Book: Howard Mandel

Howard Mandel: Miles, Ornette, Cecil, Jazz Beyond Jazz (Routledge). Our fellow artsjournal.com blogger also calls his web log Jazz Beyond Jazz. His book further increases listeners' ability to understand the avant garde music he knows so well. Mandel helps clear the way toward appreciation of Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor, who departed from standard jazz forms in the 1950s, and of Miles Davis's quite different departure in the '60s. It is a successor to and, in a way, a continuation of A.B. Spellman's classic Four Lives In The Bebop Business (retitled--dully--Four Jazz Lives).