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Presents Charles Mingus
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Book Synopsis Beneath the Underdog by : Charles Mingus
Download or read book Beneath the Underdog written by Charles Mingus and published by Canongate Books. This book was released on 2011 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Charles Mingus, bassist, composer and bandleader, was one of the towering figures of American twentieth century music. In this memoir, Mingus documents his childhood on an Army base in Arizona, his difficult teenage years in Watts, and his musical education by the likes of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Charlie Parker. Unique and lyrical voice, this memoir charts the highs and lows of a life lived to the full. Beneath the Underdog is also a portrait of life in the Forties and Fifties, of ideas of identity and race in America and the ways in which they affected the young Mingus. Above all, it is a powerful tale told through the eyes of an inspiring, anguished and extraordinary musician.
Download or read book Mingus Speaks written by Charles Mingus and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2013-04 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In-depth interviews, conducted several years before Mingus died, capture the composer's spirit and voice, revealing how he saw himself as composer and performer, how he viewed his peers and predecessors, how he created his extraordinary music, and how he looked at race. Augmented with interviews and commentary by ten close associates--including Mingus's wife Sue, Teo Macero, George Wein, and Sy Johnson.
Book Synopsis Myself When I am Real by : Gene Santoro
Download or read book Myself When I am Real written by Gene Santoro and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2001-11-29 with total page 479 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Charles Mingus was one of the most innovative jazz musicians of the 20th Century, and ranks with Ives and Ellington as one of America's greatest composers. By temperament, he was a high-strung and sensitive romantic, a towering figure whose tempestuous personal life found powerfully coherent expression in the ever-shifting textures of his music. Now, acclaimed music critic Gene Santoro strips away the myths shrouding "Jazz's Angry Man," revealing Mingus as more complex than even his lovers and close friends knew. A pioneering bassist and composer, Mingus redefined jazz's terrain. He penned over 300 works spanning gutbucket gospel, Colombian cumbias, orchestral tone poems, multimedia performance, and chamber jazz. By the time he was 35, his growing body of music won increasing attention as it unfolded into one pioneering musical venture after another, from classical-meets-jazz extended pieces to spoken-word and dramatic performances and television and movie soundtracks. Though critics and musicians debated his musical merits and his personality, by the late 1950s he was widely recognized as a major jazz star, a bellwether whose combined grasp of tradition and feel for change poured his inventive creativity into new musical outlets. But Mingus got headlines less for his art than for his volatile and often provocative behavior, which drew fans who wanted to watch his temper suddenly flare onstage. Impromptu outbursts and speeches formed an integral part of his long-running jazz workshop, modeled partly on dramatic models like Orson Welles' Mercury Theatre. Keeping up with the organized chaos of Mingus's art demanded gymnastic improvisational skills and openness from his musicians-which is why some of them called it "the Sweatshop." He hired and fired musicians on the bandstand, attacked a few musicians physically and many more verbally, twice threw Lionel Hampton's drummer off the stage, and routinely harangued chattering audiences, once chasing a table of inattentive patrons out of the FIVE SPOT with a meat cleaver. But the musical and mental challenges this volcanic man set his bands also nurtured deep loyalties. Key sidemen stayed with him for years and even decades. In this biography, Santoro probes the sore spots in Mingus's easily wounded nature that helped make him so explosive: his bullying father, his interracial background, his vulnerability to women and distrust of men, his views of political and social issues, his overwhelming need for love and acceptance. Of black, white, and Asian descent, Mingus made race a central issue in his life as well as a crucial aspect of his music, becoming an outspoken (and often misunderstood) critic of racial injustice. Santoro gives us a vivid portrait of Mingus's development, from the racially mixed Watts where he mingled with artists and writers as well as mobsters, union toughs, and pimps to the artistic ferment of postwar Greenwich Village, where he absorbed and extended the radical improvisation flowing through the work of Allen Ginsberg, Jackson Pollock, and Charlie Parker. Indeed, unlike Most jazz biographers, Santoro examines Mingus's extra-musical influences--from Orson Welles to Langston Hughes, Farwell Taylor, and Timothy Leary--and illuminates his achievement in the broader cultural context it demands. Written in a lively, novelistic style, Myself When I Am Real draws on dozens of new interviews and previously untapped letters and archival materials to explore the intricate connections between this extraordinary man and the extraordinary music he made.
Download or read book Tonight at Noon written by Sue Mingus and published by Pantheon. This book was released on 2002 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Tonight at Noon" is the story of the tumultuous, passionate marriage of Sue and Charlie Mingus, and of Sue's personal odyssey inside and outside its confines. An illuminating look at an important chapter in jazz history and at the inner workings of a rare and complex artist, it is essentially a love story--heartbreaking, joyous, and unforgettable.
Book Synopsis Jazz Musicians, 1945 to the Present by : David Dicaire
Download or read book Jazz Musicians, 1945 to the Present written by David Dicaire and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2015-01-27 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From its very beginnings, the nature of jazz has been to reinvent itself. As the musical genre evolved from its roots--blues, European music, Voodoo ceremonies, and brass bands that played at funerals, parades and celebrations--the sound reflected the tenor of the times, from the citified strains of the Roaring '20s to the Big Band swing of pre-World War II to the bop revolution that grew out of the minimalist sound the war forced upon the art form. That the music continued to develop and evolve is a tribute to the power and creativity of its musicians. Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Sarah Vaughan, Art Blakey, Dave Brubeck, Sun Ra, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Diana Krall, Archie Shepp, Chick Corea, Branford Marsalis, Larry Coryell, and Kenny Kirkland are just some of the jazz greats profiled here. The five major periods of jazz--the bop revolution, hard bop and cool jazz, the avant-garde, fusion, and contemporary--form the basis for the sections in this reference work, with a brief history of each period provided. The artists who were integral to the evolution of each period are then profiled. Each biographical entry focuses on the artist's life and his or her influence on jazz and on music as a whole. A complete discography for each musician is also provided.
Book Synopsis Aesthetics of Resistance by : Mario Dunkel
Download or read book Aesthetics of Resistance written by Mario Dunkel and published by LIT Verlag Münster. This book was released on 2012 with total page 109 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book illuminates the various ways in which Charles Mingus's music interacted with the sociocultural movements of the late 1950s and early 1960s. It explores the artist as a pioneer of an idiomatic aesthetics of resistance in jazz music that is rooted in African American traditions and is much more than merely a form of protest. Mingus's music presents a continuous challenge to an unimaginative, streamlined culture built on racism and conformity by openly protesting against it, by questioning its historical foundations, and by exemplifying its countercultural antithesis. (Series: MasteRResearch - Vol. 4)
Book Synopsis Hard Bop by : the late David H. Rosenthal
Download or read book Hard Bop written by the late David H. Rosenthal and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1993-09-09 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It's nineteen fifty-something, in a dark, cramped, smoke-filled room. Everyone's wearing black. And on-stage a tenor is blowing his heart out, a searching, jagged saxophone journey played out against a moody, walking bass and the swish of a drummer's brushes. To a great many listeners--from African American aficionados of the period to a whole new group of fans today--this is the very embodiment of jazz. It is also quintessential hard bop. In this, the first thorough study of the subject, jazz expert and enthusiast David H. Rosenthal vividly examines the roots, traditions, explorations and permutations, personalities and recordings of a climactic period in jazz history. Beginning with hard bop's origins as an amalgam of bebop and R&B, Rosenthal narrates the growth of a movement that embraced the heavy beat and bluesy phrasing of such popular artists as Horace Silver and Cannonball Adderley; the stark, astringent, tormented music of saxophonists Jackie McLean and Tina Brooks; the gentler, more lyrical contributions of trumpeter Art Farmer, pianists Hank Jones and Tommy Flanagan, composers Benny Golson and Gigi Gryce; and such consciously experimental and truly one-of-a-kind players and composers as Andrew Hill, Sonny Rollins, John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, and Charles Mingus. Hard bop welcomed all influences--whether Gospel, the blues, Latin rhythms, or Debussy and Ravel--into its astonishingly creative, hard-swinging orbit. Although its emphasis on expression and downright "badness" over technical virtuosity was unappreciated by critics, hard bop was the music of black neighborhoods and the last jazz movement to attract the most talented young black musicians. Fortunately, records were there to catch it all. The years between 1955 and 1965 are unrivaled in jazz history for the number of milestones on vinyl. Miles Davis's Kind of Blue, Charles Mingus's Mingus Ah Um, Thelonious Monk's Brilliant Corners, Horace Silver's Further Explorations--Rosenthal gives a perceptive cut-by-cut analysis of these and other jazz masterpieces, supplying an essential discography as well. For knowledgeable jazz-lovers and novices alike, Hard Bop is a lively, multi-dimensional, much-needed examination of the artists, the milieus, and above all the sounds of one of America's great musical epochs.
Download or read book Mingus/Mingus written by Janet Coleman and published by Hal Leonard Corporation. This book was released on 1991 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Two friends of the late jazz musician and composer relate their memories of him as their guide in the flamboyent literary art world of the Eisenhower/Kennedy era, and as an abiding presence in their lives
Download or read book Fish and Wildlife News written by and published by . This book was released on 1989 with total page 26 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Book Synopsis Uptown Conversation by : Robert G. O'Meally
Download or read book Uptown Conversation written by Robert G. O'Meally and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 455 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Uptown Conversation' asserts that jazz is not only a music to define, it is a culture. The essays illustrate how for more than a century jazz has initiated a call and response across art forms, geographies, and cultures, inspiring musicians, filmmakers,painters and poets.
Download or read book Mingus written by Brian Priestley and published by Da Capo Press. This book was released on 1984-03-22 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It would be no exaggeration to call Charles Mingus the greatest bass player in the history of jazz; indeed, some might even regard it as understatement, for the hurricane power of his work as a composer, teacher, band leader, and iconoclast reached far beyond jazz while remaining true to its heritage in the music of Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, and Thelonious Monk. In this new biography Brian Priestley has written a masterly study of Mingus's dynamic career from the early years in Swing, to the escapades of the Bebop era, through his musical maturity in the '50s when he directed a band that redefined collective improvisation in jazz. Woven in with exacting assessments of Mingus's artistic legacy is the story of his volatile, unpredictable, sometimes dangerous personality. The book views Mingus as a black artist increasingly politicized by his situation, but also unreliable as a witness to his own persecution. Capturing him in all his furious contradictions-passionate, cool, revolutionary but with a keen sense of tradition-Brian Priestley has produced what can be called, again without exaggeration, the best biography of a jazz musician we have ever seen.
Download or read book Weather Bird written by Gary Giddins and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2004-11-15 with total page 657 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gary Giddins's Weather Bird is a brilliant companion volume to his landmark in music criticism, Visions of Jazz, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. More then 140 pieces, written over a 14-year period, are brought together for the first time in this superb collection of essays, reviews, and articles. Weather Bird is a celebration of jazz, with illuminating commentaryon contemporary jazz events, today's top muscicians, the best records of the year, and on leading figures from jazz's past. Readers will find extended pieces on Louis Armstrong, Erroll Garner, Benny Carter, Sonny Rollins, Dave Brubeck, Ornette Coleman, Billie Holiday, Cassandra Wilson, Tony Bennett, and many others. Giddins includes a series of articles on the annual JVC Jazz Festival, which offers a splendid overview of jazz in the 1990s. Other highlights include an astute look at avant-garde music ("Parajazz") and his challenging essay, "How Come Jazz Isn't Dead?" which advances a theory about the way art is born, exploited, celebrated, and sidelined to the museum. A radiant compendium by America's leading music critic, Weather Bird offers an unforgettable look at the modern jazz scene.
Book Synopsis I Know What I Know by : Todd S. Jenkins
Download or read book I Know What I Know written by Todd S. Jenkins and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2006-06-30 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the mid-1940s until his death in 1979, Charles Mingus created an unparalleled body of recorded work, most of which remains available in the 21st century. While there have been several volumes devoted to Mingus's colorful and tumultuous life, this is the first book in the English language to be devoted fully to his music. General jazz fans as well as musicians and music students who would like a better understanding of Mingus's complex, often difficult music, will find a complete, chronologically arranged, listener's guide to all of his legitimate recordings, from the 78s he recorded in Los Angeles and San Francisco in the mid-1940s, through the legendary albums he made for Columbia, Candid, Atlantic, and his own labels. In the process of providing these in-depth examinations, Jenkins corrects common errors and clears away old misconceptions about certain recordings. His approach will illuminate long-obscure aspects of this imposing and incredibly creative man's contributions to the art of jazz. Touching upon Mingus's many innovations as a jazzman, I Know What I Know explores his advancement of the art of bass playing; his assimilations of Ellington and Monk with ideas leaning toward free jazz; his experiments with ensemble dynamics, instrumentation, and extended form; and his working relationships with partners such as Jaki Byard, Eric Dolphy, Jimmy Knepper, and Dannie Richmond. The book provides a broad, informative overview of Mingus's work without veering into technical musical terminology. Readers without an extensive background in music will thus understand and appreciate the analyses provided, and be able to use them to enhance the experience of listening to the brilliant work of this legendary jazz great.
Book Synopsis Jazz Griots by : Jean-Philippe Marcoux
Download or read book Jazz Griots written by Jean-Philippe Marcoux and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2012-06-27 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study is about how four representative African American poets in the 1960s, Langston Hughes, Umbra’s David Henderson, and the Black Arts Movement’s Sonia Sanchez, and Amiri Baraka engage, in the tradition of African griots, in poetic dialogues with aesthetics, music, politics, and Black History, and in so doing narrate, using jazz as meta-language, genealogies, etymologies, cultural legacies, and Black (hi)stories. In intersecting and complementary ways, Hughes, Henderson, Sanchez, and Baraka fashioned their griotism from theorizations of artistry as political engagement, and, in turn, formulated a Black aesthetic based on jazz performativity –a series of jazz-infused iterations that form a complex pattern of literary, musical, historical, and political moments in constant cross-fertilizing dialogues with one another. This form of poetic call-and-response is essential for it allows the possibility of intergenerational dialogues between poets and musicians as well as dialogical potential between song and politics, between Africa and Black America, within the poems. More importantly, these jazz dialogisms underline the construction of the Black Aesthetic as conceptualized respectively by the griotism of Hughes, of Henderson, and of Sanchez and Baraka.
Book Synopsis The Penguin Jazz Guide by : Brian Morton
Download or read book The Penguin Jazz Guide written by Brian Morton and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2010-11-04 with total page 1113 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings is firmly established as the world's leading guide to recorded jazz, a mine of fascinating information and a source of insightful - often wittily trenchant - criticism. This is something rather different: Brian Morton (who taught American history at UEA) has picked out the 1000 best recordings that all jazz fans should have and shows how they tell the history of the music and with it the history of the twentieth century. He has completely revised his and Richard Cook's entries and reassessed each artist's entry for this book. The result is an endlessly browsable companion that will prove required reading for aficionados and jazz novices alike. 'It's the kind of book that you'll yank off the shelf to look up a quick fact and still be reading two hours later' Fortune 'Part jazz history, part jazz Karma Sutra with Cook and Morton as the knowledgeable, urbane, wise and witty guides ... This is one of the great books of recorded jazz; the other guides don't come close' Irish Times
Book Synopsis The Real Ambassadors by : Keith Hatschek
Download or read book The Real Ambassadors written by Keith Hatschek and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2022-02-04 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Book Synopsis Journeys to the Bandstand by : Chris Wong
Download or read book Journeys to the Bandstand written by Chris Wong and published by FriesenPress. This book was released on 2024-01-19 with total page 625 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What I didn’t know [when starting to research and write this book]: I would become full-on, hopelessly obsessed with finding out every arcane detail about the artists gathered in these pages, whether they are living or long gone. Those myriad facts are puzzle pieces that—even though some pieces are missing—form portraits of extraordinary people with a hunger for jazz and other creative artforms, a determination to overcome struggles, and a deep joy for creating profound expression. —Chris Wong, from the Preface and Introduction to Journeys to the Bandstand. Journeys to the Bandstand: Thirty Jazz Lives in Vancouver chronicles the creative lives and musical journeys of thirty extraordinary artists who have helped shape the jazz scene in the west coast Canadian city, and further afield. Each chapter focuses on one remarkable artist, or a small group of impactful musicians, mostly based in Vancouver (Al Neil, Dave Quarin, Brad Turner, Cory Weeds, Jodi Proznick, Natasha D’Agostino, and others). The book also highlights some American musicians (Ornette Coleman, Charles Mingus, Dr. Lonnie Smith, George Coleman, and others) who have made an indelible impression on the city’s jazz community. Weaving a first-person perspective—through the author’s experiences hearing the musicians perform and documenting oral history from in-depth interviews—with extensive written and audio-visual history gathered from articles, letters, recordings, films, and more, Journeys to the Bandstand is a compelling collection of long-form portraits. The unique life stories of each subject include challenges—addictions, anxiety and self-doubt, racism, abuse, and other hard realities—and triumphs when they succeeded in making expressive and memorable music. Each individual path forms a complex and fascinating passage—the journey to the bandstand.