thelonious monk the life and times of an american original

Many people then associated jazz with psychological turbulence, substance abuse, rootlessness, and social disease: hence Ishmael Reed’s humorous re-telling, Mumbo Jumbo, of the Jazz Age as though the music were an epidemic. The notion of a jazz self-help book would have been laughable in the first half of the twentieth century. Marsalis shares with these writers a willingness to repackage the techniques and symbolic range of his art in portable platitudes. Choreographer Twyla Tharp, in The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life, and visual artist Julia Cameron, in The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity, have found sizable audiences by writing self-help books based around their aesthetic practices. a tension that is at the heart of swinging, in music and in life” (xvi). He extrapolates a way of life from the music’s formal qualities, focusing on “the creative tension between self-expression and self-sacrifice. Marsalis confronts diverse challenges, like getting a job, keeping a relationship together, or staying healthy, with principles and anecdotes learned from a lifetime in jazz. Technical discussions of jazz music theory, jazz terminology, and jazz biography mix with “bandstand etiquette,” as he calls it, in a series of contrapuntal lessons on everyday life (30). Marsalis’s formidable skills as a teacher, honed in symposia around the world and especially at Jazz at Lincoln Center, are very much on display here. That this contribution arrives in the form of a self-help book presents some challenges to readers and critics accustomed to dismissing such material as uncomplicated fluff. Wynton Marsalis has made a significant contribution to jazz literature with Moving to a Higher Ground.

Thelonious monk the life and times of an american original