Softcover. Jackson MS, University Press of Mississippi, 1st, 2014, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 168 pages. How early jazz musicians improvised together and how the blues became a part of jazz has until now been a mystery. Part of the reason New Orleans jazz developed as it did is that all the prominent jazz pioneers sang in barbershop quartets. This book describes how the practices of quartet singing were converted to the instruments of a jazz band, and how this, in turn, produced collectively improvised, blues-inflected jazz. Clean, like new.
Hardcover. NY, Penguin Press, 1st, 2012, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. 474 pages, b&w illustrations. "A "heroic" and "fascinating" biography of John Cage showing how his work, and that of countless American artists, was transformed by Zen Buddhism". (The New York Times). Where the Heart Beats is the story of the tremendous changes sweeping through American culture following the Second World War, a time when the arts in America broke away from centuries of tradition and reinvented themselves. Painters converted their canvases into arenas for action and gesture, dancers embraced pure movement over narrative, performance artists staged "happenings" in which anything could happen, poets wrote words determined by chance.
Softcover. Tubingen GR, Advance Music, 1st, 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 98 pages plus publisher's ads. This book/CD set addresses the development of improvisation in all its forms, individual and collective, textural and structural, and is designed to open up the mind to all the players in any jazz situation. 11 recordings on the CD. Clean copy.
Hardcover. New Haven CT, Yale University Press, 1st, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. 387 pages, b&w illustrations throughout. Remainder marks to top and bottom edge. Light edge wear to dust jacket. Else a very clean, tight copy.
Hardcover. NY, Dey Street Books/Morrow, 1st, 2024, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 437 pages. Celebrated NPR music critic Ann Powers explores the life and career of Joni Mitchell in a lyrical style as fascinating and ethereal as the songs of the artist herself. In Traveling, Powers seeks to understand Mitchell through her myriad journeys. Through extensive interviews with Mitchell's peers and deep archival research, she takes readers to rural Canada, mapping the singer's childhood battle with polio. She charts the course of Mitchell's musical evolution, ranging from early folk to jazz fusion to experimentation with pop synthetics. She follows the winding road of Mitchell's collaborations with other greats, and the loves that emerged along the way, all the way through to the remarkable return of Mitchell to music-making after the 2015 aneurysm that nearly took her life. Clean copy.
Hardcover. London , Jazz Book Club/ Andre Deutsch, reprint, 1963, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 242 pages, in a very good dust jacket.
Hardcover. New York, St. Martin's Press, 1st, 1973, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 276 pages, in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Condon has brought a half century of jazz into focus with his published scrapbook of photographs and recollections. This particular volume contains 16 original autographs obtained by a patron of his jazz clubs. Includes the signatures of all four house band leaders: drummer Buzzy Drootin (1947-1951), pianist Ralph Sutton (1948-1956), pianist Johnny Varro and cornetist Ed Polcer (1957). Also Johnny Blowers, Dick Cary, Peanuts Hucko, Cliff Leeman, Jack Lesberg, Rosy McHargue, Joe Muranyi, Red Norvo, Jess Stacy, Dick Wellstood, Spiegel Wilcox, and Teddy Wilson.
Hardcover. New Rochelle, Arlington House, 1st, 1972, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. 554 pages. Illustrated with black & white photographs. Moderate foxing to edges. An important reference book on this legend of the big band era. Clean, tight copy.
Hardcover. NY, Oxford University Press, 1st, 2011, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 336 pages, b&w illustrations. Author Larry Hamberlin guides us through this large but oft-forgotten repertoire of operatic novelties, and brings to life the rich humor and keen social criticism of the era. In the early twentieth-century, when new social forces were undermining the view that our European heritage was intrinsically superior to our native vernacular culture, opera-that great inheritance from our European forebearers-functioned in popular discourse as a signifier for elite culture. Tin Pan Opera shows that these operatic novelty songs availed this connection to a humorous and critical end. Combining traditional, European operatic melodies with the new and American rhythmic verve of ragtime, these songs painted vivid images of immigrant Americans, liberated women, and upwardly striving African Americans, striking emblems of the profound transformations that shook the United States at the beginning of the American century. Clean copy.
Hardcover. Neptune NJ, Paganiniana Publications, 1st, 1977, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 176 pages, maroon cloth covers with gilt lettering, design. Scarce book by a master teacher. No dust jacket issued.
Hardcover. NY, Ballantine Books , 1st, 2008, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 368 pages illustrated in color. For thirty-five years, bestselling author and accomplished musician Jonathan Kellerman has been, as he puts it in his Introduction to this lavishly illustrated, endlessly fascinating volume, "chasing fabulous sound." The result of that quest is a world-class collection of guitars, mandolins, and other stringed instruments that number more than 120 . . . and counting. Whether writing about household names such as Fender, Gibson, Martin, and Dobro or about marques revered by aficionados-D'Angelico, Hauser, Stromberg, and Torres-Kellerman brings to bear the same sure storytelling instincts and keen attention to detail that characterize his bestselling fiction, making each entry a sparkling mini-essay as much to be savored as the sensual photographs that follow.
Hardcover. New York, Harry N. Abrams, 1st, 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 240 pages, illustrated throughout in color and b&w. Light edgewear to dust jacket, else a clean, tight copy.
Softcover. New York , Princeton Architectural Press, 2nd printing, 2002, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Illustrated throughout in color. Light edgewear to wrappers, else a clean, tight copy. 45 RPM: A Visual History of the Seven-Inch Record celebrates a often overlooked, yet vital form of art, that of the seven inch sleeve. Not only are there more than 200 pictures display in this book, but an excellent history detailing the rise and fall of this format. There are basically five main chapters starting with the 50's all the way to the 90's. Each chapter is preceded by a written piece authored by different individuals, ranging from a record collector, renown sleeve artists, a music journalist and a music critic. Each provides thoughful, authorative, and interesting insights into the period of time they are introducing. The real meat is the pictures, and there are a lot of them.
Softcover. Durham NC, Duke University Press, 2nd pr., 1994, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 342 pages. In Extended Play, one of the country's most innovative music writers conducts a wide-ranging tour through the outer limits of contemporary music. Over the course of more than twenty-five portraits, interviews, and essays, John Corbett engages artists from lands as distant as Sweden, Siberia, and Saturn. With a special emphasis on African American and European improvisers, the book explores the famous and the little known, from John Cage and George Clinton to Anthony Braxton and Sun Ra. Employing approaches as diverse as the music he celebrates, Corbett illuminates the sound and theory of funk and rap, blues and jazz, contemporary classical, free improvisation, rock, and reggae. Using cultural critique and textual theory, Corbett addresses a broad spectrum of issues, such as the status of recorded music in postmodern culture, the politics of self-censorship, experimentation, and alternativism in the music industry, and the use of metaphors of space and madness in the work of African American musicians. He follows these more theoretically oriented essays with a series of extensive profiles and in-depth interviews that offer contrasting and complementary perspectives on some of the world's most creative musicians and their work. Clean copy.
Softcover. NY, Pathfinder Press , Revised Ed., 1998, Softcover in pictorial wrappers, 500 pages, b&w photos. Coltrane's role in spearheading the last major innovative development in jazz, and how the 1960s jazz revolution reflected an intense cultural, political, and ideological ferment -- marked especially by the rise of resistance to racial discrimination. Also contains the best-known interview with John Coltrane -- recorded in 1966, a year before his death. Clean copy.
Softcover. Ventura CA, Pathfinder Publishing, 1st, 1990, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 214 pages, b&w illustrations. The story of the career, music, and life of the man who made drums a solo instrument, symbolized the swing era, and is still internationally recognized as "the world's greatest drummer." Book was once owned by a smoker and has odor.
Softcover. Wochester MA, Simplex Player Action Company, reprint, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover booklet, undated, but appears to be a reprint from about 1940. Instructions for a device that used to help tune and repair pianos. 40 pages, b&w illustrations. Light wear to wrapper otherwise clean.
Hardcover. NY, Simon and Schuster, 1st, 2013, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 608 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. A very clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket edges. Black and white photographs throughout. Music legend Clive Davis recounts an extraordinary five-decade career in the music business, while also telling a remarkable personal story of encounters with some of the greatest musical artists of our time, including Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, Simon & Garfunkel, Barry Manilow, the Grateful Dead, Patti Smith, Whitney Houston, Carlos Santana, Dionne Warwick, Aretha Franklin, and Alicia Keys.
Hardcover. Chicago, Chicago Review Press, 1st, 2017, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in bright, unclipped dust jacket. Maximum Volume offers a glimpse into the mind, the music, and the man behind the sound of the Beatles. The first book of two, Maximum Volume traces Martin's early years as a scratch pianist and his groundbreaking work as the head of Parlophone Records. It dramatically narrates the story of Martin's unlikely discovery of the Beatles and his painstaking efforts to prepare their newfangled sound for the British music marketplace. As the story unfolds, Martin and the band craft numerous number-one hits, progressing toward the landmark album Rubber Soul--all of which bear Martin's unmistakable musical signature.
NY, RCA Victor, 1949, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Two Records/4 Sides, Youth Series Y-345, narrated by Stering Holloway. Records have moderate wear. Features the music and story from the Disney animated production "Make Mine Music!". Inside a folding album with illustrations from the story on inside covers. Mild soil to outer covers.
Hardcover. NY, Rodale Books , 1st, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Robert Hilburn's storied career as a rock critic has allowed him a behind-the-scenes look at the lives of some of the most iconic figures of our time. He was the only music critic to visit Folsom Prison with Johnny Cash. He met John Lennon during his lost weekend period in Los Angeles and they became friends. Bob Dylan granted him his only interviews during his "born-again" period and the occasion of his 50th birthday. Michael Jackson invited Hilburn to watch cartoons with him in his bedroom. When Springsteen took to playing only old hits, Hilburn scolded him for turning his legendary concerts into oldies revues, and Springsteen changed his set list. In this totally unique account of the symbiotic relationship between critic and musical artist, Hilburn reflects on the ways in which he has changed and been changed by the subjects he's covered; Bono weighs in with an introduction about how Hilburn's criticism influenced and altered his own development as a musician.
Hardcover. NY, Viking Press, 1st, 1991, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. INSCRIBED BY RUFF on the front fly leaf. Ruff traces his odyssey from the hills of north Alabama to the halls of Yale University with stops along the way with some the jazz greats. B&w illustrations. Clean copy.
Hardcover. New York, Hyperion Books, 1st, 2006, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 304 pages, illustrated in color and b&w. A complete visual history of the rock group. The Doors are rock royalty. Jim Morrison, Ray Manzarek, Robby Krieger, and John Densmore reinvented rock 'n' roll in the 60s, and their influence can be felt even today. Now, for the first time, the living members of the band are opening up their personal archives to their fans, telling their story in their own words. This book is filled with untold anecdotes and never-before-seen photos from their private collections. Fans can learn first-hand what really went on in America's most enigmatic and mythical band.
Hardcover. London, Reaktion Books, 1st, 2020, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, b&w photos. Ornette Coleman's career encompassed the glory years of jazz and the American avant-garde. Born in segregated Fort Worth, Texas, during the Great Depression, the African-American composer and musician was zeitgeist incarnate. Steeped in the Texas blues tradition, he and jazz grew up together, as the brassy blare of big band swing gave way to bebop--a faster music for a faster, postwar world. At the luminous dawn of the Space Age and New York's 1960s counterculture, Coleman gave voice to the moment. Lauded by some, maligned by many, he forged a breakaway art sometimes called "the new thing" or "free jazz." Featuring previously unpublished photographs of Coleman and his contemporaries, this book tells the compelling story of one of America's most adventurous musicians and the sound of a changing world. Clean copy.
Softcover. NY, Oxford University Press, 1st, 2009, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 366 pages illustrated in color. The widespread presence of jazz and blues in African American visual art has long been overlooked. The Hearing Eye makes the case for recognizing the music's importance, both as formal template and as explicit subject matter. Moving on from the use of iconic musical figures and motifs in Harlem Renaissance art, this groundbreaking collection explores the more allusive - and elusive - references to jazz and blues in a wide range of mostly contemporary visual artists. There are scholarly essays on the painters Rose Piper (Graham Lock), Norman Lewis (Sara Wood), Bob Thompson (Richard H. King), Romare Bearden (Robert G. O'Meally, Johannes Volz) and Jean-Michel Basquiat (Robert Farris Thompson), as well an account of early blues advertising art (Paul Oliver) and a discussion of the photographs of Roy DeCarava (Richard Ings). These essays are interspersed with a series of in-depth interviews by Graham Lock, who talks to quilter Michael Cummings and painters Sam Middleton, Wadsworth Jarrell, Joe Overstreet and Ellen Banks about their musical inspirations, and also looks at art's reciprocal effect on music in conversation with saxophonists Marty Ehrlich and Jane Ira Bloom. Clean, bright copy
Softcover. Gweru, Zimbabwe, Mambo Press, 1st, 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 153 pages, copiously illustrated throughout. Minor corner and edge wear, previous owner's signature on front endpaper, otherwise, very clean and tight copy.
Softcover. Durham NC, Duke University Press, 1st, 2017, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover. pages. From scouring flea markets and eBay to maxing out their credit cards, record collectors will do just about anything to score a long-sought-after album. In Vinyl Freak, music writer, curator, and collector John Corbett burrows deep inside the record fiend's mind, documenting and reflecting on his decades-long love affair with vinyl. Discussing more than 200 rare and out-of-print LPs, Vinyl Freak is composed in part of Corbett's long-running DownBeat magazine column of the same name, which was devoted to records that had not appeared on CD. In other essays where he combines memoir and criticism, Corbett considers the current vinyl boom, explains why vinyl is his preferred medium, profiles collector subcultures, and recounts his adventures assembling the Alton Abraham Sun Ra Archive, an event so all-consuming that he claims it cured his record-collecting addiction. Like new in publisher's shrinkwrap.
Softcover. San Francisco, Backbeat Books, 1st, 1998, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 271 pages, b&w illustrations. Chasin' That Devil Music has the feel of a documentary about the making of a thrilling motion picture. The main focus is on the Delta blues singers of the early 20th century--artists such as Charley Patton, Tommy Johnson, Son House, and Blind Lemon Jefferson who've achieved near-mythic status in blues circles. In addition, many of the articles gathered in this splendidly illustrated volume capture the process and people involved in tracking long-lost recordings nearly as elusive as the performers who made them. Here, for example, is the story of author/blues scholar Gayle Dean Wardlow's three-year hunt for the death certificate of Robert Johnson, the celebrated Mississippi bluesman and a figure whose legend has grown greater with each year since his much-debated death in 1938. The text here is nearly as raw in spots as the music that sparked it, but, as with those sounds (which can be heard on a terrific CD sampler included with the book), enthusiasts will find Chasin' That Devil Music riveting. Clean, bright copy.
Hardcover. New Haven CT, Yale University Press, 1st, 2011, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 336 pages. Despite the apparent incompatibility between Mozart's humanitarian and cosmopolitan outlook and Nazi ideology, the Third Reich tenaciously promoted the great composer's music to further the goals of the fascist regime. In this revelatory book, Erik Levi draws on period articles, diaries, speeches, and other archival materials to provide a new understanding of how the Nazis shamelessly manipulated Mozart for their own political advantage. The book also explores the continued Jewish veneration of the composer during this period while also highlighting some of the disturbing legacies of Mozart reception that resulted from Nazi appropriation of his work. Augmented by rare contemporary illustrations, Mozart and the Nazis will be widely welcomed by readers with interests in music, German history, Holocaust studies, propaganda, and politics in the twentieth century. Clean copy.
Hardcover. Cambridge UK, Cambridge University Press, 1st UK, 1993, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 168 pages. Hardcover. Dust jacket with light rubbing. Collection of correspondence between Pierre Boulez and John Cage. Translated and edited by Robert Samuels.
Hardcover. NY, Warner/Amistad, 1st, 1990, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright. unclipped dust jacket. Wonderful, inspiring stories of dozens of black women in opera and classical music. Features in-depth portrais of such notables as Sissieretta Jones, Elizabeth Taylor-Greenfield, Marie Selika, Marian Anderson, Flora Batson, Dorothy Maynor and many more. 236 pages including index. B&W photos. Inscription on front fly leaf, otherwise clean.
 "Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchellby: Ann Powers")
 "Eddie Condon's Scrapbook of Jazz (SIGNED BY 16 MUSICIANS)by: Condon, Eddie and Hank O'Neal")
 "Moonlight Serenade - A Bio-discography of the Glenn Miller Civilian Bandby: Flower, John")
 "Irving Berlin's Show Business: Broadway - Hollywood - Americaby: Leopold, David")
 "45 Rpmby: Drate, Spencer")
 "Extended Play: Sounding Off from John Cage to Dr. Funkensteinby: John Corbett")
 "Soundtrack of My Life, Theby: Davis, Clive")
 "Doors, Theby: Doors, The (with Ben Fong-Torres)")
 "Jascha Heifetzby: Weschler-Vered, Artur")
