Part music history, part cultural meditation, part travel narrative, Jazz Journeys to Japan is the first book to address the experiences of individual players -- Japanese jazz greats such as Toshiko Akiyoshi, Masahiko Satoh, Makoto Ozone, and Yosuke Yamashita. William Minor navigates the converging streams of Western music and Eastern tradition, revealing through interviews with musicians, critics, and producers the unique synthesis that results from this convergence. And, turning conventional wisdom on its ear, he disproves the widely held notion that Japanese jazz artists don't "swing." Along the way, we experience Minor's growing appreciation of Japanese culture, which mirrors his subjects' discovery of American jazz. William Minor's previous books include Unzipped Souls: A Jazz Journey through the Soviet Union, and Monterey Jazz Festival: Forty Legendary Years. He has written for Downbeat, Jazz Times, Jazz Notes, Coda, and Swing Journal.

Jazz Journeys to Japan: The Heart Within (Jazz Perspectives)

Arts & Photography

Minor, William

Music

University of Michigan Press

Goat Pan: Poems

Betty's Soup Shop Press

Natural Counterpoint

Literature & Fiction

Oehler, Paul

Poetry

Bettys Soup Shop Pr

William Minor had been married (to the same woman!) for thirty-eight years when he started his collection of short pieces entitled Our Peasant Life. Minor spares neither wit nor compassion when he explores marriage, love, household, family, and neighbors in this charming work. In Moker, Minor turns his life around, imagining that he hadn't pursued the woman he would love the rest of his life, or the passion for music that has kept him focussed. His alter ego, Moker, pads about an empty apartment in bare feet, divorced (he didn't find the right woman!), imagines a daughter he never had, and finds peace through acceptance and humor. Minor's skillfully crafted poems weave a story of life, longing, and loving in the years beyond youth. Some Grand Dust is an extraordinary portrait of ordinary lives.

Some Grand Dust

Chatoyant

Across nine thousand kilometers and six republics of the Soviet Union, William Minor embarked on a "jazz journey" to observe the development of contemporary Russian jazz, as it responded to an abundance of cultural changes. A jazz writer and musician himself, Minor sat in on private performances and went backstage at several major festivals, witnessing firsthand the artistic release and creativity of Russian musicians. Throughout his travels, Minor interviewed musicians, critics, and fans and reproduces in his book an intimate sense of their aspirations, struggles, successes - they tell of shared resources, networks, and inventive forums for playing and exchanging information. At the same time, this narrative bespeaks the hard realities of life: the difficulty of getting equipment, the scant number of clubs, and the limited information about the music scene in other parts of the world.

Unzipped Souls - A Jazz Journey Through the Soviet union

Temple University Press

Poetry. Two poem-sequences: Pigeons, and Pussy. A short poem on every page, 3 or 4 lines. The sequences presented on facing pages, emphasising the fact that the title word could be subtitled by the other if one wished. At various times, hilarious, scurrilous, and thought-provoking, this collection is one of the most unusual you will come across.

Pigeons and Pussy

Shearsman Books

In Monterey Jazz Festival: Forty Legendary Years, jazz journalist William Minor tells the story of the oldest, continuously performed jazz gathering in the world, the story of forty weekends of jazz that welcomed the likes of Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, Dave Brubeck, Gerry Mulligan, Billie Holiday, Miles Davis, Carmen McRae, Janis Joplin, Herbie Hancock and Joshua Redman, all to the same stage. Photographer and photo editor Bill Wishner has collected more than one hundred fifty rare images of the performers and performances that have highlighted the Festival over nearly half a century. Monterey Jazz Festival: Forty Legendary Years includes a complete listing of musicians who have performed on the Monterey stages.

Monterey Jazz Festival: Forty Legendary Years

Wishner, Bill

Angel City Press

At age seventeen, a boy graduates from high school and is admitted to the University of Michigan. There, both within but mostly outside the classroom, he makes troublesome discoveries about human nature, initiating a religious conversion. Challenged by Rilke’s statement “You must change your life,” he decides he must—but how cast off friends and family with whom he is all too familiar? At nineteen, he takes off on his own for New York City, attending an art school, Pratt Institute, and begins the dream of spending one’s lifetime as an artist. The year is 1955; he is exposed to the rich bond between jazz musicians (he plays jazz piano himself at the 456 Club in Brooklyn) and Abstract Expressionists. He befriends the most kindhearted, hospitable family he has ever known. A bright young woman introduces him to poets from Hart Crane to Baudelaire— and genuine love. Overwhelmed by too much “information” and insight (acquired too fast, too soon), he decides to take off with a fellow student for “the territory ahead” (one year before Jack Kerouac published On the Road): a cross-country hitchhiking adventure which, solely by chance (an injury working as a dishwasher at Big Jack’s Drive-in in Santa Monica, California) will lead him back to his hometown in Michigan—and reunion with a childhood love and a marital sojourn in the Garden of Eden (the island of Kauai in 1957). The couple, and a child, will return to San Francisco at the height of the Beat movement--and create a life together that will last for sixty years. It’s a nonfiction tale that spans significant cultural eras in American life, focused on the important discovery that you can be free only in a life you choose yourself. The book should appeal to a wide audience (anyone who’s experienced meaningful“coming of age,” which should be everyone!), a story told with considerable humor (in the spirit of Mark Twain) and lucid meaningful prose.

Going Solo: A Memoir: 1953–1958

Biographies & Memoirs

Memoirs

Park Place Publications

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Books by Minor, William