Thomas Jonathan Jackson was the most renowned and skillful commander of Confederate troops in the Civil War. Not even Lee or Stuart matched his purely military intelligence--his intransigence at Bull Run (which earned him the name "Stonewall"), his knack for knowing when to attack and retreat, which he showed throughout the Shenandoah campaign, his tactical brilliance at Chancellorsville. He was stern, a strict Calvinist, a single-minded officer for whom religion and the army were everything. Yet he had the undivided loyalty of the men he commanded. This classic biography by the British...

The emergence of Jack Teagarden as an important jazz stylist was a significant feature of the '20s jazz scene. He brought a maturity to the sound of the trombone and until late in his life played with a laconic grace that few, if any, on his instrument have equaled. His collaboration with Louis Armstrong--who rated their musical relationship higher than any he had known--was one of the great partnerships in jazz history. The story of this funny, happy Texan is told with affection and detail in this, the only biography of Jack Teagarden."Obviously a man like Teagarden, with his mastery of his...

The jazz decade saw the emergence of many of the great figures who defined the music for the world: Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, Earl Hines, Bix Beiderbecke, Fats Waller, Jack Teagarden, Fletcher Henderson--these giants set the standards for blues singing, big band arrangements, and solo improvisation that are the foundations for jazz. Richard Hadlock has chapters on each, with a discography and descriptions of all the players who made the '20s swing.

An anthology of Pablo Picasso's statements about art

In the twenties, Surrealists proclaimed that words had stopped playing around and had begun to make love. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the writings of Marcel Duchamp, who fashioned some of the more joyous and ingenious couplings and uncouplings in modern art. This collection beings together two essential interviews and two statements about his art that underscore the serious side of Duchamp. But most of the book is made up of his experimental writings, which he called "Texticles," the long and extraordinary notes he wrote for The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Eben...

This comprehensive survey of jazz piano, beginning with a brief history of the instrument within the jazz tradition and concluding with interviews that present twenty-seven pianists in their own words, is both wonderfully anecdotal and a serious piece of jazz history. Lyons has assembled a giant concert of piano voices--Bill Evans, Herbie Hancock, Teddy Wilson, Oscar Peterson, Keith Jarrett, Randy Weston, Cecil Taylor, Horace Silver, Dave Brubeck, Sun Ra, McCoy Tyner, Toshiko Akiyoshi, Chick Corea, and many others. The pianists are candid, intense, and always opinionated. Yet their responses...

The noted blues scholar Paul Oliver here examines the many different skeins of the blues form, relating them to other black traditions - musical and religious - and tracing the origin of the blues through the dense, many-colored warp and weft of influences and inspiration. He describes "the dozens," Christmas rituals, and the coded (as well as blatant) sexual imagery that has always been a vital element of every popular song tradition. With extensive source notes, photographs, a discography, and two indexes of song titles and singers, this book serves as a sound, serious, and entertaining...

With more than 500 pictures, and extensive entries on more than 350 orchestras, this complete coverage of black and white bands--from the almost-forgotten Basie, Ellington, Miller, Shaw, and Dorsey--will prompt memories and establish important facts about a glorious era of jazz and popular music. Forewords by Les Brown and Harry James and an index with more than 6,000 names bracket a book that should be part of any music library.