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Adrian Rollini (1904-1956)was as a child prodigy, playing piano when he was four. This book describes how job opportunities came to him easily at first and that his versatility helped him when they became rare.At the age of 16 he became a professional musician and, in New York, recorded piano rolls. In 1922, at the start of the jazz age, he joined the California Ramblers. He moved to the bass saxophone and gave it its definite place in early jazz. He had no serious competition and was highly appreciated by his colleagues. His style became the instrument's standard and his new sound was one reason why the band became a success. At the top of his fame Rollini became leader of his own band, with a.o. Bix Beiderbecke, Frank Trumbauer, Eddie Lang, and Joe Venuti. It was star-studded but short-lived. In late 1927, he moved to London to join Fred Eizalde's progressive dance band. A year later he became the band's practical leader. Back in the USA in 1930, Rollini joined Bert Lown's hotel band, but the bass saxophone was phasing out, so he moved to the vibraphone. Bands such as Lown's and, later, Richard Himber's did not satisfy him, and he decided to start a club, Adrian's Tap Room, as well as an instrument shop. He was one of the first to go for a jazz trio, consisting of himself,a guitarist, and a bass player. During the 40s, Rollini added another venture, a fishing lodge in Florida.

The coal fields of West Virginia would seem an unlikely market for big band jazz during the Great Depression. That a prosperous African American audience, dominated by those involved with the coal industry, was there for jazz tours would seem equally improbable. This book shows that, contrary to expectations, black Mountaineers flocked to dances by the hundreds, in many instances traveling considerable distances to hear bands led by Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Andy Kirk, Jimmie Lunceford, and Chick Webb, among numerous others. Indeed, as one musician who toured the state would recall, “All the bands were goin’ to West Virginia.” The comparative prosperity of the coal miners, thanks to New Deal industrial policies, was what attracted the bands to the state. This study discusses that prosperity, as well as the larger political environment that provided black Mountaineers with a degree of autonomy not experienced further south. The author demonstrates the importance of radio and the black press both in introducing this music and in keeping black West Virginians up to date with its latest developments. The book explores connections between local entrepreneurs who staged the dances and the national management of the bands that played those engagements. In analyzing black audiences’ aesthetic preferences, the author reveals that many black West Virginians preferred dancing to a variety of music, not just jazz. Finally, the book shows that bands now associated almost exclusively with jazz were more than willing to satisfy those audience preferences with arrangements in other styles of dance music.

When record men first traveled from Chicago or invited musicians to studios in New York, these entrepreneurs had no conception how their technology would change the dynamics of what constituted a musical performance. This book covers a revolution in artist performance and audience perception through close examination of hundreds of key “hillbilly” and “race” records released between the 1920s and World War II. In the postwar period, regional strains recorded on pioneering 78 r.p.m. discs exploded into urban blues and R&B, honky-tonk and western swing, gospel, soul, and rock ‘n’ roll. These old-time records preserve the work of some of America’s greatest musical geniuses, such as Jimmie Rodgers, Robert Johnson, Charlie Poole, and Blind Lemon Jefferson. They are also crucial mile markers in the course of American popular music and the growth of the modern recording industry. When these records first circulated, the very notion of recorded music was still a novelty. All music had been created live and tied to particular, intimate occasions. How were listeners to understand an impersonal technology such as the phonograph record as a musical event? How could they reconcile firsthand interactions and traditional customs with technological innovations and mass media? The records themselves, several hundred of which are explored fully in this book, offer answers in scores of spoken commentaries and skits, in song lyrics and monologues, or other more subtle means.

This book stands as both a remarkable biography of J. Frank G. Boom (1920–1953) and a recovery of his incredible contribution to blues scholarship originally titled The Blues: Satirical Songs of the North American Negro. The book tells how and when the Netherlands was introduced to African American blues music and describes the equally dramatic and peculiar friendship that existed between Boom and jazz critic and musicologist Will Gilbert, who worked for the Kultuurkamer during World War II and had been charged with the task of formulating the Nazi's Jazzverbod, the decree prohibiting the public performance of jazz. The book ends with the annotated and complete text of Boom's The Blues, providing the international world at last with an English version of the first book-length study of the blues. At the end of the 1960s, a series of 13 blues paperbacks edited by Paul Oliver for the London publisher November Books began appearing. One manuscript landed on his desk that had been written in 1943 by a then 23-year-old Frank (Frans) Boom. Its publication was announced on the back jacket of the last three Blues Paperbacks in 1971 and 1972. Yet it never was published and the manuscript once more disappeared. In October 1996, Dutch blues expert and publicist Verbei went in search of the presumably lost manuscript and the story behind its author. It only took him a couple of months to track down the manuscript, but it took another ten years to glean the full story behind the extraordinary Frans Boom, who passed away in 1953 in Indonesia.

This book explores how the blues became a part of New Orleans jazz. In so doing it demonstrates how the principles of barbershop harmony were applied to the instrumentation of a jazz band to produce jazz counterpoint. Using unpublished archive material and existing scholarship this book discuses the role that Buddy Bolden and Bunk Johnson played in the early years of jazz. It also clarifies the role that the white musicians and Creole musicians played both historically and musically in the development of jazz, the blues, and ragtime, in New Orleans.

Throughout his life, Louis Armstrong tried to explain how singing on the streets of New Orleans with a barbershop quartet was foundational to his musicianship. However, up to now, there has been no in-depth inquiry into what he meant when he said “I Figure Singing and Playing is the Same, “or “Singing was more into my blood than the trumpet.” This book shows that Armstrong understood exactly the relationship between what he sang and what he played, and that he meant these comments to be taken literally: he was singing through his horn. To describe the relationship between what Armstrong sang and played the book discusses elements of music theory. This is done in an approachable way for readers with little or no musical background. Jazz is a music that is often performed by people with a very limited musical education. Armstrong did not analyse what he played in theoretical terms, he thought about in terms of the voices in a barbershop quartet. This book describes Armstrong playing in term he would have understood. Understanding how Armstrong, and other pioneer jazz musicians of his generation, learned to play jazz, and how he used this background of singing in a quartet to develop the jazz solo, has fundamental implications for the teaching of jazz performance today. This book provides a foundation for today’s musicians to learn to play jazz the Louis Armstrong way.

Edward “Kid” Ory (1886–1973) was a trombonist, composer, recording artist, and early New Orleans jazz band leader. This book tells his story from birth on a rural sugar cane plantation in a French-speaking, ethnically mixed family, to his emergence in New Orleans as the city’s hottest band leader. The Ory band featured such future jazz stars as Louis Armstrong and King Oliver, and was widely considered New Orleans’s top “hot” band. Ory’s career took him from New Orleans to California, where he and his band created the first African American New Orleans jazz recordings ever made. In 1925 Ory moved to Chicago, where he made records with Oliver, Armstrong, and Jelly Roll Morton, and captured the spirit of the jazz age. His most famous composition from that period, “Muskrat Ramble,” is a jazz standard. Retired from music during the Depression, Ory returned in the 1940s and enjoyed a reignited career. Drawing on oral history and Ory’s unpublished autobiography, the book is a story that is told in large measure by Ory himself. The author reveals Ory’s personality to the reader and shares remarkable stories of incredible innovations of the jazz pioneer. The book also features unpublished Ory compositions, photographs, and a selected discography of Ory’s most significant recordings.

This book explores sacred music and spiritual activism in a little-known region of the South, the Wiregrass Country of Georgia, Alabama, and North Florida. It examines African American sacred music outside of Sunday church-related activities, showing that singing conventions and anniversary programs fortify spiritual as well as social needs. In this region African Americans maintain a social world of their own creation. Their cultural performances embrace some of the most pervasive forms of African American sacred music—spirituals, common meter, Sacred Harp, shape-note, traditional, and contemporary gospel. Moreover, the contexts in which African Americans sing include present-day observations such as the Twentieth of May (Emancipation Day), Burial League Turnouts, and Fifth Sunday. Rather than tracing the evolution of African American sacred music, this ethnographic study focuses on contemporary cultural performances, almost all by women, which embrace all forms. These women promote a female-centered theology to ensure the survival of their communities and personal networks, and function in leadership roles that withstand the test of time. Their spiritual activism presents itself as a way of life. In Wiregrass Country, “You don’t have to sing like an angel” is a frequently expressed sentiment. To these women, “good” music is God’s music regardless of the manner delivered.

In 2015 University Press of Mississippi published Mississippi Fiddle Tunes and Songs from the 1930s by Harry Bolick and Stephen T. Austin to critical acclaim and commercial success. Roughly half of Mississippi’s rich, old-time fiddle tradition was documented in that volume and Harry Bolick has spent the intervening years working on this book, its sequel. Beginning with Tony Russell’s original mid-1970s fieldwork as a reference, and later working with Russell, Bolick located and transcribed all of the Mississippi 78 rpm string band recordings. Some of the recording artists like the Leake County Revelers, Hoyt Ming and His Pep Steppers, and Narmour & Smith had been well known in the state. Others, like the Collier Trio, were obscure. This collecting work was followed by many field trips to Mississippi searching for and locating the children and grandchildren of the musicians. Previously unheard recordings and stories, unseen photographs and discoveries of nearly unknown local fiddlers, such as Jabe Dillon, John Gatwood, Claude Kennedy, and Homer Grice, followed. The results are now available in this second, companion volume, Fiddle Tunes from Mississippi: Commercial and Informal Recordings, 1920–2018. Two hundred and seventy musical examples supplement the biographies and photographs of the thirty-five artists documented here. Music comes from commercial recordings and small pressings of 78 rpm, 45 rpm, and LP records; collectors’ field recordings; and the musicians’ own home tape and disc recordings. Taken together, these two volumes represent a delightfully comprehensive survey of Mississippi’s fiddle tunes.

Free Jazz/Black Power is a treatise on the racial and political implications of jazz and jazz criticism published in 1971 by two French jazz critics, Philippe Carles and Jean-Louis Comolli. The goal of the book was to show that the strong and mostly negative reactions provoked by free jazz among classic jazz critics on both sides of the Atlantic could be better understood by analyzing the social, cultural and political origins of jazz itself, exposing its ties to African American culture, history, and the political struggle that was still raging in early 1970s USA. The authors analyze the circumstances of the production of jazz criticism as discourse, a work of cultural studies in a time and place where the practice as such was completely unknown. The book owes much to African American cultural and political thought. Carles and Comolli suggest that the African American struggle had to be seen as a singular branch of a worldwide class struggle, echoing more famous figures of the French Left of the time, such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, or Jean Genêt. Yet few were those that had articulated this de rigueur political backing with an in-depth cultural critique and analysis of the condition of African Americans informed by African Americans themselves.

This ethnography examines songwriters Bill and Gloria Gaithers’ Homecoming video and concert series. The Homecomings re-present the “southern gospel” subgenre of gospel music—a musical style popular among white evangelical Christians in the American South and Midwest. The book explores how the Gaithers negotiate the tension between preservation and modification of community norms as they seek simultaneously to maintain and expand their audience, and to initiate and respond to ideological shifts within their fan base’s culture. Using data he collected from his immersion in the Homecoming catalogue, his attendance of numerous concerts and tapings, and his extensive conversations with Homecoming fans and the Gaithers themselves, Harper reveals the Homecomings to be a crucible of American religious, racial, sexual and regional identity formation.

George P. Knauff's Virginia Reels (1839) was the first collection of southern fiddle tunes and the only substantial one published in the nineteenth century. Knauff's activity could not anticipate our modern contest-driven fiddle subcultures. But the fate of the Virginia Reels pointed in that direction, suggesting that southern fiddling, after his time, would happen outside of commercial popular culture even though it would sporadically engage that culture. This book uses this seminal collection as the springboard for a fresh exploration of fiddling in America, past and present. It first discusses the life of the arranger. Then it explains how this collection was meant to fit into the broad stream of early nineteenth-century music publishing. The book describes the character of these fiddle tunes' names (and such titles in general), what we can learn about antebellum oral tradition from this collection, and how fiddling relates to blackface minstrelsy. Throughout, the book connects the evidence concerning both repertoire and practice found in the Virginia Reels with current southern fiddling, encompassing styles ranging from straightforward to fancy—old-time styles of the Upper South, exuberant West Virginia styles, and the melodic improvisations of modern contest fiddling. Twenty-six song sheets assist in this discovery. The book incorporates performance descriptions and music terminology into his accessible, engaging prose. The book presents an extended look at the history of southern fiddling and a close examination of current practices.

This book offers a history of the guitar from America’s late Victorian period to the Jazz Age. The narrative traces America’s BMG (banjo, mandolin, and guitar) community, a late nineteenth-century musical and commercial movement dedicated to introducing these instruments into America’s elite musical establishments. Using surviving BMG magazines, the author details an almost unknown history of the guitar during the movement’s heyday, tracing the guitar’s transformation from a refined parlor instrument to a mainstay in jazz and popular music. In the process, he not only introduces musicians (including numerous women guitarists) who led the movement, but also examines new techniques and instruments. Chapters consider the BMG movement’s impact on jazz and popular music, the use of the guitar to promote attitudes toward women and minorities, and the challenges foreign guitarists such as Miguel Llobet and Andres Segovia presented to America’s musicians. The book opens a new chapter on the guitar in America, considering its cultivated past and documenting how banjoists and mandolinists aligned their instruments to it in an effort to raise social and cultural standing. At the same time, it considers the BMG community within America’s larger musical scene, examining its efforts as manifestations of this country’s uneasy coupling of musical art and commerce.

Jazz as an instrument of global diplomacy transformed superpower relations in the Cold War era and reshaped democracy’s image worldwide. This book tells the story of America’s program of jazz diplomacy practiced in the Soviet Union and other regions of the world from 1954 to 1968. Jazz music and jazz musicians seemed an ideal card to play in diminishing the credibility and appeal of Soviet communism in the Eastern bloc and beyond. Government-funded musical junkets by such jazz masters as Louis Armstrong, Dave Brubeck, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, and Benny Goodman dramatically influenced perceptions of the United States and its capitalist brand of democracy while easing political tensions in the midst of critical Cold War crises. The book shows how, when coping with foreign questions about desegregation, the dispute over the Berlin Wall, the Cuban missile crisis, Vietnam, and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, jazz players and their handlers wrestled with the inequalities of race and the emergence of class conflict while promoting America in a global context. And, as jazz musicians are wont to do, many of these ambassadors riffed off-script when the opportunity arose. The book argues that this musical method of winning hearts and minds often transcended economic and strategic priorities. Even so, the goal of containing communism remained paramount, and prevailed over America’s policy of redefining relations with emerging new nations in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

Typically, a photograph of a jazz musician has several formal prerequisites: black and white film, an urban setting in the mid-twentieth century, and a black man standing, playing, or sitting next to his instrument. That’s the jazz archetype that photography created. This book reveals how such a steadfast script developed visually and what this convention meant for the music. Album covers, magazines, books, documentaries, art photographs, posters, and various other visual extensions of popular culture formed the commonly held image of the jazz player. Through assimilation, there emerged a generalized composite of how mainstream jazz looked and sounded. The book evaluates representations of jazz musicians from 1945 to 1959, concentrating on the seminal role played by Herman Leonard (b. 1923). Leonard’s photographic depictions of African American jazz musicians in New York not only created a visual template of a black musician of the 1950s, but also became the standard configuration of the music’s neoclassical sound today. To discover how the image of the musician affected mainstream jazz, the book examines readings from critics, musicians, and educators, as well as interviews, musical scores, recordings, transcriptions, liner notes, and oral narratives.

Jazz great Gerald Wilson (1918–2014), born in Shelby, Mississippi, left a global legacy of paramount significance through his progressive musical ideas and his orchestra's consistent influence on international jazz. Aided greatly by interviews that bring Wilson's voice to the story, this book presents a perspective on what the musician and composer called his “jazz pilgrimage.” Wilson uniquely adapted Latin influences into his jazz palette, incorporating many Cuban and Brazilian inflections as well as those of Mexican and Spanish styling. Throughout, the book refers to Wilson's compositions and arrangements, including their historical contexts and motivations. It provides savvy musical readings and analysis of the repertoire, and concludes by reflecting upon Wilson's ideas on the place of jazz culture in America, its place in society and politics, its origins, and its future. With a foreword written by Wilson's son, Anthony, and such sources as essays, record notes, interviews, and Wilson's own reflections, the biography represents the artist's ideas with all their philosophical, historical, and cultural dimensions. Beyond merely documenting Wilson's many awards and recognitions, this book ushers readers into the heart and soul of a jazz creator. Wilson emerges a unique and proud African American artist whose tunes became a mosaic of the world.

When Bitches Brew was released, it was not just another jazz album, but a major single event, with ramifications rippling over the next forty-plus years. Not only did Miles Davis change the face of jazz once again by launching the entire jazz-fusion movement, he changed all of modern music. Listen to This looks in detail at the making of Bitches Brew, exploring the inner workings of Davis at his creative peak, and provides resolution to many of the controversies that have plagued this record since its inception. It revisits the mysteries surrounding the album and places it into both a historical and musical context using new interviews, original analysis, recently found recordings, unearthed session data sheets, letters, musical transcriptions, scores, and other associated data. Listen to This is not just the story of Bitches Brew. It reveals the legend of Miles Davis, his attitude, his relationship to the masses, his business and personal etiquette, and his response to extraordinary social conditions determined to bring him down. Listen to This unveils this iconic figure’s complex psyche and his impact on both the fine arts and popular culture through one of the greatest recordings ever made.

Joe Davis, the focus of this book, enjoyed a 50-year career in the music industry, which covered nearly every aspect of the business. He hustled sheet music in the 1920s; copyrighted compositions by artists as diverse as Fats Waller, Carson Robison, Otis Blackwell, and Rudy Vallee; oversaw hundreds of recording sessions; and operated several record companies, beginning in the 1940s. Davis also worked fearlessly to help insure that black recording artists and song writers gained equal treatment for their work. Much more than a biography, this book is an investigation of the role played by music publishers during much of the twentieth century. Davis was not a music “great,” but he was one of those individuals who enabled “greats” to emerge. A musician, manager, and publisher, his long career reveals much about the nature of the music industry and offers insight into how the industry changed from the 1920s to the 1970s. By the summer of 1924, when Davis was handling the “Race talent” for Ajax records, he had already worked in the music business for nearly a decade and there was more than five decades of musical career ahead of him. The fact that his life has gone so long under-appreciated is remedied by the publication of Never Sell A Copyright. Originally published in England, in 1990, Never Sell a Copyright: Joe Davis and His Role in the New York Music Scene, 1916–1978 was never released in the United States.

When Mississippi John Hurt (1892–1966) was “rediscovered” by blues revivalists in 1963, his musicianship and recordings transformed popular notions of prewar country blues. At seventy-one he moved to Washington, D.C., from Avalon, Mississippi, and became a live-wire connection to a powerful, authentic past. Hurt's intricate and lively style made him the most sought-after musician among the many talents the revival brought to light. This book provides this legendary creator's life story. The author traces Hurt's roots to the moment his mother Mary Jane McCain and his father Isom Hurt were freed from slavery. Anecdotes from Hurt's childhood and teenage years include the destiny-making moment when his mother purchased his first guitar for $1.50, when he was only nine years old. Stories from his neighbors and friends, from both of his wives, and from his extended family round out the community picture of Avalon. U.S. census records, Hurt's first marriage record in 1916, images of his first autographed LP record, and excerpts from personal letters written in his own hand provide treasures for fans. The author details Hurt's musical influences, and the origins of his style and repertoire. He also relates numerous stories from the time of Hurt's success, drawing on published sources and many hours of interviews with people who knew Hurt well, including the late Jerry Ricks, Pat Sky, Stefan Grossman and Max Ochs, Dick Spottswood, and the late Mike Stewart. In addition, some of the last photographs taken of the legendary musician are featured.

This book offers a detailed biography of ten influential American popular love ballads, from “Bill Bailey, Won’t You Please Come Home” (1902) to “You Made Me Love You” (1913). These became models for over forty years of great songs. In an innovative combination, they fused jazziness with intimate, personal qualities that were further revealed in the late 1920s with the advent of the torch song genre—and microphone crooning techniques, which linked them to the lullaby. They were a product of collective innovation by both famous figures like Irving Berlin and forgotten songwriters, including women and those from minority groups. Further, the performers, arrangers, and publishers changed the original songs, in a process similar to the oral folk music tradition. All these songs were fit into narratives—movies, plays, histories, scholarly works, and literature—which continually redefined them. The book analyzes the songs and how they were interpreted, featuring full music scores, musical excerpts, and forty illustrations. This study strips away the myths behind the creation of these ten core songs, revealing the even more colorful true stories. The discussion proposes a fresh definition for the torch song, as one making the listener aware of the flame of love within their heart. It includes an introduction to the New York music publishing industry, Tin Pan Alley, and operates as a listening guide and viewing companion for the Great American Songbook. Through the stories of individual songs, this history supplies a panoramic collage of the golden age of American classic pop.