Author Description

About the Author Brian Morton is the presenter of Radio Scotland's arts programs The Usual Suspects and The Brian Morton Show. He has published fiction, music, and literary criticism; was a founding member of the musical ensemble The Golden Horde and has composed jazz and musical theater pieces; and his PenguinGuide to Jazz on CD is the essential reference work on recorded jazz. Product Description Buddy Bolden's legendary wax cylinder recording of 1905. Louis Armstrong in 1928 taking jazz to a level of perfection never to be equaled. Benny Goodman at Carnegie Hall playing a complex blend of blues, Jewish themes, and classical forms. The birth of bebop, a revolutionary form ofjazz--complex, difficult, artful, and often antagonistic. John Coltrane takes show tune "My Favorite Things" and turns it into a dark and sinister exercise in musical estrangement. Taking five key moments in jazz history, Brian Morton challenges our assumptions about jazz's origins, its ethnic identity, and its social and political nature. Morton follows jazz as it weaves a constantly evolving tale, full of intriguing sidetracks and occasional dead ends, suddenextinctions and bizarre archaeological survivals. Underneath it, though, there is a constant questioning spirit, an unwillingness to accept orthodoxies, conventional resolutions and simple chronologies. Morton is prompted to ask, at the end of jazz's first century, how can we define a music thatembraces both the traditional Dixieland band as well as highly innovative performances that blend pop, classical music, Karelian folk song, and the cool aesthetic of Miles Davis. Does the music have any more than nostalgic connections with its African-American origins? Is there some philosophy orcast of mind which creates jazz? What does it have to do with other, more settled genres, and why do people turn to it? This is a book for jazz lovers ready to reconsider the accepted versions of jazz history, but also for those who have until now looked on either in puzzlement or suspicion. It is, above all, an invitation to listen afresh.