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Jazz eBooks

If you like Jazz eBooks, then you'll love these top picks.
Showing 1 - 24 of 1343 Results
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  • The Penguin Jazz Guide

    The History of the Music in the 1000 Best Albums

    The Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings is firmly established as the world's leading guide to recorded jazz, a mine of fascinating information and a source of insightful - often wittily trenchant - criticism. This is something rather different: Brian Morton (who taught American history at UEA) has picked out the 1000 best recordings that all jazz fans should have and shows how they tell the history ... Read more

    $26.99 USD

  • Lush Life

    A Biography of Billy Strayhorn

    by David Hajdu ...
    Billy Strayhorn (1915-1967) was one of the most accomplished composers in American music, the creator of such standards as "Take the 'A' Train", yet all his life he was overshadowed by his friend and collaborator, Duke Ellington. Through scrutiny of Strayhorn's private papers and more than five hundred interviews, Hajdu revives Strayhorn as one of the most complex and tragic figures in jazz ... Read more

    $11.99 USD

  • Rhythm Man

    Chick Webb and the Beat that Changed America

    Series series CULTURAL BIOGRAPHIES SERIES
    The first comprehensive biography of the Swing Era's pioneering virtuoso drummer and bandleader William Henry "Chick" Webb (1905-39) was one of the first virtuoso drummers in jazz and an innovative bandleader dubbed the "Savoy King," who reigned at Harlem's world-famous Savoy Ballroom. Along with the likes of Duke Ellington, Fletcher Henderson, and Cab Calloway, Webb helped create the popular ... Read more

    $22.99 USD

  • Ornette Coleman

    The Territory and the Adventure

    by Maria Golia ...
    With striking photographs and personal insight, a compelling biography of the great American saxophonist and free jazz innovator Ornette Coleman.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 ... Read more

    $19.99 USD

  • A Biographical Guide to the Great Jazz and Pop Singers

    Will Friedwald’s illuminating, opinionated essays—provocative, funny, and personal—on the lives and careers of more than three hundred singers anatomize the work of the most important jazz and popular performers of the twentieth century. From giants like Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, Frank Sinatra, and Judy Garland to lesser-known artists like Jeri Southern and Joe Mooney, they have created a ... Read more

    $24.99 USD

  • Soul on Soul

    The Life and Music of Mary Lou Williams

    Series series Music in American Life
    First time in paperback and e-book!The jazz musician-composer-arranger Mary Lou Williams spent her sixty-year career working in—and stretching beyond—a dizzying range of musical styles. Her integration of classical music into her works helped expand jazz's compositional language. Her generosity made her a valued friend and mentor to the likes of Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, and Dizzy Gillespie ... Read more

    $11.99 USD

  • Loft Jazz

    Improvising New York in the 1970s

    The New York loft jazz scene of the 1970s was a pivotal period for uncompromising, artist-produced work. Faced with a flagging jazz economy, a group of young avant-garde improvisers chose to eschew the commercial sphere and develop alternative venues in the abandoned factories and warehouses of Lower Manhattan. Loft Jazz provides the first book-length study of this period, tracing its history amid ... Read more

    $24.99 USD

  • Jazz Composition

    Theory and Practice

    by Ted Pease ...
    (Berklee Press). When you think of jazz composers, who comes to mind? Jelly Roll Morton, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Charles Mingus, Bob Brookmeyer. This book is about what they (and many others) do. Jazz composition has evolved into a disciplined art that often evidences great emotional depth and breadth of sophistication. Berklee College of Music legend Ted Pease ... Read more

    $35.99 USD

  • The Great Jazz and Pop Vocal Albums

    The author of the magisterial A Biographical Guide to the Great Jazz and Pop Singers now approaches the great singers and their greatest work in an innovative and revelatory way: through considering their finest albums, which is the format in which this music was most resonantly organized and presented to its public from the 1940s until the very recent decline of the CD. It is through their albums ... Read more

    $4.99 USD

  • Pepper Adams' Joy Road

    An Annotated Discography

    by Gary Carner ...
    Series series Studies in Jazz
    Pepper Adams' Joy Road is more than a compendium of sessions and gigs done by the greatest baritone saxophone soloist in history. It's a fascinating overview of Adams' life and times, thanks to colorful interview vignettes, drawn from the author's unpublished conversations with Adams and other musicians. These candid observations from jazz greats about Adams and his colleagues reveal previously ... Read more

    $52.99 USD

  • Cubano Be, Cubano Bop

    One Hundred Years of Jazz in Cuba

    Translated by Daniel Whitesell ...
    Based on unprecedented research in Cuba, the direct testimony of scores of Cuban musicians, and the author's unique experience as a prominent jazz musician, Cubano Be, Cubano Bop is destined to take its place among the classics of jazz history. The work pays tribute not only to a distinguished lineage of Cuban jazz musicians and composers, but also to the rich musical exchanges between Cuban and ... Read more

    $17.99 USD

  • MBGU Jazz Moveable Shapes: Concepts for Reharmonizing II-V-I's

    by Sheryl Bailey ...
    This book offers an easily learned method that will quickly move the student from intermediate into advanced harmonic territory, adding richness, texture and uniqueness to the improvisational approach. The concept starts with common elements of basic diatonic harmony and 'moves' them in ways that gradually increase the harmonic complexity of their application. Students will greatly expand chord ... Read more

    $12.99 USD

  • Experiencing Big Band Jazz

    A Listener's Companion

    by Jeff Sultanof ...
    Series series Listener's Companion
    The era of popular music from about 1917 onward saw an explosion of creative songwriting that converged with a new sound from reed, brass, and rhythm instruments. Jazz was born, and the musical sophistication that accompanied this original sound set the stage for the prominence of arrangers, whose role in big band orchestrations became as important as jazz musicians and composers themselves. The ... Read more

    $40.99 USD

  • At the Jazz Band Ball

    Sixty Years on the Jazz Scene

    by Nat Hentoff ...
    Nat Hentoff, renowned jazz critic, civil liberties activist, and fearless contrarian—"I’m a Jewish atheist civil-libertarian pro-lifer"—has lived through much of jazz’s history and has known many of jazz’s most important figures, often as friend and confidant. Hentoff has been a tireless advocate for the neglected parts of jazz history, including forgotten sidemen and -women. This volume includes ... Read more

    $24.99 USD

  • 3 Shades of Blue

    Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool

    by James Kaplan ...
    **The national bestseller!“A superb book...[Kaplan is] a master biographer, a dogged researcher and shaper of narrative, and this is his most ambitious book to date.” —Los Angeles TimesFrom the author of the definitive biography of Frank Sinatra, the story of how jazz arrived at the pinnacle of American culture in 1959, told through the journey of three towering artists—Miles Davis, John Coltrane, ... Read more

    $14.99 USD

  • Straighten Up and Fly Right

    The Life and Music of Nat King Cole

    Series series Cultural Biographies
    One of the most popular and memorable American musicians of the 20th century, Nat King Cole (1919-65) is remembered today as both a pianist and a singer, a feat rarely accomplished in the world of popular music. Now, in this complete life and times biography, author Will Friedwald offers a new take on this fascinating musician, framing him first as a bandleader and then as a star. In Cole's early ... Read more

    $24.99 USD

  • Lady Sings the Blues

    The 50th-Anniversay Edition with a Revised Discography

    Series series Harlem Moon Classics
    Perfect for fans of The United States vs. Billie Holiday, this is the fiercely honest, no-holds-barred memoir of the legendary jazz, swing, and standards singing sensation—a fiftieth-anniversary edition updated with stunning new photos, a revised discography, and an insightful foreword by music writer David RitzTaking the reader on a fast-moving journey from Billie Holiday’s rough-and-tumble ... Read more

    $13.99 USD

  • The Rest Is Noise

    Listening to the Twentieth Century

    by Alex Ross ...
    **Winner of the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award for CriticismA New York Times Book Review Top Ten Book of the YearTime magazine Top Ten Nonfiction Book of 2007Newsweek Favorite Books of 2007A Washington Post Book World** Best Book of 2007In this sweeping and dramatic narrative, Alex Ross, music critic for The New Yorker, weaves together the histories of the twentieth century and its m... ... Read more

    $13.99 USD

  • Friday Night Jam

    by Nowick Gray ...
    A how-to memoir tracing the learning curves of group music improvisation, the peaks and pitfalls of African hand drumming with electric instruments. ... Read more

    Free

  • Unknown Pleasures

    Inside Joy Division

    by Peter Hook ...
    In Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division, Peter Hook, bassist for the legendary, groundbreaking band Joy Division, takes readers backstage with the group that helped define the sound of a generation and influenced artists such as U2, Radiohead, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers.Unlike other books about Joy Division, Factory Records, or lead singer Ian Curtis—who took his own life just before the band ... Read more

    $15.99 USD

  • Reckless Daughter

    A Portrait of Joni Mitchell

    by David Yaffe ...
    "She was like a storm." —Leonard CohenReckless Daughter is the story of an artist and an era that have left an indelible mark on American music.Joni Mitchell may be the most influential female recording artist and composer of the late twentieth century. In Reckless Daughter, the music critic David Yaffe tells the remarkable, heart-wrenching story of how the blond girl with the guitar became a ... Read more

    $12.99 USD

  • Thelonious Monk

    The Life and Times of an American Original

    From the mind of brilliant historian Robin Kelley comes the first full biography of legendary jazz musician Thelonious Monk, including full access to the family's archives, dozens of interviews, and an afterword for Monk’s 2017 centennial.Thelonious Monk is the critically acclaimed, gripping saga of an artist’s struggle to “make it” without compromising his musical vision. It is a story that, like ... Read more

    $16.99 USD

  • Dilla Time

    The Life and Afterlife of J Dilla, the Hip-Hop Producer Who Reinvented Rhythm

    by Dan Charnas ...
    **WINNER OF THE PEN/**JACQUELINE BOGRAD WELD AWARD FOR BIOGRAPHYNEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER“This book is a must for everyone interested in illuminating the idea of unexplainable genius.” —QUESTLOVEEqual parts biography, musicology, and cultural history, Dilla Time chronicles the life and legacy of J Dilla, a musical genius who transformed the sound of popular music for the twenty-first century... ... Read more

    $12.99 USD

  • How to Listen to Jazz

    by Ted Gioia ...
    A "radiantly accomplished" music scholar presents an accessible introduction to the art of listening to jazz (Wall Street Journal)In How to Listen to Jazz, award-winning music scholar Ted Gioia presents a lively introduction to one of America's premier art forms. He tells us what to listen for in a performance and includes a guide to today's leading jazz musicians. From Louis Armstrong's ... Read more

    $13.99 USD