Jean Blackwell Hutson Research and Reference Division & NYPL
The Schomburg Center and the New York Public Library offers a wide variety of resources that document people of African descent across the research libraries including research guides, databases, books, zines, and more. The Jean Blackwell Hutson Research and Reference division holds a mix of primary and secondary resources relating to the Black diasporic experience. In this division you can find books, pamphlets, periodicals, collections on micro
film, access to databases, as well as other formats. Below represent some of the holdings in the Jean Blackwell Hutson Research and Reference division that jazz musicians, biographies, jazz fictions, and microfilm collections.
To find additional resources, check the NYPL catalog, or the NYPL Archives Portal.
Databases and Periodicals
- Entertainment Industry Magazine Archive Full text of entertainment industry trade magazines covering film, music, broadcasting, and theater. Titles include Variety (1905-2000), Billboard (1894-2000), Broadcasting (1931-2000) and more.
- The Jazz Discographies Online The Jazz Discography is the world's largest and most complete source of information about jazz records and jazz recording sessions. This is an online subscription service that allows subscribers to access the most up-to-date version of the Jazz Discography database.
- Naxos Music Library Streamed recordings of primarily classical music. Also includes world/folk music, Chinese orchestral, folk, and traditional music. Naxos Music Library offers the complete Naxos and Marco Polo catalogues, plus thousands of titles from other labels, including Chandos, BIS, Hungaroton, Hanssler, Bridge, First Edition, CPO, Coro, and Wergo. For details on how to log in with the mobile app, please see Streaming Audio and Video in Music Research from Home using NYPL resources.
- Oxford Music Online A gateway offering users the ability to access and cross-search multiple music reference resources in one location. Contains the Grove Music Online, as well as The Oxford Dictionary of Music, and The Oxford Companion to Music.
- Performing Arts Periodicals Database Previously known as the International Index for the Performing Arts Full Text (IIPA), the Performing Arts Periodicals Database covers the subjects of dance, film, television, drama, recorded sound, theater, stagecraft, musical theater, broadcast arts, circus performance, comedy, storytelling, opera, pantomime, puppetry, magic and more. Contains over 172,013 records providing current and retrospective coverage, with citations dating back to 1864.
Jazz Fiction
Another Country by
From one of the most important American novelists of the twentieth century--a novel of sexual, racial, political, artistic passions, set in Greenwich Village, Harlem, and France. * "Brilliant and fiercely told." --The New York Times Stunning for its emotional intensity and haunting sensuality, this book depicts men and women, blacks and whites, stripped of their masks of gender and race by love and hatred at the most elemental and sublime. Nominated as one of America's best-loved novels by PBS's The Great American Read.
Call Number: Sc Fic (Baldwin, James. Another country)ISBN: 9780679744719Publication Date: 1992-12-01
But Beautiful by
In eight poetically charged vignettes, Geoff Dyer skillfully evokes the music and the men who shaped modern jazz. Drawing on photos, anecdotes, and, most important, the way he hears the music, Dyer imaginatively reconstructs scenes from the embattled lives of some of the greats: Lester Young fading away in a hotel room; Charles Mingus storming down the streets of New York on a too-small bicycle; Thelonious Monk creating his own private language on the piano. However, music is the driving force of But Beautiful, and wildly metaphoric prose that mirrors the quirks, eccentricity, and brilliance of each musician's style.
Call Number: Sc D 97-1758ISBN: 0865474907Publication Date: 1996-01-24
Don't the Moon Look Lonesome by
"Carla is a talented jazz singer nearing forty. Maxwell is a renowned tenor saxophonist, the man Carla deeply loves and wants to marry. But Maxwell, who is black, finds himself increasingly at odds with the notion of lifelong togetherness with a white woman, as he yields to group pressure. While they are visiting his parents (whom Carla hopes to win over in her struggle to keep Maxwell in her life), scenes from Carla's past play out against the present, and we begin to appreciate the astonishing arc of her life."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Call Number: Sc E 00-990ISBN: 0375409327Publication Date: 2000-04-25
A Drop of Patience by
"At the age of five, a blind African-American boy is handed over to a brutal state home. Here Ludlow Washington will suffer for eleven years, until his prodigious musical talent provides him an unlikely ticket back into the world. The property of a band, playing for down-and-outs in a southern dive, Ludlow's pioneering flair will take him to New York and the very top of the jazz scene - where his personal demons will threaten to drag him back down to the bottom. A Drop of Patience is the story a gifted and damaged man entirely set apart - by blindness, by race, by talent - who must wrestle with adversity and ambition to generate the acceptance and self-worth that have always eluded him."--Publisher description.
Call Number: Sc D 22-2ISBN: 9781787478077
Jazz by
From the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner, a passionate, profound story of love and obsession that brings us back and forth in time, as a narrative is assembled from the emotions, hopes, fears, and deep realities of Black urban life. With a foreword by the author. "As rich in themes and poetic images as her Pulitzer Prize-winning Beloved.... Morrison conjures up the hand of slavery on Harlem's jazz generation. The more you listen, the more you crave to hear." --Glamour In the winter of 1926, when everybody everywhere sees nothing but good things ahead, Joe Trace, middle-aged door-to-door salesman of Cleopatra beauty products, shoots his teenage lover to death. At the funeral, Joe's wife, Violet, attacks the girl's corpse. This novel "transforms a familiar refrain of jilted love into a bold, sustaining time of self-knowledge and discovery. Its rhythms are infectious" (People). "The author conjures up worlds with complete authority and makes no secret of her angst at the injustices dealt to Black women." --The New York Times Book Review
Call Number: Sc D 92-650ISBN: 0679411674Publication Date: 1992-04-07
Jazz Baby by
Illustrated by Laura Freeman. A celebration of music and movement, this story in verse is inspired by the riffs, rhythms and freedom of jazz. Colourful spreads show close-ups of children playing drums, piano and bass as they swing, and jitterbug to the music. With an appealing and rhythmic text just right for young children, plus colourful, contemporary illustrations with real child appeal, Jazz Baby is an exciting way to introduce young children to the instruments and rhythms of jazz. Ages 1-6.
Call Number: Sc C 04-102ISBN: 1584300396Publication Date: 2013-04-01
Look What They Done to My Song by Call Number: Sc Fic (McCluskey, J. Look what they done to my song)ISBN: 0394488180Publication Date: 1974-01-01
The Night Train by
In 1963, at the age of 17, Dwayne Hallston discovers James Brown and wants to perform just like him. His band, the Amazing Rumblers, studies and rehearses Brown's Live at the Apollo album in the storage room of his father's shop in their small North Carolina town. Meanwhile, Dwayne's forbidden black friend Larry -- aspiring to play piano like Thelonius Monk -- apprentices to a jazz musician called the Bleeder. His mother hopes music will allow him to escape the South. A dancing chicken and a mutual passion for music help Dwayne and Larry as they try to achieve their dreams and maintain their friendship, even while their world says both are impossible. In The Night Train, Edgerton's trademark humor reminds us of our divided national history and the way music has helped bring us together.
Call Number: Sc D 11-1372ISBN: 9780316117593Publication Date: 2011-07-25
The Street by
"Petry is the writer we have been waiting for, hers are the stories we need to fully illuminate the questions of our moment, while also offering a page-turning good time. Ann Petry, the woman, had it all, and so does her insightful, prescient and unputdownable prose."--Tayari Jones, The Enthusiast, New York Times Book Review THE STREET tells the poignant, often heartbreaking story of Lutie Johnson, a young black woman, and her spirited struggle to raise her son amid the violence, poverty, and racial dissonance of Harlem in the late 1940s. Originally published in 1946 and hailed by critics as a masterwork, The Street was Ann Petry's first novel, a beloved bestseller with more than a million copies in print. Its haunting tale still resonates today.
Call Number: Sc D 00-2824ISBN: 0395901499Publication Date: 1998-03-15
Jazz Poetry
Black Case Volume I and II by
In 1977, Art Ensemble of Chicago Publishing Co. published Jarman's Black Case, a collection of writing conceived across America and Europe between 1960 and 1975. Comprised largely of Jarman's flowing, fiery free verse--influenced by Amus Mor, Henry Dumas, Thulani Davis, and Amiri Baraka--the book also features a manifesto for "GREAT BLACK MUSIC," notated songs, concert program notes, Jarman's photos, and impressions of a play by Muhal Richard Abrams. Jarman writes poetry of personal revolutionary intent, aimed at routing his audience's consciousness towards growth and communication. He speaks with compassionate urgency of the struggles of growing up on Chicago's South Side, of racist police brutality and profound urban alienation, and of the responsibility he feels as a creative artist to nurture beauty and community through the heliocentric music that he considers the healing force of the universe. A practicing Buddhist and proponent of Aikido since a 1958 awakening saved him from the traumatic mental isolation of his time dropped by the US army into southeast Asia, Jarman sings praise for the self-awareness realization possible through the martial arts. With cosmic breath as its leitmotif, his poetry both encourages and embodies a complete relinquishing of ego. While some of the poems contained within Black Case have already been immortalized via performances on classic records by Jarman and Art Ensemble of Chicago, its republication in print form breathes new life into a forgotten document of the Black Arts Movement.
Call Number: Sc D 21-780ISBN: 9781733723534Publication Date: 2019-11-05
Cosmic Deputy by
Cosmic Deputy is a literary memoir from esteemed activist, educator, producer, and poet Kalamu ya Salaam. Representative poems from Salaam's fifty years of writing are interspersed in an overarching essay tracing the poet's multitude of influences. Toward mapping a theory of a Black literary aesthetic, Salaam explores the cultural inheritances of Black resistance movements, blues music, and the ways in which these sources and others have shaped not only his own work but Black letters more broadly.
Call Number: Sc E 21-1096ISBN: 9781608011896Publication Date: 2020-12-02- Ask your mama : 12 moods for jazz [microform] byCall Number: Sc Micro R-6699ISBN: 9781607436904Publication Date: 1961
The Jazz Poetry Anthology by
..". in a class by itself... sensitive, moving, and powerful jazz imagery... the perfect companion to listening to good jazz." --Jazziz Magazine "In the course of the history of jazz, there have been only a few articles that get to the core of the meaning of jazz. These poems hit it right on the head, and the book is certainly essential for anyone who is interested in our music." --Dizzy Gillespie "To those interested in the impact of jazz upon the poetry of our century I recommend this anthology altogether without reservation." --John Lucas, JazzTimes ..". essential... Its virtues are varied and copious, and not the least among them is discovering a writer whose work is new to you." --Los Angeles Reader "What makes this work most enjoyable is knowing the music and musicians and using that knowledge to understand and judge the poets' reactions to the elements in the music that please and inspire us." --MultiCultural Review "Filled with a variety of form, rhythm, and sound, this anthology is an absolute MUST for anyone who is even remotely interested in jazz and modern literature." --David Baker Since the turn of the century, poets have responded to jazz in all its musical and cultural overtones. The poems here cover the range of jazz itself: from early blues to free jazz and experimental music. Among the 132 poets included are James Baldwin, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Langston Hughes, Jack Kerouac, Mina Loy, Ishmael Reed, and Sonia Sanchez. This anthology represents the broad appreciation for jazz as poetic inspiration, not only from the Beat movement but from writers across the decades and around the world.
Call Number: Sc E 91-133ISBN: 0253321638Publication Date: 1991-06-01
Home/Bass by
Home/Bass brings to the forefront the myriad of folks that inhabit the up-South streets of Chicago or the unaltered roads of Mississippi, Arkansas, Georgia, and other pockets inhabited by Blacks throughout the South. Sterling Plumpp has lived with these folks--sharecroppers, preachers, misplaced Mississippi blues men and women. He has been in their houses, has dined at their tables, and has drunk at the bars on the corners. He is not a stranger to their articulations--voices that call to him from a Natchez cemetery, from the outskirts of some Mississippi Delta town, or settle on Maxwell Street in Chicago--all through the observant and often omnipresent lens of blues artist Willie Kent. Plumpp is always mindful of the slow, steady rhythms of the blues, not as backdrop, but as the foundation and framework on which he structures the components of this book. With the publication of Home/Bass, Plumpp has once again captured the very essence of language and the blues from the inside out.
Call Number: Sc D 14-1376ISBN: 9780883783450Publication Date: 2012-10-30
Jazz Biographies
Charlie Parker by
Saxophonist Charlie Parker (1920-1955) was one of the most innovative and influential jazz musicians of any era. As one of the architects of modern jazz (often called "bebop"), Charlie Parker has had a profound effect on American music. His music reached such a high level of melodic, rhythmic, and harmonic sophistication that saxophonists and other instrumentalists continue to study it as both a technical challenge and an aesthetic inspiration. This revised edition of Charlie Parker: His Music and Life has been revised throughout to account for new Charlie Parker scholarship and previously unknown Parker recordings that have emerged since the book's initial publication. The volume opens by considering current research on Parker's biography, laying out some of the contradictory accounts of his life, and setting the chronology straight where possible. It then focuses on Parker's music, tracing his artistic evolution and major achievements as a jazz improviser. The musical discussions and transcribed musical examples include timecodes for easy location in recordings--a unique feature to this book.
Call Number: Sc E 21-355ISBN: 9780472037896Publication Date: 2020-07-16
Duke by
A major new biography of Duke Ellington from the acclaimed author of Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington was the greatest jazz composer of the twentieth century--and an impenetrably enigmatic personality whom no one, not even his closest friends, claimed to understand. The grandson of a slave, he dropped out of high school to become one of the world's most famous musicians, a showman of incomparable suavity who was as comfortable in Carnegie Hall as in the nightclubs where he honed his style. He wrote some fifteen hundred compositions, many of which, like "Mood Indigo" and "Sophisticated Lady," remain beloved standards, and he sought inspiration in an endless string of transient lovers, concealing his inner self behind a smiling mask of flowery language and ironic charm. As the biographer of Louis Armstrong, Terry Teachout is uniquely qualified to tell the story of the public and private lives of Duke Ellington. Duke peels away countless layers of Ellington's evasion and public deception to tell the unvarnished truth about the creative genius who inspired Miles Davis to say, "All the musicians should get together one certain day and get down on their knees and thank Duke."
Call Number: Sc E 14-157ISBN: 9781592407491Publication Date: 2013-10-17
Lady Sings the Blues by
This work presents the Billie Holiday story - her rise to the top from the slums and the streets, to the eventual slide down.
Call Number: Sc C 85-208ISBN: 9780140067620Publication Date: 1984-03-06
Mary Lou Williams by
In Mary Lou Williams: Music for the Soul, Deanna Witkowski brings a fresh perspective to the life and music of the legendary jazz pianist-composer Mary Lou Williams (1910-81). As a fellow jazz pianist-composer, adult convert to Catholicism, and liturgical composer, Witkowski offers unique insight gleaned from a twenty-year journey with Williams as her chosen musical and spiritual mentor. Viewing Williams's musical and corporal acts of mercy as part of a singular effort to create community no matter the context, Witkowski examines how Williams created networks of support and friendship through her decades long letter correspondence with various women religious, her charitable work, and her tireless efforts to perform jazz in churches, community centers, concert halls, and schools. Throughout this fascinating story told with equal amounts of deep love and scholarly research, Witkowski illumines Williams's passionate mantra that "jazz is healing to the soul."
Call Number: Sc D 23-189ISBN: 9780814664018Publication Date: 2021-08-15
Miles and Me by
Quincy Troupe's candid account of his friendship with Miles Davis is a revealing portrait of a great musician and an intimate study of a unique relationship. It is also an engrossing chronicle of the author's own development, both artistic and personal. As Davis's collaborator on Miles: The Autobiography,Troupe--one of the major poets to emerge from the 1960s--had exceptional access to the musician. This memoir goes beyond the life portrayed in the autobiography to describe in detail the processes of Davis's spectacular creativity and the joys and difficulties his passionate, contradictory temperament posed to the men's friendship. It shows how Miles Davis, both as a black man and an artist, influenced not only Quincy Troupe but whole generations. Troupe has written that Miles Davis was "irascible, contemptuous, brutally honest, ill-tempered when things didn't go his way, complex, fair-minded, humble, kind and a son-of-a-bitch." The author's love and appreciation for Davis make him a keen, though not uncritical, observer. He captures and conveys the power of the musician's presence, the mesmerizing force of his personality, and the restless energy that lay at the root of his creativity. He also shows Davis's lighter side: cooking, prowling the streets of Manhattan, painting, riding his horse at his Malibu home. Troupe discusses Davis's musical output, situating his albums in the context of the times--both political and musical--out of which they emerged. Miles and Me is an unparalleled look at the act of creation and the forces behind it, at how the innovations of one person can inspire both those he knows and loves and the world at large.
Call Number: Sc D 00-630ISBN: 0520216245Publication Date: 2000-03-08
Satchmo by
"In all my whole career the Brick House was one of the toughest joints I ever played in. It was the honky-tonk where levee workers would congregate every Saturday night and trade with the gals who'd stroll up and down the floor and the bar. Those guys would drink and fight one another like circle saws. Bottles would come flying over the bandstand like crazy, and there was lots of just plain common shooting and cutting. But somehow all that jive didn't faze me at all, I was so happy to have some place to blow my horn." So says Louis Armstrong, a tough kid who just happened to be a musical genius, about one of the places where he performed and grew up. This raucous, rich tale of his early days in New Orleans concludes with his departure to Chicago at twenty-one to play with his boyhood idol King Oliver, and tells the story of a life that began, mythically, on July 4, 1900, in the city that sowed the seeds of jazz.
Call Number: Sc D 88-339ISBN: 0306802767Publication Date: 1986-08-22
Saxophone Colossus by
Sonny Rollins has long been considered an enigma. Known as the "Saxophone Colossus," he is widely acknowledged as one of the greatest jazz improvisers of all time, winning Grammys, the Austrian Cross of Honor, Sweden's Polar Music Prize and a National Medal of Arts. A bridge from bebop to the avant-garde, he is a lasting link to the golden age of jazz, pictured in the iconic "Great Day in Harlem" portrait. His seven-decade career has been well documented, but the backstage life of the man once called "the only jazz recluse" has gone largely untold-until now. Based on more than 200 interviews with Rollins himself, family members, friends, and collaborators, as well as Rollins' extensive personal archive, Saxophone Colossus is the comprehensive portrait of this legendary saxophonist and composer, civil rights activist and environmentalist. A child of the Harlem Renaissance, Rollins' precocious talent landed him on the bandstand and in the recording studio with Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie, or playing opposite Billie Holiday. An icon in his own right, he recorded Tenor Madness, featuring John Coltrane; Way Out West; Freedom Suite, the first civil rights-themed album of the hard bop era; A Night at the Village Vanguard; and the 1956 classic Saxophone Colossus. Yet his meteoric rise to fame was not without its challenges. He served two sentences on Rikers Island and won his battle with heroin addiction. In 1959, Rollins took a two-year sabbatical from recording and performing, practicing up to 16 hours a day on the Williamsburg Bridge. In 1968, he left again to study at an ashram in India. He returned to performing from 1971 until his retirement in 2012.? The story of Sonny Rollins-innovative, unpredictable, larger than life-is the story of jazz itself, and Sonny's own narrative is as timeless and timely as the art form he represents. Part jazz oral history told in the musicians' own words, part chronicle of one man's quest for social justice and spiritual enlightenment, this is the definitive biography of one of the most enduring and influential artists in jazz and American history.
Call Number: Sc E 22-1567ISBN: 9780306902796Publication Date: 2022-12-06
Soul on Soul by
First time in paperback and e-book! The jazz musician-composer-arranger Mary Lou Williams spent her sixty-year career working in--and stretching beyond--a dizzying range of musical styles. Her integration of classical music into her works helped expand jazz's compositional language. Her generosity made her a valued friend and mentor to the likes of Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, and Dizzy Gillespie. Her late-in-life flowering of faith saw her embrace a spiritual jazz oriented toward advancing the civil rights struggle and helping wounded souls. Tammy L. Kernodle details Williams's life in music against the backdrop of controversies over women's place in jazz and bitter arguments over the music's evolution. Williams repeatedly asserted her artistic and personal independence to carve out a place despite widespread bafflement that a woman exhibited such genius. Embracing Williams's contradictions and complexities, Kernodle also explores a personal life troubled by lukewarm professional acceptance, loneliness, relentless poverty, bad business deals, and difficult marriages. In-depth and epic in scope, Soul on Soul restores a pioneering African American woman to her rightful place in jazz history.
Call Number: Sc E 04-1134ISBN: 9780252052484Publication Date: 2020-10-26
Space Is the Place by
Always riveting, Space Is the Place is the definitive biography of "one of the great big-band leaders, pianists, and surrealists of jazz" (New York Times)--unparalleled for his purposeful outlandishness, a man who exerted a powerful influence over a vast array of artists. Sun Ra--a/k/a Herman Poole "Sonny Blount--was born in Alabama on May 22, 1914. But like Father Divine and Elijah Muhammad, he made a lifelong effort to obscure many of the facts of his early life. After years as a rehearsal pianist for nightclub revues and in blues and swing bands, including Wynonie Harris's and Fletcher Henderson's, Sun Ra set out in the 1950s to find a way to impart his views about the galaxy, black people, and spiritual matters through the various incarnations of the Intergalactic Arkestra. His repertoire ranging from boogie-woogie, swing, and bebop to free form, fusion, and whatever, Sun Ra was above all a paragon of contradictions: profundity and vaudevil≤ technical pianistic virtuosity and irony; assiduous attention to arrangements and encouragement of collective improvisation; respect for tradition and celebration of the fresh. Some might have been bemused by his Afro-Platonic neo-hermeticism; others might have laughed at his egregious excesses. But Sun Ra was at once one of the great avant-gardists of the latter half of the twentieth century and a black cultural nationalist who extended Afrocentrism from ancient Egypt to the heavens.
Call Number: Sc E 97-668ISBN: 0679435891Publication Date: 1997-07-08
Straighten up and Fly Right by
One of the most popular and memorable American musicians of the 20th century, Nat King Cole (1919-65) is remembered today as both a pianist and a singer, a feat rarely accomplished in the world of popular music. Now, in this complete life and times biography, author Will Friedwald offers a newtake on this fascinating musician, framing him first as a bandleader and then as a star. In Cole's early phase, Friedwald explains, his primary task of keeping his trio going was just as much of a focus for him as his own playing and singing, always a collective or group performance. In the secondact, Cole's collaborators were more likely to be arranger-conductors like Nelson Riddle and Gordon Jenkins, rather than his sidemen on bass and guitar. In the first act, his sidemen were equals, in the second phase, his collaborators were tasked exclusively with putting the focus on him, making himsound good, while being largely invisible themselves.Friedwald brings his full musical knowledge to bear in putting the man in the work, demonstrating how this duality appears over and over again in Cole's life and career: jazz vs. pop, solo vs. trio, piano vs. voice, wife number one (Nadine) vs. wife number two (Maria), the good songs vs. theless-than-good songs, the rhythm numbers vs. the ballads, the funny songs and novelties vs. the "serious" songs of love and loss, Cole as an advocate for the Great American Songbook vs. Cole the intrepid explorer of other options: world music, rhythm and blues, country and western. Cole wasdifferent from his contemporaries in other ways; for roughly ten years after the war, the majority of hitmakers on the pop charts were veterans of the big band experience, from Sinatra on down.
Call Number: Sc E 21-661ISBN: 9780190882044Publication Date: 2020-05-13
Thelonious Monk by
Thelonious Monk is one of the most popular jazz composers and pianists since Duke Ellington, and a cultural icon of cool. This first complete biography is written with full access to the family's archives.
Call Number: Sc E 09-1026ISBN: 9780684831909Publication Date: 2009-10-06
Universal Tonality by
Since ascending onto the world stage in the 1990s as one of the premier bassists and composers of his generation, William Parker has perpetually toured around the world and released over forty albums as a leader. He is one of the most influential jazz artists alive today. In Universal Tonality historian and critic Cisco Bradley tells the story of Parker's life and music. Drawing on interviews with Parker and his collaborators, Bradley traces Parker's ancestral roots in West Africa via the Carolinas to his childhood in the South Bronx, and illustrates his rise from the 1970s jazz lofts and extended work with pianist Cecil Taylor to the present day. He outlines how Parker's early influences--Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Albert Ayler, and writers of the Black Arts Movement--grounded Parker's aesthetic and musical practice in a commitment to community and the struggle for justice and freedom. Throughout, Bradley foregrounds Parker's understanding of music, the role of the artist, and the relationship between art, politics, and social transformation. Intimate and capacious, Universal Tonality is the definitive work on Parker's life and music.
Call Number: Sc E 21-1122ISBN: 9781478011194Publication Date: 2021-02-12
Collections on Microfilm
- Collection of [the periodical literature of jazz] 1918-1972.Call Number: Sc Micro R-912
- Down beatCall Number: Sc Micro R-912
- The JazzologistCall Number: Sc Micro RS-618
- Journal of jazz studiesCall Number: Sc Micro RS-459
- New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Foundation quarterlyCall Number: Sc Micro RS-1013
- Schomburg Center Scrapbooks : Jazz Music. These scrapbooks (1936-1965) are about jazz music and contain clippings from a variety of both African American and mainstream newspapers and one jazz magazine. Coverage includes several years of the Newport Jazz Festival in Newport, Rhode Island and the Randall's Island Jazz Festival in New York City. Many clippings are notices of concerts, reviews of concerts, and profiles of artists, including Meade "Lux" Lewis, Albert Ammons, Artie Shaw, John W. Bubbles, Buck Washington, Baby Dodds, Dizzy Gillespie, Helen Humes, Nat King Cole, Tony Parenti, Ella Fitzgerald, Leonard Bernstein, Sidney Bechet, Miles Davis, Gene Krupa, Ahmad Jamal, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Dorothy Donegan, Thelonious Monk, Louis Armstrong, Lena Horne, and J.J. Johnson. Publications include African American newspaper the Pittsburgh Courier, as well as Down Beat magazine (Chicago), New York Herald Tribune, New York Times, and Newsweek magazine. Not all clippings include date and source information.Call Number: Sc Micro R-707 r. 8
- This is jazz; [Microform] A series of lectures given at the San Francisco Museum of Art by Rudi Blesh.Call Number: Sc 780.9 B (Blesh, R. This is jazz)
Jazz studies
Antagonistic Cooperation by
Ralph Ellison famously characterized ensemble jazz improvisation as "antagonistic cooperation." Both collaborative and competitive, musicians play with and against one another to create art and community. In Antagonistic Cooperation, Robert G. O'Meally shows how this idea runs throughout twentieth-century African American culture to provide a new history of Black creativity and aesthetics. From the collages of Romare Bearden and paintings of Jean-Michel Basquiat to the fiction of Ralph Ellison and Toni Morrison to the music of Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, O'Meally explores how the worlds of African American jazz, art, and literature have informed one another. He argues that these artists drew on the improvisatory nature of jazz and the techniques of collage not as a way to depict a fractured or broken sense of Blackness but rather to see the Black self as beautifully layered and complex. They developed a shared set of methods and motives driven by the belief that art must involve a sense of community. O'Meally's readings of these artists and their work emphasize how they have not only contributed to understanding of Black history and culture but also provided hope for fulfilling the broken promises of American democracy.
Call Number: Sc E 22-887ISBN: 9780231189187Publication Date: 2022-03-15
The Drum Is a Wild Woman by
In 1957, Duke Ellington released the influential album A Drum Is a Woman. This musical allegory revealed the implicit truth about the role of women in jazz discourse-jilted by the musician and replaced by the drum. Further, the album's cover displays an image of a woman sitting atop a drum, depicting the way in which the drum literally obscures the female body, turning the subject into an object. This objectification of women leads to a critical reading of the role of women in jazz music: If the drum can take the place of a woman, then a woman can also take the place of a drum. The Drum Is a Wild Woman: Jazz and Gender in African Diaspora Literature challenges that image but also defines a counter-tradition within women's writing that involves the reinvention and reclamation of a modern jazz discourse. Despite their alienation from bebop, women have found jazz music empowering and have demonstrated this power in various ways. The Drum Is a Wild Woman explores the complex relationship between women and jazz music in recent African diasporic literature. The book examines how women writers from the African diaspora have challenged and revised major tropes and concerns of jazz literature since the bebop era in the mid-1940s. Black women writers create dissonant sounds that broaden our understanding of jazz literature. By underscoring the extent to which gender is already embedded in jazz discourse, author Patricia G. Lespinasse responds to and corrects narratives that tell the story of jazz through a male-centered lens. She concentrates on how the Wild Woman, the female vocalist in classic blues, used blues and jazz to push the boundaries of Black womanhood outside of the confines of respectability. In texts that refer to jazz in form or content, the Wild Woman constitutes a figure of resistance who uses language, image, and improvisation to refashion herself from object to subject. This book breaks new ground by comparing the politics of resistance alongside moments of improvisation by examining recurring literary motifs-cry-and-response, the Wild Woman, and the jazz moment-in jazz novels, short stories, and poetry, comparing works by Ann Petry, Gayl Jones, Toni Morrison, Paule Marshall, Edwidge Danticat, and Maya Angelou with pieces by Albert Murray, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Ellington. Within an interdisciplinary and transnational context, Lespinasse foregrounds the vexed negotiations around gender and jazz discourse.
Call Number: Sc D 22-326ISBN: 9781496836038Publication Date: 2022-01-04
The History of Jazz by
An updated new edition of Ted Gioia's universally acclaimed history of jazz, with a wealth of new insight on this music's past, present, and future. Ted Gioia's The History of Jazz has been universally hailed as the most comprehensive and accessible history of the genre of all time. Acclaimed by jazz critics and fans alike, this magnificent work is now available in an up-to-date third edition that covers the latest developments in the jazz world and revisits virtually every aspect of the music. Gioia's story of jazz brilliantly portrays the most legendary jazz players, the breakthrough styles, and the scenes in which they evolved. From Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington at the Cotton Club, Miles Davis's legendary 1955 performance at the Newport Jazz Festival, and Ornette Coleman's experiments with atonality to current innovators such as Kamasi Washington and Esperanza Spalding, Gioia takes readers on a sweeping journey through the history of jazz. As he traces the music through the swamp lands of the Mississippi Delta, the red light district of New Orleans, the rent parties of Harlem, the speakeasies of Chicago, and other key locales of jazz history, Gioia also makes the social contexts in which the music was born come alive. This new edition finally brings the often overlooked women who shaped the genre into the spotlight and traces the recent developments that have led to an upswing of jazz in contemporary mainstream culture. As it chronicles jazz from its beginnings and most iconic figures to its latest dialogues with popular music, the developments of the digital age, and new commercial successes, Gioia's History of Jazz reasserts its status as the most authoritative survey of this fascinating music.
Call Number: Sc E 21-354ISBN: 9780190087210Publication Date: 2021-03-01
The Influence of John Coltrane's Music on Improvising Saxophonists by
A study that examines the magnitude of Jazz legend, John Coltrane's influence, from an analytical perspective, on subsequent Post-Coltrane saxophonists in the development of their respective improvisatory styles and creative approaches to this music genre.
Call Number: Sc E 14-1083ISBN: 0773442812Publication Date: 2014-02-15
Introduction to Jazz History by
The philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) - in particular the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (pub. 1922) and the Philosophical Investigations (pub. 1953) - was decisive for English-language 'analytic philosophy' in the post-war period. At the same time, French-language interest inWittgenstein (as well as the 'analytic' tradition) was restricted and politically charged, in particular among French 1960s philosophers. Wittgenstein's influence has waned in the last quarter-century amongst philosophers working in English.In French, however, his reputation has grown considerably. This special issue of Paragraph brings together articles by scholars working in France, the UK, and North America around the questions of language and canon-formation in philosophy and 'theory'. In addition, Wittgenstein's current pertinenceto literary and historical interpretation are explored, as are the connections between Wittgenstein's philosophy and contemporary trends in interpretation theory, such as cognitive approaches to interpretation.
Call Number: Sc E 93-551ISBN: 0134818547Publication Date: 1992-08-01
Jazz As Critique by
A sustained engagement with Theodor Adorno, Jazz As Critique looks to jazz for ways of understanding the inadequacies of contemporary life. Adorno's writings on jazz are notoriously dismissive. Nevertheless, Adorno does have faith in the critical potential of some musical traditions. Music, he suggests, can provide insight into the controlling, destructive nature of modern society while offering a glimpse of more empathetic and less violent ways of being together in the world. Taking Adorno down a path he did not go, this book calls attention to an alternative sociality made manifest in jazz. In response to writing that tends to portray it as a mirror of American individualism and democracy, Fumi Okiji makes the case for jazz as a model of "gathering in difference."Noting that this mode of subjectivity emerged in response to the distinctive history of black America, she reveals that the music cannot but call the integrity of the world into question.
Call Number: Sc E 19-223ISBN: 9781503602021Publication Date: 2018-09-04
Jazz in Print (1859-1929) by
This anthology was compiled to aid the scholar working on the origins and evolution of jazz. Covering materials published through 1929, it also begins with articles from 1859 which do not concern jazz directly but serve to present a solid foundation for understanding the American music scene from which jazz developed. Chronologically listed and well-indexed, the hundreds of articles comprise, in effect, a history of jazz as it evolved. Beginning with accounts of Negro music in the pre-jazz era, continuing in an exploration of spirituals, followed by a description of ragtime, we finally learn about the development of jazz from its practitioners and informed audiences of the time.
Call Number: Sc F 03-96ISBN: 1576470245Publication Date: 2003-07-30
Keeping Time by
Drawing from contemporary journalism, reviews, program notes, memoirs, interviews, and other sources, Keeping Time: Readings in Jazz History brings to life the controversies and critical issues that have accompanied every moment of jazz history. Highlighting the significance of jazz as acomplex and consequential social practice as well as an art form, this book presents a multitude of ways in which people have understood and cared about jazz. It records a history not of style changes but of values, meanings, and sensibilities.Featuring sixty-two thought-provoking chapters, this unique volume gives voice to a wide range of perspectives, stressing different reactions to and uses of jazz, both within and across communities. It offers contributions from well-known figures including Jelly Roll Morton, Billie Holiday,Charles Mingus, Wynton Marsalis, Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, and Miles Davis; from renowned writers such as Langston Hughes, Norman Mailer, and Ralph Ellison; and from critics including Leonard Feather and Gunther Schuller. Walser has selected writings that capture the passionate reactions ofpeople who have loved, hated, supported, and argued about jazz.Organized chronologically, Keeping Time covers nearly 100 years of jazz history. Filled with insightful writing, it aims to increase historical awareness, to provoke critical thinking, and to encourage lively classroom discussion as students relive the tangled and conflicted story of jazz. Itenables readers to see that jazz is not just about names, dates, and chords, but rather about issues and ideas, cultural activities, and experiences that have affected people deeply in a great variety of ways. Concise headnotes provide historical context for each selection and point out issues forthinking and discussion. An excellent text for a variety of jazz courses, Keeping Time can serve as supplementary reading in popular music, American Studies, African American studies, history, and sociology courses, and will also appeal to anyone interested in jazz.
Call Number: Sc E 98-1509ISBN: 0195091736Publication Date: 1998-11-19
The Kind of Man I Am by
Nearly four decades after his death, Charles Mingus Jr. remains one of the least understood and most recognized jazz composers and musicians of our time. Mingus's ideas about music, racial identity, and masculinity--as well as those of other individuals in his circle, like Celia Mingus, Hazel Scott, and Joni Mitchell--challenged jazz itself as a model of freedom, inclusion, creativity, and emotional expressivity. Drawing on archival records, published memoirs, and previously conducted interviews, The Kind of Man I Am uses Mingus as a lens through which to craft a gendered cultural history of postwar jazz culture. This book challenges the persisting narrative of Mingus as jazz's "Angry Man" by examining the ways the language of emotion has been used in jazz as shorthand for competing ideas about masculinity, authenticity, performance, and authority.
Call Number: Sc E 19-328ISBN: 9780819577559Publication Date: 2017-09-01
Latin Jazz by
Jazz has always been a genre built on the blending of disparate musical cultures. Latin jazz proves this rule perhaps better than any other style in this rich tradition, yet its cultural heritage has been all but erased from narratives of jazz history. Latin Jazz: The Other Jazz corrects therecord. Acclaimed musician and jazz scholar Christopher Washburne traces the roots of Latin jazz back to 18th and 19th century colonial New Orleans, and follows its evolution to the 21st century global stage. Washburne provides a historical account that embraces the genre's international nature andexplores the dynamic interplay of economics, race, ethnicity, and nationalism that shaped it. Along the way, he highlights the African American and Latin American traditions whose influence is still present in Latin jazz today, exploring cultural centers like New York and Cuba, moments like theCivil Rights Movement and the emergence of pan-Africanism, and the careers of musicians like Chano Pozo and Tito Puente. Told from the illuminating perspective of a long-time jazz insider, Latin Jazz proves the genre's remarkable transcendence beyond stylistic, national, and racial borders.
Call Number: Sc E 21-630ISBN: 9780197510841Publication Date: 2020-05-18
The Real Ambassadors by
Keith Hatschek tells the story of three determined artists: Louis Armstrong, Dave Brubeck, and Iola Brubeck and the stand they took against segregation by writing and performing a jazz musical titled The Real Ambassadors. First conceived by the Brubecks in 1956, the musical's journey to the stage for its 1962 premiere tracks extraordinary twists and turns across the backdrop of the civil rights movement. A variety of colorful characters, from Broadway impresarios to gang-connected managers, surface in the compelling storyline. During the Cold War, the US State Department enlisted some of America's greatest musicians to serve as jazz ambassadors, touring the world to trumpet a so-called "free society." Honored as celebrities abroad, the jazz ambassadors, who were overwhelmingly African Americans, returned home to racial discrimination and deferred dreams. The Brubecks used this double standard as the central message for the musical, deploying humor and pathos to share perspectives on American values. On September 23, 1962, The Real Ambassadors's stunning debut moved a packed arena at the Monterey Jazz Festival to laughter, joy, and tears. Although critics unanimously hailed the performance, it sadly became a footnote in cast members' bios. The enormous cost of reassembling the star-studded cast made the creation impossible to stage and tour. However, The Real Ambassadors: Dave and Iola Brubeck and Louis Armstrong Challenge Segregation caps this jazz story by detailing how the show was triumphantly revived in 2013 by the Detroit Jazz Festival and in 2014 by Jazz at Lincoln Center. This reaffirmed the musical's place as an integral part of America's jazz history and served as an important reminder of how artists' voices are a powerful force for social change.
Call Number: Sc E 22-831ISBN: 9781496837776Publication Date: 2022-02-04
