![]() |
![]() |
Your cart is empty |
||
Books > Arts & Architecture > Music > Contemporary popular music
SUNDAY TIMES MUSIC BOOK OF THE YEAR ROUGH TRADE BOOK OF THE YEAR MOJO BOOK OF THE YEAR In 1975, Viv Albertine was obsessed with music but it never occurred to her she could be in a band as she couldn't play an instrument and she'd never seen a girl play electric guitar. A year later, she was the guitarist in the hugely influential all-girl band the Slits, who fearlessly took on the male-dominated music scene and became part of a movement that changed music. A raw, thrilling story of life on the frontiers and a candid account of Viv's life post-punk - taking in a career in film, the pain of IVF, illness and divorce and the triumph of making music again - Clothes Music Boys is a remarkable memoir.
Jazz great Gerald Wilson (1918-2014), born in Shelby, Mississippi, left a global legacy of paramount significance through his progressive musical ideas and his orchestra's consistent influence on international jazz. Aided greatly by interviews that bring Wilson's voice to the story, Steven Loza presents a perspective on what the musician and composer called his ""jazz pilgrimage."" Wilson uniquely adapted Latin influences into his jazz palette, incorporating many Cuban and Brazilian inflections as well as those of Mexican and Spanish styling. Throughout the book, Loza refers to Wilson's compositions and arrangements, including their historical contexts and motivations. Loza provides savvy musical readings and analysis of the repertoire. He concludes by reflecting upon Wilson's ideas on the place of jazz culture in America, its place in society and politics, its origins, and its future. With a foreword written by Wilson's son, Anthony, and such sources as essays, record notes, interviews, and Wilson's own reflections, the biography represents the artist's ideas with all their philosophical, historical, and cultural dimensions. Beyond merely documenting Wilson's many awards and recognitions, this book ushers readers into the heart and soul of a jazz creator. Wilson emerges a unique and proud African American artist whose tunes became a mosaic of the world.
For a century and more, the idea of democracy has fuelled musicians' imaginations. Seeking to go beyond music's proven capacity to contribute to specific political causes, musicians have explored how aspects of their practice embody democratic principles. This may involve adopting particular approaches to compositional material, performance practice, relationships to audiences, or modes of dissemination and distribution. Finding Democracy in Music is the first study to offer a wide-ranging investigation of ways in which democracy may thus be found in music. A guiding theme of the volume is that this takes place in a plurality of ways, depending upon the perspective taken to music's manifold relationships, and the idea of democracy being entertained. Contributing authors explore various genres including orchestral composition, jazz, the post-war avant-garde, online performance, and contemporary popular music, as well as employing a wide array of theoretical, archival, and ethnographic methodologies. Particular attention is given to the contested nature of democracy as a category, and the gaps that frequently arise between utopian aspiration and reality. In so doing, the volume interrogates a key way in which music helps to articulate and shape our social lives and our politics.
- A comprehensive guide to musicals that are based on musicians' existing back catalogues - how they work, why they work and why they are so successful. - Written for musical theatre students at all levels - primarily on the 150 BA degrees across the UK and North America. - The first book to address this relatively new genre of musical theatre, doing so with in-depth and wide ranging analysis.
Along with Factory, Mute, and Creation, Some Bizzare was the vanguard of outsider music in the 1980s. The label s debut release reads like a who s who of electronic music, featuring early tracks from Soft Cell, Depeche Mode, Blancmange, and The The, while over the next decade its roster would include artists such as Marc Almond, Cabaret Voltaire, Einsturzende Neubauten, Foetus, Swans, Coil, and Psychic TV. For a time, Some Bizzare was the most exciting independent record label in the world, but the music is only half of the story. Self-styled label boss Stevo Pearce s unconventional dealings with the industry are legendary. Sometimes they were playful (sending teddy bears to meetings in his place), other times less so (he and Marc Almond destroyed offices at Phonogram and terrorised staff). Despite this, he was a force to be reckoned with. His preternatural ability to spot talent meant his label was responsible for releasing some of the decade s most forward-thinking, transgressive, and influential music. The Some Bizzare story spans the globe: from ecstasy parties in early 80s New York to video shoots in the Peruvian jungle, from events in disused tube stations to seedy sex shows in Soho. There were million-selling singles, run-ins with the Vice Squad, destruction at the ICA, death threats, meltdowns, and, of course, sex dwarves. For a time, Stevo had the music industry in the palm of his hands, only for it all to slip through his fingers. But he and Some Bizzare left a legacy of incredible music that still has an influence and impact today.
The Technic is Fun series offers piano students a series of graded studies for the development of technic, style, and musicianship. These studies reinforce the technical requirements found in method books and in standard piano repertory. The etudes found in this series not only build technic and musicality but have been carefully selected to provide refreshing recital repertoire as well as to develop a strong musical and technical foundation.
Graham Collier's career in jazz lasted over five decades. He was a bassist, a band-leader, a composer, an educator and an author, who wrote extensively about the music. His working life was littered with `firsts'. Amongst his many achievements, he was the first British jazz musician to study at the Berklee School of music in Boston and the first to receive an Arts Council grant. In 1985, Collier began teaching at the Royal Academy of Music, where he later established the first full-time jazz degree course in the UK in 1987. Mosaics draws extensively on Collier's personal archive, as well as on interviews with fellow musicians, ex-students and colleagues from the Royal Academy of Music. It locates Collier and his work within the social and cultural changes which occurred during his life and, particularly, in relation to developments in British and European jazz of the 1960s and 70s. Collier's work as a composer-bandleader represented an attempt to resolve the paradoxes inherent in jazz between composition and improvisation, familiarity and spontaneity and change and tradition. In this regard, Mosaics compares Collier's work with other composers such as Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus, Gil Evans, Mike Westbrook, Stan Tracey, Barry Guy and Butch Morris. Throughout, Collier emerges as a contradictory figure falling between several different camps. He was never an out-and-out musical, cultural or political radical but rather an individualist continually forced to confront the contradictions in his own position - a musical outsider working within a marginalised area of cultural activity; a gay man operating in a very male area of the music business and within heterosexist culture in general; a man of working class origins stepping outside traditionally prescribed class boundaries; and a musician-composer seeking individual solutions to collective problems of aesthetic and ethical value.
Late nineteenth-century France was a nation undergoing an identity crisis: the uncertain infancy of the Third Republic and shifting alliances in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War forced France to interrogate the fundamental values and characteristics at the heart of its own national identity. Music was central to this national self-scrutiny. It comes as little surprise to us that Oriental fears, desires, and anxieties should be a fundamental part of this, but what has been overlooked to date is that Britain, too, provided a thinking space in the French musical world; it was often - surprisingly and paradoxically - represented through many of the same racialist terms and musical tropes as the Orient. However, at the same time, its shared history with France and the explosions of colonial rivalry between the two nations introduced an ever-present tension into this musical relationship. This book sheds light on this forgotten musical sphere through a rich variety of contemporary sources. It visits the cafe-concert and its tradition of 'Englishing up' with fake hair, mocking accents, and unflattering dances; it explores the reactions, both musical and physical, to British evangelical bands as they arrived in the streets of France and the colonies; it considers the French reception of, and fascination with, folk music from Ireland and Scotland; and it confronts the culture shock felt by French visitors to Britain as they witnessed British music-making for the first time. Throughout, it examines the ways in which this music allowed French society to grapple with the uncertainty of late nineteenth-century life, providing ordinary French citizens with a means of understanding and interrogating both the Franco-British relationship and French identity itself.
(Book). The definitive, unauthorized biography of Jeff Beck This well-researched, enlightening book positions Jeff Beck's astonishing achievements like the pioneering of feedback within the musical climate of the times. Chronicling his incarnations before and with the Yardbirds, the Jeff Beck Group and beyond, the book describes in detail: Beck's favored Fender guitars; passion for hot rods; relationships with Rod Stewart, Jimmy Page, Jimi Hendrix, Buddy Guy and other artists; love of rockabilly; recording collaborations ranging from Donovan to Tina Turner; landmark solo and instrumental work; and much more. Includes a wealth of personal, musical and historical detail, great photos, and a comprehensive discography.
Black Music, Black Poetry offers readers a fuller appreciation of the diversity of approaches to reading black American poetry. It does so by linking a diverse body of poetry to musical genres that range from the spirituals to contemporary jazz. The poetry of familiar figures such as Paul Laurence Dunbar and Langston Hughes and less well-known poets like Harryette Mullen or the lyricist to Pharaoh Sanders, Amos Leon Thomas, is scrutinized in relation to a musical tradition contemporaneous with the lifetime of each poet. Black music is considered the strongest representation of black American communal consciousness; and black poetry, by drawing upon such a musical legacy, lays claim to a powerful and enduring black aesthetic. The contributors to this volume take on issues of black cultural authenticity, of musical imitation, and of poetic performance as displayed in the work of Paul Laurence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, Amiri Baraka, Michael Harper, Nathaniel Mackey, Jayne Cortez, Harryette Mullen, and Amos Leon Thomas. Taken together, these essays offer a rich examination of the breath of black poetry and the ties it has to the rhythms and forms of black music and the influence of black music on black poetic practice.
No music scholar has made as profound an impact on contemporary thought as Susan McClary, a central figure in what has been termed the 'new musicology'. In this volume seventeen distinguished scholars pay tribute to her work, with essays addressing three approaches to music that have characterized her own writings: reassessing music's role in identity formation, particularly regarding gender, sexuality, and race; exploring music's capacity to define and regulate perceptions and experiences of time; and advancing new modes of analysis more appropriate to those aspects and modes of musicking ignored by traditional methods. Contributors include, in overlapping categories, many fellow pioneers, current colleagues, and former students, and their essays, like McClary's own work, address a wide range of repertories ranging from the established canon to a variety of popular genres. The collection represents the generational arrival of the 'new' musicology into full maturity, dividing fairly evenly between pre-eminent scholars of music and a group of younger scholars who have already made their mark in significant ways. But the collection is also, and fundamentally, interdisciplinary in nature, in active conversation with such fields as history, anthropology, philosophy, aesthetics, media studies, film music studies, dramatic criticism, women's studies, and cultural studies.
* Creates a defining narrative on the history and programming of jazz on television and contributes to the emerging literature on jazz and the media; * Focuses on the cultural politics of jazz on television, exploring the relationship between jazz and a state control television in the twentieth century * Collates primary sources relevant to the understanding of a single jazz location - Portugal --and its relationship to international television jazz production in the US and Western Europe * Challenges dominant historical jazz narratives regarding the status of jazz on television and its dissemination within the public sphere.
At the end of his life, Pierre Schaeffer commented that his musical and sound experiments had attempted to go beyond 'do-re-mi'. This had a direct bearing on EinstA1/4rzende Neubauten's musical philosophy and work, with the musicians always striving to extend the boundaries of music in sound, instrumentation and purpose. The group are one of the few examples of 'rock-based' artists who have been able to sustain a breadth and depth of work in a variety of media over a number of years while remaining experimental and open to development. Jennifer Shryane provides a much-needed analysis of the group's important place in popular/experimental music history. She illustrates their innovations with found- and self-constructed instrumentation, their Artaudian performance strategies and textual concerns, as well as their methods of independence. EinstA1/4rzende Neubauten have also made a consistent and unique contribution to the development of the independent German Language Contemporary Music scene, which although often acknowledged as influential, is still rarely examined.
The book represents the revelation of a jazz culture which has been almost completely neglected in jazz studies. A major contribution to the New Jazz Studies' enlargement of the focus beyond the US in recognizing jazz as a global phenomenon Written 'from the inside' - by local teachers, scholars and practitioners
"An introduction to jazz and how to listen to it" Written by active jazz musician and jazz historian Mark Gridley, the "Concise Guide to Jazz "was created in response to students and professors asking for a clear and accurate introductory jazz text. This brief text examines how jazz originated, how it is made, what to listen for, and the major style eras. By focusing on just over fifty historical figures, "Concise Guide to Jazz, seventh edition "allows students to understand a broad range of jazz styles without feeling overloaded. "Concise Guide to Jazz "focuses on the diversity of jazz styles and serves as a basis for further jazz exploration. This text is available in a variety of formats - digital and print. Pearson offers its titles on the devices students love through Pearson's MyLab products, CourseSmart, Amazon, and more. To learn more about our programs, pricing options and customization, click the Choices tab. Learning GoalsUpon completing this book, readers will be able to:
In Mavericks of Sound: Conversations with the Artists Who Shaped Indie and Roots Music, music scholar David Ensminger offers a collection of vivid and compelling interviews with legendary roots rock and indie artists who bucked mainstream trends and have remained resilient in the face of enormous shifts in the music world. As the success of the concerts at Austin City Limits have revealed, the fan bases and crowds for indie and roots music often blur and overlap. In Mavericks of Sound, Ensminger brings to light the highways and byways trod by these music icons over the course of their careers and the ways in which their music-making has been affected by, and influenced, the burgeoning indie and roots music movements. Ranging from seminal modern singer-songwriters to rockabilly renegades and indie rockers, Mavericks of Sound features a set of broad, penetrating, and insightful conversations imbued with a sense of musical history and heritage. Ensminger captures firsthand accounts from singer songwriters like Texas Country musician Tom Russell and first wave indie artist and folk rocker Peter Case; rockabilly artists Junior Brown and the Reverend Horton Heat; American indie rock icons such as 11th Dream Day's Janet Bean, Pere Ubu's Dave Thomas, Apples in Stereo's Robert Schneider, and Swans members Michael Gira and Jarboe; English and New Zealand figures such as folk legend Richard Thompson, The Clean's David Kilgour and The Waterboys' Mike Scott; and folk, country and rock legends such as Merle Haggard, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, Ralph Stanley, Neko Case, and Yo La Tengo. Mavericks of Sound is the perfect work for contemporary indie, roots, Americana, country, and folk music fans who want to understand the unique artistry and unbound passion behind America's musical innovators that readily broke and remolded rules.
The seminal British band Motorhead have been rocking since 1975
and, led by the legendary Lemmy, show no signs of letting up. From
early classics "Ace Of Spades," "Overkill" and "No Sleep 'Til
Hammersmith" the band have racked up an incredible 25 albums, with
2011's "The World Is Yours" the latest success.
The magic couple Amadou and Mariam are one of the most loved and successful acts to come out of Africa this century, but their story is not one of overnight success. They have been singing their warm notes for more than thirty years. This autobiography traces Amadou's early years in Mali, first accepting his blindness, then adapting, to finding a source of joy in music and playing alongside some of the country's leading musicians. On meeting Mariam at an institute for the blind in Bamako, he discovers they share a passion for music and for life, they fall in love and begin their career as a duo in search of an international stage. "Away from the Light of Day" is an inspiring story which reveals the source of this golden duo's contagious music, threading its way between tradition, religion, hope and superstition.
In The New Guitarscape, Kevin Dawe argues for a re-assessment of guitar studies in the light of more recent musical, social, cultural and technological developments that have taken place around the instrument. The author considers that a detailed study of the guitar in both contemporary and cross-cultural perspectives is now absolutely essential and that such a study must also include discussion of a wide range of theoretical issues, literature, musical cultures and technologies as they come to bear upon the instrument. Dawe presents a synthesis of previous work on the guitar, but also expands the terms by which the guitar might be studied. Moreover, in order to understand the properties and potential of the guitar as an agent of music, culture and society, the author draws from studies in science and technology, design theory, material culture, cognition, sensual culture, gender and sexuality, power and agency, ethnography (real and virtual) and globalization. Dawe presents the guitar as an instrument of scientific investigation and part of the technology of globalization, created and disseminated through corporate culture and cottage industry, held close to the body but taken away from the body in cyberspace, and involved in an enormous variety of cultural interactions and political exchanges in many different contexts around the world. In an effort to understand the significance and meaning of the guitar in the lives of those who may be seen to be closest to it, as well as providing a critically-informed discussion of various approaches to guitar performance, technologies and techniques, the book includes discussion of the work of a wide range of guitarists, including Robert Fripp, Kamala Shankar, Newton Faulkner, Lionel Loueke, Sharon Isbin, Steve Vai, Bob Brozman, Kaki King, Fred Frith, John 5, Jennifer Batten, Guthrie Govan, Dominic Frasca, I Wayan Balawan, Vicki Genfan and Hasan Cihat A-rter.
1. it describes the way a European country and its jazz scene impacted the jazz world in the US from the late 1940s onwards. 2. it analyzes how the distinctive meaning of this music was constructed, paying specific attention to the influence of record covers, liner notes, jazz criticism and how these different elements related to each other. 3. it follows the one-way travel of jazz from the US to Europe, as well as the journey back into the US -- showing along the way how national borders have affected history writing in jazz. 4. it shows how non-American, European jazz was relevant earlier than has generally been recognized in the established narratives.
The social history of music in Britain since 1950 has long been the subject of nostalgic articles in newspapers and magazines, nostalgic programmes on radio and television and collective memories on music websites, but to date there has been no proper scholarly study. The three volumes of The History of Live Music in Britain address this gap, and do so from the unique perspective of the music promoter: the key theme is the changing nature of the live music industry. The books are focused upon popular music but cover all musical genres and the authors offer new insights into a variety of issues, including changes in musical fashions and tastes; the impact of developing technologies; the balance of power between live and recorded music businesses; the role of the state as regulator and promoter; the effects of demographic and other social changes on music culture; and the continuing importance of do-it-yourself enthusiasts. Drawing on archival research, a wide range of academic and non-academic secondary sources, participant observation and industry interviews, the books are likely to become landmark works within Popular Music Studies and broader cultural history.
" With a foreword by Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards Chosen by the The Amelia Bloomer Project committee for their 2005 list of recommended feminist books for young readers. Girls Rock explores the many ways women have defined themselves as rock musicians in an industry once dominated and controlled by men. Integrating history, feminist analysis, and developmental theory, the authors describe how and why women have become rock musicians -- what inspires them to play and perform, how they write, what their music means to them, and what they hope their music means to listeners. As these musicians tell their stories, topics emerge that illuminate broader trends in rock's history. From Wanda Jackson's revolutionary act of picking up a guitar to the current success of independent artists such as Ani DiFranco, Girls Rock examines the shared threads of these performers' lives and the evolution of women's roles in rock music since its beginnings in the 1950s. This provocative investigation of women in rock is based on numerous interviews with a broad spectrum of women performers -- those who have achieved fame and those just starting bands, those playing at local coffeehouses and those selling out huge arenas. Girls Rock celebrates what female musicians have to teach about their experiences as women, artists, and rock musicians.
From Fred Astaire to Raven Wilkinson, Misty Copeland to Janet Jackson, Dance Legends Alphabet shimmies and shakes through eras and genres to present the quintessential A to Z of dance. Dynamically illustrated and rhythmically written, Dance Legends Alphabet is the perfect move for every young dance enthusiast. |
![]() ![]() You may like...
African Voices - Towards African British…
Israel Oluwole Olofinjana
Hardcover
R805
Discovery Miles 8 050
|