Straight Life

Author: Art Pepper
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 0306837676
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 438

Book Description
Art Pepper (1925-1982) was called the greatest alto saxophonist of the post-Charlie Parker generation. But his autobiography, Straight Life, is much more than a jazz book--it is one of the most explosive, yet one of the most lyrical, of all autobiographies. This edition is updated with an extensive afterword by Laurie Pepper covering Art Pepper's last years, and a complete and up-to-date discography by Todd Selbert.

Straight Life

Author: Art Pepper
Publisher: Hachette Books
ISBN: 0306837676
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 438

Deep in a Dream

Author: James Gavin
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
ISBN: 1569769036
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 473

Book Description
This first major biography of the most romanticized icon in jazz thrillingly recounts his wild ride. From his emergence in the 1950s--when an uncannily beautiful young man from Oklahoma appeard on the West Coast to become, seemingly overnight, the prince of "cool" jazz--until his violent, drug-related death in Amsterdam in 1988, Chet Baker lived a life that has become an American myth. Here, drawing on hundreds of interviews and previously untapped sources, James Gavin gives a hair-raising account of the trumpeter's dark journey.

My Life in E-flat

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).

The Paper Garden

Author: Molly Peacock
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1608195236
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 416

Book Description
Traces the life and accomplishments of septuagenarian artist Mary Delany, describing her invention of the art of collage late in life after two heart-breaking marriages, in an account that also evaluates the roles of her relationships with such figures as Jonathan Swift, the Duchess of Portland and King George III. 35,000 first printing.

Beneath the Underdog

Author: Charles Mingus
Publisher: Canongate Books
ISBN: 9780857862181
Category : Double-bassists
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
Charles Mingus, bassist, composer and bandleader, was one of the towering figures of American twentieth century music. In this memoir, Mingus documents his childhood on an Army base in Arizona, his difficult teenage years in Watts, and his musical education by the likes of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Charlie Parker. Unique and lyrical voice, this memoir charts the highs and lows of a life lived to the full. Beneath the Underdog is also a portrait of life in the Forties and Fifties, of ideas of identity and race in America and the ways in which they affected the young Mingus. Above all, it is a powerful tale told through the eyes of an inspiring, anguished and extraordinary musician.

The Art of Time in Memoir

Author: Sven Birkerts
Publisher: Graywolf Press
ISBN: 1555973396
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 147

Book Description
The Art Of series is a new line of books reinvigorating the practice of craft and criticism. Each book will be a brief, witty, and useful exploration of fiction, nonfiction, or poetry by a writer impassioned by a singular craft issue. The Art Of volumes will provide a series of sustained examinations of key but sometimes neglected aspects of creative writing by some of contemporary literature's finest practioners. In The Art of Time in Memoir, critic and memoirist Sven Birkerts examines the human impulse to write about the self. By examining memoirs such as Vladimir Nabokov's Speak, Memory; Virginia Woolf's unfinished A Sketch of the Past; and Mary Karr's The Liars' Club, Birkerts describes the memoirist's essential art of assembling patterns of meaning, stirring to life our own sense of past and present.

Raise Up Off Me

Author: Hampton Hawes
Publisher: Da Capo Press
ISBN: 9781560253532
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 216

Book Description
Hampton Hawes [1928–1977] was one of jazz's greatest pianists. Among his peers from California the self-taught Hawes was second only to Oscar Peterson. At the time of his celebration as New Star of the Year by downbeat magazine (1956), Hawes was already struggling with a heroin addiction that would lead to his arrest and imprisonment, and the interruption of a brilliant career. In 1963 President John F. Kennedy granted Hawes an Executive Pardon. In eloquent and humorous language Hampton Hawes tells of a life of suffering and redemption that reads like an improbable novel. Gary Giddins has called it "a major contribution to the literature of jazz." This book includes a complete discography and eight pages of photographs.

Straight life

Author: Laurie Pepper
Publisher: Editions Parenthèses
ISBN: 9782863640173
Category : Jazz musicians
Languages : fr
Pages : 362

Book Description
Autobiographie du saxophoniste alto Art Pepper, figure de légende de la West Coast en son entier, ce livre, parlant d'une existence de la façon la plus intime et sincère qui soit, témoigne aussi d'une génération entière : celle des Américains nés entre 1920 et 1925, happés par la Seconde Guerre mondiale, emprisonnés parfois dans les drogues pour supporter l'intolérable ambiant et eux-mêmes. C'est le roman d'un microcosme désolé, chérissant en la subtilité de l'expression musicale et le pouvoir de communiquer son émotion les raisons majeures de vivre, portées à chaque instant par une conscience fascinée de la mort qui donne le ton de toute l'expérience, et la signe.

Straight Life

Author: Anita Brookner
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

Book Description