The story of Afro-Brazilian percussionist Naná Vasconcelos stitches together histories of 1960s-1980s jazz, psychedelia, world music, experimentalism and post-punk. Based in Recife, Rio de Janeiro, New York City and Paris, Naná played with musicians as varied as Egberto Gismonti, Don Cherry, Pat Metheny, Ralph Towner, Arto Lindsay, Talking Heads, Laurie Anderson, Paul Simon, Jon Hassell, Brian Eno, Os Mutantes, and Milton Nascimento. This book traces the 15 years (1964-1979) leading up to Naná's Saudades (1979, ECM), an album evoking his sonic memories of Brazil that he recorded while in Germany. Saudades features berimbau, a one-stringed instrument that looks like a bow and arrow, alongside onomatopoetic vocals and the strings of the Radio Symphony Stuttgart. Daniel B. Sharp hears Naná's playing as a counterargument against dishonest notions of the primitive just as world music emerged as a genre. With a gourd, a stick, a wire, a wicker basket, and a stone, Naná made music as complex and contemporary as the ARP synthesizers in vogue at the time.

The story of a subterranean club situated in the backstreets of Leeds, that changed the lives of all who went there. Top of The Stairs tracks the origin of the Central Dance Club and its transition, from the early mods, through the Northern Soul era to Jazz Funk, and ultimately back again. It captures the unique and personal stories of the DJs and the dancers alike, along with some of the incidents and events that have persisted in Soul folklore for decades, including stories from Tony Banks, Twink, Ian Dewhirst, Richard Searling, Paul Rowan, Pat Brady, Paul Schofield and many more.

In Performing Racial Uplift: E. Azalia Hackley and African American Activism in the Postbellum to Pre-Harlem Era, Juanita Karpf rediscovers the career of Black activist E. Azalia Hackley (1867-1922), a concert artist, nationally famous music teacher, and charismatic lecturer. Growing up in Black Detroit, she began touring as a pianist and soprano soloist while only in her teens. By the late 1910s, she had toured coast-to-coast, earning glowing reviews. Her concert repertoire consisted of an innovative blend of spirituals, popular ballads, virtuosic showstoppers, and classical pieces. She also taught music while on tour and visited several hundred Black schools, churches, and communities during her career. She traveled overseas and, in London and Paris, studied singing with William Shakespeare and Jean de Reszke-two of the classical music world's most renowned teachers. Her acceptance into these famous studios confirmed her extraordinary musicianship, a "first" for an African American singer. She founded the Normal Vocal Institute in Chicago, the first music school founded by a Black performer to offer teacher training to aspiring African American musicians. Hackley's activist philosophy was unique. Unlike most activists of her era, she did not align herself unequivocally with either Booker T. Washington or W. E. B. Du Bois. Instead, she created her own mediatory philosophical approach. To carry out her agenda, she harnessed such strategies as giving music lessons to large audiences and delivering lectures on the ecumenical religious movement known as New Thought. In this book, Karpf reclaims Hackley's legacy and details the talent, energy, determination, and unprecedented worldview she brought to the cause of racial uplift.

Has the global phenomenon that is Pop Idol completely ruined pop music, or is it just the natural revolution of a genre of music that has always been manufactured? From Tin Pan Alley via The Monkees and finally to boy bands, this is the complete history of the most successful genre of music ever.;Manufactured acts have been the money-spinning mainstay of the pop industry for decades. "Bubblegum: The History of Plastic Pop" takes a decade-by-decade look at some of the music industry's more cynical creations from the 1950s to the 21st century, encompassing acts such as The Monkees, The Bay City Rollers and The Spice Girls, as well as the phenomenon that is Pop Idol and its siblings. This revealing study includes interviews with the movers and shakers of the pop world and the artistic armies behind their successes, including Chinn and Chapman, Stock, Aitken and Waterman, Simon Fuller, Paula Abdul and Cathy Dennis. The result is a comprehensive look back at some of the fly-by-nights of pop and a DIY guide to becoming a pop star, listing the dos and don'ts of making it in the pop music industry.

What do we mean when we talk about the identity of a musical work and what does such an identity involve? What in fact are the properties that make it something worth protecting and preserving? These issues are not only of legal relevance; they are central to a philosophical discipline that has seen considerable advances over the last few decades: musical ontology. Taking into account its main theoretical models, this essay argues that an understanding of the ontological status of musical works should acknowledge the irreducible ambivalence of music as an "art of the trace" and as a "performative art." It advocates a theory of the musical work as a "social object" and, more specifically, as a sound artefact that functions aesthetically and which is based on a trace informed by a normative value. Such a normativity is further explored in relation to three primary ways of conceiving and fixing the trace: orality, notation and phonography.

This book explores an album of popular music with a remarkable significance to a violent wave of postcolonial tensions in the Netherlands in the 1970s. Several "actions" were claimed by a small number of first-generation descendants of ca. 12,500 reluctant migrants from the young independent state of Indonesia (former Dutch East Indies). Transferred in 1951, this culturally coherent group consisted of ex-Royal Dutch Colonial Army personnel and their families. Their ancient roots in the Moluccan archipelago and their protestant-christian faith defined their minority image. Their sojourn should have been temporary, but frustratingly turned out to be permanent. At the height of strained relations, Massada rose to the occasion. Astaganaga (1978) is a telling example of the will to negotiate a different diasporic Moluccan identity through uplifting contemporary sounds.