About this item
Experiencing Jazz demonstrates how the act of listening to jazz takes place on a deeply personal level and takes readers on a whirlwind tour of the genre, instrument by instrument - offering not only brief portraits of key musicians like Joe Lovano and John Scofield, but also their own commentaries on how best to experience their music
About the Author
MICHAEL STEPHANS, Ph.D., leads three distinct professional lives
He is an author, a free-lance writer, and an award-winning poet. His recent book, "Experiencing Jazz: A Listener's Companion," (Scarecrow Press/Rowman & Littlefield) has been lauded by Publisher's Weekly as a "groundbreaking book [which] reframes [the] ever-evolving, distinctly human art of jazz and invites readers to relearn how to listen....At the heart of the book, readers are invited onto the bandstand to listen to personal accounts and legendary jazz stories." Also gracing the book's pages are a foreword by esteemed jazz writer Doug Ramsey and a preface by NEA Jazz Master and renowned musician/composer David Liebman.
Dr. Stephans is also a prominent performing artist, whose long list of jazz credits includes concerts and/or recordings with such luminaries as Bob Brookmeyer, Dave Liebman, Marc Copland, Bennie Maupin, Pharaoh Sanders, and Grammy winners Joe Lovano, John Patitucci, and Alan Broadbent.
As an educator, Dr. Stephans is current on the faculty at Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania, where he teaches technical and professional writing. Past institutional affiliations have included Pasadena City College, California State University-Northridge, Woodbury University, and the University of California at Los Angeles.
Dr. Stephans' new book - his second for Rowman & Littlefield - is called "Experiencing Ornette Coleman: A Listener's Companion," and was published in October 2017. The aim of this book is to introduce Ornette Coleman to a wider audience, in a humanistic and wholly accessible way. It includes interviews with a number of prominent musicians who played with Coleman, as well as an interview with legendary saxophone colossus, Sonny Rollins, who was one of Coleman's earliest supporters.
