Music-History & Criticism

The origin story of hip-hop--one that involves Kool Herc DJing a house party on Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx--has become received wisdom. But Joseph C. Ewoodzie Jr. argues that the full story remains to be told. In vibrant prose, he combines never-before-used archival material...

The almost legendary disorder of Beethoven's house, his eating habits, his growing deafness and ill-health, his tendency to be suspicious of friends, his daily schedule of work, his famous contempt for etiquette, his daily walks in all weathers, his abilities as pianists, sight-ready, improviser,...

A gripping narrative that captures the tumult and liberating energy of a nation in transition, Sweet Soul Music is an intimate portrait of the legendary performers--Sam Cooke, Ray Charles, James Brown, Solomon Burke, Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding, and Al Green among them--who merged gospel...

"So fascinatingly behind-the-scenes that it will make you listen to the album as if you've never heard it before."--Esquire In 1974 Bob Dylan wrote, recorded, reconsidered, and then re-recorded the best-selling studio album of his career. Blood on the Tracks was composed as Dylan's...

Transformer, Lou Reed's most enduringly popular album, is described with varying labels: it's often called a glam rock album, a proto-punk album, a commercial breakthrough for Lou Reed, and an album about being gay. And yet, it doesn't neatly fit into any of these...

The serene, delicate songs on Another Green World sound practicallymeditative, but the album itself was an experiment fueled byadrenaline, panic, and pure faith. It was the first Brian Eno album tobe composed almost completely in the confines of a recording studio, over a scant...

Derek Bailey's Improvisation, originally published in 1980, and here updated and extended with new interviews and photographs, is the first book to deal with the nature of improvisation in all its forms--Indian music, flamenco, baroque, organ music, rock, jazz, contemporary, and "free" music. By...

Poetic Song Verse: Blues-Based Popular Music and Poetry invokes and critiques the relationship between blues-based popular music and poetry in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The volume is anchored in music from the 1960s, when a concentration of artists transformed modes of popular music...

June 1, 1967, is a landmark moment not just for the Beatles but also for the world of rock and roll as it marks the release date for one of the most famous albums in the history of modern music. The Beatles and Sgt....

Driven to the brink of madness by cocaine, overwork, marital strife, and a paranoid obsession with the occult, Bowie fled Los Angeles in 1975 and ended up in Berlin, the divided city on the frontline between communist East and capitalist West. There he sought...

"Oh, The Mudd Club! I may be older and wiser, but how I miss those nights on the dance floor and in the bathrooms. And the music! There was no other place like it on earth." -- Chris Frantz / Talking Heads & Tom...

"A thoughtful, entertaining history of obsessed music collectors and their quest for rare early 78 rpm records" (Los Angeles Times), Do Not Sell at Any Price is a fascinating, complex story of preservation, loss, obsession, and art.Before MP3s, CDs, and cassette tapes, even before...

The second compendium of extracts from Continuum's acclaimed and successful 33 1/3 series, Volume 2 features 20 sharp, savvy and very different writers' takes on albums by Neutral Milk Hotel, Sonic Youth, My Bloody Valentine, David Bowie, the Pixies, the Beastie Boys, Nirvana, R.E.M,...

"Music From Big Pink is a moving book that succeeds not just in vividly evoking its time and place but in distilling one young man's cliched and minor destiny into something approaching tragedy....This well-written first novel captures not just some of the dreams of...

The story of the last tour of Buddy Holly, The Big Bopper, and Richie Valens-and the fatal air crash that took their lives. Drawing on new documentary information, the author recreates the often grueling conditions of an early rock and roll tour, and provides...

This memoir chronicles the Grateful Dead's seminal years: 1965-1985.Author: Rock ScullyISBN-10: 0815411634ISBN-13: 9780815411635Publisher: Cooper Square PressLanguage: EnglishPublished: 08/28/2001Pages: 416Format: PaperbackWeight: 1.18lbsSize: 8.98h x 6.03w x 0.95d

In this groundbreaking, all-encompassing work, an eminent musicologist explores the evolution of music. It ranges from the ecstatic singing and Shaman songs of early civilizations to the development of more structured styles in Egypt, East Asia, India, Greece, Rome, the Middle East, and Europe....

The demands of tuning (attaining the perfect scale) and temperament (the compromises necessary for composing in every key) have challenged musicians from the earliest civilizations onward. This guide surveys these longstanding problems, devoting a chapter to each principal theory and offering a running account...

In the 1970s, as the disco tsunami engulfed America, the question, Do you wanna dance? became divisive, even explosive. What about this music made it such hot stuff? In her incisive history, Alice Echols reveals the ways in which disco transformed popular music, propelling...

Nelson George's chronicle of Motown Records' rise and fall remains a classic account of an essential American music company and its dynamic founder Berry Gordy Jr. Gordy's uncanny instinct for finding extraordinary talent--from performers and musicians to songwriters and producers--packed the label's roster with...

This book opens up new perspectives on the history of B駘a Bart's music in the 20th century. It joins a growing literature on music and the cultural Cold War. It draws inspiration from a trove of historic correspondence discovered in Massachusetts in 2010, written...

Pay attention to that violin you used in high school. Look closely at the next violin you see at a garage sale. It might be worth millions of dollars. The greatest violin ever made is not in a museum. It might be in your...

In 1973, Western music was banned in the People's Republic of China. But in a remarkable breakthrough cultural exchange, the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted a tour of closed-off China, becoming the first American orchestra to visit the communist nation. Jennifer Lin's Beethoven in Beijing provides...

Infinite Dead is a new, groundbreaking guide to Grateful Dead concerts. Authoritative and entertaining, Volume 1 features detailed reviews of every Grateful Dead concert performed in the month of October-over 200 shows, including: ● The three-set, acoustic-electric performances at The Warfield in San Francisco...

This book is your gateway to the oasis of Britain's music in the 90s. A Field Guide to ... delves into music's most influential genres to uncover the innovators and agitators who changed music history forever. In A Field Guide to Britpop, Steve Wide...

In 1992, Singer, pianist and composer Tori Amos achieved fame with the intensely personal solid gold record, Little Earthquakes, the first of fifteen studio albums. Each new recording cut new ground both musically and thematically. Since then, Amos has performed world-wide, both as a...

A Rolling Stone-Kirkus Best Music Book of 2020 The definitive account of pop music in the mid-eighties, from Prince and Madonna to the underground hip-hop, indie rock, and club scenes Everybody knows the hits of 1984 - pop music's greatest year. From "Thriller" to...

Featuring 21 designers and studios passionate about music, this collection showcases the best in album design across a myriad of genres. Paired with insightful interviews and essays, the projects in Behind the Album illustrate each designer's vision from concept to cover. Includes designers such...

"I had to leave town for a little while--" with these words, Elvis Presley truly came home to rock and roll. A little over a month earlier he had staged rock's first and greatest comeback in a television program, forever known as "The '68...

Jimi Hendrix - Black Legacy (A Dream Deferred) is a deep exploration of Jimi Hendrix's subtle, yet ubiquitous footprint on Black culture. Often, Jimi Hendrix was seen by many to have transcended race, which is a slap in the face to his deep cultural...

Christopher R. Weingarten provides a thrilling account of how the Bomb Squad produced such a singular-sounding record: engineering, sampling, scratching, constructing, deconstructing, reconstructing - even occasionally stompingon vinyl that sounded too clean. Using production techniques that have never been duplicated, the Bomb Squad plunderedand...

When Bruce Springsteen went back on the road in 1984, he opened every show by shouting out, "one, two, one, two, three, four," followed by the droning synth chords of "Born in the U.S.A." Max Weinberg hit his drums with a two-fisted physicality that...

Perhaps more than any other Greatest Hits compilation, Abba Gold has come to define a band's career on one disk. More than that, its release in 1992 heralded the critical rehabilitation of a group which had, since its demise a decade earlier, become little...

In April 1998, legendary southern jam band Widespread Panic held a free open-air record release show in downtown Athens, Georgia, its homebase. No one involved could have known that the predicted crowd of twenty thousand would prove to be nearly five times that size....

Long-awaited biography of an African American avant-garde composerAlice Coltrane was a composer, improviser, guru, and widow of John Coltrane. Over the course of her musical life, she synthesized a wide range of musical genres including gospel, rhythm-and-blues, bebop, free jazz, Indian devotional song, and...

"Fellow rock stars, casual members of the public, lords and media magnates, countless thousands of people will talk of their encounters with this driven, talented, indomitable creature, a man who has plumbed the depths of depravity, yet emerged with an indisputable nobility. Each of...

(Guitar Chord Songbook). The essentials of what you need to strum 58 Cash classics: just the guitar chord diagrams and lyrics. Songs include: Ballad of a Teenage Queen * A Boy Named Sue * Busted * Cry, Cry, Cry * Daddy Sang Bass *...

Schumann's genius as a composer is well known; perhaps less well known is the fact that he was also a gifted music critic who wrote hundreds of perceptive essays, articles, and reviews for the Neue Zeitschrift fur M?ik, the influential music journal he founded...

One of The Telegraph's Best Music Books 2011 Alex Ross's award-winning international bestseller, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, has become a contemporary classic, establishing Ross as one of our most popular and acclaimed cultural historians. Listen to This, which takes...

Superbly researched and vividly written, The Devil's Music is one of the only books to trace the rise and development of the blues both in relation to other forms of black music and in the context of American social history as experienced by African...

No one knew Led Zeppelin like Richard Cole. The band's tour manager for more than a decade, Cole was there when they burst onto the music scene, achieved cult status, cut platinum records, and transformed popular music. Second only to the Beatles in sales...

The hegemony of finance compels a new orientation for everyone and everything: companies care more about the moods of their shareholders than about longstanding commercial success; governments subordinate citizen welfare to appeasing creditors; and individuals are concerned less with immediate income from labor than...

The Day the Country Died features author, historian, and musician Ian Glasper (Burning Britain) exploring in minute detail the influential, esoteric, UK anarcho punk scene of the early Eighties. If the colorful '80s punk bands captured in Burning Britain were loud, political, and uncompromising,...

An album which distilled a genre from the musical, cultural, and social ether, Portishead's Dummy was such a complete artistic achievement that its ubiquitous successes threatened to exhaust its own potential. RJ Wheaton offers an impressionistic investigation of Dummy that imitates the cumulative structure...

This classic guide offers an accessible initiation into the mysteries of violin-making. Charming in its style and cultivated in its research, it covers every detail of the process, from wood selection to varnish. A fascinating history of the instrument precedes discussions of materials and...

Indiana entertainers have seen many changes through the years, but one universal truth unites them: They are all...Reaching for the High NoteMusic truly does make the world go around. It affects our moods and adds to everything we do. Can you imagine a film...

Since She Bop was first published in 1995, digital downloading has transformed the music landscape. But has issue of gender inequality changed too? For She Bop, Lucy O'Brien conducted over 250 interviews with female artists and women working behind the scenes in A&R, marketing,...

In this series of books, based on the hit podcast A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs, Andrew Hickey analyses the history of rock and roll music, from its origins in swing, Western swing, boogie woogie, and gospel, through to the 1990s, grunge,...

Hold On World revisits Lennon and Ono's love affair and startling collaborations. John Lennon's Plastic Ono Band was arguably the most emotionally honest album ever made. It wasn't merely another record but more like a sonic exorcism, a spiritual, public bloodletting. Lennon's album drove...

Siegfried Kracauer's Jacques Offenbach and the Paris of His Time brilliantly reconfigures the biography form into a remarkable work of social and cultural history. In a book that has frequently been compared with Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project, Kracauer uses the life and work of...