Riding On A Blue Note: Jazz And American Pop

Gary Giddins, winner of the 1998 National Book Critics Circle Award, has a following that includes not only jazz enthusiasts but also pop music fans of every stripe. Writing here in a lyrical and celebratory style all his own, Giddins dazzlingly shows us among many other things how performers originally perceived as radical (Bing Crosby, Count Basie, Elvis Presley) became conservative institutions . . . how Charlie Parker created a masterpiece from the strain of an inane ditty . . . how the Dominoes helped combine church ritual with pop music . . . and how Irving Berlin translated a chiaroscuro of Lower East Side minorities into imperishable songs.

Gary Giddins wrote the Weather Bird jazz column in the Village Voice for over 30 years and later directed the Leon Levy Center for Biography at the CUNY Graduate Center. He received the National Nook Critics Circle Award, the Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award, and the Bell Atlantic Award for Visions of Jazz: The First Century in 1998.

His other books include Bing Crosby: A Pocketful of Dreams-The Early Years, 1930-1940, which won the Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award and the ARSC Award for Excellence in Historical Sound Research; Weatherbird: Jazz at the Dawn of Its Second Century; Faces in the Crowd; Natural Selection; Warning Shadow; and biographies of Louis Armstrong and Charlie Parker. He has won six ASCAP-Deems Taylor Awards, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Peabody Award in Broadcasting. He lives in New York, NY.