Playing Changes by Nate Chinen

Playing Changes by Nate Chinen

From one of jazz's leading critics comes an invigorating, richly detailed portrait of the artists and events that have shaped the music of our time. Grounded in authority and brimming with style, here is the first book to take the measure of this exhilarating moment: a compelling argument for the resiliency of the art form and a rejoinder to any claims about its calcification or demise.

Playing changes, in jazz parlance, has long referred to an improviser's resourceful path through a chord progression. Nate Chinen's Playing Changes boldly expands on the idea, highlighting a host of real changes--ideological, technological, theoretical, and practical--that jazz musicians have learned to navigate since the turn of the century. Chinen, who has chronicled this evolution firsthand throughout his journalistic career, vividly sets the backdrop, charting the origins of jazz historicism and the rise of an institutional framework for the music. He traces the influence of commercialized jazz education and reflects on the implications of a globalized jazz ecology. He unpacks the synergies between jazz and postmillennial hip-hop and R&B, illuminating an emergent rhythm signature for the music. And he shows how a new generation of shape-shifting elders, including Wayne Shorter and Henry Threadgill, have moved the aesthetic center of the music.

Woven throughout the book is a vibrant cast of characters--from the saxophonists Steve Coleman and Kamasi Washington to the pianists Jason Moran and Vijay Iyer to the bassist and singer Esperanza Spalding--who have exerted an important influence on the scene. This is an adaptive new music for a complex new reality, and Playing Changes is the definitive guide.

For more than two decades, NATE CHINEN has been writing about jazz. He spent a dozen of them as a critic for The New York Times and was the editor of a long-running Jazz Times column. He works with the multiplatform program Jazz Night in America and delivers a variety of coverage to NPR Music as the director of editorial content at WBGO. Chinen is the coauthor of Me Among Others: A Life in Music, the autobiography of impresario George Wein, and an eleven-time winner of the Helen Dance--Robert Palmer Award for Excellence in Writing sponsored by the Jazz Journalists Association. With his wife and two daughters, he lives in Beacon, New York.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781101870341
ISBN 10	1101870346
Title	Playing Changes
Author	Nate Chinen
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Random House USA Inc
Year published	2018-08-14
Number of pages	288
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.