A revival of a classic oral biography of four nearly overlooked jazz giants

Four Jazz Lives (Jazz Perspectives)

Spellman, A.B.

Biographies & Memoirs

University of Michigan Press

Pages clean &amp; unmarked; binding is good. Covers show average shelf wear. Tanning to page edges from age. Fine reading/reference copy. '70 paperback. 241pp. Interviews with African-American jazz musicians circa 1970. Thanks for visiting Sunnydale Books.

Black music, four lives,

Schocken Books

Classic and new work by poet and jazz writer A. B. Spellman A. B. Spellman is an acclaimed American poet, music critic, and arts administrator. He is widely recognized as a leading figure in the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, a cultural and literary movement that emphasized Black identity, pride, and artistic expression. Between the Night and Its Music brings together A. B. Spellman's early work with a collection of powerful new poems. Spellman's literary career took flight in 1965 with his debut poetry collection, The Beautiful Days, which introduced his distinctive voice blending elements of jazz, blues, and African oral traditions. In 1966, Four Lives in the Bebop Business established Spellman as a respected music critic and scholar. It was a groundbreaking work that chronicled the lives and struggles of four influential jazz musicians. Spellman held senior positions at the National Endowment for the Arts for thirty years with lasting impact on arts funding for inner cities and rural and tribal communities. In addition to poems from The Beautiful Days (1965) and Things I Must Have Known (2008), this book contains a trove of new and uncollected poems, confirming Spellman's continued centrality to contemporary American literature. This is an essential volume for readers already familiar with Spellman, and an excellent introduction for new readers. Lauri Scheyer's introduction situates Spellman's work within jazz writing, Black Arts, and American poetry broadly. [sample text] THE TWIST a dancer's world is walls, movement confined: music god's last breath. rhythm: the last beating of his heart. a dancer follows that sound, blind to its source, toward walls with others. she cannot dance alone she thinks of thought as windows, as ice around the dance can you break it? move

Between the Night and Its Music: New and Selected Poems (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

Literature & Fiction

Poetry

Wesleyan University Press

The lives of Herbie Nichols, Cecil Taylor, Ornette Coleman, and Jackie McLean are dicussed through biographical sketches and quotations. Photographs are included.

Four Lives in the Bebop Business

Humor & Entertainment

Limelight

“Read this collection and you will need no one to convince you that poetry is a necessity.”—Keorapetse Kgositsile, South African National Poet Laureate
After a long hiatus from poetry, A.B. Spellman, a founding member of the Black Arts Movement and a nationally recognized jazz scholar, returns with an exuberant, generous collection. Touching on creativity and fatherhood, racism and workplace politics, his poems address the most important personal and public events of the last seventy years—of how it felt to grow up black in a segregated America, of the transformational experience of hearing John Coltrane live, of the give-and-take of a long marriage, and of the importance and inspiration of good friends:
if, as the yoruba say, all human beings cover their nakedness with other human beings how does friendship accomplish love? for i am never so bare as i am with you. *** lovers &amp; siblings do not have this. they have too much to defend &amp; defend against &amp; we do not. we have thoughts that match &amp; easy laughter. we have the wisdom of the ocean &amp; all the breeze that calls it there
A.B. Spellman spent thirty years at the National Endowment for the Arts, serving as deputy chairman for a decade. He has been a regular commentator on jazz for National Public Radio and is the author of Four Jazz Lives, a classic in the field of jazz criticism.

Things I Must Have Known

Coffee House Press