{"title":"American Composers","description":"","products":[{"product_id":"carla-bley-book-amy-c-beal-9780252078187","title":"Carla Bley","description":"This is the first comprehensive treatment of the remarkable music and influence of Carla Bley, a highly innovative American jazz composer, pianist, organist, band leader, and activist. With fastidious attention to Bley's diverse compositions over the last fifty years spanning critical moments in jazz and experimental music history, Amy C. Beal tenders a long-overdue representation of a major figure in American music.  Best known for her jazz opera \"Escalator over the Hill,\" her role in the Free Jazz movement of the 1960s, and her collaborations with artists such as Jack Bruce, Don Cherry, Robert Wyatt, and Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason, Bley has successfully maneuvered the field of jazz from highly accessible, tradition-based contexts to commercially unviable, avant-garde works. Beal details the staggering variety in Bley's work as well as her use of parody, quotations, and contradictions, examining the vocabulary Bley has developed throughout her career and highlighting the compositional and cultural significance of her experimentalism.  Beal also points to Bley's professional and managerial work as a pioneer in the development of artist-owned record labels, the cofounder and manager of WATT Records, and the cofounder of New Music Distribution Service. Showing her to be not just an artist but an activist who has maintained musical independence and professional control amid the profit-driven, corporation-dominated world of commercial jazz, Beal's straightforward discussion of Bley's life and career will stimulate deeper examinations of her work.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ LIKE_NEW \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49509078499601,"sku":"GOR010939445","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49730110816529,"sku":"NGR9780252078187","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50936260821265,"sku":"GOR014132466","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51287411491089,"sku":"GOR012176705","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0252078187.jpg?v=1767349950"},{"product_id":"william-l-dawson-book-gwynne-kuhner-brown-9780252088063","title":"William L. Dawson","description":"William L. Dawson is recognized for his genre-defining choral spirituals and for his Negro Folk Symphony, a masterpiece enjoying a twenty-first-century renaissance. Gwynne Kuhner Brown’s engaging and tirelessly researched biography reintroduces a musical leader whose legacy is more important today than ever.  Born in 1899, Dawson studied at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. He worked as a church, jazz, and orchestral musician in Kansas City and Chicago in the 1920s while continuing his education as a composer. He then joined the Tuskegee faculty, where for 25 years he led the Tuskegee Institute Choir to national prominence through performances of spirituals at the opening of Radio City Music Hall, on radio and television, and at the White House. The Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Leopold Stokowski premiered Dawson’s Negro Folk Symphony in 1934.    Engaging and long overdue, William L. 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The acclaimed and enormously popular Afro-American Symphony, like many of his works, drew on Black American musical heritage, and Still was the first Black composer to have his work performed by a major symphony orchestra.  Catherine Parsons Smith’s biography tracks the composer's interrelated careers in popular and concert music. Still’s artistic journey took him from conservatory study with George W. Chadwick to collaborating with Langston Hughes, working as a commercial arranger and composer on Broadway and radio, arranging for artists like Sophie Tucker and Artie Shaw, and serving as the recording director for the first Black-owned record label. But despite his prolific production and multidimensional talents, Still endured financial struggles and declining attention to his work.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51376804790545,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51376804856081,"sku":"CIN0252033221VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0252033221.jpg?v=1751390057"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/collections\/author-books-by-american-composers.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}