Pre-Holiday Newsletter

Pre-Holiday 2008 Newsletter

Click here to view this newsletter online

We wish everyone in the US a most wonderful Thanksgiving week, and to our friends all over the rest of the world, we send early holiday greetings! ejazzlines is back to let everyone know that we have an incredible selection of new items to close out the month of November. We have many exciting brand new items to suggest as holiday gifts, as well as many popular and proven products, and a special limited-time clearance page as well, loaded with CDs, DVDs, books and charts at incredible prices. We will be back again in two weeks, with our December Newsletter going out on the 8th, and we will do our very best to hunt, gather, search, excavate, and spelunk for as many great jazz-related gifts as we can find.

Late November's newest and most interesting offerings are clearly the first two Masterclass DVDs from New York City's Roberto's Winds. We are very proud to be among the first to offer these DVDs containing live performances and Masterclasses from legends David Liebman and Joe Lovano. Both of these men are among the greatest players in the world, and their educational legacies are vastly impressive as well. These DVDs are in stock and ready to ship, and surely will make wonderful gifts for students and non-students alike, and fans and players of all ages and skill levels. We have many other DVDs and books from these gentlemen, and based on their success and popularity, we know that these two new ones will be among our most popular and sought-after items.

Jazz Lines Publications comes to the end of our first year with a growing catalog of 30 charts, and we thank everyone very sincerely for making our latest two offerings, Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters' Mele Kalikimaka and Count Basie's rockin' Jingle Bells, instant successes. We hope that people are enjoying these tunes at the varied locales to which we have appreciatively sent them. We promise to continue to offer more and more classic arrangements, many never before available, and we will let everyone know on a regular basis what is new and forthcoming. And, please keep in mind that we do work with dealers, so if you would like your local music shop to carry our charts, please have them get in touch with us.

Along with the Masterclass DVDs, we also have a new DVD with a pairing for the ages: Wynton Marsalis and Willie Nelson (Miles Davis loved Willie, so this isnt that strange!); Sher Music's first DVD offering, Michael Spiro's Introduction to the Conga Drum; a brand new Sonny Rollins transcription book; Hal Leonard's very first play-along CDs to accompany Volume 1 of their popular (and completely legal and accurate) Real Books; and quite a few more new things, so please check out the various sections below. Once again, we also mention the Jazz Icons DVDs, perhaps the best holiday gifts for any jazz-lover. All three series, both individually and in the box sets, are in stock and ready to ship, all at discounted prices.

New Big Band Arrangements:

If you're preparing for a holiday concert, we've got some suggestions for you to make your concert programming a little easier. We have recently published Count Basie's Jingle Bells, a raucous chart that has been featured on many holiday compilations. Another great holiday chart is Mele Kalikimaka. This Christmas classic was written in 1946 and became a major hit for the unbeatable combination of Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters in 1949. Another very popular Andrews Sisters holiday arrangement is their classic Jingle Bells. Other vocal charts perfect for your holiday concert include: Here Comes Santa Claus, What Are You Doing New Year's Eve, Home for the Holidays, Santa Baby, and Baby It's Cold Outside. On the instrumental side, we have an arrangement of the the amazingly popular song from Charlie Brown Christmas Time Is Here, John Clayton's new arrangement of Jingle Bells, John Berry's new arrangement of The Christmas Waltz, Ellington's Sugar Rum Cherry (based on part of the Nutcracker), Guy Lombardo's classic Auld Lang Syne, and a chart on the song Hot Chocolate from the movie The Polar Express.

New DVDs:

November's most recent DVDs are led off the aforementioned David Liebman and Joe Lovano Masterclasses, and we are rarely as proud of offering items as we are of these two. Willie Nelson and Wynton Marsalis Live together offer an incredibly unique performance, and between them they represent decades at the highest levels of creating American music, which the playing and commentary on this DVD clearly demonstrate. Chuck Sher has just released Introduction to the Conga Drum, a wonderful companion piece to Michael Spiro's Conga Drummer's Guidebook. Michael is world-renowned for his conga skills, and this DVD should be a welcome addition to the library of any Latin percussionist or drummer who wishes to broaden their repertoire of skills. We also highly recommend some of early November's best, which include live DVDs from Sonny Rollins, David Murray, The Crusaders, Chick Corea, Sheryl Bailey, Tommy Emmanuel, and Bob Cooper, and an exceptionally wide variety of educational DVDs ranging from Manolo Badrena and Zoro on drums and percussion to David Gilmour, Keith Wyatt, and Stevie Ray Vaughan on guitar. Finally, we also have two volumes of DVDs/books focusing on walking bass lines from bassist extraordinaire Todd Johnson.

New Books:

November's late additions feature Hal Leonard's newest, the Best of Sonny Rollins, a book of transcriptions from this towering giant of the tenor saxophone. As previously mentioned, we now are offering four different alphabetically-arranged sets of play-along CDs to accompany Volume 1 of Hal Leonard's Real Books, and we anticipate these becoming instant-classic items. Mel Bay has just published Stephane Grappelli: Gypsy Jazz Violin, a guide to the style of this truly one-of-a-kind virtuoso. We also have a new collection of Frank Sinatra's greatest, Nothing But the Best, as well as a new Andrew Lloyd Webber jazz play-along. The Real Christmas Book, a fake book loaded with holiday classics released earlier this month, has been literally jumping off the shelves, and this is one of the best books imaginable for a musician around the holidays, along with Jamey Aebersold's newest, the Christmas Carol Classics play-along, Volume 125 in their series. Alfred's new Volume 2 of their Sittin in With the Big Band Series and Howard Morgen's Through Chord Melody and Beyond have also proved to be very popular. In addition, we have a huge variety of others including the Motown Hits play-along, several jazz piano solos books, some new Flamenco instructional guides, a selection of new holiday-themed choices, and many more for a variety of instruments and styles.

New Release Summary:
In our effort to present everything that is relevant and crucial, as of this newsletter we have added a total of 149 new CDs for the month November 2008 and 65 for the month of October 2008; 52 new DVDs for November 2008 and 21 for October 2008; 97 new music books for November 2008 and 45 for October 2008; 27 new big band and combo arrangements for the month of November 2008 and 41 for the month of October 2008.

If you haven't visited our Imports and Rarities section lately, please check it out. We are now stocking more and more obscure, rare, and hard-to-find titles from Japan and Europe, including many titles that you may not be able to find elsewhere.

In our DVD section, we now carry over 1,725 jazz DVDs!

Please keep in mind that many of our new releases are available in limited quantities. We do our best to predict demand and fill orders as quickly as possible, but we do run out of new releases. Even if we run out of stock, almost everything featured in this newsletter should be available to ship within 5-7 days; some imports may take 2-3 weeks.

As the holidays approach, we again take the opportunity to thank all of you from the over 85 countries our products have shipped to, for helping us to grow and for showing us the right path to make you happy. We vow to continue our efforts to offer the best selection and one-stop source for jazz and related styles of recordings, DVDs, charts, and educational materials. We are always here for all of you and we truly appreciate all of the support we continue to receive. Please accept our continued gratitude for your support, and please let us know anytime what we are doing right and what we need to improve.

We are Rob and Doug at ejazzlines and we are looking very forward to this Thursday.