Samuel Charters has been studying and writing about New Orleans music for more than fifty years. A Trumpet around the Corner: The Story of New Orleans Jazz is the first book to tell the entire story of ...

Musicians and music scholars rightly focus on the sounds of the blues and the colorful life stories of blues performers. Equally important and, until now, inadequately studied are the lyrics. The international ...

Jazz is typically characterized as a uniquely American form of artistic expression, and narratives of its history are almost always set within the United States.

Yet, from its inception, this art form ...

When a jazz hero dies, rumors, speculation, gossip, and legend can muddle the real cause of death.

In this book, Frederick J. Spencer conducts an inquest on how jazz greats lived and died pursuing their ...

Yank Rachell and his mandolin playing style moved every musician lucky enough to hear him perform in the early sixties. When he died in April 1997, he left behind a stack of unanswered requests to tour ...

The family of musical styles known as jazz came into being around 1900 as several popular black musical idioms coalesced. This free-flowing, spontaneous music based in improvisation emerged primarily ...

In 1969 Gerhard Kubik chanced to encounter a Mozambican labor migrant, a miner in Transvaal, South Africa, tapping a cipendani, a mouth-resonated musical bow. A comparable instrument was seen in the hands ...

Although now sometimes called "America's classical music," jazz has not always been accorded favorable appellations. Accurate though these encomiums may be, they obscure the complex and fractious history ...