Hal Leonard Bass Method - Complete Edition


Ed Friedland - 1996
    Bass MethodThe critically acclaimed Hal Leonard Electric Bass Method Second Edition in a handy composite edition Contains 3 books and 3 CDs for Levels 1, 2 and 3.

My Name is Gauhar Jaan!: The Life and Times of a Musician


Vikram Sampath - 2010
    Vikram Sampath, in this remarkable book, brings forth little known details of this fascinating woman who was known for her melodious voice, her multi-lingual skills, poetic sensibility, irresistible personality and her extravagant lifestyle. From her early days in Azamgarh and Banaras to the glory years in Calcutta when Gauhar ruled the world of Indian music, to her sad fall from grace and end in Mysore, the book takes the reader through the roller-coaster ride of this feisty musician. In the process, the author presents a view of the socio-historical context of Indian music and theatre during that period.

Performance Success: Performing Your Best Under Pressure


Don Greene - 2001
    This is a book of skills and exercises, prepared by a master teacher.Dr. Don Greene, a peak performance psychologist, has taught his comprehensive approach to peak performance mastery at The Juilliard School, Colburn School, New World Symphony, Los Angeles Opera Young Artists Program, Vail Ski School, Perlman Music Program, and US Olympic Training Center. During his thirty-two year career, he has coached more than 1,000 performers to win professional auditions and has guided countless solo performers to successful careers. Some of the performing artists with whom Dr. Greene has worked have won jobs with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, Chicago Symphony, San Francisco Opera, Montreal Symphony, Pittsburgh Symphony, National Symphony, Cincinnati Symphony, Pacific Northwest Ballet, and the Dance Theatre of Harlem, to name just a few. Of the Olympic track and field athletes he worked with up until and through the 2016 Games in Rio, 14 won medals, including 5 gold.

What was I Thinking


Paul Henry - 2011
    It will keep you entertained for hours. It's the very unusual story of Paul Henry - from his eventful childhood to his adventurous career in journalism to his recent outrageous comments on television which divided the country.A natural-born story teller, Paul spins many great yarns in this book. It's fascinating insight into his complex character. He's surprising -- he doesn't adhere to any prescribed set of beliefs. He's bold -- he set himself up as an international news correspondent working out of his Masterton lounge. And he's versatile -- turning his hand to running a cafe, running for Parliament and running from terrorists.

Incredibly Strange Music, Volume II


V. Vale - 1994
    French of Family Affair) "singing" songs by Bob Dylan, and tons more

The Great Pianists


Harold C. Schonberg - 1963
    Schonberg presents vivid accounts of the artists’ performances, styles, and even their personal lives and quirky characteristics— such as Mozart’s intense competition with Clementi, Lizst’s magnetic effect on women (when he played, ladies flung their jewels on stage), and Gottschalk’s persistent nailbiting, which left the keys covered with blood. Including profiles of Horowitz and Van Cliburn, among others, and chapters detailing the playing and careers of such modern pianists as de Larrocha, Ashkenazy, Gilels, Gould, Brendel, Bolet, Gutierrez, and Watts, The Great Pianists is a comprehensive and fascinating look at legendary performers past and present.

The Mastery of Music: Ten Pathways to True Artistry


Barry Green - 2003
    Now, in his follow-up book, The Mastery of Music, Barry Green turns his expert hand to the artistic qualities that make an extraordinary musician. Culling advice from dozens of interviews with legends including Joshua Bell, Dave Brubeck, Jeffrey Kahane, Bobby McFerrin, Christopher Parkening, Doc Severinsen, Frederica von Stade, the Harlem Boys Choir, and the Turtle Island String Quartet, he reveals that it’s not enough to have a cerebral and emotional connection to the notes. Green hows how musical excellence, exhibited by true virtuosos, requires a mastery of ten unique qualities of the soul and the human spirit, such as confidence, passion, discipline, creativity, and relaxed concentration, and he discusses specific ways in which all musicians, composers, and conductors can take their skills to higher levels. He carefully incorporates all instruments and techniques in his rejuvenating discussions, inspiring the stifled student to have fun again and the over-rehearsed performer to rediscover the joy of passionate expression. Essential reading for every musician, The Mastery of Music strikes a beautiful new chord.

Music for the People: The Pleasures and Pitfalls of Classical Music


Gareth Malone - 2011
    In this funny, evocative, personal book, Gareth takes us on a journey of musical discovery that explains and entertains in equal measure. Over the course of three series of the Bafta award-winning The Choir, Gareth has unearthed a passion for classical music in schoolchildren, reluctant teenage boys, and even a whole town. With his infectious enthusiasm and gift for explanation, Gareth's very personal narrative takes you by the hand and leads you through a world of eccentric composers, flamboyant conductors, troubled geniuses and all the colourful personalities that make up the story of Classical Music. It will also provide a foundation of classical music understanding and give the reader the tools to appreciate a whole new world of music. So whether you want to expand your horizons, spend time with the great composers, introduce an almost infinite variety into your iPod playlist, or are just curious about what you might be missing out on, Music for The People will leave you entertained, informed and completely inspired.

Devo's Freedom of Choice


Evie Nagy - 2015
    Ohio art-rockers Devo had plainly prepared with their 1979 second LP Duty Now for the Future, and now it was go time. Propelled by the new decade's high-tech, free-market, pre-AIDS promise, 1980's Freedom of Choice would rocket what Devo co-founder Gerald Casale calls his "alternate universe, hermetically sealed, alien band" both into the arms of the Earthlings and back to their home planet in one scenic trip.Before an artistic and commercial decline that resulted in a 20-year gap between Devo's last two studio records, Freedom of Choice made them curious, insurgent superstars, vindicated but ultimately betrayed by the birth of MTV. Their only platinum album represented the best of their unreplicable code: dead-serious tricksters, embracing conformity in order to destroy it with bullet-proof pop sensibility. Through first-hand accounts from the band and musical analysis set against an examination of new wave's emergence, the first-ever authorized book about Devo (with a foreword by Portlandia's Fred Armisen) explores the group's peak of success, when their hermetic seal cracked open to let in mainstream attention, a legion of new Devotees, and plenty of misunderstandings. "Freedom of Choice was the end of Devo innocence–it turned out to be the high point before the s***storm of a total cultural move to the right, the advent of AIDS, and the press starting to figure Devo out and think they had our number," says Casale. "It's where everything changes."

Alma Mahler: Or the Art of Being Loved


Françoise Giroud - 1987
    She married three of them--the composer Gustav Mahler, the architect Walter Gropius, and the writer Franz Werfel--and had a host of admirers andlovers, including the painters Oscar Kokoschka, Egon Schiele, and Gustav Klimpt. The composer Alban Berg dedicated his opera Wozzeck to her and a violin concerto to the memory of her daughter, Manon, who died of polio. In Alma Mahler, Francoise Giroud provides a spirited portrait of one of Europe's great femme fatales, ranging from her childhood (she was raised on a steady diet of Nietzche) to her heyday as a leading figure in Europe's art scene, to her later life as an exile in California and New York. We meeta woman of remarkable beauty and unconventional mind, the possessor of a fine, demanding intelligence, who was highly conscious of herself as a member of the elite, a woman never truly conquered by her lovers. Her last husband, Franz Werfel, called her one of the very few sorceresses of our time.And indeed when she appeared, her presence attracted all eyes as she moved like a queen through a room. And what eyes she drew. Virtually all the great figures of 19th-century Vienna march through these pages, including Sigmund Freud, Richard Strauss, Arnold Schonberg, Hugo van Hofmannsthal, KarlKraus, and Elias Canetti, and Giroud pens striking portraits of each. There are also many memorable scenes: Franz Werfel singing Verdi arias with James Joyce in a Paris cafe; the young Gropius, having an affair with then-married Alma, chased from the Mahler home by guard dogs and taking refuge undera bridge; Kokoschka, after his affair with Alma has died, commissioning a life-sized doll, a faithful reproduction of his former lover. But the heart of the book is Alma's marriage to Mahler. We read Alma's own first impression of Mahler--He is terribly nervous. He paced around the room like a wildanimal. He's pure oxygen. You get burnt if you go too near. Unfortunately for Mahler, his attempt to subjugate his young wife to his will--you have only one profession from now on: to make me happy--led to disaster, and he himself was burnt. Alma Mahler stood at the center of the creative world, the intimate friend (if not lover) of the major artists of her age, and Giroud paints an unforgettable portrait. It was awarded France's Grand Prix litteraire de la femme in 1988.

Making Records: The Scenes Behind the Music


Phil Ramone - 2007
    Streisand. Dylan. Pavarotti. McCartney. Sting. Madonna. What do these musicians have in common besides their super-stardom? They have all worked with legendary music producer Phil Ramone. For almost five decades, Phil Ramone has been a force in the music industry. He has produced records and collaborated with almost every major talent in the business. There is a craft to making records, and Phil has spent his life mastering it. For the first time ever, he shares the secrets of his trade.Making Records is a fascinating look "behind the glass" of a recording studio. From Phil's exhilarating early days recording jazz and commercial jingles at A&R, to his first studio, and eventual legendary producer status, Phil allows you to sit in on the sessions that created some of the most memorable music of the 20th century -- including Frank Sinatra's Duets album, Bob Dylan's Blood on the Tracks, Ray Charles's Genius Loves Company and Paul Simon's Still Crazy After All These Years. In addition to being a ringside seat for contemporary popular music history, Making Records is an unprecedented tutorial on the magic behind what music producers and engineers do. In these pages, Phil offers a rare peek inside the way music is made . . . illuminating the creative thought processes behind some of the most influential sessions in music history. This is a book about the art that is making records -- the way it began, the way it is now, and everything in between.

Bob Dylan Performing Artist 1974-1986 The Middle Years


Paul Williams - 1992
    This analysis provides an in-depth look at Dylan as a performer, exploring his work on stage and in the studio, and looks at the evolution of his style and concerns.

John Prine: In Spite of Himself


Eddie Huffman - 2015
    Across five decades, Prine has created critically acclaimed albums--John Prine (one of Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time), Bruised Orange, and The Missing Years--and earned many honors, including two Grammy Awards, a Lifetime Achievement Award for Songwriting from the Americana Music Association, and induction into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame. His songs have been covered by scores of artists, from Johnny Cash and Miranda Lambert to Bette Midler and 10,000 Maniacs, and have influenced everyone from Roger McGuinn to Kacey Musgraves. Hailed in his early years as the "new Dylan," Prine still counts Bob Dylan among his most enthusiastic fans. In John Prine, Eddie Huffman traces the long arc of Prine's musical career, beginning with his early, seemingly effortless successes, which led paradoxically not to stardom but to a rich and varied career writing songs that other people have made famous. He recounts the stories, many of them humorous, behind Prine's best-known songs and discusses all of Prine's albums as he explores the brilliant records and the ill-advised side trips, the underappreciated gems and the hard-earned comebacks that led Prine to found his own successful record label, Oh Boy Records. This thorough, entertaining treatment gives John Prine his due as one of the most influential songwriters of his generation.

My Chemical Romance: This Band Will Save Your Life


Reinhardt Haydn - 2007
    MCR achieved global prominence in 2006 with the release of their platinum-selling album Welcome to the Black Parade. Extensive touring has added to their worldwide fan base with incendiary sold-out live shows. In this provocative biography, Reinhardt Haydn presents a comprehensive profile of the band, from its hardscrabble start to its rocky upward climb to its present superstar status.

Michael Jackson Treasures


Jason King - 2009
    Michael Jackson Treasures pairs a compelling exploration of his story with photographs and memorabilia that illuminate h is fascinating, complicated life. Featuring a number of rare pieces, including selected pages from the Jackson children’s high school yearbook, the patent for the antigravity lean shoes from “Smooth Criminal,” and a fancifully die-cut mask from the Dangerous Tour, Michael Jackson Treasures is a trove of powerful images and ephemera from a truly global superstar.