< HowardMandel.com

In Miles Ornette Cecil: Jazz Beyond Jazz, award-winning journalist Howard Mandel shares his personal discoveries of, and probing conversations with, three artists whose works continue to upset and confound but also engage and enrich audiences worldwide. His accounts of growing up during the music's breakout eras,his later professional encounters with its creators and his original critical analysis highlight 50 years of controversy surrounding shockingly unconventional yet clearly substantial music. Mandel guides resistant listeners and knowledgable devotees alike to reassess avant-garde jazz and, in the process, probes dynamics of stasis and change.

 

Miles Ornette Cecil

Jazz Beyond Jazz

includes:

miles

 

a rare interview with Miles Davis attitudinizing about Wynton Marsalis, Prince and electric instruments.

 

 

ornette

 

players' own roadmaps to "harmolodics," Ornette Coleman's unique musical theory.

 

 

 

cecil

 

strategies for listening to and enjoying Cecil Taylor's often-thunderous and thorny work.

 

 

 

 

a dissection of how entrenched views of race and American culture (as well as outright racism) have shaped perceptions of these musicians, while they themselves have drawn freely from white "Eurological" and other sources to refresh and sustain the "Afrological" foundations of jazz tradition.

 

comments and commentaries from the musicians' collaborators: Jackie McLean, Jack DeJohnette, Chick Corea, Teo Macero, John Scofield, Marcus Miller, Don Cherry, Charlie Haden, Dewey Redman, Denardo Coleman, Asha Puhtli, Edward Blackwell, Max Roach, Marilyn Crispell, Jackson Krall, Dominic Duval and others.

 

 

Preface by Greg Tate. Photos by Lauren Deutsch, Enid Farber, Lona Foote, William Gottlieb, Marc PoKempner and Jack Vartoogian.

 

published by:

292 pages ISBN 0415967147

 

photos above © Jack Vartoogian

Howard Mandel's Jazz Beyond Jazz blog