Miles, Ornette, Cecil: Jazz Beyond Jazz

by Howard Mandel

Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman, and Cecil Taylor revolutionized music from the end of the twentieth century into the twenty-first, expanding on jazz traditions with distinctly new concepts of composition, improvisation, instrumentation, and performance. They remain figures of controversy due to their border-crossing processes. Miles, Ornette, Cecil is the first book to connect these three icons of the avant-garde, examining why they are lionized by some critics and reviled by others, while influencing musicians across such divides as genre, geography, and racial and ethnic backgrounds. Mandel offers fresh insights into their careers from interviews with all three artists and many of their significant collaborators, as well as a thorough overview of earlier interpretations of their work.

Genres: Music, Jazz

304 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 2007

Reviews

[Guerino Mazzola · Rating 3 out of 5]

lot of personality features, little musically relevant info

[RA · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great interview/"biography" by Howard Mandel, who treats all three musicians with respect, without much attempt at interpreting their words, and gives readers a glimpse of the inner workings of these three musical giants. It helps to play some of the music while reading!

[Daniel]

I enjoyed this quite a bit, but wow did it ramble.

[Jesse · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fascinating stuff, and traces a nice continuum in the jazz world (especially read after the Miles' Downbeat interviews) though shows the jazz avant-garde getting more and more narcissistic as it devolves from Miles' electric period to Ornette's intentionally vague harmolodic theory to Cecil Taylor's fairly incomprehensible music (and equally incomprehensible interviews).