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9781108834230

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'This is the back story of the gods who create the magic. I loved it.' Sonny Rollins 'This immensely readable and compelling book describes unique encounters with the leading figures of jazz - including extensive interviews with Sonny Rollins and Oscar Peterson - from the perspective of one of the world's leading jazz authorities. Respected by musicians, fans and academics for his encyclopaedic knowledge, Alyn Shipton is familiar to wider audiences through his prolific writing, broadcasting, bass playing and bandleading. He now offers the reader fascinating insights from his life in jazz, and vividly narrates many great stories which appear in print here for the first time.' Catherine Tackley, Professor of Music, University of Liverpool, author of Benny Goodman's Famous 1938 Carnegie Hall Jazz Concert and co-author of Black British Jazz 'I've really enjoyed the convivial chat with Roy Haynes, Harry Dial's off the cuff remarks and apocryphal stories about Bud Powell. It's not hard to be re-seduced by the music - as every page is filled with unmined gemstones, from an artform you thought you knew. All too often, jazz tomes seem unnecessarily lofty, or purely academic. However, this is both a very personal semi-autobiographical journey through jazz, and it describes the social context and cultural milieu that these great innovators emerged from.' Soweto Kinch, Musician and broadcaster

'This is the back story of the gods who create the magic. I loved it.' Sonny Rollins 'This immensely readable and compelling book describes unique encounters with the leading figures of jazz - including extensive interviews with Sonny Rollins and Oscar Peterson - from the perspective of one of the world's leading jazz authorities. Respected by musicians, fans and academics for his encyclopaedic knowledge, Alyn Shipton is familiar to wider audiences through his prolific writing, broadcasting, bass playing and bandleading. He now offers the reader fascinating insights from his life in jazz, and vividly narrates many great stories which appear in print here for the first time.' Catherine Tackley, Professor of Music, University of Liverpool, author of Benny Goodman's Famous 1938 Carnegie Hall Jazz Concert and co-author of Black British Jazz 'I've really enjoyed the convivial chat with Roy Haynes, Harry Dial's off the cuff remarks and apocryphal stories about Bud Powell. It's not hard to be re-seduced by the music - as every page is filled with unmined gemstones, from an artform you thought you knew. All too often, jazz tomes seem unnecessarily lofty, or purely academic. However, this is both a very personal semi-autobiographical journey through jazz, and it describes the social context and cultural milieu that these great innovators emerged from.' Soweto Kinch, Musician and broadcaster 'This lively book hits all the right notes and will delight both jazz aficionados and neophytes.' Carolyn M. Mulac, Library Journal

Author Information

Alyn Shipton is a writer, publisher, broadcaster and jazz double bassist. He has broadcast about jazz since 1989, and currently hosts BBC Radio 3's long-running and much loved programme Jazz Record Requests. His biographies of Dizzy Gillespie (1999) and singer-songwriter Harry Nilsson (2013) both won Association for Recorded Sound Collections (ARSC) Awards for Excellence; and Nilsson also gained an American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) Foundation Deems Taylor/Virgil Thompson Award. His New History of Jazz (2001) was the Jazz Journalists' Association (JJA) book of the year and named 'the most outstanding single-volume history of jazz' by the Jazz Institute of Chicago. His most recent work, The Art of Jazz: A Visual History (2020), was described as 'indispensible' by Publishers Weekly. He leads the Buck Clayton Legacy Band, and is a research fellow of the Royal Academy of Music in London.

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