One of the Best Books of the Year: NPR, GQ, Billboard, JazzTimes In jazz parlance, “playing changes” refers to an improviser’s resourceful path through a chord progression. In this definitive guide to the jazz of our time, leading critic Nate Chinen boldly expands on that idea, taking us through the key changes, concepts, events, and people that have shaped jazz since the turn of the century—from Wayne Shorter and Henry Threadgill to Kamasi Washington and Esperanza Spalding; from the phrase “America’s classical music” to an explosion of new ideas and approaches; from claims of jazz’s demise to the living, breathing scene that exerts influence on mass culture, hip-hop, and R&B. Grounded in authority and brimming with style, packed with essential album lists and listening recommendations, Playing Changes takes the measure of this exhilarating moment—and the shimmering possibilities to come.

Named "Best Jazz Book of 2008" by The Jazz Journalists Association "2009 Award for Excellence in Historical Recorded Sound Research" by ARSC (Association for Recorded Sound Collections) Legendary African American jazz bassist and photographer Milt Hinton (1910-2000) tells his compelling life story and illustrates it with more than 260 of his photographs, exquisitely reproduced in this collectors' edition. Hinton's stories--witnessing a lynching as a child in Mississippi, working for Al Capone, breaking the color line in the recording studio--are equal to his celebrated photographs: capturing life on the road with Cab Calloway, Billie Holiday at her last recording date, and personal and professional views of icons such as Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, Aretha Franklin, Dizzy Gillespie, and Barbra Streisand. Playing the Changes draws from Hinton and Berger's earlier Bass Line, but differs significantly from that 1988 classic. Milt's narrative takes up where the earlier story left off, and more than 140 new photographs augment 115 of his best-known images. It also boasts a CD of Milt telling stories and performing music, as well as a discography and filmography.

Catherine and Darius Brubeck’s 1983 move to South Africa launched them on a journey that helped transform jazz education. Blending biography with storytelling, the pair recount their time at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, where they built a pioneering academic program in jazz music and managed and organized bands, concerts, and tours around the world. The Brubecks and the musicians faced innumerable obstacles, from the intensification of apartheid and a lack of resources to the hardscrabble lives that forced even the most talented artists to the margins. Building a program grounded in multi-culturalism, Catherine and Darius encouraged black and white musicians to explore and expand the landscape of South African jazz together Their story details the sometimes wily, sometimes hilarious problem-solving necessary to move the institution forward while offering insightful portraits of South African jazz players at work, on stage, and providing a soundtrack to the freedom struggle and its aftermath. Frank and richly detailed, Playing the Changes provides insiders’ accounts of how jazz intertwined with struggle and both expressed and resisted the bitter unfairness of apartheid-era South Africa.

A final sequence highlights the centrality of black music to African American writing, arguing that recognizing blues, gospel, and jazz as theoretically suggestive cultural practices rather than specific musical forms points to what is most distinctive in twentieth-century African American writing: its ability to subvert attempts to limit its engagement with psychological, historical, political, or aesthetic realities.

Playing the Changes on the Jazz Metaphor proposes an expanded view of the jazz metaphor in a broadened perspective that embraces a wide range of possibilities in organizational, management, and marketing-related themes. This monograph presents a new Typology of Jazz Musicians based on different kinds of artistic offerings. This typology will combine three key distinctions or dimensions to construct a twelve-fold classification that - when extended to the sphere of organizational behavior and business strategy as a Typology of Management and Marketing Styles - will shed light on different ways in which the jazz metaphor relates to organizational design, business practice, management skills, and marketing opportunities. In order to describe these typologies, the author examines important aspects of a first-level jazz metaphor as it relates to organizational issues involved in shaping the jazz improvisation into a form of collective collaboration. This is followed by attention to a second-level linguistic metaphor based on viewing jazz as a kind of language at the foundation for a collaborative conversation.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Discover the game-changing theory of the cycles of history and what past generations can teach us about living through times of upheaval—with deep insights into the roles that Boomers, Generation X, and Millennials have to play—now with a new preface by Neil Howe. First comes a High, a period of confident expansion. Next comes an Awakening, a time of spiritual exploration and rebellion. Then comes an Unraveling, in which individualism triumphs over crumbling institutions. Last comes a Crisis—the Fourth Turning—when society passes through a great and perilous gate in history. William Strauss and Neil Howe will change the way you see the world—and your place in it. With blazing originality, The Fourth Turning illuminates the past, explains the present, and reimagines the future. Most remarkably, it offers an utterly persuasive prophecy about how America’s past will predict what comes next. Strauss and Howe base this vision on a provocative theory of American history. The authors look back five hundred years and uncover a distinct pattern: Modern history moves in cycles, each one lasting about the length of a long human life, each composed of four twenty-year eras—or “turnings”—that comprise history’s seasonal rhythm of growth, maturation, entropy, and rebirth. Illustrating this cycle through a brilliant analysis of the post–World War II period, The Fourth Turning offers bold predictions about how all of us can prepare, individually and collectively, for this rendezvous with destiny.

Art Since the ’80s, a new series from Reaktion Books, seeks to offer compelling surveys of popular themes in contemporary art. In the first book in the series, Gill Perry reveals how the house and the idea of home have inspired a range of imaginative and playful works by artists across the globe. Exploring how artists have engaged with this theme in different contexts—from mobile homes and beach houses to haunted houses and broken homes—Playing at Home shows that our relationship with houses involves complex responses in which gender, race, class, and status overlap, and that through these relationships we turn a house into a home. Perry looks at the works of numerous artists, including Tracey Emin, Rachel Whiteread, Michael Landy, Mike Kelley, and Peter Garfield, as well as the work of artists who travel across continents and see home as a shifting notion, such as Do-Ho-Suh and Song Dong. She also engages with the work of philosophers and cultural theorists from Walter Benjamin and Gaston Bachelard to Johan Huizinga and Henri Lefebvre, who inform our understanding of living and dwelling. Ultimately, she argues that irony, parody, and play are equally important in our interpretations of these works on the home. With over one hundred images, Playing at Home covers a wide range of art and media in a fascinating look at why there’s no place like home.