Steve Lacy

A collection of thirty-four interviews with the innovative soprano saxophonist and jazz composer Steve Lacy (1934&–2004).

Free Jazz: A Research and Information Guide offers carefully selected and annotated sources on free jazz, with comprehensive coverage of English-language academic books, journal articles, and dissertations, and selective coverage of trade books, popular periodicals, documentary films, scores, Masters’ theses, online texts, and materials in other languages. Free Jazz will be a major reference tool for students, faculty, librarians, artists, scholars, critics, and serious fans navigating this literature.

In Spirits Rejoice! Jason Bivins explores the relationship between American religion and American music, and the places where religion and jazz have overlapped. Much writing about jazz tends toward glorified discographies or impressionistic descriptions of the actual sounds. Rather than providing a history, or series of biographical entries, Spirits Rejoice! takes to heart a central characteristic of jazz itself and improvises, generating a collection of themes, pursuits, reoccurring foci, and interpretations. Bivins riffs on interviews, liner notes, journals, audience reception, and critical commentary, producing a work that argues for the centrality of religious experiences to any legitimate understanding of jazz, while also suggesting that jazz opens up new interpretations of American religious history. Bivins examines themes such as musical creativity as related to specific religious traditions, jazz as a form of ritual and healing, and jazz cosmologies and metaphysics. Spirits Rejoice! connects Religious Studies to Jazz Studies through thematic portraits, and a vast number of interviews to propose a new, improvisationally fluid archive for thinking about religion, race, and sound in the United States. Bivins's conclusions explore how the sound of spirits rejoicing challenges not only prevailing understandings of race and music, but also the way we think about religion. Spirits Rejoice! is an essential volume for any student of jazz, American religion, or American culture.

An inquiry into improvisation as practiced by Richard Bull and his contemporaries.

Calling all Wisconsin sports fans! This collection of sports stories and achievements, from the author of Cold Wars: 40 + Years of Packer-Viking, covers individual and team accomplishments across multiple sports and various levels of competition. Includes trivia, factoids, off-beat moments, weird/freak plays, black and white photographs, and lightearted accounts. In addition, a general compendium of records, streaks, and amazing moments complements the more than 40 greatest moments in Wisconsin sports.

Based on interviews with family and friends, this account of the jazz great's life reveals the influence of Miles Davis' life on his work as well as the musician's persistent desire to re-invent himself.