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The Jazzmen
- How Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Count Basie Transformed America
- Narrated by: Dominic Hoffman
- Length: 16 hrs and 44 mins
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Publisher's summary
From the New York Times bestselling author of Satchel and Bobby Kennedy, a sweeping and spellbinding portrait of the longtime kings of jazz—Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Count Basie—who, born within a few years of one another, overcame racist exclusion and violence to become the most popular entertainers on the planet.
This is the story of three revolutionary American musicians, the maestro jazzmen who orchestrated the chords that throb at the soul of twentieth-century America.
- Duke Ellington, the grandson of slaves who was christened Edward Kennedy Ellington, was a man whose story is as layered and nuanced as his name suggests and whose music transcended category.
- Louis Daniel Armstrong was born in a New Orleans slum so tough it was called The Battlefield and, at age seven, got his first musical instrument, a ten-cent tin horn that drew buyers to his rag-peddling wagon and set him on the road to elevating jazz into a pulsating force for spontaneity and freedom.
- William James Basie, too, grew up in a world unfamiliar to white fans—the son of a coachman and laundress who dreamed of escaping every time the traveling carnival swept into town, and who finally engineered his getaway with help from Fats Waller.
What is far less known about these groundbreakers is that they were bound not just by their music or even the discrimination that they, like nearly all Black performers of their day, routinely encountered. Each defied and ultimately overcame racial boundaries by opening America’s eyes and souls to the magnificence of their music. In the process they wrote the soundtrack for the civil rights movement.
Based on more than 250 interviews, this exhaustively researched book brings alive the history of Black America in the early-to-mid 1900s through the singular lens of the country’s most gifted, engaging, and enduring African-American musicians.
Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.
PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
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By: Paul Hendrickson
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The History of Jazz, Second Edition
- By: Ted Gioia
- Narrated by: Bob Souer
- Length: 21 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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Ted Gioia's History of Jazz has been universally hailed as a classic - acclaimed by jazz critics and fans around the world. Now Gioia brings his magnificent work completely up-to-date, drawing on the latest research and revisiting virtually every aspect of the music, past and present. Gioia tells the story of jazz as it had never been told before, in a book that brilliantly portrays the legendary jazz players, the breakthrough styles, and the world in which it evolved. Here are the giants of jazz and the great moments of jazz history.
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An Exciting Opportunity Missed
- By Kindle Customer on 02-02-15
By: Ted Gioia
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Cocaine and Rhinestones
- A History of George Jones and Tammy Wynette
- By: Tyler Mahan Coe, Tyler Mahan Coe
- Length: 25 hrs
- Unabridged
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By the early 1960s nearly everybody paying attention to country music agreed that George Jones was the greatest country singer of all time. After taking honky-tonk rockers like “White Lightning” all the way up the country charts, he revealed himself to be an unmatched virtuoso on “She Thinks I Still Care,” thus cementing his status as a living legend. That’s where the trouble started.
By: Tyler Mahan Coe, and others
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Becoming Ella Fitzgerald
- The Jazz Singer Who Transformed American Song
- By: Judith Tick
- Narrated by: Carmen Jewel Jones
- Length: 19 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Ella Fitzgerald (1917-1996) possessed one of the twentieth century's most astonishing voices. Historian Judith Tick offers a sublime portrait of this ambitious risk-taker whose exceptional musical spontaneity made her a transformational artist. Becoming Ella Fitzgerald clears up long-enduring mysteries. Archival research and in-depth family interviews shed new light on the singer's difficult childhood, the tragic death of her mother, and the year she spent in a girls' reformatory school—where she sang in its renowned choir and dreamed of being a dancer.
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Thorough history. but I couldn't finish it. I'll have to get the book.
- By CapitalHeel on 01-14-24
By: Judith Tick
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Traveling
- On the Path of Joni Mitchell
- By: Ann Powers
- Narrated by: Hillary Huber
- Length: 14 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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Celebrated NPR music critic Ann Powers explores the life and career of Joni Mitchell in a lyrical style as fascinating and ethereal as the songs of the artist herself.
By: Ann Powers
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Bobby Kennedy
- The Making of a Liberal Icon
- By: Larry Tye
- Narrated by: Marc Cashman
- Length: 19 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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History remembers Robert F. Kennedy as a racial healer, a tribune for the poor, and the last progressive knight of a bygone era of American politics. But Kennedy's enshrinement in the liberal pantheon was actually the final stage of a journey that had its beginnings in the conservative 1950s. In Bobby Kennedy, Larry Tye peels away layers of myth and misconception to paint a complete portrait of this singularly fascinating figure.
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Absorbing
- By Jean on 01-18-17
By: Larry Tye
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Johnny Carson
- By: Henry Bushkin
- Narrated by: Josh Bloomberg
- Length: 10 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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“Here’s Johnny!” Probably everyone in America knows the phrase, whether they watched every episode of The Tonight Show or none because they had to go to bed early on school nights. From 1962 to 1992, Johnny Carson and his Tonight Show dominated the American consciousness. Henry Bushkin was Carson’s best friend and lawyer during that period, and his book is a tautly rendered and remarkably nuanced portrait of Carson, revealing not only how he truly was, but why.
By: Henry Bushkin
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Our Team
- The Epic Story of Four Men and the World Series that Changed Baseball
- By: Luke Epplin
- Narrated by: Leon Nixon
- Length: 10 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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The riveting story of four men - Larry Doby, Bill Veeck, Bob Feller, and Satchel Paige - whose improbable union on the Cleveland Indians in the late 1940s would shape the immediate postwar era of Major League Baseball and beyond.
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Who will like this book?
- By Brian L. Quarton on 04-03-21
By: Luke Epplin
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Duke
- A Life of Duke Ellington
- By: Terry Teachout
- Narrated by: Peter Francis James
- Length: 17 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington was the greatest jazz composer of the twentieth century - and an impenetrably enigmatic personality whom no one, not even his closest friends, claimed to understand. The grandson of a slave, he dropped out of high school to become one of the world's most famous musicians, a showman of incomparable suavity who was as comfortable in Carnegie Hall as in the nightclubs where he honed his style.
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This audiobook needs music
- By John on 04-08-14
By: Terry Teachout
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Can't Be Satisfied
- The Life and Times of Muddy Waters
- By: Robert Gordon
- Narrated by: Keb' Mo'
- Length: 12 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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The epic, rollicking, up-and-down life of Muddy Waters—who went from Mississippi farmhand to musical legend, invented electric blues, and created the template for the rock-and-roll band and its wild lifestyle—is chronicled with rare vividness in Robert Gordon’s widely praised biography.
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The delivery was pretty bad
- By Rodney Combs on 04-27-24
By: Robert Gordon
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What a Fool Believes
- A Memoir
- By: Michael McDonald, Paul Reiser
- Narrated by: Michael McDonald, Paul Reiser
- Length: 10 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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A sweeping and evocative memoir from the Rock & Roll Hall of Famer, Grammy Award-winning, platinum selling singer-songwriter Michael McDonald, written with his friend, Emmy Award-nominated actor, comedian, and #1 New York Times bestselling author Paul Reiser.
By: Michael McDonald, and others