(Part 3) Top products from r/Jazz

Good answer! The Jazz Record Mart is a great resource - home also to Delmark records, with a rich catalog of Jazz & Blues.

Chicago is also important in the development of Free Jazz in the '60's and '70s', with the AACM including a wealth of influential figures like the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Anthony Braxton, Henry Threadgill, Muhal Richard Abrams and many more. They remain active, staging events like their Chicago Jazz Fest after-parties - often the highlight of proceedings. For the whole story check George Lewis' book - A Power Stronger Than Itself.

In the '90's and '00's another wave of free music activity began, focused on the efforts of reed players Fred Anderson, Ken Vandermark and critic John Corbett, and Bruno Johnson's Okka Disk label. Another group of Free Jazz and free improv players emerged, often collaborating with an influx of visiting luminaries - see Peter Brotzmann's Chicago Tentet, for example. You can follow the continued activity of this community at Umbrella Music. Also, watch for shows at Elastic Arts in Logan Square, and Constellation (including this year's Chicago Jazz after-fest 8/29-30).

Chicago Jazz Festival 2014 has a pretty good line-up, too - showing some renewed vitality after its move to Millenium Park. Also watch for next year's Hyde Park Jazz Festival and the year-long AACM celebrations of their 50th anniversary.

I second the jazz piano book, jazzadvice.com, and all the rest of this advice.

My two favorite music books are Victor Wooten's The Music Lesson and Philip Toshio Sudo's Zen Guitar. They contain wisdom that a lot of other music education misses.

As far as playing the piano goes, I recommend really exploring the piano as an instrument. Find the piano's strong and unique points, and be pianistly (in this sense). Conversely, target the piano's weak points, and learn to imitate other instruments: playing long unbroken lines like a sax will make you "light on your fingers" and help you to decompartmentalize fingering patterns you have learned.

I'm a big fan of this video right now. Download the pdf too, and practice the scales listed. The idea of chords being fragments of larger scale families (and being able to hear the entire scale families going by) is important. This is easiest to wrap your head around by playing modal chords on a C major scale. Allan holdsworth explains it better. This also ties into the "find which notes can be added to round out the standard chords" thing- if you hear the entire scale, then extrapolating which notes can be added is fairly intuitive.

Also, listen to great players. I like powell, monk, tatum, george shearing, and marian mcpartland, Mccoy Tyner, Kenny Barron, Esjborn Svensson Trio, Keith Jarrett, and Bill Evans. These are just a few mainstream examples. Also, learn from other instrumental traditions. If you like something, try to extrapolate a principle or lesson that you can bring with you from that song, and likewise if you dislike something, articulate what it is you dislike, then you can learn to play the opposite. John Hartford says "style is based on limitations", so choose carefully how you learn to play. If you don't like something, don't learn to play like that just because it's part of the jazz aesthetic cannon or some nonsense.

Also, play with someone. Play with bandinabox, which is easy to steal and fairly cheap to buy, and has many many many song files freely available online. Play with a metronome, at least.

Learn to adjust your technique to different pianos. Not every piano you play on will be good or even fair, so being able to get a feel for a new instrument and its limitations quickly is a great skill. On your home instrument, focus all the more strongly on finding technique compatible with that instrument. On a related note, let your mind step back and lead with your hands, letting fingerings and reflexes show you the way forward. On the other hand, let your technique fade into the foreground and practice bringing out the ideas in your ear, even if they navigate unfamiliar territory (do this slowly or it won't work and you'll revert to reflex) Both modes have their merits, and the more you get comfy with both, the less of a distinction there is between them.

Also, practice singing and playing. Meld your understanding of harmony on the piano with your ear and voice. Also, practice thinking big (long musical fragments, specific complex voicings, etc, etc) at & away from the instrument. If you can't think big, your creativity will never have good macro structure & flow. I really believe that our creative impulse is a divine gift, but it often builds on our existing experience and abilities.

Jazz: From its Origins to the Present is a super great book. Very in depth look at jazz from its inception to now without a moment of dry-ness. I also would recommend Miles: The Autobiography as more of an entertaining/supplemental read. It's a super interesting book, that follows Miles through his upbringing in Bebop with Bird and Dizzy throughout his entire genre-spanning career. There are some really great anecdotes about a lot of jazz musicians in there.

Edit: I forgot another great thing about the first book is it has a lot of examples and transcriptions so you can see the distinctive styles of a lot of great players as well as the vernacular used in each jazz era.

seconding the miles bio. very entertaining.

ted gioia's history of jazz is very comprehensive, and probably "the standard history", but a bit boring (imho). i guess what i really want to read is a history of european jazz in the last 40 years, say, and that is perhaps half a chapter of that book (understandably...).

a better history, for me, was why jazz happened by marc myers. while gioia explains who learnt from whom, and how all the music inter-relates, myers focuses on the politics, sociology, technology, economics, etc., of the time(s), and how all that shaped the music (each chapter is a separate theme - for example, the availability of LPs was probably one chapter, another was the rise in popularity of rock music, if i remember correctly). i found that much more interesting - it really explained some of the broad changes while gioia felt a lot more like genealogy.

would love to hear other suggestions. those are the only "jazz only" books i've read. [though i think this has been asked before...]

I agree with the other comments here about listening (both recordings and getting to as many live performances as you can) being the most important thing. Since you sound a bit more of an academic I thought I'd also offer a suggestion on a written text you might find interesting, especially considering your phrase: "performance practices and improv"

https://www.amazon.com/Saying-Something-Improvisation-Interaction-Ethnomusicology/dp/0226534782

"Saying Something" by Ingrid Monson. Fantastic work regarding what it really means to improvise in jazz, as a language and cultural thing as well as the strictly musical thing.

a power stronger than itself is a history of the association for the advancement of creative musicians. it's well-written, politically aware without baraka's stridentness, and quite possibly the first you'll have heard about most of these fantastic musicians.

Its a great movie, I highly recommend it.

I suggest anyone interested in jazz history read Jelly Roll's biography
or any other one. It's very informative on where he fits into the "inventor of jazz." like OM, i would choose buddy bolden, but the complete lack of any first person evidence of him makes this tough. (to my knowledge, his existence is based on other people hearing him and writing about it).
bloosteak: the soundtrack for the movie can be found online, and the sheet music available for purchase. I believe that Jelly Roll plays all original music, but I don't remember what it was right now.

I JUST ordered this yesterday.. been listening to it online and it's great. 5 CDs for about $25.

I also recommend the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra: All My Yesterdays: The Debut 1966 Village Vanguard Recordings [2 CDs] which just came out.

id give this one 5 stars. its articles straight out of the 1900's-1990's and gives a clear picture of the racial and socioeconomic underpinnings of jazz. goes from gottshalk all the way to coltrane. i highly recommend it

These books are (left to right):

Notes And Tones: Musician to Musician Interviews (Arthur Taylor): http://www.amazon.com/Notes-Tones-Musician---Musician-Interviews/dp/030680526X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1419879383&sr=8-1&keywords=notes+and+tones

The Jazz Standards: A Guide To The Repertoire (Ted Gioia): http://www.amazon.com/Jazz-Standards-Guide-Repertoire/dp/0199937397/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1419879452&sr=8-1&keywords=the+jazz+standards

DownBeat - The Great Jazz Interviews (a 75th Anniversary Anthology) (Frank Alkyer): http://www.amazon.com/DownBeat-Great-Interviews-Anniversary-Anthology/dp/1423463846/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1419879539&sr=8-1&keywords=the+great+jazz+interviews

The History Of Jazz (Ted Gioia): http://www.amazon.com/History-Jazz-Ted-Gioia/dp/0195399706/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1419879629&sr=8-1&keywords=the+history+of+jazz+ted+gioia

One of the biggest Dolphy fanatics on the planet recommended this one to me, and I enjoyed it: [Eric Dolphy: A Musical Biography And Discography] (https://www.amazon.com/Eric-Dolphy-Musical-Biography-Discography/dp/0306805243/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1526687795&sr=1-1&keywords=eric+dolphy)

On the same person, Mingus Speaks was a fabulous read.

would any of these be adequate?

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If you like these sorts of jazz stories, you should pick up a copy of Jazz Anecdotes.

It's not that rare! It can be found on this DVD along with a few other tunes from this set as well as two others. It's a must for Trane fans, imo.

You should check out the latest reissue from Ressonance records, it's the debut recprding of thad jones/mel lewis big bands.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B018W1ZS2S

I write more about it here
https://javeriousgilmore.wixsite.com/mysite/single-post/2017/11/09/It-Only-Happens-Every-Time-My-Journey-With-The-Thad-JonesMel-Lewis-Big-Band

This is not quite what you ask, but I took a class called Jazz History And Styles last year. We used this book (which was great). My first unit of notes was hand-written but after that I typed the next three units:

• Unit 2
  
• Unit 3
  
• Unit 4

The Jerry Coker book I've been referring to: http://www.amazon.com/Jazz-Keyboard-Pianists-Non-pianists-Individual/dp/0769233236/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1426207692&sr=8-1&keywords=jerry+coker+piano

The Gary Campbell book I've been referring to: http://www.amazon.com/Expansions-Gary-Campbell/dp/0634000055/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1426207744&sr=8-1&keywords=gary+campbell+expansion

It's from William O. Douglas' book, "The Court Years 1939-1975"

Here's an Amazon link: https://www.amazon.com/Court-Years-1939-1975/dp/0394492404

And sure it could have. Do you have any evidence that suggests it to be? If not, then I don't consider it a valid argument. Otherwise you're just setting up a cheap way out for yourself by claiming that any individual statements not recorded on tape or from second-hand sources are "fabricated."

And no, I didn't. I came in here to find more about a song. You're the one who brought up racism, not me.