Living the Jazz Life: Conversations with Forty Musicians About Their Careers in Jazz - Hardcover

Stokes, W. Royal

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0195081080 ISBN 13: 9780195081084

Publisher: Oxford University Press Inc, 2000

Synopsis

W. Royal Stokes' The Jazz Scene (OUP-USA 1991) was highly praised as an oral history of jazz, which, said famous jazz writer Stanley Dance, "put together a kind of mosaic that effectively illustrated the whole subject in a novel and informative way." His new collection, Jazz Profiles, follows the same successful model, but deals with jazz oral history in some significantly different ways. Stokes' interviews strongly focus on how the different musicians got involved with jazz when young and how their careers developed from an early age. This presents a wonderful range of perspectives on what makes jazz musicians. In the book, too, a number of prominent women musicians discuss their jazz careers and describe the obstacles they had to overcome and the problems of being a woman in the jazz world. They include three prominent jazz singers: DeeDee Bridgwater, Shirley Howe, and Diane Kral. Women instrumentalists - especially those performing on such "suspect" jazz instruments as harp (Dorothy Ashley) and violin (Regina Carter) - have had an even more difficult career path. The interviews in the book break down into a series of jazz-related subjects - jazz families, early jazz pioneers, saxophonists and pianists and string players, singers, jazz composers, jazz musicians beyond the US, blues players, and comics - the last being discussions with Steve Adler and Bill Cosby about their intense involvement with jazz. In their accounts of their careers, these musicians provide great insight not only into their own careers but into the nature of jazz itself and how it has attracted and sustained its players. The subjects cover the entire history of jazz - from its early days, in the 1920s and before, to the present, for Stokes is particularly good at eliciting stories from promising young musicians who are just building their careers now. But the book presents a broad perspective of jazz in all its aspects and of the talented people who have made it successful.

About this title

Review:

"W. Royal Stokes has contributed invaluably to jazz history from the inside. Living the Jazz Life is particularly unique because it focuses on how these diversified players became jazz musicians."--Nat Hentoff
"Like a long jam session."--Kirkus Reviews
"W. Royal Stokes has contributed invaluably to jazz history from the inside. Living the Jazz Life is particularly unique because it focuses on how these diversified players became jazz musicians."--Nat Hentoff
"Like a long jam session."--Kirkus Reviews
"W. Royal Stokes has contributed invaluably to jazz history from the inside. Living the Jazz Life is particularly unique because it focuses on how these diversified players became jazz musicians."--Nat Hentoff
"Like a long jam session."--Kirkus Reviews
"W. Royal Stokes has contributed invaluably to jazz history from the inside. Living the Jazz Life is particularly unique because it focuses on how these diversified players became jazz musicians."--Nat Hentoff

"Like a long jam session."--Kirkus Reviews

About the Author:

A follower of the jazz scene since his teens in the 1940s, W. Royal Stokes has written about music for such publications as Down Beat, JazzTimes, and the Washington Post, and hosted the public radio shows "I Thought I Heard Buddy Bolden Say . . ." and Since Minton's. Today he is the editor of the quarterly Jazz Notes, and is the author of The Jazz Scene and Swing Era New York. He lives in Silver Spring, Maryland.

About this edition

• Publisher: Oxford University Press Inc
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0195081080
• ISBN 13: 9780195081084
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 288