Miles Ornette Cecil

Jazz Beyond Jazz

a new book by Howard Mandel

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In Miles Ornette Cecil: Jazz Beyond Jazz, award-winning journalist Howard Mandel shares his personal discoveries of, and probing conversations with, three artists whose works continue to upset and confound but also engage and enrich audiences worldwide. His accounts of growing up during the music's breakout eras,his later professional encounters with its creators and his original critical analysis highlight 50 years of controversy surrounding shockingly unconventional yet clearly substantial music. Mandel guides resistant listeners and knowledgable devotees alike to reassess avant-garde jazz and, in the process, probes dynamics of stasis and change.

Miles Ornette Cecil

Jazz Beyond Jazz

includes:

• a rare interview with Miles Davis attitudinizing about Wynton Marsalis, Prince and electric instruments.

• players' own roadmaps to "harmolodics," Ornette Coleman's unique musical theory.

• strategies for listening to and enjoying Cecil Taylor's often-thunderous and thorny work.

• a dissection of how entrenched views of race and American culture (as well as outright racism) have shaped perceptions of these musicians, while they themselves have drawn freely from white "Eurological" and other sources to refresh and sustain the "Afrological" foundations of jazz tradition.

• comments and commentaries from the musicians' collaborators: Jackie McLean, Jack DeJohnette, Chick Corea, Teo Macero, John Scofield, Marcus Miller, Don Cherry, Charlie Haden, Dewey Redman, Denardo Coleman, Asha Puhtli, Edward Blackwell, Max Roach, Marilyn Crispell, Jackson Krall, Dominic Duval and others.

Preface by Greg Tate. Photos by Lauren Deutsch, Enid Farber, Lona Foote, William Gottlieb, Marc PoKempner and Jack Vartoogian.

published by:

292 pages ISBN 0415967147

photos above © Jack Vartoogian

Read an excerpt at PointofDeparture.org

and local booksellers.
Outside the U.S., online from Routledge, the publisher. (Routledge ships to most of world.) and Amazon/Canada.

I talk about the book (and other matters)::

"This is jazz from the inside - an essential book, not only for new listeners but for historians of jazz now, and in the future. We hear the musicians speak, informing the author - and us - thereby adding to how much more of the music we come to hear. I learned so much from Miles Ornette Cecil - Jazz Beyond Jazz. It's really reporting, as well as listening." Nat Hentoff, writer, Jazz Times, Village Voice, The Wall Street Journal

"An apt, alternative title for Mandel’s engaging and enlightening triple portrait could be 'Who's Afraid of the Big, Bad Avant-Garde?' Weaving together provocative insight and personal experience, he has found a layman-friendly way of explaining three of the most challenging and enduringly experimental icons of modern jazz – and it's a way that leads right back to the music. Bravo!" —Ashley Kahn, author of A Love Supreme: The Story of John Coltrane's Signature Album

"This book is...about the education of a serious listener of African-American improvisational music, about how and why and wherefore it is that one becomes something known as a jazz critic. Telling their story is telling his own, a process that refers Mandel back to his boyhood, adolescence, young manhood and to major professional encounters with Miles, Ornette and Cecil—figures whose conversation illuminates their art and renders it even more mystifying. You come away from these conversations convinced of each man's convictions in the provocative directions his music took, its scientific and ritual grounding in the cultural and musical traditions that formed them, and equally certain that they've taken those traditions places that invite incomprehsion, wonder and pitched debate."—Greg Tate, writer and musician, in the preface

"Howard Mandel approaches the vast musical imaginations of these three men with the immersed abandon with which a bird must approach air or a fish, water. At once insightfully critical and personal, Miles, Ornette, Cecil: Jazz Beyond Jazz will be a wonderful read for anyone who likes books about serious music by serious writers." —A. B. Spellman, poet, author of Four Jazz Lives (formerly Four Lives In The Bebop Business)

"Howard Mandel has readily accepted the white man’s burden, that is, decoding the jazz avant-garde through the thoughtful, straightforward and in-depth analysis of three major figures. Personal yet scholarly, Howard lives the jazz life like he writes it—quite well." —Mitch Myers, author of The Boy Who Cried Freebird: Rock & Roll Fables and Sonic Storytelling