Kirjahaku

Jazz is one of America's greatest gifts to the arts, and native Texas musicians have played a major role in the development of jazz from its birth in ragtime, blues, and boogie-woogie to its most contemporary manifestation in free jazz. Dave Oliphant began the fascinating story of Texans and jazz in his acclaimed book Texan Jazz, published in 1996. Continuing his riff on this intriguing musical theme, Oliphant uncovers in this new volume more of the prolific connections between Texas musicians and jazz. Jazz Mavericks of the Lone Star State presents sixteen published and previously unpublished essays on Texans and jazz. Oliphant celebrates the contributions of such vital figures as Eddie Durham, Kenny Dorham, Leo Wright, and Ornette Coleman. He also takes a fuller look at Western Swing through Milton Brown and his Musical Brownies and a review of Duncan McLean's Lone Star Swing. In addition, he traces the relationship between British jazz criticism and Texas jazz and defends the reputation of Texas folklorist Alan Lomax as the first biographer of legendary jazz pianist-composer Jelly Roll Morton. In other essays, Oliphant examines the links between jazz and literature, including fiction and poetry by Texas writers, and reveals the seemingly unlikely connection between Texas and Wisconsin in jazz annals. All the essays in this book underscore the important parts played by Texas musicians in jazz history and the significance of Texas to jazz, as also demonstrated by Oliphant's reviews of the Ken Burns PBS series on jazz and Alfred Appel Jr.'s Jazz Modernism.

Texas musicians and jazz share a history that goes all the way back to the origins of jazz in ragtime, blues, and boogie-woogie. Texans have left their mark on all of jazz's major movements, including hot jazz, swing, bebop, the birth of the cool, hard bop, and free jazz. Yet these musicians are seldom identified as Texans because their careers often took them to the leading jazz centers in New Orleans, Chicago, New York, Kansas City, and Los Angeles.In Texan Jazz, Dave Oliphant reclaims these musicians for Texas and explores the vibrant musical culture that brought them forth. Working through the major movements of jazz, he describes the lives, careers, and recordings of such musicians as Scott Joplin, Hersal Thomas, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Sippie Wallace, Jack Teagarden, Buster Smith, Hot Lips Page, Eddie Durham, Herschel Evans, Charlie Christian, Red Garland, Kenny Dorham, Jimmy Giuffre, Ornette Coleman, John Carter, and many others.The great strength of Texan Jazz is its record of the contributions to jazz made by African-American Texans. The first major book on this topic ever published, it will be fascinating reading for everyone who loves jazz.

The early swing era of jazz, from 1930 to 1941, represents both an extension of developments of the previous decade and an introduction of new tendencies that influenced subsequent periods of jazz history. Major big bands and individual artists established important styles that brought wide popularity to the music, while small groups created innovative approaches that determined the directions jazz would take in the years to come. This was a time marked by colorful band leaders, flashy instrumental soloists, showy orchestras, and engaging singers, and Oliphant's reference guide to this period is an invaluable source of information on its artists, methods, innovations, and recordings.Directing readers to outstanding performances available on compact disc, it serves not only as a scholarly historical and cultural overview, but also as a helpful guide for the layman. Organized in a biographical format, the volume discusses many individuals and groups that have not been considered so fully before, and provides a critical assessment of a major period in American music.

Dave Oliphant's thirteenth book of poetry, The Cowtown Circle, is divided into six sections, moving from an eclectic gathering of poems devoted to nature, topical issues, and the imprisonment of captured WWII German soldiers in Hearne, Texas, to a section of Mar a Poems (a series begun in 1976) and to sections on grandchildren and a visit to New York City, on music (classical, jazz, and Indian), on U.S. Presidents, and on a group of modernist Texas artists active during the Second World War.

Dave Oliphant is widely considered the finest poetry critic ever produced by Texas. This volume brings together some 40 years of essays, articles, and reviews on the topic of Texas poetry–its history as well as addressing individual poets and their books. Only one other book in the last two decades addressed the topic, and Generations of Texas Poets is larger, more comprehensive, and of superior literary quality. In 1971, Larry McMurtry famously descried the lack of good Texas poetry; Oliphant hasspent a lifetime nurturing it, publishing it, and has become its best critic.

A book forty-one years in the making, written between 1975 and 2016, Dave Oliphant's Mar a's Book presents what Douglas Flaherty has called "a delicately passionate record of an internationally conspired love affair. Oliphant's poems to his wife are valentines for the ages." With its publication in 2016, Mar a's Book marks the golden anniversary of Dave and Mar a's marriage.

"Written with knowledge and sympathy, the poem contains a delightful tangle of details. Lyndon Johnson, Elisabet Ney, Peter Flawn, Custer, O. Henry, and Joseph Jones (the sage of Waller Creek)--public figures and personal friends interact in the city of Oliphant's imagination....A lengthy proem, set at the grave of Stephen F. Austin in the State Cemetery, contains a brilliant passage about Austin in prison.... The oblique narration is kept on track with masterful transitions.... T]he language is carefully crafted, with interesting and often beautiful sound-play in virtually every line."--John Herndon, Austin American-Statesman

Written in tightly constructed rhymed quatrains, this is the first biography of internationally acclaimed Texas jazz trumpeter Kenny Dorham. Beginning in 1963 with Dorham's recordings in Denmark, this poetic biography traces the story of musician Kenny Dorham's career performing with the greatest legends of jazz history's bop and hard bop eras--including Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, Sonny Rollins, and John Coltrane. Also discussing extensive touring as a musician and his lamentably short-lived group the Jazz Prophets, this biography demonstrates the importance of Dorham's career.

In this book of poetry, Dave Oliphant examines the Lone Star State from border to border focusing on its history, its cities, its towns--and, especially--on its people."Oliphant, walking through the events and places of his own life, walks as well through the continuing presence of the past... F]ew of us are likely to notice a book-length poem in a meditative mode which examines one man's history and plays it against, in complex and intricate fashion, the history of his city and state...."

The travel memoirs of poet Dave Oliphant, adventuring through Brazil and Chile, containing a new series of sonnets, a "collection of reflections of a life in and in-between languages, cultures, and words...."

Hallazgo y traduccion de poesia chilena es una coleccion de escrituras que traza mas de cincuenta anos de la carrera de Dave Oliphant, aficionado y traductor de la gran tradicion de la poesia de Chile. De los veinte articulos, ensayos, resenas e introducciones en esta coleccion, tres estudios comparativos sobre Vicente Huidobro y Nicanor Parra, Parra y Miguel de Cervantes, y Enrique Lihn y Federico Garcia Lorca representan novedosas aproximaciones a las obras de estos maestros literarios. Otras piezas ofrecen un refrescante analisis de la poesia de generaciones posteriores y un tema como el jazz en su poesia. Una resena esta dedicada a Cantico cosmico, la epica del poeta nicaraguense Ernesto Cardenal, debido a la fascinacion de Oliphant por dicho genero que el mismo confiesa en un articulo escrito sobre su propia ""imagen y poesia"" y en una entrevista que poetas chilenos le realizaron al traductor, que tambien es vate tejano.

Summing Up is a new and collected manuscript of Dave Oliphant's poetry spanning his entire career from the 1959 to today. Oliphant is a translator, English professor, and world traveler. His experiences in life, literature, and love span the pages of this finely crafted collection of poetry.