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Book Reviews
Good Things Happen Slowly: A Life In And Out Of Jazz
Good Things Happen Slowly: A Life In And Out Of Jazz Fred Hersch 307 Pages ISBN: #9781101904343 Crown Archetype Press 2017 Disclaimer #1: Like the author, I harbor a blood pathogen (he HIV, me Leukemia) that is intent on killing me. Disclaimer #2: Being of similar age, the author's discovery of jazz as an art form very much paralleled mine. It was September 4, 2015, and I was ...
read moreJazzing: New York City's Unseen Scene
Jazzing: New York City's Unseen Scene Thomas H. Greenland 245 pages ISBN: #978025081606 University of Illinois Press 2016 This week I plan on attending three live jazz performances. I'm fortunate to reside in an area that affords the opportunity to check out a variety of jazz musicians who I otherwise might only hear on recordings, or not at all. Aesthetically-related reasons for my selections vary. On Wednesday night I'm patronizing an ongoing jazz ...
read moreDavid Bowie: Behind the Curtain
David Bowie: Behind the Curtain Andrew Kent 160 Pages ISBN: 0996058753 Press Syndication Group 2017 Very few musicians have been as documented, analyzed or scrutinized as singer David Bowie. Ever since the 60s, Bowie has spent his entire life in the spotlight and really very few musicians can match or parallel his imaginative and aesthetic influence he has had during his lifetime. An ever evolving and transformative person, he was a master of ...
read moreIn Tune: Charley Patton, Jimmie Rodgers, and the Roots of American Music by Ben Wynne
In Tune: Charley Patton, Jimmie Rodgers, and the Roots of American Music Ben Wynne 296 Pages ISBN: # 978-0807157800 Louisiana State Press 2014 With surgical precision, Ben Wynne teases away all the romantic claptrap surrounding two titan music contemporaries, placing them in their appropriate historical perspectives, perspectives that make for a unique Venn diagram of social and cultural overlaps that highlight the elements common to both the blues and country music. He does ...
read moreThe Beatles - On the Road, 1964-1966
The Beatles -On the Road, 1964-1966 Harry Benson 272 Pages ISBN: 3836533227 Taschen 2017 Feted British photographer Harry Benson first met the Beatles in 1964, when he was assigned to go to Paris and document their gig there at the Olympia Theatre. At the time the Beatles were rising stars, a phenomenon that has caught the attention of all major media outlets and they had been sending journalists and photographers to report about ...
read moreFats Waller by Maurice Waller & Anthony Calabrese
Fats Waller Maurice Waller and Anthony Calabrese 256 Pages ISBN: # 978-1-5179-0391-6 University of Minnesota Press2017/1977 With regards to the jazz piano, who came before Art Tatum, Bud Powell, and Bill Evans. Well, it was James P. Johnson, Willie “The Lion" Smith and Thomas Fats Waller. The latter of these is celebrate with the republication of Maurice Waller and Anthony Calabrese's 1977 Fats Waller (Schirmer). A significant presence in the F. Scott Fitzgerald ...
read moreThe Original Blues: The Emergence of the Blues in African American Vaudeville by Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff
The Original Blues: The Emergence of the Blues in African American Vaudeville Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff 420 Pages ISBN: # 978-1496810021 University Press of Mississippi 2017 In the late 1970s, I began a more academic approach to blues music. In addition to listening to the music, I began reading everything I could find. One of the first books I read was Robert Palmer's sweeping narrative, Deep Blues: A Musical and Cultural History ...
read moreCornell '77: The Music, the Myth, and the Magnificence of the Grateful Dead's Concert at Barton Hall
Cornell '77: The Music, the Myth, and the Magnificence of the Grateful Dead's Concert at Barton Hall Peter Conners 232 Pages ISBN: #150170432X Cornell University Press 2017 If it strains the credulity of even the most devout Deadhead that a whole book has been devoted to a single show of this iconic band, it may be even more startling that Peter Conners validates the concept with the combination of his skewed sense of ...
read more50 Years of Rolling Stone: The Music, Politics and People that Shaped Our Culture
50 Years of Rolling Stone: The Music, Politics and People that Shaped Our Culture 288 Pages ISBN: #1419724460 Harry N. Abrams 2017 A coffee table book for a generation, this near seven-pound tome entitles 50 Years of Rolling Stone is as philosophically weighty as its subtitle would imply. Or so Jann Wenner would have us believe in his introduction and essentially he's right. Yet he hedges on the fact that, while Rolling Stone Magazine ...
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