Find Books
Books and articles will make up the core of your research. These textual sources contain the research of established scholars, and they can help you interpret the scores and performances you are studying. On this page, learn how to use OneSearch to find books, read about how books are organized on library shelves, and view recommended books you might consider for your research.
Finding Books in OneSearch
Use OneSearch to find books, scores, recordings, and other items held by Ball State University Libraries. OneSearch can be found at the front page of the Libraries website and operates like Google, Bing, and other search engines. Enter keywords to begin your search and then use the filters on the left side of the page to narrow down your results. Select the filter "Library Catalog" to limit your results to items owned by the Libraries, in either print or digital formats, and to eliminate web results.
To find books, select the filter "Book/eBook" under Content Type. Scrolling through results, most books will show as available either at Bracken Library and its Music Collection or as an eBook with Full Text Online. Click on the title or location of the book to see its full record, including its Summary and Contents. For print books, make note of its call number so that you can find it on the shelves. You might choose to keep a list of books either by their authors, titles, or call numbers.
For more information about OneSearch, see the research guide https://bsu.libguides.com/onesearch, or feel free to ask any Libraries staff member for help.
A call number is an item's address in a library. Just like you have a unique mailing address, each library item has its own unique call number. Also like the components of a mailing address (i.e., street name, zip code, etc.), each part of a call number means something. The first letter or two letters is called a subclass. In music, there are only three subclasses. M is the subclass for music scores. Music books are in either ML or MT. ML is the subclass for music literature while MT is the subclass for music instruction and study, so usually music education or theory. The digits which follow indicate the specific topic of the book or score within each subclass.
Typically two alphanumeric signifiers called cutters follow the subclass. Cutters often correspond to the author or composer's last name or derive from the subject or title of the work. The numbers which follow the letter then offer clues as to the next letters of that name or title. Books about Puccini, for example, might be cuttered as P8. This provides an alphabetical ordering for each topic. The final number in a call number, for example 1991, is typically the date of publication. You can practice your knowledge of call numbers with this tutorial.
The easiest way to find items in OneSearch is through a basic keyword search as described on the Getting Started tab. You might, however, choose to run an advanced search, if you are not finding your desired results through other means. Open advanced search by clicking "Advanced" either below the OneSearch dialog box or next to the magnifying glass. The main advantage of advanced search is the ability to separate terms and select fields. Use the dropdown to select field types like "Author," "Title," "Call Number," and "ISBN." Then use operators like "AND," "OR," and "NOT" to specify how your first term relates to your second. Use the plus sign to the right of the window to add terms.
In using advanced search, you unfortunately run the risk of eliminating some results before you have the chance to see them. This is especially true if you apply filters too early in your search process. For this reason, it is recommended that you wait to apply filters until after hitting search. Generally, it is better to start with too many results and then narrow them down through filters and stronger keywords, than to start with too few.
A keyword search is when you enter text of your choice into a search box, whether as a basic or advanced search. A subject search, however, uses standardized terms which are assigned to an item by librarians. These subjects are linked from record to record, so that every item with the same subject appears when you search that subject. On OneSearch, these subjects appear as red hyperlinked text and are typically found in the Details section of an item record. When you click on this text, OneSearch runs a subject search on this term to find every other record also assigned this subject.
Subject searching is useful when you wish to search comprehensively on a known term: you already found it in one record and now want to find it in others. It is also useful if your keyword fails to yield as many results as you had imagined, and it can help you determine the term more commonly used by scholars and librarians. You can also use hyperlinked text to search for every item held by a particular author or composer. Notice how subjects are structured and you will be able to modify subject searches to meet your specific needs.
How Books are Organized
The Music Collection uses Library of Congress Classification, or LCC, for organizing print books and scores on the shelves. Used in libraries worldwide, this system groups items by topic and assigns each a unique alphanumeric call number. Hint: Enter the first part of a call number into OneSearch to see all items on a given topic. Add "AND jazz" to narrow results.
Call Numbers for Jazz:
ML 385 - 429 Biography
ML 410 Composers
ML 417 Pianists
ML 419 Other instrumentalists
ML 420 Singers
ML 3506 - 3509 History and criticism. Jazz
ML 3506 General works
ML 3507 Addresses, essays, lectures
ML 3508 United States
ML 3509 Other regions or countries
ML 3518 Big band music. Dance band music
ML 3521 Blues. Rhythm and blues
ML 3530 Ragtime music
ML 3792 Individual record companies and labels
ML 3918.J39 Social and political aspects. Jazz
MT 67 Composition. Popular music
MT 68 Improvisation. Accompaniment. Transposition
MT 239 Piano. Performance of popular music
Recommended Books
The recommended books below represent a wide sampling of topics in jazz and include biographies, histories, source readings, and investigations into different genres within jazz. Perhaps one or more of these topics will inspire your next research project. Books are sorted by their call numbers for ease of browsing. Click on the info icon to see a description.
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Louis Armstrong's Hot Five and Hot Seven Recordings
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For jazz historians, Louis Armstrong's Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings mark the first revolution in the history of a music riven by upheaval. Yet few traces of this revolution can be found in the historical record of the late 1920s, when the records were made. Even black newspapers covered Armstrong as just one name among many, and descriptions of his playing, while laudatory, bear little resemblance to those of today. For this reason, the perspective of Armstrong's first listeners is usually regarded as inadequate, as if they had missed the true significance of his music. This attitude overlooks the possibility that those early listeners might have heard something valuable on its own terms, something we ourselves have lost. If we could somehow recapture their perspective-without abandoning our own-how might it change our understanding of these seminal recordings? In Louis Armstrong's Hot Five and Hot Seven Recordings, Harker selects seven exceptional records to study at length: "Cornet Chop Suey," "Big Butter and Egg Man," "Potato Head Blues," "S.O.L. Blues" / "Gully Low Blues," "Savoy Blues," and "West End Blues." The world of vaudeville and show business provide crucial context, revealing how the demands of making a living in a competitive environment could catalyze Armstrong's unique artistic gifts. Technical achievements such as virtuosity, structural coherence, harmonic improvisation, and high-register playing are all shown to have a basis in the workaday requirements of Armstrong's profession. Invoking a breadth of influences ranging from New Orleans clarinet style to Guy Lombardo, and from tap dancing to classical music, this book offers bold insights, fresh anecdotes, and, ultimately, a new interpretation of Louis Armstrong and his most influential body of recordings.
Call Number: ML419.A75 H37 2011Publication Date: 2011 -
Free Jazz, Harmolodics, and Ornette Coleman
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Free Jazz, Harmolodics, and Ornette Coleman discusses Ornette Coleman's musical philosophy of "Harmolodics," an improvisational system deeply inspired by the Civil Rights Movement. Falling under the guise of "free jazz," Harmolodics can be difficult to understand, even for seasoned musicians and musicologists. Yet this book offers a clear and thorough approach to these complex methods, outlining Coleman's position as the developer of a logical--and historically significant--system of jazz improvisation. Included here are detailed musical analyses of improvisations, accompanied by full transcriptions. Intimate interviews between the author and Coleman explore the deeper issues at work in Harmolodics, issues of race, class, sex, and poverty. The principle of human equality quickly emerges as a central tenet of Coleman's life and music. Harmolodics is best understood when viewed in its essential form, both as a theory of improvisation and as an artistic expression of racial and human equality.
Call Number: ML419.C63 R87 2017Publication Date: 2017 -
John Coltrane and Black America's Quest for Freedom: Spirituality and the Music
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John Coltrane's unique and powerful saxophonic sound is commonly recognized among jazz scholars and fans alike as having a "spiritual" nature, imbued with the performer's soul, which deeply touches musicians and listeners worldwide. This revered and respected musician created new standards, linked tradition with innovation, challenged common assumptions, and relentlessly pursued spiritual goals in his music, which he aimed openly to use as a means to help listeners see the beauty of life. More than four decades after Coltrane's death, it is this spiritual nature of the music that has kept his sound alive - and thriving - on the contemporary jazz scene. Edited by prominent jazz musician and scholar Leonard Brown, John Coltrane and Black America's Quest for Freedom is a timely exploration of Coltrane's sound and its spiritual qualities as they relate to Black American music culture and aspirations for freedom. A wide-ranging collection of essays and interviews featuring many of the most eminent figures in jazz studies and performance - Tommy Lee Lott, Anthony Brown, Herman Gray, Emmett G. Price III, Dwight Andrews, Tammy Kernodle, Salim Washington, Eric Jackson, and TJ Anderson (foreword) - the book examines the full spectrum of Coltrane's legacy. Each essay approaches this theme from a different angle, in both historical and contemporary contexts, focusing on how Coltrane became a quintessential example of the universal and enduring qualities of Black American culture. The contributors address Coltrane as the Black intellectual, the visionary master of musical syntax, the man and the media icon, and ultimately the symbol of the spiritual core of Black American music.
Call Number: ML419.C645 J63 2010Publication Date: 2010 -
Celebrating Bird: The Triumph of Charlie Parker
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Within days of Charlie "Bird" Parker's death at the age of thirty-four, a scrawled legend began appearing on walls around New York City: Bird Lives. Gone was one of the most outstanding jazz musicians of any era, the troubled genius who brought modernism to jazz and became a defining cultural force for musicians, writers, and artists of every stripe. Arguably the most significant musician in the country at the time of his death, Parker set the standard many musicians strove to reach--though he never enjoyed the same popular success that greeted many of his imitators. Today, the power of Parker's inventions resonates undiminished; and his influence continues to expand. Celebrating Bird is the groundbreaking and award-winning account of the life and legend of Charlie Parker from renowned biographer and critic Gary Giddins, whom Esquire called "the best jazz writer in America today." Richly illustrated and drawing primarily from original sources, Giddins overturns many of the myths that have grown up around Parker. He cuts a fascinating portrait of the period, from Parker's apprentice days in the 1930s in his hometown of Kansas City to the often difficult years playing clubs in New York and Los Angeles, and reveals how Parker came to embody not only musical innovation and brilliance but the rage and exhilaration of an entire generation. Fully revised and with a new introduction by the author, Celebrating Bird is a classic of jazz writing that the Village Voice heralded as "a celebration of the highest order"--a portrayal of a jazz virtuoso whose gargantuan talent was haunted by his excesses and a view into the ravishing art of one of jazz's most commanding and remarkable figures.
Call Number: ML419.P4 G5 2013Publication Date: 2013 -
The Cambridge Companion to Jazz
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The vibrant world of jazz may be viewed from many perspectives, from social and cultural history to music analysis, from economics to ethnography. It is challenging and exciting territory. This volume of nineteen specially commissioned essays provides informed and accessible guidance to the challenge, offering the reader a range of expert views on the character, history and uses of jazz. The book starts by considering what kind of identity jazz has acquired and how, and goes on to discuss the crucial practices that define jazz and to examine some specific moments of historical change and some important issues for jazz study. Finally, it looks at a set of perspectives that illustrate different 'takes' on jazz - ways in which jazz has been valued and represented.
Call Number: ML3506 .C29 2002Publication Date: 2002 -
Playing Changes: Jazz for the New Century
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One of jazz's leading critics gives us an invigorating, richly detailed portrait of the artists and events that have shaped the music of our time. Grounded in authority and brimming with style, Playing Changes is the first book to take the measure of this exhilarating moment: it is a compelling argument for the resiliency of the art form and a rejoinder to any claims about its calcification or demise. "Playing changes," in jazz parlance, has long referred to an improviser's resourceful path through a chord progression. Playing Changes boldly expands on the idea, highlighting a host of significant changes--ideological, technological, theoretical, and practical--that jazz musicians have learned to navigate since the turn of the century. Nate Chinen, who has chronicled this evolution firsthand throughout his journalistic career, vividly sets the backdrop, charting the origins of jazz historicism and the rise of an institutional framework for the music. He traces the influence of commercialized jazz education and reflects on the implications of a globalized jazz ecology. He unpacks the synergies between jazz and postmillennial hip-hop and R&B, illuminating an emergent rhythm signature for the music. And he shows how a new generation of shape-shifting elders, including Wayne Shorter and Henry Threadgill, have moved the aesthetic center of the music. Woven throughout the book is a vibrant cast of characters--from the saxophonists Steve Coleman and Kamasi Washington to the pianists Jason Moran and Vijay Iyer to the bassist and singer Esperanza Spalding--who have exerted an important influence on the scene. This is an adaptive new music for a complex new reality, and Playing Changes is the definitive guide.
Call Number: ML3506 .C54 2018Publication Date: 2018 -
The History of Jazz
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Ted Gioia's History of Jazz has been universally hailed as a classic - acclaimed by jazz critics and fans around the world. Now Gioia brings his magnificent work completely up-to-date, drawing on the latest research and revisiting virtually every aspect of the music, past and present. Gioia tells the story of jazz as it had never been told before, in a book that brilliantly portrays the legendary jazz players, the breakthrough styles, and the world in which it evolved. Here are the giants of jazz and the great moments of jazz history - Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington at the Cotton Club, cool jazz greats such as Gerry Mulligan, Stan Getz, and Lester Young, Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie's advocacy of modern jazz in the 1940s, Miles Davis's 1955 performance at the Newport Jazz Festival, Ornette Coleman's experiments with atonality, Pat Metheny's visionary extension of jazz-rock fusion, the contemporary sounds of Wynton Marsalis, and the post-modernists of the current day. Gioia provides the reader with lively portraits of these and many other great musicians, intertwined with vibrant commentary on the music they created. He also evokes the many worlds of jazz, taking the reader to the swamp lands of the Mississippi Delta, the bawdy houses of New Orleans, the rent parties of Harlem, the speakeasies of Chicago during the Jazz Age, the after hours spots of corrupt Kansas city, the Cotton Club, the Savoy, and the other locales where the history of jazz was made. And as he traces the spread of this protean form, Gioia provides much insight into the social context in which the music was born.
Call Number: ML3506 .G54 2011Publication Date: 2011 -
Keeping Time: Readings in Jazz History
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Featuring more than seventy thought-provoking selections drawn from contemporary journalism, reviews, program notes, memoirs, interviews, and other sources, Keeping Time: Readings in Jazz History, Second Edition, brings to life the controversies and critical issues that have accompanied more than 100 years of jazz history. This unique volume gives voice to a wide range of perspectives which stress different reactions to and uses of jazz, both within and across communities, enabling readers to see that jazz is not just about names, dates, and chords, but rather about issues and ideas, cultural activities, and experiences that have affected people deeply in a great variety of ways. Selections include contributions from well-known figures such as Jelly Roll Morton, Billie Holiday, Charles Mingus, Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, and Miles Davis; from renowned writers including Langston Hughes, Norman Mailer, and Ralph Ellison; and from critics and historians ranging from Gunther Schuller and Christopher Small to Sherrie Tucker and George Lipsitz. Filled with insightful writing, Keeping Time aims to increase historical awareness, to provoke critical thinking, and to encourage lively classroom discussion as students relive the intriguing story of jazz.
Call Number: ML3507 .K4 2015Publication Date: 2015 -
The Oxford Companion to Jazz
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Jazz and its colorful, expansive history resonate in this unique collection of 60 essays specially-commissioned from today's top jazz performers, writers, and scholars. Contributors include such jazz insiders as Bill Crow, Samuel A. Floyd Jr., Ted Gioia, Gene Lees, Dan Morgenstern, Gunther Schuller, Richard M. Sudhalter, and Patricia Willard. Both a reference book and an engaging read, the Companion surveys the evolution of jazz from its roots in Africa and Europe until the present. Along the way, each distinctive style and period is profiled by an expert in the field. Whether your preference is ragtime, the blues, bebop, or fusion, you will find the chief characteristics and memorable performances illuminated here with a thoroughness found in no other single-volume jazz reference. The Oxford Companion to Jazz features individual biographies of the most memorable characters of this relatively young art form. Sidney Bechet, King Oliver, Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong, Bix Beiderbecke, Bessie Smith, Duke Ellington, Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Charles Mingus, John Coltrane, and the divas of jazz song--Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, and Sarah Vaughan--come to life in thoughtful considerations of their influences, often turbulent personal lives, and signature styles. In addition, this book looks at the impact of jazz on American culture-in literature, film, television, and dance-and explores the essential instruments of jazz and their most memorable players. The Oxford Companion to Jazz will provide a quick reference source as well as a dynamic and broad overview for all lovers of jazz, from novices to aficionados.
Call Number: ML3507 .O69 200Publication Date: 2000 -
Indianapolis Jazz: The Masters, Legends, and Legacy of Indiana Avenue
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Get into the music with David Leander Williams as he charts the rise and fall of Indiana Avenue, the Majestic Entertainment Boulevard of Indianapolis, which produced some of the nation's most influential jazz artists. The performance venues that once lined the vibrant thoroughfare were an important stop on the Chitlin' Circuit and provided platforms for greats like Freddie Hubbard and Jimmy Coe. Through this biography of the bustling street, meet scores of the other musicians who came to prominence in the avenue's heyday, including trombonist J.J. Johnson and guitarist Wes Montgomery, as well as songwriters like Noble Sissle and Leroy Carr.
Call Number: ML3508.8.I3 W55 2014Publication Date: 2014 -
Ellington Uptown: Duke Ellington, James P. Johnson, and the Birth of Concert Jazz
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The story of the African American contributions to the symphonic jazz vogue of the 1920s through the 1940s. During the early decades of the twentieth century symphonic jazz involved an expansive family of music that emulated, paralleled, and intersected the jazz tradition. Though now largely forgotten, symphonic jazz was both a popular music---arranging tradition and a repertory of hybrid concert works, both of which reveled in the mildly irreverent interbreeding of white and Black and high and low music. While the roots of symphonic jazz can be traced to certain Black ragtime orchestras of the teens, the idiom came to maturation in the music of 1920s white dance bands. Through a close examination of the music of Duke Ellington and James P. Johnson, Ellington Uptown uncovers compositions that have usually fallen in the cracks between concert music, jazz, and popular music. It also places the concert works of these two iconic figures in context through an investigation both of related compositions by black and white peers and of symphonic jazz---style arrangements from a diverse number of early sound films, Broadway musicals, Harlem nightclub floor shows, and select interwar radio programs. Both Ellington and Johnson were part of a close-knit community of several generations of Harlem musicians. Older figures like Will Marion Cook, Will Vodery, W. C. Handy, and James Reese Europe were the generation of black musicians that initially broke New York entertainment's racial barriers in the first two decades of the century. By the 1920s, Cook, Vodery, and Handy had become mentors to Harlem's younger musicians. This generational connection is a key for understanding Johnson's and Ellington's ambitions to use the success of Harlem's white-oriented entertainment trade as a springboard for establishing a black concert music tradition based on Harlem jazz and popular music. John Howland is Assistant Professor of Music at Rutgers University and the cofounder and current editor-in-chief of the journal Jazz Perspectives. This work has been supported through several prestigious awards, including the Lloyd Hibberd Publication Endowment Fund of the American Musicological Society.
Call Number: ML3518 .H68 2009Publication Date: 2009
Interlibrary Loan
Users are encouraged to search for items beyond University Libraries' catalog via RILM Abstracts of Music Literature and WorldCat. Materials not available in print or online may be requested through Interlibrary Loan. Please allow up to seven days for electronic delivery and up to fourteen days for delivery of physical items.