Showing titles in History & Criticism

Black Music is a book about the brilliant young jazz musicians of the early 1960s: John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Archie Shepp, Sun Ra, and others. It is composed of essays, reviews, interviews, liner notes, musical analyses, and personal impressions from 1959-1967. Also includes Amiri Baraka's reflections in a 2009 interview with Calvin Reid of Publishers Weekly.

This Is Our Music, declared saxophonist Ornette Coleman's 1960 album title. But whose music was it? At various times during the 1950s and 1960s, musicians, critics, fans, politicians, and entrepreneurs claimed jazz as a national art form, an Afrocentric race music, an extension of modernist innovation in other genres, a music of mass consciousness, and the preserve of a cultural elite. This original and provocative book explores who makes decisions about the value of a cultural form and on what basis.

Why Jazz Happened is the first comprehensive social history of jazz. It provides an intimate and compelling look at the many forces that shaped this most American of art forms and the many influences that gave rise to jazz’s post-war styles. Rich with the voices of musicians, producers, promoters, and others on the scene during the decades following World War II, this book views jazz’s evolution through the prism of technological advances, social transformations, changes in the law, economic trends, and much more.

A concentrated study of Johann Sebastian Bach's creative output and greatest pieces, capturing the essence of his art.

Zeth Lundy's book, in keeping with the album's themes, is structured as a life cycle. It's divided into the following sections: Birth; Innocence/Adolescence; Experience/Adulthood; Death; Rebirth. Within this framework, Zeth Lundy covers Stevie Wonder's excessive work habits and recording methodology, his reliance on synthesizers, the album's place in the gospel-inspired progression of 1970s R'n'B, and many other subjects.

Non-fans regard Céline Dion as ersatz and plastic, yet to those who love her, no one could be more real, with her impoverished childhood, her (creepy) manager-husband's struggle with cancer, her knack for howling out raw emotion. There's nothing cool about Céline Dion, and nothing clever. That's part of her appeal as an object of love or hatred — with most critics and committed music fans taking pleasure (or at least geeky solace) in their lofty contempt.

Despite its polarizing reception from critics at the time of its release, Sandinista! is often considered one of the greatest albums of all time. Nevertheless, critics and fans have spent over 40 years debating whether the album would be better as a 12-track LP. This book entertains that idea and considers what is lost or gained in the process.

Люди поют и играют на музыкальных инструментах с древнейших времен, но проследить непрерывную историю музыки невозможно, слишком она разнообразна и неоднородна. Поэтому Эндрю Форд—композитор, исследователь и ведущий популярной радиопрограммы о музыке—предлагает иной подход. Он выделяет ключевые темы в истории музыки и показывает, как они проявлялись в разных культурах и эпохах—от ритуальных песнопений и первых систем записи звуков до современных лейблов и стриминговых платформ.

Place any musical style in front of Faith No More, and seemingly, a timeless song of their own would soon be created. Between 1985-1997, Faith No More issued six full-length recordings (including such classic titles as "The Real Thing" and "Angel Dust") and in the process, influenced countless musicians throughout the world.

In this collection of musical portraits, jazz pianist and radio host Marian McPartland pays sparkling tribute to such beloved and legendary figures as Benny Goodman, Bill Evans, Joe Morello, Paul Desmond, Alec Wilder, Mary Lou Williams, and others.

In the New York Times bestseller From Pieces to Weight, rap mogul 50 Cent, a.k.a. Curtis Jackson, lifts the veil on his complicated life, from the murder of his mother when he was twelve, to hustling on the streets; from the assassination attempt that nearly finished him to his meteoric rise to...

Since 1991, only three albums have sold more than 15 million copies---Metallica (Metallica), Come on Over (Shania Twain), and Jagged Little Pill, by Alanis Morissette. JLP won Grammys, Junos, and stayed in the Billboad 200 for more than a year. Megan Volpert works through Alanis Morissette's career via JLP, her best-known record. Each chapter dives into one of the 13 tracks from the album, dissecting that song while connecting to later work that extends the relevant theme.

Though Nevermind was Nirvana's most commercially successful album, and the record that broke them—and the grunge phenomenon—internationally, In Utero has increasingly become regarded as the band's best album, both by the critics and the band members themselves. Instead of sticking to the "grunge pop" formula that made Nevermind so palatable to the mainstream, Nirvana chose instead to challenge their audience, producing an album that the band's creative force, Kurt Cobain, said truly matched his vision of what he had always wanted his band to sound like.

This book celebrates Madvillainy as a representation of two genius musical minds melding to form one revered supervillain. A product of circumstance, the album came together soon after MF DOOM's resurgence and Madlib's reluctant return from avant-garde jazz to hip-hop.

The Velvet Underground and Nico has influenced the sound of more bands than any other album. And remarkably, it still sounds as fresh and challenging today as it did upon its release in 1967. In this book, Joe Harvard covers everything from Lou Reed's lyrical genius to John Cale's groundbreaking instrumentation, and from the creative input of Andy Warhol to the fine details of the recording process. With input from co-producer Norman Dolph and Velvets fan Jonathan Richman, Harvard documents the creation of a record which - in the eyes of many - has never been matched.

How can you search for oldies you want to hear when you've forgotten them? Radio doesn't play a lot of those oldies anymore, even though you would enjoy hearing them again. This audiobook offers you access to over 150 links to YouTube videos for lost or forgotten oldies as well as history about the artists and their songs.

A first-time-ever exploration of the 290 songs from the entirety of Twin Peaks, sure to entice fans of the David Lynch-Mark Frost's cult classic that revolutionized TV, with brand-new interviews with Frost and several of the key composers and musicians involved.

Here, Rob Trucks talks to Lindsey Buckingham, as well as members of Animal Collective, Camper Van Beethoven, the New Pornographers, Wolf Parade, and the USC Trojan marching band in order to chart both the story and the impact of an album born of personal obsession and a stubborn unwillingness to compromise.

The Everly Brothers—aka Don and Phil to fans with an intimate appreciation for them—seemed to exist almost as an apparition. Emerging within the formative era for young Baby Boomers during the blandly regimented '50s, they were a ubiquitous presence, clad in snug suits and skinny ties, hair neatly Brylcreemed, never raising their voices when they sang. The two prim-looking country boys with dark, curiously penetrating eyes and perfectly merged, honey-dipped harmonies, were oddly but comfortably settled as sentimental, soothing, sometimes lovelorn voices of a still-uncharted cultural turf.

The central experience of the Ramones and their music is of being an outsider, an outcast, a person who’s somehow defective, and the revolt against shame and self-loathing. The fans, argues Donna Gaines, got it right away, from their own experience of alienation at home, at school, on the streets, and from themselves. This sense of estrangement and marginality permeates everything the Ramones still offer us as artists, and as people. Why the Ramones Matter compellingly makes the case that the Ramones gave us everything.