The pianist, composer, and bandleader Randy Weston is one of the world's most influential jazz musicians and a remarkable storyteller whose career has spanned five continents and more than six decades.
An important center of dancehall reggae performance, sound clashes are contests between rival sound systems: groups of emcees, tune selectors, and sound engineers.
In Segregating Sound, Karl Hagstrom Miller argues that the categories that we have inherited to think and talk about southern music bear little relation to the ways that southerners long played and heard music.
A hybrid of reggae and rap, reggaeton is a music with Spanish-language lyrics and Caribbean aesthetics that has taken Latin America, the United States, and the world by storm.
In A Language of Song, Samuel Charters-one of the pioneering collectors of African American music-writes of a trip to West Africa where he found "e;a gathering of cultures and a continuing history that lay behind the flood of musical expression [he] encountered everywhere .
Creator of such acclaimed works as the performance Meat Joy and the film Fuses, for decades the artist Carolee Schneemann has saved the letters she has written and received.
Hold On to Your Dreams is the first biography of the musician and composer Arthur Russell, one of the most important but least known contributors to New York's downtown music scene during the 1970s and 1980s.
Arguing that pop music turns on moments rather than movements, the essays in Listen Again pinpoint magic moments from a century of pop eclecticism, looking at artists who fall between genre lines, songs that sponge up influences from everywhere, and studio accidents with unforeseen consequences.
Soul Covers is an engaging look at how three very different rhythm and blues performers-Aretha Franklin, Al Green, and Phoebe Snow-used cover songs to negotiate questions of artistic, racial, and personal authenticity.
Tiki torches, cocktails, la dolce vita, and the music that popularized them-Mondo Exotica offers a behind-the-scenes look at the sounds and obsessions of the Space Age and Cold War period as well as the renewed interest in them evident in contemporary music and design.
In this lively ethnography Ian Condry interprets Japan's vibrant hip-hop scene, explaining how a music and culture that originated halfway around the world is appropriated and remade in Tokyo clubs and recording studios.
While the first healers were musicians who relied on rhythm and song to help cure the sick, over time Western thinkers and doctors lost touch with these traditions.
In Circular Breathing, George McKay, a leading chronicler of British countercultures, uncovers the often surprising ways that jazz has accompanied social change during a period of rapid transformation in Great Britain.
Phonographies explores the numerous links and relays between twentieth-century black cultural production and sound technologies from the phonograph to the Walkman.
In We Flew over the Bridge, one of the country's preeminent African American artists-and award-winning children's book authors-shares the fascinating story of her life.
At once the most lucrative, popular, and culturally oppositional musical force in the United States, hip hop demands the kind of interpretation Imani Perry provides here: criticism engaged with this vibrant musical form on its own terms.
A bilingual edition of a renowned work of Puerto Rican literature, Cortijo's Wake/El entierro de Cortijo is novelist Edgardo Rodriguez Julia's vivid description of the funeral of legendary Puerto Rican musician Rafael Cortijo.
"e;Hello, hello Brazil"e; was the standard greeting Brazilian radio announcers of the 1930s used to welcome their audience into an expanding cultural marketplace.
Available in English for the first time, Cuban Music from A to Z is an encyclopedic guide to one of the world's richest and most influential musical cultures.
After graduating from the Beijing Film Academy in 1982, directors like Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou transformed Chinese cinema with Farewell My Concubine, Yellow Earth, Raise the Red Lantern, and other international successes.
Marking the centenary of the birth of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946), this book offers a new approach to the Bauhaus artist and theorist's multifaceted life and work-an approach that redefines the very idea of biographical writing.
The most compelling art form to emerge from the United States in the second half of the twentieth century, rock & roll stands in an edgy relationship with its own mythology, its own musicological history and the broader culture in which it plays a part.
Japan's jazz community-both musicians and audience-has been begrudgingly recognized in the United States for its talent, knowledge, and level of appreciation.
Listening in Detail is an original and impassioned take on the intellectual and sensory bounty of Cuban music as it circulates between the island, the United States, and other locations.
Winner, 2014 Lambda Literary Award in LGBT StudiesSince the 1970s, a key goal of lesbian and gay activists has been protection against street violence, especially in gay neighborhoods.
The Fierce Urgency of Now links musical improvisation to struggles for social change, focusing on the connections between the improvisation associated with jazz and the dynamics of human rights struggles and discourses.
