San Antonio College Library

Documentary exploring the history of jazz from its beginnings through the 1990's, including the stories of many of its creators and performers. Includes archival video, still photographs, historical performances, and newly recorded interviews and musical performances.

A documentary that examines the unusual performance techniques and beliefs of the enigmatic Sun Ra. Features performances by and interviews with Sun Ra and his Arkestra.

Here are the great jazz men of the 1950s, all of whom have come to prominence since the rise of the late Charlie Parker, all of whom are the leaders of the jazz world. Beginning with Gerry Mulligan and the "cool" jazz of the early fifties, the author discusses the most significant figures of the decade: Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, the Brubeck quartet, the controversial Charlie Mingus, Ornette Coleman and his plastic saxophone, the...

This 2008 film by George Manney is an intimate profile of the world's first jazz bagpipe player, Philadelphia musician Rufus Harley. The video interweaves a rare interview with Harley in his home together with insights, memories, and commentary from family, friends, and celebrated musicians-including Kenneth Gamble, Laurie Anderson, Stephen Caldwell, Joel Dorn, Odean Pope, Byard Lancaster, Tommy Conwell, Robert "Stewkey" Antoni, Charlie Gracie, David...

The life story of this great instrumentalist, bandleader, and entertainer illustrates much of the black entertainer's impact on American culture and illuminates how popular culture often intersects with politics and economics. --from publisher description. "In the twentieth century, African Americans not only helped make popular music the soundtrack of the American experience, they advanced American music as one of the preeminent shapers of the world's...

This book is a selective tribute and guide to the jazz life, the players, and the music. It is not a chronological or comprehensive history, but rather a personal exploration through variegated seminal figures of a nature of the music (and how it keeps changing). And it is about the nature of those who make the music - temperaments as disparate as those of Louis Armstrong and Charlie Parker. It tells, too, of the political economy of jazz, its internationalization,...

In this 1989 episode of Tony Brown's Journal, Donald Byrd talks about jazz.