In addition to his prodigious musical output, including albums, concerts, and personal appearances, this beloved and enduring artist has written his second book. In 2012’s Life Is a Gift, Tony reflected on the lessons he has learned over the years. Now, in Just Getting Started, he pays homage to the remarkable people who inspired those lessons.In his warm and inviting voice, Tony talks about who and what have enriched his own life, including Charlie Chaplin, Judy Garland, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Cole Porter, Amy Winehouse, Fred Astaire, Lady Gaga, members of his family, significant places, and more. Just Getting Started chronicles the relationship Tony has enjoyed with each one of these legends, entertainers, humanitarians, and loved ones, and reveals how the lessons and values they imparted have invaluably shaped his life.As enchanting and unforgettable as his music, Just Getting Started is a beautiful compilation of reflections every Bennett fan will treasure, and a perfect introduction for those just getting to know this remarkable star and humanitarian.

    Earlier musical styles sound different to us today because we hear them through the musical filter of other styles that came after them, all the way through funk and hip hop.As its blasphemous title suggests, How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll rejects the conventional pieties of mainstream jazz and rock history. Rather than concentrating on those traditionally favored styles, the book traces the evolution of popular music through developing tastes, trends and technologies--including the role of records, radio, jukeboxes and television --to give a fuller, more balanced account of the broad variety of music that captivated listeners over the course of the twentieth century. Wald revisits original sources--recordings, period articles, memoirs, and interviews--to highlight how music was actually heard and experienced over the years. And in a refreshing departure from more typical histories, he focuses on the world of working musicians and ordinary listeners rather than stars and specialists. He looks for example at the evolution of jazz as dance music, and rock 'n' roll through the eyes of the screaming, twisting teenage girls who made up the bulk of its early audience. Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, and the Beatles are all here, but Wald also discusses less familiar names like Paul Whiteman, Guy Lombardo, Mitch Miller, Jo Stafford, Frankie Avalon, and the Shirelles, who in some cases were far more popular than those bright stars we all know today, and who more accurately represent the mainstream of their times.Written with verve and style, How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll shakes up our staid notions of music history and helps us hear American popular music with new ears.

    Combining terrific firsthand reporting with deep historical research, Preston Lauterbach uncovers characters like Chicago Defender columnist Walter Barnes, who pioneered the circuit in the 1930s, and larger-than-life promoters such as Denver Ferguson, the Indianapolis gambling chieftain who consolidated it in the 1940s. Charging from Memphis to Houston and now-obscure points in between, The Chitlin' Circuit brings us into the sweaty back rooms where such stars as James Brown, B. B. King, and Little Richard got their start. With his unforgettable portraits of unsung heroes including King Kolax, Sax Kari, and Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown, Lauterbach writes of a world of clubs and con men that has managed to avoid much examination despite its wealth of brash characters, intriguing plotlines, and vulgar glory, and gives us an excavation of an underground musical America.

    From session musician to band member of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis, his raw talent and passion for experimentation inaugurated a new movement in music. Positioned at the beating heart of the 50s and 60s jazz world, Coltrane and his quartet created some of the most innovative and expressive music of the age, including the hit album My Favorite Things and the landmark work A Love Supreme. Juxtaposing scenes from Coltrane's personal life - his military career, addictions, political activism and love affairs - against snapshots of his major recordings, Coltrane evokes an extraordinary life and the momentous historical events that formed its backdrop. It is a graphic novel that echoes his work in its structure and style, and forms a testament to a pioneer and legend, whose music continues to inspire to this day.

    Bob Mould stormed into America's punk rock scene in 1979, when clubs across the country were filling with kids dressed in black leather and torn denim, packing in to see bands like the Ramones, Black Flag, and the Dead Kennedys. Hardcore punk was a riot of jackhammer rhythms, blistering tempos, and bottomless aggression. And at its center, a new band out of Minnesota called Hvºsker Dvº was bashing out songs and touring the country on no money, driven by the inspiration of guitarist and vocalist Bob Mould. Their music roused a generation. From the start, Mould wanted to make Hüsker Dü the greatest band in the world - faster and louder than the hardcore standard, but with melody and emotional depth. In See a Little Light, Mould finally tells the story of how the anger and passion of the early hardcore scene blended with his own formidable musicianship and irrepressible drive to produce some of the most important and influential music of the late 20th century. For the first time, Mould tells his dramatic story, opening up to describe life inside that furnace and beyond. Revealing the struggles with his own homosexuality, the complexities of his intimate relationships, as well as his own drug and alcohol addiction, Mould takes us on a whirlwind ride through achieving sobriety, his acclaimed solo career, creating the hit band Sugar, a surprising detour into the world of pro wrestling, and most of all, finally finding his place in the world. A classic story of individualism and persistence, Mould's autobiography is an open account of the rich history of one of the most revered figures of punk, whose driving force altered the shape of American music.

    Because of who she was and how she chose to live her life, Lady Day has been the subject of both intense adoration and wildly distorted legends. Now at last, Farah Jasmine Griffin, a writer of intellectual authority and superb literary gifts, liberates Billie Holiday from the mythology that has obscured both her life and her art.An intimate meditation on Holiday’s place in American culture and history, If You Can’t Be Free, Be A Mystery reveals Lady Day in all her complexity, humor and pain–a true jazz virtuoso whose passion and originality made every song she sang hers forever. Celebrated by poets, revered by recording artists from Frank Sinatra to Macy Gray, Billie Holiday is more popular and influential today than ever before. Now, thanks to this marvelous book, Holiday’s many fans can finally understand the singer and the woman they love.

    In the Break is an extended riff on “The Burton Greene Affair,” exploring the tangled relationship between black avant-garde in music and literature in the 1950s and 1960s, the emergence of a distinct form of black cultural nationalism, and the complex engagement with and disavowal of homoeroticism that bridges the two. Fred Moten focuses in particular on the brilliant improvisatory jazz of John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler, Eric Dolphy, Charles Mingus, and others, arguing that all black performance—culture, politics, sexuality, identity, and blackness itself—is improvisation.For Moten, improvisation provides a unique epistemological standpoint from which to investigate the provocative connections between black aesthetics and Western philosophy. He engages in a strenuous critical analysis of Western philosophy (Heidegger, Kant, Husserl, Wittgenstein, and Derrida) through the prism of radical black thought and culture. As the critical, lyrical, and disruptive performance of the human, Moten’s concept of blackness also brings such figures as Frederick Douglass and Karl Marx, Cecil Taylor and Samuel R. Delany, Billie Holiday and William Shakespeare into conversation with each other.Stylistically brilliant and challenging, much like the music he writes about, Moten’s wide-ranging discussion embraces a variety of disciplines—semiotics, deconstruction, genre theory, social history, and psychoanalysis—to understand the politicized sexuality, particularly homoeroticism, underpinning black radicalism. In the Break is the inaugural volume in Moten’s ambitious intellectual project-to establish an aesthetic genealogy of the black radical tradition.

    Drawing on experience, psychological insight, and wisdom ancient and modern, Westney shows how to trust yourself and set your own musicality free. He offers healthy alternatives for lifelong learning and suggests significant change in the way music is taught. For example, playing a wrong note can be constructive, useful, even enlightening. The creator of the acclaimed Un-Master Class(R) workshop also explores the special potential of group work, outlining the basics of his revelatory workshop that has transformed the music experience for participants the world over. Practicing, in Westney's view, is a lively, honest, adventurous, and spiritually rewarding enterprise, and it can (and should) meet with daily success, which empowers us to grow even more. Teachers, professionals, and students of any instrument will benefit from this unique guide, which brings artistic vitality, freedom, and confidence within everyone's reach

    Full-color illustrations.

    George E. Lewis, who joined the collective as a teenager in 1971, establishes the full importance and vitality of the AACM with this communal history, written with a symphonic sweep that draws on a cross-generational chorus of voices and a rich collection of rare images.Moving from Chicago to New York to Paris, and from founding member Steve McCall’s kitchen table to Carnegie Hall, A Power Stronger Than Itself uncovers a vibrant, multicultural universe and brings to light a major piece of the history of avant-garde music and art.

    One hundred years later, his descendant Fortis James (Lick) Holden grows up in a life of poverty in Mount Marter, Louisiana with his grandmother, mother, half-sisters, and stepsister, the beautiful fair-skinned “quadroon” Sylvie Black. At the age of ten shows his skill with playing the coronet, but when he runs afowl of the law he is sent away to reform school. There he joins a band and learns to play with his “head, chops, and heart” from a man called the Professor.The story then shifts to present-day Zimindo, now the fictional African nation of Zambawi, and follows the reactions of chief Tongo, his argumentative pregnant wife Kudzai, and Musa, his zukulu, to the arrival of the African-American archaelogist from Northwestern University named Olurunbunmi (Bunmi) Durowoju (formerly Coretta Pink). She has excavate the remains of an old tribal village nearby and turned up a fantastic tribal headdress but needs Tongo’s permission to take it, which he refuses (hoping to sleep with her in exchange), but his wife intervenes, and when he goes to Musa for advice the shaman tells him he can’t help, because he is about to embark on a journey…Meanwhile in 1912 Lick returns from reform school and begins making a name for himself among the juke joints of his small home town. He soon travels to New Orleans at the height of its jazz age glory at the suggestion of a local star (and also to search for the missing Sylvie), but his connection doesn’t pan out—though a young Louis Armstrong takes him under his wing, which transforms his sound, but he departs the Big Easy once he hears that Sylvie has returned to his hometown, abandoning the prostitute he married.Back in 1998, a black Englishwoman, Sylvia di Napoli is boarding a plane bound for New York, to untangle the secret of his ancestry. Born of two ostensibly white parents, she had run away from her angry father’s household as a teenager, becoming a prostitute before deciding that she wanted to turn her life around and become a singer. She meets an Englishman named Jim on the plane who she tells her story to Jim over the course of the planeride and at a bar in New York. He decides to join her in meeting her great uncle in Harlem.In 1920 Mount Marten, Louisiana, Sylvie Black has become a prostitute for the young white gentlemen of the town, while Lick searches for her in between infrequent performances. Lick encounters her at a dance but she leaves him for the young white man she came with.In 1998 New York, Jim and Sylvia meet with Fabrizio Berlone, her long-lost grand uncle, who reveals the mystery of her racial heritage: her grandmother was a mixed-race blues singer named Sylvia who was passing for white and gave birth while in New York. They head to Chicago in search of her great aunt (where Musa the zukulu has also turned up) and go to the Apostolic Church of All Saints, where the pastor reveals that her great aunt has been survived by a daughter: Coretta Pink. They head to her office at the university, where they are informed that she is in Africa, but Musa is there to meet them.Back in Zambawi, Kudzai abandons Tongo in a fury and he makes a rash pass at Bunmi, who rejects his moves with a swift knee to the groin—but after Tongo agrees to let her take the mask, she relents. But six months later, after Musa has returned to the village Tongo reveals he did not sleep with her, and Kudzai has returned to the village with a son, now named Tongo.Six months earlier in New Orleans, Jim, Sylvia, and Musa, frequent an “Irish” bar where a blues guitarist named Fortnightly plays. There Jim reveals his jealousy at Sylvia’s attraction to Musa and Musa reveals that Fortnightly is Fortis Holden Jr.Back in 1920 Mount Martin, LA, Sylvie seeks out Lick and stays with him for five days but leaves to return to her white lover, and sees Lick on the side and begins performing with his band. But when she becomes pregnant, they decide they must leave. Fortis Holden Jr. explains the rest of the story to Jim, Sylvia, and Musa in 1998 New Orleans, and tells of how Sylvie’s white lover comes to kill Lick, Sylvie goes to New York and becomes the wife of the Italian man who Sylvia knows as her grandfather. After an ugly bout of jealousy, Jim reveals his love for Sylvia, and months later Sylvia meets Bunmi to complete the circle and the story.

    Told in his own way, in his own words, a symphony written by the King of Jazz. His story spans and defines a half-century of modern music.This man who created over 1500 compositions was as much at home in Harlem's Cotton Club in the ‘20s as he was at a White House birthday celebration in his honor in the ‘60s. For Duke knew everyone and savored them all. Passionate about his music and the people who made music, he counted as his friends hundreds of the musicians who changed the face of music throughout the world: Bechet, Basie, Armstrong, Lena Horne, Ella Fitzgerald, Sinatra, to name a few of them. Here are 100 photographs to give us an intimate view of Duke's world—his family, his friends, his associates.What emerges most strongly in his commitment to music, the mistress for whom he saves the fullest intensity of his passion. ”Lovers have come and gone, but only my mistress stays,” he says. He composed not only songs that all the world has sung, but also suites, sacred works, music for stage and screen and symphonies. This rich book, the embodiment of the life and works of the Duke, is replete with appendices listing singers, arrangers, lyricists and the symphony orchestras with whom the Duke played. There is a book to own and cherish by all who love Jazz and the contributions made to it by the Duke.

    Well, fret no more! The Rock Snob's Dictionary is here to define every single sacred totem of rock fandom's know-it-all fraternity, from Alt.country to Zimmy. (That's what Rock Snobs call Bob Dylan, by the way.)

    We hear it in the poems of Langston Hughes, E. E. cummings, William Carlos Williams, Frank O’Hara, and Gwendolyn Brooks, and in those of Yusef Komunyakaa, Charles Simic, Rita Dove, Ntozake Shange, Mark Doty, William Matthews, and C. D. Wright. Here are poems that pay tribute to jazz’s great voices, and poems that throb with the vivid rhythm and energy of the jazz tradition, ranging in tone from mournful elegy to sheer celebration.

    Born Walker Smith, Jr., in 1921, Robinson had an early childhood marked by the seething racial tensions and explosive race riots that infected the Midwest throughout the twenties and thirties. After his mother moved him and his sisters to the relative safety of Harlem, he came of age in the vibrant post-Renaissance years. It was there that—encouraged to box by his mother, who wanted him off the streets—he soon became a rising star, cutting an electrifying, glamorous figure, riding around town in his famous pink Cadillac. Beyond the celebrity, though, Robinson would emerge as a powerful, often controversial black symbol in a rapidly changing America. Haygood also weaves in the stories of Langston Hughes, Lena Horne, and Miles Davis, whose lives not only intersected with Robinson's but also contribute richly to the scope and soul of the book.From Robinson's gruesome six-bout war with Jake "Raging Bull" LaMotta and his lethal meeting with Jimmy Doyle to his Harlem nightclub years and thwarted show-biz dreams, Haygood brings the champion's story, in the ring and out, powerfully to life against a vividly painted backdrop of the world he captivated.