One of the Best Books of the Year: NPR, GQ, Billboard, JazzTimes In jazz parlance, “playing changes” refers to an improviser’s resourceful path through a chord progression. In this definitive guide to the jazz of our time, leading critic Nate Chinen boldly expands on that idea, taking us through the key changes, concepts, events, and people that have shaped jazz since the turn of the century—from Wayne Shorter and Henry Threadgill to Kamasi Washington and Esperanza Spalding; from the phrase “America’s classical music” to an explosion of new ideas and approaches; from claims of jazz’s demise to the living, breathing scene that exerts influence on mass culture, hip-hop, and R&B. Grounded in authority and brimming with style, packed with essential album lists and listening recommendations, Playing Changes takes the measure of this exhilarating moment—and the shimmering possibilities to come.

Named "Best Jazz Book of 2008" by The Jazz Journalists Association "2009 Award for Excellence in Historical Recorded Sound Research" by ARSC (Association for Recorded Sound Collections) Legendary African American jazz bassist and photographer Milt Hinton (1910-2000) tells his compelling life story and illustrates it with more than 260 of his photographs, exquisitely reproduced in this collectors' edition. Hinton's stories--witnessing a lynching as a child in Mississippi, working for Al Capone, breaking the color line in the recording studio--are equal to his celebrated photographs: capturing life on the road with Cab Calloway, Billie Holiday at her last recording date, and personal and professional views of icons such as Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, Aretha Franklin, Dizzy Gillespie, and Barbra Streisand. Playing the Changes draws from Hinton and Berger's earlier Bass Line, but differs significantly from that 1988 classic. Milt's narrative takes up where the earlier story left off, and more than 140 new photographs augment 115 of his best-known images. It also boasts a CD of Milt telling stories and performing music, as well as a discography and filmography.

(Book). Making music at any level is a powerful gift. While musicians have endless resources for learning the basics of their instruments and the theory of music, few books have explored the other subtleties and complexities that musicians face in their quest to play with ease and skill. The demands of solitary practice, hectic rehearsal schedules, challenging repertoire, performance pressures, awkward postures, and other physical strains have left a trail of injured, hearing-impaired, and frustrated musicians who have had few resources to guide them. Playing Less Hurt addresses this need with specific tools to avoid and alleviate injury. Impressively researched, the book is invaluable not only to musicians, but also to the coaches and medical professionals who work with them. Everyone from dentists to orthopedists, audiologists to neurologists, massage therapists and trainers will benefit from Janet Horvath's coherent account of the physiology and psyche of a practicing musician. Writing with knowledge, sympathetic insight, humor, and aplomb, Horvath has created an essential resource for all musicians who want to play better and feel better.

When is a game not a game? Tyler MacCandless can’t focus, even when he takes his medication. He can’t focus on school, on his future, on a book, on much of anything other than taking care of his older brother, Brandon, who’s in rehab for heroin abuse… again. Tyler’s dad is dead and his mom has mentally checked out. The only person he can really count on is his Civilian Air Patrol Mentor, Rick. The one thing in life it seems he doesn’t suck at is playing video games and, well, thats probably not going to get him into college. Just when it seems like his future is on a collision course with a life sentence at McDonald’s, Rick asks him to test a video game. If his score’s high enough, it could earn him a place in flight school and win him the future he was certain that he could never have. And when he falls in love with the game’s designer, the legendary gamer Ani, Tyler thinks his life might finally be turning around. That is, until Brandon goes MIA from rehab and Tyler and Ani discover that the game is more than it seems. Now Tyler will have to figure out what’s really going on in time to save his brother… and prevent his own future from going down in flames.

Godiva Blue thinks she controls the world she has created for her daughter Dylan and herself in a neglected corner of North Florida. While her fellow college activists have become Reagan-era yuppies, Godiva—an elementary-school janitor who is also an avant-garde artist and avowed nonconformist—staunchly refuses to compromise her ideals. Then one day she glances at the wanted posters hanging in her local post office and recognizes the face of a man she hasn’t seen since 1969: Dylan’s father. Shaken, Godiva grabs the poster and takes it home. When 15-year-old Dylan, already secretly chafing against her mother’s out-sized personality, finds the photograph, the discovery rocks the very foundation of their relationship. Fueled by simmering adolescent resentment, Dylan sets out across America to look for the father she’s never known. Left behind and powerless to protect her daughter, Godiva must finally confront the choices she made long ago. By turns funny, scary and reflective, Playing Botticelli follows Godiva and Dylan deep into the uncharted territories of their hearts as they seek that elusive balance between autonomy and family love?

A final sequence highlights the centrality of black music to African American writing, arguing that recognizing blues, gospel, and jazz as theoretically suggestive cultural practices rather than specific musical forms points to what is most distinctive in twentieth-century African American writing: its ability to subvert attempts to limit its engagement with psychological, historical, political, or aesthetic realities.

Playing the Changes on the Jazz Metaphor proposes an expanded view of the jazz metaphor in a broadened perspective that embraces a wide range of possibilities in organizational, management, and marketing-related themes. This monograph presents a new Typology of Jazz Musicians based on different kinds of artistic offerings. This typology will combine three key distinctions or dimensions to construct a twelve-fold classification that - when extended to the sphere of organizational behavior and business strategy as a Typology of Management and Marketing Styles - will shed light on different ways in which the jazz metaphor relates to organizational design, business practice, management skills, and marketing opportunities. In order to describe these typologies, the author examines important aspects of a first-level jazz metaphor as it relates to organizational issues involved in shaping the jazz improvisation into a form of collective collaboration. This is followed by attention to a second-level linguistic metaphor based on viewing jazz as a kind of language at the foundation for a collaborative conversation.