Tag: jazz history

Recent Books

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I’ve been reading a fair bit this year, as far as my standards go. More than usual, anyway. This is everything so far, though, of course, a few of those I gave up on and didn’t finish: I’ve been feeling a little disappointed lately in how so much of the SFF world online is so busy talking about scandals and outrages that we never seem to talk about the books anymore. Short stories, too, but, well, that’s for another post. So I figured: do my bit. Post about what I’ve read lately. Part of why I stopped was because–on some very bad …

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Monk, Amblyopia & All

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Wanting to check one detail about Monk’s life, I picked up my copy of Straight, No Chaser: The Life and Genius of Thelonious Monk by Leslie Gourse, and searched… and an hour later, I discovered I’d happily read a big chunk of the book. So far it’s a very balanced treatment, from what I can tell: Gourse doesn’t shy away from the few unpleasant things that come up, but doesn’t dwell on the either. It’s not a particularly musical biography, so far: no analysis of Monk’s music. (There’s more of that in Gabriel Solis’ Monk’s Music, which I’d dive into next if it weren’t …

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Newport Jazz Festival, 1960:The Year They Called the National Guard

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You won’t catch me hating on the Newport Jazz Festival, of course! When I was a teenager, the festival on Rhode Island had a kind of magical aura of importance: on PBS I’d seen footage of Gil Evans playing there with Art Farmer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlgKLwhoVgI … and listened time and again to John Coltrane and Archie Shepp’s New Thing at Newport: … and Dizzy Gillespie’s big band recording At Newport: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJF7075fvg4 … dozens and dozens of times. (Seriously, in high school, I was baffled by how everyone was into music we all knew nobody would be listening to by 2002. My jam …

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Coltrane on Coltrane: The John Coltrane Interviews, ed. Chris de Vito

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Probably one of the last books I’ll read in 2011, I actually worked my way through this book slowly. Not because it’s not interesting — though, if you’ve done any research on Trane before, you’ve seen some of it already, and there is a certain amount of unavoidable repetition — but because I was busy, and wanted to take the book slow. The impression it gives of Coltrane as an adult is somewhat vague in some ways, but it’s a wonderful look at how others reacted to him… which I suppose is partly because of how Coltrane presented himself to …

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