Playing Changes
Jazz for the New Century
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Narrated by:
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Ron Butler
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By:
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Nate Chinen
About this listen
One of jazz’s leading critics gives us an invigorating, richly detailed portrait of the artists and events that have shaped the music of our time. Grounded in authority and brimming with style, Playing Changes is the first book to take the measure of this exhilarating moment: It is a compelling argument for the resiliency of the art form and a rejoinder to any claims about its calcification or demise.
“Playing changes”, in jazz parlance, has long referred to an improviser’s resourceful path through a chord progression. Playing Changes boldly expands on the idea, highlighting a host of significant changes - ideological, technological, theoretical, and practical - that jazz musicians have learned to navigate since the turn of the century. Nate Chinen, who has chronicled this evolution firsthand throughout his journalistic career, vividly sets the backdrop, charting the origins of jazz historicism and the rise of an institutional framework for the music.
He traces the influence of commercialized jazz education and reflects on the implications of a globalized jazz ecology. He unpacks the synergies between jazz and postmillennial hip-hop and R&B, illuminating an emergent rhythm signature for the music. And he shows how a new generation of shape-shifting elders, including Wayne Shorter and Henry Threadgill, have moved the aesthetic center of the music.
Woven throughout the book is a vibrant cast of characters - from the saxophonists Steve Coleman and Kamasi Washington to the pianists Jason Moran and Vijay Iyer to the bassist and singer Esperanza Spalding - who have exerted an important influence on the scene. This is an adaptive new music for a complex new reality, and Playing Changes is the definitive guide.
©2018 Nate Chinen (P)2018 Random House AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
"Narrator Ron Butler narrates this exceptional audiobook with the laid-back flair and nuanced understanding of a seasoned jazz musician. His diverse phrasing palette is as interesting to hear as it is clarifying, and his performance is never too conspicuous as he conveys the drama surrounding the growth of jazz in America." (AudioFile)
"A terrific book about the shape of contemporary jazz, and right now is a terrific time to read it.” (The Washington Post)
"A brilliant and wide-ranging new history of jazz.... Chinen’s virtuoso jazz history will drive readers to listen to the music anew, or for the first time." (Publishers Weekly, starred review)
"Chinen has excellent taste in unruly new sounds and big, bent ears, and you’ll want to make a playlist." (Dwight Garner, The New York Times)
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- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Thelonious Monk is the critically acclaimed, gripping saga of an artist's struggle to "make it" without compromising his musical vision. It is a story that, like its subject, reflects the tidal ebbs and flows of American history in the 20th century. To his fans, he was the ultimate hipster; to his detractors, he was temperamental, eccentric, taciturn, or childlike. His angular melodies and dissonant harmonies shook the jazz world to its foundations, ushering in the birth of "bebop" and establishing Monk as one of America's greatest composers.
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The definitive bio of Monk
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By: Robin DG Kelley
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The Never-Ending Present
- The Story of Gord Downie and the Tragically Hip
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Overall
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From our talent-rich neighbor to the north comes this biography of one of the most successful Canadian rock bands, The Tragically Hip, which announced a year-long tour after sharing the news of lead singer Gord Downie’s inoperable cancer. Now available to US listeners, The Never-Ending Present details what led up to the memorable night when music fans all over the world watched Downie’s heroic final performance.
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Hometown Heroes
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By: Michael Barclay
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Kind of old wine in new skins, still good for that
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Your Song Changed My Life
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Cool if you know all interviewed artists
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Catch a Wave
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In Catch a Wave, Peter Ames Carlin pulls back the curtain on Brian Wilson, one of popular music's most revered luminaries, as well as its biggest mystery. Drawing on hundreds of interviews and never-before heard studio recordings, Carlin follows the Beach Boys from their earliest days through Brian's deepening emotional problems to his triumphant re-emergence with the release of Smile, the legendarily unreleased album he had originally shelved.
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Not great
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Solid State
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- Narrated by: William Hughes
- Length: 8 hrs and 8 mins
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Overall
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Story
In February 1969, the Beatles began working on what became their final album together. Abbey Road introduced a number of new techniques and technologies to the Beatles' sound and included "Come Together", "Something", and "Here Comes the Sun", which all emerged as classics. Womack's colorful retelling of how this landmark album was written and recorded is a treat for fans of the Beatles. Solid State takes listeners back to 1969 and into EMI's Abbey Road Studios, which boasted an advanced solid state transistor mixing desk.
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It's all about the recording studios
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Shining Star
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With more than 90 million records sold and eight Grammy Awards throughout its 40-year history, Earth, Wind & Fire has staked its claim as one of the most successful, influential, and beloved acts in music history. Now, for the first time, its dynamic lead singer, Philip Bailey, chronicles the group's meteoric rise to stardom and his own professional and spiritual journey. Never before had a musical act crossed multiple styles and genres with a quixotic blend of astrology, universalism, and Egyptology as Earth, Wind & Fire (EWF) did when it exploded into the public's conscience during the 1970s.
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Great book, but needed pro narrator
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By: Philip Bailey, and others
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The Wrecking Crew
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If you were a fan of popular music in the 1960s and early '70s, you were a fan of the Wrecking Crew - whether you knew it or not. On hit record after hit record by everyone from the Byrds, the Beach Boys, and the Monkees to the Grass Roots, the 5th Dimension, Sonny & Cher, and Simon & Garfunkel, this collection of West Coast studio musicians from diverse backgrounds established themselves as the driving sound of pop music - sometimes over the objection of actual band members....
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Left Guessing
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Let’s Go Crazy
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Purple Rain is a song, an album, and a film - each one a commercial success and cultural milestone. How did this semiautobiographical musical masterpiece that blurred R&B, pop, dance, and rock sounds come to alter the recording landscape and become an enduring touchstone for successive generations of fans?
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A Must-Read For Any PRINCE Fan
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Goodnight, L.A.
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From behind the walls of a handful of well-hidden, unlikely recording studios in the Los Angeles area, legends-in-waiting created masterpiece albums. It was a time of astonishing creativity and unprecedented fame and fortune. It was also a time of unfettered excess that threatened to unravel everything along the way. With access that only a longtime music business insider can provide, Kent Hartman packs Goodnight, L.A. with never-before-told stories about the most prolific time and iconic place in rock 'n' roll history.
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great stories and insight into a miraculous time
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Alan Lomax: A Biography
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The remarkable life and times of the man who popularized American folk music and created the science of song. Folklorist, archivist, anthropologist, singer, political activist, talent scout, ethnomusicologist, filmmaker, concert and record producer, Alan Lomax is best remembered as the man who introduced folk music to the masses. Lomax began his career making field recordings of rural music for the Library of Congress and by the late 1930s brought his discoveries to radio, including Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, and Burl Ives.
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They Done Good
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Fornication
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Despite an epic reputation for exhibitionism, drug taking, and drunkenness, through it all the Chili Peppers have continued to produce records that shock, challenge, and intrigue their fans. Jeff Apter tells the complete Red Hot Chili Peppers story, from their first meeting at a Los Angeles high school to the creation of such career-defining albums as BloodSugarSexMagik, Californication and By The Way.
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Cabron
- By Amazon Customer on 10-02-19
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Naked at the Albert Hall
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In her bestselling autobiography, Bedsit Disco Queen, Tracey Thorn recalled the highs and lows of a 30-year career in pop music. But with the touring, recording and extraordinary anecdotes, there wasn't time for an in-depth look at what she actually did for all those years: sing. She sang with warmth and emotional honesty, sometimes while battling acute stage fright.
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Fascinating
- By Jane Sheedy on 01-11-17
By: Tracey Thorn
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A man untroubled by his own contradictions
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What listeners say about Playing Changes
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Craig Herndon
- 10-19-23
Old Head New Ears
I am 76, reintroducing myself to my Father’s music. This text broadened my palette and scope.
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- álvaro castro
- 02-11-19
Jazz happens
Fantastic book surveying the recent history of jazz, and the state of the art today. What I most loved was the beautiful use of language to describe musical pieces, using adjectives through which I could imagine the music being played, even without having a technical understanding of concepts like harmony, chord progressions or the like. Those passages read like the best descriptions of the taste of wine, but using a broader spectrum of words that were accurate, clear and illustrative. I also appreciated how he covered some of the main discussions and arguments about what constitutes jazz, and the controversies regarding artists like Wynton Marsalis or Vijay Iyer. I had heard of these, but feel I know understand them better, as well as those on either side of the debate. The author did a good job of presenting the issues fairly, maintaining respect for the artists on either side of those debates. The structure of the book was superb, with the chapters well chosen, well organized, and adequately broad and detailed. The reading was excellent too, although I didn't always love the accents or acting he sometimes used when reading quotes of, say, a Latino or a woman. Nonetheless, for the most part, the reading was wonderful.
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- J. D. Lunt
- 06-30-20
Well Worth Your Time
As good a survey of where jazz is at in the 21st Century. Any obsessive such as myself will have quibbles here and there, but for a general reader this book does its job admirably. It is mostly well read as well, I only caught a couple mangled names and there are a lot of names.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Ashley Goodlett
- 10-16-23
A jazz heads delight!
A great book about where jazz is going and the musicians who are brave enough to take it there.
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- George MP
- 10-26-24
Strong overview of jazz trends
I liked the authors ability to like an artist’s biography to their music. There is done effective story telling. The book should come with a pdf with recommended listening. To tell a listener at the end that they should buy the book to get the detailed list is self-serving at best.
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