A Biography of Alan Lomax

The Man Who Recorded the World

First biography of the ultimate unsung hero in the history of popular music, Alan Lomax

Impressive - Szwed succeeds magnificently

John Szwed is Professor of Music and Jazz Studies at Columbia University, and Director of the Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia University. He is the author of a number of books, including Billie Holiday: The Musician and the Myth, Alan Lomax: The Man Who Recorded the World and So What: The Life of Miles Davis.

Writer, musicologist, archivist, singer, DJ, filmmaker, record, radio and TV producer, Alan Lomax was a man of many parts. Without him the history of popular music would have been very different. 
 
Armed with a tape-recorder and his own near-flawless good taste, Lomax spent years travelling the US, particularly the south, recording its heritage of music and song for posterity, bringing to light the talents of performers ranging from Jelly Roll Morton to Leadbelly and Muddy Waters, and crucially influencing generations of musicians from Pete Seeger to the Stones, from Woody Guthrie to Bob Dylan. 
 
His influence continues: recordings made by Lomax are the core of the sound-tracks of Oh Brother, Where art Thou? and Gangs of New York, and even featured, remixed, on Moby's Play. 
 
John Szwed's biography is the first ever of this remarkable and contradictory man (whom he both knew and worked with for ten years); through it Szwed will tell the story of a musical and political era, as he did so successfully in his previous book on Miles Davis.

The Life of Miles Davis

So What

The definitive life of one of the greatest and most influential of jazz musicians

 Szwed mixes terrific musical analysis with a deep insight into Davis's life, character and collaboration

Szwed is an accomplished sifter of wheat from the chaff.  He is not only a musicologist, he is an anthripologist

Miles Davis was one of the crucial influences in the development of modern jazz. His Kind of Blue is an automatic inclusion in any critic's list of the great jazz albums, the one record people who own no other jazz records possess, and still sells 250,000 copies a year in the US alone. But Miles regularly changed styles, leaving his inimitable impact on many forms of jazz, whether he created them or simply developed the work of others, from modal jazz to be-bop, his seminal quintet and his big-band work, to the jazz funk experiments of later years. 
 
Miles not only knew and worked with everyone who was anyone in jazz, from Coltrane to Monk, he was a friend of Sartre's, lover of Juliette Greco and musical collaborator with musicians who ranged from Stockhausen to Hendrix. John Swzed is uniquely well-qualified to do justice to Miles, both in terms of his impact on jazz, and as one of the great Black Americans: as political figure, icon and archetypal cool dude. His book fills in the gaps left by myth-making about Miles' life - both by Miles himself and by his previous biographers - telling the story of his childhood, his depressions and his relationship with heroin as well as the more familiar public career.

John Szwed

John Szwed’s swift, conversational and yet detail-rich new biography, Billie Holiday: The Musician and the Myth, communicates its artist-first priorities in the subtitle, and then makes good on them throughout … That’s about as fine a centenary-year gift as anyone had a right to expect.

Insightful, investigative… entertaining and illuminating … a wonderfully engaging and revealing look at the great Lady Day.

Illuminating account restores to the singer the dignity of a true artist.

A musicologist’s appreciation of the jazz singer… a marvel.

Szwed’s book offers a fresh attempt to understand and explain the nature and scope of Holiday’s achievement.

As with the best of Holiday’s music, this elegant and perceptive study is restrained, nuanced, and masterfully carried out.

This is as good an insight into Lady Day as you are ever going to get … It’s not just highly recommended, it’s essential reading for anyone who ever played a Holiday CD.

John Swezed provides facsinating insight into a body of work that still haunts and beguiles.

A beautifully nuanced portrait of one of the greatest musicians of the 20th century – and one whose place in the pantheon of those who used the instrument inside them is assured.

Today, Billie Holiday is an icon – an artist whose voice has weathered countless shifts in public taste, and whose impact on contemporary music is unquestionable. But when eighteen-year-old Billie Holiday stepped into Columbia studios in November of 1933 to record ‘Riffin’ the Scotch’ and ‘Your Mother’s Son-in-Law’, no one could predict the sensation that was about to emerge; marking the beginning of what is arguably the most remarkable and important career in twentieth-century popular music. 
 
Drawing on revelatory new material, including unpublished memoirs and interviews, Billie Holiday is the first account to consider the singer as an artist, her influences, her uncanny voice and rhythmic genius, a number of her signature songs, and her legacy.

Billie Holiday

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John Szwed

Praise for Billie Holiday

John Szwed’s swift, conversational and yet detail-rich new biography, Billie Holiday: The Musician and the Myth, communicates its artist-first priorities in the subtitle, and then makes good on them th ...

Insightful, investigative… entertaining and illuminating … a wonderfully engaging and revealing look at the great Lady Day.

Illuminating account restores to the singer the dignity of a true artist.

John Szwed’s swift, conversational and yet detail-rich new biography, Billie Holiday: The Musician and the Myth, communicates its artist-first priorities in the subtitle, and then makes good on them th ...

Insightful, investigative… entertaining and illuminating … a wonderfully engaging and revealing look at the great Lady Day.

Illuminating account restores to the singer the dignity of a true artist.

John Szwed’s swift, conversational and yet detail-rich new biography, Billie Holiday: The Musician and the Myth, communicates its artist-first priorities in the subtitle, and then makes good on them th ...

Insightful, investigative… entertaining and illuminating … a wonderfully engaging and revealing look at the great Lady Day.

Illuminating account restores to the singer the dignity of a true artist.

Books by John Szwed

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