The Chinatown opera house provided Chinese immigrants with an essential source of entertainment during the pre "World War II era. But its stories of loyalty, obligation, passion, and duty also attracted diverse patrons into Chinese American communities Drawing on a wealth of new Chinese- and English-language research, Nancy Yunhwa Rao tells the story of iconic theater companies and the networks and migrations that made Chinese opera a part of North American cultures. Rao unmasks a backstage world of performers, performance, and repertoire and sets readers in the spellbound audiences beyond the footlights. But she also braids a captivating and complex history from elements outside the opera house walls: the impact of government immigration policy; how a theater influenced a Chinatown's sense of cultural self; the dissemination of Chinese opera music via recording and print materials; and the role of Chinese American business in sustaining theatrical institutions. The result is a work that strips the veneer of exoticism from Chinese opera, placing it firmly within the bounds of American music and a profoundly American experience.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)9780252082030 20170321

Born into folk music's first family, Peggy Seeger has blazed her own trail artistically and personally. Jean Freedman draws on a wealth of research and conversations with Seeger to tell the life story of one of music's most charismatic performers and tireless advocates. Here is the story of Seeger's multifaceted career, from her youth to her pivotal role in the American and British folk revivals, from her instrumental virtuosity to her tireless work on behalf of environmental and feminist causes, from wry reflections on the U.K. folk scene to decades as a songwriter. Freedman also delves into Seeger's fruitful partnership with Ewan MacColl and a multitude of contributions which include creating the renowned Festivals of Fools, founding Blackthorne Records, masterminding the legendary Radio Ballads documentaries, and mentoring performers in the often-fraught atmosphere of The Critics Group. Bracingly candid and as passionate as its subject, Peggy Seeger is the first book-length biography of a life set to music.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)9780252040757 20170410

• Guitarchaeology : setting the stage
• Nick Lucas : America's first guitar hero
• Ry Cooder : prewar country blues
• Barney Kessel : the rise of Charlie Christian
• Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown : "American music, Texas-style"
• Roebuck "Pops" Staples : gospel guitar
• Ricky Nelson : remembering rockabilly
• Carol Kaye : the first lady of rock
• Stevie Ray Vaughan : on Jimi Hendrix
• James Gurley : "the Yuri Gagarin of psychedelic guitar"
• Jerry Garcia : "it's the next note, not the last one"
• Johnny Winter : sliding the blues
• Gregg Allman : "my brother Duane"
• Carlos Santana : "put wings on people's hearts"
• Neil Young : the power of one note
• Eddie Van Halen : "my first interview"
• Tom Petty : songwriting and the art of rhythm guitar
• Eric Johnson : the journey inward
• Joe Satriani : the resurgence of instrumental rock
• Ben Harper : "the strongest spirit in all creation."

In this lively collection of interviews, storied music writer Jas Obrecht presents a celebration of the world's most popular instrument as seen through the words, lives, and artistry of some of its most beloved players. Readers will read--and hear--accounts of the first guitarists on record, pioneering bluesmen, gospel greats, jazz innovators, country pickers, rocking rebels, psychedelic shape-shifters, singer-songwriters, and other movers and shakers. In their own words, these guitar players reveal how they found their inspirations, mastered their instruments, crafted classic songs, and created enduring solos. Also included is a CD of never-before-heard moments from Obrecht's insightful interviews with these guitar greats. Highlights include Nick Lucas's recollections of waxing the first noteworthy guitar records; Ry Cooder's exploration of prewar blues musicians; Carole Kaye and Ricky Nelson on the early years of rock and roll; Stevie Ray Vaughan on Jimi Hendrix; Gregg Allman on his brother, Duane Allman; Carlos Santana and Pops Staples on spirituality in music; Jerry Garcia, Neil Young, and Tom Petty on songwriting and creativity; Early interviews with Eddie Van Halen, Eric Johnson, Joe Satriani, and Ben Harper.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)9781469631646 20170530

• Business and politics : the landscape
• Ace race arranger : the Broadway music clinic
• Harlem on Broadway : nightclub and theater revues
• Theory and practice : the fundamentals
• Episode and interlude : Broadway modernism
• Futuristic ragtime : style and identity
• Heavy stuff : classics and concertos
• Give me some skin : novelty songs and ballads
• Jungle madness : jazz dance and exotic numbers.

Behind the iconic jazz orchestras, vocalists, and stage productions of the Swing Era lay the talents of popular music's unsung heroes: the arrangers. John Wriggle takes you behind the scenes of New York City's vibrant entertainment industry of the 1930s and 1940s to uncover the lives and work of jazz arrangers, both black and white, who left an indelible mark on American music and culture. Blue Rhythm Fantasy traces the extraordinary career of arranger Chappie Willet--a collaborator of Louis Armstrong, Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, Gene Krupa, and many others--to revisit legendary Swing Era venues and performers from Harlem to Times Square. Wriggle's insightful music analyses of big band arranging techniques explore representations of cultural modernism, discourses on art and commercialism, conceptions of race and cultural identity, music industry marketing strategies, and stage entertainment variety genres. Drawing on archives, obscure recordings, untapped sources in the African American press, and interviews with participants, Blue Rhythm Fantasy is a long-overdue study of the arranger during this dynamic era of American music history.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)9780252040405 20161003

• Headless heroes of the apocalypse
• Cuba libre
• Dedicated to the struggle
• Cosa nuestra.

In Chocolate Surrealism Njoroge Njoroge highlights connections among the production, performance, and reception of popular music at critical historical junctures in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The author sifts different origins and styles to place socio-musical movements into a larger historical framework. Calypso reigned during the turbulent interwar period and the ensuing crises of capitalism. The Cuban rumba/son complex enlivened the postwar era of American empire. Jazz exploded in the Bandung period and the rise of decolonization. And, lastly, Nuyorican Salsa coincided with the period of the civil rights movement and the beginnings of black/brown power. Njoroge illuminates musics of the circum-Caribbean as culturally and conceptually integrated within the larger history of the region. He pays close attention to the fractures, fragmentations, and historical particularities that both unite and divide the region's sounds. At the same time, he engages with a larger discussion of the Atlantic world. Njoroge examines the deep interrelations between music, movement, memory, and history in the African diaspora. He finds the music both a theoretical anchor and a mode of expression and representation of black identities and political cultures. Music and performance offer ways for the author to re-theorize the intersections of race, nationalism and musical practice, and geopolitical connections. Further music allows Njoroge a reassessment of the development of the modern world system, through local, popular responses to the global age. The book analyzes different styles, times, and politics to render a brief history of Black Atlantic sound.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)9781496806895 20160725

Essays that overthrow stereotypes and demonstrate the genre's power and mystique. Contributions by Georgia Christgau, Alexander S. Dent, Leigh H. Edwards, Caroline Gnagy, Kate Heidemann, Nadine Hubbs, Jocelyn Neal, Ase Ottosson, Travis Stimeling, Matthew D. Sutton, and Chris Wilson Country music boasts a long tradition of rich, contradictory gender dynamics, creating a world where Kitty Wells could play the demure housewife and the honky-tonk angel simultaneously, Dolly Parton could move from traditionalist "girl singer" to outspoken trans rights advocate, and current radio playlists can alternate between the reckless masculinity of bro-country and the adolescent girlishness of Taylor Swift. In this follow-up volume to A Boy Named Sue, some of the leading authors in the field of country music studies reexamine the place of gender in country music, considering the ways country artists and listeners have negotiated gender and sexuality through their music and how gender has shaped the way that music is made and heard. In addition to shedding new light on such legends as Wells, Parton, Loretta Lynn, and Charley Pride, it traces more recent shifts in gender politics through the performances of such contemporary luminaries as Swift, Gretchen Wilson, and Blake Shelton. The book also explores the intersections of gender, race, class, and nationality in a host of less expected contexts, including the prisons of WWII-era Texas, where the members of the Goree All-Girl String Band became the unlikeliest of radio stars; the studios and offices of Plantation Records, where Jeannie C. Riley and Linda Martell challenged the social hierarchies of a changing South in the 1960s; and the burgeoning cities of present-day Brazil, where "college country" has become one way of negotiating masculinity in an age of economic and social instability.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)9781496805058 20160619

• "Nothing but realism": early hillbilly music's blend of rural and urban
• "Country comes to town": a new urban identity for country music in the 1960s
• "You sound like us but you look like them": the racial politics of country music in the city of Nashville
• "Country music is wherever the soul of a country music fan is": Opryland U.S.A. and the importance of "home" in country music
• "They're not as backward as they used to be": country music's commercial success in the 1990s and the transformation of downtown Nashville.

Country music evokes a simple, agrarian past, with images of open land and pickup trucks. While some might think of the genre as a repository of nostalgia, popular because it preserves and reveres traditional values, Jeremy Hill argues that country music has found such expansive success because its songs and its people have forcefully addressed social and cultural issues as well as geographic change. Hill demonstrates how the genre and its fans developed a flexible idea of ""country, "" beyond their rural roots, and how this flexibility allowed fans and music to ""come to town, "" to move into and within urban spaces, while retaining a country ""character."" To understand how the genre has become the far-reaching commercial phenomenon that it is today, Hill explores how various players within the country music fold have grappled with the notion of place. He shows both how the industry has transformed the city of Nashville and how country music -- through song lyrics, imagery associated with the music, and branding -- has reshaped ideas about the American landscape and character. As the genre underwent significant change in the last decades of the twentieth century, those who sought to explain its new styles and new locations relied on a traditional theme: ""You can take the boy out of the country, but you can't take the country out of the boy."" Hill demonstrates how this idea -- that you can still be ""country"" while no longer living in a rural place -- has been used to expand country's commercial appeal and establish a permanent home in the urban space of Nashville.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)9781625341723 20160619

Harry T. Burleigh (1866-1949) played a leading role in American music and culture in the twentieth century. Celebrated for his arrangements of spirituals, Burleigh was also the first African American composer to create a significant body of art song. An international roster of opera and recital singers performed his works and praised them as among the best of their time. Jean E. Snyder traces Burleigh's life from his Pennsylvania childhood through his fifty-year tenure as soloist at St. George's Episcopal Church in Manhattan. As a composer, Burleigh's pioneering work preserved and transformed the African American spiritual; as a music editor, he facilitated the work of other black composers; as a role model, vocal coach, and mentor, he profoundly influenced American song; and in private life he was friends with AntonA-n DvoA(TM)A!k, Marian Anderson, Will Marion Cook, and other America luminaries. Snyder provides rich historical, social, and political contexts that explore Burleigh's professional and personal life within an era complicated by changes in race relations, class expectations, and musical tastes.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)9780252039942 20160619

• Listening to jazz
• Developing "big ears" : jazz fans
• Making the scene : fan communities
• Providing a place and time : jazz presenters
• Jazz jobbing : music professionals
• Hear and now : collective improvisation and spiritual synergy.

How do we speak about jazz? In this provocative study based on the author's deep immersion in the New York City jazz scene, Tom Greenland turns from the usual emphasis on artists and their music to focus on non-performing participants, describing them as active performers in their own right who witness and thus collaborate in a happening made one-of-a-kind by improvisation, mood, and moment. Jazzing shines a spotlight on the constituency of proprietors, booking agents, photographers, critics, publicists, painters, amateur musicians, fans, friends, and tourists that makes up New York City's contemporary jazz scene. Drawn from deep ethnographic research, interviews, and long term participant observation, Jazzing charts the ways New York's distinctive physical and social-cultural environment affects and is affected by jazz. Throughout, Greenland offers a passionate argument in favor of a radically inclusive conception of music-making, one in which individuals collectively improvise across social contexts to co-create community and musical meaning. An odyssey through the clubs and other performance spaces on and off the beaten track, Jazzing is an insider's view of a vibrant urban art world.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)9780252081606 20160704

• *1. Conspiracy in Bay City, or, Why is Madonna's birthplace the last place in America where she is actively controversial? *2. Seeking Refuge from '80s Rock, or, Was Madonna actually an outsider artist? *3. Magical Contagion, or, What happens to Madonna's lonely mountain of stuff after she dies? *4. Madonna Misconstrued, or, Getting the hell into Michigan *5. Mystery of the Mondegreen, or, Who was the first band to smuggle the word "masturbate" onto the Billboard top 100? *6. Flying Wedge, or, Could a band with three fans be (another) missing link between hard rock and punk? * Epilogue * Thanks.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)9780292759466 20160619

When Alina Simone agreed to write a book about Madonna, she thought it might provide an interesting excuse to indulge her own eighties nostalgia. Wrong. What Simone discovered instead was a tidal wave of already published information about Madonna-and her own ambivalence about, maybe even jealousy of, the Material Girl's overwhelming commercial success. With the straight-ahead course stymied, Simone set off on a quirky detour through the backroads of celebrity and fandom and the people who love or loathe Madonna. In this witty, sometimes acerbic, always perceptive chronicle, Simone begins by trying to understand why Madonna's birthplace, Bay City, Michigan, won't even put up a sign to celebrate its most famous citizen, and ends by asking why local bands who make music that's authentic and true can disappear with barely a trace. In between, she ranges from Madonna fans who cover themselves with tattoos of the singer's face and try to make fortunes off selling her used bustiers and dresses, to Question Mark and the Mysterians-one-hit wonders best known for "96 Tears"-and Flying Wedge, a Detroit band that dropped off an amazing two-track record in the office of CREEM magazine in 1972 and vanished, until Simone tracked it down. Filled with fresh insights about the music business, fandom, and what it takes to become a superstar, Madonnaland is as much a book for people who, like Simone, prefer "dark rooms, coffee, and state-subsidized European films filled with existential despair" as it is for people who can't get enough of Madonna.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)9780292759466 20160619

• The pop music mainstream
• Rock 'n' roll
• Jazz
• Hollywood
• Broadway
• Opera
• The classical music mainstream
• Modernists
• Mavericks.

Derided for its conformity and consumerism, 1950s America paid a price in anxiety. Prosperity existed under the shadow of a mushroom cloud. Optimism wore a Bucky Beaver smile that masked worry over threats at home and abroad. But even dread could not quell the revolutionary changes taking place in virtually every form of mainstream music. Music historian James Wierzbicki sheds light on how the Fifties' pervasive moods affected its sounds. Moving across genres established--pop, country, opera--and transfigured--experimental, rock, jazz--Wierzbicki delves into the social dynamics that caused forms to emerge or recede, thrive or fade away. Red scares and white flight, sexual politics and racial tensions, technological progress and demographic upheaval--the influence of each rooted the music of this volatile period to its specific place and time. Yet Wierzbicki also reveals the host of underlying connections linking that most apprehensive of times to our own uneasy present.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)9780252081569 20160704

• Ethnomusicology Multimedia Series Preface Acknowledgments Note on Language and Transliteration Introduction Chapter 1: Azerbaijani Musical Nationalism during the Pre-Soviet and Soviet Eras Chapter 2: Pioneers of the New Azerbaijani Musical Identity Chapter 3: The Russian-Soviet Factor: Facilitating or Disrupting Synthesis? Chapter 4: The Beginning of the National Style: 1900-The 1930s Chapter 5: Growing Maturity: 1940-The Early 1960s Chapter 6: The Spirit of Experimentalism: Since the 1960s Chapter 7: Songwriters Chapter 8: Jazz Mugham Chapter 9: Leaving the Post-Soviet Era Behind Chapter 10: "Mugham Opera" of the Silk Road Epilogue Glossary Notes Bibliography Index.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)9780253019455 20160619

This book traces the development of Azerbaijani art music from its origins in the Eastern, modal, improvisational tradition known as mugham through its fusion with Western classical, jazz, and world art music. Aida Huseynova places the fascinating and little-known history of music in Azerbaijan against the vivid backdrop of cultural life under Soviet influence, which paradoxically both encouraged and repressed the evolution of national musics and post-Soviet independence. Inspired by their neighbors to the East and West, Azerbaijani musicians enjoyed a period of remarkable creativity, composing and performing the first opera and the first ballet in the Muslim East, establishing the region's first Opera and Ballet Theater and Conservatory of Music, and discovering ways to merge the modal lyricism of mugham with the rhythmic dynamics of jazz. Drawing on previously unstudied archives, letters, and documents as well as her experience as an Azerbaijani musician and educator, Huseynova shows how Azerbaijani musical development was not a product of Soviet cultural policies but rather grew from and reflected deep and complex cultural processes.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)9780253019455 20160619

• 1. The Artist of a Generation 2. The Slow Bomb 3. Ladies, Ladies, It Is Our Turn 4. Uptown 5. What's the 411? 6. Changes I've Been Going Through 7. Hip Hop a Go-Go 8. My Life 9. Natural Woman 10. Share My World 11. On the Road with MJB: Alyson Williams 12. The Tour 13. Sisters in the Studio: Channette and Channoah Higgens 14. Mary, the Album 15. No More Drama 16. Love & Life 17. Live from Los Angeles 18. Message in Our Music 19. The Breakthrough 20. Growing Pains 21. Stronger with Each Tear 22. Hard Times Come Again No More 23. My Life II ... The Journey Continues (Act 1) 24. A Mary Christmas 25. Think Like a Man Too 26. The London Sessions 27. Being with You Selected Discography Acknowledgments.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)9780292759435 20160619

Mary J. Blige is an icon who represents the political consciousness of hip hop and the historical promise of soul. She is an everywoman, celebrated by Oprah Winfrey and beloved by pop music fans of all ages and races. Blige has sold over fifty million albums, won numerous Grammys, and even played at multiple White House events, as well as the 2013 Nobel Peace Prize ceremony. Displaying astonishing range and versatility, she has recorded everything from Broadway standards to Led Zeppelin anthems and worked with some of popular music's greatest artists-Aretha Franklin, Eric Clapton, Elton John, Whitney Houston, Sting, U2, and Beyonce, among them. Real Love, No Drama: The Music of Mary J. Blige tells the story of one of the most important artists in pop music history. Danny Alexander follows the whole arc of Blige's career, from her first album, which heralded the birth of "hip hop soul, " to her critically praised 2014 album, The London Sessions. He highlights the fact that Blige was part of the historically unprecedented movement of black women onto pop radio and explores how she and other women took control of their careers and used their music to give voice to women's (and men's) everyday struggles and dreams. This book adds immensely to the story of both black women artists and artists rooted in hip hop and pays tribute to a musician who, by expanding her reach and asking tough questions about how music can and should evolve, has proven herself an artistic visionary.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)9780292759435 20160619

• Opening Chorus: On Top of the World (or Close) 1. Sound Citizen 2. The Outsider 3. Player in the Band 4. Alpha Male 5. Spiritual Gumshoe 6. Master Builder 7. Co-Conspirator 8. Seeker 9. Svengali 10. Imagist 11. Native Son 12. Mentor 13. Hit Man 14. Reluctant Artist 15. Starmaker 16. Company Man 17. Coen Brother 18. Soundtrack Auteur 19. Minimalist 20. Lead Actor 21. Alchemist 22. Jazz Man 23. Blues Man 24. Senior Adviser 25. Audio Activist 26. Dylanologist 27. Televisionary 28. Back to the Futurist The Kill Squad: A Short List of Longtime Musical Associates Acknowledgments Selected Discography Selected Bibliography Index.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)9781477303771 20170206

T Bone Burnett is a unique, astonishingly prolific music producer, singer-songwriter, guitarist, and soundtrack visionary. Renowned as a studio maven with a Midas touch, Burnett is known for lifting artists to their greatest heights, as he did with Raising Sand, the multiple Grammy Award-winning album by Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, as well as acclaimed albums by Los Lobos, the Wallflowers, B. B. King, and Elvis Costello. Burnett virtually invented "Americana" with his hugely successful roots-based soundtrack for the Coen Brothers film, O Brother, Where Art Thou? Outspoken in his contempt for the entertainment industry, Burnett has nevertheless received many of its highest honors, including Grammy Awards and an Academy Award. T Bone Burnett offers the first critical appreciation of Burnett's wide-ranging contributions to American music, his passionate advocacy for analog sound, and the striking contradictions that define his maverick artistry. Lloyd Sachs highlights all the important aspects of Burnett's musical pursuits, from his early days as a member of Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder Revue and his collaboration with the playwright Sam Shepard to the music he recently composed for the TV shows Nashville and True Detective and his production of the all-star album Lost on the River: The New Basement Tapes. Sachs also underscores Burnett's brilliance as a singer-songwriter in his own right. Going well beyond the labels "legendary" or "visionary" that usually accompany his name, T Bone Burnett reveals how this consummate music maker has exerted a powerful influence on American music and culture across four decades.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)9781477303771 20170206

• Sunnyland Slim's birthday party
• Can blue men sing the whites?
• At the court of King Luther
• Peeling potatoes at Carey Bell's
• Turning the tables at WXOL
• Fried Mississippi catfish blues
• Comparing hangovers at Alligator
• Louis Myers's white Eldorado.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, British blues fan Alan Harper became a transatlantic pilgrim to Chicago. "I've come here to listen to the blues, " he told an American customs agent at the airport, and listen he did, to the music in its many styles, and to the men and women who lived it in the city's changing blues scene. Harper's eloquent memoir conjures the smoky redoubts of men like harmonica virtuoso Big Walter Horton and pianist Sunnyland Slim. Venturing from stageside to kitchen tables to the shotgun seat of a 1973 Eldorado, Harper listens to performers and others recollect memories of triumphs earned and chances forever lost, of deep wells of pain and soaring flights of inspiration. Harper also chronicles a time of change, as an up-tempo, whites-friendly blues eclipsed what had come before, and old Southern-born black players held court one last time before an all-conquering generation of young guitar aces took center stage.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)9780252081576 20160619

In A City Called Heaven, gospel announcer and music historian Robert Marovich shines a light on the humble origins of a majestic genre and its indispensable bond to the city where it found its voice: Chicago. Marovich follows gospel music from early hymns and camp meetings through the Great Migration that brought it to Chicago. In time, the music grew into the sanctified soundtrack of the city's mainline black Protestant churches. In addition to drawing on print media and ephemera, Marovich mines hours of interviews with nearly fifty artists, ministers, and historians--as well as discussions with relatives and friends of past gospel pioneers--to recover many forgotten singers, musicians, songwriters, and industry leaders. He also examines how a lack of economic opportunity bred an entrepreneurial spirit that fueled gospel music's rise to popularity and opened a gate to social mobility for a number of its practitioners. As Marovich shows, gospel music expressed a yearning for freedom from earthly pains, racial prejudice, and life's hardships. In the end, it proved to be a sound too mighty and too joyous for even church walls to hold.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)9780252039102 20160618

For the first time in English, this is the classic treatise that developed a radical new understanding of free jazz and African American culture. In 1971, French jazz critics Philippe Carles and Jean-Louis Comolli co-wrote Free Jazz/Black Power, a treatise on the racial and political implications of jazz and jazz criticism. It remains a testimony to the long ignored encounter of radical African American music and French left-wing criticism. Carles and Comolli set out to defend a genre vilified by jazz critics on both sides of the Atlantic by exposing the new sound's ties to African American culture, history, and the political struggle that was raging in the early 1970s. This analysis of jazz criticism and its production is astutely self-aware. It critiques the critics, building a work of cultural studies in a time and place where the practice was virtually unknown. The authors reached radical conclusions - free jazz was a revolutionary reaction against white domination, was the musical counterpart to the Black Power movement, and was a music that demanded a similar political commitment. The impact of this book is difficult to overstate, as it made readers reconsider their response to African American music. In some cases it changed the way musicians thought about and played jazz. It remains indispensable to the study of the relation of American free jazz to European audiences, critics, and artists.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)9781628460391 20160618