Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman, and Cecil Taylor revolutionized music from the end of the twentieth century into the twenty-first, expanding on jazz traditions with distinctly new concepts of composition, improvisation, instrumentation, and performance. Miles, Ornette, Cecil is the first book to connect these three icons of the avant-garde, examining why they are lionized by some critics and reviled by others, while influencing musicians across such divides as genre, geography, and racial and ethnic backgrounds.
Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman, and Cecil Taylor revolutionized music from the end of the twentieth century into the twenty-first, expanding on jazz traditions with distinctly new concepts of composition, improvisation, instrumentation, and performance. They remain figures of controversy due to their border-crossing processes. Miles, Ornette, Cecil is the first book to connect these three icons of the avant-garde, examining why they are lionized by some critics and reviled by others, while influencing musicians across such divides as genre, geography, and racial and ethnic backgrounds. Mandel offers fresh insights into their careers from interviews with all three artists and many of their significant collaborators, as well as a thorough overview of earlier interpretations of their work.
In a series of vividly drawn portraits and in-depth interviews with musicians, composers, and others in the genre, this book takes an exciting look at the contemporary jazz scene and provides an invaluable road map to the music of tomorrow.
Ornette Coleman, Psychoanalysis, Discourse develops tools from psychoanalysis for the analysis of Ornette Coleman's discourse. In this psychoanalytic, philosophical and musical meditation on what it means to follow, A. L. James presents an approach to the analysis of discourse that is a kind of listening for listening – an attempt to discern in and between the lines of Coleman's speech the implication of new ways to listen, new ways to experience Coleman’s music as movement and space – as Movements in Harmolodic Space. Each chapter of this book is oriented with respect to fragments from Coleman’s discourse, dealing with a piece, or collection of pieces, from Coleman’s work, with particular attention to the implication of relations and relationality. Insofar as Coleman’s discourse about his work also contains allusions to fields beyond music, it develops tools that draw elements and structures from these fields together, finding in their relation echoes and parallels. Ornette Coleman, Psychoanalysis, Discourse will be of great interest to psychoanalysts, musicians, and musicologists. It will be relevant for academics and scholars of psychoanalytic and Lacanian studies, music, and cultural studies.
This book examines Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Miles Davis as distinctively global symbols of threatening and nonthreatening black masculinity. It centers them in debates over U.S. cultural exceptionalism, noting how they have been part of the definition of jazz as a jingoistic and exclusively American form of popular culture.
With striking photographs and personal insight, a compelling biography of the great American saxophonist and free jazz innovator Ornette Coleman. Ornette Coleman’s career encompassed the glory years of jazz and the American avant-garde. Born in segregated Fort Worth, Texas, during the Great Depression, the African-American composer and musician was zeitgeist incarnate. Steeped in the Texas blues tradition, he and jazz grew up together, as the brassy blare of big band swing gave way to bebop—a faster music for a faster, postwar world. At the luminous dawn of the Space Age and New York’s 1960s counterculture, Coleman gave voice to the moment. Lauded by some, maligned by many, he forged a breakaway art sometimes called “the new thing” or “free jazz.” Featuring previously unpublished photographs of Coleman and his contemporaries, this book tells the compelling story of one of America’s most adventurous musicians and the sound of a changing world.
Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew is one of the most iconic albums in American music, the preeminent landmark and fertile seedbed of jazz-fusion. Fans have been fortunate in the past few years to gain access to Davis’s live recordings from this time, when he was working with an ensemble that has come to be known as the Lost Quintet. In this book, jazz historian and musician Bob Gluck explores the performances of this revolutionary group—Davis’s first electric band—to illuminate the thinking of one of our rarest geniuses and, by extension, the extraordinary transition in American music that he and his fellow players ushered in. Gluck listens deeply to the uneasy tension between this group’s driving rhythmic groove and the sonic and structural openness, surprise, and experimentation they were always pushing toward. There he hears—and outlines—a fascinating web of musical interconnection that brings Davis’s funk-inflected sensibilities into conversation with the avant-garde worlds that players like Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane were developing. Going on to analyze the little-known experimental groups Circle and the Revolutionary Ensemble, Gluck traces deep resonances across a commercial gap between the celebrity Miles Davis and his less famous but profoundly innovative peers. The result is a deeply attuned look at a pivotal moment when once-disparate worlds of American music came together in explosively creative combinations.
Free Jazz, Harmolodics, and Ornette Coleman discusses Ornette Coleman’s musical philosophy of "Harmolodics," an improvisational system deeply inspired by the Civil Rights Movement. Falling under the guise of "free jazz," Harmolodics can be difficult to understand, even for seasoned musicians and musicologists. Yet this book offers a clear and thorough approach to these complex methods, outlining Coleman’s position as the developer of a logical—and historically significant—system of jazz improvisation. Included here are detailed musical analyses of improvisations, accompanied by full transcriptions. Intimate interviews between the author and Coleman explore the deeper issues at work in Harmolodics, issues of race, class, sex, and poverty. The principle of human equality quickly emerges as a central tenet of Coleman’s life and music. Harmolodics is best understood when viewed in its essential form, both as a theory of improvisation and as an artistic expression of racial and human equality.
This Is Our Music, declared saxophonist Ornette Coleman's 1960 album title. But whose music was it? At various times during the 1950s and 1960s, musicians, critics, fans, politicians, and entrepreneurs claimed jazz as a national art form, an Afrocentric race music, an extension of modernist innovation in other genres, a music of mass consciousness, and the preserve of a cultural elite. This original and provocative book explores who makes decisions about the value of a cultural form and on what basis, taking as its example the impact of 1960s free improvisation on the changing status of jazz. By examining the production, presentation, and reception of experimental music by Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, John Coltrane, and others, Iain Anderson traces the strange, unexpected, and at times deeply ironic intersections between free jazz, avant-garde artistic movements, Sixties politics, and patronage networks. Anderson emphasizes free improvisation's enormous impact on jazz music's institutional standing, despite ongoing resistance from some of its biggest beneficiaries. He concludes that attempts by African American artists and intellectuals to define a place for themselves in American life, structural changes in the music industry, and the rise of nonprofit sponsorship portended a significant transformation of established cultural standards. At the same time, free improvisation's growing prestige depended in part upon traditional highbrow criteria: increasingly esoteric styles, changing venues and audience behavior, European sanction, withdrawal from the marketplace, and the professionalization of criticism. Thus jazz music's performers and supporters—and potentially those in other arts—have both challenged and accommodated themselves to an ongoing process of cultural stratification.
(Book). Culled from the DownBeat archives includes in-depth interviews with literally every great jazz artist and personality that ever lived! In honor of its 75th anniversary, DownBeat 's editors have brought together in this one volume the best interviews, insights, and photographs from the illustrious history of the world's top jazz magazine, DownBeat . This anthology includes the greatest of DownBeat 's Jazz Hall of Famers: from early legends like Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, and Benny Goodman; to bebop heroes like Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, and Miles Davis; to truly unique voices like Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Thelonious Monk, and Rahsaan Roland Kirk; to the pioneers of the electric scene like Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock, Pat Metheny, and Joe Zawinul. The Great Jazz Interviews delivers the legends of jazz, talking about America's music and America itself, in their own words. Features classic photos and magazine covers fron Downbeat 's vast archive.
