Popular music

John W.

John W.

Jazz has always been a genre built on the blending of disparate musical cultures.

The Nashville Cats bounced from studio to studio along the city's Music Row, delivering instrumental backing tracks for countless recordings throughout the mid-20th century.

The Nashville Cats bounced from studio to studio along the city's Music Row, delivering instrumental backing tracks for countless recordings throughout the mid-20th century.

There were but four major galaxies in the early jazz universe, and three of them--New Orleans, Chicago, and New York--have been well documented in print.

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Taking a wide-ranging approach rare in jazz criticism, Ted Gioia's brilliant volume draws upon fields as disparate as literary criticism, art history, sociology, and aesthetic philosophy in order to place jazz within the turbulent cultural environment of the twentieth century.

Louis Armstrong.

The Triumph of Vulgarity in a thinker's guide to rock 'n' roll.

In this book, a leading authority on film music examines scores of the silent film era.

From record album liner notes to serious academic pieces, Martin Williams has been perceptively chronicling the development of jazz for over three decades.

Irving Berlin remains a central figure in American music, a lyricist/composer whose songs are loved all over the world.

Amy Marcy Cheney Beach (1867-1944), the most widely performed composer of her generation, was the first American woman to succeed as a creator of large-scale art music.

Born of African rhythms, the spiritual "e;call and response,"e; and other American musical traditions, jazz was by the 1920s the dominant influence on this country's popular music.

When it was first published in 1970, this lively and fascinating book was greeted with almost universal acclaim.

Jazz Changes is the late Martin Williams's third and perhaps best collection of jazz portraits, interviews, narrative accounts of recording sessions, rehearsals, and performances, important liner notes, and far reaching discussions of musicians and their music.

"e;I've done everything in the theatre except marry a property man,"e; Fanny Brice once boasted.

It's nineteen fifty-something, in a dark, cramped, smoke-filled room.

Hailed by The New York Times as "e;America's Aristophanes,"e; Will Rogers was one of this century's most astute and beloved humorists.

If Benny Goodman was the "e;King of Swing,"e; then Fletcher Henderson was the power behind the throne.

In the early 1930s an exciting new musical form arose in Chicago known as the gospel blues.

Samuel Barber (1910-1981) was one of the most important and honored American composers of the twentieth century.

The setting is the Royal Gardens Cafe.

Alec Wilder wrote songs and lyrics of unsurpassed beauty and originality, and his work won the respect and admiration of such important musical figures as Frank Sinatra, Peggy Lee, Mitch Miller, Gunther Schuller, and many others.

Praised by the Washington Post as a "e;tough, unblinkered critic,"e; James Lincoln Collier is probably the most controversial writer on jazz today.

Art Tatum defined the limits of the possible in jazz piano.

Drawing upon a remarkable mix of intensive research and the personal experience of a career devoted to the music about which Dvorak so presciently spoke, Maurice Peress's lively and convincing narrative treats readers to a rare and delightful glimpse behind the scenes of the burgeoning American school of music and beyond.

Few styles of popular music have generated as much controversy as progressive rock, a musical genre best remembered today for its gargantuan stage shows, its fascination with epic subject matter drawn from science fiction, mythology, and fantasy literature, and above all for its attempts to combine classical music's sense of space and monumental scope with rock's raw power and energy.

Amid the recent increase in scholarly attention to rock music, Understanding Rock stands out as one of the first books that subjects diverse aspects of the music itself to close and sophisticated analytical scrutiny.

It was none other than Louis Armstrong who said, "e;These people who make the restrictions, they don't know nothing about music.

Lorenz Hart singlehandedly changed the craft of lyric writing.

Nadine Jansen, a flugelhornist and pianist, remembers a night in the 1940s when a man came out of the audience as she was playing both instruments.

In the face of the Holocaust, writes Lawrence L.

"e;When bebop was new,"e; writes Thomas Owens, "e;many jazz musicians and most of the jazz audience heard it as radical, chaotic, bewildering music.

This is the first study of "e;hard"e; country music as well as the first comprehensive application of contemporary cultural theory to country music.

For more than half of his long life, composer Roger Sessions was a commanding figure on the American musical scene.

In this unique and readable study, Jon Finson views the mores and values of nineteenth-century Americans as they appear in their popular songs.

To the perennial question "e;which comes first, the music or the words?

Four Parts, No Waiting investigates the role that vernacular, barbershop-style close harmony has played in American musical history, in American life, and in the American imagination.

What is rock and roll and where does it come from?

Lydia Mendoza began her legendary musical career as a child in the 1920s, singing for pennies and nickels on the streets of downtown San Antonio.

This book is the first biography of 20th-century pianist Rudolf Serkin, providing a narrative of Serkin's life with emphasis on his European roots and the impact of his move to America.

Although it isn't the official national anthem, America may be the most important and interesting patriotic song in our national repertoire.

Ruth Crawford Seeger (1901-1953) is frequently considered the most significant American female composer in this century.

A generation before Walt Disney, Fred Thompson was the "e;boy-wonder"e; of American popular amusements.

'A Gilbert is of no use without a Sullivan.

"e;If You Don't Know Me By Now,"e; "e;The Love I Lost,"e; "e;The Soul Train Theme,"e; "e;Then Came You,"e; "e;Ain't No Stoppin' Us Now"e;--the distinctive music that became known as Philly Soul dominated the pop music charts in the 1970s.

Gary Giddins's Weather Bird is a brilliant companion volume to his landmark in music criticism, Visions of Jazz, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism.

A jazz writer for three decades, W.