Music Farther Outside: Experimental Music During Brexit and the Pandemic examines the work of select composers, improvisers, and interpreters from England, Scotland, and Wales during the upheaval of Brexit and the COVID-19 pandemic and places them in contemporary and historical contexts. Using extensive interviews and contemporary commentary, the book provides a snapshot of composers and performers as they grappled with both the baseline challenges of creating experimental music a...

Breaking through pervasive misconceptions, Jazz in the 1970s explores a pivotal decade in jazz history. Many consider the 1970s to be the fusion decade, but Bill Shoemaker pushes back against this stereotype with a bold perspective that examines both the diverse musical innovations and cultural developments that elevated jazz internationally. He traces events that redefined jazz’s role in the broadband arts movement as well as the changing social and political landscape.Shoemaker i...

Raymond Starbuck ruined star jockey Coley Killebrew's reputation— so why is Coley cutting a deal with him? When Killebrew was barred from the track after a race-fixing scandal, he also lost his irresistible girlfriend, Francie Dorn. Starbuck says that if Coley can keep some unsavory cronies from muscling in on the old Magnolia Park track, he'll give Coley $10,000— and Francie's address. Is this the opportunity he's been waiting for, or will Coley blow his chance with the arrival of Starbuc...

From the only artist ever to win Grammy Awards for music, lyrics & orchestration, "perhaps the finest book about songwriting of our time" ( Musician )."An eminently readable master class in songwriting—one that will thrill aspiring composers and lyricists, yet still interest the general reader." — Albany Times UnionJimmy Webb has given the American songbook more hits, in m...

A landmark in jazz studies, Thinking in Jazz reveals as never before how musicians, both individually and collectively, learn to improvise. Chronicling leading musicians from their first encounters with jazz to the development of a unique improvisatory voice, Paul Berliner documents the lifetime of preparation that lies behind the skilled improviser's every idea.The product of more than fifteen years of immersion in the jazz world, Thinking in Jazz combines partici...

"There are no definitive histories," writes Elijah Wald, in this provocative reassessment of American popular music, "because the past keeps looking different as the present changes." Earlier musical styles sound different to us today because we hear them through the musical filter of other styles that came after them, all the way through funk and hiphop. As its blasphemous title suggests, How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll rejects the conventional pieties of mainstream jazz and rock ...

**An Economist Best Book of the YearAn acclaimed music scholar presents an accessible introduction to the art of listening to jazz.“Mr. Gioia could not have done a better job. Through him, jazz might even find new devotees.” ―Economist**In How to Listen to Jazz, award-winning music scholar Ted Gioia presents a lively introduction to one of America's premier art forms. He tells us what to listen for in a performance and includes a guide to ...

'It is the most singular of sounds, yet among the most ubiquitous. It is the sound of isolation that has sold itself to millions.'Miles Davis's Kind of Blue is the best selling piece of music in the history of jazz, and for many listeners among the most haunting in all of twentieth-century music. It is also, notoriously, the only jazz album many people own. Recorded in 1959 (in nine miraculous hours), there has been nothing like it since. Its atmosphere - slow, da...

A music journalist offers a lively history of modern jazz through its formative and most vital decades—from Charlie Parker to John Coltrane.In Giant Steps, Kenny Mathieson examines the most important figures in the creation of modern jazz, detailing the emergence and evolution of bebop through the likes of Dizzy Gillespie, Fats Navarro, Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk and Miles Davis. Using this as its starting point, Mathieson then delves into the developments...

An intimate exploration into the musical genius of fifteen living jazz legends, from the longtime New York Times jazz criticJazz is conducted almost wordlessly: John Coltrane rarely told his quartet what to do, and Miles Davis famously gave his group only the barest instructions before recording his masterpiece "Kind of Blue." Musicians are often loath to discuss their craft for fear of destroying its improvisational essence, rendering jazz among the most e...

Poised to become a classic of jazz literature, Visions of Jazz: The First Century offers seventy-nine chapters illuminating the lives of virtually all the major figures in jazz history. From Louis Armstrong's renegade-style trumpet playing to Sarah Vaughan's operatic crooning, and from the swinging elegance of Duke Ellington to the pioneering experiments of Ornette Coleman, jazz critic Gary Giddins continually astonishes the reader with his unparalleled insight. Writing with the g...

A book of treasure, a book of discovery, a book to open your ears to new worlds of pleasure. Doing for music what Patricia Schultz—author of the phenomenal one,zero Places to See Before You Die —does for travel, Tom Moon recommends one,zero recordings guaranteed to give listeners the joy, the mystery, the revelation, and the sheer fun of great music.This is a book both broad and deep, drawing from the diverse worlds of cl...