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The Jazz Singer grew from a moment of inspiration when author Samson Raphaelson saw Al Jolson perform in 1917. Raphaelson’s idea of a rising singer, Jack Robin, torn between sacred and secular, became in turn a short story, a play, a feature film, a novelization, and a radio play. With each new adaptation, the music evolved; the thread that binds together all of these stories is the jazz singer’s stock in trade—his songs. For Jolson and The Jazz Singer, these songs serve several functions: besides providing a unique snapshot of popular vaudeville melodies in the 1920s and beyond, the songs used in the various tellings of The Jazz Singer have a specific connection to Jolson, providing numerous opportunities to retell his (largely fictionalized) origin story with the very songs he had used to make it on Broadway in the first place. We might then consider The Jazz Singer a proto–jukebox musical, in which preexisting songs with a common thread or history become the basis for a new story. Making extensive use of archival documentation and addressing previously unexamined adaptations of the story, this article shows how each version of The Jazz Singer came to be a musical summary of Jolson’s life as a performer.

The American musical has long provided an important vehicle through which writers, performers, and audiences reimagine who they are and how they might best interact with the world around them. Musicals are especially good at this because they provide not only an opportunity for us to enact dramatic versions of alternative identities, but also the material for performing such alternatives in the real world, through songs and the characters and attitudes those songs project.

This essay offers a reassessment of The Jazz Singer (1927) and Al Jolson by challenging several different lines of persistent criticism: its lack of artistic merit, its effacement of Jewish identity and its racist depictions in light of Jolson's use of blackface. Rather than a failed adaptation of Samson Raphaelson's play of the same name, the picture innovatively reworked both that play and E.A. Dupont's film The Ancient Law (Das Alte Gesetz, 1923), further placing it within a framework of Jewish culture. The black press and Negro moviegoers warmly embraced both The Jazz Singer and Jolson for a variety of reasons, including his promotion of black artists. Among African Americans, he was the most popular Hollywood movie star of the late 1920s.

Based on unrivaled access to archival interviews with those who knew her at every stage of her life, the most revealing biography of the incomparable Lady Day.

From its very beginnings, the nature of jazz has been to reinvent itself. As the musical genre evolved from its roots-blues, European music, Voodoo ceremonies, and brass bands that played at funerals, parades and celebrations-the sound reflected the tenor of the times, from the citified strains of the Roaring '20s to the Big Band swing of pre-World War II to the bop revolution that grew out of the minimalist sound the war forced upon the art form. That the music continued to develop and evolve is a tribute to the power and creativity of its musicians. Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Sarah Vaughan, Art Blakey, Dave Brubeck, Sun Ra, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Diana Krall, Archie Shepp, Chick Corea, Branford Marsalis, Larry Coryell, and Kenny Kirkland are just some of the jazz greats profiled here. The five major periods of jazz-the bop revolution, hard bop and cool jazz, the avant-garde, fusion, and contemporary-form the basis for the sections in this reference work, with a brief history of each period provided. The artists who were integral to the evolution of each period are then profiled. Each biographical entry focuses on the artist's life and his or her influence on jazz and on music as a whole. A complete discography for each musician is also provided.

From this cold bed I can gaze out three billion light years...

From this cold bed I can gaze out three billion light years...

This Rebel Girl was an icon of American music, a musician who used her talent to inspire others, writing songs of freedom and protest. We discover who Nina Simone was. Based on the best-selling books 'Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls'.

Certainly no singer has been more mythologized and more misunderstood than Billie Holiday, who helped to create much of the mystique herself with her autobiography,Lady Sings the Blues. \"Now, finally, we have a definitive biography,\" saidBooklistof Donald Clarke'sBillie Holiday, \"by a deeply compassionate, respectful, and open-minded biographer [whose] portrait embraces every facet of Holiday's paradoxical nature, from her fierceness to her vulnerability, her childlikeness to her innate elegance and amazing strength.\" Clarke was given unrivaled access to a treasure trove of interviews from the 1970s-interviews with those who knew Lady Day from her childhood in the streets and good-time houses of Baltimore through the early days of success in New York and into the years of fame, right up to her tragic decline and death at the age of forty-four. Clarke uses these interviews to separate fact from fiction and, in the words of theSeattle Times, \"finally sets us straight. . .evoking her world in all its anguish, triumph, force and irony.\"Newsdaycalled this \"a thoroughly riveting account of Holiday and her milieu.\" TheNew York Timesraved that it \"may be the most thoroughly valuable of the many books on Holiday,\" and Helen Oakley Dance inJazzTimessaid, \"We should probably have to wait a long time for another life of Billie Holiday to supersede Donald Clarke's achievement.\"

Stuart Nicholson's biography of Ella Fitzgerald is considered a classic in jazz literature. Drawing on original documents, interviews, and new information, Nicholson draws a complete picture of Fitzgerald's professional and personal life. Fitzgerald rose from being a pop singer with chart-novelty hits in the late '30s to become a bandleader and then one of the greatest interpreters of American popular song. Along with Billie Holiday, she virtually defined the female voice in jazz, and countless others followed in her wake and acknowledged her enormous influence. Also includes two 8-page inserts.