renowed luthier Robert Benedetto is included as an added bonus. This book illustrates the passion these guitarists have for their art, the respect they have for music and one other, and their desire to pass their art and sentiments on to others.

Explores the role of jazz celebrities like Ella Fitzgerald, Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, and Mary Lou Williams as representatives of African American religion in the twentieth century Beginning in the 1920s, the Jazz Age propelled Black swing artists into national celebrity. Many took on the role of race representatives, and were able to leverage their popularity toward achieving social progress for other African Americans. In Lift Every Voice and Swing, Vaughn A. Booker argues that with the emergence of these popular jazz figures, who came from a culture shaped by Black Protestantism, religious authority for African Americans found a place and spokespeople outside of traditional Afro-Protestant institutions and religious life. Popular Black jazz professionals—such as Ella Fitzgerald, Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, and Mary Lou Williams—inherited religious authority though they were not official religious leaders. Some of these artists put forward a religious culture in the mid-twentieth century by releasing religious recordings and putting on religious concerts, and their work came to be seen as integral to the Black religious ethos. Booker documents this transformative era in religious expression, in which jazz musicians embodied religious beliefs and practices that echoed and diverged from the predominant African American religious culture. He draws on the heretofore unexamined private religious writings of Duke Ellington and Mary Lou Williams, and showcases the careers of female jazz artists alongside those of men, expanding our understanding of African American religious expression and decentering the Black church as the sole concept for understanding Black Protestant religiosity. Featuring gorgeous prose and insightful research, Lift Every Voice and Swing will change the way we understand the connections between jazz music and faith.

In this collection of interviews originally published in CODA magazine, Jazz artists such as Lee Konitz, Mary Lou Williams, Dexter Gordon, and John Tchicai talk about their dedication to the music and about their careers. Taken together, the interviews offer an insight in the development of jazz.

Before Ralph Ellison became one of America’s greatest writers, he was a musician and a student of jazz, writing widely on his favorite music for more than fifty years. Now, jazz authority Robert O’Meally has collected the very best of Ellison’s inspired, exuberant jazz writings in this unique anthology.

During his nearly forty years as a music journalist, Ralph J. Gleason recorded many in-depth interviews with some of the greatest jazz musicians of all time. These informal sessions, conducted mostly in Gleason’s Berkeley, California, home, have never been transcribed and published in full until now. This remarkable volume, a must-read for any jazz fan, serious musician, or musicologist, reveals fascinating, little-known details about these gifted artists, their lives, their personas, and, of course, their music. Bill Evans discusses his battle with severe depression, while John Coltrane talks about McCoy Tyner's integral role in shaping the sound of the Coltrane quartet, praising the pianist enthusiastically. Included also are interviews with Dizzy Gillespie, Sonny Rollins, Quincy Jones, Jon Hendricks, and the immortal Duke Ellington, plus seven more of the most notable names in twentieth-century jazz.

In the late 1970s legendary pianist Bill Evans was at the peak of his career. He revolutionized the jazz trio (bass, piano, drums) by giving each part equal emphasis in what jazz historian Ted Gioia called a “telepathic level” of interplay. It was an ideal opportunity for a sideman, and after auditioning in 1978, Joe La Barbera was ecstatic when he was offered the drum chair, completing the trio with Evans and bassist Marc Johnson. In Times Remembered, La Barbera and co-author Charles Levin provide an intimate fly-on-the-wall peek into Evans’s life, critical recording sessions, and behind-the-scenes anecdotes of life on the road. Joe regales the trio’s magical connection, a group that quickly gelled to play music on the deepest and purest level imaginable. He also watches his dream gig disappear, a casualty of Evans’s historical drug abuse when the pianist dies in a New York hospital emergency room in 1980. But La Barbera tells this story with love and respect, free of judgment, showing Evans’s humanity and uncanny ability to transcend physical weakness and deliver first-rate performances at nearly every show.

A woman in jazz. How was she treated on- and offstage? What was it like to play with Dizzy Gillespie or Charlie Parker? What was the breakthrough moment in her career? How did she balance her personal and professional life? In six illuminating interviews, female jazz musicians answer these questions and more, discussing the challenges of being a woman in a scene historically dominated by men. Jazzwomen Speak gathers the voices of women whose careers highlight the bebop and post-bop era of jazz, as they share stories of their musical training and entrance into the jazz world, relationships and encounters with other musicians, limitations on the bandstand and in the recording studio, and how being a female musician has formed their musical performances over time.

Herinneringen van de Britse jazzcriticus aan ontmoetingen met musici.