Great Jazz Books

art pepper's autobiography - "straight life"
paul bley's autobiography - "stopping time"
mingus's autobiography - "beneath the underdog"

x-post

Also:
Derek Bailey - Improvisation
Forces in Motion: The Music and Thoughts of Anthony Braxton

Not as notable but worth reading depending on where your interests lie:

Free Jazz - Jost
Miles Beyond - Paul Tingen
Ornette Coleman - A Harmelodic Life - Litweiller
and there's a good Coltrane bio that I can't find at the moment.

The title is jazz, the cover is jazz and Babs, the mad old bastard, is extremely fucking jazz.

xxpost
wow edd I thought Geoff Dyer's But Beautiful was piss, a half-assed attempt at "jazz fiction" -- maybe I should try it again.

Also Fred Wesley's autobiography, Hit Me, Fred has a whole lot of jazz in it.

Space is the Place /Szwed

Black Music Jones/Baraka sort of an artifact now, but a good intro to the 60's culture of black nationalist music

4 Lives /Spellman

John Coltrane /Lewis Porter

Jazz: It's Evolution and Essence /Andre Hodeir
Intellectual analysis, french, pre-freejazz
better than Martin Williams which is also worth reading

Litweiler

New Musical Configuations (about Anthony Braxton) /Radano

Another vote here for Geoff Dyer's But Beautiful – sad stories, rivettingly told.

I'm currently reading Mike Heffley's Northern Sun, Southern Moon about European free jazz and improv. Highly academic and erudite, not an easy read by any means but great to see this music getting the serious critical attention it deserves.

Anyone ever read Black Music by Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka)?

i did read that one -- some great insight, though some of it may have gone a bit over my head...

cool, i'll check it out! i'm accustomed to my head being 2 to 3 feet below where things fly, so no big deal there

Read it long time ago for a university class actually. Can't remember that much about it tbh. Found some of it interesting I recall.

I should revisit Geoff Dyer's But Beautiful. I like his writing generally, but was a bit put off by his dismissal of free jazz and hyperbolic stanning for Keith Jarrett (the greatest musician of our times my arse). Having different opinions is fine though - he writes about the music well.

I have both Black Music and Blues People lined up. Baraka's poetry is in itself a kind of jazz writing at times. Worth checking out the PennSound archive for readings such as I Love Music, where he impersonates Coltrane's horn to electrifying effect.

Val Wilmer's As Serious As Your Life is essential, but I'd also recommend her memoir, Mama Said There'd Be Days Like This. She's an absolute hero. Would also like to read her collection of interviews, Jazz People.

I've heard great things about George Lewis's book on the AACM, A Power Stronger Than Itself.

Ben Ratliffe's Coltrane book is good and I'll add to the Litweiler praise.

Could never read Dyer on jazz -- and given a couple of things I've seen by him its amazing he got it published. Some FIFA styles corruption going on there.

but beautiful has some good stuff in it, but yeah, borders on fan-fic (i imagine the musicians he writes about would be mildly horrified by some of it).

Ben Ratliff book on Trane is not a patch on the pants of the Lewis Porter one mentioned upthread.

perhaps inspired by this thread, i bought a random JAZZ BOOK during my lunch break today. don't know if it'll be great or not!
http://www.thewire.co.uk/2013/08/13/Beyond_A_Love_Supreme.jpg

Ashley Kahn book about A Love Supreme is very good, don't know that book you bought.

yeah i just bought it because it was greatly discounted ... kahn's book is good!
this one might be on the academic side of things, but seems to cover coltrane's late period fairly extensively, so that hopefully will be interesting.

Loved Frank Kofsky's bk on Coltrane -- almost like the only one I need, especially the way things are #politics

Lots of good recommendations here ... not mentioned yet:

Duke Ellington, Music Is My Mistress
Louis Armstrong, Satchmo and Swing That Music
Mezz Mezzrow, Really the Blues

I"ll check out the Lewis Porter. Sounds quite musicological, but I can handle a bit of that (says he with his Grade 5 Music Theory, haw).

I have Ashley Kahn's The House That Trane Built. It's a coffee table book with lush photos of the Impulse! album art, but it's full of detailed background and analysis.

Picked up John Edward Hasse's Beyond Category: The Life And Genius of Duke Ellington recently. Heard mixed reports, but it's based on the Ellington archives, so research wise it should be solid.

Various of the Penguin Book of jazz have been better than others and its gone through quite a few volumes.

The big THelonious Monk biography that came out 5 years or so ago which is presumably the Kelley one.

I've got Billie's Blues somewhere and haven't read it through so can't really say if it is a classic but seems pretty good.

A book called something like Note For Note which is a lot of interviews conducted by an ex-player sometime around the late 60s/early 70s . I really do need to get some organisation in here cos its around somewhere.

Blue Note Cover Art which is now in several volumes.

Herman leonard's book of Jazz photography which I managed to get for 99c a couple of years back

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/gallery/2014/oct/04/catastrophic-coltrane/

Anyone like this? Tiresome middlebrow worries, etc.

It's funny that he thought he could re-ignite a debate that was settled 40 years ago. But maybe the fact that the debate wasn't settled to his anti-new-music liking is why he tried to re-ignite it.

Various of the Penguin Book of jazz have been better than others and its gone through quite a few volumes.

The first one was a revelation -- learned about who was who in the FMP stable (and a fair amount of vinyl was still in print/reviewed), great Duke recommendations, all-around indispensable. Was never steered wrong by their five-star (or later "crown") recommendations.

Later volumes more-or-less rose or fell on what was in or out of print at the time. I gave up around the fifth volume, when they started heaping praise on mediocre also-rans.

THe book I refer to above as note for Note is actually Notes and Tones by Arthur Taylor which is based on conversations carried out between 1968 and 1972 with a lot of jazz musicians. it has a lot of people going back to bebop days, possibly further as well as some who came up in the 60s new Thing. I found it in my local 2nd hand/remainder book shop. It first came out in '77 then Da Capo republished it in '93.

It's been mentioned already but Miles' autobiography is amazing - not just a great book about music but one of the best books I ever read. His narrative voice is unique and the descriptions of 30s 40s New York are wonderfully evocative - it's also a powerful story about drug addiction and racism.

I recently read Teachout's Armstrong bio which was very informative but not very interesting as literature, then read David Hajdu's Strayhorn bio which was a well told, moving story - but still, nothing so far has come close to the Miles bio for me. I guess I'll just read that one again, but if anyone can books with somewhat similar aesthetics I'll be very pleased.

ugh @ geoff dyer. I'm apparently the only reader on earth who finds his work pointless and annoying. this coltrane review does nothing to correct that. I'll leave the analysis to wiser more musically literate heads while quoting this astonishingly vacuous and presumptious sentence as a parting shot.

But Coltrane seems to have felt compelled to add musicians in the hope that doing so would clarify the reason for having done so.

I'm apparently the only reader on earth who finds his work pointless and annoying

I posted that you know :-)

Wanted to like his Lawrence book, can't remember if I succeeded or not

xpost

well i meant outside our enlightened circle!

I want to read more about the following: John Coltrane, Tarkovsky and Lawrence.

Just not by him. xp = ah!

including of course noted jazz db and one man graham parker tribute band james redd

mystified by dyer's ratio of good reviews to wooly prose but whatever. have long considered an ILB diatribe in his honor but this will do.

Dyer's book reads as if it was written by someone who buys jazz records bcs the covers look cool. I thoroughly enjoyed Richard Williams' The Blue Moment, which uses Kind Of Blue as a starting point to explore Riley, Reich, VU, Eno, The Necks etc etc.

one man graham parker tribute band james redd
lol. Saw Steve Goulding perform last week, did not see him last night, discussed his future whereabouts including another Rumour reunion show a few minutes ago.

Yes, the Williams book is lovely. His blog, The Blue Moment, is always worth a look too: review of gigs and records, plus the odd retrospective piece.

Had a skim through Duncan Heinings Trad Dads, Dirty Boppers and Free Fusioneers: British Jazz 1960-75 in the uni library the other day. A little dry and academic in style, but it's well put together and his research is excellent.

Has anyone read Ian Carr's Music Outside, which covers a similar topic/period? It's cited a lot.

RIP Nat Hentoff

https://ehsankhoshbakht.blogspot.com/2009/07/nat-hentoffs-liner-notes-part-iii.html

Former Voice blogger Tom Breihan is now tweeting about how Hentoff was the only one he ever saw stand up to New Times-era Voice honcho Lacey in person---at a really bad meeting, with Lacey having a shitfit all over several VV veterans.

I asked him just now who else was there for the treatment:
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Tom BreihanVerified account
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@0wlred I mean: Tom Robbins, Greg Tate, Christgau, Lynn Yaeger, Chuck Eddy, Joy Press, Musto, forget who all else. It was a hell of a room.
10:44 PM - 7 Jan 2017

Ilx's tylerw tweeted this pic of two Hentoff books I still need to get:
if they don't show up, they're Hear Me Talkin' To Ya: The Story of Jazz As Told By The Men Who Made It(co-edited with Nat Shapiro) and Jazz Is.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C1nVEX8UQAAhPb6.jpg:large

RIP. Actually this revive would be about the Bob Porter book Phil posted about on the Rolling Jaxx thread.

Lol at typo.

60-61, on Candid, 4 CDs (if doesn't show, it's Cecil Taylor, The Nat Hentoff Sessions, with Shepp etc.)

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C2Bx-vSUoAQY5l-.jpg

I think that iteration of those recordings (it used to be a Mosaic set; the version in the photo is on the Solar label out of Spain, the same folks who did that amazing Sonny Rollins/Don Cherry 6CD live set last year) is out of print already - I see it going for exorbitant third-party prices now when it was originally under $25.

Is there a salty, anecdote-heavy history of jazz from 1920s to 50s that isn't too scary for a non-muso?

Miles Davis' autobio