What is a popular kind of music that originated in the United States? The answer is Jazz. Mixing folk and blues influences, talented artists from Scott Joplin to Wynton Marsalis have kept jazz at the forefront of the American music scene. The musicians portrayed in this book played different instruments and had different styles, but all helped keep jazz fresh and new. Readers follow ten prominent jazz musicians (Scott Joplin, Daniel Louis Armstrong, Edward Kennedy Ellington, Mary Lou Williams, Benjamin David Goodman, John Birks Gillespie, Charles Christopher Parker, Jr., Miles Dewey Davis, III, John Coltrane, and Wynton Marsalis) through their many successes and varied hardships.

Thanks to the pioneering tours of the Creole Band, jazz began to be heard nationwide on the vaudeville stages of America from 1914 to 1918. This seven-piece band toured the country, exporting for the first time the authentic jazz strains that had developed in New Orleans at the start of the 20th century. The band's vaudeville routines were deeply rooted in the minstrel shows and plantation cliches of American show business in the late 19th century, but its instrumental music was central to its performance and distinctive and entrancing to audiences and reviewers. Pioneers of Jazz reveals at long last the link between New Orleans music and the jazz phenomenon that swept America in the 1920s. While they were the first important band from New Orleans to attain national exposure, The Creole Band has not heretofore been recognized for its unique importance. But in his monumental, careful research, jazz scholar Lawrence Gushee firmly establishes the group's central role in jazz history. Gushee traces the troupe's activities and quotes the reaction of critics and audiences to their first encounters with this new musical phenomenon. While audiences often expected (and got) a kind of minstrel show, the group transcended expectations, taking pride in their music and facing down the theatrical establishment with courage. Although they played the West Coast and Canada, most of their touring centered in the heartland. Most towns of any size in Iowa, Illinois, and Indiana heard them, often repeatedly, and virtually all of their appearances were received with wild enthusiasm. After four years of nearly incessant traveling, members of the band founded or joined groups in Chicago's South Side cabaret scene, igniting the craze for hot New Orleans music for which the Windy City was renowned in the early 1920s. The best-known musicians in the group--cornetist Freddie Keppard, clarinetist Jimmy Noone and string bassist Bill Johnson--would play a significant role in jazz, becoming famous for recordings in the 1920s. Gushee effectively brings to life each member of the band and discusses their individual contributions, while analyzing the music with precision, skillful and exacting documentation. Including many never before published photos and interviews, the book also provides an invaluable and colorful look at show business, especially vaudeville, in the 1910s. While some of the first jazz historians were aware of the band's importance, attempts to locate and interview surviving members (three died before 1935) were sporadic and did little or nothing to correct the mostly erroneous accounts of the band's career. The jazz world has long known about Gushee's original work on this previously neglected subject, and the book represents an important event in jazz scholarship. Pioneers of Jazz brilliantly places this group's unique importance into a broad cultural and historical context, and provides the crucial link between jazz's origins in New Orleans and the beginning of its dissemination across the country.

Why did jazz become a dominant popular music genre in the 1920s and rock 'n' roll in the 1950s? Why did heavy metal, punk rock and hiphop find their way from sub-cultures to the established music industry? What are the effects of new communication technologies and the Internet on the creation of music in the early 21st century? These and other questions are answered by Peter Tschmuck through an integrated model of creativity and innovation that is based on an international history of music industry since Thomas A. Edison invented the phonograph in 1877. Thus, the history of the music industry is described in full detail. By discussing the historic process of music production, distribution and reception the author highlights several revolutions in the music industry that were caused by the inference of aesthetic, technological, legal, economic, social and political processes of change. On the basis of an integrated model of creativity and innovation, an explanation is given on how the processes and structures of the present music industry will be altered by the ongoing digital revolution, which totally changed the value-added network of the production, dissemination and use of music. For the second edition, the author has reworked chapter 9 in order to include all the developments which shaped the music industry in the first decade of the 21st century – from Napster to cloud-based music services and even beyond.

Musicians from Puerto Rico played a substantial role in the development of jazz during the early years of the twentieth century, before and during the years surrounding the Harlem Renaissance. These jazz pioneers, including instrumentalists, composers, and vocalists, were products of the Puerto Rican diaspora in the United States and contributed to the early history of this uniquely American genre. In this study, author Basilio Serrano provides a detailed look at the lives of these men and women and their contributions to the development of jazz and Latin jazz. Serrano explores how the music of Puerto Rico helped to shape them and offers a comprehensive review of the bands in which they played, studying specialists in a variety of instruments as well as band leaders and composers. This group included notable figures such as Fernando Arbello, the Bayron sisters, the Rivera family, Louis King Garcia, Joe Loco, Juan and Paco Tizol, Augusto and Willie Rodriguez, Augusto Coen, and Cesar Concepcion. Covering a period from 1900 to 1939, Puerto Rican Pioneers in Jazz, 19001939 presents the stories of early Puerto Rican jazz musicians whose contributions to the genre have previously been overlooked.

The story of the development of jazz and the extraordinary jazz legends who changed the face of music.

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Handsomely illustrated and engagingly written, New York Modern documents the impressive collective legacy of New York's artists in capturing the energy and emotions of the urban experience.

First Published in 1996. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.