jazz for dummies

the greatest guide on earth

"Whaddya say, gate? Are you in the know,

or are you a solid bringer-downer?"

Hip to the streetwise slang around him spoken by players like Lester Young and Mezz Mezzrow (the original wigga, a substantial musician as well as Harlem playa whose powerful bud was known as "the mezz"), Cab Calloway, a consummate PR man, published his  own "Hepcat Dictionary", awreet?
Writing the new Jazz for Dummies was a revelation. We set out to revise but wound up with a complete makeover. Read it front to back or start wherever you want: you'll get satisfying hunks of information. Ingredients of jazz are here and easily digested--rhythms, harmony, melody, improvisation. History, from New Orleans to Chicago to New York, and from Big Band Swing to Bebop to West Coast Cool and Free Jazz, are vastly expanded. I came across hundreds of nuggets that were not in Version 1.0. I pay big dues to giants like Louis Armstrong, John Coltrane, Miles Davis and Charlie Parker, as well as some monsters you may not know: harpist Dorothy Ashby, Latin honcho Machito, California trumpeters Howard McGhee and Clora Bryant, and black free jazz renegades like the World Saxophone Quartet (whose music grew from the sociopolitical turmoil of the 1960s and 1970s). There's also new, essential history of the pre-jazz decades in America dating back to the inhumane slave trade that brought Africans (and their music) to America. If you're a pop culture vacuum cleaner like me, you'll enjoy the new chapter Jazz in Popular Culture, which captures jazz in film and on film scores; and in cartoons, photography, fashion and literature. Those early Harlem zoot-suiters were way ahead of their time, and dudes like Cab Calloway, Mezz Mezzrow and Lester Young helped invent the hepcat lingo that was purloined by the Beats and the Hippies. I can imagine an indie film about Mezzrow, the original "wigga" and a decent musician who played with the greats in Chicago and New York and who doubled as their dope dealer. The book was a labor fueled by many mochas at a certain corporate coffee chain with wi-fi, but I fell in love with jazz all over again. I hope you begin your own love affair.
 
Copyright . Dirk Sutro. All rights reserved.
GoDaddy.com