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As a scholar as well as performer of the African American creative improvised music usually called jazz, my attunement to this art form resonates with its historico-cultural matrix as much as with the sounds themselves. These books distinguish themselves for being well-researched and rigorous. They are the real deal, doing justice to the heart as well as the intellect of this art form.
Pianist Hawes is an under-sung master of the early bebop period. This supremely readable narrative tells the story of how he met and played with Charlie Parker already in his teen years, painting a picture of how jazz musicians lived in the heyday of the bebop revolution. A fun and informative book.
Hampton Hawes [1928–1977] was one of jazz's greatest pianists. Among his peers from California the self-taught Hawes was second only to Oscar Peterson. At the time of his celebration as New Star of the Year by downbeat magazine (1956), Hawes was already struggling with a heroin addiction that would lead to his arrest and imprisonment, and the interruption of a brilliant career. In 1963 President John F. Kennedy granted Hawes an Executive Pardon. In eloquent and humorous language Hampton Hawes tells of a life of suffering and redemption that reads like an improbable novel. Gary Giddins has called it "a…
I am a musician and an author. Many of my mentors and collaborators are members of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), a collective organization of African American composers and performers founded on the South Side of Chicago in 1965. Their farthest-reaching innovation, a form known as “creative music,” transformed the fields of jazz and experimental music by breaking down the barriers that—prior to the advent of the AACM—had separated the disciplines of composition and improvisation. My book Sound Experimentsand the other books on the list give readers new insights into the members of the AACM and their groundbreaking music.
New Musical Figurations is a profile of AACM composer Anthony Braxton. One of the best-known AACM musicians, Braxton is also one of the most influential: while writing hundreds of compositions and touring the world with his many ensembles, he has also found time to teach some of the best composers and improvisers of the twenty-first century, including Taylor Ho Bynum, Mary Halvorson, Steve Lehman, and Tyshawn Sorey. Braxton continues to compose and perform today, and New Musical Figurations explores the ideas and philosophies that motivate his creative practices and draw new generations of listeners to his music.
By relating biography to the cultural and musical contours of contemporary American life, Ronald M. Radano observes jazz practice as part of the complex interweaving of postmodern culture - a culture that has eroded conventional categories defining jazz and the jazz musician. Radano accomplishes all this by analyzing the creative life of Anthony Braxton. Born in 1945, Braxton is not only a virtuoso jazz saxophonist but an innovative theoretician and composer of experimental art music. His refusal to conform to the conventions of official musical culture has helped unhinge the very ideologies on which definitions of "jazz", "black music," "popular…
I am a musician and an author. Many of my mentors and collaborators are members of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), a collective organization of African American composers and performers founded on the South Side of Chicago in 1965. Their farthest-reaching innovation, a form known as “creative music,” transformed the fields of jazz and experimental music by breaking down the barriers that—prior to the advent of the AACM—had separated the disciplines of composition and improvisation. My book Sound Experimentsand the other books on the list give readers new insights into the members of the AACM and their groundbreaking music.
In The Freedom Principle, Chicago music critic John Litweiler examines the AACM’s connections to the experimental styles of jazz that emerged in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Figures such as Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane were important early influences on the AACM, and Litweiler shows how their work became the foundation for the even more radical advances of AACM composers and improvisers. The Freedom Principle is also replete with wonderful stories from the AACM’s first two decades, including Henry Threadgill’s account of how he created the hubkaphone, a percussion instrument made from salvaged hubcaps.
}Ornette Coleman's discovery some thirty years ago that his band's music was indeed a "free thing" marked the beginning of a revolution in jazz. From the early free-form experiments, Coleman's dancing blues, and John Coltrane's saxophone cries and sheets of sound, to the brittle, melancholy modes of Miles Davis, vibrant, sophisticated new jazz idioms proliferated. In this critical and historical survey of today's jazz, noted critic John Litweiler traces the evolution of the new music through such artists as Coleman, Coltrane, Davis, Cecil Taylor, Eric Dolphy, Sun Ra, Albert Ayler, Anthony Braxton, and others. He also addresses questions such as:…
I am a musician and an author. Many of my mentors and collaborators are members of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), a collective organization of African American composers and performers founded on the South Side of Chicago in 1965. Their farthest-reaching innovation, a form known as “creative music,” transformed the fields of jazz and experimental music by breaking down the barriers that—prior to the advent of the AACM—had separated the disciplines of composition and improvisation. My book Sound Experimentsand the other books on the list give readers new insights into the members of the AACM and their groundbreaking music.
Naomi Beckwith and Dieter Roelstraete’s book shares its title with the book described above, but its subject is completely different. Instead of focusing on the AACM’s music, this book centers on visual art related to the AACM, including paintings, sculptures, and installations created by AACM members such as Muhal Richard Abrams, Douglas Ewart, and Roscoe Mitchell. Published in conjunction with a major exhibit at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, Beckwith and Roelstraete’s book is a visual feast and a tribute to the AACM’s boundless creativity.
On the South Side of Chicago in the 1960s, African American artists and musicians grappled with new language and forms inspired by the black nationalist turn in the Civil Rights movement. The Freedom Principle, which accompanies an exhibition on the topic at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, traces their history and shows how it continues to inform contemporary artists around the world. The book coincides with the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), a still-flourishing organization of Chicago musicians who challenge jazz's boundaries. Combining archival materials such as brochures, photographs,…
I am a musician and an author. Many of my mentors and collaborators are members of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), a collective organization of African American composers and performers founded on the South Side of Chicago in 1965. Their farthest-reaching innovation, a form known as “creative music,” transformed the fields of jazz and experimental music by breaking down the barriers that—prior to the advent of the AACM—had separated the disciplines of composition and improvisation. My book Sound Experimentsand the other books on the list give readers new insights into the members of the AACM and their groundbreaking music.
AACM member Nicole Mitchell Gantt’s The Mandorla Letters is a companion to her series of Mandorla Awakening compositions, which use music and text to imagine new societies that “embrace dualities” and empower people to live in harmony with one another—and with the natural world. “Part memoir, part manifesto, part Black speculative novella,” The Mandorla Letters is an extraordinary work by the figure who best embodies the AACM’s philosophy of creativity as a way of life.
Afrofuturist memoir on jazz, collaboration, and the search for collective well-being
Part memoir, part manifesto, part Black speculative novella, The Mandorla Letters: for the hopeful blurs boundaries between this world and an imagined future whose overlapping wisdoms make cooperation with our natural environment a central concern for collective thriving. Extending her ongoing musical project Mandorla Awakening, Nicole Mitchell Gantt explores inequity, the musical legacies of jazz, creative music, and intercultural collaboration to guide readers toward an alternative society that disrupts binaries, hierarchies, and western ideas of progress. Paying homage to artists, musicians, and writers who have inspired her, Mitchell Gantt…
As a scholar as well as performer of the African American creative improvised music usually called jazz, my attunement to this art form resonates with its historico-cultural matrix as much as with the sounds themselves. These books distinguish themselves for being well-researched and rigorous. They are the real deal, doing justice to the heart as well as the intellect of this art form.
Based on extensive personal interviews with some of the most impactful musicians in jazz, Dr. Monson demonstrates how the supremely interactive nature of jazz improvisation is based on the oral and aural traditions of African American vernacular speech. It therefore demonstrates the way that music, language, and other aspects of culture intrinsically form a unified complex whole.
In this work, Ingrid Monson juxtaposes musicians' talk and musical examples to ask how musicians go about "saying something" through music in a way that articulates identity, politics, and race. Through interviews with Jaki Byard, Richard Davis, Sir Roland Hanna, Billy Higgins, Cecil McBee, and others, she develops a perspective on jazz improvisation that has "interactiveness" at its core, in the creation of music through improvisational interaction, in the shaping of social communities and networks through music, and in the development of cultural meanings and ideologies that inform the interpretation of jazz in twentieth-century American cultural life.
As a scholar as well as performer of the African American creative improvised music usually called jazz, my attunement to this art form resonates with its historico-cultural matrix as much as with the sounds themselves. These books distinguish themselves for being well-researched and rigorous. They are the real deal, doing justice to the heart as well as the intellect of this art form.
To me, due to the rigor of its scholarship, this is the best book written about Coltrane. It combines meticulous attention to Coltrane’s life story with in-depth musical analysis of his oeuvre. A must-read for anyone who wants to really delve into the music of this monumental musical master.
This is a definitive assessment of the life and work of jazz musician John Coltrane, based on new interviews with his colleagues and never-before-published material. John Coltrane was a key figure in jazz, a pioneer in world music, and an intensely emotional force whose following continues to grow. This new biography, the first by a professional jazz scholar and performer, presents a huge amount of never-before-published material, including interviews with Coltrane, photos, genealogical documents, and innovative musical analysis that offers a fresh view of Coltrane's genius. Compiled from scratch with the assistance of dozens of Coltrane's colleagues, friends, and family,…
As a scholar as well as performer of the African American creative improvised music usually called jazz, my attunement to this art form resonates with its historico-cultural matrix as much as with the sounds themselves. These books distinguish themselves for being well-researched and rigorous. They are the real deal, doing justice to the heart as well as the intellect of this art form.
This scrupulous 624-page tome elucidates the life and work of the High Priest of Bebop, Saint Thelonious Monk, in amazing detail and exactitude, while remaining supremely engaging and easy to read. The fact that the author developed the book with members of Monk’s family comes through in the authenticity of the narrative.
The image of Thelonious Sphere Monk (1917-1982), with his trademark goatee, dark glasses, and hat, is today a poster-image of coolness just as Che Guevara's face once was an image of rebellion. Jazz fans revere Monk for his ground-breaking compositions and piano playing from the 1950s and 1960s, but to a wider audience he stands for something much bigger: the very idea of native genius; a quirky, absent-minded, unalloyed originality that is the perfect symbol of the indefinable essence of jazz. Monk's creations from the 1950s and 1960s rank among jazz's most beloved classics, yet Kelley shows that the life…
So look, I’m going to admit something: I’ve been casting myself as the heroine in historical adventures and mysteries since the age of six. I’ve been Sherlock Holmes’s daughter, Elizabeth Bennett’s slightly disreputable sleuthing cousin, the lone lady Pinkerton hunting down Butch and Sundance. These youthful fantasies combined three things I adored: puzzles, adventure, and geeking out on history. When I got a little older, I left off imagining myself in the starring role in favour of something even more immersive: becoming someone else entirely. Whether I’m writing them or reading them, books like the ones on this list transport me, and I hope they’ll transport you, too.
I have a thing for Pinkertons. They’re so often portrayed as villains, but this one is a hero: Kate Warne, the (real-life) first female Pinkerton detective. Kate’s story is fascinating and tense, full of surprising twists—some real and some fictional. At times Girl in Disguise reads more like a spy novel than a detective story, especially when it comes to a certain real-life assassination attempt I’d never heard about, and which literally dropped my jaw. Readers interested in fascinating women largely forgotten by history will devour this one.
"Electrifying...a rollicking nineteenth-century thrill ride." -Amy Stewart, New York Times bestselling author of Girl Waits with Gun Inspired by the real story of investigator Kate Warne, this spirited novel follows the detective's rise during one of the nation's times of crisis, bringing to life a fiercely independent woman whose forgotten triumphs helped sway the fate of the country. With no money and no husband, Kate Warne finds herself with few choices. The streets of 1856 Chicago offer a desperate widow mostly trouble and ruin-unless that widow has a knack for manipulation and an unusually quick mind. In a bold move…
I’m an artist who likes to write, but I’ve never been interested in classic superhero or pulp graphic novels. Early in my career, the word “comics” felt like an insult—it's not “real art,” right? Too childish! While that instinct was definitely wrong, I found a (small) world of experimental, abstract, genre-breaking graphic novels that combine art and writing in a wholly unique way. This is a list of some of my recent favorites that have inspired my drawing and writing practice, and will hopefully inspire you.
This is one of the first graphic novels to truly reinvent the medium, and is absolutely required reading for anyone who wants to experiment with visual storytelling. Instead of a traditionally bound book, you get an oversized box filled with pamphlets, booklets, newspapers, and more. The comics themselves read pretty straightforwardly, but it's the act of rifling through this giant box for the first time, not knowing exactly where it'll lead you, that's truly a unique reading experience.
In Chris Ware's own words, 'Building Stories follows the inhabitants of a three-flat Chicago apartment house: a thirty-year-old woman who has yet to find someone with whom to spend the rest of her life; a couple who wonder if they can bear each other's company for another minute; and finally an elderly woman who never married and is the building's landlady...'
The scope, the ambition, the artistry and emotional heft of this project are beyond anything even Chris Ware has achieved before.
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