Japan's jazz community-both musicians and audience-has been begrudgingly recognized in the United States for its talent, knowledge, and level of appreciation.
In The Political Force of Musical Beauty, Barry Shank shows how musical acts and performances generate their own aesthetic and political force, creating, however fleetingly, a shared sense of the world among otherwise diverse listeners.
Microgroove continues John Corbett's exploration of diverse musics, with essays, interviews, and musician profiles that focus on jazz, improvised music, contemporary classical, rock, folk, blues, post-punk, and cartoon music.
The crooner Rudy Vallee's soft, intimate, and sensual vocal delivery simultaneously captivated millions of adoring fans and drew harsh criticism from those threatened by his sensitive masculinity.
The contributors to Negotiated Moments explore how subjectivity is formed and expressed through musical improvisation, tracing the ways the transmission and reception of sound occur within and between bodies in real and virtual time and across memory, history, and space.
Addressing a wide range of improvised art and music forms-from jazz and cinema to dance and literature-this volume's contributors locate improvisation as a key site of mediation between the social and the aesthetic.
Since launching his career at the Village Voice in the early 1980s Greg Tate has been one of the premiere critical voices on contemporary Black music, art, literature, film, and politics.
Licia Fiol-Matta traces the careers of four iconic Puerto Rican singers-Myrta Silva, Ruth Fernandez, Ernestina Reyes, and Lucecita Benitez-to explore how their voices and performance style transform the possibilities for comprehending the figure of the woman singer.
From scouring flea markets and eBay to maxing out their credit cards, record collectors will do just about anything to score a long-sought-after album.
"e;Taken as a trilogy, consent not to be a single being is a monumental accomplishment: a brilliant theoretical intervention that might be best described as a powerful case for blackness as a category of analysis.
Originally published in 1991, Rodger Lyle Brown's Party Out of Bounds is a cult classic that offers an insider's look at the underground rock music culture that sprang from a lazy Georgia college town.
A groundbreaking appreciation of Dylan as a literary practitioner WINNER OF THE ELIZABETH AGEE PRIZE IN AMERICAN LITERATURE The literary establishment tends to regard Bob Dylan as an intriguing, if baffling, outsider.
The first history of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra to describe and document its origins in 1887 to the present day, relating its changing fortunes in light of the economic, demographic, and cultural history of the city of Detroit.
Originally a euphemism for Princeton University's Female Literary Tradition course in the 1980s, "e;chick lit"e; mutated from a movement in American women's avant-garde fiction in the 1990s to become, by the turn of the century, a humorous subset of women's literature, journalism, and advice manuals.
An in-depth biography of "e;a major artist whose work is sometimes obscured by the shadows of Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen"e; (Craig Werner, author of Up Around the Bend: An Oral History of Creedence Clearwater Revival).
Told in personal interviews, this is the collective story of a punk community in an unlikely town and region, a hub of radical counterculture that drew artists and musicians from throughout the conservative South and earned national renown.
On September 19, 1973, Gram Parsons became yet another rock-and-roll casualty in an era of excess, a time when young men wore their dangerous habits like badges of honor.
An essential work for rock fans and scholars, Before Elvis: The Prehistory of Rock 'n' Roll surveys the origins of rock 'n' roll from the minstrel era to the emergence of Bill Haley and Elvis Presley.
Few bands in the past three decades have proven as affecting or exciting as the Misfits, the ferocious horror punk outfit that lurked in the shadows of suburban New Jersey and released a handful of pivotal underground recordings during their brief, tumultuous time together.
Steel Drums and Steelbands: A History is a vivid account of the events that led to the ';accidental' invention of the steel drum: the only acoustic musical instrument invented in the 20th century.
From John Philip Sousa to Green Day, from Scott Joplin to Kanye West, from Stephen Foster to Coldplay, The Encyclopedia of Great Popular Song Recordings, Volumes 1 and 2 covers the vast scope of its subject with virtually unprecedented breadth and depth.
Shortly after Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's death, his widow Constanze sent a manuscript copy of one of his most beloved operas, Die Zauberflote, to the court of the Elector of Cologne.
The Annual Review of Jazz Studies (ARJS) is a journal providing a forum for the ever expanding range and depth of jazz scholarship, from technical analyses to oral history to cultural interpretation.
In Child Composers and Their Works: A Historical Survey, Barry Cooper examines over 100 composers born before 1900 who wrote substantial musical works before age 16.
The work of multiple scholars is combined in this single volume, bringing together in conversation the traditions of brass instrumentalism and jazz idiom.
Inside Pierrot lunaire: Performing the Sprechstimme in Schoenbergs Masterpiece is a handbook on the performance and interpretation of the recitation in Arnold Schoenbergs Pierrot lunaire, op.
Mystical Love in the German Baroque: Theology, Poetry, Music identifies the cultural and devotional conventions underlying expressions of mystical love in poetry and music of the German baroque.
In The Contradictions of Jazz, Paul Rinzler takes a new approach to jazz aesthetics and theory by exploring four pairs of opposites present in jazz: individualism and interconnectedness, assertion and openness, freedom and responsibility, and creativity and tradition.
