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Author: Stanley Crouch Publisher: Harper Collins ISBN: 0062314068 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 285
Book Description
“A tour de force. . . . Crouch has given us a bone-deep understanding of Parker’s music and the world that produced it. In his pages, Bird still lives.” — Washington Post A stunning portrait of Charlie Parker, one of the most talented and influential musicians of the twentieth century, from Stanley Crouch, one of the foremost authorities on jazz and culture in America. Throughout his life, Charlie Parker personified the tortured American artist: a revolutionary performer who used his alto saxophone to create a new music known as bebop even as he wrestled with a drug addiction that would lead to his death at the age of thirty-four. Drawing on interviews with peers, collaborators, and family members, Stanley Crouch recreates Parker’s Depression-era childhood; his early days navigating the Kansas City nightlife, inspired by lions like Lester Young and Count Basie; and on to New York, where he began to transcend the music he had mastered. Crouch reveals an ambitious young man torn between music and drugs, between his domineering mother and his impressionable young wife, whose teenage romance with Charlie lies at the bittersweet heart of this story. With the wisdom of a jazz scholar, the cultural insights of an acclaimed social critic, and the narrative skill of a literary novelist, Stanley Crouch illuminates this American master as never before.
Author: Stanley Crouch Publisher: Harper Collins ISBN: 0062314068 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 285
Book Description
“A tour de force. . . . Crouch has given us a bone-deep understanding of Parker’s music and the world that produced it. In his pages, Bird still lives.” — Washington Post A stunning portrait of Charlie Parker, one of the most talented and influential musicians of the twentieth century, from Stanley Crouch, one of the foremost authorities on jazz and culture in America. Throughout his life, Charlie Parker personified the tortured American artist: a revolutionary performer who used his alto saxophone to create a new music known as bebop even as he wrestled with a drug addiction that would lead to his death at the age of thirty-four. Drawing on interviews with peers, collaborators, and family members, Stanley Crouch recreates Parker’s Depression-era childhood; his early days navigating the Kansas City nightlife, inspired by lions like Lester Young and Count Basie; and on to New York, where he began to transcend the music he had mastered. Crouch reveals an ambitious young man torn between music and drugs, between his domineering mother and his impressionable young wife, whose teenage romance with Charlie lies at the bittersweet heart of this story. With the wisdom of a jazz scholar, the cultural insights of an acclaimed social critic, and the narrative skill of a literary novelist, Stanley Crouch illuminates this American master as never before.
Author: Chuck Haddix Publisher: University of Illinois Press ISBN: 0252095170 Category : Music Languages : en Pages : 226
Book Description
Saxophone virtuoso Charlie "Bird" Parker began playing professionally in his early teens, became a heroin addict at 16, changed the course of music, and then died when only 34 years old. His friend Robert Reisner observed, "Parker, in the brief span of his life, crowded more living into it than any other human being." Like Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, and John Coltrane, he was a transitional composer and improviser who ushered in a new era of jazz by pioneering bebop and influenced subsequent generations of musicians. Meticulously researched and written, Bird: The Life and Music of Charlie Parker tells the story of his life, music, and career. This new biography artfully weaves together firsthand accounts from those who knew him with new information about his life and career to create a compelling narrative portrait of a tragic genius. While other books about Parker have focused primarily on his music and recordings, this portrait reveals the troubled man behind the music, illustrating how his addictions and struggles with mental health affected his life and career. He was alternatively generous and miserly; a loving husband and father at home but an incorrigible philanderer on the road; and a chronic addict who lectured younger musicians about the dangers of drugs. Above all he was a musician, who overcame humiliation, disappointment, and a life-threatening car wreck to take wing as Bird, a brilliant improviser and composer. With in-depth research into previously overlooked sources and illustrated with several never-before-seen images, Bird: The Life and Music of Charlie Parker corrects much of the misinformation and myth about one of the most influential musicians of the twentieth century.
Author: Nancy Pickard Publisher: Ballantine Books ISBN: 034551663X Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 337
Book Description
One beautiful summer afternoon, Jody Linder receives shocking news: The man convicted of murdering her father is being released from prison and returning to the small town of Rose, Kansas. It has been twenty-three years since that stormy night when her father was shot and killed and her mother disappeared, presumed dead. Neither the protective embrace of Jody’s three uncles nor the safe haven of her grandparents’ ranch could erase the pain caused by Billy Crosby on that catastrophic night. Now Billy Crosby is free, thanks to the efforts of his son, Collin, a lawyer who has spent most of his life trying to prove his father’s innocence. Despite their long history of carefully avoiding each other in such an insular community, Jody and Collin find that they share an exclusive sense of loss. As Jody revisits old wounds, startling truths emerge about her family’s tragic past. But even through struggle and hardship, she still dares to hope for a better future—and maybe even love. BONUS: This edition contains a The Scent of Rain and Lightning discussion guide.
Author: Howard Blum Publisher: Crown ISBN: 0307410269 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 362
Book Description
It was an explosion that reverberated across the country—and into the very heart of early-twentieth-century America. On the morning of October 1, 1910, the walls of the Los Angeles Times Building buckled as a thunderous detonation sent men, machinery, and mortar rocketing into the night air. When at last the wreckage had been sifted and the hospital triage units consulted, twenty-one people were declared dead and dozens more injured. But as it turned out, this was just a prelude to the devastation that was to come. In American Lightning, acclaimed author Howard Blum masterfully evokes the incredible circumstances that led to the original “crime of the century”—and an aftermath more dramatic than even the crime itself. With smoke still wafting up from the charred ruins, the city’s mayor reacts with undisguised excitement when he learns of the arrival, only that morning, of America’s greatest detective, William J. Burns, a former Secret Service man who has been likened to Sherlock Holmes. Surely Burns, already world famous for cracking unsolvable crimes and for his elaborate disguises, can run the perpetrators to ground. Through the work of many months, snowbound stakeouts, and brilliant forensic sleuthing, the great investigator finally identifies the men he believes are responsible for so much destruction. Stunningly, Burns accuses the men—labor activists with an apparent grudge against the Los Angeles Times’s fiercely anti-union owner—of not just one heinous deed but of being part of a terror wave involving hundreds of bombings. While preparation is laid for America’s highest profile trial ever—and the forces of labor and capital wage hand-to-hand combat in the streets—two other notable figures are swept into the drama: industry-shaping filmmaker D.W. Griffith, who perceives in these events the possibility of great art and who will go on to alchemize his observations into the landmark film The Birth of a Nation; and crusading lawyer Clarence Darrow, committed to lend his eloquence to the defendants, though he will be driven to thoughts of suicide before events have fully played out. Simultaneously offering the absorbing reading experience of a can’t-put-it-down thriller and the perception-altering resonance of a story whose reverberations continue even today, American Lightning is a masterpiece of narrative nonfiction.
Author: Stanley Crouch Publisher: Civitas Books ISBN: 0465015123 Category : Music Languages : en Pages : 370
Book Description
From a preeminent--and always controversial--jazz critic and intellectual firebrand comes the long-awaited collections of essential essays on the great music and performers of the jazz world.
Author: Jocelyn Davies Publisher: Simon and Schuster ISBN: 1481440551 Category : Young Adult Fiction Languages : en Pages : 303
Book Description
A bolt of lightning inspires an incredible adventure in this charming, magical realism story that takes four teens on an all-night journey through the streets of New York City. Extraordinary things happen when we least expect them. Tiny, Lu, Will and Nathaniel used to be best friends. Then life-defining events the summer before high school tore them apart. Now, three years later, they hardly talk anymore. Nathaniel has become obsessed with winning the prestigious science scholarship that his genius older brother once won. Will has risen from anonymity to popular soccer star. Lu grew into a brash, impetuous actress. And shy, poetic Tiny has slowly been fading away. But fate weaves their lives together again the night before the SATs, during a wild thunderstorm that threatens to shut down New York City. And lightning strikes. Before they know what's hit them, the four teens embark on an epic all-night adventure to follow their dreams, fall in and out of love, reconcile the past, and overcome the fears that have been driving them since that one lost summer. And by the time the sun rises, odds are they’ll discover that there’s a fine line between science and magic, and that the mysteries of love and friendship can’t be explained.
Author: Chan Parker Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press ISBN: 164336278X Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 234
Book Description
A memoir of the Jazz Age and a life profoundly influenced by it My Life in E-flat is the remarkable memoir of a woman who witnessed some of the most important movements in the history of jazz. Through her autobiography, Chan Parker provides intimate insights into the music and into life with Charlie Parker, the key figure in the development of bebop and one of the most important of all jazz musicians. Born Beverly Dolores Berg in New York City at the height of the Jazz Age, Parker's father was a producer of vaudeville shows and her mother was a dancer in Florenz Ziegfeld's Midnight Frolic. Parker became part of the jazz culture as a nightclub dancer and later as the wife of jazz saxophonists Charlie Parker and then Phil Woods. In a moving and candid portrait of Charlie Parker, the author describes in harrowing detail a man of incredible talent besieged with addictions and self-destructiveness. She painfully recounts his death at the age of 35 while married to her and its effect on her life as well as on the musical world. Parker's honest portrait of one of the most gifted musicians in jazz provides unique insight into the history of the music and the difficulties faced by African American performers during the 1940s. Parker also reflects on her struggle to find her own voice and on her work with Clint Eastwood on the film biography of Charlie Parker, Bird (1988).
Author: Bill Simmons Publisher: ESPN ISBN: 0345520106 Category : Sports & Recreation Languages : en Pages : 754
Book Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The NBA according to The Sports Guy—now updated with fresh takes on LeBron, the Celtics, and more! Foreword by Malcom Gladwell • “The work of a true fan . . . it might just represent the next phase of sports commentary.”—The Atlantic Bill Simmons, the wildly opinionated and thoroughly entertaining basketball addict known to millions as ESPN’s The Sports Guy, has written the definitive book on the past, present, and future of the NBA. From the age-old question of who actually won the rivalry between Bill Russell and Wilt Chamberlain to the one about which team was truly the best of all time, Simmons opens—and then closes, once and for all—every major pro basketball debate. Then he takes it further by completely reevaluating not only how NBA Hall of Fame inductees should be chosen but how the institution must be reshaped from the ground up, the result being the Pyramid: Simmons’s one-of-a-kind five-level shrine to the ninety-six greatest players in the history of pro basketball. And ultimately he takes fans to the heart of it all, as he uses a conversation with one NBA great to uncover that coveted thing: The Secret of Basketball. Comprehensive, authoritative, controversial, hilarious, and impossible to put down (even for Celtic-haters), The Book of Basketball offers every hardwood fan a courtside seat beside the game’s finest, funniest, and fiercest chronicler.
Author: Terry Teachout Publisher: Penguin ISBN: 0698138589 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 498
Book Description
A major new biography of Duke Ellington from the acclaimed author of Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington was the greatest jazz composer of the twentieth century—and an impenetrably enigmatic personality whom no one, not even his closest friends, claimed to understand. The grandson of a slave, he dropped out of high school to become one of the world’s most famous musicians, a showman of incomparable suavity who was as comfortable in Carnegie Hall as in the nightclubs where he honed his style. He wrote some fifteen hundred compositions, many of which, like “Mood Indigo” and “Sophisticated Lady,” remain beloved standards, and he sought inspiration in an endless string of transient lovers, concealing his inner self behind a smiling mask of flowery language and ironic charm. As the biographer of Louis Armstrong, Terry Teachout is uniquely qualified to tell the story of the public and private lives of Duke Ellington. A semi-finalist for the National Book Award, Duke peels away countless layers of Ellington’s evasion and public deception to tell the unvarnished truth about the creative genius who inspired Miles Davis to say, “All the musicians should get together one certain day and get down on their knees and thank Duke.”
Author: Stanley Crouch
Author: Stanley Crouch
Author: Chuck Haddix
Author: Nancy Pickard
Author: Howard Blum
Author: Stanley Crouch
Author: Jocelyn Davies
Author: Chan Parker
Author: Bill Simmons
Author: Mercedes Lackey
Author: Terry Teachout