这是三位美国革命音乐家的故事，他们是爵士乐大师，演奏了在二十世纪美国灵魂中悸动的和弦。
艾灵顿公爵，奴隶的孙子，被命名为爱德华·肯尼迪·艾灵顿，他的故事就像他的名字所暗示的那样多层次和微妙，他的音乐超越了范畴。
路易斯·丹尼尔·阿姆斯特朗（Louis Daniel Armstrong）出生在新奥尔良的一个贫民窟，那里非常艰苦，被称为战场。七岁时，他得到了自己的第一件乐器，一个10美分的锡喇叭，它吸引了买家来到他的旧货货车前，并使他走上了将爵士乐提升为自发和自由的脉动力量的道路。
威廉·詹姆斯·贝西（William James Basie）也是在一个白人粉丝不熟悉的世界中长大的——他是一个马车夫兼洗衣工的儿子，每次巡回嘉年华席卷小镇时，他都梦想逃离，最终在费兹·华勒的帮助下策划了他的逃离。
关于这些开创性的人，鲜为人知的是，他们不仅被他们的音乐所束缚，甚至被他们像他们那个时代几乎所有的黑人表演者一样经常遇到的歧视所束缚。每个人都挑战并最终克服了种族界限，让美国人的眼睛和灵魂看到了他们音乐的壮丽。在这个过程中，他们为民权运动创作了配乐。
基于250多次采访，这本经过详尽研究的书通过美国最有天赋、最迷人、最持久的非裔美国音乐家的独特镜头，生动地展现了20世纪早期至中期美国黑人的历史。
The Jazzmen: How Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Count Basie Transformed America
English | ISBN: 035838043X | 2024 | EPUB | 416 pages | 21 MB
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.
