W. Royal Stokes, JJA Lifetime Achievement in Jazz Journalism honoree and past editor of Jazz Notes (among many other credits) has compiled an annotated list of some 125 volumes published in the 12 months of 2018, including biographies of Bing Crosby by Gary Giddins, Dexter Gordon by his widow Maxine Gordon, Mark Murphy by Peter Jones
, studies of Charles Mingus and Pat Metheny, new editions of Valerie Wilmer’s As Serious As Your Life and the writings of Albert Murray. A few are highlighted below; see all and the annotations here. The Essential W. Royal Stokes Jazz, Blues & Beyond Reader is scheduled for publication in early 2019.
Gary Giddins, Bing Crosby: Swinging on a Star: The War Years, 1940-1946 (Little, Brown and Company).
Sophisticated Giant: The Life and Legacy of Dexter Gordon (University of California Press), by Maxine Gordon, Foreword by Farah Jasmine Griffin, Afterword by Woody Louis Armstrong Shaw III
Zeke Schein, with Poppy Brite, Portrait of a Phantom: Story of Robert Johnson’s Lost Photograph (Pelican Publishing Company, Inc.)
Nichole Rustin-Paschal’s The Kind of Man I Am: Jazzmasculinity and the World of Charles Mingus Jr. (Music/Culture)(Wesleyan)
Peter Jones, This Is Hip: The Life of Mark Murphy(Popular Music History) (Equinox)
Mervyn Cooke, Pat Metheny: The ECM Years, 1975-1984 (Oxford Studies in Recorded Jazz) (Oxford University Press)
Brian Gruber’s, Six Days at Ronnie Scott’s: Billy Cobham on Jazz Fusion and the Act of Creation (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform/ grubermedia.com)
Jas Obrecht, Stone Free: Jimi Hendrix in London, September 1966–June 1967 (University of North Carolina Press)
Jason Berry, City of a Million Dreams: A History of New Orleans at Year 300 (University of North Carolina Press)
Val Wilmer, As Serious As Your Life: Black Music and the Free Jazz Revolution, 1957–1977 (Serpent’s Tail Classics), Foreword by Richard Williams
Nate Chinen’s Playing Changes: Jazz for the New Century (Pantheon)
DC Jazz: Stories of Jazz Music in Washington, DC (Georgetown University Press), Maurice Jackson and Blair A. Ruble, editors
Questlovle’s Creative Quest (Ecco/Harper Collins)
Michael Azerrad, Rock Critic Law: 101 Unbreakable Rules for Writing Badly About Music (Dey Street Books)
Jack Sullivan, New Orleans Remix(American Made Music Series) (University Press of Mississippi)
Albert Murray: Collected Essays & Memoirs: The Omni-Americans, South to a Very Old Place, The Hero and the Blues, Stomping the Blues, The Blue Devils of Nada, From the Briarpatch, and Other Writings (Library of America), Paul Devlin and Henry Gates Jr., editors
Joel Dinerstein’s The Origins of Cool in Postwar America (University of Chicago Press)
Rory Stuart, The Rhythm Book: Beginning Notation and Sight-Reading for All Instruments (Hal Leonard).
Jason Borge’s Tropical Riffs: Latin America and the Politics of Jazz (Duke University Press Books)
Shawn VanCour, Making Radio: Early Radio Production and the Rise of Modern Sound Culture (Oxford University Press)
Debbie Burke’s Glissando: A story of love, lust and jazz (Waldorf Publishing).
