Hardcover. NY, Dominic Books, 1st, 2003, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover in pictorial glossy boards. When a jazz-loving kitten named Nicky meets a legendary trumpet player, he learns how to play jazz and word travels fast--soon all the top musicians hear about this jazz cat and want to play with him. This charming story is illustrated with photographs of Nicky with jazz greats Roy Eldridge, Lionel Hampton, Lena Horne, Quincy Jones, Abbey Lincoln, and Gerry Mulligan as they meet and make friends. The colorful graphics and rhyming text--call and response conversation between Nicky and his new musician friends--reflect the humor, rhythm, and spirit of jazz itself. Nicky the Jazz Cat teaches children about the magic of jazz, the value of friends and mentors, and the power of imagination and originality. Children and adults alike will delight in his journey from curious jazz kitten to acclaimed jazz cat. This is the true first edition published 2 years before the poerHouse edition.

Softcover. Paris, Marval, 1st, 1989, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 79 pages, text by Francis Hofstein IN FRENCH. wonderful photobook devoted to the blues scene in Oakland during the 1980s. Dozens of full-page black & white photographs. Clean copy.

Hardcover. London, Reaktion Books, 1st, 2020, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, b&w photos. 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 Featuring previously unpublished photographs of Coleman and his contemporaries, this book tells the compelling story of one of America's most adventurous musicians and the sound of a changing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. Clean copy.

Hardcover. San Francisco, Pomegranate, 1st, 1992, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 164 pages. Hardcover. Black & white photographs by Jazz musician Milt Hinton. Dust jacket with light wear. Clean, tight copy.

Softcover. Durham NC, Duke University Press , 1st, 2013, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 312 pages, b&w illustrations. In People Get Ready, musicians, scholars, and journalists write about jazz since 1965, the year that Curtis Mayfield composed the famous civil rights anthem that gives this collection its title. The contributors emphasize how the political consciousness that infused jazz in the 1960s and early 1970s has informed jazz in the years since then. They bring nuance to historical accounts of the avant-garde, the New Thing, Free Jazz, "non-idiomatic" improvisation, fusion, and other forms of jazz that have flourished since the 1960s, and they reveal the contemporary relevance of those musical practices. Many of the participants in the jazz scenes discussed are still active performers. A photographic essay captures some of them in candid moments before performances. Clean copy. like new.

Softcover. Durham NC, Duke University Press , 1st, 2013, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 312 pages, b&w illustrations. In People Get Ready, musicians, scholars, and journalists write about jazz since 1965, the year that Curtis Mayfield composed the famous civil rights anthem that gives this collection its title. The contributors emphasize how the political consciousness that infused jazz in the 1960s and early 1970s has informed jazz in the years since then. They bring nuance to historical accounts of the avant-garde, the New Thing, Free Jazz, "non-idiomatic" improvisation, fusion, and other forms of jazz that have flourished since the 1960s, and they reveal the contemporary relevance of those musical practices. Many of the participants in the jazz scenes discussed are still active performers. A photographic essay captures some of them in candid moments before performances. Clean copy. like new.

Hardcover. New Haven, CT, Yale University Art Gallery, 1st, 2014, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 207 pages. Hardcover with no dust jacket. Very clean, unmarked copy still in shrink wrap. Images of New Orleans and the city's jazz culture, performers, bands, and clubs between 1957 and 1982. Over 200 black and white photographs taken by Friedlander. Tight copy.

Hardcover. New Haven, CT, Yale University Art Gallery, 1st, 2014, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 207 pages. Hardcover with no dust jacket. Very clean, unmarked copy still in shrink wrap. Images of New Orleans and the city's jazz culture, performers, bands, and clubs between 1957 and 1982. Over 200 black and white photographs taken by Friedlander. Tight copy.

Softcover. NY, Da Capo Press, reprint, 1994, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 301 pages, b&w photos. Sarah Vaughan possessed the most spectacular voice in jazz history. In Sassy, Leslie Gourse, the acclaimed biographer of Nat King Cole and Joe Williams, defines and celebrates Vaughan's vital musical legacy and offers a detailed portrait of the woman as well as the singer. Revealed here is "The Divine One" as only her closest friends and musical associates knew her. By her early twenties Sarah Vaughan was singining with Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, and Billy Eckstine, helping them invent bebop. For forty-five years thereafter, she reigned supreme in both pop and jazz, with several million-selling hits (among them "Broken Hearted Melody," "Make Yourself Comfortable," and "Misty"). But life offstage was never smooth for Sarah Vaughan. Her voluptuous voice was matched by her exuberant appetite for excess: three failed marriages, financial difficulties through many changes in management, late-night jam sessions, liquor, and cocaine. Remainder line on bottom edge, otherwise clean.

Softcover. NY, Stein and Day, 2nd pr., 1974, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, laminated card wraps, 112 pages, b&w illustrations. Ex-library copy with light stamping and bookplate on inside front cover. On the African influences on blues and jazz.

Hardcover. New York, Harry N. Abrams, 1st, 2010, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 160 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket. A celebration of jazz legend Sonny Rollin's incredibly prolific career. This intimate appreciation in pictures and words combines the images of John Abbott, who was Rollin's photographer of choice for the past twernty years has captured the saxophonist at home and at work, and the essays of Bob Blumenthal, a jazz critic who has chronicled Rollins and his art for nearly four decades.

Hardcover. US, Harry N. Abrams, 1st, 2010, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 160 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket. a celebration of jazz legend Sonny Rollin's incredibly prolific career. This intimate appreciation in pictures and words combines the images of John Abbott, who was Rollin's photographer of choice for the past twernty years has captured the saxophonist at home and at work, and the essays of Bob Blumenthal, a jazz critic who has chronicled Rollins and his art for nearly four decades.

Softcover. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1st, 1997, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 253 pages. In this work, Ingrid Monson juxtaposes musicians' talk and musical examples to ask how musicians go about "saying something" through music in a way that articulates identity, politics, and race. Clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. Berkeley, University of California Press, 3rd pr., 2018, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 279 pages, b&w photos. Sophisticated Giant presents the life and legacy of tenor saxophonist Dexter Gordon (1923-1990), one of the major innovators of modern jazz. In a context of biography, history, and memoir, Maxine Gordon has completed the book that her late husband began, weaving his "solo" turns with her voice and a chorus of voices from past and present. Reading like a jazz composition, the blend of research, anecdote, and a selection of Dexter's personal letters reflects his colorful life and legendary times. It is clear why the celebrated trumpet genius Dizzy Gillespie said to Dexter, "Man, you ought to leave your karma to science." Clean copy.

Softcover. NY, Vintage Books, reprint, 1982, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, pictorial wrappers, 264 pages, b&w illustrations. In this classic work of American music writing, renowned critic Albert Murray argues beautifully and authoritatively that the blues as such are synonymous with low spirits. Not only is its express purpose to make people feel good, which is to say in high spirits, but in the process of doing so it is actually expected to generate a disposition that is both elegantly playful and heroic in its nonchalance. In Stomping the Blues Murray explores its history, influences, development, and meaning as only he can. More than two hundred vintage photographs capture the ambiance Murray evokes in lyrical prose. Only the sounds are missing from this lyrical, sensual tribute to the blues. Originally published in 1976. Name on front fly leaf, otherwise clean with mild shelf wear.

Hardcover. NY, G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1st, 1981, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover, 272 pages, b&w photos. Dust jacket with light edgewear, short tears,

Hardcover. NY, W. W. Norton, 1st, 1993, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. A biography of the jazz clarinetist. Illustrated with photos, 522 pages including index. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1st, 2016, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, still in publisher's shrinkwrap. This stunning book charts the rich history of the blues, through the dazzling array of posters, album covers, and advertisements that have shaped its identity over the past hundred years. The blues have been one of the most ubiquitous but diverse elements of American popular music at large, and the visual art associated with this unique sound has been just as varied and dynamic. There is no better guide to this fascinating graphical world than Bill Dahl--a longtime music journalist and historian who has written liner notes for countless reissues of classic blues, soul, R&B, and rock albums. With his deep knowledge and incisive commentary--complementing more than three hundred and fifty lavishly reproduced images--the history of the blues comes musically and visually to life.

Softcover. Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University , Revised Ed., 2002, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 105 pages. Interviews with the jazz drummer, known for his wild style of drumming, who recounts his life and adventures playing with some of the best known jazz musicians and bands of his time. Includes additional reading and selected recordings. 6 leaves of b&w photo plates. Bright and clean, but with the light odor of a smoker-owned book.

Softcover. NY, Oxford University Press, 1st, 2009, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 366 pages illustrated in color. The widespread presence of jazz and blues in African American visual art has long been overlooked. The Hearing Eye makes the case for recognizing the music's importance, both as formal template and as explicit subject matter. Moving on from the use of iconic musical figures and motifs in Harlem Renaissance art, this groundbreaking collection explores the more allusive - and elusive - references to jazz and blues in a wide range of mostly contemporary visual artists. There are scholarly essays on the painters Rose Piper (Graham Lock), Norman Lewis (Sara Wood), Bob Thompson (Richard H. King), Romare Bearden (Robert G. O'Meally, Johannes Volz) and Jean-Michel Basquiat (Robert Farris Thompson), as well an account of early blues advertising art (Paul Oliver) and a discussion of the photographs of Roy DeCarava (Richard Ings). These essays are interspersed with a series of in-depth interviews by Graham Lock, who talks to quilter Michael Cummings and painters Sam Middleton, Wadsworth Jarrell, Joe Overstreet and Ellen Banks about their musical inspirations, and also looks at art's reciprocal effect on music in conversation with saxophonists Marty Ehrlich and Jane Ira Bloom. Clean, bright copy

Hardcover. NY, Knopf, 1st, 2009, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 268 pages. After having a breakdown in the midst of working on a photo-essay on Pittsburgh in 1957, legendary photographer W. Eugene Smith holed up in a loft in New York's Chelsea, in the Tin Pan Alley area. There, over the next several years, he became deeply embroiled in the New York City jazz scene, opening his home as a practice and performance space for some of the great artists of mid-century jazz, including Thelonious Monk, Zoot Sims and many others. Of course, he took pictures--both of musicians and of a window-size view of mid-century New York--and also wired the place for recording, logging hours and hours of tape, capturing the music and the talk around it. These photos and tapes had been thought lost--the stuff of rumor, buried in Smith's archive--until Stephenson dug them out and culled the best, along with transcriptions of material from the tapes, for this landmark book. Smith's stunning use of contrast makes figures like Monk seem dramatic and completely ordinary at the same time. The photos of the city offer a rare glimpse into a neighborhood being itself when it thought no one was watching. This will be an essential book for jazz fans, photography lovers and those interested in the history of New York.

Hardcover. NY, Broadway Books, 1st, 2003, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 289 pagesGreen turns his expert hand to the artistic qualities that make an extraordinary musician. He culls advice from dozens of interviews with legends including Joshua Bell, Dave Brubeck, Jeffrey Kahane, Bobby McFerrin, Christopher Parkening, Doc Severinsen, Frederica von Stade, the Harlem Boys Choir, and the Turtle Island String Quartet. Green organizes the ineffable virtuoso quality that the greats possess into ten characteristics, such as confidence, passion, discipline, creativity, and relaxed concentration, and discusses specific ways in which all musicians, composers, and conductors can take their skills to higher levels. Foreword by Mike Stryker.

Softcover. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, reprint, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 883 pages.The author reveals how musicians, both individually and collectively, learn to improvise. Chronicling leading musicians from their first encounters with jazz to the development of a unique improvisatory voice, Paul Berliner documents the lifetime of preparation that lies behind the skilled improviser's every idea. The product of more than fifteen years of immersion in the jazz world. Interviews with more than fifty professional musicians: bassists George Duvivier and Rufus Reid; drummers Max Roach, Ronald Shannon Jackson, and Akira Tana; guitarist Emily Remler; pianists Tommy Flanagan and Barry Harris; saxophonists Lou Donaldson, Lee Konitz, and James Moody; trombonist Curtis Fuller; trumpeters Doc Cheatham, Art Farmer, Wynton Marsalis, and Red Rodney; vocalists Carmen Lundy and Vea Williams; and others. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, W.W. Norton & Company, 1st, 2010, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 430 pages. During America's Swing Era, no musician was more successful or controversial than Artie Shaw: the charismatic and opinionated clarinetist-bandleader whose dozens of hits became anthems for "the greatest generation." But some of his most beautiful recordings were not issued until decades after he'd left the scene. He broke racial barriers by hiring African-American musicians. His frequent "retirements" earned him a reputation as the Hamlet of jazz. And he quit playing for good at the height of his powers. The handsome Shaw had seven wives (including Lana Turner and Ava Gardner). Inveterate reader and author of three books, he befriended the best-known writers of his time. Tom Nolan, who interviewed Shaw between 1990 and his death in 2004 and spoke with one hundred of his colleagues and contemporaries, captures Shaw and his era with candour and sympathy, bringing the master to vivid life and restoring him to his rightful place in jazz history. Clean, bright copy.

Softcover. NY, Da Capo Press, reprint, 1978, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 245 pages, b&w photos. Sidney Bechet (1897-1959) was one of the most brilliant exponents of New Orleans jazz. A prodigy on the clarinet, he soloed with Bunk Johnson's orchestra at age eleven, was improvising cornet-clarinet duos with Buddy Petit at age fifteen. Leaving New Orleans in the 1920s, Bechet took his Creole sound and spirit to New York, where he adopted the soprano saxophone and soon developed the unique style that marked his special artistry.

Softcover. Durham NC, Duke University Press, 1st, 2017, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover. pages. From scouring flea markets and eBay to maxing out their credit cards, record collectors will do just about anything to score a long-sought-after album. In Vinyl Freak, music writer, curator, and collector John Corbett burrows deep inside the record fiend's mind, documenting and reflecting on his decades-long love affair with vinyl. Discussing more than 200 rare and out-of-print LPs, Vinyl Freak is composed in part of Corbett's long-running DownBeat magazine column of the same name, which was devoted to records that had not appeared on CD. In other essays where he combines memoir and criticism, Corbett considers the current vinyl boom, explains why vinyl is his preferred medium, profiles collector subcultures, and recounts his adventures assembling the Alton Abraham Sun Ra Archive, an event so all-consuming that he claims it cured his record-collecting addiction. Like new in publisher's shrinkwrap.

Softcover. Lake Front Editions, 1st, 2002, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Memoirs of Vermont's own "Big" Joe Burrell with inscription by Big Joe on front fly leaf. Illustrated with photos in b&w. Light wear and rubbing to covers and spine, else a very nice, tight, clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Skira Rizzoli, 1st, 2010, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 224 pages. Illustrated in color and b&w. The most comprehensive book on the artist to date, offering an insightful look into the legendary musician and his enormous impact on the development of jazz. Miles Davis explores the life and art of one of the greatest visionaries in jazz history--through photographs, handwritten musical scores, album covers, posters, and more--cementing his reputation as the embodiment of cool, both on- and offstage. To examine his extraordinary career is also to examine the history of jazz from the mid-1940s through the early 1990s, as Davis was crucial in almost every important innovation and stylistic development during that time. His genius paved the way for these changes, both with his own performances and recordings, and by choosing collaborators with whom he forged new directions. Miles Davis--trumpeter, bandleader, and composer--was one of the most important figures in jazz history. He was born in a well-to-do family in St. Louis in 1926 and died in a Los Angeles hospital in 1991. He was at the forefront of several major developments in jazz music, including cool jazz, hard bop, free jazz, and fusion. Davis worked with many of the greatest jazz musicians of all time, including Ron Carter, John Coltrane, Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock, Quincy Jones, Charlie Parker, and Max Roach, among numerous others.

Softcover. Ventura CA, Pathfinder Publishing, 1st, 1990, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 214 pages, b&w illustrations. The story of the career, music, and life of the man who made drums a solo instrument, symbolized the swing era, and is still internationally recognized as "the world's greatest drummer." Book was once owned by a smoker and has odor.