January 2009 Update

January 2009 Update Newsletter

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As America inaugurates a new president, we here at ejazzlines once again renew our vow to preserve, protect and defend jazz to the best of our ability, and to continue to faithfully execute excellent service to all of you with the goal of creating a better jazz world. Our bipartisan efforts will continue throughout 2009 and the foreseeable future, and we continue our march through January with another excellent selection of new items, with the latter part of this month being especially strong in the new book and arrangement areas.

Jazz Lines Publications continues its growth, now presenting a library of 34 wonderful charts to choose from. Minor League and New Girl as arranged by Duke Pearson have recently joined the ever-expanding Jazz Lines family of classics. We will be publishing all of Duke Pearson's arrangements directly from the original manuscripts - these are not transcriptions! We have many, many more exciting new tunes in the works, and we will keep everyone updated on a regular basis as to what is new and what is coming soon.

January's newest items feature Chuck Sher's latest, The Jazz Singer's Guidebook and The Real Easy Ear Training Book. Hal Leonard has just released three more play-alongs, Jazz at the Lounge, Latin Jazz Standards, and Motown Classics. The folks at Berklee have just published Berklee Jazz Piano, sure to be an instant-classic text. Jamey Aebersold's latest is Bebop Scales, a budget priced book for all musicians. New DVDs feature last week's re-release of the Keith Jarrett Trio live in Tokyo, which contains the two now-deleted DVDs, Live At Open Theater East 1993 and Trio Concert 1996. We also have several new educational DVDs, ranging from Brian Auger's Mastery of the Hammond B-3 to the ever-popular Anton Fig's In the Groove.

New DVDs:
First off, we again have The World of Maynard Ferguson DVD! We unexpectedly received a shipment of what we have been told are the last copies that will be available of this limited edition, so we encourage all of the Maynard fans who do not have this classic DVD not to wait too long! January's most recent include the new Keith Jarrett DVD, which makes two of his very popular live video performances available again. This is sure to be a treat for the many fans of the legendary virtuoso. In addition to the Auger and Fig DVDs, we also have new DVD guitar lessons from Stefan Grossman, Pat Bergeson, and Greg Howe, as well as several from Guitar World. We have drum-focused DVDs from Henrique De Almeida, Russ Miller, and Robin Dimaggio. And for those of you who are constantly looking to add new elements to your knowledge and repertoire, we have Learn the Art of Playing Tabla. We again remind everyone of December's best, Sophie Milman's first live DVD, and Alfonso Ponticelli and Swing Gitan's Gypsy Jazz Odyssey.

New Books:
January has seen the release of quite a few excellent new items, led by Sher Music's newest. The Jazz Singer's Guidebook is a comprehensive guide to improving your jazz singing. The Real Easy Ear Training Book is designed to help anyone improve their ear, and their playing and overall musicianship as well. These two new books appear destined to join many others of Chuck's publications as indispensable items. Berklee Jazz Piano is a course from legendary educator Ray Santisi, and with these names attached to it, it speaks for itself! Bebop Scales intends to help players shape their scales in a more bebop-ish direction. The Lounge, Latin, and Motown play-alongs continue Hal Leonard's invaluable effort to create a play-along library which molds just about every style into a jazz experience. 20 Tunes in Basic Style for Clarinet, 44 Magnum Drills for Trumpet, Eight Essentials of Drumming, and the Four-Fret Concept are among the best of the new educational books we have just added to our site. The very best of early January have proved to be very popular, and were led by Oscar Peterson Classic Trio Performances and David Liebman Transcriptions.

New Big Band Arrangements:
We just released the second arrangement in our new Duke Pearson series: Minor League - last month we released New Girl. Minor League was recorded in 1968 on the 'Now Hear This' record for Blue Note and featured a cast of incredible players including Frank Foster, Marvin Stamm, Garnett Brown, Jerry Dodgion, Pepper Adams, Bob Cranshaw, and of course, pianist/arranger/conductor Duke Pearson. This up-tempo swing chart will certainly bring out the best of your players. Based around a C minor blues, this advanced-level arrangement features beautifully contrasting sectional interplay as well as punchy brass. A strong reading drummer is essential to carry this off. We have also added a bunch of new Eric Richards arrangements including Cherokee, Doxy, It's All Right with Me, Lush Life, and You Don't Know What Love Is.

New Release Summary:
In our eternal effort to present a veritable cornucopia of the newest and best jazz-related items available, as of this newsletter we have added a total of 153 new CDs for the month of January 2009 and 128 for the month of December 2008; 21 new DVDs for January 2009 and 9 for December 2008; 54 new music books for January 2009 and 24 for December 2008; 48 new big band and combo arrangements for the month of January 2009 and 10 for the month of December 2008.

In our DVD section, we now carry a truly amazing total of over 1,725 jazz DVDs! We have all of the live performance DVDs, the documentaries, the method DVDs, the personal master classes - we proudly offer a selection of jazz and jazz-related DVDs that is second to none.

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

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.

We are Rob and Doug at ejazzlines and we thank you once again for your continued generosity and support.