Product Description

The groundbreaking music of Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman, and Cecil Taylor -- three African-Americans known to a broad-based audience by their first names alone -- have impacted successive waves of musicians, not only in jazz but across the musical spectrum. Born within four years of each other, but with dissimilar family backgrounds and distinctly different personal temperaments, Miles, Ornette, and Cecil are individually and collectively American originals. They've inspired creative talents as disparate as Leonard Bernstein, Robert Rauschenberg, Thomas Pynchon, Mikhail Baryshnikov, and Lou Reed; they've become gods or gurus to generations. Each has transcended the musical field to influence African-American and American culture. This book explores their innovative and radical musical lives, based on original interviews with all three musicians, as well as decades of following their careers. It promises to be a milestone in jazz literature.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #123117 in Books
• Published on: 2007-11-07
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 292 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780415967143
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Review
"I dived into the Miles chapter and loved it, especially the autobiographical material and reading of Miles' last years. By far the best stuff on Miles I've ever read. Howard--u r a bad mamajamma! Bottom line is that I learn so much from you, and especially relate to the burning passion you bring. You help me stay open." -- David Ritz, author of Divided Soul, The Life of Marvin Gaye; Faith in Time: The Life of Jimmy Scott; Brother Ray: Ray Charles' Own Story

"This is jazz from the inside - an essential book, not only for new listeners but for historians of jazz now, and in the future. We hear the musicians speak, informing the author - and us - thereby adding to how much more of the music we come to hear. I learned so much from Miles Ornette Cecil - Jazz Beyond Jazz. It's really reporting, as well as listening." -- Nat Hentoff, writer, Jazz Times, Village Voice, The Wall Street Journal

...an indespensable resource. --Andy Hamilton, The Wire

I learned so much from Miles Ornette Cecil: Jazz Beyond Jazz. Its really reporting, as well as listening. This is jazz from the inside - an essential book, not only for new listeners but for historians of jazz now, and in the future. We hear the musicians speak, informing the author - and us - thereby adding to how much more of the music we come to hear. --Nat Hentoff, writer, Jazz Times, Village Voice, The Wall Street Journal

Howard Mandel assumes many roles here -- elucidating critic and devoted fan, knowledgeable listener and Boswellian acolyte, evangelist and champion of the avant garde -- all taken on with infectious enthusiasm. --George Kanzler, JazzTimes

The most impressive aspect of the book is [Mandels] writing: honest and evocative, flavorful and generous, enthusiastic and thought-provoking. --Art Lange, Jazz Notes

Customer Reviews

An Excellent Overview and Study
Mr Mandel has accomplished the hardy task of reviewing, organizing, and analysing the progressive jazz world--its accomplishments, or not--of the past 50 years. Highly readable and quite well written. Never overly dense nor overly technical, it provides an access to a better understanding of this music. There's a nice balance between the author's study, interviews, and anecdotes. Each and every jazz fan will discover certain recording gems that he or she has overlooked. A must for the progressive jazz aficionado.

Mainstream jazzers--that may be baffled by this music--may find in this book the needed keys to open new doors.

A deeply humane book about the most human of music
This is one of the most perceptive, thought provoking and humane books I have ever read about the music I love. The section on Ornette Coleman was particularly rewarding and articulated the relationship between Ornette's verbal and musical language in a way that gave me new insights into his harmolodic theory as a means of thinking about life and human existence as much as (maybe more than) a way of thinking about sound and music. Ornette's music encapsulates everything that it is to be human, and Howard Mandel's book elucidated these connections in a most intellectually elegant way. (And the sections on Miles and Cecil are highly enlightening too, of course.)

Musical Courage in Diminished Times
BY KEVIN LYNCH Ornette Coleman once called his music "The Shape of Jazz to Come. " Mandel calls it "Jazz beyond Jazz," music from a land where individuals chase their dreams and destiny, one reason why it begat an art form expressing that freedom.
And yet one of them, Cecil Taylor, says "there is no such thing as freedom, only preparation." He invokes an American boy scout motto! So in Mandel's excellent book we see three artists prepare for life's possibilities in his special way. Mandel, a superb writer and the President of the Jazz Journalist Association, explains these men as what critic Albert Murray called "Omni-Americans," who "want to claim and/or partake of everything available and relevant to their present nationality, more than their racial and ethnic ancestry." This aesthetic embraces an omnivorously eloquent Americanness. Mandel quotes Gerald Early: Miles was "enormously inventive, snappishly opportunistic and yet surprisingly principled in the simple act of making a living in a dying art, that is dying as an art form with a large audience."
Miles' limpid trumpet could melt your heart with future dreams which arguably arrive with "Bitches Brew," the surreal studio pastiche of sinuous polyrhythms which used "a street-savvy, pan global and well-capitalized slanguage, right for the present and maybe the future... What was always compelling was his personal line, variously wary, bold, romantic, wry, base and candid."
Pulitzer Prize winning Ornette Coleman's intellectual quirkiness and integrity radiate the dancing cubism of his "harmolodic" concept of equalizing melody, rhythm and harmony. You hear the three elements' intrinsic qualities deftly balanced in his incomparably mournful "Lonely Woman," the rambunctious "Ramblin'" or the hair-raising beauty of the song "What Reason Could I Give?"
Cecil Taylor invokes European sources, poetry and dance in music of rare harmonic density, evident in his piano ballads and darkly lyrical large group works. Though conservatory trained, he plays the piano like "88 tunes drums," as one critic resonantly wrote, with an elemental, primeival strength.
In 1977 his cougar like dynamism produced the greatest live musical performance I have ever witnessed - two three-hour solo piano concerts in one day. "Jazz beyond jazz" can speak to non-musicians whom, Cecil notes, grasp "a fullness of the dynamics" of sound structures that always appealed and enchanted" because it was arrived at through (the listener's) love" and "insight that could not be denied."
Taylor sees himself as part of a musical continuum that includes Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, James Brown and Marvin Gaye. Despite his music's tempestuous complexities the man possesses a warmth and humanity that I have sensed when I interviewed him in 1986 for Down Beat magazine. Such creative music gradually mutes life's contradictions and cruelty. As Mandel writes, "little if anything of lasting value comes from half-heartedness, hypocrisy or genuine cynicism about one's own work." This truth applies to every person's life. Mandel ends by noting how, in the climax of a 2006 concert, Taylor quoted from the joyous fifth movement of Olivier Messiaen's "Turangalila Symphonie." The work's Sanskrit title means "a love song, hymn to joy, time, movement, rhythm, life and death."
We sense how fearless creativity echoes and feeds from that continuum of human elements. Therein lie the wellsprings of hope even in these diminished times.