Sweet Swing Blues on the Road: A Year with Wynton Marsalis and His Septet

Wynton Marsalis's captivating text and Frank Stewart's stunning black-and-white photographs give us a year in the life of today's premier jazz musician and composer, in a book that is itself structured like a jazz blues. Featuring jive-talking cat daddies in the Second Line, gorgeous and mysterious women in the Sweet Refrain, exotic vistas in the Bridge, and musicians, like the J-Master on piano, who live the music the way they play it. By turns lyrical, down-to-earth, exalted, and profane, here are a thrilling evocation of the experience of group improvisation, a provocative take on rap, and distinctive views on the road, romance, creativity, politics, culture, tradition and innovation, and the role of the artist in American society. The result is a fascinating self-portrait, and the next best thing to being there for every fan who has ever dreamed of traveling with the band.

The most popular and acclaimed jazz musician of his generation, Wynton Marsalis is also a distinguished classical performer, the first artist to win Grammy awards for both jazz and classical recordings. The founder of Lincoln Center's Classical Jazz Series, Marsalis is artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center Frank Stewart is a prize-winning photographer and filmmaker. His credits include Two Centuries of Black American Art and the Emmy-winning Bearden Plays Bearded.

From Wynton Marsalis, one of the most intriguing artists of our time, and award-winning photographer Frank Stewart comes a spellbinding interplay of word and image. For every fan who has ever dreamed of traveling with the band, for anyone curious about the current state of America's greatest art form, here is a book that delivers the full, heady flavor of jazz life at the end of the twentieth century. Wynton Marsalis's absorbing text and Frank Stewart's stunning duotones capture the smoky intimacy of a late-night club scene, the high-voltage excitement of a concert hall premiere, the unbuttoned byplay of the band, the communion of artist and audience in the intensity of performance, interactions with fans, red-hot debate on the tour bus, and the romantic alliances that mitigate the loneliness of the road. Here are jive-talking cat daddies in the Amen Cadence, gorgeous and mysterious women in the Sweet Refrain, exotic vistas in the Bridge, and in the Chorus musicians, like the J-Master on piano, who live the music the way they play it. Swinging as hard and true as the music itself, the result is like nothing else that has ever been published on or from the world of jazz, a book that redefines what it means to be hip in today's America.