Product Description: Listening to Jazz offers an engaging introduction to the rich history and culture of jazz. Featuring coverage of all standard periods and genres, this text helps students understand how jazz evolved and how its various styles intersect and blend...read more

Jazz was born on the streets, grew up in the clubs, and will die—so some fear—at the university. Facing dwindling commercial demand and the gradual disappearance of venues, many aspiring jazz musicians today learn their craft, and find their careers, in one of the many academic programs that now offer jazz degrees. School for Cool is their story. Going inside the halls of two of the most prestigious jazz schools around—at Berklee College of Music in Boston and the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music in New York—Eitan Y. Wilf tackles a formidable question at the heart of jazz today: can creativity survive institutionalization? Few art forms epitomize the anti-institutional image more than jazz, but it’s precisely at the academy where jazz is now flourishing. This shift has introduced numerous challenges and contradictions to the music’s practitioners. Solos are transcribed, technique is standardized, and the whole endeavor is plastered with the label “high art”—a far cry from its freewheeling days. Wilf shows how students, educators, and administrators have attempted to meet these challenges with an inventive spirit and a robust drive to preserve—and foster—what they consider to be jazz’s central attributes: its charisma and unexpectedness. He also highlights the unintended consequences of their efforts to do so. Ultimately, he argues, the gap between creative practice and institutionalized schooling, although real, is often the product of our efforts to close it.

Product Description: "Music has been in my blood from the day I was born," said Louis Armstrong. He rose from a troubled childhood and a life of poverty to set the music world on fire. Armstrong's lively trumpet playing, trademark "scat" singing, and natural talent for showmanship dazzled audiences for more than fifty years...read more

Product Description: Biography of famous Jazz composer written for ages 10-13.

Product Description: Biography of famous Jazz composer written for readers ages 10-13.

Product Description: Biography of famous Jazz composer written for ages 10-13.

Product Description: Born in a poor, dangerous section of New Orleans known as The Battlefield, Louis Armstrong overcame tremendous odds to become one of the most important musicians of the 20th century. From his 1920s-era Hot Five recordings, which forever changed the face of jazz, to such latter-day pop hits as Hello, Dolly! and the well-known What a Wonderful World, Armstrong enjoyed a remarkable career that spanned more than five decades...read more