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So What
Miles Davis was one of the crucial influences in the development of modern jazz. His Kind of Blue is an automatic inclusion in any critic's list of the great jazz albums, the one record people who own no other jazz records possess, and still sells 250,000 copies a year in the US alone. But Miles regularly changed styles, leaving his inimitable impact on many forms of jazz, whether he created them or simply developed the work of others, from modal jazz to be-bop, his seminal quintet and his big-band work, to the jazz funk experiments of later years. Miles not only knew and worked with everyone who was anyone in jazz, from Coltrane to Monk, he was a friend of Sartre's, lover of Juliette Greco ...
Space Is the Place
Considered by many to be a founder of Afrofuturism, Sun Ra—aka Herman Blount—was a composer, keyboardist, bandleader, philosopher, entrepreneur, poet, and self-proclaimed extraterrestrial from Saturn. He recorded over 200 albums with his Arkestra, which, dressed in Egypto-space costumes, played everything from boogie-woogie and swing to fusion and free jazz. John Szwed's Space is the Place is the definitive biography of this musical polymath, who was one of the twentieth century's greatest avant-garde artists and intellectuals. Charting the whole of Sun Ra's life and career, Szwed outlines how after years in Chicago as a blues and swing band pianist, Sun Ra set out in the 1950s to impart his views about the galaxy, black people, and spiritual matters by performing music with the Arkestra that was as vital and innovative as it was mercurial and confounding. Szwed's readers—whether they are just discovering Sun Ra or are among the legion of poets, artists, intellectuals, and musicians who consider him a spiritual godfather—will find that, indeed, space is the place.
Alan Lomax
Writer, musicologist, archivist, singer, DJ, filmmaker, record, radio & TV producer, Alan Lomax was a man of many parts. Without him the history of popular music would have been very different. John Szwed's biography tells the story of this remarkable and contradictory man - whom he both knew and worked with for ten years.
Cosmic Scholar
Named one of the Best Books of 2023 by the New Yorker and The New York Times' Dwight Garner “The first comprehensive biography of this hipster magus . . . [John Szwed] allows different sides of Smith’s personality to catch blades of sun. He brings the right mixture of reverence and comic incredulity to his task.” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times Grammy Award–winning music scholar and celebrated biographer John Szwed presents the first biography of Harry Smith, the brilliant eccentric who transformed twentieth century art and culture. He was an anthropologist, filmmaker, painter, folklorist, mystic, and walking encyclopedia. He taught Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe about the ...
So What
Based on interviews with family and friends, this account of the jazz great's life reveals the influence of Miles Davis' life on his work as well as the musician's persistent desire to re-invent himself.
The Man who Adores the Negro
The challenges of interracial fieldwork
Billie Holiday
When eighteen-year-old Billie Holiday stepped into Columbia studios in November of 1933 to record âe~Riffinâe(tm) the Scotchâe(tm) and âe~Your Motherâe(tm)s Son-in-Lawâe(tm), it marked the beginning of what is arguably the most remarkable and important career in twentieth-century popular music. Today, Billie Holiday is an icon âe" an artist whose voice has weathered countless shifts in public taste, and whose impact on contemporary music is unquestionable. Most of the writing on Holiday has focused on the tragic details of her life âe" her prostitution at the age of fourteen, a her heroin addiction and alcoholism, her series of abusive relationships, the ravages of her voice by the t...
Writing Dancing in the Age of Postmodernism
Drawing of the postmodern perspective and concerns that informed her groundbreaking Terpsichore in Sneakers, Sally Banes’s Writing Dancing documents the background and developments of avant-garde and popular dance, analyzing individual artists, performances, and entire dance movements. With a sure grasp of shifting cultural dynamics, Banes shows how postmodern dance is integrally connected to other oppositional, often marginalized strands of dance culture, and considers how certain kinds of dance move from the margins to the mainstream. Banes begins by considering the act of dance criticism itself, exploring its modes, methods, and underlying assumptions, and examining the work of other cr...
The Man who Recorded the World
Folklorist, archivist, anthropologist, singer, political activist, talent scout, ethnomusicologist, filmmaker, concert and record producer, Alan Lomax is best remembered as the man who introduced folk music to the masses. Lomax began his career making field recordings of rural music for the Library of Congress and by the late 1930s brought his discoveries to radio, including Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, and Burl Ives. By the 1940s he was producing concerts that brought white and black performers together, and in the 1950s he set out to record the whole world. Lomax was also controversial. When he worked for the government he was tracked by the FBI, and when he worked in Britain, MI5 continued the surveillance. In his last years he turned to digital media and developed technologies that anticipated today's breakthroughs. Featuring a cast of characters from Eleanor Roosevelt to Lead Belly, Carl Sagan to Bob Dylan, Szwed's biography provides an account of an era seen through the life of one extraordinary man.--From publisher description.
Lying Up a Nation
What is black music? For some it is a unique expression of the African-American experience, its soulful vocals and stirring rhythms forged in the fires of black resistance in response to centuries of oppression. But as Ronald Radano argues in this bracing work, the whole idea of black music has a much longer and more complicated history-one that speaks as much of musical and racial integration as it does of separation.
