Book Review

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Miles Davis And The Search for the Sound

Read "Miles Davis And The Search for the Sound" reviewed by Doug Collette


Miles Davis and the Search for the Sound (graphic novel) Dave Chisholm 150 Pages ISBN: #9798886560428 Z2 Comics2023 Miles Davis and the Search for the Sound could not be a more appropriate title for Dave Chisholm's altogether riveting graphic novel devoted to “The Man With The Horn." The latter spent the better part of his career literally and figuratively hunting for novel forms of music that would challenge both himself and the musicians ...

9

Sound Experiments: The Music of the AACM by Paul Steinbeck

Read "Sound Experiments: The Music of the AACM by Paul Steinbeck" reviewed by Tom Spargo


Sound Experiments: The Music of the AACM Paul Steinbeck 272 Pages ISBN-13: 978-0-226-82953-1University of Chicago PressHardback 2022/ Paperback 2023 Paul Steinbeck's Sound Experiments is a historical narrative and technical analysis of the music of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM). Steinbeck traces the chronology of this wildly creative organization from its origins in the mid-1960s to the present day through the course ten chapters, each dedicated to a particularly influential album, composition, or live ...

13

Bob Dylan: Mixing Up The Medicine - Treasures From the Bob Dylan Center

Read "Bob Dylan: Mixing Up The Medicine - Treasures From the Bob Dylan Center" reviewed by Doug Collette


Bob Dylan: Mixing Up The Medicine Mark Davidson and Parker Fishel 608 pages ISBN: # 978-1734537796 Callaway Arts & Entertainment2023 There have been more than a few books written about Bob Dylan during the course of his sixty-plus years in the public spotlight, but perhaps none is so dense as Mark Davidson and Parker Fishel's Mixing Up the Medicine. Granted, the Nobel Laureate's own tome, The Philosophy of Modern Song (Simon & Shuster, ...

6

Kansas City Jazz: A Little Evil Will Do You Good

Read "Kansas City Jazz: A Little Evil Will Do You Good" reviewed by Andrew Hunter


Kansas City Jazz: A Little Evil Will Do You Good Con Chapman 358 pages ISBN: # 978 1 80050 282 6 Equinox Publishing Limited 2023 In January 1920, the Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution came into effect, ushering in 14 years of Prohibition and, inadvertently, a golden age for organised crime. As Harry Truman, not yet the president, observed in a letter to his fiancée, things were looking pretty good for ...

6

John McLaughlin: From Miles and Mahavishnu to The 4th Dimension

Read "John McLaughlin: From Miles and Mahavishnu to The 4th Dimension" reviewed by Jeff Schwartz


John McLaughlin: From Miles and Mahavishnu to The 4th Dimension Matt Phillips 287 Pages ISBN: # 978-1-5381-7094-6 Rowman and Littlefield 2023 In fall 2023 John McLaughlin led a new edition of his band Shakti on a world tour. Reviews and fan videos caught the eighty- one-year-old McLaughlin playing with the same breathtaking technique and abundant creativity as when he debuted atop the jazz world on Miles Davis' In a Silent Way (Columbia, 1969) ...

12

On Minimalism: Documenting A Musical Movement

Read "On Minimalism: Documenting A Musical Movement" reviewed by Ian Patterson


On Minimalism: Documenting A Musical Movement Kerry O'Brien and William Robin 449 Pages ISBN: 9780520382084 University of California Press 2023 Much like jazz, the origin story of minimalism is messy and hard to pin down to a date. And like jazz, definitions of minimalism can be rather slippery or downright contentious. Such challenges, thankfully, have not stopped editors Kerry O'Brien and William Robin from colourfully depicting a movement(s) in all its weird and ...

1

Music Farther Outside by Bill Shoemaker

Read "Music Farther Outside by Bill Shoemaker" reviewed by Jeff Schwartz


Music Farther Outside: Experimental Music During Brexit and the Pandemic Bill Shoemaker 213 Pages ISBN: #9781538178775 Rowman & Littlefield 2023 Music Farther Outside is a sequel to two books. First, it is Bill Shoemaker's follow-up to his excellent Jazz in the 1970s: Diverging Streams (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017). Both are in the tradition of jazz critics such as Nat Hentoff, Martin Williams, Stanley Crouch, Amiri Baraka, and Greg Tate, whose books were mostly ...

1

Easily Slip Into Another World: A Life In Music

Read "Easily Slip Into Another World: A Life In Music" reviewed by David A. Orthmann


Easily Slip Into Another World: A Life In Music Henry Threadgill and Brent Hayes Edwards403 pagesISBN: #9781524749071Alfred A. Knopf 2023 Describing Easily Slip Into Another World: A Life In Music as an autobiography of a jazz musician misses the mark by a wide margin. Better to say that Henry Threadgill--regarded by many as an integral part of the jazz tradition--is a significant composer whose work from the 1970s to the present ...

4

The Gerry Mulligan 1950s Quartets

Read "The Gerry Mulligan 1950s Quartets" reviewed by Ian Patterson


The Gerry Mulligan 1950s Quartets Alyn Shipton240 Pages ISBN: 978-0197579763 Oxford University Press 2023 Several are the biographies of Gerry Mulligan, arguably jazz's most celebrated baritone saxophonist. None, however, have focused as specifically and as closely as this tome does on the quartets with which Mulligan made his name in the 1950s. Such focused, detailed analysis is the bread and butter of author Alyn Shipton and Oxford University Press. Shipton, BBC ...

1

Brothers and Sisters: The Allman Brothers Band and The Inside Story of the Album That Defined the '70s

Read "Brothers and Sisters: The Allman Brothers Band and The Inside Story of the Album That Defined the '70s" reviewed by Doug Collette


Brothers and Sisters: The Allman Brothers Band and The Inside Story of the Album That Defined the '70s Alan Paul 352 pages ISBN: # 978-1250282699 St. Martin's Press Year 2023 Alan Paul's Brothers and Sisters: The Allman Brothers Band and The Inside Story of the Album That Defined the '70s has just enough information and insight to posit the book as an ideal place to begin close scrutiny into the history ...


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