The Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz

One night, in the late 1940's [he writes], a student from the New England Conservatory of Music came into a jazz room in Boston where Pee Wee was playing, went up to the stand, and unrolled a series of music manuscript pages. They were covered, densely, with what looked like the notes of an extraordinarily complex, ambitious classical composition. brought this for you, the young man said to Pee Wee Russell. It's one of your solos from last night. I transcribed it. Pee Wee, shaking his head, looked at the manuscript. This can't be me, he said. can't play this. The student assured Pee Wee that the transcribed solo, with its fiendishly brilliant structure and astonishingly sustained inventiveness, was indeed Russell's

Art · Art history · Jazz · Visual arts · Music Technology and Sound Studies · Musicology and Musical Analysis

• A Study of Jazz

  Lawrence Starr, Paul O W Tanner et al.•American Music•1984

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• The Making of Jazz

  Lewis Porter, James Lincoln Collier et al.•The Black Perspective in Music•1981

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