My Jazz Odyssey

Reminiscences of the author's musical experiences in college and professional jazz bands, including the Auburn Plainsmen Orchestra and the Auburn Knights Orchestra. Includes information about others with whom he played and their careers ourside of music, as well as autobiographical material about his military experience, work as a vetrinarian, etc.

"Sentiments such as this may never have been expressed by a jazz musician such as Bernie McGann who was nervous about preciousness, pomposity and poetry. Bernie's music however, and the music expressed by others like him in this book, speak to our individual and collective souls better than any other musical genre." -- Back cover.

An overview of the career of jazz pianist Oscar Peterson, from the fame of his early years as the star attraction of Canada's renowned Johnny Holmes Orchestra to the 1970s and his role as a solo pianist and television personality.

Drummer, record producer, bandleader, jazz researcher, and cigar-chomping raconteur Barry Martyn is a New Orleans original who happens to have been born in England. Implausible though this may seem, it makes perfect sense to members of the New Orleans traditional jazz community, who view themselves as an extended family based on merit as much as nativity. For more than forty years, Martyn has been a fixture in the Crescent City's jazz scene, laying down the beat for generations of celebrated musicians and avidly promoting the city's unique musical heritage around the world. In Walking with Legends -- based on over forty hours of interviews with Martyn by fellow British jazz enthusiast and author Mick Burns -- Martyn reflects upon his life in jazz and offers a window into a musical world that few have understood, let alone witnessed from the inside. At the age of nineteen, jazz fanatic Martyn found his way to the Crescent City and began working as a professional drummer in clubs and studios. The first white man in the United States to join a black musician's union, he eventually started his own record label and recorded hundreds of jam sessions that today are regarded as classics in Europe. In 1972, he formed the Legends of Jazz, an old-style New Orleans jazz band that toured the world and took New Orleans jazz into the American showbiz mainstream. Martyn's life story provides unique intimate glimpses of a vanished generation of New Orleans musicians, including Louis Armstrong, Kid Sheik Cola, Harold Dejan, Joe Watkins, Albert Nicholas, Kid Thomas, Andrew Blakeney, and many others. Throughout his chronicle, Martyn highlights the continual clash of cultures that arose from an avid British pupil learning lessons of life and music from elderly African American strangers who take him under their wing both out of curiosity and self-interest. Together, they find a way to connect through music, even if the road gets a little bumpy at times. A standard-bearer for New Orleans's jazz drumming tradition, Martyn remains one of the city's busiest musicians and most avid promoters of New Orleans music. In Walking with Legends, he honors the legacies of the African American musicians who taught and inspired him and affirms the importance of the human relationships that make the music possible.

Traces the life and career of the noted jazz clarinetist and provides insights into the development of jazz in Seattle, Los Angeles, and San Francisco

Oscar Peterson's career as a jazz pianist has spanned over five decades. During that time, he has recorded nearly 90 albums, won seven Grammys, and earned lifetime achievement awards from the Black Theatre Workshop, the Peabody Conservatory of Music, and the National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences. He has played with, and come to know, many of the genre's greatest contributors, including Ella Fitzgerald, Dizzy Gillespie, Count Basie, Nat King Cole, Louis Armstrong, and Duke Ellington. Peterson chronicles his storied career in A Jazz Odyssey: The Life of Oscar Peterson.Organized chronologically, A Jazz Odyssey takes readers through the development of jazz over the course of the late 20th century as seen by one of the jazz world's most celebrated figures. Peterson guides readers through the turbulent 1940s, when he was playing with the Johnny Holmes Orchestra in Montreal, and first met Norman Granz - the jazz producer who would launch his career. With Granz, he joined Jazz at the Philharmonic, playing at Carnegie Hall and touring all over North America. A Jazz Odyssey also brings readers to the birth of the Oscar Peterson Trio - where Peterson would hone his trademark arrangement of piano, guitar, and bass and work with the likes of Ray Brown, Barney Kessel, and Herb Ellis. Peterson describes the endless practice sessions and tireless work ethic that earned the group the reputation of the hardest working trio in the business. He also describes meeting his idol Art Tatum during the 1950s and touring with him in Jazz at the Philharmonic.A Jazz Odyssey explores the process behind cutting the dozens of albums that the Oscar Peterson Trio cut during the 1950s. The trio's incarnation atthat time included Peterson, himself, in addition to Herb Ellis and Ray Brown - a group that would become known as one of the gre