Straight Life (book)
''Straight Life: The Story of Art Pepper'' is the autobiography of jazz saxophonist Art Pepper written with his wife, Laurie Pepper. It was published in 1979 by Schirmer Books. Background In April, 1972, musician Art Pepper agreed to tell the story of his life to his wife, Laurie Pepper. Although he quickly lost interest in the process, she used her privileged position to keep him answering her questions for seven years. Using the standard oral history techniques of modern anthropology, she tape recorded, transcribed, re-interviewed, and edited that material, also interviewing "relatives, acquaintances, and friends" to assemble and present often contradictory accounts. Contents The book is mainly a description of events in Art Pepper's life. He details his early sexual anxiety; his turning to alcohol, marijuana and harder drugs, leading to periods in prison; marriage and divorce; developing racism; and addiction treatment at Synanon.Gary Giddins, Giddins, Gary (February 18, 1980) ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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WikiProject Books
A WikiProject, or Wikiproject, is a Wikimedia movement affinity group for contributors with shared goals. WikiProjects are prevalent within the largest wiki, Wikipedia, and exist to varying degrees within sister projects such as Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikidata, and Wikisource. They also exist in different languages, and translation of articles is a form of their collaboration. During the COVID-19 pandemic, CBS News noted the role of Wikipedia's WikiProject Medicine in maintaining the accuracy of articles related to the disease. Another WikiProject that has drawn attention is WikiProject Women Scientists, which was profiled by '' Smithsonian'' for its efforts to improve coverage of women scientists which the profile noted had "helped increase the number of female scientists on Wikipedia from around 1,600 to over 5,000". On Wikipedia Some Wikipedia WikiProjects are substantial enough to engage in cooperative activities with outside organizations relevant to the field at issue. For e ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Art Pepper
Arthur Edward Pepper Jr. (September 1, 1925 – June 15, 1982) was an American alto saxophonist and very occasional tenor saxophonist and clarinetist. Active in West Coast jazz, Pepper came to prominence in Stan Kenton's big band. He was known for his emotionally charged performances and several stylistic shifts throughout his career, and was described by critic Scott Yanow as having "attained his goal of becoming the world's great altoist" at the time of his death. Early life Art Pepper was born in Gardena, California, United States.Dupuis, Robert. "Art Pepper." ''Contemporary Musicians: Profiles of the People in Music.'' Vol. 18. Detroit, MI: Gale Research, 1997. 164-67. Print. His mother was a 14-year-old runaway; his father, a merchant seaman. Both were violent alcoholics, and when Pepper was still quite young, he was sent to live with his paternal grandmother. He expressed early musical interest and talent, and he was given lessons. He began playing clarinet at nine, switc ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Schirmer Books
G. Schirmer, Inc. is an American classical music publishing company based in New York City, founded in 1861. The oldest active music publisher in the United States, Schirmer publishes sheet music for sale and rental, and represents some well-known European music publishers in North America, such as the Music Sales Affiliates ChesterNovello, Breitkopf & Härtel, Sikorski and many Russian and former Soviet composers' catalogs. History The company was founded in 1861 in the United States by German-born Gustav Schirmer Sr. (1829–1893), the son of a German immigrant. In 1891, the company established its own engraving and printing plant. The next year it inaugurated the Schirmer's Library of Musical Classics. ''The Musical Quarterly,'' the oldest academic journal on music in the U.S., was founded by Schirmer in 1915 together with musicologist Oscar Sonneck, who edited the journal until his death in 1928. In 1964, Schirmer acquired Associated Music Publishers (BMI) which had buil ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Jazz
Jazz is a music genre that originated in the African-American communities of New Orleans, Louisiana in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with its roots in blues and ragtime. Since the 1920s Jazz Age, it has been recognized as a major form of musical expression in traditional and popular music. Jazz is characterized by swing and blue notes, complex chords, call and response vocals, polyrhythms and improvisation. Jazz has roots in European harmony and African rhythmic rituals. As jazz spread around the world, it drew on national, regional, and local musical cultures, which gave rise to different styles. New Orleans jazz began in the early 1910s, combining earlier brass band marches, French quadrilles, biguine, ragtime and blues with collective polyphonic improvisation. But jazz did not begin as a single musical tradition in New Orleans or elsewhere. In the 1930s, arranged dance-oriented swing big bands, Kansas City jazz (a hard-swinging, bluesy, improvisationa ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Synanon
Synanon is a US-founded social organization created by Charles E. "Chuck" Dederich Sr. in 1958 in Santa Monica, California, United States. It is currently active in Germany. Originally established as a drug rehabilitation program, by the early 1960s, Synanon became an alternative community centered on group truth-telling sessions that came to be known as the "Synanon Game," a form of attack therapy.''Helping People Change: A Textbook of Methods'', Page 508., Frederick H. Kanfer, Arnold P. Goldstein, , 1980, Pergamon Press The group ultimately became a cult called the Church of Synanon in the 1970s. Synanon disbanded in 1991 due to members being convicted of criminal activities (including attempted murder) and retroactive loss of its tax-exempt status with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) due to financial misdeeds, destruction of evidence, and terrorism. It has been called one of the "most dangerous and violent cults America had ever seen." Beginnings Charles Dederich, a me ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Gary Giddins
Gary Giddins is an American jazz critic and author. He wrote for ''The Village Voice'' from 1973; his "Weather Bird" column ended in 2003. In 1986 Gary Giddins and John Lewis created the American Jazz Orchestra which presented concerts using a jazz repertory with musicians such as Tony Bennett. For five years, Giddins was the executive director of the Leon Levy Center for Biography at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Selected works Books *''Riding on a Blue Note'' (1981) *''Rhythm-a-ning'' (1985) *''Celebrating Bird'' (1987) *''Satchmo'' (1988) *''Faces in the Crowd'' (1992) *''Visions of Jazz: The First Century'' (1998) *''Bing Crosby: A Pocketful of Dreams - The Early Years, 1903-1940'' (2001) *''Weather Bird'' (2004) *''Natural Selection'' (2006) *''Jazz'' (2009) *''Warning Shadows: Home Alone with Classic Cinema'' (2010) *''Bing Crosby: Swinging on a Star - The War Years, 1940-1946'' (2018) Films *1987 ''Celebrating Bird: The Triumph of Charlie Parker ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Whitney Balliett
Whitney Lyon Balliett (17 April 1926 – 1 February 2007) was a jazz critic and book reviewer for ''The New Yorker'' and was with the journal from 1954 until 2001. Biography Born in Manhattan and raised in Glen Cove, Long Island, Balliett attended Phillips Exeter Academy, where he learned to play drums in a band he summed up as "baggy Dixieland"; he played summer gigs at a Center Island yacht club. He was drafted into the Army in 1946, interrupting his freshman year at Cornell University, to which he returned to finish his degree in 1951 and where he was a member of Delta Phi fraternity. He then took a job at ''The New Yorker'', where he was hired by Katherine White, one of the magazine's fiction editors. He went on to write more than 550 signed pieces for ''The New Yorker'', as well as many anonymous pieces. Acclaimed for his literary writing style, Balliett died on 1 February 2007, aged 80, from cancer Cancer is a group of diseases involving abnormal cell growth ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Lewis Porter
Lewis Robert Porter (born May 14, 1951) is an American jazz pianist, composer, author, and educator. Education and career Porter was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, but raised primarily in the Bronx in New York City. Porter decided at age 10 that he wanted to be a musician, and took violin lessons from about age 10 to 12, then taught himself at the family's upright piano, eventually taking some lessons in college and afterward. Porter earned a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology from the University of Rochester in 1972, and, while there, studied music at Eastman. He went on to earn a Master of Education in Counseling from Northeastern University in 1976, followed by a master's degree in Music Theory from Tufts University in 1979, under T. J. Anderson, his primary mentor. In 1983, Porter received his Ph.D. in Musicology from Brandeis University, where he studied under Joshua Rifkin. He first taught at Tufts University, jazz history, part-time, starting in January 1977. (This led to hi ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Jonathan Yardley
Jonathan Yardley (born October 27, 1939) was the book critic at ''The Washington Post'' from 1981 to December 2014, and held the same post from 1978 to 1981 at the ''Washington Star''. In 1981, he received the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. Background and education Yardley was born on October 27, 1939 in Pittsburgh and spent his childhood in Chatham, Virginia. His father, William Woolsey Yardley, was a teacher of English and the classics, as well as an Episcopal minister and a headmaster at two East Coast private schools. His mother was Helen Gregory Yardley. Yardley graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. There, he was a member of St. Anthony Hall and was the editor of the student newspaper, ''The Daily Tar Heel'', in 1961. Career After leaving Chapel Hill, Yardley interned at the ''New York Times'' as assistant to James Reston, the columnist and Washington Bureau chief. From 1964 to 1974, Yardley worked as an editorial writer and book reviewer at t ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Terry Castle
Terry Castle (born October 18, 1953) is an American literary scholar. Once described by Susan Sontag as "the most expressive, most enlightening literary critic at large today," she has published eight books, including the anthology ''The Literature of Lesbianism'', which won the Lambda Literary Editor's Choice Award. She writes on topics ranging from 18th-century ghost stories to World War I-era lesbianism to the so-called "photographic fringe." The daughter of British parents, Castle was born in San Diego and lived in England and Southern California as a child. She attended the University of Puget Sound and graduated in 1975 with a B.A. in English. She went on to attend the University of Minnesota to get her Ph.D. in English. A longtime resident of San Francisco, Castle is currently Walter A. Haas Professor in the Humanities at Stanford University. Her wife is Blakey Vermeule, also a professor at Stanford. Starting around 2000, Castle increasingly began to write more widely ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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1979 Non-fiction Books
Events January * January 1 ** United Nations Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim heralds the start of the '' International Year of the Child''. Many musicians donate to the '' Music for UNICEF Concert'' fund, among them ABBA, who write the song '' Chiquitita'' to commemorate the event. ** The United States and the People's Republic of China establish full diplomatic relations. ** Following a deal agreed during 1978, France, French carmaker Peugeot completes a takeover of American manufacturer Chrysler's Chrysler Europe, European operations, which are based in United Kingdom, Britain's former Rootes Group factories, as well as the former Simca factories in France. * January 7 – Cambodian–Vietnamese War: The People's Army of Vietnam and Vietnamese-backed Kampuchean United Front for National Salvation, Cambodian insurgents announce the fall of Phnom Penh, Cambodia, and the collapse of the Pol Pot regime. Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge retreat west to an area along the Thailand, Th ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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American Autobiographies
American(s) may refer to: * American, something of, from, or related to the United States of America, commonly known as the "United States" or "America" ** Americans, citizens and nationals of the United States of America ** American ancestry, people who self-identify their ancestry as "American" ** American English, the set of varieties of the English language native to the United States ** Native Americans in the United States, indigenous peoples of the United States * American, something of, from, or related to the Americas, also known as "America" ** Indigenous peoples of the Americas * American (word), for analysis and history of the meanings in various contexts Organizations * American Airlines, U.S.-based airline headquartered in Fort Worth, Texas * American Athletic Conference, an American college athletic conference * American Recordings (record label), a record label previously known as Def American * American University, in Washington, D.C. Sports teams Soccer * ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |