Miles
by Miles Davis
from Simon & Schuster
For more than forty years Miles Davis has been in the front rank of American music. Universally acclaimed as a musical genius, Miles is one of the most important and influential musicians in the world. The subject of several biographies, now Miles speaks out himself about his extraordinary life.
Miles: The Autobiography, like Miles himself, holds nothing back. For the first time Miles talks about his five-year silence. He speaks frankly and openly about his drug problem and how he overcame it. He condemns the racism he has encountered in the music business and in American society generally. And he discusses the women in his life. But above all, Miles talks about music and musicians, including the legends he has played with over the years: Bird, Dizzy, Monk, Trane, Mingus, and many others.
The man who has given us some of the most exciting music of the past few decades has now given us a compelling and fascinating autobiography, featuring a concise discography and thirty-two pages of photographs.
Coltrane: The Story of a Sound
by Ben Ratliff
from Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Jaco: The Extraordinary and Tragic Life of Jaco Pastorius
by Bill Milkowski
from BACKBEAT BOOKS
A fitting tribute to the troubled genius who revolutionized electric bass playing and bridged the gaps between jazz, RandB, rock and funk. From his early days in RandB club bands through his international stardom with fusion group Weather Report and on to his solo career and tragic death at age 35, this book portrays the life and music of Jaco Pastorius, the self-proclaimed "world's greatest bass player." This special anniversary edition features new interviews with Jaco's childhood friends, prominent bass players of Jaco's era and afterward, and girlfriend Teresa Nagell, who was with Jaco in the last few years of his life. Some incidents from the first edition have been further researched and expanded to become full chapters. Exclusive to this edition, the CD features newly revealed music tracks from Jaco's early years along with spoken testimonials from Jaco's friends and colleagues. The book also contains new, never-before-seen photos acquired from the Pastorius estate.
John Coltrane: His Life and Music (The Michigan American Music Series)
by Lewis Porter
from University of Michigan Press
Delightfulee: The Life and Music of Lee Morgan (Jazz Perspectives)
by Jeff McMillan
from University of Michigan Press
One of the most individual stylists of his time, trumpeter Lee Morgan began his professional career in Philadelphia at age fifteen. At eighteen, after a short stint with Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, Morgan joined Dizzy Gillespie's orchestra, where he stayed until the group disbanded in 1958. A return to Blakey brought Morgan new opportunities, including his first successful attempts at composition. But however much his time with Blakey helped to advance his playing and writing, his boss's and his bandmates' destructive drug habits exerted just as strong an influence. Within three years, Morgan would be back home in Philadelphia, strung out on heroin and penniless.
Morgan's return to music in the early to mid-sixties witnessed a tremendous evolution in his playing. Formerly a virtuoso in the model of his idol, Clifford Brown, Morgan brought to his critically acclaimed Blue Note records of the era an emotionally charged, muscular tone, full of poise and control. But it was with the record Sidewinder, recorded in 1963, that Morgan found his greatest fame and commercial success, due to the infectious groove of the title tune. By the time of his death, at thirty-three---murdered in a New York City club by his girlfriend Helen More, during a gig---Morgan had begun a new phase of his career, experimenting with freer-forms of musical expression.
Jeff McMillan's Delightfulee is the first biography to seriously examine Morgan's vast contributions to jazz, both as a performer and as a composer. Thanks to exclusive access to Lee Morgan's now-deceased brother, McMillan is also able to provide unparalleled insight into Morgan's personal and family life
Jeff McMillan received his master's degree from the Jazz History and Research program at Rutgers-Newark in 2000 and currently works as an archivist for the Metropolitan Opera in New York City.
I Put A Spell On You: The Autobiography Of Nina Simone
by Nina Simone
from Da Capo Press
Playing the Changes: Milt Hinton's Life in Stories and Photographs
by Milt Hinton
from Vanderbilt University Press
Named "Best Jazz Book of 2008" by The Jazz Journalists Association
Legendary African American jazz bassist and photographer Milt Hinton (1910-2000) tells his compelling life story and illustrates it with more than 260 of his photographs, exquisitely reproduced in this collectors' edition.Hinton's stories--witnessing a lynching as a child in Mississippi, working for Al Capone, breaking the color line in the recording studio--are equal to his celebrated photographs: capturing life on the road with Cab Calloway, Billie Holiday at her last recording date, and personal and professional views of icons such as Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, Aretha Franklin, Dizzy Gillespie, and Barbra Streisand. Playing the Changes draws from Hinton and Berger's earlier Bass Line, but differs significantly from that 1988 classic. Milt's narrative takes up where the earlier story left off, and more than 140 new photographs augment 115 of his best-known images. It also boasts a CD of Milt telling stories and performing music, as well as a discography and filmography.
Jazz Anecdotes: Second Time Around
by Bill Crow
from Oxford University Press, USA
When jazz musicians get together, they often delight one another with stories about the great, or merely remarkable, players and singers they've worked with. One good story leads to another until someone says, "Somebody ought to wrie these down!" With Jazz Anecdotes, somebody finally has. Drawing on a rich verbal tradition, bassist and jazz writer Bill Crow has culled stories from a wide variety of sources, including interviews, biographies and a remarkable oral history collection, which resides at the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University, to paint fascinating and very human portraits of jazz musicians. Organized around general topics--teaching and learning, life on the road, prejudice and discrimination, and the importance of a good nickname--Jazz Anecdotes shows the jazz world as it really is. In this fully updated edition, which contains over 150 new anecdotes and new topics like Hiring and Firing, Crow regales us with new stories of such jazz greats as Benny Goodman, Chet Baker, Ravi Coltrane, Buddy Rich and Paul Desmond. He offers extended sections on old favorites--Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young, and the fabulous Eddie Condon, who seems to have lived his entire life with the anecdotist in mind. With its unique blend of sparkling dialogue and historical and social insight, Jazz Anecdotes will delight anyone who loves a good story. It offers a fresh perspective on the joys and hardships of a musician's life as well as a rare glimpse of the personalities who created America's most distinctive music.
Lady Sings the Blues the 50th Anniversary Edition (Harlem Moon Classics)
by Billie Holiday
from Harlem Moon
Lady Sings the Blues is the fiercely honest, no-holds-barred autobiography of Billie Holiday, the legendary jazz, swing, and standards singing sensation. Taking the reader on a fast-moving journey from Holiday’s rough-and-tumble Baltimore childhood (where she ran errands at a whorehouse in exchange for the chance to listen to Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith albums), to her emergence on Harlem’s club scene, to sold-out performances with the Count Basie Orchestra and with Artie Shaw and his band, this revelatory memoir is notable for its trenchant observations on the racism that darkened Billie’s life and the heroin addiction that ended it too soon. We are with her during the mesmerizing debut of “Strange Fruit”; with her as she rubs shoulders with the biggest movie stars and musicians of the day (Bob Hope, Lana Turner, Clark Gable, Benny Goodman, Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins, and more); and with her through the scrapes with Jim Crow, spats with Sarah Vaughan, ignominious jailings, and tragic decline. All of this is told in Holiday’s tart, streetwise style and hip patois that makes it read as if it were written yesterday.
Bird Lives!: The High Life And Hard Times Of Charlie (yardbird) Parker
by Ross Russell
from Da Capo Press
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