With dreams of building a vast steel production operation, Memphis planter Enoch Ensley founded a city in the wooded valley at the heart of Jefferson County, Alabama. He named the city Ensley, after himself, and established the Ensley Land Company to acquire and develop 4,000 acres for industrial facilities and a town. As field workers left their farms to work in steel mills and businesses sprang up on the valley floor, Ensley became a diverse place of hopes and desires. A strong community of churches, businesses, civic clubs, and neighborhoods developed around the factories and railroads. Jazz music was the social thread of Ensleys African American community, known as Tuxedo Junction. Musicians such as Erskine Hawkins famously mastered the style. The annexation of Ensley into Birmingham established the Magic City as the largest and wealthiest in Alabama and the heart of the Southern steel manufacturing economy.

With dreams of building a vast steel production operation, Memphis planter Enoch Ensley founded a city in the wooded valley at the heart of Jefferson County, Alabama. He named the city Ensley, after himself, and established the Ensley Land Company to acquire and develop 4,000 acres for industrial facilities and a town. As field workers left their farms to work in steel mills and businesses sprang up on the valley floor, Ensley became a diverse place of hopes and desires. A strong community of churches, businesses, civic clubs, and neighborhoods developed around the factories and railroads. Jazz music was the social thread of Ensley's African American community, known as Tuxedo Junction. Musicians such as Erskine Hawkins famously mastered the style. The annexation of Ensley into Birmingham established the "Magic City" as the largest and wealthiest in Alabama and the heart of the Southern steel manufacturing economy.

Magic City is the story of one of American music's essential unsung places: Birmingham, Alabama, birthplace of a distinctive and influential jazz heritage. In a telling replete with colorful characters, iconic artists, and unheralded masters, Burgin Mathews reveals how Birmingham was the cradle and training ground for such luminaries as big band leader Erskine Hawkins, cosmic outsider Sun Ra, and a long list of sidemen, soloists, and arrangers. He also celebrates the contributions of local educators, club owners, and civic leaders who nurtured a vital culture of Black expression in one of the country's most notoriously segregated cities. In Birmingham, jazz was more than entertainment: long before the city emerged as a focal point in the national civil rights movement, its homegrown jazz heroes helped set the stage, crafting a unique tradition of independence, innovation, achievement, and empowerment. Blending deep archival research and original interviews with living elders of the Birmingham scene, Mathews elevates the stories of figures like John T. "Fess" Whatley, the pioneering teacher-bandleader who emphasized instrumental training as a means of upward mobility and community pride. Along the way, he takes readers into the high school band rooms, fraternal ballrooms, vaudeville houses, and circus tent shows that shaped a musical movement, revealing a community of players whose influence spread throughout the world.

(Faber Piano Adventures ). ChordTime Piano Jazz & Blues is a fun-filled collection of jazz standards and appealing blues. The selections motivate students to play while providing valuable practice with rhythm and chords. As the title ChordTime suggests, the emphasis of this book is on the student's mastery of I, IV, and V7 chords. The pieces are arranged in the keys of C, G, and F with valuable warm-up exercises for each key. Songs include: Tea for Two * Baby Face * Tuxedo Junction * Ain't Misbehavin' * and more.

"Categorizing Sound addresses the relationship between categories of music and categories of people: in other words, how do particular ways of organizing sound become integral parts of whom we perceive ourselves to be and of how we feel connected to some people and disconnected from others? After an introduction that discusses the key theoretical concepts to be deployed, Categorizing Sound presents a series of case studies that range from foreign music, race music, and old-time music in the 1920s up through country and rhythm and blues in the 1980s. Each chapter focuses not so much on the musical contents of these genres as on the process of 'gentrification' through which these categories are produced."--Provided by publisher.

Reveals the rich, untold story of the evolution of American jazz music and how the inhabitants of Charleston, South Carolina, had a huge impact on the music as we know it today. Original.

(Faber Piano Adventures ). FunTime Piano Jazz & Blues provides an entertaining collection of pieces from the jazz/blues idiom. The book is perfect for the Level 3 student interested in exploring this style. It consists of easy arrangements of jazz and blues standards as well as delightful original compositions that are sure to motivate and entertain any student.

18 profiles of lively contributors to jazz and popular music.