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Moving to Higher Ground: How Jazz Can Change Your Life
“In this book I hope to reach a new audience with the positive message of America’s greatest music, to show how great musicians demonstrate on the bandstand a mutual respect and trust that can alter your outlook on the world and enrich every aspect of your life–from individual creativity and personal relationships to conducting business and understanding what it means to be American in the most modern sense.”
— Wynton MarsalisIn this beautiful book, the Pulitzer Prize-winning musician and composer Wynton Marsalis explores jazz and how an understanding of it can lead to deeper, more original ways of being, living, and relating — for individuals, communities, and nations. Marsalis shows us how to listen to jazz, and through stories about his life and the lessons he has learned from other music greats, he reveals how the central ideas in jazz can influence the way people think and even how they behave with others, changing self, family, and community for the better. At the heart of jazz is the expression of personality and individuality, coupled with an ability to listen to and improvise with others. Jazz as an art — and as a way to move people and nations to higher ground — is at the core of this unique, illuminating, and inspiring book, a master class on jazz and life by a brilliant American artist.
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Jazz ABZ: An A to Z Collection of Jazz Portraits
The award-winning book by celebrated jazz composer Wynton Marsalis is now available with an exclusive art print by illustrator Paul Rogers. Featured on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered; Winner of a Bologna Ragazzi Award; A Norman Sugarman Honor Book for Excellence in Children’s Biography; An International Reading Association Children’s Book Award Winner; Winner of a Lion and the Unicorn Award for Excellence in North American Poetry.
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To a Young Jazz Musician: Letters From The Road
In To a Young Jazz Musician, the renowned jazz musician and Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Wynton Marsalis gives us an invaluable guide to making good music — and to leading a good life.Writing from the road “between the bus ride, the sound check, and the gig,” Marsalis passes on wisdom gained from experience, addressed to a young musician coming up — and to any of us at any stage of life. He writes that having humility is a way to continue to grow, to listen, and to learn; that patience is necessary for developing both technical proficiency and your own art rather than an imitation of someone else’s; and that rules are indispensable because “freedom lives in structure.” He offers lessons learned from his years as a performer and from his great forebears Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, and others; he explores the art of swing; he discusses why it is important to run toward your issues, not away; and he talks about what to do when your integrity runs up against the lack thereof in others and in our culture. He poetically expresses our need for healers: “All of it tracks back to how you heal your culture, one patient at a time, beginning with yourself.”
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Jazz
Inspirational quotes by Wynton Marsalis, with photographs by Nubar Alexanian. Soft bound only.
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Jazz In the Bittersweet Blues of Life
Marsalis gives readers a seat on his old septet’s tour bus for a ride down memory lane. It’s the early 1990s, and the trumpeter is coming into his own as a composer, despite his tight road schedule (check-in at hotel, go to sound check, eat supper, iron the suit, play the gig, snooze a bit, hit the road). Should a day off (or a few free hours) arise, he’s speaking at a local school, composing a ballet, recording an album or playing a ballad to his sons on the phone. Loosely using a sort of call-and-response style, the book swings between Vigeland’s (Stalking the Shark: Passion and Pressure on the Pro Golf Tour) fly-on-the-wall documentation and the poetic solos of Marsalis, philosophizing on jazz, joy, love and lifeall synonymous for him. For better or for worse, it’s easy to lose one’s sense of time and place on the roadand it’s equally easy to do so in this book.
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Sweet Swing Blues On The Road
Jazz and classical musician Wynton Marsalis’s free-ranging text includes characterizations of the musicians in his septet, breezy descriptions of places where they perform and snippets of their lively banter, while Frank Stewart’s 140 b&w photos offer a behind-the-scenes look at the performers, their families and their audiences. The book conveys the nervous energy and fast pace that characterize the lives of musicians on the road and includes trenchant accounts of conversations with young followers who want to become musicians. Marsalis’s advice is always the same: practice. The self-consciously hip writing, however, becomes incoherent when he discusses his views on romance, politics and the history of jazz.