I'm excited today to announce the release of my first book Conceptualizing the Jazz Piano Trio: Interviews and Analysis with Nine Jazz Legends. Interviewees include Fred Hersch, Joanne Brackeen, Eric Reed, Rufus Reid, Chuck Israels, Richard Davis, Peter Erskine, Jeff Ballard, and Jeff Hamilton.
It's available as an e-book from multiple online stores. Here are the links:
Amazon: Conceptualizing the Jazz Piano Trio: Interviews and Analysis with Nine Jazz Legends
The affordable price is only $2.99 at all of these retailers. If you purchase a copy and like it, please leave a positive review at one or more of the sites. Positive reviews do the most in terms of promoting future sales.
If you are a regular reader of my blog, you have already read the analysis section of my dissertation-turned-book here: Conceptualizing the Jazz Piano Trio.
The frustrating thing about writing a dissertation- and school in general- is that in order to specialize, one must ignore so much "non-relevant" data. Not only did I delete more than half of the quotes I originally used in my analysis section, but because of the scope of the research I was kept from addressing some of the most important parts of the conversations.
Read what bassist Chuck Israels said in the middle of our interview:
"Are you getting this stuff down somewhere?... Because this is, this is the real stuff."
These enthusiastic moments weren't uncommon, and regrettably the "real stuff" often didn't make it into the analysis section. I believe there is tremendous value in the artists' responses with or without my analysis. For this reason, I'm publishing the entire work with the complete interview transcriptions which, in print, represents nearly 200 pages of articulate, thought-provoking commentary about the interactions, expectations, and beliefs about jazz piano trios.
It is my hope that this work will bring insight and joy to those who- like myself- ardently love jazz piano trios.
