In his short life, Parker was one of the most influential musicians in jazz, and together with Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk, he was the main architect of the modern jazz revolution of the 1940s known as bebop. Addicted to drugs and alcohol, and with a tangled private life, Parker died young, and a legend grew up about his tragic genius.

Chasin’ the Bird is a completely revised and expanded edition of the short biography of Charlie Parker by Brian Priestley. First published in 1984, it quickly established itself as the most succinct, accurate and readable book on Parker. This edition, which is twice the length of the original, incorporates material which has come to light since the first edition was published. It also provides an expanded discussion of performances and recordings, with a complete discography, notes and bibliography.

CONTENTS:
1. Birdland
2. Body And Soul
3. The Jumpin’ Blues
4. Now’s The Time
5. Parker’s Mood
6. Celebrity
7. I Remember You
8. The Song is You
9. Confirmation
Discography

“Brian Priestley has not just chased but captured the elusive Bird, illuminating the turbulent life and marvelous music with human and musical insight” – DAN MORGENSTERN, Rutgers Institute of Jazz Studies

“Brian Priestley is one of the most accomplished jazz historians, critics, and biographers, and Chasin’ the Bird is an indispensable gem – an ideal introduction to a major figure in twentieth century music and an inventive interpretation of Parker’s life and art that will also engage veteran jazz lovers. The comprehensive discography is a major bonus, making this a handbook every Bird chaser will relish” – GARY GIDDINS…

Lennie Tristano was one of jazz’s most extraordinary innovators, possessing a superb piano technique and an awesome musical imagination. Unheralded by the general public, the blind pianist’s work was revered by many jazz greats including the legendary Charlie Parker. Tristano’s persuasive personality made him an ideal teacher, and he proved that (against the accepted theory of the time) jazz improvisation could be taught. His guidance played a big part in the development of many instrumentalists including saxophonists Lee Konitz and Warne Marsh and double-bassist Peter Ind. It is Ind’s long, direct involvement with his subject that makes this such a revealing book: the story of an English musician going to New York to study with a neglected jazz giant. In the process, Tristano’s genius is examined and his reputation revalued, with Ind making a persuasive case for the pianist to be placed at the centre of jazz developments in the mid-twentieth century.

CONTENTS:
Preface
PART I – Lennie: The Man and His Music
1. My Early Contact with Jazz – the Sounds of Lennie Tristano and of Charlie Parker (Bird)
2. My Early Experiences of New York Jazz
3. Living in New York – Working with Lennie in the Early Days
4. Other Influences on Jazz Musicians and Artists During the Fifties
5. Lennie and the Changes in Jazz from the Fifties
6. Lennie’s Influence and What Happened to His Associates from Those Fifties Days
7. A Reflection on Lennie as I Knew Him – the Man and Musician
PART II – Lennie: A More Technical Consideration of Jazz Improvisation and His Legacy
8. What Do We Mean by Jazz?
9. Appreciating Jazz Improvisation
10. The Technical Base of Jazz and Lennie’s Approach
PART III – A Reconsideration of Lennie’s Legacy
11. Mythmaking About Lennie
12. Lennie Tristano and the Enigma of Non-recognition
13. Mythmaking and Prejudices in Jazz
14. Reappraisal
Bibliography
Select Discography
Index

“Jazz Visions is a remarkable book which presents a fascinating double portrait of the subject and the author” – JOHN CHILTON, professional jazz trumpeter and writer on jazz

“This book is just what is needed to inform musicians, students, teachers, and historians around the world with an ‘up close and personal’ view of the genius of jazz pianist/composer/teacher, Lennie Tristano. Bassist, Peter Ind describes vividly how exciting it was to be living in New York City as a creative musician. Peter’s writing skills throughout will also enlighten and entertain the novice and non musician as well. The best part for me, is that it was written by a great player who was there right in the thick of it all. What can be a better source for the real truth? Bravo, Peter!” – RUFUS REID, jazz bassist

“The Lennie Tristano story has needed telling for a long time. Who better than Peter Ind who knew Lennie and his music probably better than anyone” – IRA GITLER…

In Circular Breathing, George McKay, a leading chronicler of British countercultures, uncovers the sometimes surprising ways that jazz has accompanied social change during a period of rapid transformation in Great Britain. Examining jazz from the founding of George Webb’s Dixielanders in 1943 through the burgeoning British bebop scene of the early 1950s, the Beaulieu Jazz Festivals of 1956-61, and the improvisational music making of the 1960s and 1970s, McKay reveals the connections of the music, its players, and its subcultures to black and antiracist activism, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, feminism, and the New Left. In the process, he provides the first detailed cultural history of jazz in Britain.

McKay explores the music in relation to issues of whiteness, blackness, and masculinity – all against a backdrop of shifting imperial identities, post colonialism, and the cold war. He considers objections to the music’s spread by the “anti-jazzers” alongside the ambivalence felt by many leftist musicians about playing an “all-American” musical form. At the same time, McKay highlights the extraordinary cultural mixing that has defined British jazz since the 1950s, as musicians from Britain’s former colonies – particularly from the Caribbean and South Africa – have transformed the genre. Circular Breathing is enriched by McKay’s original interviews with activists, musicians, and fans and by fascinating images, including works by the renowned English jazz photographer Val Wilmer. It is an invaluable look at not only the history of jazz but also the Left and race relations in Great Britain.

George McKay is a professor of cultural studies at the University of Salford in England. He is the author of Glastonbury: A Very English Fair and Senseless Acts of Beauty: Cultures of Resistance since the Sixties; the editor of DIY Culture: Party and Protest In Nineties Britain, and a co-editor of Community Music: A Handbook and Social Movement Studies: Journal of Social, Cultural, and Political Protest.

“Circular Beathing is quite simply the best book so far on jazz in Britain. Geroge McKay acts as a cultural archaeologist, digging up traces of a ninety-year musical presence and writing them back into history. He comments acutely on a music which can be peripheral and exclusive but which he rightly sees as vital to the story of Britain’s social and political evolution.” – ANDREW BLAKE, author of The Land Without Music: Music, Culture, and Society in Twentieth-Century Britain…

As a popular music, the evolution of jazz is tied to the contemporary sociological situation. Jazz was brought from America into a very different environment in Britain and resulted in the establishment of parallel worlds of jazz by the end of the 1920s: within the realms of instituionalized culture and within the subversive underworld. The author demonstrates the importance of image and racial stereotyping in shaping perceptions of jazz, and leads to the significant conclusion that the evolution of jazz in Britain was so much more than merely an extension or reflection of that in America.

The book examines the cultural and musical antecedents of the genre, including minstrel shows and black music theatre, within the context of musical life in Britain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Parsonage is particularly concerned with the public perception of jazz in Britain and provides close analysis of the early European critical writing on the subject. The processes through which an evolution took place are considered by looking at the methods of introducing jazz in Britain, through imported revue shows, sheet music and visits by American musicians. Subsequent developments are analysed through the consideration of modernism and the Jazz Age as theoretical constructs and through the detailed study of dance music on the BBC and jazz in the underwordl in London. The book concludes in the 1930s by which time the availability of records enabled the spread of ‘hot’ music, affecting the live repertoire in Britain.

Dr Parsonage sheds entirely new light on the development of jazz in Britain, and provides a deep social and cultural understanding of the early history of the genre.

CONTENTS:
PART I: Historical & Theoretical Perspectives
1. The Cultural & Musical Antecedents of Jazz in Britain
2. The Evolving Image of Jazz in Britian in Sheet Music
3. The ‘Jazz Age’ in Britain
PART II: The Evolving Presence of Jazz In Britain
4. In Dahomey: A Negro Musical Comedy
5. The Music & Symbolism of the Banjo
6. The Original Dixieland Jazz Band & the Southern Syncopated Orchestra
7. Dance Music, the ‘Plantation Revues’ and the ‘Underworld of London’
8. Hot Jazz: Jack Hylton, Bert Firmin and Fred Elizalde
9. Louis Armstrong & Duke Ellington

Dr CATHERINE PARSONAGE is Research Lecturer at Leeds College of Music, England.…

A History of Jazz In Britain 1919-50 was the first truly comprehensive survey of the phenomenon from a purely British perspective. Despite the increase in jazz literature before it was first published in 1984, there is no other book to rival it. This new edition includes additional photographs and an updated text.

The author, who began a lifelong involvement with jazz at eighteen as the secretary of the 161 Rhythm Club, Sidcup, Kent, and has yet to ‘grow out of it’, examines in great detail the arrival of the music with the Original Dixieland Jazz Band in 1919, the struggles towards the establishment of criteria, the big-band era, the disastrous Musicians’ Union ban and the extraordinary internecine warfare caused by the advent of bop.

The American trail-blazing artists and bands of the period are all covered: the ODJB itself, Ted Lewis (with Jimmy Dorsey and Muggsy Spanier), Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Paul Whiteman, Cab Calloway, Dizzy Gillespie, Fats Waller, Benny Goodman, Sidney Bechet and many more. Their influence on British musicians is examined, as are the press reports of the time (some quite hilarious, others downright offensive). The specialist magazines, especially the Melody Maker, the rhythm clubs, discographers and pundits and the roots of British trad and bop are all discussed . In addition, the book tells of the fascinating cloak-and-dagger plots which culminated in the presentation of Sidney Bechet and Coleman Hawkins on British stages in defiance of the Musicians’ Union ban and of the resulting court fiasco.

All this wealth of conscientiously researched detail is related with the trenchant and pithy humour for which the author is well-known, and the result is both an indispensable reference tool for the aficionado and an interesting, sometimes startling, read for the lay observer.

CONTENTS:
1. When I Hear That Jazz Band Play
2. The Melody Maker
3. Stumbling Towards Criteria
4. Early Definitions, Bands and Records
5. Odd Bedfellows
6. Leading up To Louis
7. Duke and Less Mortals
8. Pundits, Record Companies, Rhythm Clubs
9. Books and Magazines
10. Discographers
11. Archer Street Jazzmen and the BBC
12. Peckham Pandemonium and Humphrey Lyttelton
13. Heebie Jeebie Boys
14. Jazz Comes to Britain by Stealth
15. Jazz and Justice
16. Britain’s First Real Jazz Age

JIM GODBOLT was born in south London in 1922. He became manager of George Webb’s Dixielanders in 1946 after demobilization from the Royal Navy. He ran a band agency with Lyn Dutton and Humphrey Lyttelton in 1951 and formed his own agency in 1952, representing Mick Mulligan’s Magnolia Jazz Band, the Sandy Brown-Al Fairweather All-Stars and various pop groups including the Swinging Blue Jeans. He left the entertainment business in 1971 to concentrate on a career in writing, supporting himself with work as a meter reader, and published an autobiography, All This And 10%, later updated to include his hilarious meter-reading experiences as All This And Many A Dog. In 1979 he founded Jazz At Ronnie Scott’s, the house magazine of Ronnie Scott’s Club, which he still edits. His other books include A History of Jazz in Britain 1950-70 and the World of Jazz in Printed Ephemera and Collectibles.…