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Author: John Terry Davis
Publisher: Watson-Guptill Publications
Published: 2000
Total Pages: 200
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe longest-running showcase on television today celebrates a quarter-century of the best of America's music--from country, blues, and folk, to rock, bluegrass, Tejano, and more--with this exuberant, informative, richly illustrated, and highly entertaining book for Austin City Limits fans (past, present, and future) and music fans everywhere.
Author: Kevin Mooney
Publisher:
Published: 2021-04-05
Total Pages: 240
ISBN-13: 9781623499655
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAt 102 years of age, Louise Tobin is one of the last surviving musicians of the Swing Era. Born in Aubrey, Texas, in 1918, she grew up in a large family that played music together. She once said that she fell out of the cradle singing and all she ever wanted to do was to sing. And sing she did. She sang with Benny Goodman and also performed vocals for such notables as Will Bradley, Bobby Hackett, Harry James (her first husband), Johnny Mercer, Lionel Hampton, the Glenn Miller Orchestra, Peanuts Hucko (her second husband), and Fletcher Henderson. Based on extensive oral history interviews and archival research, Texas Jazz Singer recalls both the glamour and the challenges of life on the road and onstage during the golden age of swing and beyond. As it traces American music through the twentieth century, Louise Tobin's story provides insight into the challenges musicians faced to sustain their careers during the cultural revolution and ever-changing styles and tastes in music. In this absorbing biography, music historian Kevin Edward Mooney offers readers a view of a remarkable life in music, told from the vantage point of the woman who lived it. Rather than simply making Tobin an emblem for women in jazz of the big band era, Mooney concentrates instead on Tobin's life, her struggles and successes, and in doing so captures the particular sense of grace that resonates throughout each phase of Tobin's notable career.
Author: Kevin Mooney
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
Published: 2021-05-19
Total Pages: 249
ISBN-13: 1623499666
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAt 102 years of age, Louise Tobin is one of the last surviving musicians of the Swing Era. Born in Aubrey, Texas, in 1918, she grew up in a large family that played music together. She once said that she fell out of the cradle singing and all she ever wanted to do was to sing. And sing she did. She sang with Benny Goodman and also performed vocals for such notables as Will Bradley, Bobby Hackett, Harry James (her first husband), Johnny Mercer, Lionel Hampton, the Glenn Miller Orchestra, Peanuts Hucko (her second husband), and Fletcher Henderson. Based on extensive oral history interviews and archival research, Texas Jazz Singer recalls both the glamour and the challenges of life on the road and onstage during the golden age of swing and beyond. As it traces American music through the twentieth century, Louise Tobin’s story provides insight into the challenges musicians faced to sustain their careers during the cultural revolution and ever-changing styles and tastes in music. In this absorbing biography, music historian Kevin Edward Mooney offers readers a view of a remarkable life in music, told from the vantage point of the woman who lived it. Rather than simply making Tobin an emblem for women in jazz of the big band era, Mooney concentrates instead on Tobin’s life, her struggles and successes, and in doing so captures the particular sense of grace that resonates throughout each phase of Tobin’s notable career.
Author: Chris Smith
Publisher: University of North Texas Press
Published: 2014-10-15
Total Pages: 412
ISBN-13: 1574415743
DOWNLOAD EBOOKMel Lewis (1929-1990) was born Melvin Sokoloff to Jewish Russian immigrants in Buffalo, New York. He first picked up his father's drumsticks at the age of two and at 17 he was a full-time professional musician. The View from the Back of the Band is the first biography of this legendary jazz drummer. For over fifty years, Lewis provided the blueprint for how a drummer could subtly support any musical situation. While he made his name with Stan Kenton and Thad Jones, and with his band at the Village Vanguard, it was the hundreds of recordings that he made as a sideman and his ability to mentor young musicians that truly defined his career. Away from the drums, Lewis's passionate and outspoken personality made him one of jazz music's greatest characters. It is often through Lewis's own anecdotes, as well as many from the musicians who knew him best, that this book traces the career of one of the world's greatest drummers. Previously unpublished interviews, personal memoirs, photos, musical transcriptions, and a selected discography add to this comprehensive biography.
Author: Joe La Barbera
Publisher: University of North Texas Press
Published: 2021-10-15
Total Pages: 241
ISBN-13: 1574418548
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn the late 1970s legendary pianist Bill Evans was at the peak of his career. He revolutionized the jazz trio (bass, piano, drums) by giving each part equal emphasis in what jazz historian Ted Gioia called a “telepathic level” of interplay. It was an ideal opportunity for a sideman, and after auditioning in 1978, Joe La Barbera was ecstatic when he was offered the drum chair, completing the trio with Evans and bassist Marc Johnson. In Times Remembered, La Barbera and co-author Charles Levin provide an intimate fly-on-the-wall peek into Evans’s life, critical recording sessions, and behind-the-scenes anecdotes of life on the road. Joe regales the trio’s magical connection, a group that quickly gelled to play music on the deepest and purest level imaginable. He also watches his dream gig disappear, a casualty of Evans’s historical drug abuse when the pianist dies in a New York hospital emergency room in 1980. But La Barbera tells this story with love and respect, free of judgment, showing Evans’s humanity and uncanny ability to transcend physical weakness and deliver first-rate performances at nearly every show.
Author: Dean Alger
Publisher: University of North Texas Press
Published: 2014-04-15
Total Pages: 384
ISBN-13: 1574415468
DOWNLOAD EBOOKLonnie Johnson (1894–1970) was a virtuoso guitarist who influenced generations of musicians from Django Reinhardt to Eric Clapton to Bill Wyman and especially B. B. King. Born in New Orleans, he began playing violin and guitar in his father’s band at an early age. When most of his family was wiped out by the 1918 flu epidemic, he and his surviving brother moved to St. Louis, where he won a blues contest that included a recording contract. His career was launched. Johnson can be heard on many Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong records, including the latter’s famous “Savoy Blues” with the Hot Five. He is perhaps best known for his 12-string guitar solos and his ground-breaking recordings with the white guitarist Eddie Lang in the late 1920s. After World War II he began playing rhythm and blues and continued to record and tour until his death. This is the first full-length work on Johnson. Dean Alger answers many biographical mysteries, including how many members of Johnson’s large family were left after the epidemic. It also places Johnson and his musical contemporaries in the context of American race relations and argues for the importance of music in the fight for civil rights. Finally, Alger analyzes Johnson’s major recordings in terms of technique and style. Distribution of an accompanying music CD will be coordinated with the release of this book.
Author: Helene LaFaro-Fernandez
Publisher: University of North Texas Press
Published: 2009
Total Pages: 340
ISBN-13: 1574412736
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWinner of the Best Book of 2009, Jazz Division, sponsored by AllAboutJazz-New York, 2009. Selected for "The Best of the Best" from University Presses, ALA Conference, 2010. Winner of the 2010 Association for Recorded Sound Collections Award for Excellence in Historical Recorded Sound Research in Jazz, 2010. Jade Visions is the first biography of one of the twentieth century's most influential jazz musicians, bassist Scott LaFaro. Best known for his landmark recordings with Bill Evans, LaFaro played bass a mere seven years before his life and career were tragically cut short by an automobile accident when he was only 25 years old. Told by his sister, this book uniquely combines family history with insight into LaFaro's music by well-known jazz experts and musicians Gene Lees, Don Thompson, Jeff Campbell, Phil Palombi, Chuck Ralston, Barrie Kolstein, and Robert Wooley. Those interested in Bill Evans, the history of jazz, and the lives of working musicians of the time will appreciate this exploration of LaFaro’s life and music as well as the feeling they’ve been invited into the family circle as an intimate.
Author: Alan B. Govenar
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
Published: 2008-10-09
Total Pages: 622
ISBN-13: 158544605X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKTexas Blues allows artists to speak in their own words, revealing the dynamics of blues, from its beginnings in cotton fields and shotgun shacks to its migration across boundaries of age and race to seize the musical imagination of the entire world. Fully illustrated with 495 dramatic, high-quality color and black-and-white photographs—many never before published—Texas Blues provides comprehensive and authoritative documentation of a musical tradition that has changed contemporary music. Award-winning documentary filmmaker and author Alan Govenar here builds on his previous groundbreaking work documenting these musicians and their style with the stories of 110 of the most influential artists and their times. From Blind Lemon Jefferson and Aaron “T-Bone” Walker of Dallas, to Delbert McClinton in Fort Worth, Sam “Lightnin’” Hopkins in East Texas, Baldemar (Freddie Fender) Huerta in South Texas, and Stevie Ray Vaughan in Austin, Texas Blues shows the who, what, where, and how of blues in the Lone Star State.
Author: Rickie Lee Jones
Publisher: Grove Press
Published: 2021-04-06
Total Pages: 401
ISBN-13: 080218880X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA candid and colorful memoir by the singer, songwriter, and “Duchess of Coolsville” (Time). This troubadour life is only for the fiercest hearts, only for those vessels that can be broken to smithereens and still keep beating out the rhythm for a new song . . . Last Chance Texaco is the first-ever no-holds-barred account of the life of two-time Grammy Award-winner and Rickie Lee Jones in her own words (Hilton Als). It is a tale of desperate chances and impossible triumphs, an adventure story of a girl who beat the odds and grew up to become one of the most legendary artists of her time, turning adversity and hopelessness into timeless music. With candor and lyricism, she takes us on a singular journey through her nomadic childhood, her years as a teenage runaway, her legendary love affair with Tom Waits, and ultimately her longevity as the hardest working woman in rock and roll. Rickie Lee’s stories are rich with the infamous characters of her early songs—“Chuck E’s in Love,” “Weasel and the White Boys Cool,” “Danny’s All-Star Joint,” and “Easy Money”—but long before her notoriety in show business, there was a vaudevillian cast of hitchhikers, bank robbers, jail breaks, drug mules, and a pimp with a heart of gold, and tales of her fabled ancestors. This intimate memoir by one of the most trailblazing and tenacious women in music is filled with never-before-told stories of the girl in the raspberry beret, whose songs defied categorization and inspired American pop culture for decades. “A striking, distinctive self-portrait.” —The New York Times “Terrific . . . Jones is as fearless in prose as she is on stage.” —Minneapolis Star-Tribune “Men leave, fame fizzles, family breaks your heart . . . but Jones knows a good story and how to tell it.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “[The] premiere song-stylist and songwriter of her generation.” —Hilton Als, Pulitzer Prize–winner and author of White Girls
