Stir It Up: Musical Mixes from Roots to Jazz

 

It's a cliché that the world is shrinking. As Gene Santoro sees it in his second collection of essays, music is one arena where that cliché takes on a real, but paradoxical, life: while music crisscrosses the globe with ever greater speed, musicians seize what's useful, and expand their idioms
more rapidly.
More and more since the 1960s, musicians, both in America and abroad, have shown an uncanny but consistent ability to draw inspiration from quite unexpected sources. We think of Paul Simon in Graceland, blending Afropop rhythms and Everly Brothers harmonies into a remarkable new sound that
captured imaginations worldwide. Or Jimi Hendrix, trying to wring from guitar the howling, Doppler-shifting winds he experienced as a paratrooper. Or Thelonius Monk, mingling Harlem stride piano, bebop, the impressionist harmonies of DeBussey, and a delight in "harmonic space" that eerily paralleled
modern physics. From the startling experiments of such jazz giants as Charles Mingus, to the political bite of Bob Marley and Bruce Springsteen, we see musicians again and again taking musical tradition and making it new. The result is a profusion of new forms, media that are constantly being
reinvented--in short, an art form capable of seemingly endless, and endlessly fascinating, permutations.
Gene Santoro's Stir It Up is an ideal guide to this ever changing soundscape. Santoro is the rare music critic equally at home writing about jazz (John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Tom Harrell), rock (Sting, Elvis Costello, P.J. Harvey), and the international scene (Jamaican, Brazilian, and
African pop music). In Stir It Up, readers will find thoughtful but unpretentious discussions of such different musicians as David Byrne and Aretha Franklin, Gilberto Gil and Manu Dibango, Abbey Lincoln and Joe Lovano. And Santoro shows us not only the distinctive features of the diverse people who
create so many dazzling sounds, but also the subtle and often surprising connections between them. With effortless authority and a rich sense of music history, he reveals, for instance, how Ornette Coleman was influenced by a mystical group in Morocco--the Major Musicians of Joujouka--whom he
discovered via Rolling Stone Brian Jones; how John Coltrane's unpredictable, extended sax solos influenced The Byrds, The Grateful Dead, and most significantly, Jimi Hendrix; and how Bob Marley's reggae combined Rastafarian chants with American pop, African call-and-response, and Black Nationalist
politics into a potent mix that still shapes musicians from America to Africa, Europe to Asia.
A former musician himself, Santoro is equally illuminating about both the technical aspects of the music and the personal development of the artists themselves. He offers us telling glimpses into their often turbulent lives: Ornette Coleman being kicked out of his high school band for
improvising, Charles Mingus checking himself into Bellevue because he'd heard it was a good place to rest, the teenaged Jimi Hendrix practicing air-guitar with a broom at the foot of his bed, Aretha Franklin's Oedipal struggle with her larger-than-life preacher-father.
Throughout the volume, Santoro's love and knowledge shine through, as he maps the rewarding terrain of pop music's varied traditions, its eclectic, cross-cultural borrowings, and its astonishing innovations. What results is a fascinating tour through twentieth-century popular music: lively,
thought-provoking, leavened with humor and unexpected twists. Stir It Up is sure to challenge readers even as it entertains them.

 

Gene Santoro (Author)  

 

Whisper not, the autobiography of Benny Golson

 

Born during the de facto inaugural era of jazz, saxophonist Benny Golson learned his instrument and the vocabulary of jazz alongside John Coltrane while Golson was still in high school in Philadelphia. Quickly establishing himself as an iconic fixture on the jazz landscape, Golson performed with dozens of jazz greats, from Sonny Rollins, Coleman Hawkins, and Jimmy Heath to Dizzy Gillespie, Freddie Hubbard, and many others. An acclaimed composer, Golson also wrote music for Hollywood films and television and composed such memorable jazz standards as “Stablemates,” “Killer Joe,” and “Whisper Not.”

An eloquent account of Golson’s exceptional life—presented episodically rather than chronologically—Whisper Not includes a dazzling collection of anecdotes, memories, experiences, and photographs that recount the successes, the inevitable failures, and the rewards of a life eternally dedicated to jazz.

 

Benny Golson (Autor)  

Jim B Merod (Autor)  

 

Art of India • Vincent Arthur Smith

   

Vincent Arthur Smith (Autor)

Deep in a Dreamː The Long Night of Chet Baker

 

 

 

This first major biography of the most romanticized icon in jazz thrillingly recounts his wild ride. From his emergence in the 1950s--when an uncannily beautiful young man from Oklahoma appeared on the West Coast to become, seemingly overnight, the prince of "cool" jazz--until his violent, drug-related death in Amsterdam in 1988, Chet Baker lived a life that has become an American myth. Here, drawing on hundreds of interviews and previously untapped sources, James Gavin gives a hair-raising account of the trumpeter's dark journey.

 

James Gavin (Author)  

  

Lightnin' Hopkinsː His Life and Blues

 

 By the time of his death in 1982, Sam “Lightnin’” Hopkins was likely the most recorded blues artist in history. This brilliant new biography--the first book ever written about him--illuminates the many contradictions of the man and his myth.

Born in 1912 to a poor sharecropping family in the cotton country between Dallas and Houston, Hopkins left home when he was only eight years old with a guitar his brother had given him. He made his living however he could, sticking to the open road, playing the blues, and taking odd jobs when money was short. This biography delves into Hopkins’s early years, exploring the myths surrounding his meetings with Blind Lemon Jefferson and Texas Alexander, his time on a chain gang, his relationships with women, and his lifelong appetite for gambling and drinking.

Hopkins didn’t begin recording until 1946, when he was dubbed “Lightnin’” during his first session, and he soon joined Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker on the national R & B charts. But by the time he was “rediscovered” by Mack McCormick and Sam Charters in 1959, his popularity had begun to wane. A second career emerged--now Lightnin’ was pitched to white audiences, not black ones, and he became immensely successful, singing about his country roots and injustices that informed the civil rights era with a searing emotive power.

More than a decade in the making, this biography is based on scores of interviews with Lightnin’s lover, friends, producers, accompanists, managers, and fans.

 

  Alan Govenar (Author)

 

Music Is My Life Louis Armstrong, Autobiography, and American Jazz

 

Music Is My Life is the first comprehensive analysis of Louis Armstrong's autobiographical writings (including his books, essays, and letters) and their relation to his musical and visual performances. Combining approaches from autobiography theory, literary criticism, intermedia studies, cultural history, and musicology, Daniel Stein reconstructs Armstrong's performances of his life story across various media and for different audiences, complicating the monolithic and hagiographic views of the musician.

The book will appeal to academic readers with an interest in African American studies, jazz studies, musicology, and popular culture, as well as general readers interested in Armstrong's life and music, jazz, and twentieth-century entertainment. While not a biography, it provides a key to understanding Armstrong's oeuvre as well as his complicated place in American history and twentieth-century media culture.

 

 

Daniel Stein (Author) 

Cant Be Satisfied The Life and Times of Muddy Waters

 

First recorded at his house in Stovall, Mississippi, in 1941 as part of a Library of Congress field project to record authentic country blues artists, Muddy Waters was inspired by the experience to move to Chicago and work as a professional musician. This biography chronicles the life and music of the bluesman who went electric in the late 1940s and inspired a generation of rock and blues bands who changed the shape of popular music.

 

Sam Phillips The Man Who Invented Rock n Roll

 

 

The music that he shaped in his tiny Memphis studio with artists as diverse as Elvis Presley, Ike Turner, Howlin' Wolf, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Johnny Cash, introduced a sound that had never been heard before. He brought forth a singular mix of black and white voices passionately proclaiming the vitality of the American vernacular tradition while at the same time declaring, once and for all, a new, integrated musical day.

With extensive interviews and firsthand personal observations extending over a 25-year period with Phillips, along with wide-ranging interviews with nearly all the legendary Sun Records artists, Guralnick gives us an ardent, unrestrained portrait of an American original as compelling in his own right as Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, or Thomas Edison.

 

 

 

World Music, Politics and Social Change: Papers from the International Association for the Study of Popular Music

 

Simon Frith

Music, Sound, and Technology in America A Documentary History of Early Phonograph, Cinema, and Radio

 

This unique anthology assembles primary documents chronicling the development of the phonograph, film sound, and the radio. These three sound technologies shaped Americans' relation to music from the late nineteenth century until the end of the Second World War, by which time the technologies were thoroughly integrated into everyday life. There are more than 120 selections between the collection's first piece, an article on the phonograph written by Thomas Edison in 1878, and its last, a column advising listeners "desirous of gaining more from music as presented by the radio." Among the selections are articles from popular and trade publications, advertisements, fan letters, corporate records, fiction, and sheet music. Taken together, the selections capture how the new sound technologies were shaped by developments such as urbanization, the increasing value placed on leisure time, and the rise of the advertising industry. Most importantly, they depict the ways that the new sound technologies were received by real people in particular places and moments in time.

 

 

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Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Photography

  

The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Photography explores the vast international scope of twentieth-century photography and explains that history with a wide-ranging, interdisciplinary manner. This unique approach covers the aesthetic history of photography as an evolving art and documentary form, while also recognizing it as a developing technology and cultural force. This Encyclopedia presents the important developments, movements, photographers, photographic institutions, and theoretical aspects of the field along with information about equipment, techniques, and practical applications of photography. To bring this history alive for the reader, the set is illustrated in black and white throughout, and each volume contains a color plate section. A useful glossary of terms is also included.

 

Lynne Warren (Author) 

 

All shook up how rock n roll changed America

 The birth of rock 'n roll ignited a firestorm of controversy--one critic called it "musical riots put to a switchblade beat"--but if it generated much sound and fury, what, if anything, did it signify?

As Glenn Altschuler reveals in All Shook Up, the rise of rock 'n roll--and the outraged reception to it--in fact can tell us a lot about the values of the United States in the 1950s, a decade that saw a great struggle for the control of popular culture. Altschuler shows, in particular, how rock's "switchblade beat" opened up wide fissures in American society along the fault-lines of family, sexuality, and race. For instance, the birth of rock coincided with the Civil Rights movement and brought "race music" into many white homes for the first time. Elvis freely credited blacks with originating the music he sang and some of the great early rockers were African American, most notably, Little Richard and Chuck Berry. In addition, rock celebrated romance and sex, rattled the reticent by pushing sexuality into the public arena, and mocked deferred gratification and the obsession with work of men in gray flannel suits. And it delighted in the separate world of the teenager and deepened the
divide between the generations, helping teenagers differentiate themselves from others. Altschuler includes vivid biographical sketches of the great rock 'n rollers, including Elvis Presley, Fats Domino, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Buddy Holly--plus their white-bread doppelgangers such as Pat Boone.

Rock 'n roll seemed to be everywhere during the decade, exhilarating, influential, and an outrage to those Americans intent on wishing away all forms of dissent and conflict. As vibrant as the music itself, All Shook Up reveals how rock 'n roll challenged and changed American culture and laid the foundation for the social upheaval of the sixties.

 

Glenn C. Altschuler (Autor)  

Amped The Illustrated History of the Worlds Greatest Amplifiers

 

 

Guitarists love amps—really love them. Amplifiers may look dull to the rest of the world, but to guitarists they are full of mystique, romance, and rockin' sound. And while there are many strong-selling electric guitar histories available, here's the first illustrated history of the electric guitar’s best friend, the amp. World-famous guitar and amp historian Dave Hunter tells the story of 60 of the greatest amps ever built, including classics from Fender, Marshall, Vox, the bizarre EchoSonic that created Elvis' sound, and the ultimate esoteric $75,000+ Dumble amps. The story is illustrated with hundreds of technical photos, rare machines, catalogs, memorabilia, and the amps of the stars, from Jimi Hendrix to Stevie Ray Vaughan to Eric Clapton. This is a book guitarists will drool over.

 

Dave Hunter (Autor)  

 

Detroit 67 The Year That Changed Soul

 

Detroit 67 is the story of Motor City in the year that changed everything. Twelve chapters take you on a turbulent year-long journey through the drama and chaos that ripped through the city in 1967 and tore it apart in personal, political and interracial disputes. It is the story of Motown, the break-up of The Supremes and the damaging disputes at the heart of the most successful African-American music label ever.

Set against a backdrop of urban riots, escalating war in Vietnam and police corruption, the book weaves its way through a year when soul music came of age and the underground counterculture flourished. LSD arrived in the city with hallucinogenic power and local guitar band MC5 – self-styled holy barbarians of rock – went to war with mainstream America. A summer of street-level rebellion turned Detroit into one of the most notorious cities on earth, known for its unique creativity, its unpredictability and self-lacerating crime rates.

The year 1967 ended in social meltdown, rancour and intense legal warfare as the complex threads that held Detroit together finally unravelled.

 

Stuart Cosgrove (Autor)  

 

Memphis 68 The Tragedy of Southern Soul

 

In the 1950s and 1960s, Memphis, Tennessee, was the launch pad of musical pioneers such as Aretha Franklin, Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Al Green and Isaac Hayes, and by 1968 was a city synonymous with soul music. It was a deeply segregated city, ill at ease with the modern world and yet to adjust to the era of civil rights and racial integration. Stax Records offered an escape from the turmoil of the real world for many soul and blues musicians, with much of the music created there becoming the soundtrack to the civil rights movements. The book opens with the death of the city’s most famous recording artist, Otis Redding, who died in a plane crash in the nal days of 1967, and then follows the fortunes of Redding’s label, Stax/Volt Records, as its fortunes fall and rise again. But, as the tense year unfolds, the city dominates world headlines for the worst of reasons: the assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King.

 

Stuart Cosgrove (Autor)  

 

Harlem 69 The Future of Soul

 

 

Harlem, 1969, and the vibrant community around 125th Street is rife with creative innovation. Troubled genius Donny Hathaway, bandleader King Curtis, and Miles Davis and his visionary wife Betty Mabry are reinventing black music. Jimi Hendrix is staging a benefit concert in support of the Biafran famine victims, and helping him behind the scenes is flamboyant indie label owner and heroin kingpin, Fat Jack Taylor. The Apollo Theater is bringing the best of soul music to the crowded streets, and at the height of a blistering summer Harlem plays host to Black Woodstock, a series of free concerts starring Sly and the Family Stone, Stevie Wonder and Nina Simone.

Meanwhile, a city-wide raid has led to the arrest of twenty-one members of the Black Panther Party - and ultimately to one of the most controversial trials of the era - and a heroin epidemic is spiralling out of control. Young people are dying on the streets of Harlem faster than the body count in Vietnam.

Harlem 69 has all the trademarks of its predecessors - deep research, compelling storytelling and a keen awareness of social change - and maps out how Harlem became the genesis of future musical forms including jazz-funk, psychedelic soul, disco, boogie, rap and hip-hop amidst intense social change.

Stuart Cosgrove's critically acclaimed trilogy began with Detroit 67 and was followed by Memphis 68, which won the Penderyn Prize for Music Book of the Year in 2018. Harlem 69 brings his epic story of sixties soul to its triumphant conclusion.

 

Stuart Cosgrove (Autor)  

 

Blaxploitation Films

 

Fully updated to include Baadassss and The Hebrew Hammer and to cover the deaths of Isaac Hayes and Rudy Rae Moore In the early 1970s a type of film emerged that featured all-black casts; really cool soul, R 'n' B, and disco soundtracks; characters sporting big guns, big dashikis, and even bigger 'fros; and had some of the meanest, baddest attitudes to shoot their way across the screen. An antidote to the sanitized "safe" images of blackness that Sidney Poitier and Bill Cosby presented to America, these films depicted a reality about the world which African-American audiences could identify with, even if the stories themselves were pure fantasy. This guide reviews and discusses more than 60 Blaxploitation films, considering them from the perspectives of class and racial rebellion, genre, and Stickin' it to the Man. Subgenres covered include Blaxploitation horror films, kung-fu movies, westerns, and parodies. 

 

Popular Music in Southeast Asia: Banal Beats, Muted Histories

 

 

From the 1920s on, popular music in Southeast Asia was a mass-audience phenomenon that drew new connections between indigenous musical styles and contemporary genres from elsewhere to create new, hybrid forms. This book presents a cultural history of modern Southeast Asia from the vantage point of popular music, considering not just singers and musicians but their fans as well, showing how the music was intrinsically bound up with modern life and the societal changes that came with it. Reaching new audiences across national borders, popular music of the period helped push social change, and at times served as a medium for expressions of social or political discontent.

 

Bart Barendregt (Author),  

Peter Keppy (Author),  

Henk Schulte Nordholt (Author)  

 

Psychedelic Popular Music: A History through Musical Topic Theory

 

 

Recognized for its distinctive musical features and its connection to periods of social innovation and ferment, the genre of psychedelia has exerted long-term influence in many areas of cultural production, including music, visual art, graphic design, film, and literature. William Echard explores the historical development of psychedelic music and its various stylistic incarnations as a genre unique for its fusion of rock, soul, funk, folk, and electronic music. Through the theory of musical topics―highly conventional musical figures that signify broad cultural concepts―and musical meaning, Echard traces the stylistic evolution of psychedelia from its inception in the early 1960s, with the Beatles' Rubber Soul and Revolver and the Kinks and Pink Floyd, to the German experimental bands and psychedelic funk of the 1970s, with a special emphasis on Parliament/Funkadelic. He concludes with a look at the 1980s and early 1990s, touching on the free festival scene, rave culture, and neo–jam bands. Set against the cultural backdrop of these decades, Echard's study of psychedelia lays the groundwork and offers lessons for analyzing the topic of popular music in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

 

William Echard (Autor)

Lost Soundsː Blacks and the birth of the recording industry, 1890-1919

Biographies of the first African-American recording stars, and how they succeeded against tremendous odds.

"An act of cultural reclamation - the great lost heroes of black performance." New York Times "Brooks has uncovered a wealth of fascinating detail about the record business, its artists and the range of music they recorded 100 years ago. This engaging work of thorough scholarship is essential reading for anyone interested in the birth of commercial recording and African American music in the early part of the 20th century." Samuel Brylawski, Head, Recorded Sound Section, Library of Congress.

 

 

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